6/15/26: Anthropic Model Banned, AI Crash Incoming, Eric Trump UFC Scandal, WH Panic Over Situation Room Leak

25:50Jeremy Scahill:It obviously does the coding relatively well. We're now getting into the era of agentic AI that can actually go out and do stuff in the world. You know, the proponents argue that that is a significant development forward. And then in terms of just sort of regurgitating pre-existing human knowledge, you did recently have AI solve, for example, a mathematical problem that humans had been unable to solve and trying to solve for 80 years. So I do think that there is some significant technological progress here that may not live up to all the hype of we're going to replace every human, you know, all human endeavors and all human labor within the next five years.

26:26Jeremy Scahill:but certainly seems that it will be disruptive and is already being disruptive in some significant ways. I'm going to start at the beginning of that. The spreadsheet jockeying doesn't always work. It's actually quite unreliable with financial models. I have tried this because I wanted to make sure that that was the case. They will hallucinate cells that are not there. They will spit out stuff that just involves data you didn't enter. Sure, it might work at some point in some way. But what use is that if you end up building a financial model that you rely upon? With coding as well, it can do that very well.

27:01Meaning what? Because across all of these organizations right now, everyone in the large enterprise space is having to pay token-based billing. So the actual cost of AI. And so with all of those AI services written by LLM code, all this time no one has been able to actually measure whether that's good or not whether that's i don't know actually resulting in better software shipping the coo of uber andrew mcdonald said that they couldn't it was getting harder to justify the costs because of the actual outputs not resulting in better software faster shipped software and so on and so forth and also agentic coding going out and doing stuff i'm this is not an attack i'm just saying what does that actually mean what do they go out and do?

27:47Because while there might be some software engineering tasks that they might be able to do, and that is a load-bearing might there, that hallucination within that process would break a lot of things. And also, code written without intention is increasingly harder to work on as organizations work on this. Now, these big jumps, the ERDOS problem you're discussing as well, I'm not super read up on mathematics. I can do that myself. But my general sense there is no one has been able to explain why that is a big breakthrough or indeed what the outcome is from that, which is the larger problem of LLMs.

28:25The very benchmarks these things are trained on are specifically made for LLMs because LLMs can't really do human stuff. They can't do jobs. So we have to, like a gifted child, coddle them and find a way to measure them that matches their skill set. The thing is, three years in, we still can't measure the ROI of our AI. We still can't point and say, wow, it's done all this stuff and the outcome is this. So again, people are saying, oh, it's dark outputs. Oh, there are other measurements we can use. Why? And it's because, Because like our society at the moment, we must coddle the mediocre and the expensive to pray at the foot of capitalism.

29:06Jeremy Scahill:So let me ask you – I just want to ask you on the financial piece of this because I just interviewed another journalist who has a different view of this, of the economic aspect, Garrison Lovely, last week. And his contention is that they actually each individual model, if taken on its own, is profitable, that the revenue of, for example, OpenAI and Anthropic has skyrocketed in a very short period of time. Now, they are not net profitable because of the amount of money that they plow into training new models and that when you take that into account that they are not profitable. But if you just look at any individual model to run and the user base they've been able to acquire, that they actually are quite profitable and do have an economic business model that makes sense, at least in the near term.

29:55Jeremy Scahill:So what is your response to that view? If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. Yeah, if you remove the costs, they're profitable. That's not generally how businesses work. Also, I don't believe that's - Well, removing the costs of training the next model is the idea here. So if you just stopped at the existing model and had the user base you have, that they would actually be profitable today. But it's that investment in the research for the future that leads to that picture that you're presenting. So let's start at the beginning, which is, no, I actually don't think they're profitable when you remove training.

30:33I think when you have sales and marketing, when you have all the other costs, I think you'll find the open AI and Anthropica not profitable with training removed.

30:42Jeremy Scahill:And we should say since they're not public, we don't have a total complete financial picture, which I think is important to add to this conversation. Yeah. Sure. But really key point here, though, training is not just pre-training. Training is not just feeding stuff into it. They have to constantly train these models. Even the ones that are out must be post-trained because there's something called model drift, which sounds kind of sinister. But what it means is any machine learning model that is left in a vacuum will stop being able to respond to human inputs because human inputs are based on experience in the real world that is constantly changing.

31:18But AI models stay the same. So they have to continually post-train them. On top of that, when they post-train them, they have to get specialized data, which also has a cost. So you're actually continually updating these models. You can't just stop training because if you do that, well, everyone will go to the one that isn't. It's kind of a Red Queen's race here. Everyone must keep training to keep up with each other so they can all do basically the same thing. So in the end, training is an inherent cost. training is probably the greatest con that word training is the greatest con because it's a word that's meant to make you when you hear that your brain's meant to go oh yeah that's going to go away one day oh they don't need to do that no training is as essential a cost as inference which is the creation of the outputs so i think the the ai industry wants to have this kind of fanciful thing of just just don't worry about the training don't worry about the training training's not a big deal.

32:20Training is as much part of it as any other cost of goods sold. It should not be, we need financial regulation of AI companies, not for the models, but for the way that they refer to their businesses. And I think when these S1s come out, people are going to realize I'm right here. But also, very simple point, when does training stop exactly? When does that stop happening? Because until it does, until they can say with clarity, we're done training for a bit, training costs are coming down, it may as well be a cost of goods sold. But they want you to remove that cost because when that cost is there, they are so unprofitable.

32:56They are basically insolvent when you continue training at this scale. But they want everyone to ignore that because that's the only way for these companies to be profitable is to literally remove costs. So, Ed, this is where we have to loop in SpaceX because a lot of what you just laid out would apply to SpaceX. I believe that their market valuation is based on sales, not on earnings, very untraditional ways of valuing. We have D2 that we can put up here on the screen. SpaceX is now literally the sixth largest U.S. public company at its current valuation, or at least it was at market close on Friday.

33:32Their S1 came out. We saw how much money they make versus their sales. But they had 22 pages, I believe, of pictures of rockets and some promises of AI, and they got a$2 trillion valuation. Why will that not apply to Anthropic and OpenAI with very similar promises? If anything, honestly, maybe even a better product in terms of what they're actually selling here. So does that challenge their forthcoming IPOs of when we see their S1s and it's all going to fall apart? That didn't happen to SpaceX. So not a big fan of Elon Musk personally. Don't like him. But he is a better salesperson than Dario Amadeo Sam Altman.

34:11He is also dependent on Anthropic, who is a customer. most they built open i'm sorry spacex built this massive massive data center with all these turbine these horrible gas turbines gassing local neighborhoods but nevertheless they built all these data centers claim they'd use them for grok ai then sold access to them for to uh anthropic turning them into one of the larger ai compute providers except that deal has a 90 day out and anthropic can leave it at any time putting all that aside but spacex is like several companies stapled together. You've got Starlink Internet. You've got the rocket business.

34:47You've got the CSAM generator, XAI. You've got all of these different businesses hammered together. And then you have, of course, the fact that it's Musk. It's the Elon Musk industrial complex where Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan are so inherently corrupt that they just, I think I saw one of them claiming the AI revenue would increase by 300x. Elon Musk is a better marketer than any of these companies and on top of that i think that spacex's losses are going to be much low well are much lower than anything we'll see out of open ai and anthropic because their ai business is extremely small grok does not have that many customers the biggest costs are buying these gpus the biggest costs are the former training runs of grok the model i don't even know how long they're going to stick around with grok at this point a lot of the people have left there there are stories about it.

35:40Nevertheless, very different company. Don't know if you could say better or worse. We don't have the S1s yet. But I will say that it's going to be a very different story for Anthropic and OpenAI, especially given this story around the export controls.

35:55Jeremy Scahill:So the other thing Elon has going for him is you mentioned that the Elon industrial complex is how tightly tied in he is with the government and especially this government. I mean, you know, SpaceX relies on government contracts. He obviously put a quarter of a billion dollars into Trump's reelection campaign. They had a falling out, but they're back together now. Unlike Dario Amadei, who's clearly on the ounce as a disfavored oligarch in the economy, Elon Musk and I think Sam Altman are both favored oligarchs. And Altman in particular seems to be betting explicitly on the idea that already his company and the gigantic bet this country has placed on AI development makes it too big to fail.

36:38Jeremy Scahill:And so I wonder if that also is a challenge for your theory that there's a bubble that'll crash at some point, simply because even if you're right about the underlying economics, the government will say, if we allow this all to come crashing down, like this is all we've got. The rest of the economy doesn't look so great. This is where we've plowed all this cash. You know, some of our own fortunes and net worth are tied up in this thing. We got to keep it going no matter what. and then you throw on top of that the geopolitical considerations of, oh my God, we got to keep up with China. And it does create a reality where they are too big to fail and will be propped up and bailed out no matter what, even if the rest of your economic analysis is correct.

37:20Okay. So they're not too big to fail. Too big to fail refers to a vastly different system. After the great financial crisis, people like, oh, it was the government bailouts that actually kept things together. No, it wasn't. It was the repo window. It was the fact that the government basically sat there with a firehose of cash and put it into the mouths of all the finance companies of the Goldman Sachs and the banks of the world. Looked like hundreds of billions of dollars. Like I think trillions of dollars just got funneled straight into the banks. Even if, and I don't think this would happen, OpenAI somehow got bailed out.

37:51OpenAI is on course to burn tens of billions of dollars a year. This is already reported. Anthropic think they're probably going to be in a similar situation. Let's say you actually bailed out these companies. That won't change the fact that we need$400,$500 billion within the net, I think by 2030, worth of AI compute revenue. So people renting GPUs. We need NVIDIA to keep selling. Well, they claim that they're going to sell a trillion dollars worth of GPUs by the end of 2027. We need those data centers to keep being built. We need all of this stuff to keep happening, whether or not OpenAI and Anthropic exist.

38:28whether or not they continue to exist, whether or not they keep alive. We need way more AI compute revenue to keep the markets going. Put aside anything I feel about OpenAI and Anthropic, the markets themselves are based on the fact that NVIDIA always sells more GPUs, that Marvel sells more memory, Sandix sells more storage, that SK Hynix and Samsung continue selling RAM. These things can only happen with a near unlimited amount of money that is unrelated to OpenAI and Anthropic, OpenAI and Anthropic as well, they don't buy enough compute and they buy more than anyone else in the world to sustain the semiconductor rally that is actually holding up the markets.

39:07The markets are not held up on AI revenues. None of this is. It's held up on hype, specious hype, but also the largest infrastructural build out in history that they're claiming they're going to keep doing for years. They're going, at this rate, they're going to spend$5 trillion by the end of 2030. No too big to fail situation changes that at all. And the thing is, here's a fun one for you. You'll like this one. Let's say OpenAI dies, or even OpenAI just has trouble and can't get$70 billion a year. They will be unable to pay Oracle for the compute that mad Larry Ellison has been building. Larry Ellison needs$70 billion or more for all of those Stargate data centers to actually be worth it.

39:52If that doesn't happen, the value of Oracle's stock crashes and he gets margin called and suddenly Larry Ellison isn't a billionaire anymore. While you might bail out Oracle, you can't bail out the price of a stock. There are so many different bits here that are not just, it's too big to fail doesn't even apply because too big to fail isn't relevant here. The whole too big to fail situation in 2008 was that the modern banking system was built on commercial paper loans. We don't have that here. We just have a bunch of messy people burning the most money ever on something that does not reconcile with reality and building hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers for AI compute demand that does not exist.

40:34It doesn't matter if open AI or Anthropic survives. We need two or three more Anthropic and open AI sized companies on top of everything right now to substantiate the data centers being built. I also don't think they'll bail out anyone, but that's just my personal belief. Last question then, Ed. So what's the logical conclusion of what you're saying? Are you short? Is this going to be the greatest bust in history? What do you think? I'm not short anything. I'm long humans. And I think the thing to remember here is that this is all of a symptom of a greater problem, which is that the tech industry is out of hyper growth ideas there is no smartphone there's new app no new app store no new cloud computing generative ai was meant to be the next thing the thing that brought google to a 10 trillion dollar market cap the thing that was meant to replace google search for them or add on to google search everyone has been looking for the next big thing the next new startup that could be worth a trillion or two trillion or three trillion the next generation of those.

41:36Because the tech industry has no more big ideas, because the tech industry does not have the next smartphone, they have sunk more money than anything into this. So everything we're seeing is not coming from a place of innovation or building the future. It's a sign that the rot economy, the growth at all costs capitalist system, has finally reached kind of its end. And the way this falls apart will be gruesome because it's not just the AI bubble bursting that's the problem. It's the fact that there's nothing left for them to sell. No new business line that could enhance their businesses, the Microsoft's, Google's, Amazon's, Metas of the world.

42:13They don't have a next step. And when the markets realize that, I think there'll be a fundamental revaluation of the tech industry writ large. And I think venture capital may break, probably permanently. Wow.

42:24Jeremy Scahill:Ed, do you have a sense of, do you have a guess on timing or Or what could trigger that bubble pop? I know it's a very difficult question. Oh, it's going to be difficult. I think that if anything comes out about, say, OpenAI or Anthropics finances in the next few months, I think that could really spook people. I think by the end of the year is possible. It's just that their wacky stuff keeps happening, so it's hard to say. But it's hard to see this going on another year. It's just hard to see we are reaching the most ridiculous heights of this story. And I mean, it's going to be horrible for everyone involved.

42:59Well, yeah. What's the saying? It's like markets can stay irrational longer than you can be solving. You can stay solving. Let's all remember that for the retail day traders who are watching this. Ed, really enjoy your perspective, man. Just appreciate it. Everybody go subscribe to his YouTube channel as well. Thank you. And the newsletter. And the newsletter.

43:19Jeremy Scahill:Do it all. Thank you, Ed. I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything. It's the rage bait. It feels like it's trying to divide people. If we got clear facts, maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America. You're building your career. Your routine, your future. But this summer, that's for you. This season, escape into stories that feel like golden hour, rooftop drinks, and the kind of love that sneaks up on you when you least suspect it. Sourcebooks' Summer of Romance brings together the rom-coms everyone's talking about from Laugh Out Loud favorites by Lucy Score and Megan Quinn to binge-worthy reads you'll want to finish in one sitting.

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44:54Jeremy Scahill:So President Trump's big birthday party, America 250 UFC bash on the White House lawn after a rain delay happened last night. And there's a lot to get into around it surrounding the events, some potential attempted insider trading, the imagery of all of this and what it means for the country. joining us now to break down all of that is Luke Thomas, who is a combat sports analyst and also one half of the Morning Combat podcast and was up very late last night watching all of this so that we didn't have to. Luke, it's great to see you. Good to see you, Luke. It's great to be here. A real honor. Thank you for having me.

45:33Of course.

45:34Jeremy Scahill:Yeah, it's our pleasure. So I wanted to get your reaction off the top just to sort of like the spectacle of all of this, you know, what you as someone who's a fan of these events, what you think of it. And we can throw into the mix, put E3 up on the screen. This was some of the biggest news that came out of it. The winner apparently shouted out, Michelle Obama is a man in an interview with Joe Rogan right after his victory. So tell us about that and your overall thoughts here. Well, the guy who did that is a dude by the name of Josh Hokett. He wrestled collegiately and briefly made it to the NFL before washing out.

46:09He's a very good athlete and he's a good fighter. What's so interesting about this is, I have to tell you, this is just what MMA is now. Josh Hokett had to try out, like a lot of fighters do, to be on the UFC through this show called The Contender Series, where it's essentially an audition, but you fight through the audition. And he won it. And in his post-fight question and answer period, he did the exact same thing. He actually said, Michelle Obama is a man. This was the whole time. And he's done several different versions of this throughout his short, but I would say somewhat memorable tenure in the UFC.

46:41and what the UFC will simply say is, well, this is free speech, but this is such a nonsensical argument. It's just so crazy to me that fight promoters can tell the media, this is what we believe, and the media will just never question it. For example, if a fighter who is destitute wins a bout and you hear them afterwards say, it'd be really great if I got a post-fight bonus, the UFC has an informal policy that if you do that on TV, they're never going to give you the bonus. It's actually a mistake that fighters make all the time, but isn't that supposed to be a function of free speech? It just sort of goes to show that like the, the, the operating way in which they treat speech is like almost, I mean, it's not intentionally this way, but it ends up being like de facto pro slur because they don't allow a questioning of the kinds of things that free speech would normally allow for in terms of the event itself.

47:30I'm just going to give you two perspectives and you can decide which one is the most valuable or important one with inside the MMA bubble. I'm going to describe what we saw last night within the bubble as something approximating a home run. I think most fight fans and the fight world generally really liked what they saw, in part because the UFC put an enormous amount of effort into it. You'll recall last year when they tried this with that military parade, it fizzled. And they even had a fan fest at the Ellipse. And I was told that was a disaster. But this fan fest was super well run. So I think that inside the bubble, there's just a lot of positive things to say.

48:05But I mean, naturally, as somebody who's lived in D.C. a long time, as somebody who cares about the ominous nature of the Trump administration, any blending of the UFC brand with the Trump administration and essentially as they serve now as something of like the propaganda sports arm of the Trump administration, these things give me a great degree of pause to say nothing of using important architecture in our nation's history as set pieces for these kinds of events. Yeah, so Luke, I think that's an interesting point and one that I think you in particular have been trying to focus on ahead of this is like this is like the apotheosis of Dana White and Donald Trump's relationship.

48:44Do you want to go into that a little bit about what this event kind of signifies to you about the two of them, about the blending of the White House and the UFC, how the two of them came together? I mean, you know, it's kind of funny. Heading into last night, I would have said to you, I think that the UFC is the most important mainstream actor in essentially rehabilitating Donald Trump's image and more generally just conferring something of a positive spotlight on him. Honestly, after last night, I might say it in terms of general conservative world more broadly. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, who I interviewed, Lena Kahn, and she described the business of meta to me as, you know, serial rule violators.

49:19And they're out here giving these glasses to blind veterans. And of course, this is a nice thing, but they're being sued for basically ignoring warning signs about how their products made it easier for predators to find kids. I mean, let's just sort of be real about this. But the generisists, I mean, everyone goes back to 2016, the Republican National Convention for Dana White. That's really not it. It's really after January 6th. As you recall, he leaves office. He has low polling. And he goes to two CPAC events in that February and in that July. But in that same second week in July, he actually attended a UFC event.

49:49It was the Conor McGregor-Dustin Poirier trilogy. And again, for folks who've never seen this, you just don't understand what this is. He gets a walkout on TV by himself with Dana White. There is often Mike Johnson, Elon Musk, somebody else there in tow. He gets walkout music. The commentators glad hand him. They talk him up. They seat him by the cage. They don't do it like the NBA did where they put him in the box and he kind of falls asleep. They put him right there. And then the fighters get in on the act where they're in the post fight. This is the greatest president of all time. You got to go vote for this guy.

50:21I'm referring to prior to the election, you know, he's going to save America. So ask yourself, if you're a campaign, if you're running a campaign, and remember, at this time, he is not a president. He is a candidate. Where can you go to buy that kind of mainstream third party validation? It's literally not even for sale. And to say nothing of how hard it is to reach the young men as a portion of the electorate and how good they are at facilitating that he and Rogan, or I should say UFC and Rogan, they are the the entity that it's simplistic to say that they got trump elected nor am i suggesting as much however what i would say is people vastly underestimate how important this relationship is and what it's done for him and especially last thing i'll say on this recall that like when all this is happening 2021 to 2024 this is when the long arm of the law is descending on trump and And that is the point at which the UFC goes to the mat the hardest for him.

51:21They helped, to an extent, keep this dude out of prison. This is why they got a gigantic spectacle on the White House last night.

51:30Jeremy Scahill:Another thing this was was a giant cash grab for a lot of Trump friends. Dana White, obviously, being a close Trump friend. Trump's crypto company was advertising here. The fighters are actually getting paid in Trump crypto. You had, I naively thought this would be free for people because this is supposed to be a celebration of the country, blah, blah, blah. It wasn't free. You had to sign up for Paramount Plus and pay for that streaming service. Of course, David Ellison running Paramount. He was also there. And so he's getting in on the cash grab here. But we also have this very strange thing that happened in advance of the event.

52:11Jeremy Scahill:So Daniel Cormier, which you can tell me, Luke, He's like one of the top UFC announcers, correct? Sort of alongside Rogan. Is that the idea of who he is? Former two-time member of the Olympic team, former captain of the Olympic team in wrestling. And yeah, he is MMA royalty, something like that. Got it. Okay, so let's put this first element up on the screen. He posts, I'm probably going to get a lot of flack for bringing this to light. However, I refuse to stay silent. The UFC is a sport I am deeply passionate about. I will not tolerate this type of insider behavior. Shame on anyone trying to ruin this beautiful event.

52:47Jeremy Scahill:And attached to that are screenshots of what appear to be a conversation with the president's son, Eric Trump, where he says, hey, Daniel, I'm going to be attending UFC 250 tomorrow. Saw you were casting. Hope to see you there. He responds, yo, Eric, didn't expect a DM from you. Excited to meet you in the family. Much love, brother. Eric replies, anything you can tell me about the fighters tomorrow? Who you got winning? Daniel replies, ha ha, I like to stay unbiased, but I love to watch Nickel fight. Let's go on to the next ones here. He says, you placing any bets? No, I'm actually not allowed to bet on any cards or anything.

53:30Jeremy Scahill:Makes sense. Are any of the fighters injured that you know of? Eric Trump, according to these screenshots, wants to know. I'm not quite sure why you're asking me this, but I think they're all in good shape. Then Eric Trump says, I'll just cut to the chase. Are any of the fights tomorrow rigged? I've been eyeing the Lopez fight, and I think an upset wouldn't be too unrealistic. Dollar sign, dollar sign. And then Daniel replies, no, none of our fights are rigged. And honestly, I am appalled that you would even ask me something like that. So after this, Daniel posts something to the effect of, you know, A lot of people are really stupid out there.

54:07Jeremy Scahill:He deleted this very quickly, but I think we pretty much confirmed at this point that he did post this and the screenshots. Eric Trump put up this denial. He says, we are aware of the fake AI-generated screenshots being circulated online. I have never spoken to Daniel. He has since deleted his post, which confirms it was clearly fabricated. That also inadvertently confirms that he did post this thing. So it wasn't just something that was completely created out of thin air. So, Luke, what is going on here? What do you make of this? What can we say about what likely transpired here? It's one of the strange, I mean, this whole event, this whole event, I've been covering this sport for two decades.

54:46I don't think I've ever seen anything like this event in all myriad different ways. And this is just another example of this. I, like you, someone tagged me in this and I looked at it and I was like, oh, this is obviously, I mean, there's nothing to this. And then I saw a reporter who I know and trust being like, I saw it. He deleted it. I'm like, how can that possibly be? And so I ended up talking to a bunch of other reporters last night, like what they thought about and what was going on. And they all seemed equally bewildered. It is true. He tweeted it out to the point that you raise, they can see the replies even to the deleted tweets.

55:18So like it emanated from his account. And so then it's like, okay, well, how did that happen? And then you see, as you indicated, Cormier kind of insinuating that everyone's pretty stupid. I saw later, he kind of suggested to a bunch of people who are outside in Washington, DC that he was hacked. I mean, maybe that is the case. I mean, I, to me, Daniel has been something of a, maybe a company man more recently, but an honest guy in general, especially as it relates to things like this. So this would be, you know, did you get hacked and then you immediately recovered your account? Right. I suppose that can happen.

55:51I don't really know if that is the case. Um, certainly I don't think reputationally It would be a great surprise to know that or to learn in maybe any way that the Trumps would want to engage in something like this. That does not seem to me necessarily out of character, because as you mentioned, the bonuses paid to some of the fighters last night came from World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial, for folks who don't know, and I know your audience is smart about this, but just to say it out loud, this is one of the centerpieces of Trump's financial corruption and self-dealing. I mean, it's literally like if you're making taxonomy, a taxonomy chart of how it's done, you couldn't make one without World Liberty Financial.

56:30So it just remains – I mean, combat sports, this is what happens when you bring combat sports to the mainstream world. This is a very, very bizarre place where unusual things happen in unexplained ways. No one really knows, and it just kind of keeps going this way. I would chalk it up to something like that. Okay. All right. Let's put E5 up here on the screen. I mean, I'm curious for your reaction. Last night was also an incredible event for sports betting. We had, in many cases, polymarket ads here on the South Lawn. My personal favorite, an advertisement for Stake, which is a crypto casino, literally illegal in the United States, which is offshore.

57:12I believe it's a Caribbean-based one. Crypto.com and multiple other gambling advertisements that were not only just present on the arena itself, but ever present around the entire UFC. I'm curious. You've covered the sport now for two decades. I'm not naive. I know betting has always kind of been part of it. But this does seem particularly extraordinary to see illegal offshore betting sites have their advertisements there as part of the UFC at the White House. Does that just show us the power of Dana White, that he can just openly flaunt this on the White House lawn? What do you make of it as a combat sports analyst?

57:54Do you worry about it? I'm curious for your thoughts. Well, let me have a matter of disclosure here so you and your audience can make up your mind about what I'm about to say. I do have a show on the DraftKings network. Now, I personally don't ever gamble. It's not a thing that I necessarily engage in. And I will say that I have followed your coverage on this saga very closely, and I've learned a lot from it, and I pay close attention to it. So I'm glad that you are covering it in the way that you are. It's helped me to understand a lot of this as well. I will say that I am not against sensible reform of online gambling, and I think it's important to say that out loud.

58:31But I will say one thing you have to understand, and this is the thing that I will go to the mat on this, is that, you know, the relationship between combat sports and betting and the rest of the sports world is completely different. Ah, that's an important point. That's like combat sports. I looked this up. Like, when did the New York State Athletic Commission get going in this country? It was in the early part of the 20th century, and it was created specifically, if you look up articles at the time that were written about it, it was to combat, you know, promoters who were like, you know, hiring guys and then leaving town before paying them.

59:00And then also illegal gambling. Like if there, I've been to many, many sporting events in casinos. They've only ever been combat sports events. There is a unique tie in. And I think it comes from being both kind of associated to vice culture. These are, these are related enterprises in a way that, for example, Hey, what's the parlay on the NHL game or something like that? That is very new. Right now, as it relates to this kind of a thing, I'm as blown away by this as you. I mean, there were early kind of indications from Mark Shapiro, one of the leaders of TKO, the parent company of UFC, that they were going to be very kind of judicious in how they did advertising when this was kind of announced.

59:39I didn't see any evidence of that. But I think the way to kind of understand it to me is like, you asked, is this the power of Dana White? To an extent, maybe. But I think the other way to look at it is this is kind of the power of combat sports. Like, one thing you really got to understand is combat sports does not act as quality control for things like this. Combat sports is going to say yes to everything they're going to say yes to absolutely everything all the time UFC was airing ice ads up until the uh Renee Good got murdered then they took him off the air they never aired him again after that like they're just part of saying yes to money in ways without much interrogation and so what they'll do is they'll just kind of mainstream it they'll just kind of make it normal they're just introducing you were asking earlier Crystal about for example Hokit this is the thing that's happened already and then there was no repercussions I've seen people would be like, oh, is the UFC going to come down on this guy?

1:00:27No, they will never, ever do that. That's not what they do. They lead with a certain kind of just having a permissive structure about matters generally. And then the rest of the world kind of uses that as well. If they're doing it, I suppose we should do it too. Got it.

1:00:41Jeremy Scahill:Well, that also fits very well with Trumpian philosophy. The anything for cash is justified. It's a good fit for him there as well. Look, if you could put on your sort of political hat here. Harry Anton over at CNN did an analysis of how Americans are viewing the idea of this event in general and didn't find a lot of broad-based public support for it. Let's go ahead and play E7. Let's just say this much. They do not like it. They don't like it. I like you, Amar, but Americans don't find this thing to be appropriate. Take it here. Take a look here. UFC White House fights are appropriate. Just 16%, just 16 % overall And among Republicans, even among Republicans, you know, the diehard base Republican Party with Trump through thick and thin, just 31 percent of Republicans.

1:01:29His approval rating amongst Republicans overall, as you know, usually hovers a little bit north of 80 percent. So we're talking 50 points lower here. And, you know, this overall, you know, being 16 percent, you know, what is it, like 28 percent of Americans, you know, believe in telepathy. So this is even below that.

1:01:45Jeremy Scahill:So not a lot of support there. And then I'm also curious for your view on, you know, you've made the case probably better than anyone, how central UFC was to Trump's reelection, appealing to young men, young men who aren't particularly political. You know, the whole podcast, Burr's Fear, very important with that and also tied in directly with UFC with Dana White and Joe Rogan being sort of the entree point there. Well, his approval rating with young men, as it has with virtually everyone, has really fallen off a cliff. He won young men by a single point, which was an extraordinary accomplishment because usually young people in recent years have voted for Democrats.

1:02:21Jeremy Scahill:Now he is underwater some 30 plus points among that same demographic. So I'm wondering if you think that this type of event will hit the same with that group that was so central to his reelection. I think it will. I would actually be interested to see what the polling would look like now for the Dems. I don't think that the broader one would change all that much, the 16%. Maybe that comes up a little bit. But I think that 31 % would climb. I mean, you know, Jack Posobiec tweets a lot of not super awesome or intelligent things. But it's kind of like a proxy to see what the enthusiasm is from that side of the aisle.

1:02:58And there was just a lot of it. I saw a lot of people saying, you know what? I actually saw this. Trump delivered this for us. I actually saw that word used last night. And it's like, you know, he can't deliver on these other policy objectives. We're in the shadow of the humiliation of the Iran war. But we got this, and we really enjoyed it. It's something to give back to them. Now, the question is, how long will that last? How long will this bump last? I suspect it will be fleeting. I think that there's going to be high watermark maybe today, this week, this month, something like that. But once Trump gets sort of back to the natural rhythm of his, what do you want to call it, governing, I think that this number will probably decline.

1:03:34And I want to say this too, which is kind of funny because I've talked to some like, you know, sort of more mainstream, you know, liberal kind of outlets. And they're like, oh, young men are really abandoning Trump. And I'm like, yeah, but not for you. Right. They're not they're not walking away. They might be mad at Trump because of high gas prices. They know more foreign wars, all the stuff that, you know, all the stuff that your audiences know. That does not in any way, shape or form mean that they're like, we should really reconsider the ideas of the Democratic Party. They have just the same level of distrust and antipathy of them as they always did.

1:04:09So I think that these numbers will get a temporary boost. I don't think it will last. But I do think that if the UFC and Trump have a more robust, continuous pace at maybe doing events, I guess we'll see how that works. Yeah, it's quite a gamble there for Dana White. Luke, you're so awesome to talk to, man. I'd love to have you back on the show and talk more. Thank you for coming. Anytime. Thank you, guys. I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything. It's the rage bait.

1:04:41Jeremy Scahill:It feels like it's trying to divide people. If we got clear facts, maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America.

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1:06:04Turning now to leaks, an extraordinary new concern from the White House. Let's go put F1 up here on the screen. Trump aides fear that Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have obtained Situation Room tapes for their new book called Regime Change inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. So we have actually shown you two of the excerpts from their book here on the show. One of them was how the U.S. was taken to war with Iran. It famously included the exact quotes out of the Situation Room, what the various leaders said about going to war with Iran, who and exactly said what. It even included Situation Room basically exact quotes from Marco Rubio talking about Israeli intelligence being, quote, bullshit.

1:06:49It included, you know, J.D. Vance saying that he opposed the war, but then said he would back Donald Trump. It included Trump, you know, and many of the reasoning for why he decided to push the U.S. forward. It included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff very tepidly warning the president about what was going to happen if the U.S. were to be taken to war with Iran. It was an extraordinary revelation. Now, the assumption, Chris, I'm curious what you think. my assumption is this was a Bob Woodward style, like a reckoning, as in he interviews like 15 people who are all in the room. You reconstruct the dialogue.

1:07:23You put in a note to say these are based on the recollections of those who were involved. However, what they note here is that in many cases, the words are so exact and so on point that they fear that it's impossible for it to be anything but a direct recording, which I should note is an extraordinary breach. The Situation Room is a skiff. You are not allowed to bring in your phone. Traditionally, they're all checked right before you even enter the secure area. I mean, this is longstanding policy going back 25 years or so. Same at the Pentagon. However, we do know that between SignalGate and a lot of these other things, the administration has played very fast and loose, I think, with classified information and others, and it's possible that somebody did bring in a phone and taped it.

1:08:13What makes it even more extraordinary is that somebody brought their phone in, taped it, and then leaked it to a New York Times reporter for these exact comments that are there in the situation room. What they point to is that not a single piece, not one piece of exact dialogue, which has been quoted by the authors, has been disputed yet by the White House out of fear that if they were to dispute it, they could say and point to direct tapes that they are in possession of from the situation room around the most sensitive things that are being discussed in the White House at the very, very highest level.

1:08:46Jeremy Scahill:I mean, it's some extraordinary reporting. Either way, if it was so it's so accurate that the White House is afraid that they literally have the verbatim tapes. I mean, that's pretty incredible and I think provides a lot of credibility to these accounts, which you always have to take with a grain of salt because it all depends on who is leaking to you and the way they want themselves to be portrayed. I still suspect that it wasn't recorded. I still suspect that it was that they just had good sources in the room who were able to provide them with quotes that they were able to cross check and get very close to how it actually unfolded is still my assumption.

1:09:23Jeremy Scahill:But the very fact that the White House fears they have tapes sort of is a direct validation of what they reported out here. You know, the other thing that's really interesting, though, is I think most people assume it was J.D. Vance or somebody in the J.D. Vance world that has been leaking to them most extensively. But it's not like an either the Epstein cover up piece or the Iran war piece makes him or literally anyone else look good. Normally, that's the way you have to look at these accounts. It's like, OK, well, who is this trying to paint in a favorable light? Who is leading to them so that they can get their story on the record and help to establish for the historical record?

1:10:02Jeremy Scahill:Like, oh, well, I was the one who knew what was going on. I was the one who had the right decisions. I was the one who was opposed to Iran. I was the one who had the correct strategy with regard to Epstein. But it is a little bit hard to tell because everybody looks pretty bad based on how this went down. The other thing is just to point out the fact that the Epstein cover up was being hatched in the situation room is really kind of crazy. I mean, it makes sense because it is genuinely like a massive national security issue, given all of the entanglements and, you know, Israeli connections and all of those sorts of things.

1:10:39Jeremy Scahill:But it still is incredibly crazy that that's where they were doing some of their most significant brainstorming about how do we keep the truth that Donald Trump is all over these files? out of the view of the public or at the very least sort of like throw enough in their face so that they can't grab on to one, you know, one single allegation and then move on. The whole thing is nuts. As I said, it's not uncommon for Woodward style recreation books. I've read a lot of them. Obama's War, by the way, probably one of my favorite Woodward books literally ever written. I do. I think it should be recommended reading for a lot of people about how exactly the war machine in the Pentagon can roll you even whenever you are the most powerful person in the White House.

1:11:20This type of reporting was extremely common in the first Trump term. I will say, you know, this one has been a lot less leak prone than the original one where you would get, you know, live texts from Steve Bannon and other people about Jared and Ivanka to these various types of reporters and exactly what was going on in terms of the drama. But this is very much akin to how the first term of the White House really went down. And I think that's really what's surprising and shocking a lot of people in the room. From what I've been told, a lot of them feel that they were battle-tested. They were very committed through the campaign and through the administration.

1:11:55They were like, look, we went through this together. We survived this onslaught. We won the popular vote. We're a team. But it does appear that now that the political fortunes are going down, that a lot of people are trying to save their legacy. Now, as you said, I don't think it really makes anybody look particularly good in this. There's a lot of missteps. There's I mean, for example, let's take the vice president. You have somebody who internally opposed the war. And as we just heard just this morning, whenever we're playing the defense, he's like, oh, thank you to the president for – I mean, obviously he's going to say that.

1:12:25But to say on the record and to have – or to basically say – to have a tape or a recollection of saying you oppose something and then you come out publicly and support it, that doesn't look good, right, whenever you're the vice president. But then let's take people like Dan Bongino. Dan Bongino, some people were like, oh, he must have leaked the Epstein coverage. Just put F2 just so people know what we're referencing, where Bongino screamed at the White House chief of staff and all of that. Well, yeah, he might have screamed at that and said, oh, you guys are screwing all this stuff up. Well, he came out afterwards and he supported it.

1:12:56And he said he stood by all of the work he did while he was in the administration. Same with Kash Patel, who publicly or at least privately had said a few things and acquiesced to the infamous Epstein memo of nearly one year ago. I mean, I could go down the list. I can't think of a single really public official in any of these deliberations who actually comes out looking better. You can give some credit to some of those who said, hey, this is going to be a big problem. But in basically every case, I'm like, this is a real problem. I would say F3 in particular, the one about how Trump took the U.S.

1:13:29to war with Iran. There is not one person that comes out of that looking good. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs looks like shit because as I flagged to everyone earlier, they did not talk to Trump in the way that they're supposed to from their congressionally mandated role. They did not tell him the truth. That's I'm not absolving Trump at all. It also showed clearly how Bibi manipulated Trump and the secretary of state and the entire CIA intelligence and how even the secretary of state and others were like, hey, quote, literally, this is bullshit in terms of the Israeli assessment. So what does it say about Trump that he believed it?

1:14:00But it shows how there was very little pushback inside of the NSC and others once Trump had made up his mind about how to take the U.S. to war with Iran. I mean, really, it's a breakdown in the entire U.S. chain of command and the way that any of this type of decision making is supposed to work. So that's part of the reason why I'm kind of mystified genuinely as to why anybody would have leaked any of these conversations in the first place. It really doesn't make them look good. But I'm glad it did if it did, because, look, the historical record matters. This is the first draft of history. It will be the Obama's war of its era.

1:14:35It really will. We will refer to it really extensively in the future. And the good thing is, is that all of these public officials will have to be asked about it when the book comes out and say, did you say this? And if they don't say no, it tells you a little bit about what went down in that room.

1:14:51Jeremy Scahill:Yeah. And J.D. Vance on the Iran war piece, he said something like, you know, I have my reservations, but if you do it, I'll support you. It was basically his position. I mean, I guess if you had to say of anybody, he does kind of I mean, like you said, nobody comes out looking good, but he's on the record of being like, oh, this isn't a great idea with the Iran war. he's one of the aides in the Epstein piece who is at least in touch with the fact that this is a problem for Trump, whereas others who are who are quoted in that excerpt are just don't have any understanding of the way that this is a big issue for the base and why it's going to be a problem for him.

1:15:30Jeremy Scahill:But, you know, the other possibility is, Sagar, that you've got some people in the White House who just like to talk. I mean, there is like a human instinct to gossip. You're on the inside. You know some things you get to you get to talk to some New York Times reporter and feel like you're giving them this into power. Like that's a very intoxicating feeling. And again, there is this just sort of human instinct that when you have a piece of juicy information, you want to be able to share it. So you could just have someone like that. And we know, you know, I'm not saying that is her. But we do know that Susie Wiles, like, talked to reporters extensively for that piece on her profile and vanity.

1:16:10Yeah, it was ridiculous.

1:16:12Jeremy Scahill:Right. And it was over months where she said all kinds of things that she should not have been saying. So you've got at least one who has that tendency to, you know, OK, well, whether it makes me look good or, you know, Marco look good or J.D. Vance look good or make everybody look bad. I just want to be able to share what I know from the inside. So that is also a possibility here, too. I know both of these reporters. They're excellent at their job. Part of your job is making them feel important. I used to do this. I mean, it's not fun, but yeah, you got to make them feel important. You know, buy them a few drinks.

1:16:44You'd be amazed what you can get out of people.

1:16:47Jeremy Scahill:Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And especially because you do have, I think, one thing that's telling is obviously the wheels have come off of this administration. The approval rating is in the toilet. The midterms are going to be a total blowout for Republicans. The writing is on the wall with, I think, all of that. And so you do have people who are going to be rats on a sinking ship who are like, OK, how do I position myself for what comes after? Because it's increasingly clear that there is going to be an after and that after may be coming sooner rather than later. So I think we'll probably see more leaks, not less, as the regime days wear on.

1:17:24Keep it coming. Keep it coming. All right. Thanks for everybody watching. We appreciate it. We'll see you all tomorrow.

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