Rational Security: The “No Banner is Safe” Edition

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, everyone. Scott, our Anderson here.

“As a senior editor with Laugh Fair, you might know me as the guy always”

rambling about treaties and war powers, or perhaps as the host of rational security. What you might not know is that Laugh Fair has been a part of my life a lot longer than I've been contributing to it. Before I came to Laugh Fair, I was a national security lawyer and occasional

diplomat working for the government, both here in Washington DC and overseas. They were the sorts of jobs that wrestled with hard, natural security choices of the type Laugh Fair specializes in, which

why Laugh Fair is one of the first things I opened when I got to my desk

each morning. We're from around to Venezuela, to back here at home, those questions haven't gotten an easier. Policy makers, journalists, and citizens all need the sort of deep non-partisan expertise Laugh Fair specializes in, now more than ever.

Laugh Fair is also a non-profit, meaning we're committed to keeping all of our core content from getting put behind a paywall. We can't do it without help from the people who read and listen to us. People like you. So if you can, visit Laugh Fair Media.org/support and join our community

of supporters. Just $10 a month will make a world of difference in helping us keep Laugh Fair free to everyone for a long time to come. So Bena, I understand you have been up to some of your old tricks once again newly liberated from captivity.

What did you get up to last night?

“Well, I may have projected on the Trump banner”

at the Justice Department last night. I mean, I wouldn't confirm or deny that, but, you know, somebody seems to have projected the John Adams quotation

a government of laws not of men right across the face of the

government, but it's not a government of law. So it's not a government of law. So it's not a government of law. So it's not a government of law. So it's not a government of law.

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So it's not a government of law. So it's not a government of law. Hello everyone and welcome back to rational security of the podcast. We invite you to join friends and members of the law fair team. As we tried to puzzle through the week's biggest national security news stories.

Whether they are in our lane or not. I'm thrilled to be joined by none other than rational security, host, emeritus and an editor and chief of law fair Ben. But what is back on the podcast after a while Ben?

“It's been like, I think a solid couple months that we've had you on.”

So it's good to have you back on the cast. It's good to be back. I think this may be the longest repeat you've ever been granted from rational security, which is, you know, a sin not to be repeated. It hasn't been that long.

I, I don't know. It'll be interesting to go back and figure out when the last time was. Yeah, well, we'll do that. Well, of course, it numbers out. I think it's been, I think it's been a little while.

time guests from the Brookings institution. Seeing your fellow. Carry here. And Carry, thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm thrilled to be here with you Scott.

And we've tried to make this happen a few times. And I'm glad it worked out this time. Because there's plenty of great news that is in my lane for sure, even if I know nothing about the law. I will leave that to you.

There we go. Well, we might have found a few topics that are in your lane as the, as the Maven of economic state craft for us here at the Brookings institution. So let's take it into it.

Our first topic for this week with friends like she.

This past week, top U.S. officials and business CEOs, travel with President Trump to Beijing for his summit with President Xi Jinping. The summit had a warm air to it. With Trump going so far as to call Xi his friend Far Cry from the Hockey stance towards China.

He adopted during the campaign and his prior administration. But Trump left having made relatively few concrete deals on the host of issues dividing the two countries. Whether a missed opportunity here or is the seeming thought in relations itself a positive sign for the future of the relationship.

Topic two dirty dancing. Havana fights. Cuba ran out of oil last week. But the Trump administration's pressure campaign against the island nation. And the miles off the coast of Florida has only intensified on Monday.

The United States announced new sanctions on three Cuban government agencies and 11 top officials. A misreports that the Department of Justice may seek an indictment against Rao Castro, the 94-year-old brother of Fidel Castro and former president among other senior and current and former officials.

Meanwhile surveillance flights of the island nation have reportedly increased substantially in recent weeks in advance of an expected military buildup in the next few weeks from now.

“How seriously should we take Trump's repeated threats to pursue regime change?”

In yet another country after Iran and Venezuela. And how long can you may hang on with its economic situation becoming more dire? Topic three. I've got one twenty two problems that a tariff is one.

On May 7th, the US court of international trade struck down yet another round of Trump tariffs this time. The across the board, 10% section one twenty two tariffs that President Trump imposed after the Supreme Court invalidated the earlier tariffs that he had issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Specifically, the Court of International Trade ruled that the administration cannot meet the statutory requirements for using section one twenty two. Though it's really good sense to been stated by the Federal Circuit pending appeal. Is this decision likely to stick? And with another legal defeat, what options the administration have left to follow

through on Trump administration's trade policy agenda?

So for our first topic last week, we had our guests on kind of laying the

stage for this big Trump G summit that has been really in the works for better part of a year at this point.

“I think this is the third official date that finally stuck toasting this summit.”

When we talked about that, we went. The two parties came to be coming with slightly different agendas. The Trump administration had kind of five bees. They wanted to get soybean trade issues, Boeing planes, and a third be that and escaping exactly what it was, but kind of specific trade deliverables and specific

industries. And then they had two boards. They wanted to set up kind of institutions to help manage the bilateral relationship in the economic domain. It won't focus on trade and one focus on investment.

Meanwhile, China was intended, was reported as kind of coming with a broader agenda of kind of broader and more foundational issues, which essentially was tech, Taiwan, and tariffs. So we have now a sense of the deliverables that come out of this. We've seen agreements by China to lift various research and agricultural imports, commit to buying a certain number of Boeing planes.

We have these two boards in process, or there's a commitment to get them in process. So to some extent, we, you can see the Trump administration saying, well, this is a victory. We got, you know, most of our deliverables of one form or another, we came in going in with. But the fundamental relationship isn't that different. And that list of deliverables, they kind of set for themselves, wasn't extraordinarily high bar,

given the centrality of the US China relationship to a lot of the Trump administration. So a policy is to a lot of what people see as broader US interest kind of moving forward.

So I want to come to you first on this, because partly because so much of this is trade based.

How big a difference does it make that we have come out of this summit with this soft list of deliverables and with a generally warmer tone towards China. Not a close ally and so friendship by any strategy imagination, but a sense that, you know, hey, there's not sharp rhetoric going back and forth. There seems to be a mutual desire to kind of deescalate.

Is that itself a victory?

“Can we see this as like a successful summit or at least a good thing generally for the United States?”

And how sustainable does that seem like they'd be between now and the fall, where as one of the deliverables, President Trump invited Xi Jinping back to Washington, he see for a US-based summit, which is expected to take place sometime in September, October, I believe. Yeah, thanks, Kat. I mean, I think it certainly was not a summit where the fundamental disagreements were addressed,

but I don't think the leaders were really teed up to do that. I mean, there's plenty of other things going on, including Iran. And so I don't think it was forecasted that it would do much other than sort of stabilize things

And so one can say that one of the deliverables was, quote, a constructed relationship of strategic stability. That is what we're after now.

“I think what's really interesting here is sort of the emergence of this like shift from the first Trump administration era”

through Biden to now, where sort of in the first Trump administration and even in the Biden administration,

a bit the economic state craft toward China, our economic policy trade and others, was really more designed to be an effort to discipline China for the practices that they do that are undermining the global economic system, forced tech transfer IP issues, non-market policies and practices, the preferred language of the G7 discussions on this. So it's moved kind of away from like we need to discipline China from the way that it's undermining our ability to sustain our system, to really, in this Trump administration, kind of more accepting that China system is not something that the U.S. can change.

And so the focus seems to be moving from discipline to management, where the idea is to sort of preserve areas of mutual economic benefit, and separately manage the rivalry and vulnerability part, if they can manage to separate those two things that would be possibly what we have to do in this era, that the devil's really in the details there.

So I think, you know, the most relevant part of this summit is not sort of the immediate deliverables, the beans and the bowings, and beef is the third one,

but actually the sort of normalization of a more managed economic relationship between the U.S. and China,

“and I think those boards are potentially important in that respect, although we don't know a lot of, we don't have a lot of detail of what they look like,”

but it does sound like something different than the usual economic dialogue. But I want to come to you on this, and let me, let me throw in an added perspective of kind of like the diplomat perspective on this, which is, we seem to be have setting up a cycle of kind of summit diplomacy in this, at least for between now, and the next cycle, I'm frankly, we've been working in that zone for the last couple of months, as they've been leading up to the originally scheduled summit that could be laid, because they are on war, and there was another date before that, so we've kind of been using these anticipated meetups as a big driver of the relationship.

And to some extent, I think a lot of diplomats would look at that and say, that's a good thing. Like one of your big objectives in diplomacy is keeping lines of communication open, particularly between the actual decision makers that matter, giving them a form to voice concerns and opportunities to try and address them before you escalate a relationship, or escalate to some that could arrive at hostilities or other sort of escalatory measures, and that this sets up a framework for doing that. Highly personalized framework, but notably because you do have these two boards,

at least on the investment and trade front, you have bureaucratic mechanisms that where you will have lower level more technocratic engagement, if they're set up adequately, there's also talk in a couple of weeks before the summit that there have been kind of a reconnection of a Chinese, U.S.-China military lines of communication that have been relatively dormant for a couple of years, they've been offered to reinvigorate those. So those things are all good. So like I come out of this, and I have my former State Department hat on and I look at this and I say,

actually this is kind of a successful summit if we've gotten to the point where we can keep these lines of communication and dialogue open, even if we didn't reach an immediate resolution on them because the process itself is an objective if we want to avoid is either, you know, capitulating or escalating, and I do think that's kind of where we are, or at least that's the way that the kind of slide I could shed on this. Does that make sense to you, or are you a little more skeptical about what the Trump administration has done here,

“and how it lines with is kind of broader positioning around China and related national security issues?”

So I am largely in sympathy with that view, I think. My view of major Trump administration events, multilateral or bilateral is very hypocritic in quality that, you know, if you look at something and you say,

first, the first question is what catastrophic harm have they done, and here the answer appears to be none, and then you ask,

did we get anything little that may be valuable, and here the answer for all the reasons that both of you have said, there seems to be some good structures or things that are at least teased or contemplated here, and so then you will allow yourself to breathe a big sigh of relief, and you contrast it with, you know, going to the Munich security summit and blowing up NATO, right, or, you know,

Now, if that sounds like I'm, you know, not willing to dish out a lot of praise for it, that's correct.

“I, I don't think that's the, the ideal way to frame our evaluation of major administration initiatives,”

but that is the way I'm conditioned to think about these things. I will say, there are some real danger issues in the US,

China relationship right now, and I didn't see this summit as doing much to deal with either of them.

One is Taiwan, where I do think the administration is communicating over time to China that we will not do anything to protect Taiwan. And just as the Biden administration may have been airing in the other direction by articulating a little bit too loudly and clearly that we would go to war to defend Taiwan, this administration is in a thousand little ways communicating we won't do shit.

“And that is the kind of message that Xi Jinping cares a great deal about and will alleviate other things in order to facilitate that environment.”

The second issue is, you know, there is this US China AI competition thing going on, and, you know, we still don't really have a US posture with respect to that.

The administration has a very accelerationist attitude toward AI that is mostly couched in the language of China competition. On the other hand, it frees up in video to sell, you know, high value chips in China. And has this kind of weird Janice faced policy toward competition with China in the AI space? I want to lay out there. I don't know what the right policy is on that question, and I'm not pretending that I do.

“I do think there is something to be said for having a policy that you can clearly articulate and that actually has some content and I don't think we have that.”

So I don't want to give them too much praise for having a summit that, you know, we're not all talking about what a disaster it is, and we are talking about the incremental gains, but I don't deny that that's where we are. Yeah, I think I agree, Ben, that a lot of this is sort of incremental adjustments to some things that are arguably needing to be addressed, and I think what makes me a little bit uncomfortable is that we're sort of setting up mechanisms that might be hard to walk away from. And we're doing this in this sort of unilateral and transactional way that might leave us in the long run, not in a good strategic position relative to China that China might be getting some winds out of this in the long sweep if we're not doing this very carefully.

Well, let me dig into that a little deeper. You all want to talk about tech and Taiwan, but before I do that, let's dig into the two bees that are kind of like the big outstanding operative parts of whatever this arrangement and that came out of. That's the trade board of the investment board, two separate bodies that are supposed to be establishing what I take to be fairly technocratic, although I suspect there will be a strong involvement of the private sector as well, just because that's administration's usual approach to these things, that's going to try and manage and resolve trade investment issues between the two countries.

So, you know, they're going to be standing that up between now and the fall. I my guess is there's not going to be a lot of urgency to have really hard results from either of those processes given that the next time it's only a few months away and they're going to be standing these things up and it takes time. They'll probably only have one or two of these board meetings once they actually figure out who they're going to put on them, etc. Before, that's next time. That's just the way these things tend to go. That's my prediction totally uninformed totally speculative, but I would put money on it like that's as good as we're going to get.

But it is creating these forums where they're trying to segment out these two universes of issues. How big is the divide on those two issues between this administration and the Chinese government and how much space is there for being able to reach accommodation within those domains without having being able to bring in the other big part to the bilateral relationship like tech and Taiwan. Is there a lot of space that we can expect these boards to make more progress on addressing bilateral concerns? Or is it more that they're going to sharpen what the real divide is and that's going to have to be some that enters into the political mix along with the bigger agenda items outside of the trade and investment spaces.

The US says we're going to manage trade in non-strategic sectors. I think that's our nonsense of our non-strategic. I can't remember which one. And China's read out is that we're going to talk about lowering tariffs. So it's a little bit of a different thing and it could overlap. I mean we certainly have talked about in the in the sweep of the tariff escalation with China from the first China 301 in the Biden administration thinking.

There are some things in here that aren't strategic that we don't need to have tariffs on. We're pulling down the tariffs could help consumers, you know, work on affordability.

It could be that there is a way to kind of, you know, when I was advising in the Council of Economic Advisors in the Biden administration, I sure sort of tried to identify some categories where you might not think that you would be opening up a vulnerability. There are some variables about, you know, downstream use, how concentrated production is in China does this feed into some of the ways that they use coercive leverage. There are some sort of objective parameters. One could use to divide that up, but it really is a continuum. So finding exactly where those boundaries are is a challenge and you'd want to have really, really clear objectives. You'd want to have really serious discipline and you'd want to have consistency over time to do this very, very well.

“All those things are difficult in any administration. I think in particular in this one.”

The second thing I will say is that it is interesting to me that Ambassador Greer announced that there would be a public notice in comment on what the board should do.

And I'm really looking forward to engaging in that process and getting some more information on what they're thinking, what they're asking the public about. And I think that if they're going to have that period that usually, I think they have to have something like a period of a few weeks. And then resolving what to do and then getting everything together by the fall. I think the timeline is a little bit longer and steady progress is what we should expect.

“Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that's a good step to do that sorts of things, but it also underscores.”

This is a very preliminary agreement. We don't know what the scope of representation duties jurisdiction of these bodies is going to be. So it's hard to know like what we can expect them to accomplish down the road. So Ben, let's go to the other two teas, Tekken Taiwan. Maybe we start with Taiwan. So we had a kerfuffle in the lead-up to the summit where the Trump administration, and particularly President Trump himself, I should say, said at one point, you know, arm sales to Taiwan may be on the table in terms of negotiation with China.

“And that is a big traditional no-no for the United States. You know, they're always kind of passively on the table.”

But, you know, the official line is that the United States has adopted since a series of series of communications and assurances that have been on the table since the 1980s. And have always been kind of referenced as pillars of the U.S. policy towards China and Taiwan, has centered on the idea that, look, the United States is not going to directly consult with China and arm sales. We're going to provide arm sales, and there's going to be a relationship between the arm sales we provide a Taiwan, and the sense that China, mainland China, is working towards a peaceful resolution of bilateral issues as opposed to a forceful resolution of the status of Taiwan.

And so if there's, you know, increased threats of a forceful resolution arm sales are supposed to increase, and if it looks like there's peaceful process in China generally backs off, then the United States will may well lower arm sales. I'm highly simplifying what is actually like fairly complexly worded sets of assurances, but that's the basic contours of it. That's basically been the trajectory of U.S. policy. And notably the Taiwan Relations Act, the foundational statute that kind of defines in so many ways U.S. relationship with Taiwan focus on arm sales. That's the bulk of it.

It doesn't make assurances about security coming to military assistance in the kind of attack that's actually just not something in the United States has done, and we're glad to Taiwan, although, as you said, several administrations have implied it, but it is very concrete on arm sales. Well, in Joe Biden stated it baldly at one point several times.

Yeah, Joe Biden repeatedly did things that was a step in an interesting direction, what we saw them do is that the official U.S. policy is always been strategic ambiguity.

You know, we don't take a position one way or the other of what we would do if China were to attempt to take Taiwan by force, military intervention. That's been the position for a long time. The Biden administration leaned one way, as you said, Joe Biden repeatedly said, "Oh, yeah, we've come to the defend to them." And then every time his national security council would come back and say, "No, no, no, he was just simplifying and saying something in that was a little bit frank and reality, our position hasn't changed."

We basically saw the same thing here happened in the other direction where President Trump said, "Maybe, arms sales are on the table." And then we saw various U.S. officials saying, "This isn't a change in U.S. policy, U.S. policy is the same."

I think the Biden administration described some of it as aspirational, maybe that's what they would say about President Trump's statements as well.

We came out of the summit with really not much happening on the Taiwan file. No sign that arms sales were actually discussed, although there is a period of direct discussion between Jean Trump that we don't know what was on the agenda there, so that we could have come up there.

“The strongest statement came from G basically saying, "Look, Taiwan is a really sensitive issue." He called it like the biggest common denominator in a way that I don't think translated quite right?”

Because we were afraid to describe it as basically saying, "This is the issue that touches everything else. It's foundational," the United States has to walk very carefully around this issue set. Which I took as a sign that there wasn't a sign of any sort of change or break or concessions on President Trump administration, because it was the strongest, harshest thing that I saw, as you say, out of this sort of engagement. I thought of the different statements that seemed. So, what should we keep our eye on for Taiwan in this leading up to this next cycle and the sort of diplomacy? I mean, is it the arm sales and seeing the level commitment there?

Which we should note, our cyclical always have been like, it's not as much a constant flow, you see spikes and ebs and flows.

Is it about Chinese posturing around Taiwan, exercise with their pursuing, you know, they do a lot of these naval militia exercises that use like nominally civilian ships to do a variety of sort of harassment things around Taiwan.

“All these gray zone warfare measures, is it seeing where they spike those up and whether that is an issue that Trump administration is willing to raise?”

Like, what are the lines we should be monitoring to know what the someone actually meant, may have meant for Taiwan, given that we can't really tell right now?

Well, there are a few things. So, one is, one is rhetoric, and Chinese rhetoric on this subject is generally pretty consistent.

So, US rhetoric is actually the huge variable here, and, you know, in a way that you don't take any single statement seriously about Ukraine, but you do take the overall tone over time about Ukraine very seriously. I think there's something similar to do with respect to Taiwan, right, that there's a, you know, Trump can say anything at any given time. And so the fact that he says once that weapon sales around the table doesn't particularly concern me. It turns me, because it concerns the Chinese, the wrong message, but it's not in the broad scheme of things, it gets triaged out.

What doesn't get triaged out is a longer term pattern of suggesting that this really isn't our problem, and that this is China's sphere of influence, and, you know, we care as long as they leave us alone and about Latin America. I'm not going to fight with them about, you know, fights with the Philippines about fisheries or the South China Sea, right, and you do want to see a kind of a continuity in that regard. That's the area that I'm most concerned about, you know, and it's not just Taiwan, it's South Korea, it's Japan, it's, you know, it's our basic commitments in that region.

You see that as something that is, you know, permanent, do we see it as something that we would trade away for enough soy burned being in you and Boeing purchases. Do we see it as something that we say is permanent until the day we traded away for more soybean purchases, right, like, and I do think the aggregate statements over time, the aggregate tone that we're sending really is the major indicator of our behavior, the major indicator of China's behavior involves, you know, you cannot invade Taiwan without a very significant military build up.

“Invading Taiwan is very hard because it's quite mountainous, so, you know, there are visible signs that you would see long before anything happened that there's no way to do a surprise attack, right?”

And so, you know, you are at some level looking for forced behavior changes, overt preparations to do all kinds of things, right? And then, finally, I don't think the question is separable from a certain set of text questions, and the reason for that is that Taiwan is still the world's producer of chips and Taiwan does have this insurance policy, which is that the world operates off of its

So those are the things that I kind of loosely keep an eye on, but I, this is not, I'm sure I'm not the person who has the best answer to that question.

“Well, before we break on this topic, I do want to circle back to the other T, the technology point, and Carl, I want to come to you on this because this intersect a lot with this trade and investment questions.”

I saw a kind of panel of leading tech CEOs go with President Trump on the summit, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla and much of other stuff. James and Wang of NVIDIA, I came up with a, I think there were maybe one or two other ones as well. They didn't appear to come back with anything concrete, although they all came with a couple of big agenda items mostly seeking greater access to markets in China to some extent, there are some supply chain issues, production issues that I think they're aiming to secure.

And we've been this, particularly in the AI space and the NVIDIA space, we're in this kind of unique position where the Trump administration, I think it just days before the summit gave final approval to a specific list of 10 Chinese companies to be recipients and be able to sell the H200 chip of very high end chipset that NVIDIA's developed.

That was been criticized, Trump administration, but criticized for authorizing this to scale to China because people worry it will kind of help jumpstart and accelerate their AI development.

“But now we're this opposition where NVIDIA, I think wants to sell these things, United States has authorized it, but China actually is the barrier because China is saying, well, we have our own supply chain concerns like the United States does.”

We don't want to cultivate too much reliance upon US chipsets and they're worried about opening the floodgates here. All this is very tied in with the broader economic relationship to some extent and the political relationship in a way the AI should in my mind kind of bridges them to the large extent. So I'm just kind of curious from from your perspective, which we take away from the fact that we saw these major CEOs come on the summit and don't appear to have gotten a big opening here. And is their drive for it and the fact the administration is kind of catering to it, a sign of like a more of a sea change posture towards China, where in the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, a big concern is that we had too much US investor in China, too much business operations, too much IP that was being capitalized upon and illegally transferred to China, too much investment, other things that were inadvertently benefiting China and accelerating their rise.

I don't think either of those administration's urge for cut off of those relationships, but they did want to put some guardrails on them. And here the administration at least, the posture seems to be much friendlier to try to push it. It's actually China that's pushing back, particularly in this chipspace that's been one of the most hotly contested. So what should we make of this? Is there a big change at how the US is posturing towards economic engagement with China and is this summit a big sign that the Trump administration is actually wanting to go back to the older days,

or there was much more open investment and participation in China by US companies, despite these concerns that other administrations, including the first Trump administration have had in recent years.

I don't really know, I'm sort of thinking about it in a couple of ways, one of which is this is sort of this shift to not thinking about how to discipline China to act more like us, but how to manage the fact that they aren't.

“And one of the aspects of this is just that competition with a very large non market economy isn't going to look like open market competition, and so you have to think about ways to manage it.”

And one of the things, both strategically and competitively that you want to be thinking about is it isn't bad for us if China gets hooked on our chips and doesn't make their own and isn't the source of innovation. And likewise for China thinking it would be bad to get hooked on US chips and not be able to indigenize this industry because maybe there are going to be more barriers to being able to do tech transfer and some of the other ways. And IP theft and some of the other ways that sort of were more of a concern several years ago.

I really know the answer to that, but those are the sort of two pulling ends of all of these discussions is how much do you allow China to buy because it makes them more dependent on you and you have a strategic advantage there that you can then use as leverage versus being concerned that it will help advance their process. I mean potentially what they're thinking is that the innovations are close enough where they are. Perhaps they're just thinking we need to do capture what we can while we can because we won't be able to in five years.

I don't really know what the calculus is here, but there are a few different ways to look at it and what I really suspect is that there is a mishmash of different opinions on this and that is why we're not ending up with a real outcome there's three people who think you know oh we got to get China hooked on our chips.

Yeah ideally you would have a process that tries to reconcile these and comes up with something more cohesive but that is the challenge in this case is opposed to when you maybe that can explain a little bit of this ricocheting back and forth depending on who's kind of got the year at this particular moment. Well regardless we have a lot to watch on these various fronts as we look forward to the next summit in the fall the next step of the summit diplomacy but for today let's go on to our second topic and look to things a little closer to home and that is the eastern Caribbean which may.

I don't know eastern Caribbean just the Caribbean generally which may be the site of another substantial military buildup in the weeks to come that's what a number of sources have reported to different media reports that have already reporting a spike in surveillance flights that has been a kind of growing crescendo that in the recent weeks have been particularly notable.

“We're a Cuba this is action that you know could obviously predate some sort of military action it also may simply be an intimidation tactic although particularly because.”

As a number of sources and some of the media reports on this have noted the way that they're pursuing surveillance of these cases is not particularly covert and there might be quite or ways to get information if you really need it to do it. Instead this appears a kind of overt showy ways of preparing and doing things or regard to Cuba so there's a little question about how much is substance how much is signaling in regards to a potential military action on Cuba. We have statements by Marka Rubio who in a Cuban independent state released today a Spanish language video basically said the United States wants a new relationship with Cuba but talk about we need fundamental political change.

We saw a similar message delivered by CIA director Rack Liff about two weeks ago when he took a trip to Cuba to deliver sort of engagement with the government there and this all happening at the backdrop of pretty extreme economic measure being posed against Cuba. Basically on par of what is done against Iran and North Korea and Russia evolving substantial secondary actually I'm not sure if North Korea has secondary sanction but evolving substantial secondary sanctions that are putting a lot more pressure on global engagement with Cuba.

And this was already an economy suffering severely particularly after losing its primary oil exporter Venezuela a few months ago the economy has never been on strong footing and now appears to be quite as a result of deliberate U.S. policy being weakened perhaps to the breaking point but what exactly that looks like if and when it comes I think is a bit of an open question.

That's a very long process to turn to you on Ben and ask you about what do you make of all this I mean what is the Trump administration's objective and regard to Cuba.

“I think we can take on their face with their objectives what they would happen if they want but what is their willingness to what steps are they willing to do to follow it through is military action really likely to be on the table in your view.”

Is it that we're going to continue the economic sanctions till something breaks and something may or may not break at a certain point I'm kind of curious about how you're reading the TV's about what the administration may or may not be intending here.

Well, I'm going to interpret your question as actually coming to two different Benjamin witnesses.

There is the Benjamin witness who lived 56 years of his life until the Venezuela operation followed by the Iran operation.

“And then there is the Benjamin witness who is very young he's only a few months old but who has the experience of those two as the president calls them excursions.”

And I would say if you're asking the 56 year old Benjamin witness this question the answer is I assume this is all just intimidation and and is a effort to thumb chests and be demonstrative in a fashion that will cause people in Havana to maybe turn over Raul Castro for trial. So he is 94 and will maybe cause you know concessions on frankly long overdue political reforms but if you ask the you know I would say both older and wiser Benjamin witness but really what I mean is the baby Benjamin witness who was born at the day that we I woke up and found out we had invaded Venezuela.

And who matured when we attacked Iran over two successive periods.

I would say we're preparing for military operation against Cuba and the pretext for it is going to be effectuating a warrant involving Raul Castro and even if you don't think that that is correct as a predictive matter of the greatest likelihood you kind of have to act like it is.

And so I just take it at least value at this point that you know Venezuela from their point of view worked very well and produced a some good press Iran didn't work well and produced a lot of bad press that they're still dealing with. But there's a shiny new object that they think that you know it's hard to lower gas prices or effectuate domestic policy objectives particularly if you can't pass any legislation.

But blowing things up is always in foreign jurisdictions is always an available option because Congress doesn't enforce war powers principles anymore at all.

And so you can just do it and the attraction of that as the point ahead of a spear in order to be able to claim short term gains is always there. And you know, bringing down the Cuban regime is a long term policy objective of many conservatives and a lot some non conservatives as well. And so this is an opportunity to do it and I just assume that this is the next picture of uncongressionally authorized regime change wars and many wars that the administration plans and fights for domestic political reasons of its own.

“Yeah, it is interesting, you know, I will say one thing I think is worth disaggregating is the Iran and the Venezuela operations which because they're both regime change proximate military action.”

There's clearly a relationship psychologically between the two in how President Trump and other people around them seem to conceive of it.

They're really very different operations in their strategic goals and scope and the lead up to them in Iran the Iran operation while there's lots to criticize about it. What's something that has been in the works in a way for decades and winning with a much more ambitious agenda. I mean, there's really government was very clear are objective is set aside the regime change part of it, which is part of it is just decimating Iran's military capability. It's to remove a regional actor from being able to directly threaten us.

“Here in Cuba in Venezuela, you have a case where it's much more discreet objectives. It appears to be primarily a concern with the regime. We know what we forget. I think easily is that up until the Maduro operation actually happened.”

The Trump administration have been very solicitous to Maduro and other people in the administration. Basically saying we're going to give you a golden retirement.

This was an offer he made just a week before the operation started, we will give you a golden retirement if you step out from power and hand it over to somebody else and start enacting some of these reforms we want to see in your autonomy. And in your political system. Maduro ultimately didn't and he kind of wanted it in front of Trump's face and that's supposedly least coordinated reporting is what led President Trump to authorize this military operation that have been developed as one option, but always one of several options that they could execute on.

So, you know, if I were to fit this into a pattern, it seems to fit into that Venezuela pattern, which does ultimately lead to a military action, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a military action with the strategic goals of what Iran. I don't think actually the Trump administration wants to, and it probably at this point hopefully would recognize it would be very hard for it to actually occupy Cuba, right, in a meaningful way. Because that requires funds, support from Congress and a lot a lot long-term commitment, then they're clearly going to have support for.

And if they're already running into those barriers against Iran, a much more where they had a better political situation. But that doesn't mean I don't think you're right, but they want necessarily maybe try the Maduro move again. For the other time, a much more limited thing, hopefully you get a different regime in there, especially because, you know, there's a sense that opposition to the Cuban regime has been an issue and that there's always been the sense that there are opposition figures that would be willing to work with the United States out there and about.

Well, I don't think we have a real concrete sense of that. My sense is in regard to Cuba, like we might have 20 years ago.

“Pardon me for interrupting, but I think your brief monologue here contains more strategic thinking about the problem than the entire administration above the career level has engaged in about this enterprise.”

I want to translate Scott's version of this thought into the way that it is actually being thought about within the administration, which is Marco Rubio wants to take out the Cuban regime.

And the president wants an out from Iran that makes him look like he's a decisive.

“And so you've just engaged in a level of, like, I don't believe that anybody at the political level is having any conversation at the level of sophistication that your description just gave.”

We'll have to say, hopefully somebody else will have to say, Karna, I want to come to you on another aspect of this, and that is the economic toolkit that we're seeing the Trump administration lean on most directly here. We haven't seen direct military action against Cuba other than, you know, we have this blockade that has maritime elements, we have surveillance flights, stuff like that, we haven't seen direct military action. What about what we know about these sorts of very aggressive sanctions campaigns, and their ability to achieve this sort of regime change? I mean, we've seen the Trump administration do something very similar to Iran.

Or, in some way, though, as much more complicated target than Cuba is during the First Trump administration, that's the maximum pressure campaign obviously didn't work because we are now back during the second term administration at war with Iran. That's the same regime that regime wasn't placed until President killed it or killed the supreme leader, you know, in March. So, which would we expect if the Trump administration is limited to the economic toolkit? Can they root should they reasonably be able to expect it to actually deliver the sort of results they want, like regime change or reform, or what does that depend on what are the circumstances where that might work or might not work in your sense?

Yeah, Scott, you know, I've talked about this a lot, so I'm glad you asked, but yeah, I think what we're doing now, I wouldn't call that straight economic sanctions. I think there is, you know, we have long used sanctions and lots of them in assumed that more sanctions would be more pressure and be more difficult. And I don't think that's borne out in terms of if your objective is the same thing that a military invasion could accomplish. Think economic sanctions could put a lot of pressure on a regime. It can be very costly. It can it can be a real penalty. It can really prevent a regime from carrying out things that might have otherwise done, but we haven't seen a lot of circumstances where economic sanctions alone take down a regime.

So I think though that what you're talking about with a blockade and with, you know, harassment is more like hybrid warfare, which is, you know, what we're seeing a lot emerge just in with Russia and Europe, but this is kind of a different way of operating with this sort of like economic and quasi gray kind of military as tools and then there's the sort of real kinetic operations that are the third level and there's sort of a threat between them.

“And I think what we're seeing is a lot of sanctions paired with this sort of hybrid approach with a stronger, stronger threat of kinetic activity. And I think that's that is pretty different.”

I don't know if that will work, but it will sure, you know, cause increased economic pain. What I think is really kind of interesting with the, if the new car, post Venezuela, things is really interesting is it also seems like we're kind of departing from the sort of you break it, you bought it theory. We're going to, we are doing this for regime change and then we're going to ensure the regime changes there and we're going to do reconstruction and all this stuff. So even if we do have this, you know, we take down the Cuban regime, then what comes next?

“I'm not sure how stabilizing and how quickly that improves the material economic and political conditions that are currently in Cuba, which are different from how Venezuela was which was dire but not to this level.”

And I'm kind of interested in how that would go ahead without allies and without Congress providing the kind of resources. What the next step is is is also really interesting to me.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a really big question and it is worth bearing in mind like this administration is in such a dramatically weaker posture domestically politically now than it was in March or than especially it wasn't January we have to bear in mind this administration now as we've seen just last few weeks. It's post Republican primary season down a lot of cases that means that there are a lot of Republican legislators that are looking to the general or in the case of like people like John Coranon, no Cassidy and other folks, people who might have a beef with the Trump administration not feel a lot of desire to act oily with them now that they've been defeated by usually Trump back rivals in primaries.

And so, the congressional situation was really narrow margin of Republicans control Congress in the first place. The idea of getting anything more out of this Congress is extremely low and the next Congress is not looking a lot friendly or must they really pull a rabbit out of that the election.

But if there's any sort of that calculation happening, that gets really, really expensive, really hard and you really can't do it that easily without Congress.

You can do a lot of damage and a lot of like physical harm to another country, but the sort of long term presence you would need and particularly if involves ground troops that you would need to like steer and recreate a political system if you completely annihilate it. And this is a type of mission that I think even if this administration has to be getting to Trump wrestling with the terms of the fact that it might be beyond its reach to do without Congress, because that's the limit it's running up to against Iran right now. And that's not to happen that say that like two wars happening at the same time, it's also something that I think will raise a lot of concerns on Congress.

I actually think there's like reasons to think the administration may not have that card to play, but maybe that's a reason why it's willing to take terms that it might not have taken in the feminist way like case.

“And there is a waspace for negotiation here like I think that's a real possibility now I also thought that was the case in Maduro in Iran.”

I always think there's a possibility of negotiation and maybe they're not willing to go that far. I'm just waiting for the new Scott to emerge. Yeah, I believe the new Benjamin, but just doesn't believe the things I used to believe any more. I told, I mean, I told like I would not rule at all the possibly than doing something particularly Maduro size off the table at all. I think you have to take that seriously. I think Cubans have to as well, but I do wonder whether they maybe willing to take less beneficial terms that they can actually reach on this, but we'll have to see.

Well, we have a third topic I want to get you before we run out of time today and that is some interesting litigation happening here at the home front, but litigation that has implications for the whole rest of the world. And that is yet another round of terrification a couple of which there's a couple of actual matters happening, but one main one we're going to talk about. The court of international trade, which is essentially the court of first instance for trade disputes is a three judge panel don't kick confused is still basically a trial court. Just works a little differently. The court of international trade has issued a ruling against the section 122 tariffs that President Trump installed.

These are 10% across the board tariffs that after the learning resources decision came down in February, which ended the Trump administration tariffs that were based on the international emergency economic powers act they quickly came with these 122 tariffs that basically said.

“We are going to impose these and keep these in and then they're allowed for only a fixed period of time that I'm blanking on the exact term now, do you remember what is a K250 days?”

I don't know. I think it's 100, I don't know, did July it's done in July. Okay, okay, if it's July, it's 150 days. So it's a hundred sometime in July where they would would be extended to if they're still in place and they are still in place because this decision was put on hold by the pelicort. So the last of July and then the understanding, I think they said this quite openly that the administration we were pairing 301 and 232 tariffs that kind of more conventional both trade related and that's really related.

Terrif measures and tariff authorities that they've just opted not to use thus far at scale like the acting is that for IEPA they're going to set that up and do all the procedural measure it takes to install those. Now, getting one 22 struck down would be a problem for the administration, but it would be a problem of a couple of months because in theory they're going to have these 301 and 232 tariffs they will be able to kick back in, whether that the one 22 tariffs are still in place or not with that 10% sort of threshold.

But it's still a big indicator that is another tool seems to be being taken out of the administration toolkit because the court and national trade basically said the statute doesn't apply anymore.

“The statute has tied specifically to balance of payments issues and they basically said as I understand all the car you should correct me that the sort of balance of payments was tied to.”

The old gold standard that we don't have anymore and that since we moved away for that system it actually doesn't really make sense in this current economic environment and said basically one 22 tariffs don't exist anymore. So that brings us to the big question, which I want to post to you, car, let's assume for a moment that that holds and I think we can get into why, but like I think there's a good chance that actually holds on appeal. What does that mean for the toolkit that's left to the Trump administration to be able to pursue it's a pretty aggressive tariff policies?

Like it's presumably chosen I eat before a reason so what is about 301 and 232 that might prove a hindrance why they wouldn't have been the authorities of first and since they turned to.

To try and address these broader tariff policies that it's advancing and what does it mean in terms of what we're likely to see how we're likely to see tariffs be used by Trump administration. And you know over the next two and a half years it still has some office. Yeah, I mean I think the main thing is that they're not as flexible and they're not as immediate. The IEPA authority under the original thinking of the Trump administration is you can say tomorrow we're putting tariffs on Columbia if they don't take our migrants.

They can be raised lowered and didn't need a lot of justification for that. But the section 301 tariffs are that they require an investigation and they require public notice and comment and they require us to link the tariffs to a specific on fair trading practice.

That's 301 232 is similar 232 the Department of Commerce has to do a big long investigation saying imports threatened national security for this reason and you have obligations to the public on those so they take a while to put in place.

Now you guys will correct everything about to say because you are the legal experts but my understanding is that once these investigations are done and it's not by observation as well.

From having this in place of four once that investigation is in place the president does regain some of that flexibility to go up to go down to go left to go right. So 301 I think is the instrument there's two big investigations of many of our trading partners that are ongoing. They've just gone through the sort of public notice and comment period and presumably the lawyers at USTR busy writing their report. Deciding what the tear of remedies are and I think you know most businesses in trading partners kind of think that these are really going to be the vehicles.

To rebuild the tear of architecture that was put in place by IEPA which has changed in some ways because there has been some exclusions over time some products have been removed from those broad tariffs.

“And I think economically what matters is the expectation that the administration is still committed to high tariffs and has ways to pursue it.”

Section 232 is a little different those tariffs have never been struck down we have tariffs under section 232 this national security authority.

Very broad set of investigations much broader than has historically been the case they have been very rare and very narrowly pursued until the first Trump administration initiated some and the only two that really went all the way through and the first Trump administration where the steel and aluminum. Now we have I think 12 section 232 designations or actions on 12 different sectors section 232 is a little different because it doesn't go by country which the the president really wants to be able to kind of pull strings by laterally and use tear of says leverage in that way which section 301 I think could allow section 232 goes by industry and you have a little bit of bilateral flexibility there.

The Biden administration negotiated with allies some relief from the seal and aluminum tariffs which they left in place from the first Trump administration. But you know covering the entire economy with section 232 tariffs is a little bit harder but I think it's possible that as you know the section 301 investigation goes forward and you start to see what's exempt and what's not you might see them adding additional section 232 investigations.

“I don't know that just seems like a more treacherous route. You know I think the the bigger story beyond sort of the instruments that the administration can use is that you know tariffs are just no longer being used as trade remedies.”

There are sort of these general purpose tools of economic statecraft for leverage for bargaining pressure for industrial policy and you know I think the argument here that a lot of this section 232 and 301 is about rebuilding industrial capacity and reducing dangerous vulnerabilities and isn't just about extracting leverage.

I think that's probably true but I think the jury's really still out on whether these tools are actually building more competitive and strategically valuable industrial capacity in the United States.

I think there's a pretty big risk that these sectors just come to depend on continuing protection and political management over time and you know that's the the thing I'm keeping my eye on. It's really fascinating like evolution we've had here and I want to throw one more flag in here which I think I've played on this podcast on the podcast a few times car I know you and I have talked about this which is that.

“I think the one 22 tariffs while this is a very important set of litigation to bear on actually is like not the most consequential tariff litigation still ongoing.”

It's a case currently waiting potential cert before the Supreme Court says the HMTX case that challenges the ability under the 301 tariff regime to modify the tariffs that are imposed as a result of the initial report that's conducted as the as the factual predicate of the imposition of tariffs. That's actually really huge I mean in this case the plaintiff's alleged essentially that the original finding for the three on tariffs which I think was in 2016 or 17 or 18. This was the original Trump tariffs that were imposed and then maintained by the Biden administration that the actual tariffs being imposed on the base of that same finding over the subsequent almost ten years has increased sevenfold from the original measures and they've argued in a way that I think is intuitively very persuasive.

I look you know you are really doing things here that have no relationship to this original finding which is not the structure intended by Congress. The federal circuit was very generous to them and said no the statutes that gives express authority to modify things this is modifying things and that kind of makes sense from like the lens through which.

I don't know if that's still holds after late learning resources because learning resources says expressly the taxation power is a core congressional authority if it's doing a delegate it's going to delegate it expressly and I do think that means you have to read statutory terms somewhat more narrowly. And that's exactly what's been court did for a but in learning resources so I'm not sure I'm really curious what's been worth does with us so so coincidentally just in the last I think last week we saw the government finally filed their opposition to the petition for certain.

So you know in the next few weeks or months we're going to get the spring court weighing and on whether it'll actually take up this matter or not.

“And it carries whether ends up you know vacating opinion and remanding back the federal circuit to say learning resources maybe change things here you should reassess your decision and light over learning resources.”

Because there's clear aspects of learning resources and how it constructs the constitutional framework around these authority that to me seems to bear it like it would bear just as much on the 301 tariffs and that would be such a bigger problem for the Trump administration. And so moving forward because it means that they would have to redo this six or seven month process before it had to if you wanted to ever modify things beyond whatever scale they deem is appropriate for this modification language.

And in the total 32 context I don't believe there isn't express modification provision at all.

“I think it's something the executive branch has been doing as a basically sort of like an implied authority to do it.”

You follow already resources which says you should be looking for express statutory delegation that's a argument that's hard to hold water. So I don't know I think there may be a lot bit more pain coming to the Trump administration on this particular front. And I think it goes beyond that to Scott because I think you're right that the the Trump administration is tried to totally reorient US tariff architecture using very narrow delegations of congressional authority and sort of winking and nodding.

Yeah, you know, there's a structural over capacity over here. I mean they don't have I like that you did a gangster movie said that's good.

I also has a long cigarette in her hand and one of those hats with the little nails in case anybody can't see the video.

“I'm totally different person, but I mean I think also there are some real needs to perhaps adjust our our tariff architecture in in materially in response to China and if we don't have the tools that we think we do.”

And we do have to ask Congress to do things and that is is a challenge as well. Yeah, and that is a lot harder self from the Trump administration now than it would have been a year ago, which may lead them to regret some of their choices at front end. We are going to have more time to talk about this in the weeks and months to come. This issues are going to be with us for least the next two and a half years. If not longer for now. We are out of time. But this would not be rational. It's great if we'd not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Ben, what did you bring for us this week?

So I have spent the last few weeks revolutionizing my understanding of AI. And the reason for this is that I have done my first substantial project that is for my first set of substantial projects that are AI based and they began with an effort by one of my colleagues to identify all of the cases in United States in which the administration was accused of violating court orders. And this project was so meaningfully effectuated by our ability to deploy clawed on writing software to collect data to evaluate data for human to tee up human decisions, and then ultimately to write a piece of software to present all of this data on law fair.

That I dove into trying to write a piece of software that would generalize these tools and would allow anybody to search very large data sets of court documents across jurisdiction across subject matter and to do that with the assistance of their large language model of choice. And this weekend I finished a working prototype of what we call ragtime and we call it ragtime because rag is an abbreviation for retrieval augmented generation. And I am super pumped by it and have become an enthusiast of large language models going from being the most skeptical of skeptics of them only a very short number of weeks ago.

And you are not experimenting with how you can do it better more powerfully with chat GPT or Claude, which is my favorite model or Gemini or something else.

You are probably missing something big about how you could be doing cool stuff and my suggestion for how to get started is to sit down with the, this is literally how I started, I said to Claude, I want to find every single case in which the government has violated a court order.

“Can you help me do that and this began a giant process of software development and so what I would say is sit down in front of a large language model you choose which one you want to use I don't want to get into.”

The do we want to pay for the endorsement, guys, you got to pay for that as of the department of defense do we love her hate chat GPT because of Sam Altman and you know, Ronan Farrow do we love her hate Google because Google I'm not getting into any of that you choose which model you want to do and then think of the most crazily ambitious project you can think of that is within you that you have some genuine. And just tell me you want to do that and start going down a road and you're going to be surprised at what you can do with this and instead of thinking about it as something that's threatening you and it's going to take away your job which it might think of it as something that is going to radically empower you between now and then.

Good description endorsement. Ben the right thing Ben is put together is genuinely amazing people should check it out if and when it's public and particularly like use the get an API key and try it with LLM integration like it is really really impressive and you can do really great thing I spent three hours being four hours a day with Claude and developed a thing that let me scrape.

“100 of thousands of pages of diplomatic records off of government databases and put it in one searchable thing to query like very detailed technical discussions of legal issues 100 years ago like it's pretty crazy.”

What you can do if you just ask it to tell you how to do it so it is kind of amazing it is going to put us all out of work, but it'll be a fun ride till we get there.

And then maybe it'll maybe it'll keep us off from having to work, maybe we'll get there all get all get a UBI and we can all just retire at some point. Well, from my object lessons I will go slightly less heading route I'm actually going to recycle an endorsement but put a different gloss on it a couple of weeks maybe months ago at this point Shane Harris co host emeritus of rational security when he was on. I think we have an endorsement to a man on the inside and it's object lesson this is a new ish I guess second season was new ish to dance and show where he is a as to dance it is an ADS year old man who is a I think a engineering professor who goes undercover and retirement home to help investigate something with a PI and it's this kind of like story about being it's first season the retirement home the second season is a similar thing about university like a small college.

“Shane shared it because he thought it was very clever and charming which it is and it is he's like it had some good spycraft in it which I can't really testify to so I would take chance we're not on it.”

What I will say though having watched it more recently both cases it is trying it's interesting it is like the perfect show for middle age people.

I would say I would feel very I felt like in my soul I've been in for most of my life because the whole show is about well has this kind of like pretext of over undercover investigating this thing. It's really about like these human relationships about this house made deals with aging and how his kids deal with the fact that they've lost their mother. He's lost his wife and then he gets in a new relationship and starts wrestling with the ideas of aging of kids aging and becoming adults of all these different things that are tied in with real adulting as a colleague of mine.

I often take a breather to talk about and it's something really hard challenging stuff but the show is so incredibly empathetic about it in a way that's light has a light touch like it's not super heavy contemplation on these things but it deals with them seriously and with a lot of empathy. It's kind of extraordinary for that and it's found that made shows that like strike that right balance like I think the good place is the last show I watched I thought like gave that balance of like dealing with serious things empathetically but still being funny and clever and enjoyable to watch and this did it and Ted dances like the most charming man in the world which is great and he dressed like a king so.

So I highly recommend the show but the different glass if you're not entranced by the spycraft angle Shane gave you. I strongly encourage you to check it out if you're looking for a light show with a lot of heart. I really enjoyed my wife and I have been watching it last couple nights and have really enjoyed it.

Where do you choose to land? What do you have for us for an object lesson?

I choose to land back in Norway which is where I was yesterday. Oh good. Yeah, I went for fun with friends and I would definitely strongly suggest thinking about spending some time.

“I'm asking if yours in hiking mountains, it was spectacular but you know I think it was a great experience.”

Beautiful country, beautiful scenery, kind people but I will say one of the things I'm taking away from that trip and a recent one to Canada is that you know I've spent a lot of years and years as an adult traveling around the world.

There have been times in the past where our fellow global citizens are very disappointed in the United States for extraterrestrial renditions or torture or tear of one thing or another.

“And it does seem that there is a bit of a break.”

It used to be sort of that you know people would you would encounter and say you are from the United States would say oh I'm not fond of your government but I don't feel differently about Americans. I'm starting to feel that we got scolded about democracy multiple times and it felt more personal than it usually does from just people you come across on a mountain and you know I in both both Canada and Norway countries that have long ties. I grew up near Canada and my ancestors came from Norway and so I feel close to these people and they I think have never felt so far apart from the United States and I think much as the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic gave sort of a tangible sense of what it would mean to have sort of a disruption in supply of things that we need made us a little bit more willing.

“To think about putting up barriers in that way I think there will be this sort of tangible legacy of the way that the United States is treating its allies and partners that changes fundamentally for a very long time the way that we interact.”

Hopefully for the better although we'll see a record on that is not great might be part of the problem. The first one is dilating curve is not always as deep one. What regardless that brings us to the end of this week's episode rational security is of course a production of law fair so be sure to visit law fair.

Media.org for our show page for linked to fast episodes for our written work and the written work whether law fair contributors and for information law fairs other phenomenal podcast series.

And this podcast among other special benefits more information visit law fair media.org/support our audio engineer producer this week was known as band of goat rodeo and her music as always was performed by Sophia again. We're once again edited by the wonderful gen patcha half my guess Ben and curry. I am Scott our Anderson we'll talk to you next week until then goodbye. This is the funeral that is on Schlagbar. Call for the M, give it to the telecom the best deals for all fans. Now can the M come in.

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