Why Trump Might Send Ground Troops to Iran

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New episodes of Runaway Country drop every Thursday, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. Welcome to Potsayville World, I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. How's the Iran War in Somalia for you?

I do have this kind of habitual fall sleep in wake up at 3/30 in the morning, and I was right at four. I'm racing, and then I start reading stuff, and then you're up. So, you're not a good idea to look at your phone these days. Not a good idea to look at your phone ever in the middle of the night.

I break that rule frequently, and I do think there's a weird instinctive you know, I'm not trying to over-dramatize this. But having in eight years like had to kind of feel like you had to work when something terrible, I'm honoring the situation. Yeah, I mean, you just kind of like, there's this weird instinctive thing in my body that's like,

“do you see the thing where the, when the war started about all these dads who were saying they had to monitor this situation?”

Yeah, yeah, I did. I once seen that all day, or some BC or whatever.

Yeah, well, that's basically us.

Well, by the way, it's an interesting war in that regard, because I mean, I hate to say this, but I don't find CNN's coverage to be particularly illuminating. Look, I got that guy in CNN. That guy's good, but some of the, let's just say some of the guest choices in the panels are pretty, 2004 feeling, you kind of have to really search for your content on this war.

There's clearly censorship happening. Like why does Algesia have all these images that don't seem to appear on other stations, you know? Yeah, a lot of people covering it from Israel are probably having an ideal with sensors. Yeah, the guy's name is Frederick. Plightkin, P.L.E.I.T.G.N.

He's doing a great job.

“He is doing a, uh, Frederick Plightkin search for him on Twitter if you want to see what CNN's doing actually in Iran.”

Which is, I mean, it's pretty fucking brave to get in a car and drive into Iran as it's getting. Oh, bombed. Can't get in the Gaza. Right. You can get in Iran.

That's a very good point then. We're obviously going to focus much of our time today on Iran. We're going to talk about the total incoherence of the White House's messaging and we're going to try to figure out genuinely whether this war is about to end, whether it's about to escalate something in between.

I genuinely don't know. I'm excited to hear your opinions. We have not talked about this. We'll take through seven to latest developments from the last week, including casualties, all things oil and then some scary signs of escalation.

We'll tell you what we know about the new Supreme Leader of Iran and what his selection signals from the regime will also talk about what a ground operation to get Iran's nuclear materials, what actually entails the latest on the bombing of an Iranian girl's school and then what's happening.

In Lebanon, then finally, Ben, we're going to talk about the U.S. military's new counter

drug mission in Ecuador and then the Gen Z rapper who is about to be a prime minister of Nepal. That's actually a fun story. That's a fun story. Then you can hear my interview with Mike Horowitz.

He's put on the show before he is an expert on how the Pentagon adopts and uses new technologies. We talk about the fight between the Trump administration and the AI company anthropic, over the use of its model, Claude, as well as growing concern about this munitions shortage, especially missile defense system shortages and how the U.S. is now turning to drone technology from Ukraine to close the gap in counter these Iranian drones.

So very interesting conversation with them. Yeah. There's a lot there. I do think, again, I'm glad you did that because the anthropic story is not getting the attention that it might otherwise get, but for the future of humanity, it's hugely important.

Yeah. I'd love to know what the Pentagon is doing with a super powerful AI systems.

“Why they need autonomous weapons and mass surveillance capabilities?”

Yeah. It seems like something would be easy to say no, too. Also for those of you who are friends of the Pods subscribers, you're going to hear Ben and I do a Q&A where we take some questions from the Pods A of the World Discord. By the way, if you like Kirk and Media, if you like this show, if you like we're doing

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And our promise to you in return is never to book Lindsey Graham on any of our shows.

Unless we are going to be really mean to him. We promise to play Clips of Lindsey Graham and to react to them and make fun of him. We also, we also know Fly Zone for John Bolton, although I'll be fun to yell at them. Mike Pompeo, he's in suffer, he's just a part of how much he's disappeared. Yeah, he's gone.

Yeah, another proof point that second to Trump does not save you the humiliation that always comes at the end of it. But like somehow, Graham is just like a barnacle on the ass of whatever person he thinks is in charge of. John McCain for decades, Donald Trump, and now he seems to have real influence, it's just

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because it helps the show grow and it helps us displace all the propaganda that's floating around on the internet about this terrible war. All right, Ben. So, we're now 11 days into this regime change, where we're the run.

“The goals in the broader strategy are like somehow less clear I think now than when they”

started. We'll do a broader update in a minute on like major developments since our last recording. But we just wanted to like recap this, this head spinning messaging shift from the White House this week. So, the quick version is at the end of last week and over the weekend, Trump was suggesting

like really maximalist goals for the war. He posted a message on true social where he said, quote, "There will be no deal with the run except unconditional surrender." That freaked out the oil markets, understandably, to the point we're on Sunday night, you saw the price of oil hitting above 120 dollars a barrel, just like exploding.

So it seems like Trump freaked out the Wall Street Journal reported that his advisors were telling him like, "Find an off ramp, this is going to kill us in the midterms." So, he made this call to CBS News while markets were still up in the U.S. stock market was still open and basically it was like, "Oh yeah, the war's about to be over everything's going to be fine."

And that seems to have worked. In the near term, remember, because the stock market as this taco phrase, which is

Trump always chickens out, so it folded into that.

But once the markets closed, the messaging changed again. We had Trump like talking to Republicans at this retreat, we had him doing a press conference, and then Pete Hexeth was out this morning Tuesday morning doing another press conference. And this is a super cut that our team put together of Trump and Hexeth messaging from Saturday through Tuesday that I think gets out the incoherence.

Let's watch. "We're putting a war by a lot, we've just submitted their whole people at bar, it'll

"We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do the excursion right of some

“people, and I think you'll see it's going to be a short term excursion."”

"We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough." You've said the war is, quote, "very complete," but your defense secretary says, "This is just the beginning." So, which is it, and how long should Americans be? "Well, I think you could say about it.

We could call it a tremendous success right now as we leave here. I could call it, or we could go further, and we're going to go further." "You probably see Iranian people, you would help them, but it sounds like you're willing to end this fight after your military objectives have wrapped up. Is that, is that an obitrayal?

"Will I help them?" "I'd like to. I've taken behave, but they've been very interesting." "Today will be yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran. The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.

I see in the media, banners that say in a war expanding or war spread, it's actually the opposite. It's actually quite contained."

“"It's so, again, I think, excellent super cut there.”

So, let's just take on this idea.

First of all, quite a message to the Iranian people, like, if you can behave, maybe,

I'll consider supporting you, like, what does that mean? This idea that the war has been a success. First of all, the nuclear material has not been secured, we'll get into what that would entail in a bit, but it's 900 pounds of highly-indrich uranium sitting around. The ballistic missiles are diminished, but not gone, right?

The US and Israel are not saying they've gotten all their stockpiles. Before the war, Iran was on the cusp of a leadership transition, but by killing the 86-year-old man, I had to pull up before he could regime, so we killed the 86-year-old man that to die. Now installed as much on-grid sun, so that's great. And we might have taken out Iran's navy, but there are some reports we'll get into in a

minute that they are mining the straight-of-war moves, as we speak. So, we really took at the people who are 1,000 miles away who are defenseless with no weapons and killed them without saving them. Yeah. We should talk about that.

“Because, right, there was a Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean that I believe was unarmed”

that had been invited as part of a parade of military assets that we sang, which is probably a war crime. Ben, is the war over, is it just beginning like what's happening? Trump talks about a war literally, like it's a football game. We got a big lead in the second quarter, we're winning, and we can call the end of the game

whenever we want. And I think what those clips confirm, I mean, there are a number of things. The first thing is that he literally started this war with no idea what its objective was or what it was going to lead to or how it was going to end.

I mean, because he himself never defined it.

And we talked about that, but he essentially came out, made it sound like regime change, Iranian people rise up, the language of regime change, the language of unconditional surrender. I BB Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham, whatever small number of people convinced them to do this. Clearly, made him think that this was going to be very easy, then regime is about to collapse. Because by the way, that's the kind of arguments they've been making for years.

Like if only you bomb them, this will be easy, no all collapse. I actually think BB Netanyahu knew full well that this wouldn't happen. Oh, yeah. BB Netanyahu knew full well that this would not be quick and easy and simple. And frankly, because he wants to destroy Iran and have it be a violent cataclyce that's

fine with him, but Trump cannot say what he talks about winning and, you know, we're achieving our objectives, but he doesn't say what they are, look what our military objectives are. I heard him say in the clip, you know, we're achieving our military objectives, but what are the military objectives? Because we're not achieving any clearly defined objective that you are, I could understand.

And he's got his finger in the wind here, and it's just a polling, and we should say it's a polling that, you know, he seems to care the most about the markets, you know, not the human beings who are being destroyed, not the geopolitical consequences to the surface of the earth. He was service members dying, Iranian civilians dying, Gulf state security being completely

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

Jong-un. I think we as Americans, even when we don't like our president, tend to think of him as a, like a bad, really bad version of a bad US president, you know, so like, we've had presence lie about wars before, you know, pick, pick, pick, I'll be Jay Nixon, whoever. He's in a whole other category of he'll just make stuff up out of whole cloth, you know,

I don't trust anything he's saying. Not a word. And we probably get more, what he said, but the girl school, this type of thing, we have

Yeah. So show you that. Yeah, unfortunately. So then there's that.

The last thing we want to say about headset is again, to take a historic analogy, remember

“the body count, you know, in Vietnam with the only way that we could kind of try to quantify”

the success was like the number of people we killed. He's taken this to the level of like the number of bombing that we do every day is somehow a measure of our success, that, that is an insane way to talk. Jay is going to be even more bombing, you know, okay, what are we bombing? Why are we bombing it?

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

He certainly doesn't seem to know, and he's the secretary of defense, and he doesn't this like annoying cat and the hat rhymes game, which is really great for this thing. Yeah, and so like what you have is a kind of clueless US government that has no idea why it's doing this other than maybe Israel was going to do it and we had to come in or

“where I just don't know what we're doing and we can go through like they can blow up some”

more nuclear material, the Iranians will regenerate it because they know how to do that. They can blow up a bunch of ballistic missiles, the Iranians will regenerate their ballistic missile program. They killed the spring leader, now they're the younger spring leader. Like this, this is making everything worse, it's not making anything better, and it's

creating all these risks, you know, some which will get in here, and they don't even know why they're doing it. Yeah, there's a, there's a big picture strategy piece missing here.

So we're going to go deeper on the spring leader in a second, the ground operation,

a Democrat should respond, and then the latest on Lebanon, but just like quick news updates in the last week, Ben, so the, the, in terms of the casualty count for the broader region so far, these are from official government sources. So for the US, it's seven U.S. service members have been killed, but today we learned that 140 have been wounded, including eight who are seriously wounded.

So that is new information.

“Iran says 1255 people have been killed in 12,000 have been injured, obviously that number”

of probably growing as we speak, Israel says 12 killed over 1900, Lebanon says 486 killed over a thousand injured, UAE's death toll is six Kuwait reports, six dead as well, and Bahrain reports one, and then on the sort of oil front that Trump seems to primarily care about. As we're recording, oil is backed down to about 86 dollars per barrel, but the straight

of four moves is still effectively closed, and there are reports of right before we started recording that U.S. intelligence is either starting to see indications that Iran is taking steps to deploy mines in the state and the state of four moons, or CNN won even further, and said that Iran has begun laying mines. They said it was a couple dozen in recent days.

So after those reports, Trump posted something a true social saying that, quote, we have no reports and quote of Iran mining this straight, but that if Iran did do it, he wants them removed or else there will be a major military response, which, as far as I can so we're major than doing. Yeah.

So that clear things up. But if the straight is mined, it would be a disaster for shipping, and if shipping is shut down in the straight of her moves, the oil producers and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, they can't ship their petroleum products out, they will have to either further cut production or fully stop production in ways that could permanently impact supply.

So like watch this space, as people say, and also like congrats Vladimir Putin, you're now getting into a bunch more revenues from the price of oil just went way up.

So first of all, we heard in that clip, Hexas say this war is contained and getting smaller,

even though the bombing is getting bigger, there are 700,000 displaced people in Lebanon because of this war, like this, the violence being unleashed in Lebanon would normally shock the consciousness. The front page news, I'm sure what the reason Israel is doing it is because they know that the attention is on Iran, so we go.

But the war is in Lebanon, it's in every Gulf state, it's firing missiles at Turkey. It's in Turkey, like this war is not contained. This is a region thing. And part of what is so frustrating is that the people, those of us who have been warning against this type of war with Iran for 15 years, all of these things were very predictable.

These are the things that were going to happen, and they seem caught off guard that they're happening. And it is horrible that we should just pause for the people of Lebanon that there's a normalization and a mutinization of obey routes being bombed again for the umpteenth time. Then if you get to the Straits of Formus, again, Iranian war game scenario knew that the extreme

version of what the Iranians could do is mine the Straits.

impact for a period of time, but then kind of once the hostilities seem like they have

“diminished that traffic begins, it takes months and months and months to demine the Straits”

of Formus. And so if you are disrupting or halting the traffic of 20% of the world's energy, the oil and gas coming out of the Straits of Formus, the economic consequences that could be absolutely catastrophic. The far beyond high-world prices and gas prices, it could be like seismic shock to the global

economy. Again, very predictable. I'm not sure why Trump is surprised by that. And he has no strategy to deal with it other than to bomb them more. That is it logic of escalation, of a regime change war.

Oh, I'm not able to get you to do what I want by bombing you. So I'm just going to keep bombing you more, which is going to make you want to do more to hurt me. I, you know, keep mining the Straits of Formus, keep shooting at the Gulf States. And this is the other crazy thing I see in how Trump talks about this.

He thinks he controls the time line. He doesn't. He can stop bombing in two weeks. The Iranians could still mind the Straits of Formus. They're not going anywhere.

They could still launch Stimper Cell Tax. They don't give a shit about Trump's time line. These rallies certainly don't seem to care. And so this idea that he's in control of events is such a fiction. He has taken a war to, like, this is not the Assassin's Solamani where you can calibrate

or even the 12-day war. He, by going for regime change, by killing the Supreme Leader, was also the religious leader, Gia Islam, whatever you think of the guy, and he was a creep during robin' on. Yeah, yeah. Like, the idea that you can, like, neatly say this is a, you know, we had a 12-day war

and it's a 19-day war this time. No, it's one big war. This is the same war as a 12-day war, too, by the way. Like, you don't have multiple wars with the same country within a year and get to call them different wars, because you want to have shorter timelines.

We are at war with Iran on an open-ended basis even if we stop bombing in a couple of weeks. Yeah, this is not terrorists where you can turn it off. Speaking of oil, I mean, over the weekend, the Israelis bombed 30 Iranian oil depots. I'm sure folks saw these images. They were massive fires right in Tehran, it created these, like, apocalyptic scenes of these

massive black clouds, like it was dark during the day.

And then you had literally had oil raining down on an entire city of 10 million people that

could create health problems for generations. The Trump administration leaked to Axios that they were mad about these strikes that the Israelis did this. But like, it's not really clear to me if they were mad because this is oil that will be needed by the Iranian people or if Trump was just mad that it spooked the oil markets.

The other kind of major escalatory development from over the weekend then was the targeting of desalination plants. So Iran accused the US of hitting one of their water desalination plants when returned, they targeted desalination plant in Bahrain. And if that kind of like escalatory tit for attack continues, it could have devastating consequences.

Because Bahrain is basically totally dependent on desalination for its fresh water.

“I think Israel gets 80% of its water from desalination quake, it's 90% of its supply.”

So I mean, that's people just like literally not being able to drink the dye.

On Monday, as we mentioned, NATO defenses shut down a second missile from Iran over Turkey.

US diplomats were pulled from a consular facility in southern Turkey. So back to this thing being contained and contained. And then finally, there's some data out today indicating that the UAE's missile defense systems might be degrading. On March 10th, 25% of Iran's drones made it through the UAE's missile defense systems. The previous high was 10% on March 3rd. So it's like, it's not clear if the Iranians are learning or if the UAE's like

running out of missiles or if the radar is being gone or something's impacting it. There's also reports today that the US is taking missile defense systems from Asia and redeploying them to the Middle East. So again, so much for dealing with the threat from China. Well, first of all, on the oil strikes, beyond the horrific scenes and potential horrific human cost of the strikes, what does that have to do with degrading the ballistic missiles?

What does it have to do with degrading nuclear program? Don't tell me that this is about degrading Iranian capabilities. Your Israel is trying to destroy Iran. They're trying to destroy the Iranian regime. But they're also just, I mean, what is that? And so they're going to try to spin their victory as, you know, we took out this many ballistic missile sites. Well, then why are you bombing desolination plants?

Why are you bombing energy infrastructure? Right? The US is doing that, too, with the desolination lands. By the way, on the oil piece, you mentioned this early, but it bears repeating and I

“have a subject out on this. If you want to check out my subject, Putin wins because energy”

prices are higher and Russia benefits from that. Putin wins because Trump even acknowledges and gave India waver to buy more Russian oil because they know that they can't get the energy from the Middle East. In the long run, Putin wins if other countries, including in Europe,

we have to go back to buying a question. But these are all these countries that shifted from

“Russian oil and gas to a Qatar. Yeah. Now the Qatar shut down. And by the way, that takes”

a while to turn back on if you shut it down. This is not like a 12-day war kind of situation. Putin wins, by the way, because Ukraine has to send anti-drone technology and personnel down to the Middle East, which they're doing to help protect the Gulf States against Iranian drones. Like, Putin is such a big winner of this war that he could have designed it in a laboratory. Now he's, of course, he's giving targeting to the reports that he's giving targeting to the

Iranians to -- Steve Wittkov says that he's not and that we take them at their word. Is there more credulous idiot on the planet than that guy? No. And so the oil piece is assigned that there's not just bad ballistic missiles. It's also a huge boom to Putin. The

desalination thing is existential to the Gulf. It's going to accelerate then thinking that

the U.S. cannot be relied on because they put our security in existential risk. Again, even if he calls you into the war tomorrow, the geopolitical cost of potentially endangering the whole global economy for it in St. War and endangering the security of the Gulf States, they're going to look for their own nuclear weapons. They're going to look for their own security guarantee. Like, across the board, they just -- so comprehensively didn't

think through the consequences of this. Again, I can see it might serve Israel's interest to unleash this kind of violence in chaos in Iran, illuminate any potential competitor, have regional hegemony. By the way, the UAE, which had been Israel's biggest partner in that effort through the Abraham Accords, is clearly being targeted more than the Gulf States by Iran for that. So the UAE didn't get security from the Abraham Accords. They

got -- or from our bases. Yeah. Or from our bases. And so this is going to reverberate

“for many years to come if it ended today. And I think that is what is not being told to”

the American people by their political leaders sufficiently, that this has already been like a catastrophic decision. Yeah. And like, Trump might say, well, you know, we blown up the entire Iranian Navy. And maybe that's the case. But like, you don't need the naval ship to -- Was that causing you problem? I mean, I was really worried about you. You were -- Was it Iranian Navy causing your problem? I live in LA. Was it Iranian Navy going

to come and invade the California? No. They were not. And also, but like getting rid of the Iranian Navy doesn't mean they can't mind the straight-over moves. You do that with small boats. These little boats can carry like two to three mines. The Iranians are estimated to have a stockpile between 2006,000 naval mines, which they bought from the Russians in the Chinese, by the way. And a friend of ours is an expert in this stuff pointed out

that even if they have decided to do this, like whether or not they're successful, is it pretty clear indication that they are all in on this war, and that they are not seeking peace. And we'll talk about the news. And just real quick. The reason that they wouldn't do it, right, is because they sell their energy through the states of our moves. But if Israel is bombing their oil facilities, they can't sell it anyway. Right. So, in a way, you're

lowering the price tag for them to sabotage the straight, because they're just fucking over the Gulf states and not themselves, because their shit is getting blown up anyway. [Music] Positive world is brought to you by Inkogni. Have you ever wondered how a random company

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dash giant.com when you use the code world that check out that 20% off your first order at American dash giant.com code world. There's also been a leadership change in my early in the war. Israel killed the Iranians the Premier leader. I told Ali Hamanai in an era strike. That was with US intelligence to help that. Hamanai, Ali Hamanai was 86 years old. He was about to regime change himself

or be regime change by nature. But now thanks to Trump. It's not Yahoo. His son, a younger, reportedly even more hard line figure is now in charge. This selection reportedly went against Ali Hamanai's written will and desire because he did not want Iran to become a dinastic country again. That was part of what the 1979 revolution was all about. But 56

“year old, Mustafa Hamanai was the RGC's choice to lead Iran because that's the best way”

to give the middle finger to Trump and Netanyahu and the military guns like Mustafa. So here we are. We don't know much about Mustafa Hamanai. He's been behind the scenes

player in Iranian politics. A lot of Iranians have remarked that they've never heard

him speak in public. There's never much of a public profile. But he does seem to have operated as kind of like a chief of staff. Maybe for his dad. Maybe he's like a liaison between his father's office at the military and the intelligence leader. So we know that they like him. We know that the RGC guns reportedly wanted Mustafa to be selected. He doesn't have all the religious credentials that you were supposed to have for that job. But now he's

in charge. He's the spiritual leader of the country. He's a commander chief. He's the final decider of all political decisions. And again, like time will tell. But it seems like he won't want to make nice with the U.S. and Israel saying so far in this war. The U.S. and Israel have killed his father, his wife, his mother, and his son. So that doesn't seem like someone who will want to sue for peace. Of course, he may not last long in the job. These rallies

already tried to kill him. According to news reports, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump would be cool with killing him. But for now, at least he's the guy. Then thoughts on this new Supreme Leader of Iran. I think what I would say to people who sincerely want a better future for the Iranian people, right? A lot of people in the diaspora, other people, is that you would have had a better leadership transition if we had not bombed and killed the spring

leader. That regime was beginning to change. Not because it wanted to, it did not want to. But you saw, again, the women life freedom movement, it made the, it forced some societal changes, right? People were beginning, women were beginning to appear in public uncovered. There was a sense of like prying something open that was closed. If in a, if in the normal course of events, which would not have been much longer, how many had died of natural causes, the ability to force

his son on the country would have been, I think, much more difficult. There would be protests. There would be mass protests. There would be competing people. There would be processes that would have been under huge pressure. Because of the rally around the flag that happens, particularly among the IRGC and the hardliners in the country, when they're under attack,

“you have the most hardline possible succession. Because that's what this is. And it just puts the”

lie to the idea that bombing a country and assassinating its leader is a way to bring democracy to the country. No, it's a way to ensure that the people with the most guns in the country are the ones who choose the successor. Now, he may not last. He may be killed. But I think what we learn is, if he's killed, it'll be another IRGC back person, right? Because they're the only people with power left. When you are under assault like this, the people with power in the country are the

another. I just think, this is why even in times when there were no laws of war, we didn't assassinate

“the leaders of countries. Again, that doesn't mean you like harmony, but we don't just get to go”

and choose, that we assassinate the leaders of places we don't like. And part because it, usher is in a very dangerous new world where that may become normal. And some of you have more and more assassinations. Well, Trump has reportedly very angry about the Iranians plotting to assassinate him. Well, I mean, that's the other piece of this. They're going to be trying to kill a US president for a long time, including after Donald Trump has seen your general ways and people

work to do this. They will do that. This is why you don't end the war in 12 days. They might

try to assassinate the next US president because of what Donald Trump did. But the reality is that

we've made this situation internal to Iran worse by bombing and killing them, but also by empowering the absolute most hardline people in the country. So that part's going good. The other thing that I imagine, like the actual national security experts, both in the US and the Israeli government are probably the most worried about is this 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium that is, we think is buried under a mountain that one or more sites, but we don't really know.

And securing those materials will almost certainly require a sending in troops to get them.

“That's why I suspect Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out putting boots on the ground.”

And Iran, here's a couple of examples of him kind of dancing around this. I don't even want to talk about it. I mean, I don't think it's an appropriate question.

You know, I'm not going to answer it. Could there be possibly for a very good reason?

I have to be very good reason. And I would say if we ever did that, they would be so decimated that they would be able to fight at the ground level. The reason is no, you need ground troops to secure the enriched uranium at the nuclear sites. We find out about that. We haven't talked about it, but it was a total obliteration. They haven't been able to get to it. And at some point, maybe we will.

You know, I have to be a great thing, but we haven't, we haven't gone after it, but something we could do later on. We wouldn't do it now. Maybe we could do it later. Okay, so let's dig into what this kind of operation would look like. Because I got very triggered over the weekend that I was reading this Axios report that said, the White House doesn't view a mission to secure Iran's nuclear materials

as boots on the ground or an invasion, which is just like insane on every level. This would be, could be going socks and that boots? Yes, yes, yes. We're just torturing the English language here. So, this would be a major military operation that by any definition is men boots on the ground and innovation. So, there's been some good reporting on what this operation would look like. A lot of these plans existed when

we were in government. We've talked to experts about them. So we got, we got a good window into this one. So, long story short, like you were talking about sending hundreds of troops into Iran. You would need a specialized team to find secure and store the nuclear materials that might be a highly trained Delta Force team or a Navy SEAL team. And then on top of that, the Pentagon would almost certainly send a troops to secure a big perimeter around the sites

where the guys are digging up this shit. You might have to send in, like, earth-moving equipment

“and stuff, or, like, specialized equipment. And then that's why a lot of people's heads”

parked up last week when the Washington Post reported that the 80-second airborne was given a

change in its planning, seemingly to be more ready to deploy because they do this kind of stuff. Like, they go in behind enemy lines. They seize airports. They seize strategic areas. The Pentagon would also need to figure out how to get those materials out of Iran, hundreds of miles. So, either be by air or ground. You would need, like, missile defense drone defense during the operation throughout. And so, this would not be a small operation

by any stretch of the imagination. I just, like, don't get why a news outlet would repeat this absurd spin that it wouldn't be blew its on the ground. And then finally then, um, earlier today, Tuesday, uh, Richard Blumenthal, Senator Richard Blumenthal came out of an Iran briefing and said, quote, "We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran." Uh, he also added that Russia seems to be eating our enemies, so he seems to be

confirming that, even though Steve Wakeoff doesn't think that-- -But it takes putting in his word. -Yeah, it takes putting in his word. -We're in such a trust with him. He also said, "This is a China might be eating them too, so I guess we'll find out." But, like, what do you think the odds are that there is this kind of, like, HEU focused ground invasion? And like, how was leaving this material in Iran not, like, a red line for Netanyahu? This seems to be the thing he cares about

most over the last three decades? -There's something surreal about, you know, the fact that Trump has to simultaneously affirm his lie that he obliterated the Iran nuclear program. While leaving open the door to the fact that we may have to do an incredibly complex and risky operation.

Iran nuclear program, because as many of us have been saying for 15 years, you can't bomb a nuclear

“program and obliterate it's physically impossible. So that just shows you the kind of danger of having”

someone who's this dishonest, making decisions, because you can't really explain anything, because he's trying to keep these competing narratives from bumping into each other. Look, yeah, we've been there, we've studied this, we've followed this because you can't bomb all of the nuclear program

away. There has always been this idea that if you're truly going to try to take out as much of the

Iranian nuclear program as possible. By the way, you can't eliminate it entirely. They know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle. So you can't bomb the knowledge that exists inside of Iran how to do this. But if you were to do this, you would need a very complex special forces operation with closer support and lots of personnel. I will tell you this time, too, that in some of the kind of war gaming on this, and I'll say like even out of government, right? So this is not anything sensitive.

You might want the element of surprise. Look, pop up here's the team to get these materials. This is the most telegraph punch possible. So I imagine that that wake at harder, that wherever this is buried and whatever you know, things that they put in place to try to protect against this operation doesn't mean you couldn't do it, but it just be incredibly risky. And whether it's Israeli commanders or US commanders and special forces, joint US Israeli military

operation, it's complex. It's risky. It introduces ground forces into Iran even if you get some of these materials. It still doesn't eliminate the nuclear program. Because again, they know how to do this. There are people inside of Iran, like not even Israel and the US can kill that fast,

“who know how to do this. And it sets them back. And we've told them that the only way you could”

ever survive is getting nuclear weapons. So I guarantee you, if we see this, whatever we do, there's still going to be trying to build a nuclear weapon there, you know, on the back end of it. Yep. So here we are. The other kind of like invasion option that I think people are talking about and worried about is the US or Israel seizing a place called Carg Island, which is the little island. It's about 25 kilometers off the coast of Iran, which is a key transit point for the

export of about 90 or 95% of Iran's oil. So that would be a way for the US or Israel to essentially take control of Iran's oil industry. It would again be very risky. You would be shot at. There's troops there. It would be a big, big deal. But that's the thing. I think the nerds will tell you that like centcom is had that plan on a shelf for a long time. There's probably people on there want to do it. But it's amazing. And we're back in the 19th century here. This is what this is where we're at.

“That we were just seeing. I saw some people in Fox who never heard of Carg Island, you know,”

we could go or like, oh, we're going to get the island and get the oil. Like we're back in the empire business. By the way, that would be the biggest terrorist target in the world if we were like see some island and try to like run the Iranian oil industry from there. Like this is how we got in Islamic Republic of Iran in the first place because we overthrew a democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 because that leader was nationalizing the Iranian oil resources and lo and behold,

you know, within 25 years, we get the Islamic Republic. So the reason we've had an Islamic

Republic in the first place is because we tried to do this. disagree then. We are always the victims

in these stories. You can't ever make us a protagonist. The one of the little bit of good news is that last week there were all these reports that the US was arming Kurdish militia forces, especially in Iraq and encouraging them to go into Iran and try to topple the government. Trump now says he doesn't want the Kurds to go into Iran. Hopefully, that's true when he's being honest, but like I guess put a pin in that one. I always say about that, it seems pretty

clear to me that at least the Iraqi Kurds said no because they were saying it very publicly. Yeah, they were raising their hands, you know, the people that are in the Kurdistan regional government Iraq were like we don't want any part of this war. So I don't necessarily give Trump credit for that. I actually think the Iraqi Kurds would be like this had been in same thing for us to do. Yeah, I saw one of them was interviewed on Fox News and was just like, this is a really bad idea.

I don't think this is what we're doing. Also, I just one last thing then. I mean, I just think it's very clear. There's been a bunch of really good reporting now about the nuclear negotiations that took place between the Trump administration and the Iranians, specifically what Wikaf and Kushner were doing. And it's just so clear to me now that Jared and Steve Wikaf like fundamentally didn't understand the subject matter. Obviously, right? They're not nuclear experts.

They're not scientists. They're not PhDs. But there was a transcript of a call that those two bozos did for press. And like you can just tell like they keep mistating the name of the IAEA,

like they're getting basic facts wrong. Yeah. And like maybe look, maybe Trump never wanted to

cut a deal. And there was always going to be a war. But those idiots definitely didn't make it

negotiations and Ukraine, like no ship that nothing's going well. There are two scenarios. One is that the entire diplomatic effort, both last summer and this time were a facade, a deception operation, so that we could bomb Iran. That is outrageous and dangerous thing to do, because no one will ever trust US diplomacy again, if you know, if it's just meant to be a deception or a story. Yeah. If they were sincerely negotiating, we make fun of these people.

We have a laugh about them, particularly Jared, because he's a moron who like was born with a

winning lottery ticket and thinks that he like earned all that money. But the reality is sending

to complete idiots into the most sensitive negotiations in the world over and over and over again is not just embarrassing. It is terrible for US interests. Like an American sometimes make this mistake, particularly right wing Americans. They think other people are stupid, you know, that

“particularly brown people like the Iranians. These are very smart sophisticated people, right?”

The Russians, these are the Russians are the toughest negotiators in the world, you know? They are eating these people for lunch every day in every negotiation. The Russians are. I mean, such that Steve Rickoff is reporting propaganda that Putin is somehow not doing things that he's clearly doing, right? Or the Iranians aren't going to figure out that these guys aren't

serious, and so it's not worth coming back in the talks of them. Trump would clearly like

to be able to say we're back in the talks of the Iran, because he's dangled at a couple of times, and the Iranians keep shooting it down. So this is Jared Whitcoff show is in a bombination from a corruption standpoint, but from a pure competence standpoint as well. Yes. And speaking of US credibility, Ben, so it's just like increasingly clear as you've mentioned that this airstrike on an Iranian school full of young school girls, the killed 168 children in

14 teachers, was an airstrike conducted by the United States Military. Iranian state media released footage that has been confirmed by major news organizations as authentic. It shows a US Tomahawk missile hitting a naval base that is directly adjacent to this girl school. There have also been a number of news reports that the Pentagon, like has been doing internal investigations, they believe they were responsible for this strike. But Trump, of course, is refusing to take

responsibility. He is instead trying to lie and spin his way through this one. So here's a couple examples of his shifting story on this. Did the United States bomb a girl's elementary school southern Iran on the first day of the war in Kail 170 people? Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. Is that true, Mr. Hexan? It was Iran. You did that?

“It was certainly a best beginning. Still in the past. But the only thing on the other side,”

the targets, civilians, is Iran. missile likely destroyed that Iranian girl school. So will the Americans, will the US accept any responsibility? Well, I have been saying it. And I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of

the most powerful weapons around is used by, you know, is sold and used by other countries,

you know that. And whether it's Iran, who also has some Tomahawk, so we wish they had more. You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war. But you're the only person in your government saying this, even your defense secretary wouldn't say that when he was asked standing over your shoulder on your plan on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this? Because I just don't know enough about it.

So like, we don't sell Iran Tomahawk missiles. That's crazy. Like, my understanding is the only

“the US, the UK and Australia currently have Tomahawks deployed, at least the Iranians broke into a”

British submarine, Seoul, Tomahawk, and then dropped it on their own IRGC naval base/girls school, like this story's bullshit. So Trump, like he clearly thinks he could deflect and like wait for this story to go away, Ben. But like when you combine those lies with Pete Hegseth, bragging about getting rid of like woke rules of engagement. Yeah. It sends, it's hard to like think of a way to make the US military look worse than that. And all of us, you and I paid for that

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

them. The idea that they got this conspiracy theory that is all over the internet. The reason we have to address this is because this is all over the internet. I assume these railways are supercharged. Yeah. The bots are out there with this. I had a running woman come up to me in LA. I was like hanging out with Lizette. Lovely woman couldn't have been nicer, but it was like spouting, like insane, made up propaganda about the war and be like, "Tell everyone that you know,

"Well, the IRGC is the one who bomb that school is like name it." That's not what happened. It was one hundred percent off. If you think that, I feel sorry for you because you're unwilling to look like truth in the eye. And here's the other thing. We gave a lot of shit to the Biden administration during the Gaza war for defending the IDF. Every time there was some horrific incident in

Gaza, which is very regular. Remember, it was always, this is being investigated or this was the

Hamas Pentagon. Every hospital had the Hamas Pentagon under it. There's a way in which we are becoming like that, like the Trump response to this and even the headset response, which we're the headset that is actually not going as far as Trump. He's more reasonable than Trump. Because

“the US military, I believe there are still some people with some honor, I'm not mean this. I'm not trying,”

I'm saying this is a compliment, who have some honor in that institution who are like, "We do not lot about our mistakes." But most of the military is horrified that this happened. This was a massive intelligence fuck up, and I'm sure that people are like, just devastated. Devastated. But this is why you don't do what Biden and Trump both have done with the IDF, which is go along with this bullshit, that every single child who's killed is like a Hamas terrorist or every single hospital that's

blown up is a secret target, or a secret Hamas command center, or every single one that you can't

possibly defend. You just say we're investigating it, but we never get to the results of the

investigation, and oh, by the way, it's Hamas's fault. We are now doing that about Iran. We're doing the same language. We're investigating it. We'll get back to you, but maybe they did it. They're the only ones who kill civilians, not us. We cannot become, should not become that kind of country, but I fear that, you know, with Trump as president, like that's where we're at. But that is a dangerous dangerous place to be, not alone because of what we saw already with these girls,

which the whole war is not worth it. I'd rather have those kids back than all the missile launchers

“if we'd blown up. That's why we had to be an anti-war party in this country. This stuff can happen.”

Let's talk more about how our tax dollars should be spent in the Democratic Party, because as listeners probably know, last week, the House of Representatives voted down a bill to stop the war in Iran, not Trump would have vetoed it, but it was important, symbolically. Before Democrats voted in favor of allowing Trump and Pete Hexeth to continue this regime change or of choice in Iran, which is just insane to me. But political reported that the next

step in Congress will be the administration coming back to them to request an estimated $50 billion

in additional funding for the war. That's on top of the nearly $1 trillion Pentagon budget for 2026. Over the weekend, CNN's Jake Tapper asked Senator Chris Murphy about this request. Let's play that exchange and then talk about it. The administration is reportedly weighing Congress to approve an additional $50 billion in funding for these operations. You have said you're a hell now, not just to know on funding the war. We have seen this movie before. We know

that vote will be cast as, especially if you run for a higher office. You voting against the troops. Come on. I mean, the American people don't want this war. They don't want this war. They have seen what happens when American troops go into places like Iraq, places like Afghanistan, ultimately we get a lot of people killed. We waste a lot of dollars. The one thing the American people are clear about is that they do not want the United States dragged into another

“long-term war in the Middle East. If you support the troops, then you should be voting against”

funding this war so that we get our troops out of harm's way. Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands of Americans to die inside Iraq in the 2000s. And if we don't learn that lesson, then shame on every single one of us. It's a good answer by Murphy there. So I teed on the off on this on Potset, America, Monday, so I'll be quick. But I want to make sure that every Democrat listening understands that you cannot oppose the war and then vote for funding. That

is not a position that exists in the real world. That's a thing people in Washington convince themselves is rational and it's actually incoherent. Also, I just want them to understand that like opposing funding is the right thing to do strategically morally and politically. This is not 2004. This is the Jake is wrong. We're not going to watch the same movie like the Pentagon. It doesn't even more money to sustain operations. They have a trillion dollars. There are not

guys sitting in Foulouja waiting to get an M-Rap that might not show up if you vote against the 77 billion or whatever the funding request was in 2004. Trump could end this war tomorrow. He has basically declared victory a couple times. It suggests that it might be over tomorrow. And I also voters will reward you. If you say, let's not spend 50 billion more bombing girl schools in Iran. Let's spend it on education, healthcare, literally anything else.

That will be like the most popular thing you ever do as a lawmaker. Absolutely. And first of all,

Barack Obama, the very first meeting I was in with him. The first time I met him was in 2007 when he decided to vote against the supplemental that funded the search. And the argument of this cast at him was if he was voting against the troops and lo and behold, if it wasn't for his

opposite in the Iraq War, he never would have become president of the United States. This political

thinking is so outdated that it's astonishing to me that it still gets currency in the kind of media framing around these issues. I also want to say you covered the argument well about the obvious political point that people don't want to be spending this money that this war is not popular. I also think that one of the things that drives people crazy about the Democratic Party is it seems like it's a party that has constantly got its finger in the wind and is trying to figure

out like what it stands for, what it actually believes, what will be the most politically fruitful are we in tough? Are we tough? Can I for to piss off these donors? Look, if you vote

“for the funding of this war, you should be primary. I don't want you in the Democratic Party.”

And I'm not trying to be you know obtuse or stubborn, but this is a threshold issue. Like I would like to have a big tent on this party. I think there should be people with different ideas of how to get health care, different ideas of taxation. To me, this is not a left-centre issue. This is a right and wrong issue. Morely, what do we stand for as Democrats? If you as a Democrat, can't say that I'm against a war and I'm not going to fund a war that is being launched by an

authoritarian president illegally with no rational basis that is explained to the American people that is already unleashed these consequences. If you can't stand against that, you don't stand for a fucking thing, okay? And everybody can see it. How is anybody going to trust you to fight for their health care if you're too afraid to cast a vote that someone might call you weak or some donor might call you in complain? So I'm sorry I got a lot today I came in hot, but

I don't know what to say anymore. It's an astounding lapse in judgment. I think to trust Donald

“Trump and Pete Higgs F to lead a regime-chained war of choice with Iran, along with BB Netanyahu,”

and we didn't put it on the run down today because it's just like the things to be mad about is our endless. But Trump wearing a hat to the dignified transfer ceremony like really bothered

me because I know you've been like, I'm sure you've been to Dover. I never went to Dover with

President Obama, but I went to Walter Reed with- I never went to Obama. So like 2009 or 2010, it was like me, Reggie, Matt Flavin, and Obama like in Marine One on the way there, and then you know, like I chilled out with the press while he went and met with wounded service members for like three or four hours, whatever it was, and then we all flew home together. And like my memory of flying there is talking and people like it was fun, right? It was cool. And on the way back, it was like

the heaviest situation I've ever been in. Like you could feel the weight of what Obama had just experienced on his shoulders and the devastation you'd seen in the families and the people's lives were just ruined, and he didn't say a fucking word, nor did anybody else. And just like to see Trump kind of winging it out there, doing press events, goofing around, you're like he's talking about the Iran war in front of like the Miami inter- Miami soccer team, Kraken jokes about

the renovations at the White House. He's just like a fundamentally unserious person who is not conducting this war for a serious strategic reason. It's all about his politics. It's all about linty-gram, fluffing him, ten times a day, and like doing whatever Netanyahu tells me to do, and it's just it's a fucking embarrassment. So vote no. Yeah, and to your point, I mean the guy is showing up the dignified transfer of caskets of dead service members coming home because of decisions he's made,

and he's wearing a USA hat that looks like the kind of thing that you could buy like a gas station rest of, right, which no offense against those is a great hat said, but his hat's there. But the point is that were the afraid of being called weak, were afraid of being called unscathed old man in a weird way, were afraid of like they were against the troops, the guy against the troops is the one who's getting them killed for no reason, and he was showing up in a fucking baseball cap for

a dignified transfer ceremony. Like this is not a hard argument to make. Very easy. I just couldn't agree more. Ben speaking of our Feckless Congress, as we did a minute ago, so November is going to be a huge election on the other side of Democrats are in control of the house, maybe we can take back the Senate or Trump just maintains his iron grip on the trifecta, winning the house is going to be the fastest way to put a real check on Trump's abuses of power, and the Republicans

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that Squarespace.com/world. Let's end this around section by talking about like Hesball, Lebanon, and the fact that the country is once again getting hammered by the IDF. The numbers are really grim then, as you mentioned at the top, like we're talking about nearly 500 people dead in Lebanon, and nearly 700,000 people have been displaced. So, you know, Hesball, I entered the conflict,

it started firing rockets at Israel after the spring leader was assassinated. The Israelis leapt on this opportunity to retaliate and just destroy them again, and like whatever was left to the 2024 Seas Fire Grimman is now just fully eviscerated. And the IDF is both been conducting massive airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the parts of the suburbs of Beirut, but also the IDF ground forces have pushed into southern Lebanon. Last week, the French

offered to like intervene and maybe support the Lebanese military, Emmanuel Macron, like jumped into the fray here. I think the Israelis basically told him to fuck off. Yeah. I can't tell if anything came about. You're not exactly showing a lot of strength on this Iran war in general. No, not much. I think my concern bent, though, if I were Lebanese official, like beyond the immediate security and threat to people's lives and the humanitarian

situation and humanitarian crisis that could develop, if this many people are displaced for this long, like I would wonder if Israel is going to use this opportunity to just permanently capture

“parts of Lebanon while the world is kind of focused elsewhere. I think that's what's happening.”

I mean, I think that they want to permanently occupy if not end up annexing southern Lebanon. Some Israeli political leaders talk about that openly. They know that this is a chaotic and violent time in the region so they can kind of ratchet it up in Lebanon without getting as much scrutiny. They have not announced kind of what their end game is in Lebanon, other than just destroying things. And I think people have to realize that these people have been through hell in Lebanon and,

you know, seven hundred thousand people being told to evacuate is, I mean, just think about that.

And we've so thoroughly normalized that level of destruction with this idea that it's somehow like about his blood. I mean, this is so far beyond his blood. This is like breaking Lebanon completely,

yet again. By the way, what always ends up happening, I'm not defending corrupt Lebanese politicians

because they're plenty of those too. But like they'll palm Lebanon for, you know, however long they bomb it and destroy all this stuff and displace people. And then nine months ago, they call

“the politics in Lebanon, they're so dysfunctional. Like what the hell these people supposed to do?”

Yeah, that's like a city, the size of Denver, just being pushed out of their homes in this place. Yeah. I mean, it's staggering. Like, you know, and I guess we'll just keep it on it. Like, I don't know, the world is just kind of that. Well, and then you'll get these people, you know, who will like be posting pictures from like 1984 of like women and bathing suits in Beirut and Beirut and Beirut and Beirut has this is what it was like

before his blood or something. No, no, this is what it was like before the place got bombed,

you know, however many times I've lost track of it. Yeah, it's a nightmare. Okay, so a couple more things from us. So while the world is focused on Iran, the U.S. military has been expanding its activities in South America. Specifically, the U.S. military is now conducting joint military operation against drug cartels in Ecuador. So this is on top of the boat strikes off the coast of Ecuador and in the Caribbean. The New York Times reported that U.S. special forces are quote advising

and supporting Ecuador and Commandos who are hitting drug facilities. U.S. Southern Command, Ben, I don't know if you saw that they tweeted out this weird video. I saw there's a helicopter taking off, right? And then it was like a drone feed of like U.S. troops getting into the helicopter, but the way they filmed it and it looked like there was about to be an air strike on our own helicopter. It was all very, very weird. As you discussed on the show before Ecuador went from being

one of the safest countries in Latin America to becoming one of the most dangerous and becoming a major transit point for cocaine coming out of Colombia and Peru, usually the Europe. There's also these Albanian gangs in Ecuador and they're sort of like facilitating this cocaine flows into Europe. In 2024, the president did on the bow declared war on the gangs and on the cartels. That said, in motion, this huge crackdown in a wave of violence. There's not solve the problem,

but it's led to a lot of deaths and now apparently involved the U.S. military. Ben, it was just, you know, reading about this sort of marveling and how little attention it's getting. And then remembering back in 2018 when Trump said, quote, we more and more are not wanting to be the policeman of the world. It feels like that's kind of... That's not the window. And again, another thing that we're doing with no public discussion. He clearly has this idea that the

“discollection right wing leaders across Latin America, it's kind of his team. I think Christy”

Knome is now like, isn't she the envoy to the envoy of the shield, the shield of the earth? Absolutely, made up. Kerry said that actually happens. Yeah, if she gets a plan to go down

Ecuador. But the reality is, this idea of where the U.S. becomes like to...

It's like, "Corey down, Ecuador." I mean, I think Lewandowski would last long down in the country. Eric Prince could probably put him to work. Yeah, she Eric Prince, I posed the Iran war. I think I saw him. He did. He went on banning and he opposed it. And part of this is the kind of war he wants to say. I want to be an equity player for this. But the reality is, are we just going to become the security force for every right wing autocrat in Latin America? What's the goal here? What's the

end state? If we lose personnel down there, Americans are going to know why they're there.

“You had Ricardo on the way to deal with these drug cartels. You first you have to go off their”

money because they're multi-billion dollar enterprises and it's going to skipping right ahead to like some military operation for ambiguous purposes. So yeah, we are in this kind of slippery slope to being the kind of military force for the shield of the Americas. And I just, that's yet another thing. How much is this operation cost? Good question. Because they're not free, right? So yet another argument to make that that's not lowering prices. That's not doing anything to solve problems

Americans actually. Because it's not even doing anything about the fentanyl problem, which is where Americans are most concerned about it. It's just buttressing some right wing autocratty tells Trump when he wants to hear it. Not great. Okay, let's end this by talking about the recent election in Nepal. So this ladies and gentlemen is Nepal's next prime minister. Let's watch. I mean collab with Zoro and I'm Dani. I mean Michael had a better time watching that. That guy's

Polendra Shaw, a rapper, civil engineer, turned politician. People call him ballin. He's the former. He's

ballin. Yeah. He's ballin out there. Also, a preacher curall has that same code. Anyway, he's the former mayor of Kathmandu. They're still counting ballots, but so far he's leading in what looks like a landslide election. This election is the result of these Gen Z lead protests from

“last year that brought down the former government. The protests kicked off, remember there's”

the social media ban that seemingly was just a cover to hide the children of the elites. We're just like spending money in Paris and pissing away government money. But like the protests exploded in size because of deep frustration about corruption and lack of economic opportunity. Because Nepal is a very young, highly educated population, but also has a 21% youth unemployment rate. So there's a brain drain and a lot of people leaving to go work abroad. Nineteen people were killed during

those initial protests last year because the government violently cracked down on them. Then

70 more on the unrest and chaos that followed. So that forced out the prime minister at the time. So ballin is part of the centrist party. He has campaigned on anti-corruption, on creating jobs. He says he's going to double per capita GDP to $3,000 within the next decade. Nepal is landlocked between India and China. They have very limited manufacturing. They rely on a tourism to mount Everest for their economy. And it's current GDP per capita is about $1,500, so delivering

on that promise will be quite a challenge. But then thoughts on our new Gen Z rapper King. Yeah, look, I can't really vouch for ballin. I spent a bunch of time reading up on this because

“it's fascinating. We'll see how it goes. Here's the main thing that I think I take away from this”

that is hopeful. Clearly people across the world, particularly younger people, are absolutely fed up

with the corruption and the kind of rotten establishments that govern their lives. And I do think

that there is a connection between the Zoran Mamdoni campaign and what he did. Did you see the Hanna Spencer Green Party campaign in the UK? I mean, if people have watched Hanna Spencer, she was a Green Party member who won a by-elect recently. She's 34 years old. She had a very Zoran-esque kind of message in campaign. Did Morris go over there, Morris Cats go over there and meet with some of those characters?

More Morris is kicking the tires on taking over European Parliament. Morris Cats is a friend of ours who works for Zoran Mamdoni, like a kind of young brilliant community, brilliant guy. Really a brilliant guy. Yeah, absolutely. Good for him going over to Europe, and he has some of these progressive parties, because we need to trade best practices. My advice to Europeans, and I know we have

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

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

that Gen Z, they're disengaged. They seem pretty fucking engaged in a lot of these places. They're pretty engaged over there. They're a lot of buyers. Yeah, they're engaged. And they've been engaged. We've seen it in Africa. We've seen it in the Middle East. We've seen it in this country. We're seeing it in Europe. And again, I'll just talk to the places where if you are a smart politician trying to appeal to young voters, you got to get to that mood. You know, maybe not the

ball and video. Yeah, that's the establishment. But the anti-stab of mood of like this is different. This is a clean break. This is a dip, this politics is going to look different. It's going to feel different. It's going to be funded differently because I think that is increasing the where the mood's going to go given the direction of events in the world. Yeah, people don't like elites. Get inside my scene in all the closet full of rap tapes. This is how I do hallucinate like a

Baptist. That was a V-tort joint. No, that was a ball in joint. Y'all said he also dropped kind of gunners name. Whatever. I heard the guy like Jenner in there. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot to train on trying to follow with the lyrics. It sounded, sounded good. There's more of a slant rhyme which, you know, Bob Dylan would tell us. Yeah, he's an art form. Ballon seems to not do a lot of media too. Like I was trying to, like it didn't give a lot of interviews. Let's just say something

“like it's a bit of a mystery. I remember I hear someone named Ballon. I think of the big baller brand.”

Yes, you know, but well, I saw them by the way. Just to, you know, we, I heard you guys in PSA read the complaint about the video game message. But I also hate them expropriating like I saw, I don't know, one of their Dan's giving a war porn post said like, if you don't know now,

from, you know, like the one of the greatest biggie was not wrapping the military industrial. Yeah,

biggie was not a place, you know. But said they don't know now, you know, give me a break. Shut up. Dan's giving her whatever, like 23-year-old white nationalist groper's like now,

“become a war porn addict. Well, what's funny is I think actually like they're trying to appeal”

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

mega crowd, like in Tucker's among it. Because I, you know, I sample this to see where things are going. It is remarkable. They'd like say go to somehow like solve Trump. Yeah. Like we should need to call this out. Like listen, like listen, I mean, actually don't listen, like, well, listen to it for you. But like the end of it, two-hour conversation on like Tucker, Megan Kelly, and like, you would think that this happened to Trump, you know? They'll blame

like the undersecretary for something something over the Pentagon. Or by the way, they'll blame Netanyahu. I like, like, I blame Netanyahu, but that doesn't absolve Trump. I blame Netanyahu, too, but I blame Trump for being too weak. I blame Trump more than Netanyahu. Of course, like to be

very clear. He's more powerful. He's the American president. He made the decision. Every other

American president, 21st century, said no to this. So it just, just, this, all the more reason for Democrats to burn on this, because just because there's some anti-war mega influencers, they won't call out Trump. And Americans are not stupid. They know that the down Trump either Asian and down this, and B could have said no to be Vignania. No, Jesus. Okay. So Trump truth, as we were recording, Ben, I'm pleased to report that within the last few hours, we have hit

and completely destroyed 10 inactive mind-laying boats and/or ships with more to follow. I'm not really sure what that means or does exactly what it means. That means he's trying to tell the markets and the oil futures to not price in a mining of the streets of Hormuz, Google price. All he cares about is that. Now it's up at 8771. So you don't really want the crude oil futures to rip like Bitcoin. You know what I mean? I just, yeah, and you also want like, and not to get too heavy here, but like,

I kind of like a commander of chief who cares more about the lies of U.S. service members and

“Iranian schoolchildren than he cares about tomorrow's oil futures, which is really the only thing”

that can get his fat ass in gear to like truth social something. Until Lizzie Graham gets them on the phone, gets me a hot and bothered again for another regime change. Okay, I think that's it for us for this week. Anything else pissing you off? I will say the only thing pissing me off is that I had to. My best friends come into town. I got Bangor tickets to the NYX Lakers game on Sunday and the NYX Clippers game last night. Got to both games half an early and in the in the two games,

the NYX led once by a single point and just fucking mailed it in. Sorry, man. Except for cat, except from my guy Carl Anthony Townsby showed up. The rest of these guys, not much. I love them, but they just didn't show up for me. I bet when you're playing away in LA, it seemed like so, so this Saturday, we were, we were taken into the Saturday game. So we at 12 30 p.m. 12 30 start. So we're in the Uber over because we're going to like pound some beers at the game. So responsibly took a number. And I

said to these guys, I was like, "Hey, I'm worried that our guys are out last night." You know, like it's LA, you know, we got OG, we got Josh Harb, we got these guys. Maybe they went in and to go out. And like, no, no, no, like the our guys are serious, you know, our guys look like they went out

“Friday night. I think a lot of players go out every single night. If you're young and rich and”

a great athlete, you're probably having a good time. Let me just say that Nick's did not come out of the, you know, blocks run at a full speed on Saturday at 12 30. No. Luke will look like you

sang over, but Luke always looks like he's kind of a very sober and he doesn't matter. It a little bit

hungry. CNN headline US intelligence community ramps up warnings of possible retaliatory tax by Iran. That's great of cyber attacks. I don't know, everything's really great. So yeah, I came and kind of pissed off today. Sorry about that. I don't know how to be light about a war there. That's not fun. It is not fun. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. But when you come back, you're going to hear my interview with my carbohydrates. We're going to talk about the

Pentagon fighting with AI companies, drones, uh new drone technology that will help us take out Iranian drones that's we're getting from the Ukrainian. So very important conversation about the future of warfare and technology. So stick around for that.

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“So if you're listening to this, hit pause, go to your browser and head to Crooked.com/YesWeDAN”

because I have a special offer for Crooked Media fans. You will get 20% off the message box for an entire year. So go to Crooked.com/YesWeDAN. I am very excited to welcome back today's guest to the show. He's a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and then from 2022 to 2024, he served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

for forced development and emerging capabilities. My core, what's great to see you again. Thanks so much for having me. You know, not like anything's going on in the world. Yes, slow week. Also, it's very funny. We booked you twice and you've been on vacation twice. So we'd love to just ruin whatever you're doing in your real life. But given all the fighting

between the Pentagon and these AI companies, then what's happening around, it seemed like an amazing

time to get you back on the show. So before we get to this big fight between the defense department and inthropic and AI company, I was just hoping you could understand how AI is being used in warfare because we've now seen reports that AI was used in the operation to get Nicholas Maduro and Venezuela. There's lots of reports that AI is being used in the Iran operations, including Claude and Thropic's model. The reports that these railways were using AI with targeting

both in Gaza and now again with Iran. What does that mean in practice to the best you can kind of help us get it? Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about the integration of AI into warfare, you separated into three buckets in your mind. The first are the kinds of uses of AI that any company might do. Think like HR, payroll, processing, basic logistics, like that kind of thing. And the Pentagon should be full speed ahead at that, although frankly, that has taken a lot of

time to get moving as well. The second bucket is in what's called intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. So that is all the data and information that say the American military gets about the world, whether from satellite, whether from human intelligence sources, whether from truth, social, or X, or whatever your like poison might be, and trying to aggregate that all together to separate the signal from the noise. The third, and this is both where the current operational

the battlefield. And those are essentially AI decision support systems that help commanders in theory make better decisions about how to use force within operations. And then autonomous weapon systems that can involve AI actually on the edge selecting an engage in targets. And it's that

third category where people have really raised lots of questions about how much, how much that

integration is happening today. And the Iran context, how much happened at the Maduro operation, and then where it may go, where it may go from there. So I could imagine the scenario where over Iran, the US and Israel have so many satellites or drones or things bringing in imagery that it's almost impossible to monitor them all in real time. And you could imagine an AI that's trained to notice the second that a shape that looks like an Iranian ballistic missile

launcher shows up on the screen and then you immediately move to target that. It's like that the kind of thing we're talking about. And maybe that data is cross-checked with some other

“second thing that's happened. Like it's just, I think it's hard for people to understand like”

the volume of data that's coming in to three intelligence channels and how quickly we need to move to kind of act on it. So there's two different categories, which I'd put some of the

things that we have heard about in the Iran context. The first is this that AI decision support

category I mentioned before. And that is often using a platform built by the tech company, a tech company Palantir called mevan smart system. And what that's doing is aggregating all this data together to try to give advice to the US combatant commander in the in-central command. So the head of the US military in the Middle East, who has, and there are all these processes for how the Pentagon selects targets, makes decisions to engage them, legal reviews, checks,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's lots of really fantastical descriptions, you know, out there. But imagine what what Maven essentially does is kind of the way a paralegal would support

“a lawyer, where they're doing all of this research and analysis to simplify all of these sort of different”

tasks, all of the sort of staff one that would normally happen on the battlefield. Now it's so the lawyer that goes to court and argues and so the lawyer that takes responsibility, but that paralegal or team of paralegal is or whatever, is doing a ton of the back office work to sort of queue things up. That's the way that Maven essentially works in the way that Claude that is integrated into Maven to as one of many different tools to simplify those data processing tasks even more.

So that's category one. And then category two is more like that missile defense scenario that you're talking about, we're frankly, you don't need large language models, like you don't need Claude to, you know, do this, but like good old-fashioned computer vision, sort of algorithms, can do this sort of thing. And that's just about detecting launches and then moving systems in position to shoot them down, which say like Israel's iron dome, for example, has proven to be

exceptional at and the Patriot missile defense system for the United States is much more expensive, but also very good at it. Got it. Okay, so we've talked on this show about this dispute between this AI company and Thropic and the Pentagon. The gist for those who have not followed this is at Thropic's Model Claude was at the time the only AI model cleared for use on the Pentagon's classified systems. The department wanted Claude to sign a contract that allowed them,

quote, all lawful uses of the model. But in Thropic said, no, we have some red lines and they don't want Claude used for NASA surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons yet, because they say the software is not ready yet. The two sides couldn't come to an agreement. That led a bunch of people, the Pentagon, to absolutely flip out on Twitter a couple of weekends ago. And then Higgs F. Pete Higgs F. The Secretary of Defense declared in Thropic a, quote, supply chain

risk. That is a designation normally reserved for companies like Huawei, which has ties with the Chinese military. What do you think happened here? Can you explain the impact of a supply chain risk designation on a company like in Thropic? I just noticed as filed suit.

“Yeah, that's not like the least surprising thing this week. The, the, I think this to me is a”

dispute about vibes and personalities masquerading as a policy dispute. And what I mean by that is

in Thropic, as you said, was the first company in the door to work with the Pentagon in a classified

environment. And there were no things that in Thropic was doing with the Pentagon that either were either sidehead objections. Furthermore, there were no asks of the Pentagon of in Thropic for the future that in Thropic had that in Thropic had an issue with. Essentially what happened is after the Maduro operation, it sounds like somebody from in Thropic called somebody from Palantir. So, remember I said that the way that Claude is implemented operationally for the military

right now is through this Palantir platform called Maven Smart System. So, some from Anthropic calls Palantir, somebody from Palantir, up to be like, "Hey, did they use Claude in the Maduro operation?"

and they were, you know, you know, and essentially to like really simplify a bunch of things.

“They're like, "Why are these woke tumors asking all of these questions?" Like this seems like”

this seems problematic and the dispute really escalates from that given the fact that there's no disagreement between the company and the Pentagon about any current use cases and the Pentagon is using Claude in Iran, as has been like widely reported in the media, calling them a supply chain risk, calling Anthropica supply chain risk like Huawei means that any the parts of any company that work with the federal government, say like the part of Microsoft that works with

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

so that it was illegal to do business with Anthropica at all in that the say the part of Microsoft, that doesn't work with the federal government still could work with Anthropica, and so don't get me wrong. This is a big hit to Anthropica and this is a bad move in my view from a sort of free market, kind of perspective because it means that the sort of best technology in the world from an American company is no longer going to be available either to the Pentagon in that they give us six

month time frame for this to sort of happen and with other, and for contractors who also are seeking to work with the Pentagon. Like, from more isent, that is a win for China and a loss for, in a loss for America and problematic from a free market perspective. I mean, just from the Anthropica perspective, don't you understand why they would maybe have some questions? I mean, like, this sort of like all lawful uses provision, what federal laws are

there regulating AI use right now, right? I guess in the part of the problem is that the federal

government is completely asleep at the switch when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence, and then you have all these, nerds out there telling us that this could be more powerful than the atomic bomb. I mean, like, I don't understand what these companies are doing in practice or the technology itself, but like the combination of those two things controlled by Pete Hexeth and Donald Trump, like, doesn't make me feel great. Totally fair. I just to be perfectly honest, comparing AI to the

atomic bomb is vaguely triggering, and so I'm going to leave that one aside for the moment.

“The, but the, I think that the, what this really reflects in some ways is a breakdown in trust”

between Anthropica and the Pentagon, and that the Pentagon didn't trust that Anthropica would be there to talk, Anthropica would be there for important national security use cases, and Anthropica didn't trust that the government would use their technology responsibly. I will say, I think, I think of one can have some sympathy for the Pentagon, actually, on parts of this, or like, I certainly would have when I, when I, when I work there, at least in here's why. When Lockheed sells like an

F-35 or a missile to the Pentagon, it's not like Lockheed gets to say, like, hey, you could use this against like Cuba, but like, don't use it against Iran, or or something, or, you know, like, or something like that. The, these, these companies like sell a product to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon then uses it the way that, the way that it sees fit. I think Anthropica's thinking about this more like terms of service in a software contract, which is a thing in contracts with

the Pentagon, and they think that, and they think that once they sell, that they have the right to tell the Pentagon, like, hey, we want to sign a contract for, you know, like, "X" set of use cases, but not "Y" set of use cases. And Anthropica's even said, we will work with you on, on, on, like, something like, how to make LLM's ready for fully

“autonomous weapon systems. But the, but I think that it is not true to say that there's no”

law or policy that governs these topics, and there's two layers of this. One that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. So there's federal law and international treaties that require the U.S. to use force in ways that comply with international humanitarian law, using things that you're ignoring left and right. Right. But like, but like, those are bombing the fuck out of boats in the Caribbean, like, on the regular,

and it's just a violation of international law. Yeah. No, no argument. Absolutely, do argument. Okay. I just mean that, in theory, when it comes to, like, AI, like, the way that that boils down is essentially all uses for any use of force, whether it's a bow and arrow, a radar guided missile or an autonomous weapon system, there has to be human responsibility and accountability for the use of force. Like, for example, in that, like,

first vote operation back in September, that was really not that they're not all controversial,

focused on the specific military commander that authorized the second strike. Like, there's always

“responsibility, a human responsibility. And that is true, even in the case for an autonomous”

weapon system, and that has nothing to do with any policies surrounding AI in particular. It is also true that there is not law governing the Pentagon's use of AI for the most part. Well, there is policy, like, the office that I used to work for in the Pentagon wrote the Pentagon's policy on autonomy and weapon systems. It's called DOD Directive 3000.09. And more people have probably downloaded and read that directive and became experts on it.

In the last two or three weeks, that probably read it since it was, like, re-released in January 2023. And the, and that does sort of set out pretty clear guidelines. At least on the autonomous weapon system side for when it is that you could use them, it's not law. And, and Thropic did

have questions. I get, yeah, I mean, I hear you on the, like, look, if I were a combatant commander,

the idea of calling over to a tech company to say, hey, can we do this thing? It, you're right, on some level, it's untenable and unworkable. On your Lockheed comparison, I mean, this is very imperfect. I do think, like, Lockheed probably sells the US military F-35s, assuming they will not be used to bomb Boston, right? And it's sort of, like, a bit of what it throp eggs getting. I'd like to think something. I'd like to think something. You would like to think so.

Not necessarily bomb Americans. Well, like, but so, let's get at this other piece of this, because then a competitor to an Thropic OpenAI, they sweep in, they can deal with the Pentagon to replace in Thropic. You wrote in your financial times piece where you also got into these sort of bigger picture philosophical questions that they got 99% of the deal in Thropic wanted. What does

“that mean in practice? And what's the one percent that they didn't get and, how relevant is it?”

Sure. I think it's really interesting that OpenAI has gotten so much heat for this. I think that it's a timing question in some ways as much as it is a substance question. So, like, here's why. Yeah, the OpenAI deal says that their technology can only be used through the cloud. It couldn't be used on the edge. And so, you couldn't put an OpenAI model say, like, into a weapon system directly and use it. If you were, now, you couldn't theory then put an, I guess,

in theory, put an OpenAI model in, you know, in the cloud and have it be, like, directing a weapon to the target. But if you did that, it wouldn't be an autonomous weapon system. The thing that makes it an autonomous weapon system unless it's human supervised is that there is no data link. And that's because autonomous weapon systems are designed for, say, I don't know, like, a war in the Indo-Pacific where you might not have access to satellites and all of that data. And you

and you want the weapon system to keep operating. And so, if OpenAI's technology can only be used in the cloud and not on the edge, then, then actually, it means that the, you know, an autonomous weapon system without human supervision that their model simply can't, wouldn't work for. On the surveillance side, it sounds like, then that, I'm, you know, personally, a little less expert. And there are, there do seem to be concerns that the, that the technology, that the sort of deal that OpenAI

side might not be quite as restrictive as what Anthropics wanted. But some of this, I mean, to, to kind of like the back and forth, we are having about international, about international law and about the Pentagon sort of in general. At some point, like if you, if you do business with the Pentagon, the business of the Pentagon is war. And if you don't trust that the Pentagon will follow its own rules, sort of, or laws, then you, then you shouldn't, then, you know, it's like,

it's, you know, it's like a tough look, then the new business with the Pentagon. And perhaps one shouldn't.

“Yeah, I know, I, look, I think that's sort of a very real part of this. It's getting less attention,”

which is like if, if Anthropics has, I don't know, if they're, if they're so concerned about how the Pentagon might use the models, and maybe they shouldn't do business with the Pentagon period. Look, I think the reason OpenAI got so much blowback is because Sam Altman looked like a total scumbag and he swept in at the last moment and swept up a contract from his competitor. And he's seen as someone who has been willing to kiss Trump's ass more than, you know, any other AI CEO.

And therefore he, you know, made a deal that it seems like Anthropics didn't want. It's also my understanding that maybe Anthropics was looking for their concerns to be handled in the contract where OpenAI is now saying, actually we're just going to kind of like hard code the restrictions into the model. And I think experts will then point out, well, then you can update the model

down the road and maybe we'd probably never know about it, right? Not wrong. You know, I mean,

like, like, I think that that, that, that, that's in some ways because there is no, if what you are worried about is that the Pentagon's going to misuse your technology. There's, like, two scenarios for misuse. One is that your technology would actually be very good at the thing that the Pentagon wants to do. In which case, there's actually, there's probably very little you could put in a contract that would stop them for doing it if they wish to

violate the law. The, the second, and this is actually why I am personally less concerned on the

but the, if like, your correct that your technology isn't like ready to do the thing,

“that will come out in the Pentagon's own testing and evaluation process. Like, the worst thing,”

like, but not, like, the last thing you would use in LLM for, like, a large language model that, like, like, like, clutter, chatGPT or something like that, is to put into an autonomous weapon system. If you want to build an autonomous weapon system, you should do that with a bespoke algorithm, trained on a, a data set, a very specific things, like, say, Russian tanks, or Chinese fighters, or, or something like that. The idea that you would take a, you would take a large language model,

trained on the slap of the internet, and, like, plug it into a missile and, like, send that missile off, like, what are we even doing here? And, and I feel like, either the Pentagon's testing and evaluation process should clearly reveal that, like, or we've got, like, bigger problems that have nothing to do with AI. Yeah, that's where, like, sometimes I've just confused about this fight, like, the mass surveillance piece of this really worries me, because one major limiting factor

when you talk about, you know, preventing the mass surveillance of an entire population, let's say, all Americans, was that it was prohibitively difficult to work with that much data.

“And I think AI has fundamentally changed that. But, I guess my concern,”

then would be about more about, like, contracts with the NSA, or the CIA, or other intelligence community components than the Pentagon. I was wondering what your read was on that, kind of piece of this fight. Yeah, I'm super worried about mass surveillance and the context of, of AI technology and the way that it could help de-identify a bunch of data that, like, losses that the, you're not supposed to have on the American people. I'm not worried about the

Pentagon is the locus of the American mass surveillance state. I would be, like, much more worried maybe about, like, other departments and agencies that are in the news sometimes. And the, and so, like, I, and I think the, and I think the reaction of the Pentagon is telling in this context, and that on the mass surveillance side, you can, I mean, to whatever extent one, like, use them as credible, like, on this, and, you know, like, my literal travel for different people.

The, like, the Pentagon on the mass surveillance side is essentially, like,

how could you ever say that, like, we would never do that, that violates the fourth amendment.

And I suspect that they probably genuinely think that. Because again, I think other departments and agencies are a higher risk, or maybe, like, an in-between, like, the NSA, like, I guess if you really wanted to worry, but the man does the NSA of rules. The, the, if it were, there was, response to the autonomous weapon side, it's like, well, we totally wouldn't do that now. Like, we agree with you, the tech isn't ready, but it might be at some point. Right.

“And anthropics, like, yeah, that's why we want to work with you on that, like, why are you kicking us out?”

Yeah, it's all, yeah. It just feels like the, the, the Pentagon, the Trump administration, they have one speed, which is to punch back, it's hard as humanly possible. And in, in so doing, escalated this fight. Yeah. I mean, look, this is, like, the headset Pentagon is on full send all the time. Like, no matter what. Yeah. And in that case, like, this is, like, going back to what I said before, that this is, like, really about vibes and personalities, which I think are, at least to me,

like, our discussion in some ways is, has illustrated the, and, you know, in that kind of, like, breakdown and trust, like, how do you crawl down from here there? And how do you climb down from

here then in some ways? If, like, if we're talking about a Pentagon that literally will never admit that

it's wrong about anything. Yeah. And it's like rage tweeting at 5 p.m. or like 10 p.m. on a Friday night, for no reason about this issue. Um, last sort of topic I want to talk about was, is a lot of experts are very concerned about US weapons stockpiles, in particular, interceptor munitions that are being used in the Patriot missile systems and other systems to defend from Iranian missiles and drones. And then also some offensive, uh, US missile systems that you can get into. Um, that is a problem

in the near term with the war in Iran, especially for some of these Gulf states, which news reports are, like, within a week of running out of some of these interceptor, but more broadly, for our readiness is a country to fight the next war, especially with one with China. How worried are you about these stockpiles? And what do you make of these efforts to use new drones developed by the Ukrainians to defend from these Iranian drones, which have been used by Russia as a, as a solver of fix?

Uh, that's a, that's a, that's a, oh, what a short question. Um, the, the, I mean, like, call back to the last time I was on. I, I, I, you know, I talked about how we are in the age of precise mass and war, where advances in AI and autonomy and commercial manufacturing, uh, and, uh, and the fact that precision guidance is now a 50 year old technology means everyone can now access, precision strike. And now we see that on display in Iran sort of every day when Iran fires these

Shaheed 136 weapons, you know, like the Shaheed 136 is arguably the best precise mass system in the world. It can go like 1500 to 2000 kilometers. It can carry a, you know, 50 to 150 kilograms of warhead. And unless you shoot it down, it gently, depending on build quality will like hit the thing that it's aimed at. They can produce that for an average of $35,000. A Patriot missile costs about

trying to be better about that with a bunch of different kinds of things. And like the unit costs

“for say like Israel's iron dome is a little bit, is a little bit lower. But because Iran has thousands”

of these Shaheeds and it's just firing them off, everybody in the region with Patriot missile interceptors is now is now using them. And so the U.S. is in a position where and Iran is starting to target the radars that try to track those that we use to ensure those missiles hit their target, which would mean you, and if those get really damaged, you would need to fire even more to intercept a single thing. And add all of that up. And the U.S. is running short,

on missile defense interceptors, especially for the Indo-Pacific. But even in the context of the Middle East, if the U.S. wants to sort of re-up the stockpiles of all of the Gulf states that have had our back in the context of this conflict. And so guess what? In some ways, like China wins again. And while you focus more on the missile defense question, I'll note that the U.S. has produced about the like premier U.S. cruise missile for like both of our professional

lives is being called the the Tamahak missile. The U.S. has produced about like 9,000 plus of them like over that time period there. If you look at like inventory based on uses over time, retirements, tests, et cetera, the U.S. inventory might be around 3,000 or even below. Frankly, at this point, in decreasing rapidly, given the hundreds that the U.S. has already used against Iran. And so we are running out of weapons. And in this age of precise mass,

like that's a big problem, which is why the U.S. needs to be producing itself, then a lot more of these low-cost weapons, our own precise mass systems like the Lucas, which the U.S. debuted against Iran for the first time. And it's actually reverse engineered from an Iranian weapon. So like a little bit of irony there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sorry, when you say low-cost weapons,

“do you don't mean that the T-lams are the Tamahak, do you mean these new modern drones?”

No, like the so like the Lucas system, what the Lucas system essentially is the U.S. equivalent of the Shaheed. So the Lucas system costs the U.S. like $35 to $50,000 a pop, which is really different

than a Tamahak missile that costs about like $2 million each on average. And because you can

produce them with commercial manufacturing, like the Lucas of rounds that the U.S. is using in the Middle East where produced by it, like, specter works, like a tiny company in Scottsdale with like 13 employees, not like Raytheon or Lockheed, shows that you could really scale production of these kinds of things in a way that would give, you know, future American leaders like a lot more like depth and a lot more, and a lot more options. And so on the Ukrainian front, I mean the

Ukrainians have been dealing with the Iranians provided Russia with the Shaheed drones and now, the Ukrainians will have swarms of them fired at Ukrainian cities, maybe dozens, maybe even hundreds of them at a time. And so one option they have evolved to deal with that threat is low-cost drones of their own, which basically are, like, hunt these drones. Can you talk about bat technology, how effective it is, and how quickly we might be able to put that to use in this conflict with Iran,

if at all? Yeah, absolutely. Like you think about, like, if we have currently been using, you know,

four million dollar interceptors to shoot down, like not just Shaheeds, but things that are slightly

more expensive, but still maybe, like, like a running ballistic missiles that might be, say, I don't know, like half a million dollars each, or something like that. The, the, you need something cheaper than. Otherwise, the cost curve just isn't in your favor. You've got a couple of options if you want the cost curve to be really low. The first, and this has been, like, the dream of the 1980s, like, on repeat, is lasers. Like, you could use directed energy, microwave weapons,

things like that, where the cost per shot is super low, and now you've got options to try to take down these systems. Like, Israel used iron beam, which is their short range laser defense

“system. I think maybe for the first time, operationally, in the context of it recently, right?”

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

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

trainers are going to come help those people. And that's actually really promising. But again, remember, I said, like, China's the winner and all of this up before. It's hard to see, I mean,

them from a weapons perspective, the, like, Patriot missile interceptor inventory going way down

around the world is really bad for Ukraine, who needs more of those interceptors for when they're inexpensive solutions fail to protect them from not like the Russian Shaheed variant necessarily, but say, like, Russian hypersonic and Russian ballistic missiles that they also fire at Ukraine on a regular basis. Well, yeah, I'm glad we kicked off this Iran war to just inject more chaos

“in dysfunction and horror into the world. It feels like that's what we're missing. It was just another”

theater of war. You know, we really need this right now. We're off to a great starting 2026. What can I say? Being in a great start, bomb in eight countries, and in 15 or 16 months, President Trump, the President of Peace, the FIFA Peace Prize winner. I can come back when Cuba's next. Yeah, you know, listen, there might have been a deal cut. Hopefully, maybe that won't happen, but I know, we got to get Lindsey Graham off TV. He's talking about invading, uh, literally everything.

My core was to thank you so much for doing the show. It really appreciated you, uh, you've made us a lot smarter on this topic and many other things. We appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to my core, what's we're doing a show? And see you guys next week. Unless we

record something sooner. You never know. It's my possible.

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