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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds.Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation.They said yes.
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Well, if nothing else, the election recently brought me one of the weirder emotional experiences of my life, which is I went to Pennsylvania, where I am from, and saw on television an ad
in the local congressional race, where the person talking about how bad the Republican is going to be, generic person, who you sort of always assume is just an actor.No, my 11th grade high school English teacher.It was like a dream.
It was like one of those moments where you, in a dream, you have one part of your life following Congress for a living, collide with a totally different part of your life that you haven't thought about in however many years.Very strange, guys.
Wow.I went to Pennsylvania, too, to project on the 30th Street Station, and I was shut down.I projected, among other things, at the suggestion of somebody watching the live stream, yo, Adrian, go vote.
And a little while after I did that, the Amtrak police came out, and it turns out that, I didn't know this, the 30th Street Station is private property owned by Amtrak, and they asked me to stop projecting, so I did.
And as soon as I shut off the live stream, the cops said, the Yo Adrian, go vote one was fabulous.
You truly speak the language of the people of Philadelphia better, presumably. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security.I am your host, Scott R. Anderson.
Thrilled to be back in the virtual studio with an assortment of my lawfare colleagues as we invite you to join us as we try to make sense of the week's big national security news stories.
Joining me this week, we have co-host Emeritus, Alan Rosenstein, not the one you were expecting, but still counts as co-host Emeritus.Alan, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Hello.
It's good to be back after I think like four or five weeks.I'll admit, I've missed it.
There you go.Hey, well, you come back on any time.Meanwhile, we have co-host even more emeritus, emeritus-er, emeritus, emeritus.
Emeritus-est, Benjamin Wittes.Ben, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Yo, you've been on much more recently because we've been trying to talk about the topic we're finally going to get to talk about for three or four times in the last month.
But we finally timed it right to get you on the podcast in time to talk about this Israel-Isran interaction we have this week, this past week.So excited to have you back on the podcast.
And for our third guest, we are thrilled to have back, of course, lawfare and the Brookings Institution's own Molly Reynolds.Molly, thank you for coming back on the podcast as well.
It's good to be here, even if I don't have any sort of emeritus title behind my name, I'll still take it.
You are the, in ways, guest emeritus.I suspect you were the first guest of any of us on this podcast, or at least you were listening in the background and perhaps got some cross noise when you were recording next to Ben's office back in the day.
That's true, when I was convinced that the plants were going to come through the wall, like Kool-Aid Man style.
I'm still working on that.We'll rebuild.We'll rebuild better.It just takes time.Plants take a while to grow to that density.
The plants are going to ascend several floors of the building.But yeah, for now, all my walls are still intact.
Well, I am excited to be here with all three of you guys.We've had, perhaps unsurprisingly,
Or perhaps a little surprisingly, given how much momentous election-related news is happening this week, we still had a really big week in general national security news, which is what we're going to talk about this week.
Our first topic, an eye for an Iran.After weeks of waiting, Israel finally launched the strikes on Iran.It had its long promise in response to the volley of missiles Iran hit it with earlier this month.
Compared to expectations, the strikes were relatively limited and aimed primarily at Iranian military targets instead of its nuclear and oil infrastructure.And the United States is now urging an end to these tit-for-tat strikes.
But is this likely to be the case, or are Israel's actions just the beginning of a bigger conflict?Topic two, he just slid into my DMs.
This week, the Wall Street Journal published a stunning report indicating that a billionaire industrialist, Elon Musk, and ex-owner, Elon Musk, has been having previously undisclosed communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials.
How concerning should these conversations be, and what ramifications might they have for US national security? Topic three, post-mortem.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos' late decision to squash an official editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris and to abstain from presidential endorsements moving forward has triggered a tidal wave of opposition, leading to hundreds of thousands of canceled subscriptions from a newspaper that was already set to lose a substantial sum of money this year.
How wrongheaded was Bezos' move and what should the proper response be? For our first topic, Ben, this is it.This is the moment we've been waiting for.
I think we've had you on the podcast three times in anticipation of these strikes happening imminently, only to be proven wrong.But here we are.It has finally happened.And they were, I think, a little bit
a different sort of response of the range of options.This was certainly an option we talked about.
But on the more muted conservative side, at least in this initial response, tell us a little bit about the strikes as they played out, what we know about them, and what explains them.
What is Israel thinking with this particular set of strikes and its relationship to Iran and its relationship to the United States and its other ongoing military endeavors and Lebanon and Gaza, West Bank and Syria as well.
Where does this fit in the strategic picture?What accounts for Israel taking this particularly, you know, targeted and relatively constrained response?
Well, so the answer to all of those questions is that we don't know for sure.Israel talks a big game with Iran, as they always reserve the right to do dramatic things.Sometimes they do it, killing Iranian scientists, killing
senior military figures killing Hezbollah people in Iran and Hamas people.But when it comes to opening a major third front in a war that already has two fronts that are quite costly for the Israelis,
They've lost 60 soldiers between Gaza and Lebanon this month.They're not always as big as their mouths, and I think the U.S.definitely has a significant role in that.The U.S.
made clear that they were entitled to respond, made clear that the United States would support a significant response, but also does not want to destabilize world oil prices
and also does not want this to be an attack on the Iranian nuclear system that will drag the United States into a full or full-ish scale war with Iran.And so,
What among those factors was the major one or more minor ones that caused the Israelis to say, let's do something sharp and notable but relatively non-escalatory that will not offend the United States, that Iran can
if it chooses to not retaliate for and consider a sort of wind down of this scale of escalation.I'm not really sure what the major factors were, but what we know is that the Israelis did a pretty substantial
set of strikes that were principally directed first at Iranian air defenses, which they seem to have pretty systematically taken out.And the significance of that is that it enables the second wave of attacks, but also that it enables
any future attacks which may be directed at, say, the nuclear program.The second wave in this case was directed at missile production facilities and missile storage, and that is designed obviously to
not reduce Iran's capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, but reduce its ability to deliver any kind of weapon system to Israel.And so I think it's, you know, from an international law perspective, it's an unobjectionable set of attacks.
And from a U.S.relations point of view, it's exactly what the United States would have wanted.But how much of that was driven by U.S.
pressure and how much of it was driven by a kind of sober desire to bring down the temperature while also reserving the ability to respond?I don't really know.What do you think?
I generally agree with that sort of assessment.
There's an interesting data point that I think has been missed a little bit in most of the coverage of this, which is worth looking at, and particularly relates to US involvement, which the official statement is the US was not involved in these airstrikes.
But actually, the first thing that tipped off some people closely watching development to the region that airstrikes could be incoming was the fact that the United States military actually moved a bunch of air-to-air refueling vessels to the region hours before the strike came out.
And so there was speculation at the time saying that the United States would be involved at least in this sort of refueling effort.
It's something that the United States did supporting Saudi and Emirati forces in Yemen quite controversially, but it's generally seen as something that's short of a use of force, not the sort of thing that triggers war powers, resolution obligation, things like that.
But it's like a significant logistical type of support they can provide.The United States is very good at providing in a way that a lot of allies can't do as easily on their own.
But then doesn't appear to have actually happened, or maybe DOD is defining being involved in a way that excludes that, but I'd be a little surprised by that.I think they simply didn't use it.
What I think this might suggest is that there is a possibility that these airstrikes were going to be more substantial in a way that the United States would still have supported.
And I don't know what that means, why they would have ratcheted it back.I think the best inference I can draw is, well, maybe they were ready to pursue an additional strike if they didn't hit their targets.
Meaning this isn't just a symbolic response with a certain number of rockets, that they actually had very clear strategic objectives they were trying to accomplish.
And that lines up with the idea of saying we're going to severely compromise their air defense systems in a way that's going to open the door for another strike, and it's going to be hard to come back from quickly.
And we're going to hit a number of strategic targets specifically relating to, you know, fuel development, missile development, a couple of other of these targets.So it really does seem to be a very calculated, deliberative move.
This was not a volley of rockets which is much more like what we saw Iran launch at Israel.
Yes, Iran also did say, and to some extent does appear to have targeted military facilities, but it was a lot more haphazard and a lot more about using military facilities as a pretext to say, we're gonna lob rockets in that general direction.
This appears to have really been aimed at accomplishing something.That does imply both the specific message you're trying to send and the possibility that this is a step into another direction.
Because certainly this does open the door to a much broader military campaign.Maybe that's the message they're trying to send Iran as opposed to something they actually intend to do.But I don't think we really know.
Yeah, I think the message they're trying to send Iran is if I'm speculating here is, you know, and we know, that we've created a free hand for ourselves for the next time we need to use it.
You know and we know that we control your airspace to the extent that we want to, and therefore, don't fuck with us again.
I have a follow-up question for Ben or Scott or Al and Franklin, if you want to weigh in.Maybe this is because I'm now constitutionally incapable of seeing anything, not through the lens of next week's US presidential election.
I'm just curious to hear folks' thoughts on how to read any of what's happening.Maybe the answer is not to do it and then I should go outside and take a deep breath and not think about the election.
And so maybe none of this has anything to do with the timing, but just what are you thinking about the degree to which how things are unfolding in the region is going to change or not change based on what happens in the US next week?
Ben, I'd actually be curious about what you want to say on this, actually, because I want to revisit something you said on national security, I think the last time you were on it, maybe the time before that, where you made the argument that you thought either a strike wasn't going to happen or it was going to be a much more calibrated response because the Israelis would be worried about kicking a lot of uncertainty into the U.S.
election and doing it before the election. I think that actually looks like it may well have borne out as a prediction.
I was much more skeptical of that, so I'm going to give you a small w, lowercase w on this one, because it did happen, but it does appear to be much more calibrated.
Yeah, it may be a super overdetermined variable.
Also, as well.But how does the election calculus fit in both going into the strike in your mind and then after the war?It's like as Molly's saying, where does it go from here?
Yeah. I was surprised to hear that they were operating at all.My assumption was that they would wait until after the election.But given that they didn't, this is consistent with them having kind of worked something out with the Biden administration.
It was clearly coordinated with the United States. And so, look, the Israelis will perceive a Trump election as giving them a free hand.And for good reasons.
They will receive none of the pressure from Donald Trump that they received from Biden about calibrating the response.And while a lot of people on the left really hate Joe Biden's response to this,
he has in fact not given the Israelis a completely free hand, and Trump would.
And so I think, you know, it's an interesting question if you see a Trump win, whether you should expect further Israeli escalation in December or maybe in early January on the theory that you may as well
push and push and push until somebody makes you stop, and that that's unlikely to happen.But I don't know.I don't know how much of the Israeli calculation is really related to American domestic politics.I do know that the Israelis
you know, are aware and correctly aware that they can get away with more in a Trump administration and, you know, are uncertain about who Kamala Harris is on this issue, as, by the way, is everybody else.
I thought one really interesting point, a place where you might see departure in a Harris versus Trump administration, and frankly a departure as soon as November 6, as soon as we might know who the winner is, is the fact that the Biden administration has been very lean forward since the strike happened about saying this needs to be the end of it.
And it's interesting because this talking point is showing up in press statements by spokespersons for agencies.So like state spokesperson, I think I dropped it in our kind of work document, a statement by a deputy spokesperson at DOD.
When you see a statement reiterate across the agency like that, that means it is a unified talking point that the administration has agreed upon and is proactively putting out there.
and is trying to make the top way we're going to address this issue that we know we're going to get questions on.
And in fact, Department of Defense even released as the top header for its news two days ago, Israeli strike in Iran should mark end of tit for tat between two nations.That's a pretty, pretty strong policy statement for an ally like Israel, honestly.
Even though the statement is directed towards Iran, saying Iran, you don't need to strike back.I think the clear message here is that Israel, this needs to be it. and Iran don't hit back.
And that makes sense because now Iran knows if it were to strike Israel again, Israel is going to have way more free reign than it did this first time even.
hitting whatever it wants in Iran because Iran's air defense system has been severely compromised.Is that going to be the same on November 5th?I'm not 100% sure it is.A Harris administration probably going to stick to that line, I suspect.
But, you know, you're going to see this transition moment where there's going to be a lot of flux on the different points.You're going to see a lot of pressure.
Iran is a tricky issue, and we have... This does reflect a fundamental shift in how the US has approached Iran in democratic administrations to some extent.Like, I think the days of the JCPOA are probably
gone for the time being, at least, because this conventional profile has now overtaken the nuclear profile and priority.The Trump administration's may not do any of this.
Remember, there are serious figures in Trump administration, many of whom we expect to come back, who were actively agitating for more aggressive US military action against Iran from the get go.
And by some accounts, you know, we're looking for pretexts to be able to pursue that military action.And that Trump himself actually is the one who balked, particularly when you think about the shooting down of a US drone over the Persian Gulf.
and then potentially responding to the initial volley of response to the Soleimani assassination.Those voices are still going to be there.I don't know if they're going to be dominant or not.
There's a clear tension between that hawkish anti-Iran voice and the general restraint slash isolationist crowd that is the broader tenor of Trump's foreign policy community.
But yeah, I think a likely outcome is that you're not going to see the United States or Trump administration start making these statements.
And as soon as it's clear Biden's not gonna be in the White House four months from now, I'm not sure how much the Biden administration's views on this stuff really will matter.
So Molly, actually, let me take the opportunity to kind of flip the question back on you.Because a question that I have coming out of this is, is the role we think this conflict more broadly has played, or I guess will play in the coming week,
in the election day.Obviously, a lot of ballots have already been cast, but a lot more, the majority are still expected to come in the next week.
If we are right, and I think it's a good inference to say the Israelis coordinated this response with the Biden administration in part because they didn't want to do anything too chaotic, too disruptive in the final weeks of the election, because the political bite for them might be too bad if one party won or didn't.
And like I said, I'm willing to buy that argument now.I was more skeptical of it a couple of weeks ago when we talked about it. What does that say about how we think this issue could or would tip things in?
If Iran does take a response in the next two days, and Israel feels compelled to do something much more aggressively, and the fact that we're still seeing Gaza and Beirut military operations continue and escalate and expand in a way that actually the Biden administration has begun to call out and raise objections to Amos Hochstein, who's been kind of the lead point person on Lebanon and Beirut,
said some pretty stunning things about Israeli military operations, specifically in relation to Beirut, not Southern Lebanon, but raising them and saying, essentially, they've gone too far, which, again, is a really, really strong statement, not something we've seen out of this administration, except in the last few months as this conflict has gotten to a point they're less comfortable with.
What is the domestic calculus of all this?How does it enter into the Biden-Harris-Trump choices people are making?And is there a risk it will have more ramification if something does spike up?
Yeah, it's a good question.And I don't know, I don't know the degree to which anything in particular that happens in the next six days is going to sort of affects the outcome of US domestic elections.
So, you know, if something happened tomorrow, I don't know that that's gonna change people's minds.I will say that we generally think that kind of foreign policy is less relevant in the decision-making of individual voters in the United States.
I think the ongoing conflict in the region, particularly in Gaza, is a little bit of an exception to that.And I do think that particularly in some communities with very large Muslim American populations.
So you see this in Michigan in particular, where kind of not so much like what has happened over the last week, but what has happened over the last 13 months does possibly stand to, if not be determinative in the outcome of the election, does stand to
affect people's votes in a way that, again, we just don't generally think most foreign policy questions do.I'll also note that this cuts in the other direction in some communities, particularly in upstate New York that have very large
Orthodox Jewish populations.Particularly the farther you drill down, you can find examples where this could matter.
But again, I don't know that it's really anything that's going to happen in the next six days as much as it is what's happened in the last 13 months.
Speaking of some mixed messages being sent and received by the United States and its allies, let's go to some mixed messages being sent and received by some partners of the United States and some rivals of the United States.
The Wall Street Journal published a real, real barnstormer of a story this past week laying out in a fair amount of detail, somewhat surprising amount of detail,
communications that industrialist Elon Musk, billionaire owner, of course, of the X slash Twitter platform of Tesla, of SpaceX, perhaps more relevantly from a national security perspective, has been engaging in a range of communications with senior Russian officials and Vladimir Putin himself, at one point may well have
received a request through Putin from China, or at least on behalf of China, to not activate Starlink over Taiwan, an area where Starlink has still been forthcoming, although the article notes there are maybe domestic legal reasons in Taiwan why Starlink hasn't been able to operate there as of yet.
and generally has maintained a level of communications far above what we knew.
We knew that there had been some sort of communications between Putin and Trump in 2022 around Ukraine, direct or indirect, but there was this well reported stories at the time about concerns that Musk had declined to activate Starlink to support Ukrainian military operations against Crimea.
for a variety of reasons that there had been some sort of communication then.
But this goes into a much higher level of detail, entails and reflects a much denser degree of communication, although it's worth noting Musk has officially denied that these are taking place, as have the Russians.
And all around, it's just a really wild type of exchanges that, if verified in the Wall Street Journal, firmly found it credible enough to publish and appears to have multiple sources confirming big parts of it.
is a pretty dramatic step for somebody who leads up a major national security partner of the United States, meaning Starlink, to be taking.
So Alan, you and I recorded what may be the worst timed mini podcast in lawfare history that we did for our Patreon subscribers, a short mini podcast about what to do about Elon, to what extent he is a national security risk, and what the country can do about him if it proves that he is.
And we released that, I think, the day before this story broke.And obviously, this story is a big amplifier there. I'll turn the stage over to you first.Tell us, does this change your assessment?
Maybe give us a sense of what your assessment was and how it changes in light of these revelations if they prove to be accurate.
Yeah, so, I mean, my assessment, as is always my case with all things Elon, is very complicated because I think he contains multitudes and I don't want to be sort of pigeonholed into being either a Musk fanboy or a sort of reflexive Musk hater.
I mean, my short version in the mini-pod and, you know, despite it being poorly timed, I thought it was a great conversation and you should all become material supporters so you can listen to our mini-pods and suggest questions for future mini-pods.
was that on the one hand, Musk is actually a huge national security asset because things like Starlink, things like SpaceX, even things like Tesla, which is really amplifying the electric battery industry in the United States, which is a huge geostrategic advantage for us.
He is, to use a very old-fashioned term, a very, I think, impressive industrialist, and that's actually really important.And so that and the fact that he flies NASA and puts all of DOD's satellites into space, that's a huge national security asset.
My main concern about Musk was actually on the fact that he has supported Donald Trump.He has turned X into this cesspool of misinformation.So my concern about Musk was more about his potentially malign influence on American democracy.
And I did make some noises about how it's not that great to have so many of our national security assets in the hands of one company.But that was not my main concern.
Obviously, the Wall Street Journal article takes that concern and amplifies it massively. But I guess, and so whatever my views were as to the level of Musk's national security threat, I will increase them by 20%.I don't know.
It's hard to know how much to move the needle exactly.But I'm definitely more concerned than I was before.
But I still want to say that on this side of the analysis, which is to say the national security concerns that might stem from Musk the industrialist rather than Musk the unhinged-based ex-owner who is concerned about the woke mind virus.
I still find it hard to really blame Musk for this exactly.
Look, at the end of the day, if you're going to have satellites in space, if you're going to run a private company that puts satellites in space, you are going to have to talk to world leaders, and you're going to have to deal with what they want.
Now, that doesn't mean that I'm excusing Musk's actions if they are helping Russia or China, but I think that this is more downstream of the fact that
The United States government has lost the ability to be agile and nimble and do impressive things like be able to build reusable rockets, or be able to put a fleet of satellites in low Earth orbit to provide internet access around the world.
It's not Musk's fault that the US government has lost the ability to build its own rockets.Now, again, this is not to excuse what Musk may or may not do with respect to requests from China and Russia.
And it's certainly not to say that it's a good thing that Musk continues to have a security clearance.And we should get into that.But at the end of the day, the solution for this is to
make sure that the government is in charge of these incredibly important national security assets.And the government should just do that.Now, there are reasons the government can't do that, right?
Or the government, you know, there are reasons like that why NASA and DOD have become so risk averse.
It's because, you know, if a Musk rocket blows up on the launch pad, everyone says, wow, good for Musk for being, you know, really aggressive and being willing to have a bunch of his rockets blow up before the rockets work.
If a rocket blows up on a NASA launch pad, there's this endless you know, set of recriminations and investigations from Congress and mockery and stuff like that, which makes, you know, the government super risk averse.
But I think we should not, in our sort of love of all things Musk, and when I say love, I mean, in our love of talking about him constantly, whether pro or con, we should not lose track of, I think, what the bigger problem is, which is that it took Musk to build a reusable rocket when NASA could have done it too, had they been appropriately motivated and incentivized to do so.
And I will just say, provided with sufficient resources by the fine individuals who occupy seats in the United States Congress.I mean, I just think this is a really important point.
And while, Alan, you separated a little bit, like, Musk the industrialist and Musk the I don't even know what word I want to use to describe him.
You can just say crazy person, Molly.I know that's what you're thinking.You can just say it.Musk the man.
Musk the man.Musk the person who makes questionable choices.
Guys, we clearly should have called this segment Elon's Musk.How did we miss this?Scott, with all due respect.I think I've used that one before, unfortunately.
While Alan separated those two pieces a little bit, I actually think it's important to unite them under the framing of this question because it is the fact that the US government has gotten itself into a place where it is basically required to use private sector expertise to do things like build reusable rockets and build the technology that allows for, you know,
internet satellites in low Earth orbit and all the other things that, and the domestic battery production stuff, all that stuff.The fact that the US government created that situation and then is allowing it to be exploited by someone with like
many reprehensible views on lots of other issues.That is the problem, or at least as I see it, is that in a world where we didn't need to turn to the private sector in the same way, Musk would still have these reprehensible views.
He could still buy X, he could still do all the other bad stuff he's doing, but he wouldn't be doing it with the imprimatur of the US government behind him because the government itself would be doing those things.
I also feel like we need – there's a little bit of a factual, I think, accounting that we need to take into account when we evaluate this. Private actors dominate every aspect of US national security.This is not a new phenomenon.
When we go to war, we rely upon Raytheon and Boeing to build weapons and missiles.We rely upon the steel industry to produce steel.
We rely upon a number of foreign governments and foreign countries to provide a lot of core essential resources, American farmers to feed soldiers.
We have a capitalist society, and that is how we produce and build anything, certainly anything at the scale of you know, war industry or national security industry that we need.So I don't think SpaceX is actually that different in that regard.
It's a little different in space, but like, that's mostly because we just stopped caring about space for the last 40 years, right?Or at least Congress did, and most presidents did.
And now it's newly around, and Musk has an early actor advantage in that it is the private sector actor best positioned to provide these services we want.
But there are competitors, and there are competitors, you know, trying to build up, whether it's Boeing or What is it, Blue Sky, which is Jeff Bezos' thing?Blue Origin.Blue Origin.Thank you.I'm sorry.Blue Sky is a social media app.Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, which may buy out Boeing's Starliner line of production, at least according to some media reports recently.There are other actors kind of up in the wings. And the US government has a lot of legal tools for managing this.
This is where the Defense Production Act comes from.This is where, to some extent, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act comes from.
There are all these statutory and regulatory tools the executive branch, with cooperation from Congress, can enact.
And there's even more Congress could bring in, which we're seeing them beginning to do in certain industries, particularly sensitive industries around telecommunications.
where China is particularly involved in artificial intelligence, like even more restrictions they can put to give regulatory authority over these key industries, even though they are dominated by these private actors.
The question to me, and this is one thing this story really brings to the fore that maybe I wish I'd emphasized more in our prior conversation, Alan, is like,
there's a delta between implementing those measures, which are politically costly, legally complicated, and kind of extreme measures, and when a national security threat might happen.
And the assumption is, yeah, like we can, if we need to essentially nationalize or exercise a lot of federal control over key strategic industries, that doesn't mean national security can't be compromised up into the point where we assert that control if there's not sufficient
you know, reliability and credibility with private sector partners.I think that raised a question with Elon.
The thing that's weird about Elon is that he's just personally mercurial and personally involved with these companies in a way that no individual is with Raytheon, Boeing, or any of these other companies.
They're closely held companies, and he is eclectic enough to, like, stick his nose into things and to do erratic, weird things like this.
And that makes his story, and particularly his continued possession of a security clearance, if these facts seem to be true and they weren't reported to authorities, maybe they were and they're okay with it, that's possible too.
Because, yes, the United States government could at some point, if it needs to, frankly, nationalize SpaceX or compel SpaceX to prioritize the services it provides to the US government under the DPA.It absolutely could.
And SpaceX probably would have to go along with that.
But until you reach that measure, there's lots of damage Elon can do in the meantime about providing information, all the other things that we usually worry about in day-to-day national security, and why we have security clearances and protective measures like that.
Ben, I saw you both nod and frown as I was speaking.So what parts of that do you agree with and what parts do you not agree with?
So I agree with all of it, but I want to take it a step further, which is to say I disagree with Alan completely.There is no Elon, the industrialist problem for all the reasons that Scott says.There is an Elon, the mercurial crazy person problem.
And anytime you have somebody who is providing essential defense services to the United States government, who is secretly having serial conversations with Vladimir Putin, you've got a serious question.
And that raises a couple of factual questions that I don't think we know the answer to.One, as Scott alluded to, is whether in fact these were undisclosed conversations, in which case, you know, that's a big problem.
Or are they conversations that, you know, the US government was aware of and doesn't have a problem with, in which case it's a non-problem.
But I don't think it's a problem that the United States has mostly gotten out of the putting satellites in orbit business.We're focused mostly on sending robots to Mars, and we have a question about how much we want to spend on space.
stuff, as Molly points out.And it's fine, it seems to me, if the private sector steps up and we do it in a set of contractual relations with the private sector.
It is not fine if the private sector actor who does that is secretly working for the Russians or secretly working at cross purposes with U.S.foreign policy.This is not a new problem.
We had some sort of similar, you know, who is he really questions about Howard Hughes once upon a time, though they were, he was so reclusive that I don't think there was a fear of foreign influence.
But there was a, is he a madman question, the answer to which was yes. It happens sometimes, but I don't think the problem is the structure of the relationship.I think the problem is that this individual wants to be a big player in U.S.
domestic politics on behalf of some pretty awful ideas, and that he is consorting with a major political candidate on whom he is spending a lot of money. and that along the way, he is...
also consorting with one of our principal geopolitical adversaries.
And I just want clarity about what the terms of that latter relationship are, and ask the question, is this a situation that is in the national security interests of the United States?And if it's not, I don't think we necessarily have to nationalize
SpaceX, but we do have to use the various authorities that Scott describes to get the situation under control.
So I guess I'm, I think I agree with you.And so I'm not sure where our disagreement is because.
Well, the disagreement is you seem to think there were two separate problems.One is, you know.
Industrialist, one is crazy.
One is the man.And I'm saying, I actually don't think there really is an Elon, the industrialist problem.There is only an Elon, the man problem.
Okay, so then I think I do disagree with you because imagine a world in which Elon is just, you know, he's a great industrious and he has the most boring political opinions and doesn't do any of this sort of stuff, right?
I still think there would be a problem because these things that he's created have externalities.So imagine a situation in which Elon owns Starlink, and Elon owns whatever.He still owns Tesla, but none of this Twitter stuff exists.
You could still find himself in a position where, let's say, he has contracts with China for one part of his business.And because of that, he is open to pressure.
Again, not for ideological reasons, just on a purely bottom line basis for deactivating Starlink Taiwan or you could run the same play in Russia.
I mean, that that that is an Elon, the industrialist problem, and that is totally separate from whatever his malign democratic effects might be.
Right.But this is a problem we deal with all the time, you know, and we have these companies, defense contractors,
contractors that do business with the intelligence community, that we basically say, hey, maybe you don't do that, those China contracts, general dynamics, Raytheon.And to the extent that they're not willing to do that stuff,
and to play ball that inhibits their value as a government contractor and that, you know, affects their viability and in that like we have a framework in which we deal with that problem.
It only doesn't work when the guy is willing, you know, when the guy is so flamboyantly pardon me, asshole-ish that he's, you know, that he plays the game in a completely different fashion than everybody else does.
Yeah.So look, I will, I will accept the point that there's a framework for dealing with this, but I don't know if we're actually using that framework right now with Elon's companies.And that seems like a problem.
This itself is a second order capacity problem.When I was talking about capacity problems before, I was talking about forced order problems in terms of, does the US government still build things that go into space?
But then when Scott was talking about the myriad of ways that the US government relies on, contractors do lots of things.And yes, there are mechanisms in place to try and monitor those processes.But are we resourcing those mechanisms well enough?
And this, I think, gets to the point that Alan was just making.And whether or not that is happening in the context of Musk, I don't know.But that is sort of also a concern.And then I will also note that
we are heading into an election next week where the country might select Donald Trump as the next president who throws all of this, both his personal relationship with Elon and his relationship towards the infrastructure of the federal government and its ability to do things in a responsible and unbiased way, throws that all into question.
And so I think as we're having this conversation, we can't have it in isolation.And here is a place where I will say that we have to keep thinking about the election. We can't have it in isolation from that.
And the other aspect of this, I do think really this raises for me, and this is a very wonky point, and I will invite listeners actually, if you know people have written about this, because I think it's a really interesting area that is kind of underexplored, is this question of corporate structure, right?
We're not relying on the man Elon. We're relying on these organizations that he's built.And they are governed, in this case, because of his preferences by him individually.And that's like the big source of the concern.
There are other crazy industrialists with crazy political views who we may agree with, may not agree with. you know, who very well might choose to leverage their industrial power in a particular direction.
But most, they can't do that with most companies, which they control, because they very rarely are like personally owned, right?Usually they have boards that they have to answer to and stockholders because they're publicly traded.
So maybe there is an argument here to say, like, we need to look at corporate structure when we think about government contracting partners in the national security space more than we do.
I'm not sure that actually enters into the traditional calculus to saying who's an eligible U.S.government contracting partner.Ironically, one place it comes into play a lot is when we review – we mean the U.S.
government – review foreign investment in the United States, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States process, the CFIUS process.
There, corporate structure is actually one of the big variables we look at and say, okay, does this mitigate concerns that this foreign actor will have access to sensitive information because it's adequately insulated by corporate structure?
actually less true now than it was like five or ten years ago because of Chinese manipulation concerns, but it's still kind of true.
So I wonder whether that same logic doesn't have a role domestically as well, and that's one way to reconcile this industry versus industrialist sort of conundrum.If listeners know anyone who's writing on this, send them my way.I want to read it.
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Well, speaking of billionaires and politics, let us go to the other billionaire whose choices have put him under a lot of heat.In some weird ways, more heat than Elon Musk for talking to Vladimir Putin, which might say something about this moment.
Who also owns a space company while we're making the video.
Who also owns a space company, which is also talking to former President Trump in recent weeks, which has come out.What is with these space billionaires?I'd say it's a boom industry, I'm telling you guys.That brings us to Jeff Bezos, of course,
who is not only the founder and owner of Amazon, founder and owner of Blue Origin, I believe he's a founder, but at least the owner of Blue Origin, and also the owner but not founder of the Washington Post for the last 10 plus years.
He kicked off a really, really monumental firestorm in the last week when he apparently, I think it's been confirmed at this point, squashed what was going to be an editorial by the editorial board of the Washington Post endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
Surprising no one, that is exactly, I think, what everyone would expect. editorial board to do.
But he quashed it and essentially said the Washington Post is not going to be endorsing presidents moving forward, not addressing other sorts of endorsements for other political offices.
This has led to a huge negative wave of reaction, including by some reports, tens of thousands of people dropping their subscriptions.Hundreds of thousands, 250,000 potentially, which could be truly
devastating to a publication that, frankly, was already deep in the red by most accounts this year and in coming years, and has been for the past several years.
And frankly, for most of the time, Bezos has owned it, the Trump years being a weird period where it was in the black. Molly, let me start with you on this.
I'm kind of curious of your reaction as a person who follows kind of the domestic politics of this so closely.What about this move has kicked off such a firestorm of reaction?
You know, we saw the LA Times do a very similar thing and its similar billionaire owner do almost the exact same thing a week earlier or so.
That triggered some opposition, but I don't think quite the scale that we're seeing with the Post for whatever reason in terms of people unsubscribing and other measures.
Now we've seen USA Today follow in this sort of line, somewhat less surprisingly, because Gannett has always been kind of like a big media enterprise.
So not an eclectic billionaire, but nonetheless, a media enterprise that's very much trying to have it both ways and avoid pissing anyone off politically.So maybe that's an opportune moment for them to shift their policy in this regard.
But how does this question of these endorsements, A, do they even matter?How do they enter into the political process? And B, does that correspond to this sort of reaction?
Like why is this such a sensitive point for so many people to trigger such a strong reaction?
Yeah, so maybe I'll separate those two questions.I think the question of like, do newspaper endorsements matter?Should newspapers be doing them?
If we could like abstract that question a second from this specific conversation about the Washington Post, like that's a real conversation.And I think there are arguments about sort of what the value is.People
often, not unfairly, are confused about the role of a newspaper's editorial board and how it sits in relationship to the rest of what a newspaper does.
And so I think we could have a good faith conversation about, should editorial boards do this sort of thing?Should editorial boards exist?We could talk about all of that.And Alan is shaking his head
vigorously no, I don't know, in response to which thing I said.But we should not have that conversation two weeks before the most consequential pro-social election of our lifetime.
That's a separate, distinct conversation from this conversation about what Jeff Bezos did in this particular case.And so as to kind of why this thing in particular spiraled in the way that it did, I'll say that
I think we should take a moment to realize that it spiraled, 250,000 is a big number, but it's still spiraled in sort of one segment of the population.
I don't want to downplay the importance of people who read the Washington Post, but this has been a taboo conversation among a certain set of people.But I do think part of it is because
of the particular direction that the post took itself during the Trump administration.They added that branding, democracy dies in darkness.
And they sort of positioned themselves as, again, on the journalistic side, very rightly as an outlet that was going to hold Trump administration in particular, vigorously accountable for what it was doing.
And so some of it is like, once you have tried to build your subscriber base by saying, this is what we stand for, when your owner makes a decision like this, I think that's, to me at least, that's part of why it brought on so much outrage and such a big reaction from
the actual subscribers.I'd be really curious to know more about those 250,000 people.There are lots of conversations we could have on the Washington Post.
I personally would be happy to have one about the decline of its local news coverage because it is my local newspaper in addition to being one of the nation's leading national newspapers.
Lots of things to talk about, but I think that once you leaned into this idea that you were going to be a journalistic
bulk work against particularly President Trump's tendencies, then when your owner does something like this, then these are the consequences.
I think that's a useful divide to have, because that really hits how I feel about this issue, my instincts are, right?
I think if Bezos had done something like this six months or a year ago, probably a year ago, probably more than six months ago, I'd be much more sympathetic to it as a general policy.
I think when you do something like this a week out from election, clearly did not really communicate it very well to the editorial board.
or anyone else at the Washington Post or anywhere else, doesn't really, purely been solidly consulted other than this management team that he has installed at the Washington Post that's new and itself was a controversy in a variety of regards in the last few months.
There's a process and a procedural foul and a messaging foul that's really bad.And Bezos is continuing to dig himself into.
He released a statement at the Washington Post that I actually thought says a lot of things I like, but is flinty and tone deaf and highly defensive and really doesn't acknowledge, hey, this would be a really stupid thing for me to do at this particular moment.
It sends all the wrong messages.It doesn't really try and adjust it.It's kind of a defense of this as a broad principle and only does like a sentence conceding maybe my timing wasn't great. So we can tackle those two things separately.
I don't know if anybody wants to defend his timing on this, to say like, is this the sort of thing that he should have done at this stage?And I agree, that's a big part of the reaction, I think.
But maybe let's take a step back then and say, unless somebody wants to jump in to defend that, and say, what is the value of this as a policy generally if it were implemented at a different time a year ago, two years ago, when it doesn't have this political valence?
How should we think about that?And then also, how does that maybe inform the right remedy that people who are disgruntled with what Bezos has done here should be approaching the post?
Ben, let me start with you on this because you, of course, are a veteran of the Washington Post editorial board.That's where you really kind of cut your teeth for a big part of your kind of formative part of your career.
I think it's fair to say, sharpen them into, you know, rodent-like incisors across the board.
That's really not like a visual image that I need.
He's like a Game of Thrones villain, basically, that's Benjamin Winnis of Ars.That's fine.It's a really formative experience for you.
I think you and I have very different instincts about the usefulness of editorial boards, but let me hand it over to you to say – and the editorial function of editorial boards, I should say, like the writing, the institutional editorial.
I'm not sure we do.We might not now.I think we've talked about it in the past and had a different perspective, but I want to know where you see it falling at this point.
I would say, historically, they have played a very important function, which is, you know, up until the advent of the World Wide Web, the principal means of large numbers of people getting information and commentary was a lot of newspaper that got thrown at their doors in the morning.
And the institutional voice of the paper
And the Washington Post was unique among national newspapers in getting some awesome percentage of the total households in the DC metropolitan area literally had a Washington Post thrown at them in the morning.
It was way higher than anywhere else in the country.And that institutional voice on the left-hand side of the editorial page, of which you know, I wrote probably 2,000 editorials over the course of my years there, or something like that.
I have no idea what the precise number was, but those actually reached a very large number of people, and they were particularly for a paper like The Post, which had a kind of
centrist, slightly left of center orientation, but was, you know, philosophically very diverse on foreign policy issues.You know, it carried a real institutional heft.And we actually, so
We used to spend a lot of time on endorsements, not really so much on presidential endorsements because people form their own impressions.But, you know, one of the, Molly mentioned the local coverage.
We used to interview every local candidate who was running for office and we would actually do the work on behalf, it was a huge amount of work for every city council office, every, county executive, county boards, local congress races.
This was just an enormous investment in time on the part of the board in order so that everybody in the DC metro area could have the benefit of, okay, We know your ballot's complicated.We went through and did the work of a voter.
And here, let us show our work and explain why we think these are the right.So these are the endorsements that I think are really important.I don't think the editorial board
in a world in which you have the whole world of opinion at your fingertips, has the same function today that it had 20 years ago or 30 years ago.It doesn't have the same institutional heft.And frankly,
When a newspaper is owned by Jeff Bezos, it does not have the same moral authority to a local community than it has when it's owned by the Graham family, which was a family that meant something to the Washington, D.C.metropolitan area.It was local.
It was the family that had built the paper into what it is. and it is the family that had guided it through, in sequence, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.I'm not a particular enthusiast of the concept of an editorial page anymore.
I am a particular enthusiast of the historic role of the Washington Post editorial page, to which Jeff Bezos did a lot of violence the last week, and you see that in the resignations that have happened there.
from some, you know, illustrious opinion writers.You see that in the voice of dissent from the principal, many of the principal Washington Post columnists, and you see it in
the mocking tone that Alexandra Petri adopted in her own, I thought, superb column on the subject, which was headlined something like, It Falls to Me, the Humor Writer to Endorse Kamala Harris.And
Look, this was handled in a completely dreadful fashion.The substance of it is also dreadful, and the substance is Donald Trump may be elected next week, and owning the Washington Post is a big pain in my ass, and I don't want to have to
deal with the complexities that it adds for my other businesses.And that's basically what Bezos said in his editorial, in his op-ed, explaining himself.And I think that is a fine way for
a businessman to feel, but then just don't own the Washington Post.There's a lot of other ways for a person of that many billions of dollar net worth to have a hobby.The Washington Post shouldn't be a plaything.
Can I ask one follow-up to that, Ben?I think this really gets at a core assumption here, is that a lot of people see what's happening here as representative of Bezos being willing to capitulate on a whole range of Washington Post activities.
And that's a big question I have.So Jeff Stein, an economics reporter, did, I think, a really valuable tweet thread.
And we've seen a lot of these come out from Washington Post reporters and other parts of the Washington Post say, essentially, look, we still do really important work and have been allowed to do really important work under Bezos ownership.
And I don't think any of them are defending what Bezos did in this case, again, at least on the procedural and timing and process questions, if maybe the substance as well.
But they drive home the point saying, this is actually not representative of our experience under Bezos and at the Post generally for whatever period they've been there.
I think Jeff said he's been there seven or eight years, which sounds about right to me.You're both a former Washington Post veteran and a lifelong reader.I'm sure as a DC area native, I'm a lifelong reader as well.
You know, my impression is that I think the Washington Post has actually had still exceptionally good and frankly often courageous coverage, including under Bezos' ownership.I'd be a lot worried, more worried if we saw actual genuine interference.
And in some ways, like some of the appointments of the leadership at the Post in the newsroom, which I know have been their own source of controversy in the last couple of months, in some ways would be more concerning to me than something dealing with the editorial board, because I think the newsroom function is really essentially the most essential part of what the Post does.
Am I wrong on that?Do you have a sense that the newsroom is being compromised, or could this be indicative of there being more compromising in the newsroom?And I guess, what will the warning signs be if that happens?
So I trust the staff of the paper to sound the alarm if that happens.And look, I don't even assume this presages systematic interference of the work of the editorial board.
You know, you have not seen mass resignations, though you have seen some from the editorial board, most notably David Hoffman, who received his Pulitzer last week for editorials and resigned on Monday, I think.
And so, you know, look, it is possible that you forbid endorsements and you don't interfere beyond that. So I don't want to reduce to the most dreadful outcome.I do think
if you ask, is somebody who interferes like this in a heavy-handed way with gross misunderstanding of what the staff and the readership expect in terms of his management, is that person more likely to make future stupid mistakes of this type?
or then somebody who has a defter sense of the paper?I think the answer to that is yes.Does it create a major crisis of confidence in the paper on its own?Yes.10% of the subscriber base has cancelled their subscription.So,
and you've seen some talent flight as a result of this alone.And so, you know, with all newspapers right now, you're one push away from pushing them into their death spirals.
And I am not gonna say that this is the thing that will finish off the Washington Post, but am I concerned that this could be the thing that sends the Post into a spiral that's very hard for it to come out of?Yeah, I am.
Yeah, I think the big question for me, in addition to the ones that Ben raises, is what are the actual financial consequences of this for the Post?So $250,000 is a big number.
David Folkenflik at NPR, the NPR media reporter, has been doing really good reporting on this. has estimated that that could cost the paper $10 million a year.
Then what does that mean for the ability, separate from the question of would Bezos intervene on the news side to tell journalists not to cover certain stories, etc., or work through the newsroom leadership to tell folks not to write about certain things?
take certain angles on coverage, but just do they have the resources that they need to do the kind of work that wins the Pulitzers?
And how do you sustain that if you start to lose the trust of readers, particularly readers who you brought in because you had staked out this position as the sort of paper that was going to prevent democracy from dying in darkness?
This adds to another part of this equation that I think we have to bear in mind, which is that the post for most of the time Bezos has owned it has been a losing enterprise.
And most newspapers are these days, the Trump years being like a weird exception where we have media come up.And we're in this vicious cycle where doing media and reporting right is very expensive, but it's really hard to make profitable.
And those companies we saw do try and make profitable, like Gannett who owns USA Today, right?Like you end up with news that's much more of a lowest common denominator than I think most people would say is ideal.
And so you have small kind of independent shops like Lafayette, like other groups that can do good and important work, but just aren't resourced and aren't staffed at the level to do the sort of reporting that a major newspaper can do and will never be there, I don't think.
I don't think there's a good decentralized way to do it.So is there an alternative to Jeff Bezos?
Like, when you have key public institutions that cannot survive in a capitalist economy, is there any alternative to having a billionaire subsidize them?Because I'm kind of not sure there is, at least in the short term.
In that sense, I think Bezos has actually done a pretty big public service in keeping the Post as well resourced as he has.But I'm not sure what the alternative would be.I don't know if there's a more benevolent billionaire out there.
and I hope this doesn't deter him from that sort of position.
In the future, maybe that means we need to explore things like more nonprofit newsrooms and endowments and things like that, but Lord knows those all start with somebody willing to write a very, very large check.
And so I just don't know if there's a way to get 100% out of this trap, although hopefully one day maybe you can insulate the news functions more from the corporate control.
Again, maybe it comes back to corporate structure, just like with the Musk questions.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about Bezos's leadership of the Post.On the one hand, look, Don Graham sold the paper to him because he was in a position to be a trustee leader of it.
And for the most part, most of the time he has done that, including, by the way, in matters that relate to coverage of his other businesses.So in important ways, he has been exemplary.He has also invested a great deal.
The Post was on a hiring spree for a while, particularly during the Trump administration.It did some great journalism.It continues to employ a lot of great journalists.
And so I don't want to say that Jeff Bezos is, you know, a demon or that he has not had positive impact.I will say that he took a major step
to destroy an important institution, the Washington Post editorial page, and that it was, it is a step from which this, that page, which is different from other editorial pages around the country and being something of a most, mostly a kind of independent little think tank that is housed in the Washington Post.
and has you know played a role that is different and i would say better than that of the new york times or the wall street journal or the la times or the chicago tribune it has really done a lot of good and important stuff and i don't know that
it will recover from this, and I think that's bad.And so I'm happy to praise what he has done well and criticize what he's done badly, and I don't think there really is an alternative other than what the New York Times is doing.
which is radical experimentation and investment in diversifying areas from cooking to games to sports stuff, which is a different experiment.It's as a business matter, much more successful than what the post is doing.
So people look, people are trying different things.And one of the things that people are trying in different ways, you know, from the bulwark
to in a very different way, lawfare involves, you know, a kind of reader investment that is a different ask from what the Washington Post does.So we do it in a nonprofit model.
I would be remiss if I didn't say become a material supporter of lawfare, because that's how we do this.
Look, it's a very, very hard problem how to bring high quality information to people at the level that serious journalists, serious scholars want to do it, how to finance that.No one has really figured it out.
And we're all working on different models.And the Bezos model is a model with positives and negatives.
Well, that brings us to the end of our time together this week.But this would not be rational security if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come.Alan, what do you have for us this week?
So I have fallen deeper into my science fiction rabbit hole.And I'm trying to go back to the classics, because there's this kind of golden age of science fiction from the 70s and 80s that's very, very good still.
And so I have inhaled the first two books of Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos over the last two weeks, and now- So good. Oh, so good.
Now my wife is reading it and it's so much fun to sit next to her while she reads it because every 30 pages she just goes, oh my God.So it's really, it's extremely fun.The world building is amazing.
It's just, it's just, it's, the writing is beautiful.It is wild.The reveals are fabulous.So yeah, at the very least everyone should read.
I think you have to, I mean, if you're gonna read the first book, you have to read the second book because it's really one, 1300-page book that was obviously just divided because the publisher didn't want to publish a 1300-page book.
But yeah, at the very least, read the first two.Scott, have you read all four?Because I'm going to – I want to read them all.I have read all four at least three times.
If you count listening to the audiobook, I've done at least three times.Cool, cool.So you're saying it's worth reading three and four too?I will agree.
I think Hyperion is structurally the hardest to get through because it's so consciously modeled on Canterbury Tales.And so it ends up with a slightly like less narrative-driven structure that I found slightly less appealing.
So I like when he gets away from that structure.
I actually loved the structure.I love the Canterbury Tales structure of it.I think the world building that it allows is so, so, so good.
I like the intermingled chapters, kind of like Game of Thrones-y, where you have 10 different plots that are interwoven.But because of the way he's structuring it, modern Canterbury Tales are not that interwoven.They just intersect towards the end.
So he doesn't stick to that structure later in a way that I think lends itself even more to the world building.So all phenomenal reads, really, really great.
Bradley Cooper owns the rights and has been talking about making a movie for five or six years now.What?
How would you make that movie though?
I agree.But Bradley Cooper, the guy's got an eye.I don't know, man.I like it.
Yeah.No, it's got to be a... I don't think it could be a movie, but what it could be is a 12-part, 20-hour miniseries, but then it has to end, because it's one amazing story.
I agree.We'll see what happens to it, but I have my eye out on that.Molly, what do you have for us this week?
So I actually have, as my object lesson, a piece of Washington Post journalism.
So the Washington Post has been doing a series where they commissioned writers, quite prominent writers, folks like, actually I should say not just writers, writers and creators of other kinds, so folks like Dave Eggers and Geraldine Brooks, to write profiles of individual civil servants in the federal service to sort of contemplate questions about
the role of the civil service, what amazing things nameless government bureaucrats do for the country.It's just called sort of who is government.
And today's Dispatch in this series is actually sort of a 20-minute short film by W. Kamau Bell about a paralegal in the antitrust division at the Department of Justice who is also one of my former students. And it was a delight to see it.
It was a delight to see what she is up to.So that is my personal investment in this particular dispatch in the series.But the whole series is really worth a read or watch across the various components.
It was sort of done somewhat in partnership with the great folks at the Partnership for Public Service.And so I really commend the whole thing to all of you, but especially today's piece.
It's a phenomenal series.I'm mostly just frustrated the State Department didn't make the cut somehow.It's one federal agency they didn't get, but that's okay.We'll let that one slide.
For my object lesson this week, I think it's a little bit trite to encourage people to get out to vote the week before Election Day, so I'm not going to do that, although probably everyone should go out and vote.
I'm going to say... I will do that.That's not trite.There we go.People should vote.
I'm about to do something maybe even more trite, so that's why I preface it that way.
People should get out and vote, but I'm going to encourage you all as we get close to election day to do something that I've tried to do every election day with most success, the least I've been living in the country for the last 20 years or so now, which is to go out and actually volunteer a campaign for a day or two.
And frankly, the best way to do it is in your community is good, in your community is important, but some of the most
insightful and rewarding experience I've had is when I've traveled to go somewhere else and spend a few solid days campaigning, which I am going to be doing in the next few days with the blissful forbearance of my wife, who's been watching our two small children.
This is an incredibly huge, diverse country, and we sometimes have trouble understanding or seeing how big parts of the rest of the country live.
And I have never gotten more windows into that than when I volunteered for various campaigns going around knocking on doors. It is sometimes a little awkward experience, sometimes be a little challenging.
But frankly, on the net, I found it incredibly rewarding, heartening about our democracy, heartening about our country.Even when elections don't go your way, I think it's a good thing to do.
So whoever you're supporting, whatever candidate you're supporting, however you feel about the election, try and maybe take a couple hours or a day or two out and go out and knock on some doors in coordination with the local campaign for local candidate, national candidate, whatever.
and engage with your fellow citizens in a way that we don't get to do that often, because it's become really an essential part of how I think about how I engage with our country and our political process.
I think it's something that I think more people should take advantage of.So my object lesson is to encourage you to go out and do it in these last few days before the election.Ben, what do you have for us?
Well, as the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, as Alexandra Petrie would say, it falls to me.501c3.To introduce you to our forthcoming podcast.There we go.Pulled out of that nose dive.
You don't usually hear Scott pull out his general counsel voice, but that was a moment.
I'm just pointing out to you that in the chat, you will find that I shared the link to this before this object lesson began, and even labeled it as my object lesson.So this was just an introduction.
It was a reference to the earlier conversation by way of introducing my object lesson.I was not threatening to make a political endorsement.
For the last nearly nine months, a small team of law fairers led by Anastasia Lapatina, who has been on Rational Security a couple of times, Tyler McBrien, who you all know, and our estimable colleague at Goat Rodeo, Max Johnston, have been working on a podcast narrative history of
U.S.-Ukrainian post-Soviet relations.The teaser for the series is now available.I have shared it in the show notes as well as on the chat.It is not an endorsement of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.
In fact, the amount of work they have done is truly awesome. and the quality of the work is incredible.And so check out the trailer.This is gonna be our next Lawfare Presents series.
Check it out, and we will be releasing the first episodes of this in January sometime, and I could not be more excited about it.
I will say I had a very small role in the initial conception of this idea, and it's gone in such a wonderful direction.
It was, and then I had a baby, and I backed out entirely and did absolutely no work to support it.But I'm thrilled at the way it's come out through no involvement on my part whatsoever.
It's absolutely phenomenal, the snippet that we've seen and the other bits I've seen.If you all missed our first – not our first one – our last edited podcast series, Allies, that's kind of of this model, this kind of contained
So the aftermath is a similar mode, actually, I guess, that kind of was interspersed around it.It's some of our best work when we get these series together, and I think this one may leave the other ones, which I think are phenomenal, in its dust.
So definitely check it out, and it's incredibly relevant for all the things we've been talking about regarding Ukraine here on the podcast and elsewhere on Lawfare for the last several years.
And with that, that brings us to the end of this week's episode.
Rational Security is, of course, a production of Lawfare, so be sure to visit us at lawfaremedia.org for our show page with links to past episodes, for written work, and the written work for other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series, including
Escalation coming soon.And be sure to follow us on Twitter or X at RTL security and be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening.
Also sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits.For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org slash support.
Our audio engineer and producer this week was Noam Ozband of Goat Rodeo, and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan.We are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Pacha.
On behalf of my special guests, Alan, Ben, and Molly, I am Scott R. Anderson, and we will talk to you next week.Till then, goodbye.
