Trump & Carney’s Heated Rivalry

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Welcome back to Poxa, the world on Tommy Feetor. I'm Ben Rose. Ben, um, when your grandkids ask you, pop-up, pop-up, mima, is it pop-up? Where are you on economic D-day? Are you fighting on the, I guess, are we actually currently fighting? Because we're not buying a Ronin oil. Are we part of it? I was fighting on 12 vessels beach, you know, just battling some, just shadow fleet temperatures, just battling some, oh, fact licensing.

You and Scott, uh, Bessant, uh, I want to ask you something before we get to this show. I was listening to, um, a fascinating conversation at a debut, Bill Simmons and, uh, Sammy Copeland, who is a friend, actually, about the Mark Walter scandal, which if folks haven't followed, he's the owner of the Dodgers and the Lakers, who seems to have committed some crimes as now selling a team's in a fire sale. Sammy was saying that, uh, seeing all this private equity

and foreign money come into sports has made him actually think that Jim Dolan might be a good owner and that Nick's fans are lucky. Thoughts on that. I heard that, too. Do you want to apologize, but, but, but, no, I don't. Jim Dolan is running him as surveillance enterprise, and that's where I didn't, um, so I was Barack Obama. I guess, I will say, saving compliment gets a lot of shoutouts for being a true Nick's fan, too. By the way,

he, like me, suffered the the Isaiah Thomas years, uh, through a lot of dark times, but I will say, um, at least Jim Dolan seems to want to actually own the team and run his Masserville on Center Prize rather than leveraging his family business. Yeah, the right rather than leveraging teams. I'm insurance schemes. Yeah. That's fair. I also learned from that podcast, uh, the detail that I uh, shared with you. I heard it out there. I'm online, which is that

the Guggenheim associates, the name of this investment company that Mark Walters runs, is actually not the Guggenheim family. He just found some random Guggenheim like inlaw or something for like two seconds. Guggenheim partners used to include someone who is a distant relative of the museum, Guggenheim family and he brought him in to name it and then

immediately pushed him out. Yeah. Yeah. I incredible detail. I will say this is an organic plug of my

sub stack, uh, notes on the stories we tell. Um, I also dipped into is a Nick, the Nick sing actually triggered this and this canter was a Nick. And if you saw him tossed out of the, uh, the in any and a feverish discussion. Yeah. I walked to half court and started talking to a player. Yeah, wearing a shirt that said woman noun, uh, you know, not subtle. And so the culture was, but to to write this sub stack, I went back and actually read the entire transcript of his

appearance on this podcast, in just all of like, Erdogan, right? Yeah. In 2019, which made me

“something to remember when in this canter was like actually fighting authoritarianism rather than”

joining authoritarian movement, but also made me feel very old. That was like seven. I was like combing transcripts some seven year old pots of the world. Yeah. We've been doing this for a minute. Uh, well, we got a great show for you guys today. We're still going. We got, uh, we are going to

that why the political incentives and the economic incentives make it very hard to see a

clear path forward to ending this thing anytime soon. We are going to evaluate the latest Iran sanctions that we're called economic D-Day. We'll tell you if they lived up to the hype, uh, this is on Iran, by the way. Um, we're going to talk about this grim milestone in Ukraine when it comes to drone technology and speculation about why CIA director John Ratcliffe took a secret trip to Moscow today. Very interesting. You see the clips that kind of, I think, I think this broke

because there were a bunch of people in traffic in Moscow that saw an American motorcade go by and started filming it and posting an online there from just sort of like, what's that? Yeah.

“Anyway, cool. That's why we have telegram. Yeah. That's why we're going to explain why matters”

that Pete Hexeth just gutted, uh, a military newspaper called Stars and Stripes. How the guy who

once called himself the world's coolest dictator has become the standard bearer for right-wing politicians

in Latin America and then Ben E. Did our interview last Friday? What are folks going to hear? I'd talk to Posi Tang and for us, Sidwa, um, who, uh, Po is the director of the new documentary film, American Doctor, which everybody should see, which follows for Rose, who's been on the podcast before, and two other doctors, uh, who are Americans that served in Gaza, um, throughout, uh, the bombardment of Gaza, um, you see behind the scenes what it was like to be in Gaza, to be treating

patients, to be dealing with horrific, uh, incoming wounded. But, but it's not just about that. It's us about, you know, who are these people, what motivated them, how they came back to the United States and, uh, took up activism, went on the media, uh, started, you know, obviously pushing for politicians to change policy, uh, in Gaza. I guess I'd tell you this tell me, given that there's no international

“journalist inside of Gaza still to this day, this is actual coverage of what it was like to be there,”

I mean, which we've had from Palestinian journalists, but, but to see this footage, uh, inside of hospitals, inside of Israeli attacks, um, that is, uh, an act of journalism that we are lacking, um, these three doctors are extraordinary people, um, and to see the sacrifices they made to see the kind of people that decide to kind of raise their hand to do this is truly inspiring. And you start to see the kind of shift in public opinion that they're a part of that that they're, they're, they're

bearing witness helped contribute to this continued shift we're seeing in the United States. So it's a great interview. They're both fascinating people to talk to, uh, the film is in theaters. People should check it out. American doctors. Seeing them in the office last week and talking up for us for a while, um, reminded me just sort of brought me back to those early days of the war and it took, I was just texting with him when he was going back in and out and I don't know,

it was unbelievably courageous decision to go and improve, I'd care, given how many healthcare workers we now know were killed, uh, by the IDF or others or journalists, Palestinian journalists were killed, um, but then just in, in terms like that shift you're talking about, I mean, it just, I was reminded the other day how, now the Israeli government accepts the hummus, led health ministry is casualty count and before that was something that if you cited, you know,

on Twitter, if you're saying it, you're told, yeah. No, you're told you were like, regurgitating propaganda. It's like now it's like a lot of the things people said were happening early on or just accepted, but I agree with you, unbelievably important story, uh, a really important film and very much work through time. Um, after Ben's interview, by the way, our friends of the Pods subscribers are going to hear Ben and I take some some questions from the Pods

of the world discord. If you wanted to become a friend of the Pods subscriber, a paid subscriber,

uh, it really is the most important thing you could do to help us grow and build as a company.

So go to crooked.com/friends, you get ad free episodes, uh, bonus content, all sorts of great stuff. Um, and also last week Ben and I recorded a YouTube episode about a couple of things. We talked about the bizarre role that Secretary Defense Pete Heggsets wife plays at the Pentagon very weird story from the Times. Uh, we talked about the latest news about why Prince Harry and Megan Markle are, uh, high talented at a California. And then why the U.S. is attacking judges on the International

“Criminal Court. If you want to hear that episode and lots of other bonus content, we do, uh,”

for YouTube, please subscribe to Pods of the World of the YouTube. We're trying to build a progressive counterweight to all the right wing crap from Fox News and others that you find on YouTube. When you subscribe, it helps us at a lot. It helps us get good information into the YouTube algorithm and also it's free. So, you know, getting money, getting money, getting money's worth. All right, let's talk about Canada then. So the U.S. and Canada are now officially in a trade war, uh,

which is just what the economy needs. Over the weekend, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the Canada was walking away from these trade talks. Here's a bit of what Carney had to say and then we're going to explain to you the backstory. We pursued every opportunity to reach an agreement that protects Canadian workers and their families, that strengthens our economy and that respects Canadian sovereignty. We've been under no illusions. We recognized from the start that America has

the net benefits for Canada and called into question the reliability of any deal. Last spring,

I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promise that that will never

ever happen. The U.S. introduced at the last hours and the last hours, efforts to restrict our ability to have other trade deals, efforts to restrict our protections, of our language, our culture, and in effect our sovereignty. You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked. War with Canada. So the rupture came after months of negotiations. There has been a lot of great reporting both in the U.S. and Canada, shout out to the front burner podcast from the CBC that's

sort of unpacked. It's a good show. Nice. A couple of quick things. So Trump apparently reportedly wanted to exempt certain kinds of trucks from the reduction in tariffs that would have come from the deal, which would have made it unprofitable for car manufacturers to have factories in Canada

and basically get them shut down over time. I think it's like a GM Silverado's are made in Canada

and the Ford F350 and F450. The U.S. wanted Canada to get rid of laws that would require streaming services like Netflix to feature Canadian content, including French language shows and

“protecting the French language is a very, very big deal and Quebec. Remember that Air Canada,”

CEO is forced to resign because he put out like a condolent statement only in English. Yeah, and he got sent out of there. Trump, people apparently wanted Canada to get rid of certain buy Canadian programs that Canada put in place to respond to U.S. tariffs without actually getting rid of the tariffs, so that doesn't seem fair. And the U.S. wanted to force Canada to essentially abide by certain U.S. trade policies when they cut their own bilateral deals with other countries,

especially around U.S. deal tariffs. And for what it's worth, the U.S. side says that Mark Karni kind of floored it with reviving the Keystone XL pipeline, but then wouldn't go through with it when it became kind of deal time, but who knows? So Canada is also putting the finger at a commerce secretary Howard Lutnik, apparently the Canadians liked Jamison Greer, the trade rep, but then Lutnik got involved, and he is famously a massive asshole. Yeah, and thanks went badly.

“Lutnik also oversees the tariffs on cars, trucks, and metal. But I think the biggest issues of”

all were just trust and Canadian sovereignty, then we obviously know that Trump kind of flies like it's breathing. But in this case, the official negotiating position from the U.S. delegation was that even if a deal got done, the U.S. has to write to Levy tariffs and change the policy at any time, which makes you wonder what's the point of any of this. So those are the substantive reasons. And I think that made the politics a lot easier for Mark Karni. There's a poll out today

from the Angus Red Institute, which is a Canadian poster that found that 76% of Canadian voters support Karni's decision to walk away from the talks. So now the U.S. and Canada, we're stuck

in this escalatory tip for tax cycle, like Trump announced 20 billion worth of tariffs on Canadian

goods, Karni announced they'd responded to Karni. Those going to place us 10/8, Trump then threatened even more tariffs starting January 1st and on we go, how do you think they put the toothpaste back in the tube here? It feels like this has gotten so politicized when normally you just want trade deals to kind of get hashed out behind the scenes and then voted on or agreed to. So that's not this massive high profile fight. Yeah, it's nothing is impossible, right? Especially in the

“Trump era where these huge swings, I think that at core what's happening here is Mark Karni”

better than any other leader of certainly an allied country kind of understands a new reality that we're in. And there's there's different components to that. The first is quite simple, it's that last thing you said, there's this line Karni had where he said we've learned that the deals that the US makes are not signed and penned, they're signed and pencil, which are those pretty long as the speaker editor. But it's because it's this dizzying game that Trump plays

where you cut some mini deal and then he tariffs you more and I think Karni saw this is just going to keep happening. It might as well just draw the line right here and say, you know, fuck you, we're in a trade war right? Now, why did he do that? I think because all the economic questions are what they are, I think at core it is a sovereignty question and that's where I think Karni does understand what Trump is doing is essentially really infringing upon core Canadian sovereignty.

So first of all, this question about whether they could add their own trade deals. Essentially you're looking into it and kind of making sense of the reports and what the US was insisting on was not that we'll sit in like literally review, you know, the negotiations it can is in with other countries.

if we have tariffs and because you know, the Trump people like to try to control the supply chain to other countries, they don't want China or some Latin American company dumping a bunch of steel and Canada, then gets sent to the US at a discount rate for example. But that means that Karni's entire strategy, which is we need to diversify away from the United States and we need to cut trade deals with the countries, can't literally can't work because essentially you'll have to check over

a shoulder with any deal that he makes. The second thing, this French language stuff is it's not

that we're literally going in there and saying you can't speak French, but if you know, Quebec has

“come close to succeeding, that's right. This is quarter Canadian national identity, that's why”

there's it's bilingual, that's why they have these specific protections in place for the French language, particularly in Quebec, including the kind of content that's on television, is on streaming services, the kind of labeling on products. That's not just because they, you know, have some eccentric interest in the French language, it's because they made those agreements to keep Quebec as a part of Canada, and so it's about holding Canada together. And then this speaks to kind of the

political backdrop, which is we can, you know, look at JD Vance and Donald Trump joking about

Canada being 51state, or we can see some of the outreach that has been done to like Albertan

separatist as kind of weird eccentric things. You know what, if somebody was doing that to the United States, particularly a much larger power, you know, we would feel pretty better shape about it, you know, and so I think all the accumulated grievance of how Canada's been treated, how covered, how clearly they, their sovereignty's been discussed, and Carnies a whole theory of the case about middle power, is having to kind of make their own deals, you know, all of that kind of

compels him to take this action. And as you say, the kind of politics reinforces it, again,

“what I think Carnies saw, not that he's perfect, and we're not, you know, we're not here to just”

act like Mark Carnies come down from on a high, but he's a very smart guy, and he's got the politics and the economics, and the sovereignty questions all in mind, and they all suggest, hey, better for me to just draw a line here and take a stand against this guy and try to have this fight. And frankly, hope that he'll blink. I mean, I think, I don't think Carnies did by, I think, delaying the reciprocal to have some till January. Yeah. I don't think Carnie wants to be in a trade war

for the next 2 and a half years, but I think he does realize it, you know, after a few months, he has 76% support for this. What support does Trump have, you know, I think Carnie realizes it in two democracies, and we're still a democracy here, and a trade war of public opinion is ready for it, on one side, and is not forward on the other, that he can squeeze us until essentially Trump declares some victory and cut some deal. Yeah, look, economically, this sucks for Carnie and it sucks for Canada.

I mean, Canada imports about $270 billion worth of U.S. goods per year. The Canadian economy is

1/12 the size of ours. There was the, the abacus, this abacus data, it's an analysis company. They did a report, but the economist got, and the, the found that the Canadian economy, like, finally started to grow again by, like, 0.8% in the second quarter of this year, after contracting and stagnating in 2025, and an unemployment was coming down. So this is really going to punch them hard at the time when the economy was just recovering. So it's terrible.

But I do think you're right, it's a, it's a quiz question of sovereignty, and the politics of this are complicated for Carnie. And you mentioned Alberta, which is the big oil producing province, they have a independence referendum in October. That would be a huge problem for Canada if they decided to leave because they contributed a ton of revenue because of oil money. And also, like, Carnie currently is getting a lot of support from even conservative leaders, but there's a long term

trepidation. Yeah. So let's play a clip. This is Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, and then Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, talking about Carnie's decision. You sound a little more subdued than you did this morning on the radio, and you said, Donald Trump could kiss your ass. The prime minister tell you to ask you to tone it down a bit. No, he didn't. He wasn't against that. And I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room to kiss my ass. The retaliatory terrorist, I know

emotionally it feels good to retaliate. I get that. But let's remember what happens when we retaliate. Well, when when retaliation happens, it means that everybody who is buying products from the United

“States are not going to face upwards of 50% upwards to 50% terrorist. So I think Doug Ford”

reportedly talked to Carnie before he walked away from the deal, and, you know, kind of got the briefing on it and told him, I actually will not order stores to put US booze back on the shelf because I think this is a terrible deal for us. So again, Carnie's like kind of juggling all these complicated political equities. I do think though the Donald Trump is unleashed a rage from Canada

and get US booze back on the shelf in all these places. But I think a lot of Canadians are going

to say fuck you. We're not buying it. They're really mad. Yeah, I don't diminish the economic risks. We're kind of there. They're significant. It's going to have a harm to Canadian consumers in terms of prices. It's going to have a harm to Canadian growth because of how much they're dependent on exports of the US. All of that said, once again, to get to the politics and kind of national identity piece of this, the Canadians are already having an impact on the United States

just by taking American products off shelves. There's billions of dollars in tours and travel off. Yeah, travel. It's been lost. That shows you that is a people that is pretty united, not totally as we just saw in that clip around the sense that they need to stand up for their sovereignty. Are we united? Is this American national identity? I mean, it's quite remarkable to me. We've

generally my whole life been a more nationalist country. There's a stronger sense of shared Canadian

“identity, I think right now, heading into this trade war than there is American national identity.”

And if Carnegie can hold that together, and that will require like pretty a student politics and you know, good allies. But if you can do that, and they can distribute pain in the United States in strategic ways, right, to certain sectors in certain states and try to hit Trump's base harder. They're trying to focus the pain on red states, which is kind of interesting. Then I think, you know, it's possible that he comes out of this. Yes, having probably suffered

some short and maybe even medium term economic pain. But if he can accomplish what he's trying to do and show that Canada can stand up to the United States, show that they can diversify their trading partners, show that they can kind of maintain a sense of shared national identity through this. He's kind of, he's doing something more ambitious than Trump's doing. Like he's trying to kind of remake a sense of what Canada is, you know, it's like a big project that he's involved in.

A while trying to model how can, you know, so-called middle powers survive in a tumultuous age from which the US and China and Russia are all fighting with each other. So I don't know, I, I'm, thus far, I find a lot to admire and how Carney's approaching this. That's not to diminish the risks. And I just, again, like Mark Carney, we've talked about this before, but the former head of the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, like he knows this stuff. On the outside, we've got Howard

Lotnick and Donald Trump and if James and Greer is like the sharpest tool in the shed, like I'm not sure that we're, we're sending our best to the trade world. Well, look, I mean, regardless, like Mark Carney was elected for this moment. He was elected to take on this fight. And so he decided it's a difficult decision because he knows the economic case he's going to take, but he decided to take it on. And so far voters are supporting him. He also knows the Trump

is weekend because of the war with Iran and he's about to go into a midterm. He's likely to lose a bunch of seats and come out of that further hobbled. So the timing is right for him.

I think the question with Trump is always like, what does he want? Do you want to, do you really

want a new trade deal? Do you really think, what does he, what do you think? Do you think he really wants like, you know, to make sure that softwood lumber is going to, he's not, he just wants

“to dominate a smaller country. That's what he is. And again, that's what Carney's right about it.”

It's not even about a trade dispute about, I was in trade dispute to the Canadians of actually often about softwood lumber. Like, that's something with this is about. And I mean, time I ask you, like, how many leaders have we talked about whose political standing and dignity has been undercut because they, you know, Macron tried to cut these deals with Trump. And he he signed the, you know, Treaty of Versailles, MOU, like, you know, the Kierstormer cut a trade deal

Trump, the EU. They all looked weak. Like, they're political standing and their polls dropped. Like, I think Carney's right that, like, Trump respects strength, too. Like, the Xi Jinping is the only other guy that really punch Trump in the face in a trade war anyone. And the other challenges in terms, like, back to nerdy stuff is the US and Canada and Mexico are supposed to now go into these updating the US MCA trade agreement, the new NAFTA trade agreement. But Trump's,

which Trump negotiated, right, which Trump negotiated now hates, but also it's very clear that, Trump doesn't really think those negotiations matter. He's trying to dictate the terms of US MCA through this bilateral fight with the Canadians. So, like, Carney can either fight them now or fight them later. Like, it's going to happen on trade. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe he can be Carney,

“if he's smart, you know, we'll get Claudia Shanebaum on side. Right. And, you know, that's what”

Carney's going to try to do is get other countries to stand up to the United States with them. Yeah, he immediately called her to coordinate. This show is sponsored by strawberry.me. People usually have to be pretty motivated one way or the other to take the time to write an online review about a product or service that they have used. You've seen these reviews, people feel quite strongly when they take to the comments.

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back guarantee. The other big administration announcement this week was better on. The administration is calling it economic D-Day. This was supposed to be Treasury Secretary Scott Besson's plan to crush Iran financially and win the war with sanctions. The official name was Operation Economic Outcast. A lot of names for this thing. What ever happened to, what was the original one? Epic Fury,

sorry. They got rid of that name and renamed it to try to get around the war power. Yeah, yeah. So I didn't, I've lost track of the name. Yes. Infinite Justine. A nightmare. So Besson said he was targeting Iran's financial lifeline, specifically digital assets

“in crypto. Technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Treasury sanctioned, I think, 60 individuals”

or entities that could be a business or a ship or whatever. But the Trump administration has put

over 1,000 sanctions on Iran since he took office the second time. So there's a lot of overlap

with what was released Monday. Nothing really all that new. Far more important was what was not mentioned, which were specifically any big banks in China. China buys between 80 and 90% of Iran's oil. Chinese banks create these systems and financial architecture to facilitate the movement of Iranian oil in a way that avoids US sanctions. In many experts sort of pointed at essence announcement and asked, like, couldn't this just give China time to adjust how they do

things and avoid sanctions in the future as well? We'll see. Besson was pressed on the plan during his remarks on Monday. Let's watch a clip of that. In the second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive

the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries. Today, in that same spirit,

we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe, around the globe. You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn't a threat of an invasion

“in the US didn't give a timeline to Germany. So why not impose the sanctions today?”

Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity, the to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? Great question. It does seem like we kind of emailed to be emailing the Nazis, the operational pillar of the planet. So Xi Jinping is coming to Washington and late September. Trump clearly doesn't want to piss off Xi before that visit, but there's still a bigger structural problem, which is that we got in the trade war with China.

When was that last year? This year, I don't remember. Yeah, there's remember the Chinese said, "Hey, we have all these rare earth materials. We will bend you to our will, Donald Trump,

So Ben, none of this is to say that Iran's economy is currently in great shape. I think the US blockade has actually cut off a lot of their exports of oil and will really hurt the economy over time. We'll hurt the Iranian people over time. But two things, one, making such a big deal out

of this, which is odd to me, they always overpromise under deliver. But also, it just seems

likely that the IRGC won't really care about the economy period and the civilian political leaders don't really have any same. Yeah, that's the core substance of things. Is that the Iranians have priced in a lot of economic pain for a period of time here, and so this will have

“I know impact. I think this is completely, it's as meaningless as, you know, all the other”

D days that we've discussed. I mean, you know, have an impact marginally on their economy. But the idea that this is going to, what is it going to achieve? Like, Iran's going to surrender, Iran's going to reopen the state of foreign moves. Like, I don't think that's going to happen. It look, a couple of thoughts in this. The first is D day was like tens of thousands of people,

and the most complex and fabulous invasion history getting into boats and literally storming beaches

to fight Nazi fascist on the other side. This is Scott Bessent signing some papers and a few lures at OPEC finding 60 designations to make on sanctions. We shall fight them on the beach. It is so laughable. Like, like, it's, it's just such an insult to, to, to D day, and to, to any semblance of, of language, you know, that leads me to Scott Bessent. Like, can we put him in the Marca Rubio category of somebody that is often passed as, like, a more competent and reasonable person just because

“he's able to string, like, three sentences together with that scene, like, a complete moron?”

This guy is completely mediocre. He's completely marginal mediocre figure. Did he practice the D day speech in the mirror? The guy, there's nothing about that suggested, like, strength and toughness and, ah, you know, like, like, really the IRGC is going to be quaking in their boots. Like, the guys that are overly shutting down the straightaway moves, like, give a shit about that press conference. I mean, all they're trying to do is fill programming every week on right-way media.

Right. You know, like, Hugh Heward is probably excitedly referring to the, you know, a D day in the same way, excitedly referred to the epic fury and the same way that he excitedly referred to the blockade. Like, they, they're just going to come up with this, some new thing to throw into the trance of, right, we media to distract from the fact that they've lost this war and more get them to the midterms because you see that they've loaded, they might resume full scale conflict after

the midterms. Well, then they're in, then the Iranians will, and the Iranians get what they do, they will actually bomb stuff. They will hit stuff with, like, real life things, not with, like,

“designate. I mean, Iran is nothing left to sanction. Like, to your point, the only thing left to sanction”

is, like, the Chinese or the Indians, which would bring down the global economy, which cut best in itself, like, admitted said. So, so, or do Americans really believe it is worth tanking the global economy. Because if, if suddenly, like, major Chinese banks are taken off line, like, the whole thing unravels, right, for what? To, to, to compel the Iranians to do what? I still don't even know what they want them to do. I don't know what they want them to do. I think it's

just to, like, to crush the economy to inflict so much pain on a population that may be they, because you're so mad to be lost. Because you're so mad that you lost the war. I don't know, like, it feels like we're just going through phases of losing this war. Yeah, we definitely are. Two other things. The, the Wall Street Journal had a great report out this week about how Trump was in fact warned about all the things currently going wrong and how they could go wrong. So,

they have, you know, Tulsi Gavard, then the DNI, warning him the killing the Supreme Leader would lead to a more hard line regime that was more committed to getting into the weapon. Check. To stop up, right? There's a lot of close-estrader removes in US bases in the region. Check.

The DOD warning him about stockpile shortages of critical weapons and munitions and interceptors.

Check. But it was, like, headset, beat headset and the raising cane. Yeah. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Cane, basically telling Trump that the military could kind of handle any contingency and would deal with it and Trump bought that line. Also, Ben, did you see that Iranian-like tackers are believed to have shut down a, like, small-scale British power plant for four days? The Sunday telegraph broke the story. The, the, the British officials say there was

no risk to their energy system. But it does show once again a rons ability to retaliate with cyber operations way outside of their borders. And it follows on those attacks on US water infrastructure. We talked about a couple weeks ago. Yeah. The, the, the, the Iranians have other ways of inflicting pain. And it's not that they're stronger than us. It said they don't care about the pain that we inflict. And because they're used to power outages, they're used to, you know, sanctions

are used to economic hardship. And they don't care about their people, whereas if any of that stuff

fuck is going on? Why, why is this happening? So it speaks to the asymmetry that there's a,

does a double asymmetry. There's an asymmetry of power. We have more of it. But the asymmetry that works, the Iranians, is that there's an asymmetry of how much pain people are willing to take,

“right? The only thing on the Wall Street Journal, so I thought that was important because”

it's kind of nod on me here, like it's easy to blame Trump, it's easy to blame Netanyahu. It's certainly easy to blame Pete Heckset, this is more on. I've, I've been wondering about Dan Cain, you know, um, and I've been wondering about Centcom, you know, people don't like to criticize the military. I've done it here a couple of times. Like, it does feel like Adminimum, there wasn't enough, like, hey, just so you know that you can't change his regime with

air strikes, and a little too much, like, sure we could make this work. We had the strongest military

in the world. You know, like, I'm getting a little worried, uh, frankly, about what kind of messages have come out of this war about whether or not we have military leadership that is willing to tell Trump that something's a bad idea or something won't work. Because the reason I'm worried about that is both because we're in a war, but because what happens in Greenland, you know what happens

“in Panama now, what happens here? Yeah, like, a little less yes, man, um, because I can tell you,”

I've been in meetings with military leaders, you're like, that's a bad idea. Yeah, there's usually like a lot of people will die, sir. Yeah. We'll be very bad. Another, by the way, the casualty number was updated, it's like something like 770 wounded. Yeah. You have service members now. I mean, it's just goes up and up and up. Yeah. And we still though, and that's on the military, too. Like, we, they're not exactly being the most transparent bunch over there. No, no, they are not, uh,

shifting military theaters here. Unfortunately, the war between Russia and Ukraine has reached another grim milestone, the deployment of autonomous killer drones been. Who's not excited about that? Right. And for that, the New York Times wrote this up that's based on forensic analysis of this drone that landed in, uh, somewhere in Ukraine, by the Ukrainian military. The gist is that human operators in Russia programmed the drone to fly to a specific point in Ukraine, but then upon a

rival, the drone selected its own target with AI and then attacked. Now, Ukraine thinks the drone was trained with AI to strike fuel tanks to recognize and strike fuel tanks. The targeting decisions were made by an onboard MIDI computer produced by Nvidia, the big graphics company, uh, chip company in the US, so congrats to Jensen Wong for his new business model. Yeah, mostly kidding. But yeah, certainly not a company. Um, so that's terrible. Also, Ben, uh, earlier today, we learned that the

CIA director John Rackliffe made this surprise trip to Moscow. Uh, this is on Tuesday. We don't get no why. Uh, there's a lot of speculation that it could be the issue some kind of warning like, uh, hey, we know via intelligence that you're planning to attack a NATO country or do something terrible. Don't do it. Remember this happened during the Biden administration. It was ineffective. If we said don't invade Ukraine, but Bill Burns, the CIA director went over to Russia to tell Putin directly

“although I think you had to do it via phone because Putin was in search of or whatever. Um, the”

Wall Street Journal reported quote, the US is collecting intelligence showing Russia's early preparations for a possible military mobilization in Ukraine in plans for testing the NATO alliance or NATO's resolve, whatever that means. So, uh, it could also just be a scottal location for the newest Trump tower. Yeah. CIA could do that, too. Um, Ben, any guesses to what this trip was all about? Um, and I guess should we all just be happy that it wasn't Steve Whitkoff sent over there. It was

actual professional. I, I, I find this kind of worrying, uh, because, uh, this still sounds strange. I'd feel better for Steve Whitkoff in a way, because that would just be probably another, you know, fruitless effort to resume some talks of some Trump coin. Um, the fact that the CIA director went to me suggest that there was some concerning intelligence, right? Because why else would you

send the CIA director? Like Trump always sends Whitkoff or Jared or some other kind of

personal envoy if it's about resolving the war or something like that. Um, and so we, we talked a lot recently about these concerns that Russia might start trying to either escalate its sabotage operations inside of Europe. It might try to literally hit some targets in Europe. Like that they've been kind of making statements that suggest that the places in Europe that are manufacturing, the Ukrainian weapons that are hitting in Russia are fair targets. So there are places on Germany

or the UK that make the rockets or drones that the Ukrainians are then sending deep into Russia, and it wouldn't shock me if there was intelligence that the Russians are considering like hitting stuff in, or sabotaging stuff in, like, Jordan. Yeah, and that would be enough to get even in the Trump administration, the CIA director on a plane. And the other thing that concerns me to your point about Bill Burns is I'm not sure that like what warning John Radcliffe can carry,

this watched the space for escalation from the Russian side. They've taken a lot of hits over the last six to nine months, whether that's further mobilization or that's further tax into Europe, both of those things would be bad, obviously. And along the lines of the retaliation to Ukraine supporters,

other retaliation against Ukraine supporters, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham took his first foreign

trip to Ukraine, he was there this week. He was announcing that Britain's basically going to help Ukraine build these long range missiles, the storm shadow missiles would take all its a joint French UK missile. He also spent some time with Ukrainian troops. We'll talk about that in a second. But the Russians flipped out in response, to meet your pescov said, the UK was called Hellbent on pouring oil on a fire and plotting to prevent any kind of peace process. And then last week,

Moscow threatened the UK over Ukraine using British-made drones. So sort of a very wide issue that you're talking about. But we enjoyed this clip, Prime Minister Burnham, in Ukraine that was going around his social media. Let's watch.

“So here's my note to Prime Minister. He's playing a Smith song, I think. The thing about”

electric guitars is they're awesome in their badass, but they sound like better plugged in. You don't plug in. You sound like a total goober when you're just kind of

swing away. First of all, any Burnham does have good taste in music. He's, you ever see the

documentary 24-party people, the origins of the punk rock scene. Yeah, he loves it. It's all those, you know, the clash and the Smiths and everybody. The other thing to say is that I'm looking at the Ukrainian guy and I don't know, they must find different people for the new photo-op for each new British Prime Minister because they've been like five hundred. They've been like five or six since the war began, you know, like that dude is part of a military and artistic

unit that plays on the front lines apparently. That's who Burnham was with. So they must just do a profile of each of these British Prime ministers and they're like, you know, any Burnham-like music, let's get the music guy here, you know, Tony Blankin played Brockton in the free world

the club back in the day. It's a little weird. Kirstream, I'm not sure what

interests you had, but actually the kind of thing that you do wonder about is that each British Prime Minister in trying to reaffirm this, you know, support for Ukraine, which I get and I support. But it's like they need something new to announce, you know, like, and the timing should not be dictated by that. So I mean, maybe this thing has been the works of truly must have been for a while with the French to have to manufacture this like on a long range rocket, but boy, like

this, someone, there's nobody that is de-escalatory right now, you know, like there are times of the past when the Europeans are trying to negotiate something, obviously Trump was right now, like everybody's ratcheting it up and I, you know, I worry about where that's going. Yes, that's not great. Last thing on Ukraine, a couple of weeks back, we talked about Solensky's botched firing of his very popular defense minister, Mikhail Fedorov, last week Fedorov,

“for at least a video calling for new elections, so that kind of I think confirms what we all suspected,”

which is that Zelensky might view Fedorov as a possible political opponent down the road. Yeah, and I don't see any elections happening during the war, but unconstitutional while they're under martial law. But watch, we're going to take a quick break, but Mark Carney is not the only one who has the chance to check Donald Trump in the near future, Ben, we all do in November. We got the midterms coming up. We can stop the Trump agenda in its tracks

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All right, back to the US military event. So last Friday the Pentagon fire three people from stars and stripes, which is a military newspaper that publishes for our armed forces. Stars and stripes started during

civil war. It was revived during World War I. Today it has an average of about 1.4 million

readers a day. It is partially funded by taxpayer money. The staff are technically Pentagon employees, but traditionally there's been editorial independence. But last Friday the publisher Max Letterman and the editor and chief Eric Slavin and Middle East correspondent Laura Quarty were all told they were fired for insubordination. So there's like a short version in a long version of this story. The short story is that CBS Sunday morning had done a piece about stars and stripes being

under pressure from the Pentagon and Slavin and Quarty were interviewed for it and the lines that caused a stir are these. I'm working for stars and stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policy maker. I'm here to cover the military community. Editor and chief Eric Slavin may have to choose between his allegiance to the first amendment

“and his obligation to obey Pentagon orders. Do you have red lines in your mind?”

Yes, I do. Give me a red line. Don't run a perfectly accurate story. Run this instead. Here it is written by the Pentagon. That would be red line. You have a sign on your desk. Pick your battles. Which foxholes are you willing to die? We need to be able to provide independent news to surface members. If we can't do that, if we were turned into something other than that,

if we were public relations, that's the foxhole. Quite telling that that was considered in subordination. The tensions with the Pentagon press office and stars and stripes have been bubbling up for a while. Back in January, the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the department was going to refocus stars and stripes content, quote, away from woke distractions. They also borrowed the

war in Iran. It also borrowed it from publishing comics or associated press articles and said only active duty personnel would write stories presumably because you can boss them around pretty good when you're in the military. Then they fired the obbidsmen. They installed this deputy editor and then that person I think kind of stayed to coup and fired these three. Then it's not at all surprising that PTXF and the gang want to kill off independent journalism

I've curious how big of a deal you think it is in practice for the service members who actually rely on stars and stripes and versus just sort of the obviously terrible precedent it sets in the principles involved. I think it's enormous deal and it made me think Tommy, I don't know why and revealing that I'm a little older than you. I'm like that

“edge of Gen X and the money. But did you see good morning Vietnam? Do you remember that there's a”

whole the whole supply of that movie was he's like a broadcaster for the military, Robin Williams and then there are these two meatheads who sit there and censor all the news he can read

and he finally goes in there and he rips the actual news off and he reads it aloud and that's

where it gets him thrown off air. Great movie. And I remember watching that scene and thinking like, we fixed that problem. I mean that's where we are. If you haven't seen Good Morning Vietnam actually you should. We're back to like the meatheads censoring the news that the service members and their families can get because this is like Russian state media stuff. It's because what they were reporting on notably they got rid of the editor in chief and you know the publisher

and the Middle East correspondent. She's been reporting on the Iran War. She's just been reporting the news. Nothing woke about it. Probably reporting you know the truth about what's happening in the Iran War and the military wants to keep that information from reaching service members

and to be clear like this is a huge publication and it's reached to service members but also to

“base communities right so because they cover I mean you you must have dealt them to me like”

they they they cover you know things that are of issue to military families like lengths of deployments and far more depth. You know and and like to me like this is like this is a this is a huge warning sign about the kind of state media that they want to you know shape military coverage and again. Pete Hexeth I get. Where's Dan Kane like I'm not trying to pick on the guy today but like I think you know I'm not to sound like an Atlantic. I think that's a value of

chicken. A random three star out of retirement. General Millie. I think General Millie or Jim Mattis would have gone in there and been like I've read stars and stripes for decades like back the fuck off. I shouldn't do this. Yeah I think the the precedent here is chilling the message it sends is chilling. For those who are listening and thinking come on these guys can just like log on to the internet and get news anywhere. I was talking to a former service member today

who said no like stars and stripes was the main source of non TV news for this person whenever he was deployed because when you are somewhere like let's say you're on the front lines in Iraq someone would upload the PDF of the daily stars and stripes to the sippernet which is the secret level classified network and while this guy said he had very little satellite bandwidth like go on the

internet and surf news websites sippernet was always available the stars and stripes was always

“available. So sometimes it was like the only thing you could read like if you're sitting in a”

skiff or if you were online. I'm an aircraft carrier. Yeah we're in the submarine right. So it is pretty significant. Let's end by talking about the rise of the far right and far right politicians in Latin America. So in recent years we've seen conservative politicians win elections in Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia. The New Yorker and the York Times ran recent pieces about how these leaders seem to view El Salvadoris president Diabucaley as their standard bearer

and the person they sort of emulate. Listeners to this show again we've been doing a show for a while now. They've heard us talk about Bucaley for a long time. He is very popular in El Salvador, because he managed to drastically reduce gang violence. But according to MSC International he did so via quote, "NAS arbitrary detentions the suspension of guarantees and serious human rights violations that could amount to crimes against humanity. He is also believed to have cut deals with gangs

to better hide their violence not really curb it." Then Bucaley became a megadarling because I'm sure books remember he allowed Trump to send migrants to secode their horrific mega prisons in El Salvador. Bucaley's political success though has led a bunch of right wing leaders down in Latin America to celebrate him to emulate him both in kind of style and substance. One upcoming race we're going to watch this very closely is the presidential election in Brazil. You've got President Lula de Silva

and then the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio Bolsonaro who were facing off in October, Bolsonaro towards secode the mega prisons in El Salvador. He's explicitly campaigned on the Bucaley model and promised five new maximum security prisons. Bolsonaro also campaigned with Megadarling Havir Mele President of Argentina. So Ben, I wonder what you make of these pieces, the influence of Bucaley and like I guess sort of how to disaggregate his image from the kind of

the Trump brand and the reality that like, you know, kind of right-wing, strongman or want to be

Yeah, I think there are a couple things I'd highlight because you know, the other thing we've

talked about him over the years is this is like kind of crypto obsession, Bitcoin obsession,

“he's buying the dip and I think the two things are the clearly what Bucaley's tapping into is”

is people being fed up with violence and crime and large parts of Latin America, which is a real problem. However, the problem with Bucaley's approach and we've seen this in history and lots of places including Latin America is the high-water mark for how people feel about the kind of mass arrest suspension of rights approach is at the beginning of it and it just gets, you know, that over time, because what he's done is sure the human rights violation started with the kind of mass arbitrage

detentions, but then it became like, oh, and I don't really need a parliament that has any power, and oh, I have no term limits, and you get on this slippery slope where then people look up in 10 years and nobody likes the guy anymore, but he's just, they're stuck with him and nobody has any rights, and so there's a real danger that this kind of short-term interest in security leads countries to kind of repeat the history of allowing right-wing strongmen to kind of capture

power and consolidate it. What's different about Bucaley and this kind of came up in some of these stories that we were looking at this week is, you know, he doesn't present as like, you know, that the traditional strongman is like, you know, military guy. He's our need of form. He's like a young guy, he like presents this kind of cool, like he's going to wear in backwards hats and, you know, he looks like a, you know, crypto bro and he's very social media savvy,

and so it's kind of like having the like, you know, Zoro and Mamdhani touch at communications combined with like the absolute strongman approach. It's an alarming, an alarming, effective recipe that he's kind of cracked where his presentation isn't like scary, it's kind of, it's tough, but it's also meeting people somewhere they are and he's using social media. And yeah, I worry that, you know, it's a test for the center and the left and Latin America, like hey, you're going to have to take

crime pretty seriously here. Right. Because if, if you don't have an alternative solution, people are going to turn to guys like this. Yeah, look, Pukaila is a dictator, like Sikot is a crime against humanity. It's like, it's just evil institution. On top of that, I mean, he wrote, he rewrote the Constitution in El Salvador to abolish term limits, so he could run again. He sent troops into parliament. He, uh, this party removed like all their magistrates on the Supreme

Court than forced through this change to make all judges over 60 retirees so they could pack the

“courts. So he's done like a lot of authoritarian things. Um, I think people are willing to look”

past that because I think we probably just don't understand what it's like to live in a country, yeah, that had that level of gang violence or like war zone, like levels of violence. I also think politically, Pukaila married up a real skill set, which is like marketing, communication, social media savvy with an issue that is extremely visceral and easy to demagogue, right? Like we all know social media, we don't share the best, most fact-based voxics planer where we share like the,

the video that makes us mad or scared or whatever it is. And I think like crime stirs those emotions and uh, Pukaila gets that and you very effectively use social media tools to highlight those issues, what he's doing about them. I mean, a camera which sorry was one of them talks about how

El Salvador opened this amazing new library, which is like beautiful and like really like an exciting

thing, it's something to celebrate. Pukaila's quote about it was, and now we'll be open later because El Salvador is finally safe. Like he makes his message a part of everything he does in a way. It's very disciplined. Yeah, and but even like the library, like this, this is such right wings, strong land stuff where it's like, you know, you, you drive down crime, you throw all these people in prison, you can sell a power, then you kind of build some stuff that like, you know,

monumental safe. But then like 20 years from now, the corruption is really like rot at the economy, people are still rotting and prison, like because even some of the the we're entering interviews I saw from some more thoughtful journalists, because I know Salvador in oppositionists, right, and so they'll say to me, this is horrible. But but then you read these interviews with people like, hey, isn't your son like in prison in these mass detentions and like it's worth it,

“you know, like he'll get out, but maybe he won't get out. You know, over time I think people will”

start to see a wait a second. These emergency powers are permanent, you know, and by the time

people figure that out, it's too late because there's full-state capture. And I think that's the model that Bukaila's setting. Now, Miele hasn't gone that far, you know, others haven't been able to go as far as he has, because, you know, Salvador is a smaller country, too. But it's a dangerous

and we should say, backed by the U.S. entirely. Usually it's the U.S. that's like, hey,

“I'm sorry about that. But let's see these people out of prison. Well, there's some people”

from the Biden administration quoted in the story saying they wish they had pushed back harder on some of Bukaila's more authoritarian instincts, although others question whether he would have cared. Yeah. I don't think, I mean, for someone who's usually pretty hard on the Biden administration, that's certain things. I'm not sure they could have made much of a difference. Yeah.

Finally, finally for the session with me and Ben, if you're in a group chat with me,

by now you've probably gotten like a half dozen clips from the world humanoid robot games in Beijing. I will not apologize for that. I find them equal parts terrifying and hilarious. So I asked Michael and our team to pull together a few examples of some of his favorites that we've spotted on Twitter today and just show them to Ben and I. We're going to watch him for the first time, potentially. Probably not because I'm on group chat with you guys. We're deep in

things, but we'll tell you what we see and how you can enjoy the do. All right, we've got Oh, boy. We're doing kind of a gymnastics routine, cheerleader routine. Oh, and one of them is now on the ground. And this one, there's a running this one at the time. It's for no reason. Oh,

kickbox. Now we're doing kickboxing and karate. We're just going to be like blind. This one. Oh,

this poor guy's trying to put the bar over. Oh, no. She can count on. Oh, he fell down. That's the best one. That's the best one. This one fell into a wall and then snapped in half. This one's flying. Oh, my God. What? Oh, this one did a flip by accident. What's really interesting, Ben, is apparently, um, who that just tons of these poor robots running into walls, just sprinting as fast as humanly possible into walls and then wiping out, uh, just to some

dudes at the stretcher. And I'm trying these guys carrying their corpses off of the, uh, of the track.

“That's a great little selection of these clips. Ben, so one of the clips has the robots that I think”

beat Usain Bolt's record run really funny. They kind of run like this. Yeah. And apparently, um, the

AI trained itself to run that way. Because it was trying to run like a person with arms going up

and down, but it kept overheating and like parts would burn up and stuff. So they had to just train itself. So it trained itself to learn how to run really fast and stay stable. And that's, that's our robot future. Yeah. I'll, I'll be dystopian in this regard, too. In the same way that remember, I don't know, five years ago, people are like, hey, they're going to be these deep fakes, you know, where people are going to look like people or AI's going to look like people and

not going to tell the difference. We're watching the robot Olympics where it's these kind of, they look like kind of, you know, imperial stormtroopers. It's like, like, kind of funny. Like, I kind of feel like we're probably only two, three years away, where they look exactly like people, like, like imagine watching those clips, including some robot running in a wall and exploding, and it like looks exactly like a person, you know, like, I feel like, unfortunately,

because humans feel compelled to build things that nobody's asking for. I feel like that's coming, too. It is coming. All right. We are going to take a quick break, but when you come back, you're in your Benz interview about what it was like to be an ER doctor volunteering in Gaza at the height of the war. So stick around for that. Pot say the world is brought to you by him. His ED is more common than guys talk about. The good news,

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Viagra is a registered trademark of Viatrus specialty LLC. Hims is not affiliated with or endorsed by Viatrus. All right. American Doctor is a new documentary film that provides a really gut-wrenching and important look at the experiences of three American physicians who went to Gaza to work in hospitals during the genocide. And then documents their fight to hold American politicians accountable

for the weapons, the violence that our tax dollars are funding. Before we get to our guests,

little girl for what two and a half hours. And she's probably going to lose her right leg left leg

in the left arm. If she's starting to wake up, let's get her warm. As a Jewish physician, I knew nothing about Gaza. Like most Americans, I thought everybody out here were nothing but

“terrorists because that's what I was told. I'm not Israeli, I'm not Palestinian, I'm not Christian,”

I'm not Muslim, I'm not Jewish, I don't really have any connection to it, but as an American, I just don't want my government involved in crimes. I'm a Palestinian, I'm not a spokesperson, I'm a human being, I'm a US doctor who wants to see babies like my babies, not be killing anymore. What surprised me most was how the carnage was focused on journalists, health care workers,

and children. Where was that? That bomb hit the building. There was a 15 year old kid

ready for discharge. That wasn't generated. And if I had gone down and been changing that kid's dressing, there would have been three bodies that I would have been one of them. All right. So that gives you a glimpse into a movie that I think everybody needs to watch. It opened in Los Angeles last Friday. It's in theaters in nine other cities, so please look for American doctor in your community. Joining me today, we have a repeat visitor. Dr. Furus said was one of the people profile

in the film, who was on Potset the World last year. As well as the film's director,

“Posi Tang, who's with us, who was I think following for us with the camera.”

The last time you're here, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having us.

Well, pull me just start with the question of how did you decide to make this film and how did you make it in the difficult circumstance of being able to film a Gaza, and then of course, back in the United States? So I'll say the starting point was a year into the genocide. It just felt like nothing was shifting in the United States. And as I was a journalist long before I became a documentary filmmaker, so I've worked in various newsrooms and was extremely

difficult and painful to see former colleagues in mine at Al-Jazeera. I used to be a documentary commissioner, Al-Jazeera English, former colleagues getting targeted and executed. It did something to me. And at that time, I was a studio executive for a studio, and I thought to myself,

“"Look, I don't want to do this job anymore." But what I did not know, I just knew that”

if I'm going to make a film, I'm going to have to quit my job, and I'm going to have to find the story. And so that started me off, and then I met Dr. Mark Promutter. I reached out to him, because I saw a clip of him saying like very undoctorally things, as he does in the film, and then he introduced me to Dr. Froesidwah and Dr. Theraman. And that's when I thought, "Well, as a filmmaker, you're really lucky if you meet one participant who is so engaging that

you can't stop watching and you want to learn from them. When you meet three, who couldn't be more different, that's when that is our true privilege." And as anybody I'm sure in media, you feel that, you're like, "There's something here. There's something I can learn here." And I'll be honest with you, Ben, I live in New York. And so I have worked with people, I still work with people from different walks of life, different religious backgrounds,

different ethnic backgrounds, different nationalities, and I had lost the language to be able to navigate and to talk to people effectively and also to speak from my heart. And so meeting the three doctors, it gave me a way to move in the world. And I'm grateful for that. As to how we did it. Now I will say this. As a filmmaker, we are only the sum of our parts. And this team, the American Doctor team, spans eight different countries. And at the heart of our entire team,

our gas and colleagues, Ibrahim Al-Otla, our cinematographer, and Muhammad Saawaf, a co-producer. And we did it with them and team members over spread out out of eight countries. Set the tone right away. You're kind of dropped into this conversation that you're having with Dr. Mark about whether to show images of dead children. And he very kind of almost stridently argues like you don't pixelate this, don't blur it, people need to see what happened.

And so we get a brief glimpse of something that is absolutely the most horrifying thing imaginable for anybody, but certainly apparent like me, which is an image of dead children. How did you wrestle with the need to bear witness and to bring the experience of these three doctors and the experience of people in Gaza, to people with, you know, obviously the heroine subject matter

that's the second day that I'm filming with Mark, and so. And he was very, very upset with me,

because I wasn't sure or been, you know, as a non-fiction storyteller, as a former journalist, it's something that we grapple with. How much do we show? You show too much. It's gratuitous. You know, if he will see in a theater, they're going to walk out. It is you watch it on streaming platform, they're going to turn it off. Is that effective? You show too little. It's a huge disrespect to those who have passed and those who have survived those who have passed. And it's a

disservice. So it's such a delicate balance, which until today, like, I still struggle with, but at the end of the day, like, what was my purpose doing there? And Mark was upset with me, because he was thinking, you are just like the rest of them. And so, as a filmmaker, as a director, when you feel this kind of

“discomfort that just doesn't sit well, that's when you have to lean into it. And so that set the”

tone for what American doctor was going to be. Well, for us, one of the things that's so powerful

about the film, which we should say, like, it encompasses footage in Gaza, but it also encompasses, you know, the three doctors, like, in their lives, back home. And then ultimately, we'll get to the activism piece of it, you know, when you're back here and you're doing media and you're meeting the politicians. But I wanted to ask you, it's a peculiar thing, you know, to be a subject of a documentary. And in any circumstance, in this case, you know, you, I mean, when you're in Gaza, you know,

you are interacting with the tremendous amount of trauma, but you're doing your job as a doctor. But I can imagine that you're even able to process, because you're just working, you're just trying to save any life you can. What is it like for you to watch this footage with the slight removal of time? And does it take you back there? Like, what is the experience like, not just having been a subject, but now having seen this finished product, but to particularly see those images

“of when you were in Gaza? Yeah, you know, when I, when I was in Gaza, I don't really remember”

being filmed. Like, yeah, I knew Ebrahim was there, and I talked to him, obviously, but the camera kind of disappeared just because everything was in total chaos. You know, there was a lot going on. So when I watch it back now, you know, it's funny, I, um, I've seen the movie like four or five times,

and, uh, because, you know, we go to screenings and surveys and things. And I didn't, the, the first

several times I watched it, I didn't think that it was, um, I, I didn't understand why people thought it was difficult to watch sometimes. Like, you know, some people have a harder time watching it. And, uh, but then I watched it with a friend of mine, and she actually grabbed my hand during some of the scenes and like, you know, was just because I, some of the stuff, you know, I'm a trauma surgeon, so I'm used to seeing, uh, uh, people that are hurt. I'm, I'm used to, and I've been in Gaza,

so I'm used to hearing explosions. I'm used to feeling explosions. But, um, but most people aren't.

“And I think, you know, it kind of goes back to what Mark says at the, at the top of the film,”

we're, uh, and then like what Paul was saying, if you, there's a balance between showing too much and not making it real, you know, and I think this movie does a good balance of that. It makes, I think it shows people a little bit of what we saw in Gaza, not so much that you can't watch, but, um, but enough that you can understand why we were so affected by it, and then why we had to try and do something about it when we came back. But you know, Ben, as far as movies about

and documentaries about war and conflict and genocide, this one in terms of the graphic imagery, we scale back. Oh, I know you, yeah, people should know. This is not the, you scale way back, and, and, um, but, and you know what, I think this is my theory on why it's challenging and why people are like, oh my God, it's the guilt. They don't want to see it. I mean, you know, I remember for us the last time you were here, um, the question that I kind of felt you, because you're an

flappable guy, um, uh, the question I could kind of feel you, uh, you know, absorbing a bit extra was when I was like, how did it feel to be over there and know that your tax dollars are paying for the weapons, which is something you obviously rest with and film, that's the discomfort more than just, we, we have seen images of war or we've seen documentaries about war, um, and, and first, I want to ask, ask you, like, the, the interesting, it's very interesting to watch

you transition into this kind of more activist role, the film kind of shows your starting to media, you're starting to bring attention on, you're starting to try to get politicians involved, um, I was struck when I met you, but how much you are first and foremost a doctor, you know, like, um, your identity is that, but you've clearly been on a journey here where you want people

film, uh, of you taking on a bit more of a role with the other doctors of being spokes, maybe not

spokespeople, but activists, um, or at least people trying to, you know, get attention on this. Yeah, 100% so, you know, and yeah, just to be clear, it's hardly, like, I'm not even the person at the forefront of those efforts, it really fair is. Yeah. Um, but the, uh, you know, physicians are, and especially somebody who works in an emergency setting, like I do, like there's an emergency room, Dr. Emma, I'm a trauma surgeon. I regularly testify at, um, uh, drunk driving trials

at murder trials at a soldier's, you're here in the States, because that's part of my job, you know, it's, it's very common for doctors to witness the aftermath of crimes, while they're providing medical care to people. Um, for a thayer, as an emergency room, Dr. if he sees a suspected, uh,

child abuse, suspected spouse to abuse, any of those things are all reportable events, we call them,

and, um, uh, we are mandatory reporters. In the setting of the United States, like, you know, reasonably normal place, it's obvious who you're supposed to report that to, the police or the social workers or whoever it is. In the context of Gaza when I'm the criminal, who my supposed to report it to is it's kind of a weird situation to be put in as a physician. Who do you report a genocide, too? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the, uh, an obvious place to start seems to be the

people carrying it out. Um, I'm one of them, you're one of them, posed one of them. We're all paying for this, but obviously not by choice. Uh, so, you know, we, we do, um, you know, all the, the healthcare workers who've been to Gaza, we all communicate with each other a lot. And, um, uh, we, we've started, we've created a group called Peace Med and we're, we're just trying to work on these issues at the level of the US government because that's where, you know, the, the Israeli military

can't do any of the things that it's doing without the United States. I mean, it would stop, yeah, it's trying to, yeah, everybody knows that. It's that's hardly a secret. So, the, you know,

the, the problem is actually here. And it's something that we can do something about. And since there

isn't a court or an authority that we can go to, we just have to go to Congress. And like you, you know,

“you, I think you said it, it's a, it's a political question. In the end, that's, these, these are”

political, it is a political decision. You know, whoever's signing off on that arms transfer every single day, that's a political choice. As soon as he gets, here, she gets the, the, the word a stop signing off on those arms transfers, they'll just stop. That's it. And then they'll stop. We go, these arms aren't rolling downhill. We're choosing to send them over there. It's not, you know, it's not like the laws of the universe or just mandating it. So, that was how we, um, approached it. Yeah, it was just

saying, look, we don't know who to talk to. So, we're going to go talk to Congress. Well, you know, Poise, I was struck by, uh, you know, maybe it's because of my own, you know, history and both politics and media. Um, but, but some of the strangely more uncomfortable scenes, obviously the most uncomfortable where it's happening as a, but back in the United States are when we see like the media, because the doctors are starting to go on cable news. And, and we see sometimes like the very conventional,

like, well, as in Hamas, like going to threaten you if you, or doctor there, they, and and, and you could kind of feel the, the failure of the American media, the traditional American media, to, to, literally just tell people what's happening. Uh, and actually even worse, you see the kind of laundering of narratives about everything, some else is fall. You have a background in media, like you've been at ABC News right and New York Times and other places like how, how, um, how do you think about

“the role of, of the American media in either reporting or not reporting or obscuring the genocide?”

And, and, and, and, and why did you make this decision kind of step outside of more conventional, uh, media platforms to, to try to self finance or, you know, raise money for this kind of project? You know, because I felt like it's not for lack of facts that people are either not engaging or they don't know. And, you know, when it came to established media, I mean, cut real deep. You know, I cut real deep as, you know, I was, I've held all these different roles. I was a

journalist long before I became a documentary filmmaker, and to, to, to live in New York, to, to, to see a former colleagues with journalists, you know, who were not speaking up when it came to Gaza and journalists, when you know they do speak up when journalists are taken in Russia, in Ukraine and different parts of the world. Yeah. What was going on? And so, a lot of the film is critiquing the media. Yeah. And this is from my years of being in newsrooms. But, you know,

I had to hold myself back when filming because, in the early days, I, I could see, for those that Aaron Mark does getting pummeled and pummeled, and the film is purely verity. So you're just in their world. So I'm holding back. I'm just watching.

“You want to jump in and be like, how can you ask them these questions?”

I mean, there was a, there was a lot of rage. I had a lot of rage. This is, this is terrible. How could you do this to doctors who just went to Gaza, telling you what they saw and yours and,

in there. And, and to pummel these doctors in such a way, but I saw, I thought to myself,

“let the tape play. Let's see, let's see where this is going to end up. But what was also”

incredible is, over time, as I was filming the three doctors, I saw them got better and how they

were dealing with it. And so, you know, my hope is always with what you see in the world of these

doctors that some lessons can be cleaned here, you know, for the general public and how they look at media, but also for journalists and how they should be. And I've had conversations with so many journalists across the board and all the newsrooms that I've worked with. This is incredible, you are brave, and I'm like, you know what? No, I'm not. I'm doing the job that we all would not do if this was somewhere else, you know. And I'd say, you know what? I'm just trying,

and you know who's brave, the Gaussian journalist's brave, the doctors who went there to work and serve alongside them, that's brave. We just have to do our best and push from within. And with that, air, what I learned from him, there's a scene in in D.C., and all the doctors have come

“together to D.C. in there about to descend on Capitol Hill. And that air is like leading. He's”

telling the other doctors and he's telling them, don't overestimate what people know. Tell them a story, make it real. And that is how we wanted to make American doctor. Yeah, I will say there's such a good activity that he occasionally was like popping up in my inbox, like, who could I'm eating Congress, you know, like, like, he just relentless, you know. But on the on that, you know,

like, because even if I never saw him as an activist, I don't even that term, like, I still cringe

everywhere that when it's mentioned because it's a former journalist, because it's somehow diminishes. No, yeah, it's more just, like, I'd need to go report this. It's your point. Like, I saw a crime. I had to report it to the people who were responsible. What I learned really loved and respected in the way fire there was in is, is that it would drew me to him, was he so reluctant. He never wanted this role. And he, in fact, many times in the film, and, you know, as for those

of, you know, who actually, it's already out there, but he doesn't get to go into Gaza. Yeah. He ran away. He didn't, he was so ashamed. He didn't want to be part of the film. He just felt, like, you know, what purpose can I serve? And, um, and I'm glad he let me stick with him.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, what is something most part I told you before? I mean, it's so powerful. He's got

these two beautiful daughters, you know, in the juxtaposed that, but the kids in Gaza just reminds you, they're all kids. They're all the same. Um, and to that end for us, I want to ask you, like, you know, we talked about your experience last time you're here. Um, I'm curious, um, what is your sense if you talk to former colleagues or people you know in Gaza? What is your sense of the health care infrastructure such as it is now? Um, the, the capacity to provide care to people.

There's still, you know, over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire. Do you do talk to people? You're able to follow up with, with both how things are going and also,

“like, do you ever hear about people you treated? Do you get any report on how people are?”

Yeah. Uh, but when I right after I left, yeah, that, you know, the last time I was there was April of 2025. I tried to go back in November, but I was blocked for mentoring. Um, but yeah, no, I do. I keep in touch with a lot of a lot of physicians from, uh, from Gaza. Uh, you know, one of them, uh, he, I mentioned him in the movie, too. He's an anesthesiologist named as are, you know, he just sent me a photo of him, like, he's with his family. He's just, they're in this tent encampment. And,

you know, it's not, um, these aren't like, these aren't manufactured tents. These are some sticks of wood and some tarping that somebody pulled off of, you know, this were that NGO tent that was blown up or they pulled out of, pulled out a, um, a sheet from someone's blown up home or something. And that's, it's just a constructed apparatus that they're living in. They're under, you know, the, the 100 degree gauze in heat. They have no access to water, look to drinkable water. The,

the, no, no pipe to water. They have to, you know, go pick it up and bring it back to themselves. If they can, if they can keep it at all, they have no access to a toilet. They have no access to a shower or, you know, they can't bathe. They can't clean their clothes. Gaza's, um, uh, solid and liquid waste facilities have been completely destroyed or offline. Uh, so there's no way to dispose of garbage. There's no way to dispose of sewage. It's such a laboratory for death that

the hospital's just overwhelmed now. Children are just constantly sick. You know, all of these things like a sewage system, clean water, clean food, healthy food. All of these things are meant to keep children alive until they get to the age of five. That's when they're kind of more robust and they can maybe survive a little bit of the challenges of the world. Uh, that's all been taken away in Gaza, you know? And then on top of that, the medical system has just been destroyed. I mean, it's, it,

can. They do way, and not just doctors, doctors, nurses, health, everybody that's there. They do way more than you would expect with what they have. Um, but, uh, you know, right, the, the, the, the large majority of Gaza's hospital capacity has been destroyed, physically destroyed. The little bit that remains is mostly at nostrometical complex, and uh, Huxa Martyr's Hospital and Darabah, those are the two, like, uh, hospitals right in the middle. That's about 300 to 350 hospital beds

total for 2 million of the sickest people in the world. It's just completely, there's no way this

is going to work, you know? Um, but, you know, our colleagues, they, they get up and they go to work every day, and, you know, one of the things that they actually tell us, um, is that they're, they're kind of afraid that if they don't, if they, if the, the community, every community lionizes and respects health care workers, it's just universal. There, these doctors and nurses, they're kind of afraid that if they aren't seen going into work every day, people will lose more

“hope than they already have. So they just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you know?”

And people, I mean, you said you couldn't get in, uh, I mean, who is left providing this health care. I'm not sure they're causing doctors, but there's also been doctors, disorders, and, but I just like, you describe your, your journey there. I mean, um, how hard is it for someone to get in?

Who wants to help? It's, it's entirely arbitrary. So like, you know, in my case, it's kind of ridiculous.

I, uh, I was supposed to enter Gus in, um, mid-November of last year, uh, five hours before I'm going to enter. I'm informed that I will not be allowed to enter. So I'm already in a mon Jordan, you know, literally getting ready to go down to the hotel lobby to get on the bus to go. I kept trying to appeal the decision. The Israelis were steadfast. They said, no, you're not going. But I also, I had lectures scheduled in Israel. After I was scheduled to come out of Gaza.

So I said, well, I don't want to abandon my friends there. You know, some, some of the repalistinians who live in Israel, some are Jewish Israelis. They're, they're mostly professors

“that have been growing until the university. And, uh, I didn't want to abandon them.”

They want you to tell your story. Yeah, they, I was getting, you know, the plan was to go into Gaza for three weeks, come out to Jordan, then go into Israel and give these these talks. And these talks were like 20 people, you know, it's not, not a big deal. Um, they're not a big thing, uh, you know, the universities wouldn't even give them a space. Like, they, we had to like do it guerrilla style. But I was like, you know, they blocked me from entering Gaza. Obviously, they're going to block

me from entering Israel too. But I was like, let me try, you know, I want to tell these people that I tried. So I food Athens, food to Tel Aviv, and not they just, they're just, they're just of, why are you here? I said, for this reason, why, you know, you've been in Gaza, yes, I've been in Gaza twice. And you just blocked me from entering. Why did we block you? I don't know. You'd have to ask the shinbet, why I was blocked. You can, you know, the other ones that did it. Um,

and, and then they just gave him a password. It was actually, I've, I've, that was the third time

event or Israel through Ben Gurian airport. It was the easiest entry I've ever had. So obviously, there was no security concern with letting me. And, you know, the, the blocking of health care workers and about half of international health care workers try to go to Gaza are blocked from entering. The blocking, it's completely and totally arbitrary. It has nothing to do with security. It's completely ridiculous. Um, and it's just a way of, of separating Gaza from the rest of the world. You know,

like, they are in, in the movie, maybe I, I shouldn't do spoilers, sorry. In the, in the movie, it becomes apparent that they are being Palestinian is, is what is, it's Israel's excuse for

“not letting him go. And from, it's family. And his family and yeah, exactly. Um, that that's why”

he's not allowed to enter Gaza is because he's Palestinian. But that's like, that's, that's, that's, should be the other way around. That's why he's entitled to enter Gaza. And not only is this family Palestinian, his family is from the Gaza strip. You know, that's, that's where they're actually, actually grew up in. Actually, you're based. And, um, but it's, it's not just stopping Palestinians from helping Palestinians. It's actually stopping plenty of other people in the world from doing.

It's a way of severing Gaza from the world. And for me, that was the heart of why I wanted to make the film. Like, who gets to say what, who gets to do what, who gets to go where? You know, there's a privilege in who you are and the identities that one carries. And, and to be able to navigate that, you know, with colleagues, there couldn't be more different. And I wanted, I wanted to learn that for myself as, as a, as a woman, as a woman of color, as somebody from

a minoritized religious community. Uh, you know, I am very perceptive to that. And so I just wanted to be an affairs world in markswell and for roses world. And let's see, everybody has different, they can see different challenges. They can see different opportunities. They can walk into different spaces. And together, they can do something really, really, really hard. Even though they are so different and they're not a monolith. So those were the lessons that I wanted to learn

as a filmmaker and just, just as somebody living in the United States. Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I wanted to ask you, the last thing I wanted to ask you is that the, as we speak, international journalists are still not allowed into Gaza. They had not been allowed in since October 7th. It's pretty extraordinary. As you said, some of the same journalists would be raising hell if that was the case somewhere else or notably silent about this. I was struck

the social media and a very small number now of documentaries or the kind of the only glimpse you get behind the curtain of what's happening there. What do you, what do you hope people take away from this? What, what, what do you hope that the film achieves in kind of documenting what's happening and and potentially galvanizing people? And is this, you know, as someone who's had a career in journalism, do you feel like, you know, one of the reasons public opinion is "Shift down Gaza,"

because people are actually turning to other sources of information because they know they're not getting the truth from, or these are the full truth, from more traditional media platforms. I mean, do you think this is going to hopefully crack open the door to more storytelling or, or how do you think about this film as an object in the world in our current media environment? The door is already open and there's no turning back. You know, the cracks were there long before and now, and now we're

seeing, we're seeing, you can't, how are you going to stop? There's no way any entity or even the government can stop all these images being broadcasted or put on social media coming out of Gaza. And yes, foreign journalists, American journalists, Western journalists can't go in, but the Gaza journalists continue to do their job and they continue to do it even at the expense of their own demise as they have to document it. And so I think so much of it in this film, what I want

right, I really, really wanted to do, because it's not for lack of like the carnage that you see

“on social media. I think it's there. If you're following, it's there. And if you want to look for it”

is there. And, but it was more of like, I wanted people to see, they're no different than we were. And one of the things that dawned on me really early on, because in my last job, I was an executive for a studio. And we watch how people watch things. It was not lost on me that medical dramas do very well. I'm a big fan of the pit. I was a big fan of ER, big fan of grazing out of me. Love house MD. So how can we, how can we make the pit? We understand the format of how that story telling is.

How can we make the pit? Differences is set in Gaza and it's real. And that's how we're going to bring, you know, what's happening in Gaza back into the American psyche in the format that people

understand. You know, so that, that was always like the thought. And in terms of what people will

get out of it. And my hopes, I mean, this is what I've seen people have gotten out of it. And which has been very encouraging. When we premiered at Sundance, first of all, I didn't think that would happen. But it happened. But that's a very... Right now, it happened a couple years ago. It may not have happened a couple of years ago, but, you know, institutions are made out of people. And, you know, but in this case, they really pushed for us. They really pushed for the film.

And for that, I'm forever grateful. But Sundance is a specific kind of audience.

“It's critics. It's cinnafiles. It's Hollywood, right?”

The true test. The true test was when it went from Sundance to Missouri, to Colombia, Missouri, to another festival called True Falls. It's still by far our largest audience yet. 1,200 people. And what I didn't realize until I got there, the true false that year, this year, was sponsored by medical university. So 1,200, full. I don't think people knew what they were coming

in for. They came to see the film, because it's called American doctor, and that was always my

hope, you know? Let's see whether we can trojan horse this in. Yeah, yeah. And still, he's laughing. And still, today, like, that was probably one of the most wild and electric audiences, because people didn't know. So when the film ended, people, they, I mean, they stood, they gave a standing evasion. All right? But they started shouting, what can we do? We didn't know what can we do? And that's when I realized we have something. Yeah. So in my, in our experience now, having had the

film now, you know, on the road, internationally domestically across the country. Whatever reason people are coming in for, whether they're coming in, because they're from the Palestinian community, and they're coming to see that air, and to see the diaspora, fighting really hard for other Palestinians in Gaza, or they're coming in for Faro's, you know, because

“Faro's is Faro's. Are they coming in? Are they coming in for Mark, because Jewish American people?”

Yeah, no, which is interesting experience in habit. Whatever, whatever reason they're coming in, they all leave the same. Yeah. They all leave wanting to do something. And that is enough for me. Yeah. There's a, this weird thing happened when I was walking out of one of the screenings where there, and this, there was an older woman who was walking with a probably a friend of hers, and they were talking about the movie after seeing it, and she, um, she was trying herself for this, but

and I just heard it, and I couldn't believe it, but she said, I'm, I'm embarrassed, but I've never

thought of Palestinians as having families. And you know, a big part of this movie is there's

family. There's such a, just quintessentially normal family, what else would they be? But, you know,

and she, like, this woman was chiding herself for that, but this, this kind of, you know, you can't, you can't explain to someone on CNN that Palestinians have families. You, that's not a thing. Like, they have to see it, and they have to say, oh my god, I can't believe I hadn't conceived of these

“people as people before, you know, I think the film does a really, really good job, not just”

if they are in his family, but the, the, the healthcare workers in Gaza, you know, you hear their stories. You, you see that, like, these people have gone through the same losses, everyone else in this territory. This besieged open air prison that's just been bombarded to hell. And they still are going to work. They're still trying to take care of their own families. They're, you know,

it's, uh, I think people when they leave have a different impression of the world than when they

went to make it go in. And I remember having these early conversations with that, or, you know, like his, his, his entire community is under siege, right, in many ways. And so for him to open up his, his home and to let me film with his children, that's a lot. Yeah. As a journalist, former journalist, I knew that, as a filmmaker that, where the film I'm making is purely observational, that means we're not doing sit-down interviews and going to have to make it real for him to

allow me to film his family. That's a huge privilege. And I remember telling him in the early days, I promise you, I will try my best not to waste this. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's so much of it, you know, it's been such a huge privilege, even working with our gotten colleagues. As a promise, we will not waste your efforts. Then they, they also made me promise. Then make sure you bring this film back to the United States, bring it to the American people. Yeah. You know, and I asked them,

like, film, you know, I said, I said to, to Abraham and Muhammad, like, the American doctors, they're going, they're stepping into this world, your world. And it's a portal that they're stepping into. And so I want, please, film the interactions that they have with Dr. A.M. Dr. Abed, Samakuday, all the doctors and healthcare workers in the film because we don't know if you're going to get to see them again. Film NASA, like, it is the last time. But it also was for me,

trying to tell them, like, this is the record. This is the record that we are going to make. And whatever happens, we try our best. Yeah. Well, and to take your point about the audience Missouri, I mean, we have to remind ourselves, I mean, your Potsay, the world audience is presumably in following this. But a lot of Americans, like, you know, they may be the only here the version

“that is sanitized, or, you know, maybe just it's another conflict. And, and, and I think we cannot”

underestimate, you know, how it's to me, it's actually kind of remarkable. Public opinion is stripped as much as it has without, you know, the media coverage you'd want of this. So hopefully, this kind of opens up a new space. The last thing, I'll give you the last word for Rose. I'm just kind of curious, like, how, how is this whole process of of both going to guys being a part of this film, doing things that you probably didn't anticipate, like, media? How is this kind of change your

life? In the film, I say something like, you know, the, the, the, the reason I do this work is because I want to see my own country reach its moral potential, and I want to reach my moral potential. I don't want to continue to be forced to subsidize the mass murder of children. I don't think you want that either. I don't think the vast majority of Americans want that. Nevertheless, we are being forced to by, you know, by two administrations in a row is pretty shocking. And, but people,

people are aware that they, you know, when you, when you point out to them, number one what's going on a number two that we're responsible for, and that we have the ability to stop at it any time,

“they're just pretty genuinely horrified. I think that kind of thing can go a long way towards”

making the United States a place that actually lives up to its ideals. The ideals that are just of basic humanity, honestly, that's not, they're not uniquely American. So if that's, if I get to do that, that's a, that's a privilege and I'm, I'm blessed for it. Well, I want to thank you both for us for all that you've done, including in Gaza. I think you, you kept your promise. It's an incredibly

powerful film. Everybody should check out American Doctor. It's across the country and theaters.

Hopefully, we'll have a life in theaters. It'll then have a life, you know, in other places where you can watch it. So thanks so much for making the film and for being here today. Thank you for having us. Thanks again to Pharaohs and Pope for joining the show, and we will talk to you guys next week. Pause the world as a quick and media production. Our show is produced by Elona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Inisha Bonerjik. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethcote,

Jordan Cantor, Kenny Muffet, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Her staff has proud the unionized with the writer's Guild of America East.