3/6/26: Jobs CRATER, Gas SKYROCKETS, Anti-War Vote FAILS

13:12Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. He had a rough interview with Isaac Chotner, as many have. So I recommend people go and read that if you want to see just how sound or how not sound his logic was on all of this. What about—

13:23Krystal Ball:I don't know why people keep interviewing with Isaac Chapman.

13:26Saagar Enjeti:It is one of the great mysteries of our time. It's got to be some level of ego, arrogance. You think you're going to be the one that comes out looking good. Warning to everyone, yes. But Congressman, one other thing I wanted to ask you about is we saw we've seen now a couple of senators in particular who came out and were wavering. So I'm thinking of Mark Kelly, who you actually got asked about. You were on right after him where he wasn't sure he was going to vote for the War Powers Resolution. He ultimately did. Democrats in the Senate only lost John Fetterman, who was just a lost cause in like every regard.

13:59Saagar Enjeti:In any case, he pretty quickly was like, oh, no, no, no, I'm going to vote for it. We saw something similar with Ruben Gallego, who came out and was like, well, I would support the funding if the Gulf states front 50 percent of it. So, like, I'm not opposed to funding the war that he's actually been very aggressively rhetorically against. And then, you know, he got a lot of public pushback, including from myself and others, and immediately put out a tweet. No, no, no. I oppose the funding. I'm not going to support the funding. Also, you know, in a related, similar matter, you've also seen Gavin Newsom really trying to shift on Israel saying, oh, it's an apartheid state.

14:34Saagar Enjeti:You know, yes, we should look at conditioning aid, which is obviously very different from where he's being. But specifically on the Iran war, you know, what is your sense of how many calls people are getting, how much pressure members of Congress are feeling, especially on the Democrats, Democratic side over this?

14:48Krystal Ball:They're feeling pressure. I mean, they they're feeling pressure on Gaza. They're feeling pressure on getting into another Middle East war. This is much bigger than Venezuela. I mean, I was opposed to what happened with Madero, but that one didn't have the same public residence, partly because it was in our hemisphere, partly because it was a short two-day mission. I mean, I was opposed to it. I've been opposed to these boat strikes, but it but it doesn't resonate as much politically. Iran does because it's a reminder of what happened in Iraq, because the casualties were unfortunate and so quick because people are seeing the stories of these these families and because they're seeing the the amount spent.

15:30Krystal Ball:And look, I'm always glad when people come on our side. That's why my tweet about Godheimer was not sarcastic. I was actually trying to be appreciative. And if Kelly and Gallego and Newsom were moving, I'm glad. The only thing I would say in genuineness is when you're in D.C. and we've seen this with people who become chair of the armed services committee or who become vice president or president, the pressure is immense. And it's much more likely that anti-war people become pro-war than you move in the other direction. So what we really need in this party and in this country are people who are going to have the courage to actually stand up to the generals, to the neocon establishment, to the think tanks, to the editorial boards, and to actually shift policy.

16:25Krystal Ball:I mean, Trump, who ran rhetorically against this, has not done that. And so that I think is, yes, we want to build a broad coalition, but we also want to see what are the proof points of courage that folks have demonstrated.

16:40Ro Khanna:And the Iran war is a moment where the kind of, correct me if you think I'm wrong here, the two issues that you've made most central to kind of who you are as a candidate and as a politician are intersecting. And that's your focus on the economy for regular people and also your focus on war. The war, you know, like you said, the Maduro campaign, that doesn't really change people's day-to-day interaction with the world as it exists right around them. It's not – and it's – you know, maybe it will have some influence on gas prices a tiny bit. But it's not going to be significant in that sense. The war on Iran is going at the kind of foundations of the global economic system right now.

17:22Ro Khanna:It was interesting to hear Gallego say, we're going to have the Gulf states fund half of the war effort, as if the Gulf state funding kind of just materializes out of thin air. Like Americans kind of think that everything we have just comes down from the heavens upon us. It's like, no, no. Where do you think the Gulf states get their money? They get their money from pumping fossil fuels out of the ground and then shipping them around the world and turning those into dollars and they send the dollars into our economy. You may not have noticed a lot of that is not happening right now. So these Gulf states, even if we wanted them to fund half of this war effort, with what money?

18:01Ro Khanna:Like their economy is collapsing as we speak. Like, so are people recognizing that? Because of the intersection that you have of these two issues, I imagine that you're seeing this clearly unfold. But I'm getting the sense that our lawmakers and also our public think this is just another event that is unfolding on their phones that they're either for or against, but isn't really going to have a huge effect here. Gas prices surging again today. Oil prices are up close to 90 now. Are they recognizing that yet? or no?

18:36Krystal Ball:It's slowly hitting them, but we've only been there a week. And, you know, I don't think they realize with the Strait of Hormuz closing how much of an impact that can have on global oil prices. I mean, already the average price I was seeing has gone up to$3.30. And gas prices matter. I mean, anyone ask President Biden how much they matter. This is the visible sign of inflation for many people, rents and gas prices and grocery prices. So I do think it is hitting folks, but more delayed. I mean, I think over the next few weeks, it'll become more apparent. And then the cost of it. I mean, we have to continue to remind people the billions of dollars we're spending.

19:22Krystal Ball:I also find this idea just somewhat offensive, which we're all like the Gulf states. They say this about Palestine. Let them just pay for the development of Palestine. How about we stop the occupation first? You know, I mean, it's not just a resource issue. It is a rights issue. And, you know, I think we have a lot of misconceptions about the Middle East.

19:47Ro Khanna:Almost 30 years together, four kids and some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments, We know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in our new podcast, Between Us, with me, Heather Dubrow. And me, Terry Dubrow. Between Us isn't about perfect lighting or curated Instagram grids. It's the unfiltered, behind-closed-doors conversations you wish you could eavesdrop on. Equal parts smart, funny, and a little bit scandalous. Every week, Heather will bring you an unapologetic take on the headlines, the trends, and the cultural moments everyone's texting about.

20:20Ro Khanna:And Terry will deliver insider beauty, health, and wellness insights you won't find on TikTok. Together, we'll tell the stories, spill the secrets, and share the hacks that keep life, marriage, and everything in between feeling fresh and fun. We may live in a gated community, but there's zero gatekeeping here. And plenty of, did they just say that moments? Listen to Between Us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:47Krystal Ball:I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him. I was like, hi, dad.

20:52Saagar Enjeti:And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk. This is a badass convict.

21:02Krystal Ball:Right. Just finished five years. I'm going to have cookies and milk at mom. Yeah.

21:08Ro Khanna:On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more. I'm an alcoholic. And without this trouble, I'm going to die. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search The Cito Show, and listen now. This is Ryder Strong with a podcast called The Red Weather.

21:49Ro Khanna:In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Traynor, disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.

21:58Krystal Ball:No, I am not your guru.

22:01Ro Khanna:Back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. You can now binge all episodes of The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

22:17Saagar Enjeti:let me get your reaction and uh griffin if you could pull this up um i'm having trouble sharing my screen but trump uh was asked by reuters about rising gas prices and he said quote i don't have any concern about it they'll drop very rapidly when this is over and if they rise they rise but this is far more important than having gasoline price go up a little bit and they haven't risen very much. The person who posted this is the White House correspondent from Reuters said, by the way, AAA has national gas average up 27 cents from last week to$3.25 per gallon. There was also a Politico report that they were caught off guard by the impact on oil and on gas prices.

23:02Saagar Enjeti:And they're trying to figure something out. They have not refilled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which had been drawn down during the Biden administration, which means that they don't have, you know, a lot of tools in their toolkit to do anything about this. And meanwhile, you know, the reports are that they're planning for this war to go into September. I would say that that's at this point an optimistic projection that it would only last till September.

23:27Krystal Ball:Well, this is the clearest evidence that Donald Trump may not be thinking of running in 2028 again. I mean, he's, I think, unleashed from any politics. He is out there saying there could be threats to Americans, retaliation in our homeland. I mean, think about that. You're going to your target. You're going to the grocery store and you may face or your kids may face retaliation from Iran. And you're thinking, what the hell are we doing getting into this war? And then the gas prices that you put out up to almost three dollars and 30 cents. He said, well, that's just the price we need to pay. And he's in a in one sense and as a traditional second term president thinking about quote unquote, his legacy.

24:05Krystal Ball:And he's been talked into this view that his legacy is going to be taking out the Iranian regime or changing the Iranian regime. And it's sad and it's dangerous. And the question is, how do we stop him, especially when he seems not to care as much about the political consequence? I mean, both on Epstein and on Iran, he's acting like someone who cares more about his ideological pursuit of whatever he wants than the American public.

24:39Ro Khanna:You've got either a primary challenge threat or the oligarchs in your district actually found somebody to go up. What's the status of your competition for a primary? Because I've seen And, you know, a bunch of your former friends on Twitter, deeply unhappy with. The all in pod is very unhappy with all in.

25:05Saagar Enjeti:They're all out.

25:07Krystal Ball:They're having a freak out over me. You know, it's funny because they didn't care when I was for Medicare for all or when I'm voting against these defense budgets or child care,$10 a day or a free public college. But, you know, tax the billionaires. And that's we found the red line. We found the red line. But so they've recruited this candidate who's basically saying that he's running because he believes that the billionaire tax is a tax on the middle class. That's his argument. Actually, it's a tax on billionaires, and it would go to help 2 million Californians not lose insurance. But I guess, you know, here's the broader point I'll make.

25:48Krystal Ball:There are a lot of people who are adopting now, fortunately, the language of economic populism. let's be not against left and right. Let's be the real challenges top versus bottom. You know, we need economic working class messaging. We need economic populism. And all that is better, I guess, than just saying we need incremental centrism. But if you're not willing then to say, okay, yeah, let's tax the billionaires at 5 % like Bernie and I want to do every year, or let's have a tax of billionaires so that people don't lose healthcare, or let's make sure we don't have private health insurance and have Medicare for all, or let's make sure we have free public college, that it's sort of empty rhetoric.

26:28Krystal Ball:And the question is, we've won the rhetorical war, the progressive, but are we going to win the programmatic agenda? Because what you saw with Bernie or you see with AOC or you see with Mamdani or real progressives is not rhetorical. They're actually committed to substantive policy change. And that, I think, is the real divide.

26:54Ro Khanna:Congressman, I've got a question for you on big tech. I got a question for you with big tech in this war. There's been some reporting from the New York Times and Washington Post about the strike on the Iranian school that killed somewhat of like 170 plus schoolchildren. And the Washington Post has reported that anthropics clod was used in some of those targeting systems. What do you think do these AI companies, should they be working with this Pentagon? And should these AI companies face any consequences if their technology is used to commit war crimes?

27:34Krystal Ball:Yes, on the ladder. And no, if their technology is being used to make decisions about who to kill and who to strike. And I'm surprised Claude was used there, given that Dario said that he that was a red line for him. So I'd have to look at the reporting because I do not think we should be using artificial intelligence to make decisions about killing human beings. Look, I believe that every human being has dignity and that that that while as a political matter, we have to care about our nation and America. That doesn't mean that the life of an Iranian schoolgirl has less dignity intrinsically as a human being than the life of an American.

28:11Krystal Ball:That's what we mean by God has created inalienable rights for every human being. And to have Pete Hexed saying it's PC to care about civilians is just such a betrayal of every principle of the founding of this country. And it's sort of the Netanyahu approach in Gaza. And the question I think is broader. Yes, there's the question of AI, obviously, which we shouldn't have. But the question is, do we believe in the dignity of every human life? Or has America first become so warped that we actually believe that lives overseas, particularly lives in the Middle East, that maybe brown don't have the same human dignity?

28:58Krystal Ball:And that to me is what's so tragic about what happened.

29:01Ro Khanna:The only point I was going to make wasn't even a question was just your point about the rhetoric on the left changing and hoping that drags people in the substance along with it. It's so it's so paralleled by what's happening with, quote unquote, America first, as you just pointed out right now, that there was a lot of excitement among genuine skeptics of interventionism on the right that Donald Trump was talking this way and that Pete Hegseth was describing himself as a reformed neocon. But it's all rhetoric until the substance is on the table. So not necessarily a question. I don't know if you have a response to it, Roe, but it is it's it's how politics work.

29:35Ro Khanna:It's depressing.

29:35Krystal Ball:Well, I think it's why our politics for the last few decades hasn't been as serious and why there's so much cynicism about the country, because we've been such a marketing, branding, let's have the change candidate, generational change, new change, outsider. But the presidents and leaders who made a real mark were substantive. Like we study FDR not because he had great speeches, but because he had programs that fundamentally changed people's lives. And of course, you know, I was a co-chair of Bernie's campaign. But what drew me to Bernie was not, I mean, he can rally people and he had more people at Stanford when we were together than even President Obama did.

30:19Krystal Ball:But what drew me to him is the substantive ideas, the programmatic agenda that he was offering. And that, I think, is the challenge for the progressive movement now. We're winning. I actually think we're ascendant on the rhetoric, on the diagnosis of the problem. But we can't be co-opted into just the branding without the fight, right? I mean, I could say, look, I'm against – I think the problem in Silicon Valley is the top versus the bottom. And we need to hold billionaires accountable and billionaires need to pay their fair share and avoid a primary challenge. And still – it's like, OK, he's right.

30:57Krystal Ball:Or no, like, no, I actually am going to support an initiative to raise their tax, right? And if you don't have that substance, then there's going to be no change.

31:07Ro Khanna:Now, you hear from the billionaires. Some of the billionaires just hate it, you know, and will openly admit that they hate it on the principle that don't take any of my stuff. It's all my stuff. I worked for it. You can't have any of it. But a lot of the billionaires, though, will say, we're only talking about a thousand people, so I don't want to pretend there's a whole lot of people, roughly a thousand people. But a lot of them will say, we should pay our fair share. We should give back. But this isn't workable because you're going to hurt, you know, founders and you're going to hurt, you know, you're going to harm the economy.

31:40Ro Khanna:So they've set up this system where, you know, they they just accumulate assets and then they borrow against those assets and they use that borrowing to fund their extremely lavish lifestyle. and then when they die, they pass it all down to the next generation without paying any taxes. And they never had any income then because it's just all asset growth and borrowing against the asset growth. So if you had any of these billionaires who claim that they agree with the principle that they should pay their fair share, come to you and say, talk to my accountant and let's figure out a way that it actually is workable so that we're not punishing startups and we're not undermining innovation as if they care about innovation.

32:21Ro Khanna:They've spent the last 15 years, you know, gobbling up startups and destroying them. But let's pretend they do care about innovation. Has anybody come to you and said, okay, you're wrong about this. I don't like the way you're doing it, but I agree with the principle. So here's a way you could actually do the thing that you're trying to do without, you know, squelching innovation.

32:39Krystal Ball:Yes, and you're right. Look, I think there are more than a thousand billionaires. There are certainly more billionaires on paper. And some of the folks are doing incredibly innovative things. Now, they're benefiting from public investment and things that happened at Dartmouth and MIT and Stanford and Berkeley, which they don't often acknowledge. But, yeah, a lot of people are hardworking and entrepreneurial and innovative. And they're right on an issue of paper billionaires and illiquid stock. You don't want to tax that. But there are provisions that can be worked out by the IRS or the California Franchise Board.

33:13Krystal Ball:Let me give you a simple one. You could get a non-recourse loan on your pledged stock. What does that mean? Let's say your company is worth a billion dollars and you have to pay a 5 % tax. So you say, OK, I will give you this 5 % in stock as collateral. You give me a loan to pay the tax. You can't come after me personally. So it's non-recourse. And if the stock goes down, then, you know, I'm not liable for it. But the stock could also go up, right? So any of these problems have simple workarounds, and they're using them because they're opposed to the tax, not because they're looking for a creative solution.

33:57Krystal Ball:If they are, you know, I've offered one on the issue of illiquid stocks that would solve a lot of those concerns.

34:33Saagar Enjeti:All right. all in the entire year of 2025, and I believe it was in the month of December, there was actually a net loss here. So here you can see the numbers, 92 ,000 jobs lost below expectations of a 58 ,000 job gain. Unemployment rate is 4.4 % above expectations of 4.3%. And this is just the second monthly job loss we have seen since the 2020 pandemic. You know, what is your reaction to these numbers in your sense of where the country is economically right now. Do you think that AI also is playing a role in this job loss? I do.

35:11Krystal Ball:I mean, I'm obviously saddened and concerned by it, but I'm not surprised. As someone who taught economics as a visiting lecturer at Stanford before getting into politics, I was probably going to be an academic. You know, I've always been surprised that we haven't seen these numbers yet for a number of reasons. Look, when you blanket restrict immigration, as this president has, and you have blanket tariffs, as this president has, and you skew an economy where you're just going to apply tax breaks to the very wealthy and not invest in consumer spending for working in middle class, as this president has, you're going to have an impact on slowing down the economy and causing unemployment.

35:52Krystal Ball:And, you know, he's been skirting by. But anecdotally, I mean, talk to people who are graduating school, as all of you have, or even not just high school, even college, even prestigious colleges. And they're saying they're having a hard time in the job market. And then I think AI is adding to that, not just anecdotally, but there's a paper at Stanford that shows that there's a 16 percent job loss for young people under 25 in AI exposed professions, in coding, in customer support. and you have to still disaggregate the data, but that's adding to it as well. So all of this says is that we need an actual economic policy, a jobs policy that's going to hire people with the federal government getting involved, in my view, in hiring and preventing mass displacement.

36:35Krystal Ball:We need a policy that's going to actually focus on the working and middle class again to have consumer spending. We need a policy that's actually going to have industrial investments across this country. And you have, unfortunately, a president who has the exact opposite view. And I really believe it's like the 1920s where you had Mellon, who was the Treasury Secretary, basically saying, only a few elites really drive the economy to Hoover and the rest are just a waste. And we need to skew all of our policy to them. And they did, and they caused a Great Depression. I'm not saying that we're going to have a Great Depression, but we've got mismanagement.

37:12Krystal Ball:And the opportunity for the Democrats in 26 and 28 is to have a real New Deal moment that helps rebuild the economy of this nation.

37:21Ro Khanna:Have you been tooling around with any new policies to address this? Shroykat Chakrabarty, who I think you know, the co-founder.

37:30Krystal Ball:Yeah, he's running a great campaign up in San Francisco and has a real shot.

37:35Ro Khanna:Yeah, and so he was on Hassan Piker's show this week and was saying that, for instance, one of the ideas that he threw out was there needs to be more thought about the public's involvement in the economy And that if AI is able to drive the cost of providing something to the public down to basically zero, that that should no longer be controlled privately by oligarchs. That the government then, if it is really zero, that the government should be able to then just provide it for people. um we're like that that's just one like kind of new idea about how you have to reorient your thinking about an economy that you know is going to be you know cost free for a lot of the services just aside from you know if you can solve the you know the compute the energy problem of course um but of all the it wouldn't cost as much as the oligarchs are kind of extracting from the economy, in other words.

38:31Ro Khanna:So is there anything you're kicking around, like, because we're entering a new kind of series of social relations to the economy?

38:40Krystal Ball:No, no. I mean, I've called for a new tech social contract and I laid out seven principles at a speech recently with Bernie Sanders at Stanford. But one of the ideas that I believe is that we should have like a civilian conservation corps, a federal future workforce administration that It hires people right out of high school, right out of college, both to go into their community, to rebuild those communities, do child care jobs, elder care jobs, counseling jobs, and or to work in the federal government to do renewable energy or moonshot projects or improve customer service. And it should be paid for it by both a wealth tax, a tax on billionaires and a tax on a token on AI use, on enterprise AI use that would generate a public return for employment from the automation that may be caused by AI.

39:31Krystal Ball:We can go to other policies, but the other thing I believe is that we need to be protecting human beings and make sure truck drivers aren't losing their jobs. Make sure that there's not mass displacement in industries, that you need a human being in the loop. So I certainly think that there's this opportunity now for a strong economic jobs agenda that because the impact is not just on blue collar workers, it's also on white collar workers. All right.

39:59Saagar Enjeti:Well, Congressman, thank you for your time this morning. I think I speak for our audience when I say thank you for your leadership on the War Powers Resolution and any number of other issues. We're always grateful for your for a chance to get to speak with you. So thank you.

40:12Krystal Ball:Always enjoy it. Thanks for having me.

40:17All right.

40:17Saagar Enjeti:Thank you, Ro. Thanks. Thanks. That was great.

40:20Krystal Ball:Thank you.

40:22Ro Khanna:Almost 30 years together, four kids, and some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments, we know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in our new podcast, Between Us, with me, Heather Dubrow. And me, Terry Dubrow. Between Us isn't about perfect lighting or curated Instagram grids. It's the unfiltered, behind-closed-doors conversations you wish you could eavesdrop on. Equal parts smart, funny, and a little bit scandalous. Every week, Heather will bring you an unapologetic take on the headlines, the trends, and the cultural moments everyone's texting about.

40:56Ro Khanna:And Terry will deliver insider beauty, health, and wellness insights you won't find on TikTok. Together, we'll tell the stories, spill the secrets, and share the hacks that keep life, marriage, and everything in between feeling fresh and fun. We may live in a gated community, but there's zero gatekeeping here. And plenty of, did they just say that moments? Listen to Between Us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:22Krystal Ball:I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him. I said, hi, dad. And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk. This is a badass convict. Right. Just finished five years. I'm going to have cookies and milk at my mom. Yeah.

41:43Ro Khanna:On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville and more. I'm an alcoholic. And without this trouble, I'm going to die. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search The Cino Show, and listen now. This is Ryder Strong with a podcast called The Red Weather.

42:25Ro Khanna:In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Traynor, disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.

42:33Krystal Ball:So no, I am not your guru.

42:36Ro Khanna:Back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. You can now binge all episodes of The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, well, I think we should pick up with some more updates on the Iran war. Why don't we start with a little bit of new comments from our president here?

43:04Krystal Ball:So what's left? But they're tough and they want to fight. And they're calling. They're saying, how do we make a deal? I said, you're being a little bit late. And we want to fight now more than they do. We've had 47 years, depending on the way you count it.

43:24Ro Khanna:All right. We want to fight now more than they do. Who's the we?

43:30Saagar Enjeti:Great question. Great question. Certainly not the vast majority of the country. Certainly he's not sending Barron over to fight. So apparently the we doesn't include him. It's him and Lindsay.

44:12Saagar Enjeti:try to deter them from going down this path again. So, you know, I think this is this is just a flat out lie as far as I can tell from the president, like, oh, they totally want to talk, but we're not interested. You know, we really want to keep fighting when in actuality he was thinking he'd be able to go in and have some sort of glorious mission accomplished moment. And then the Iranians would come back to say, please, sir, please, can we go back and, you know, diplomas? Yeah, etc. And obviously that didn't work out because that was idiotic from the jump. And now they're having to scramble and figure out what comes next.

44:47Ro Khanna:Yes, I think that is a lie. Now, there could always be back channel communications that we don't know about. And that Trump is just alluding to. Right. I think it's made up. Jeremy, my colleague over at JobSite, spoke with the deputy foreign minister of Iran on Wednesday afternoon local time and asked him that directly. And he said, absolutely not. And he said, like, how stupid is all close to a direct quote, but he's like, how stupid would we have to be to immediately enter into negotiations with this with this country that has shown that it is not willing to abide by any of the norms of negotiations?

45:31Ro Khanna:You know, they were scheduled to meet in Geneva on Monday when the U.S. and Israel launched the war on Saturday. And, you know, right out of the gate, bombing the school down in Manab in southern Iran. And back in June, they were also scheduled to meet in Muscat. Like a day later or something to go over technical details. Like a lot of the hard things had allegedly been worked out. And so he said no. And he also asked him, do you see this as a kind of a war for positioning and negotiations or more of an existential war? And he said, we see this as an existential war. So from their perspective, they believe that the U.S.

46:14Ro Khanna:is trying to wipe them off the map. And so if you believe that, then you have to then hit back and you have to take a huge chunk out of the U.S. and Israel to make it costly to them. And they very clearly seem aimed at the global economy, and in particular, the Western economy as it orients itself around like Dubai and Qatar and the kind of flows of natural gas and oil. There was some reporting where they said, they commented that, you know, they want to turn Dubai into Kuwait, basically. They said, you know, Kuwait in 1991 was like the Dubai of the region and never quite recovered from the Iraq war.

47:02Ro Khanna:Kuwait is a very wealthy country. They're doing extremely well, but they're not Dubai. And their argument is that it's because of that, you know, that experience of violence. It's very difficult to create this like Western expat culture if people think that their apartment building is going to be knocked down at any moment. And so they're trying to, it sounds like, inflict that kind of pain on these Gulf states. They have knocked out significant elements of the American radar and early warning systems. they themselves have had a lot of their launch capacity obliterated by the United States, but they've continued to be able to launch drones.

47:49Ro Khanna:And they're now moving into their more expensive and more sophisticated and newer ballistic missiles, which is terrible news for Israel because at the same time that Israel has less early warning capacity and has drained their, you know, their defense capacity, Iran is now shifting to its, you know, more sophisticated, more, and, you know, these missiles that have much more kind of maneuverability and are much more difficult for the Patriot and THAAD systems to intercept. You know, the, you know, lateral gas production is shut down in Qatar. The, you know, the straits are closed. The oil prices are surging.

48:30Ro Khanna:Asia is like choking from, you know, Asia is choking more than we are because like, you know, goes from the Strait of Hormuz through the Indian Ocean and over to Asia first. But our supply chains are directly linked, like whether it's copper or chlorine or anything else, like it all relies on these global supplies continuing to move. they you know iran in what you'd have to have to call a war crime they had they hit another tanker um with you know which was an unarmed civilian piece of infrastructure they but they've promised that they're going to do that like that's they've said their straight is closed and if ships try to go through it we're going to attack them and that's against international law uh but both you know neither side has shown any respect for it the you have a lot of last last point you have I've seen a lot of Israeli officials complaining about what they're calling cluster munitions that Iran is using to try to get around defense missiles.

49:35Ro Khanna:Neither Israel nor Iran ever signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Israel has spent the last many decades actively mocking the idea of international law. pushing sanctions on the people who are judges who are on international criminal court and the IJC. So to now kind of reach for international law as, you know, when you're getting attacked, I think it's probably going to strike a lot of people as, as hypocritical and, and inconsistent. So yes, our cluster munitions against international law only for the, only for the countries that signed on to it. Israel never signed on to it.

50:21Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. Well, I mean, this is something, of course, you know, we've been warning about, obviously, with Gaza, but, you know, going back longer to the war on terror, et cetera, and the war crimes prior to the Gaza genocide era. But, you know, once you take international law off the table, it's off the table for everyone. You know, and that means right now we have not only our service members in the region, we have, you know, a million Americans who are basically stuck because the airports are all closed and the government didn't give them any warning. And now, lo and behold, oopsies, you're all at risk.

50:53Saagar Enjeti:And so, you know, that law of the jungle, that barbarism, that Pandora's box that you've opened up, that is already putting, you know, not just the bad guys that you don't like, if you're Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, but that's putting your own people at risk as well. That is the world that you have yourself created. So, yeah, I mean, I don't even like, yes, it's a war crime to attack those, you know, those tankers, the attacks on the like luxury hotels where they seem to think that U.S. service personnel are staying. Now, you know what the Israelis would argue there, though? Oh, they, you know, they're using those, yeah, those people's human shields because they shouldn't be there in that civilian infrastructure.

51:37Saagar Enjeti:So that gives us the right to be able to bomb the hell out of it. Yeah, well, that's true, too. Yeah. So, you know, I just I I think it will fall on deaf ears if they try to complain about, you know, a tanker being struck when meanwhile, you know, you've just bombed a girls school and murdered some 170 little girls. Yeah.

51:55Ro Khanna:And after they they hit Ray Fadal Arir in a second floor apartment, a poet. With a with a precision strike.

52:03Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. No.

52:04Ro Khanna:And that's just which is one. That's just one strike.

52:08Saagar Enjeti:Right. Well, I mean, we assassinated their head of state. We murdered their head of state. That is not consistent with international law. So, yeah, I mean, this is the world they have created. Don't be surprised when your adversaries also then ignore the rules that protect civilians and protect civilian infrastructure.

52:28Ro Khanna:Well, also, they like to wax poetic about fanaticism in the Iranian government. And we got in a little bit with Sagar yesterday, Crystal, to some of that element of this. You just mentioned we killed their leader, who was saying it was his greatest wish to be martyred and not die basically a normal death. And that discussion was specifically, it wasn't about Shia Islam or Islam in general, it was specifically about the IRGC's theology. And the neocons love to bang that drum over and over again as an excuse not to go to war. And then you realize, yes, the IRGC had a lot of its command taken out.

53:10Ro Khanna:It's still functioning. Right now, what's potentially on the table is how many son taking over. And now you have people who watch what happened at the girls school and see their leader being, as he would have said, martyred. Mm-hmm. Why is this a better situation by your own logic? Borrowing their own argument here. Why are you now in a better situation in the long term when, to Ryan's point, these drones are so cheap to produce, you can't bomb the knowledge away of how to make the drones. You can't bomb the knowledge away of how to make the missiles. And you certainly aren't going to bomb away the ideology by your own argument.

53:53Ro Khanna:So I don't know why anybody would feel safer right now.

53:56Saagar Enjeti:They reduced Gaza to rubble and, you know, did not get rid of Hamas. No. So you think in a large country, 90 million people, that this is going to work out this time when literally in all of aviation history, it has not succeeded to create regime change using air power alone. Now, can they, you know, can they collapse the country? Can they create chaos, civil war? That's obviously the goal at this point. And, you know, maybe, maybe they'll be able to accomplish that.

54:28Ro Khanna:Well, speaking of chaos and Emily, I wanted to get your reaction to this comment from Trump from Time. Asked whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump acknowledges the possibility. I guess, he says. Like I said, some people will die. when you go to war, some people will die. Now, what do you make of that? That is cartoon villain behavior. And what would this retaliatory... What's the cartoon that some of you may die and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make? Yeah, Lord Farquaad. That's the Farquaad. Oh, that is a Shrek quote. That's right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we're doing the Shrek philosophy on the world stage.

55:10Ro Khanna:But what would that mean, retaliatory attacks at home? Well, I mean, there's a serious problem of, I mean, what we saw in Austin doesn't appear to have been connected to some broader network or anything like that yet. But yeah, there could be like intelligence. I don't know to what extent we can believe it, but obviously U.S. intelligence does believe they're like, quote unquote, sleeper cell of Iranian agents in the country who would absolutely do what we have seen terrorists do for decades, which is infiltrate the country and attack civilians at bars. wherever. We've seen it in Europe. We've seen it here.

56:01Ro Khanna:And so the cavalier attitude that the president expressed right there, if you see another Austin situation, especially one that is connected to some obvious broader operation, that comes back to haunt him. It's remarkable. It's not surprising, but his messaging, the administration's messaging, it's completely all over the place. He's saying wild stuff. Republicans in support, in polling, have very high levels of support right now. And, you know, I take calls on the SiriusXM show that I do every day, and it reminds me a lot of Iraq in that people are saying, you don't criticize troops while we are at war.

56:44Ro Khanna:So that's kind of the sentiment that's building, and Trump probably knows that. But independent voters, Democrat voters, certainly, but independent voters who Republicans need, they will be furious. I mean, that doesn't fly. Saying that type of stuff doesn't fly with independent voters. That's a truly crazy thing to say. And what's definitely not going to fly is if you attack Iran and then you see bursts of potentially, I hope not, but if there is terrorism. And Trump said, well, yeah, this is what happens in war. Great. That's Republicans will be answering for that for 10 years. Ryan, is he almost hoping for that to happen to sort of improve the war morale?

57:32Ro Khanna:I mean, this war is insanely unpopular. Is this the false flag attack they're hoping gins up support back home? I don't think so. I don't think he. No, I think he's very sensitive to to like American service member casualties as well. I also would caution on the insanely unpopular. I don't know. Like what are the, you know, the polling? They're now showing more of a 50 50 split. Right. Yeah. So we need to like understand that this is this is the United States of America and it's you can get people to rally around military assaults around the world.

58:11Saagar Enjeti:So have the polls shifted? Because the initial polls that came out had it like 25 % support, 30 % support. Yeah, I saw two polls.

58:19Ro Khanna:One was a Fox News poll and one was a outright Republican poll, if I remember correctly, that had it more like 50-50. But it was like 49, 48, somewhere around there. It feels like a, yeah, I wish it hadn't happened. I was against the idea of it. But now that it's happening, I'm going to support my country. The Alyssa Slotkin approach. We're in it. We're in it. We actually have a survey out in the field right now. We'll see what ours comes back with. But so, I know, I don't think he wants to see that type of thing. I think that hurts him. Because I don't think, this isn't 2001 where, I think, if we start getting hit at home, or American service member casualties continue to climb, then I don't think that creates a rally around the flag.

59:14Ro Khanna:I think that creates a, I didn't like this in the first place. Yeah. I was willing to give this the benefit of the doubt that maybe it would turn out wonderfully and beautifully like with Maduro, but it's not, it's awful. The world's falling apart and people are dying and we need to end this. So I think it goes the opposite direction.

59:31Saagar Enjeti:It's crazy the media propaganda doing its work there to get it to 50-50. I just saw the Fox News, Paul. That's wild. I also wanted to flag, and we talked a little bit about the oil, but I mean, I think this is really honestly, if anything, undersold in terms of the impact. And again, insane that the administration apparently didn't think this through in terms of how it would impact people's daily lives. But the Financial Times had an exclusive with the Qatari energy minister. And he warned that war in the Middle East could, quote, bring down the economies of the world, predicting all Gulf energy exporters will shut down production within weeks and drive oil to one hundred and fifty dollars a barrel.

1:00:14Saagar Enjeti:And basically what they said is if they hadn't declared force majeure, which is like, you know, act of God yet, they're going to like between the risk to the energy infrastructure, which, you know, Iran has been has been hitting. They sort of deny this, but in any case, there has been impacts on some of the energy and infrastructure in the oil fields directly. And then the closing of the Strait of Hormuz between all of these risks. Yeah, you're going to have continually spiking oil prices and it is going already having an impact at the pump. You can go and watch them changing the price of gas per gallon.

1:00:53Saagar Enjeti:And of course, you know, we've done next to no work to. In fact, this administration is adamantly opposed any sort of renewable energy or electric vehicles. So you're completely screwed if that's, you know, if those are the costs that are going into like literally everything and certainly into transportation.

1:01:09Ro Khanna:And they don't actually have to hit the infrastructure itself because if you can, and people probably know this, but if you can block the ships, then the production, the oil and the gas that you produce has nowhere to go. You can't put it anywhere. There's only so much kind of storage. Storage is full. Ships aren't getting in. Ships aren't getting out. And so even if you have a functional production facility, you have to shut it down. Otherwise, where does it go? Venezuela had the same problem because they couldn't unload all of the stuff that they had offshore. So Trump really actually genuinely helped out their industry by moving a lot of that offshore.

1:01:52Ro Khanna:And then they could start producing again. So they had to shut down. And it causes huge problems. It's not as simple as being like, all right, you know what? We don't have anywhere to put the oil or the gas. Shut this down. It's like it's a very expensive and complex process to safely shut it down. And then it's a very complex and expensive process to start it up again. And all the money that the Gulf countries were going to give to Barry Weiss to take over Paramount and CNN and all these other things. Uh-oh. That could be a force majeure. It could be like that's under threat right now. Yeah. They were funding what, 50 % of it, 25 to 50 %?

1:02:32Ro Khanna:A massive amount.

1:03:02Ro Khanna:I don't even know that it's – it had to have occurred to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff that a lot of these downstream effects would indeed happen. And when you look at Trump, the way he's described his own thinking and his own strategy over the last week, I mean, if you're Marco Rubio or you're Pete Hegsa, then you have to go out and describe, or Caroline Levitt, you have to go out and describe the objectives as Caroline put out a list of the objectives after the first few days of the war because nobody knew what it actually was. You're getting so many different. It was the nukes. It was the missiles.

1:03:44Ro Khanna:Well, it was the Iranian. It was for the freedom of the Iranian people. It just honestly it sounds crazy to say, but it honestly looks like Trump has been freelancing the strategy and that there wasn't. He just he said, we're going to do it. We're going to do it now. Time is right. We'll figure the rest of it out because I can make deals. That's my best description. And it's so strikingly against his own personal self-interest. Like, he is aware that he has become a billionaire by extracting Gulf wealth and taking it personally. He also is aware. Yeah, the Trump Gulf, the Trump Organization is building a golf resort in the UAE, isn't it, Ryan?

1:04:27Ro Khanna:Of course. And he's also aware that the American economy is propped up by an AI bubble that is funded by Gulf investment. so like just from a cynical personal perspective when it comes to either his stewardship over the economy or his own personal wealth like taking a hatchet to the to the leg that is on which this like rickety economy and his own rickety wealth is is rested is insane like what are you doing But Roe mentioned immigration. But yeah, again, like think it from Trump's perspective. He's doing mass deportations. He's doing blanket tariffs. And there's lots of uncertainty over the tariffs.

1:05:12Ro Khanna:Now you're adding artificial intelligence, massive effects potentially to the job market very soon. And then war on top of all of that. Maybe the explanation is he thought the war could be the catch-all blame scapegoat for problems in the economy. It's possible to me that he says, well, you know, this is a wartime economy. So these are the problems that we have to sacrifice in war. I have no idea if that's the thinking. But to add war onto the, like you said, Ryan, rickety, shaky economy is a move. Crystal, I know you have to jump in a second if you have any final words here.

1:05:51Saagar Enjeti:Well, I was just going to say, I hate to fall back on the analysis of like, well, he's just dumb because that seems lazy, right? It seems lazy. It seems like underestimating, you know, your adversaries. And yet I can't really come up with an explanation that makes sense for why he decided to do this right now. Other than, you know, not necessarily he's dumb, but that he has this particular psychology where he doesn't believe the generals when they're like, this is a bad idea. doesn't believe the economists when they're like, this is a bad idea, doesn't believe the political people when they're like, this is a bad idea, is on this sugar high from Venezuela, thinks it's going to look cool and awesome.

1:06:38Saagar Enjeti:You know, maybe you guys will play later the like utterly embarrassing like movie trailer style video that they just put out on Twitter. So he feels like more of a man when he's sending our sons and daughters over to like risk their lives and some of them get killed in action. in some new war-military conflict. And so whatever, he heard what he wanted to hear from Netanyahu or who else was interested in this outcome. Like, I think it, I can't, I mean, and I mean, you have to factor the Epstein files into it too. Maybe that's part of it. And whatever Israel knows about him, like I can never put that off the table because we know that's how they operate.

1:07:19Saagar Enjeti:And we also know how weird he's been around the Epstein files. But the thing does not add up and make sense without attributing some aspect of it to either blackmail or his own particular bizarre psychology or some combination of the two.

1:07:38Ro Khanna:That seems to be the big question that Normie's asked me all the time is like, why is this happening? Why? And I think that there's like a complex web of mysteries there still to unpack. Crystal, thank you for joining us on this Friday show. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, y 'all. Any final words?

1:08:00Saagar Enjeti:See you, Crystal. Nope, no final words. I'll see everybody Monday, but probably before then if there's breaking news. So see you soon.

1:08:10Ro Khanna:All right. We got a jam-packed second half of the show. If you want to check that out, breakingpoints.com. Get a free trial for a limited time, only available for another week. You can go to breakingpoints.com and use the promo code BPfree26. We are doing this because we want to provide a resource during these times. I mean, if you look at what Ryan said, the polls are up for this war. If you're watching CNN and Fox News, that makes sense because it is a disgusting display over there. And we want to provide a resource to people to really understand what's going on and the intricacies. and we are all working overtime and getting a lot less sleep to bring that to you.

1:08:51Ro Khanna:So thank you everyone who has supported us and we'll keep doing that and we'll see you on the second half. Hey, if you liked that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

1:09:02Saagar Enjeti:And if you'd like to get the full show, ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com.

1:09:08Ro Khanna:That's right. Get the full show, help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.

1:09:14Saagar Enjeti:Hi, I'm Danielle Robay, host of Bookmarked, the podcast by Reese's Book Club. And this week on Bookmarked, we're basically hosting the ultimate girls night. Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, Rita Wilson, and Gary Rice and author Laura Dave. These are the women behind season two of the Apple TV series, The Last Thing He Told Me. We're talking about turning a book into a hit show and what it really takes to bring a story to life.

1:09:40Ro Khanna:The most important metric for me is do I want to share this book with somebody.

1:09:45Krystal Ball:That's what creates community. And that's the main

1:09:47Ro Khanna:thesis of our book club and why we started it was just to connect people together.

1:09:51Saagar Enjeti:Listen to The Bookmarked by Risa's Book Club podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10:00Krystal Ball:Then she says, have you seen a photo of my son? And I'm like, who is this person? Welcome to the Boys and Girls podcast. Arranged marriage is basically a reality show and you're auditioning for your soulmate?

1:10:12Ro Khanna:And who's judging? Only your entire family? I sacrificed myself to this ancient tradition, hoping to find love the right way. And instead, I found chaos, comedy, and a lot of cringe. Listen to Boys and Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

1:10:29Krystal Ball:or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10:31Saagar Enjeti:Hey, everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the

1:10:34Ro Khanna:Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.