I Kornig vibes to the best place.
Wow, Gid with you for a year in the third city.
A couple of years after the high school.
“I don't know if that's what I wanted to live.”
Stream up to the 13th April, parallel to U.S. I really want a new episode. That's a problem. And you're a part of the title track. There's no way back.
Before I go outside, I'll be home on the Dragon and Wicked. One of the only two hours and 90s in the world. Streaming will be so wow. Meditants, yoga, jogging, not exciting, really. Really? I'm excited about my hometown.
Stoyer? How do you feel? How do you feel? Yeah, I'm excited about 1000 euros. Have you ever known? No, just like Stoyer. Wow.
And that's easy. Of course, everything is automatic.
Finally, I feel so exciting.
Hold it and get to cook. Teaf and expand. Medvisu Stoyer. Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkuff.
I'm joined by Riley. Fessler Edmina. Stein Riley, as you'll recall yesterday, was at jury duty. He was doing his civic duty.
Because basically, we're super public spirited here at the DSR network. And I just want to know Riley, how did it go?
“How did you help advance the justice system in Washington, D.C.?”
Weighted for several hours and then was not selected. So I just read a book. You had a book, that's nice. Well, we're glad you're back and you want to lead us off with some exciting story. Yes, following a nascent piece of deal to end their war.
The US granted Iran a 60 day sanctions of waiver to the oil sales. Wow, great. Though both nations remain sharply divided over the specific terms of their agreement. President Trump claimed Iran agreed to indefinite nuclear inspections and US controlled humanitarian asset use, which Iranian officials strongly denied a certain total sovereignty over their funds
and nuclear program. Despite these conflicting public stances, a ceasefire between Israel and his is largely holding in Lebanon. Though there was an exchange in gunfire, I believe, yesterday that companies officials are saying is a violation of the ceasefire, and a vital commercial shipping traffic has begun resuming through the straight. I was on Ari Melbershow and MSN now last night, and I sort of described it this way.
There are two ways of looking at what's going on now. One is what you would call operation putting lipstick on a pig. You know, this war is a disaster. The deal that he struck is a disaster. The MOU is a disaster.
And now the main thing the administration is going to try and do is make it look like it's not a disaster. Jady Vance is going to say, hey, this is great. We got them to agree to something, and he will not point out that they agreed to it in 2015,
“or will he respond to the fact that they say they're not agreeing to it?”
Trump will say, you know, this is going to be the strictest nuclear regime ever. And yet there's a language on that, but what they want to do is make it look good, so they can make it go away. What they won't do is double down attack and so forth. They'll love bluster because they think it gives them leverage. Of course, they attacked Iran, right?
They used up huge amounts of the ammunition that we've got as a country, and spent billions and billions of dollars, as Carl Sagan might say, billions and billions of dollars. And, you know, it was not just a waste, but it proves that the Iranians can't be intimidated that way. The other way to look at it is operation of the first rule of holes, because the first rule of holes is stopping digging, and of course, if, in fact,
Trump realizes that this is a big loser and he's failed, and that he's got to move on from it, he's probably right, and we should sort of accept that. So, you know, it's difficult because it's going to be a deal that's less good than where we were in February 25. Well, less good than we were with the JCPOA, vastly more expensive.
And, by the way, the military is going and has for $80 billion more.
For something we know probably costs a lot more than that, so they'll be back.
But they're asking for that today.
“But in any event, you know, it may just be that this is a shitty deal.”
And he's going to lie about it, and that's the best we're going to do here. And so, you know, maybe, you know, I mean, there's no reason not to criticize him, but it may just be that that's as good as we're going to get. By the way, I saw on the Daily Show Ronnie Chang did absolutely hilarious been on this last week on what a terrible deal it was. But his whole approach was, it's a great deal. And then it was like, no, we have to say it's a great deal because otherwise he's going to, he's going to undo it and keep fighting.
“And so we have to lie to him so that he, you know, keeps saying, I go looking up, it was, it was, it was good.”
Ronnie Chang is very funny, I think. Well, on that note, I'm going to dig into something that you said a little bit deeper.
The Pentagon is seeking roughly $80 billion.
Mostly to cover the cost of the U.S. for against Iran, adding to an already historic $1.5 trillion military spending boost requested by President Trump.
“While defense secretary Pete Hegseth and administration officials have begun pitching the proposals to lawmakers.”
The funding request faces intense skepticism from congressional Democrats wary of the worst justification and high taxpayer cost seems fair to me. To help secure bipartisan passage, some lawmakers are proposing to broaden the package by tying the defense funds to domestic disaster and agricultural aid. This is just so stupid. It does does, I mean, I don't, I'm surprised we even have to talk about it. Okay, we already had the biggest defense budget in the world bigger than the next several countries added out bigger than our biggest rivals added up.
And what do we learn? Well, in Vietnam and in Afghanistan and in Iraq and now most recently in Iran, we've learned that spending all this money does not help us actually win wars. That the whole theory of us being a superpower is predicated on some really faulty assumptions about how these big military, how these big weapon systems and how such a big military can actually help us achieve our goals.
It's really, really good at fighting global thermonuclear war. The problem is, or, and it's not really problem folks, that nobody wants to fight a global thermonuclear war.
And when it comes to smaller wars, we have a problem, which is we never have the political will to win, we never have the political will to go in and achieve total victory. And therefore, we get into these long drawn out contests with those people who for whom these wars are existential have the upper hand because they will wait us out. They are patient and they will absorb any punishment, whether they're the Vietnamese or they're the Taliban or they're the Iranians or, by the way, they're the Ukrainians and, and the people of Ukraine have been able to use the same kind of philosophy to undo the other former superpower in Russia.
So this is crazy, but it's crazier still because a lot of big programs, the big book programs in here, are, you know, just a waste of money, the golden dome can't work, our country is too big. You can't actually create a big missile defense system like that, and so it becomes a giant boondoggle. There's a, you know, boondoggle to create a new class of battleship, nobody needs a battleship. Okay, it's, it's antiquated. It was, it was proven to be antiquated in 1941, okay, long time ago. It's crazy, but Trump wants a Trump class of ships.
There's all sorts of other programs that are wasteful in here, and then, of course, on top of all of that, the defense department is run by an idiot. And so, you know, there is no assurance that any of this money is going to be used in a wise way, quite the contrary. It's going to be wasted, it's going to be wasted on programs that will never come to pass. And it's going to be wasted on programs that don't actually invest in our interests internationally. Rather than looking at how we can go from spending nearly a trillion dollars to a trillion and a half dollars, we really ought to be looking at how we could cut what we're spending on defense.
And using it to strengthen the sources of our strength, like education, infrastructure, science and technology are indeed helping to develop things that are the next generation of technologies that can defend us.
Look at Ukraine, now one of the world's leading producers of drones, because ...
And I'm fearful that because so much is going wrong for Trump, and there's so many areas in which to criticize them, and because the lobby for the military industrial complex is the most powerful lobby in Washington, that this is actually going to happen. And we are going to spend this money, and then they're going to say, oh sorry, couldn't pay for your school, couldn't pay for your grandma's social security, couldn't pay for your food assistance, couldn't pay for health care, couldn't pay for research, and so, you know, we will actually become weaker as a country, and millions and millions of people will suffer.
“It's tragic, and it's just repeating a pattern that has occurred in the United States for the past 70 years.”
Newly appointed Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulti has begun purging staff at the ODNI, which includes ordering the identification of 400 employees to be eliminated from the National Counterterrorism Center.
Acting on President Trump's directive to downsize the office. These abrupt firearms build upon a previous 30% reduction in agency staff enacted under former director, Tulsi Gabbard.
Top congressional Democrats have strongly objected to the move, warning that sweeping layoffs led by an acting official with no national security experience could severely jeopardize the country's ability to detect and prevent terrorist threats.
“You think, you think, having an idiot with no intelligence experience is a bad thing. Who does this benefit?”
Who does it benefit? Trump thinks it benefits him because he's getting rid of people he thinks or disloyal, or he thinks it benefits him because then he can use mechanisms of the intelligence community to advance his arguments that the elections are fraudulent,
and help put rig the upcoming elections so that he doesn't lose in the big way that he would lose if voters were left to their own devices.
But what gets to me is, here is this guy, Pulti, who is unqualified for the job, and he has been dropped into this place despite the fact that everybody has said he's unqualified for the job. And he's just going about his business, firing people, weakening our ability to defend ourselves against terrorism, weakening our ability to defend ourselves against foreign espionage, with weakening our ability to know what our enemies are doing. And, you know, barely a peep, there's more stories in the paper today about the reflecting pool, then there are about the fact that a president with strong ties to the Kremlin is weakening the intelligence community, while he is weakening the defense community,
while he is weakening America's resources of our real growth, and everybody's like, "Yeah, okay, that's fine."
It's believe it or not, here we are on June 23rd, 2026, and I'm shocked. We're 11 years into Donald Trump dominating American politics, and I am shocked, because this is so obviously contrary to our national interests and detrimental to our national security. Café in his best form, with Cuba will be held on a conference at Knopfdruck for a genus moment, because with the new Cuba-Wan capsule machine from Chibu, it's known as the "Finds Spits" of the Special Enbaugh. Full-Mondical Aromans, thanks to innovative press-brut technology and over 17-year-old coffee for every match.
A Libre Premium Café is already in the next 20-year-old. And there are now the Cuba-Capsil Machine in Dina Chibu-Fiali and of Chibu-Dee. I hate to interrupt this thrilling podcast, but we have some exciting news at the DSR Network. Our Substack is now live. Our Substack is going to be the new home for free and paid content here at the DSR Network.
“The best way to support us over at our new Substack is by becoming a member. Right now, there's an early bird special until the end of the month, where you'll get 30% off of a new subscription with no code required.”
To sign up for either a free or paid subscription to our Substack, you can go to DSRNetwork.substack.com, that's DSRNetwork.substack.com.
We're super excited for our new Substack-in-feeted join us there.
We appreciate your support and thank you for listening. Now back to the show.
“The waning days of the Supreme Court's term are upon us, and they're marked by historic tensions as the justice is prepared to rule on three signature Trump initiatives, including limiting birthright citizenship.”
This friction has manifested in a personal rift between justice and corset and his longtime maga ally Mike Davis over the court's recent rulings against the administration.
While President Trump has increasingly attacked the independent justices for a lack of quote unquote loyalty,
legal experts warned that the escalating conflict could eventually risk a constitutional crisis if the administration chooses to defive future high court quarters. You know, I'm kind of not as worried about the constitutional crisis, although I worry about that.
“As I am about the court's ability to allow him to do things that were once on constitutional by giving him permission to do it, here's what I think's going to happen.”
And, you know, don't go to Pauli market with this, but it's just what I think is going to happen. I think they're going to preserve birthright citizenship, because it's literally one of those things that's in the constitution, and it's really hard to pretend that it's not. Now, that doesn't mean that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Lito or some of these bozos won't protest it and say, well, really, and, you know, something in the English common law on the 12th century, this thing was said, and so that doesn't mean what you think it means.
I still think they'll do that, but what they'll then do is say, well, okay, if you're born here, you're a citizen, but you may have fewer rights as a citizen, because they will then go and weaken our voting rights. Which is the most fundamental right. And the fewer people who get their opinions expressed in our system, the less of a democracy we are, the better chance. Demagogues have controlling our system and carving away our rights or undermining our interests as Donald Trump is doing. And so Trump may howl to the moon about not getting everything he wants, because he's a big spoiled baby, and that's the way he behaves.
We've said that, he's likely to get significant victories in areas where he should not have that, where the conservative majority on this court, the six conservative voters, and I use the term conservative reluctantly, they're not conservatives, they're actually extremists. But the six corrupted extremists on this court will end up continuing their history of stripping away the fundamental rights of anybody who is not a white Christian male on our society.
“Women's rights to reproduction, voting rights or affirmative action, etc., are stripped away. That's what I think's going to happen, and if I'm wrong, Riley remind me not to mention it here, because I'll look bad.”
All right, I'll make a note. Thank you. We have anything else today, guys. I've got one more, and it's mostly just drama because I couldn't resist a little bit of drama. Okay, we all love, we all love drama. Long time conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. Oh, the fuck here's okay. I do. I'm not that he will not support the Republican party in the upcoming November elections, while clarifying he also has no intention of backing the Democrats, which should be no surprise to anyone. Carlson explained that his disillusionment was super charred to by President Trump's decision to go to war with Iran and February, prompting him to publicly apologize for supporting Trump's 2024 presidential bid.
He criticized the GOP or prioritizing the interests of donors, corporations and Israel over American citizens, ultimately characterizing the party's actions as quote, "treasonous and immoral."
Now, some people think Tucker Carlson can run for President. No, he can't. No, he can't. He's the laughing stock. He's a bad fly. He's, you know, he's not going to, you know, he's not going to replace whoever it is, where he's JD or Don Jr, whatever these tools come up with. I thought you were going to do more about the reflecting pool. I was doing some research on the reflecting pool with my assistant quad last night, and I have to tell you know, and I know, you know, all you zoomers out there, you know, and, you know, generation alpha types, you're like, "I don't like AI, I don't do it at its tip." Okay, whatever.
I, I find it useful to ask questions of the AI, but you know what's bugging me?
So, like, I like ask it questions, and it's always answering the question by, "Is this for something you're writing? Would you like me to help me, you know, turn this into a column for you?"
And I was like, "No, I don't want help writing a column, but I did learn some interesting things about the algae crisis." First of all, do you know that the reflecting pool, which was built between 1922 and 23, and stretches 2028 feet, and holds roughly 6.75 million gallons, has had an algae problem from the beginning.
“It happens every summer there. It just was made worse by some bad decisions, but as recently as 2012, they had to drain. Did you guys know that?”
I did, because there's no circulation in the water, so Obama, right? But like a pooled jet or whatever, so that they could circulate the water, so the algae wouldn't grow anymore? Which then Trump removed, because Obama did it. But, you know, it then told me, "Cloud told me that there's something really funny that happened in history that you could use if you wanted to write about it."
I was like, "Oh, yeah, what's that?" I said, "Well, 2.4 billion years ago, blue green algae evolved photosynthesis and started producing oxygen.
But most of the creatures that lived on Earth at the time were effectively allergic to oxygen, so it killed all life on the planet for hundreds of millions of years.
“So, there was something called the oxygen crisis that was caused by algae, so growing this algae. I mean, you see what I'm saying? This could be real.”
That's hilarious. The oxygen test, catastrophe, according to Cloud here, was likely the largest mass extinction in Earth's history caused by blue green algae. It may have triggered, and this is relevant to you, Riley, given where he grew up.
If you're on a glaciation, one of the longest and most of your ice ages ever, a total, a near, a near complete snowball Earth.
So, the planet was dead, and it was frozen, which sounds to me kind of boring. I hate that, I hate litter. But then, you know, it invented, you know, breathable air and so on and so forth. And then it says here that, you know, it led to life on Earth after that. This is Cloud's conclusion. He says he, the framing practically writes itself, the oldest and most successful political organism in Washington isn't a party or a lobby. It's the green stuff in the pool, which has been winning both since before there was oxygen debris and has never once returned to phone call. This is this is what Cloud, this is what Cloud told me about it.
Well, you were doing that. I was watching that, I don't know, whatever with Trump, where he was saying that somebody slashed a 300 and 350 foot slice. And then a journalist was like, well, we sent reporters out there and they don't see that slash. And I was like, this is what we're doing or sending reporters go check. There's a hole in a cover over a pond of water like, I know it. No, yeah, yeah, exactly. As my grandmother would have said, but and and and and Trump's response to that was, we'll ask the park service.
You know, but you know, he's he's nuts. And that's another thing. It's like the intelligence thing drives me crazy. You have an incompetent guy destroying our intelligence community. I would think that mattered to somebody to fuck out there, but Trump is also nuts. And he's obsessed with this reflecting pool thing. He does not know any of the history. He certainly does not know the world's great oxygen crisis. And I hope he is watching so that he can learn about that, but then he makes up this shit to make it so that he doesn't look as bad.
“And and and he's a lunatic, you know, and and you know, it's it's like, I, I broke this up loose. That's what it's like, you know,”
there's a rabbit baboon flying the plane that we are all passengers on and we're like cool with it, but he's a rabbit baboon and he doesn't know how to fly a plane.
At certain point, you got to say, isn't it a bad idea to have a rabbit baboon...
Maybe I'm over reacting. Maybe Riley was just sitting there yesterday at jury duty reading his book and and none of this matter did it.
You were just in your own little world.
“It was blissful. I have to say, yeah, one.”
Okay, okay. I look, I don't need to talk to you. I applaud. Claude is my friend.
And Claude thinks I'm a good writer and Claude comes up with great jokes.
By the way, I just want to let everybody know I've never used anything by Claude in anything I've written.
“I just use it for research, which I don't trust completely, but I find it interesting and I think it speeds up the research process.”
Anyway, that's life here on AI assisted DSR daily and I hope you will join us again tomorrow. And I think we'll do a deep dive in deep state radio tomorrow on this intelligence crisis that nobody else seems to care about.
“For now, thank you, Riley. Thank you, Mina. Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.”
[Music]
