After a sponsor read for Fast Growing Trees offering 20% off with code WORLD, the hosts dive into a warm studio reunion. Ben has just returned from Norway, where he watched matches in a bar and joined tens of thousands of Norwegians doing the famous Viking Row after their wins. Both hosts lament that every underdog they backed — including Norway — got knocked out on questionable calls, and Tommy floats the theory that the entire tournament is 'rigged for Argentina.' The banter sets an irreverent, engaged tone before the episode's heavier material begins.

Tommy runs through a densely packed agenda: the war between the US and Iran is back on; a crazy Israeli scheme to install Ahmadinejad has new details; questions about the Qatari-gifted Air Force One led to subpoenas against journalists; a bridge between Detroit and Canada is at the center of a corruption story; Venezuela's earthquake toll is catastrophic; Boko Haram is using AI; Erdogan gave NATO leaders guns; and Ben spoke with Congressman Ro Khanna. Ben summarizes the Khanna interview — how Khanna was threatened by heavily armed settlers in the West Bank, detained by the IDF, and then criticized by fellow Democrats for going. Ben asks the obvious question: why is a foreign ambassador setting the itinerary for an American congressman visiting territory that isn't legally Israel?

Tommy plays a supercut that juxtaposes Trump and Steve Witkoff's ebullient ceasefire rhetoric — 'the way we've done business for 47 years is a mistake' — with Trump's later truth-social threats of '1,000 missiles locked and loaded.' Ben diagnoses the pattern: 80-90% of what the Trump team says is pure bullshit, and the roller coaster rhetoric obscures a static reality — Iran controls the strait, the regime has gotten more hardline, and the nuclear question remains unanswered. Tommy explains the proximate triggers: Israeli intelligence about an alleged Iranian assassination plot against Trump, and a dispute over which shipping channel vessels should use in the Strait. The key fault line is MOU paragraph 5, which Iran reads as granting it sovereignty over maritime services in the strait. Oil futures jumped 10% on the news, Wall Street coined the 'Nacho Trade' (Not A Chance Hormuz Opens), and Goldman Sachs is studying bypass pipelines that won't be ready until 2027-2028. Ben's core argument: you cannot solve this with military force. Iran is there. It's not going anywhere. Only a diplomatic deal will reopen the strait.

Tommy highlights a Washington Post investigation detailing a series of military leadership failures during the Iran conflict: soldiers were moved from a defended base to a smaller, poorly surveilled one without air defense; officers prematurely ordered troops out of bunkers; and one brigadier general allegedly hid in a bunker rather than helping rescue survivors. Ben uses the story to complicate a common progressive framing — yes, Trump is an idiot, but that doesn't mean the Pete Hegseth-run military is competently run. The hosts note that the true damage, the true casualties, and the actual military strategy remain opaque to the public.

Tommy walks through the extraordinary story: Israel used its relationship with Viktor Orban to get a Hungarian university to invite Ahmadinejad to a fake climate conference in Budapest, where Israeli operatives could meet him. A parallel meeting was arranged in Guatemala. The extraction plan involved bombing Ahmadinejad's compound, killing his guards, and picking him up in a Peugeot to take him to a safe house — which he quickly abandoned. His Kurdish army backers never materialized. Ben connects Orban's far-right political symbiosis with Netanyahu, noting that Netanyahu's 2009 campaign consultants became Orban's 2010 consultants, and that Orban's allies hired Black Cube — former Mossad operatives — to spy on critics and leak to the Jerusalem Post. The broader lesson: the Mossad's vaunted reputation is for killing, not building. No one in Jerusalem apparently asked the basic question: with what army was Ahmadinejad supposed to take power?

The decision to leave the Qatari-gifted Boeing 747 behind was publicly attributed by Trump to letting troops tour it, but the New York Times reported the real reason: the new plane lacks missile defense countermeasures. Trump was reportedly furious at the story. What followed was extraordinary: FBI Director Kash Patel canceled a personal trip to sit in the White House for eight hours, then served subpoenas on Times journalists with five days to comply. The Pentagon and DOJ simultaneously announced a joint task force to prosecute leakers. Ben draws a sharp distinction between normal leak investigations — years-long, cast-wide nets focused on government employees, run by independent US attorneys — and this: the president directly ordering his FBI chief to immediately target journalists from the White House. He calls it 'a total new Rubicon' and 'fucking Putin-esque behavior.' The key detail that crystalizes the story: Kash Patel canceled his girlfriend's country concert to spend eight hours at the White House running this political operation.

Tommy tells the story of the Gordie Howe Bridge with novelistic specificity: Canada paid $4.7 billion entirely on its own to build a six-lane bridge across the Detroit River, covering roughly 25% of all US-Canada truck trade and $100 billion per year in commerce. The existing Ambassador Bridge is privately owned by the Moroun family, notorious Detroit slumlords. When Matthew Moroun — son of the late Matty Moroun — donated $1 million to a Trump-aligned PAC and met with Howard Lutnick, Trump posted a truth-social screed hours later demanding the US own 'at least one half' of the bridge and blocking its opening. The eventual deal gave the US a cut of net tolls for 15 years and gave Moroun's bridge a veto over any competing price cuts below comparable crossings. Ben zooms out: point a camera at any Trump-adjacent deal and you find something like this. It's not random — it's systemic. He compares it to how Russia under Putin runs its economy, where no bridge gets built without a kickback to someone in the circle. Tommy adds a fresh example: a New York Times story posted mid-recording revealed Trump received $2 million from a South Korean company under US trade investigation, listed as a 'nonrefundable development fee.'

Tommy reads ads for four sponsors. Sundays for Dogs is promoted with an anecdote about office dogs going crazy for the fish recipe. Squarespace's Blueprint AI website builder is highlighted. Hims offers online access to ED treatment with generic Sildenafil. Bilt rewards renters and homeowners with points redeemable for flights, hotels, Lyft, and more through its AI neighborhood concierge.

Tommy updates the Venezuela situation: nearly 4,500 dead, 16,000 injured, up to 50,000 missing in a disaster the administration has pledged $300 million to address — funneled through the very international organizations it has systematically defunded. President Dulce Rodriguez hurt herself politically by wearing a $1,300 ski jacket while visiting victims. A New York Times story confirms what was long suspected: Marco Rubio is making granular decisions about which businesses operate in Venezuela, how money is spent, and even vetting Rodriguez's media appearances. Ben's reaction cuts through the triumphalism: to what end? Venezuelans are still repressed. Americans aren't seeing cheaper gas. The only plausible explanation is that Trump-connected Florida cronies are getting contracts to build Venezuelan infrastructure — the same extractive pattern as the Canadian bridge.

The Cambridge paper — titled 'God Has Helped Us and So Will AI: How the Terrorist Group Boko Haram Uses Frontier AI' — gives the hosts a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging conversation about AI governance failure. Boko Haram members describe using Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok in three ways: learning to assemble weapons and manufacture bombs, improving surveillance, and planning specific attacks. One fighter says AI told them which chemicals to add to make their bombs 'heavier.' ISIS has dedicated AI units. Ben argues this is the predictable consequence of building transformative technology entirely in private hands with no regulation, no legislation, no international dialogue between the US and China, and no UN summits. Even if US companies add safety filters, open-source replicas will replicate the dangerous capabilities — a dark AI will emerge just as the dark web did. Tommy adds parallel threats: North Korean coders infiltrating US tech companies, AI-generated targeting for military strikes, and the bio-threat frontier where AI could help synthesize novel pathogens faster than any defensive response. Ben's bottom line: there's no single villain — the overall failure is that we cannot slow down long enough to put rules around a technology that companies insist is the most transformative in human history.

Tommy recounts the story with barely suppressed delight: Slovakia's president opened a box on camera to reveal an engraved pistol and note, next to six live bullets. The gift came from Turkey, now the world's third-largest exporter of small arms — making the gesture as much product placement as diplomatic communication. Ben notes that the inclusion of live ammunition is what makes it truly extraordinary: you could immediately shoot someone with it. European leaders scrambled to deal with strict domestic gun laws; Belgium's PM had to surrender his to police, Ursula von der Leyen donated hers to a military museum, others decommissioned theirs at Turkish embassies. Canada's Carney brought the revolver home but inexplicably left the bullets in Turkey. Ben reminisces about the Turkish Olympic shooter who went viral for holding his pistol sideways like a gangster — and suggests that's probably what Erdogan was trying to evoke.

Tommy flags a detail from the Dan Patrick Show: a source told Patrick that FIFA committee chairman Mohammed al-Kamali of the UAE made the decision to lift Balogun's ban alone, without informing the rest of the committee. The UAE is among the most commercially entangled parties with Trump's business interests. Ben says this was entirely predictable: if Trump wants something fixed in the Gulf, you know who he calls. He's more frustrated with sports podcasters who ran away from the story than with Trump himself — every soccer fan on Earth cared about this, and pretending otherwise was pure audience cowardice. Both hosts are clear that they didn't think the original call should have been a red card — but Trump's intervention has turned the US team into international villains regardless of whether they deserved the win.

Tommy and Ben both vouch for Helix mattresses — Ben specifies his model is the Dawn Luxe. The Helix read emphasizes the 120-night sleep trial and lifetime warranty. The Pod Save the UK promo features the UK hosts describing their irreverent, progressive politics show, humorously uncertain about who their boss is and whether it's Tommy, Favreau, or Lovett.

Ben interviews Ro Khanna about his decision to take a Palestinian-led tour of the West Bank, inspired by Ben's insights and journalist Jasper Nathaniel's embedded reporting. Khanna describes arriving at Zunada Village — destroyed by settler Ynon Levy, whose murder of a Palestinian was caught on camera — when two armed settlers in their early twenties blocked his van. The IDF arrived and sided with the settlers, telling Khanna his group was in an illegal area (the IDF later acknowledged it was not). After 75 minutes, a US embassy career official, David Brownstein, reached the Israeli government and police came to release them. Khanna pointedly notes this has not happened to a US congressman abroad since Leo Ryan's assassination at Jonestown in 1978. Netanyahu responded on Meet the Press by calling the settlers 'juvenile delinquents' — a 150-person fringe, he claimed, among 99.9% law-abiding settlers. Khanna dismantles this framing, recounting Palestinian families terrorized nightly by settlers throwing objects, planting flags on their homes, vandalizing cars; a school shooting where the principal was never asked about the shooter; an American citizen detained for ten months with no trial, released emaciated and scarred. The interview turns to Democratic Party politics: Josh Gottheimer and the DMFI attacked Khanna's character rather than his policies. Khanna reads this as a deliberate strategy to stop other members from visiting the West Bank by making the trip seem illegitimate. He also acknowledges with striking candor that he previously voted for the $3 billion in annual US military aid that contributed to the conditions that led to his own detention. He calls on a future administration to sanction settler banks and construction companies, and set a 100-day deadline for the IDF to arrest named extremist settlers and destroy illegal outposts. He closes on a note of hope: the Palestinian families he met showed his Jewish American colleagues nothing but warmth and no bitterness.

Tommy thanks Congressman Khanna (calling him 'Congressman Connolly' in a slip) and previews a bonus pod recorded at the Aspen Security Conference where he and Ben plan to 'hang out with some blobby friends.' Ben jokes that the mics will probably be turned off for the good stuff. Show credits acknowledge producers Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonergy, and the team's unionization with the Writers Guild of America East. A promotional segment for Stacey Abrams' podcast Assembly Required closes the episode.