Xi Jinping comes to Washington, the UN struggles for relevancy, and the Russian parliamentary elections turn out exactly as expected.

Tommy and Ben break down Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to Washington since 2015, including Trump’s personal airport greeting, and what leverage China has on everything from AI to rare earths to Iran.

Then a new list of disturbing AI headlines: a Bloomberg investigation on how AI-assisted targeting contributed to the US strike on an Iranian elementary school, a CNN report on how AI nearly triggered a war with China, and the Israeli election is being flooded with AI-generated slop. It's also UN General Assembly week in New York, where Trump met with Zohran Mamdani, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and threatened Iran.

The Houthis keep expanding their military campaign in Yemen, attacking Riyadh and Saudi oil facilities, and Trump can't seem to decide whether to help the Saudis or not. Russian parliamentary elections are setting Vladimir Putin’s party up for its largest majority ever.

The far-right AfD wins again in two more German regional elections, and Ben and Tommy give some thoughts on Trump’s arch and the Pentagon’s height and weight requirements. At the end of the show Ben speaks to Maher Bitar, executive director of National Security Action, about new polling that reveals why foreign policy is on the ballot in the midterms.

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The Houthis seize control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Trump rolls a grenade into Northern Ireland's politics, and a Russian oligarch funds Don Jr.'s wedding.

Tommy and Ben break down some of the most alarming expansions of the Iran war: Houthi rebels have captured roughly 80 miles of Yemen's Red Sea coastline, Iranian-backed militants have blown up a Saudi pipeline in Iraq, and Iran's targeting has improved thanks to Chinese satellite imagery.

An exclusive first look at a new Eurasia Group poll finds the Iran war's approval sitting at 34% nationally, with disapproval among independents jumping 13 points. Then Trump visits his Irish golf course on the taxpayer's dime and casually upends decades of US policy on Northern Ireland in an impromptu press conference. This week also brings multiple stories of brazen grift: ProPublica reports that a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for portions of Don Jr.'s Bahamas wedding, and The New Yorker does a deep dive on how much Jared Kushner’s diplomacy is colored by his personal financial motives.

And finally, a Russian drone strikes a Ukrainian train station minutes after trains carrying the national security advisors of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy passed through. At the end of the show, Tommy speaks to Hamza Chaudhry from the Future of Life Institute about the crazy last week in AI, how to judge tech leaders’ calls for a slowdown in development, and what to expect from Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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The far right gets a huge win in Germany, Serbia celebrates a war criminal, and Nigel Farage gets caught on camera breaking the law.

Tommy and Ben dig into the ultra-right-wing AfD party's historic results in a regional election, what drove it, what it would mean if they actually form a coalition government, and what it says about the state of European politics more broadly. Trump’s dumb and dumber team of negotiators (Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff) return from a busy weekend traveling to Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin, and their first trip to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky on a train they named the “Peace Express.”

In Serbia, convicted genocide architect Ratko Mladić is given a funeral fit for a national hero, which doesn’t bode well for the country’s pathway into the EU. The UK's new Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announces a sweeping shift in British policy toward Israeli settlements, and a bombshell Haaretz investigation reveals that Netanyahu received a direct warning from the UAE about a major Hamas attack ten days before October 7th.

There are nothing but bad updates in the fallout from the war with Iran, including tit-for-tat strikes, mass polygraph tests at the Pentagon, and the dangerous escalation of the Saudi-Houthi conflict. And finally, a Channel 4 investigation catches Nigel Farage on camera conspiring to illegally solicit foreign donations.

At the end of the show, Ben speaks to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 about what we have and haven’t learned 25 years after the 9/11 attacks.

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