US Router Ban

This week we talk about modems, WiFi, and kinda sorta bribes.We also discuss Huawei, government subsidies, and the FCC.Recommended Book: Replaceable You by Mary RoachTranscriptMany homes, those with WiFi connections to the internet, have two different devices they use to make that connectivity happen.The first is a modem, which is what connects directly to your internet service provider, often via an ethernet jack in the wall that connects to a series of cables webbed throughout your city.The second is a router, which plugs into the modem and then spreads that signal, derived from that network of city-wide cables around your home, either by splitting that single ethernet jack into multiple ethernet jacks, allowing multiple devices to plug into that network, or by creating a wireless signal, WiFi, that multiple devices can connect to wirelessly in the same way. Many routers will have both options, though in most homes and for most modern devices, WiFi tends to be the more common access point because of its convenience, these days.That WiFi signal, and the connection provided via those additional ethernet ports on the router, create what’s called a Local Area Network of devices, or LAN. This local area network allow these devices—your phone and your laptop, for instance—to connect to each other directly, but its primary role for most people is using that connection to the modem to grant these devices access the wider internet.In addition to providing that internet access and creating the Local Area Network, connecting devices on that network to each other, routers also usually provide a layer of security to those devices. This can be done via firewalls and with encryption, which is important as unprotected networks can leave the devices plugged into them vulnerable to outside attack. That means if the router is breached or in some other way exploited, a whole company’s worth of computers, or all your local devices at home, could be made part of a botnet, could be held hostage by ransomware, or could be keylogged until you provide login information for your banks or other seemingly secure accounts to whomever broke into that insufficiently protected LAN.What I’d like to talk about today is a recently announced ban on some types of routers in the US, the reasoning behind this ban, and what might happen next.—On March 23, 2026, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on the import of all new consumer-grade routers not made in the United States.This ban does not impact routers that are already on the market and in homes, so if you have one already, you’re fine. And if you’re buying an existing model, that should be fine, too.It will apply to new routers, though, and the rationale provided by the FCC with the announcement is that imported routers are a “severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt US critical infrastructure.”They also cited recent, major hacks like Salt Typhoon, saying that routers brought into the US provided a means of entry for some components of those attacks.This stated concern is similar to the one that was at the center of the Trump administration’s 2019 ban of products made by Chinese tech company Huawei in the United States. Huawei made, and still makes, all kinds of products, including consumer-grade smartphones, and high-end 5G equipment sold to telecommunications companies around the world for use in their infrastructure.The concern was that a company like Huawei might leverage its far better prices, which were partly possible because of backing from the Chinese government, to put foreign competitors out of business. From there, they could dominate these industries, while also getting their equipment deep in the telecommunications infrastructure of the US and US allies. Then, it would be relatively easy to insert spy equipment and eavesdrop on phone calls and data transmissions from phones, or to incorporate kill-switches into these grids, so if China ever needed to, for instance, distract the US and its allies while they invaded Taiwan, they could just push a button, kill the US telecommunications grid, and that would buy them some time and fog of war to do what they wanted to do without immediate repercussions; and undoing a successful invasion would be a million times more difficult than stepping in while it’s happening to prevent it.As of 2024, Huawei still controlled about a third of the global 5G market. It controlled about 27.5% back in 2019, the year it was banned in the US and in many US allied nations, so while it’s possible they could have grown even bigger than that had the ban not been implemented, they still grew following its implementation.Chinese companies currently control about 60% of the US router market, and it’s likely the local, US market will shift, reorienting toward US makers over the next decade or so. But it’s possible these Chinese companies will grow their global footprint even further, as previous US bans have pushed them into different, less exploited markets, and that’s resulted in a wider footprint for such companies, even if their profits may drop a little after leaving the spendier US market.There’s also a pretty good chance we’ll see deals to move more manufacturing to the US, which could allow some of these companies to make relatively small changes to their operations in order to bypass the ban entirely.This seems extremely likely, at least in the short term, as all major players in the US router market fall under the FCC’s definition of not being entirely US owned and operated, and making consumer-grade routers that are designed or manufactured outside the US. Even the ostensibly more US companies, based and founded here, make their stuff primarily in Southeast Asia; so even those companies would seem to fall afoul of this new rule.The FCC has also given these companies the opportunity to apply for what’s called Conditional Approval from the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, which would require they give a bunch of details about their company and products to these entities, along with plans to manufacture more stuff in the US, and these departments can then give them permission to keep selling in the meantime.It’s worth mentioning here that this kind of set up has previously given foreign entities a chance to funnel money into President Trump’s properties and businesses, before then speaking with him or one of his representatives and coming to some kind of agreement, the President then instructing the relevant agencies or departments to let those companies through, the ban not applying to them or not applying in the same way.There are concerns that such bans basically operate as requests for bribes, in other words, and those who don’t pay up see their customer base dwindle in the US market, while those who do get away with a slap on the wrist so long as they promise to make more stuff in the US at some point—though they’re not really held to that promise in any concrete way, and often that’s where their efforts stop, at the announcement of such changes.Also worth mentioning is that it’s not clear why this applies only to consumer-grade routers, as it would seem like the industrial- and military-grade ones would be of even greater concern, at least based on the claims made by the FCC when announcing this ban.We also don’t know why it’s being applied to new models, but not models currently being sold, and not those already in our homes; all of which would seem to be just as vulnerable as newer models that haven’t made it to the market yet.There’s a chance those details will follow, and there’s also a chance, again, that this is more about the administration maybe accumulating promises from foreign companies to move manufacturing to the US, because that looks good in an election year, and it’s maybe another means of accumulating bribes from companies that would find it far cheaper to make contributions to organizations the President either controls or favors, than to build new manufacturing capacity in the US, or leave the market entirely.Show Noteshttps://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-2026-explainerhttps://archive.is/20260326232922/https://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-2026-explainerhttps://www.cnet.com/home/internet/i-review-routers-for-a-living-dont-buy-a-router-right-now/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_(computing)https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-updates-covered-list-include-foreign-made-consumer-routershttps://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/fcc-banning-imports-new-chinese-made-routers-citing-security-concerns-2026-03-23/https://www.wired.com/story/us-government-foreign-made-router-ban-explained/https://itif.org/publications/2025/10/27/backfire-export-controls-helped-huawei-and-hurt-us-firms/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about cheap drones, energy resources, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.We also discuss the Strait of Hormuz, the war in Iran, and economic asymmetry.Recommended Book: The Age of Extraction by Tim WuTranscriptRussia’s invasion of Ukraine has been pretty universally bad for everyone involved, very much including Russia, which going into the fifth year of this conflict, which it started by massing troops on its neighbor’s border and invading, unprovoked, following years of funding asymmetric military incursions in Ukraine’s southeast. Following their full invasion though, Russia has reportedly suffered around 1.25 million casualties, with more than 400,000 of those casualties suffered in 2025, alone. It’s estimated that Russia has also suffered at least 325,000 deaths, and Ukrainian officials reported confirmed kills of more than 30,000 Russian soldiers just in January 2026.As of early 2026, Russian controlled about 20% of Ukraine, down from the height of its occupation, back in March of 2022, when it controlled 26% of the country.And due to a combination of military spending, intense and expansive international sanctions, and damage inflicted by Ukraine, it’s estimated that Russia has incurred about $1 trillion in damages, about a fifth of that being direct operational expenses, and around a fourth the result of reduced growth and lost assets stemming from all those sanctions.There’s a good chance that all of these numbers, aside from the land controlled, are undercounts, too, as some estimates rely on official figures, and those figures are generally assumed to be partially fabricated to allow Russia to keep face in what is already a pretty humiliating situation—a war they started and which they thought would be a walk in the park, lasting maybe a week, but which has instead gone on to reshape their entire country and present one of the biggest threats to Putin’s control over the Kremlin since he took office.That in mind, a report from last week, at the tail-end of March, suggests that the Kremlin knows things aren’t looking great for them, and they asked Russian oligarchs to donate money to the cause, to help stabilize Russian finances. This report, which is unconfirmed, but has been reported by multiple Russian media entities, arrives at a moment in which the Russian government is also planning cuts to all sorts of spending, including military spending, but also a reported 10% across the board, to all “non-sensitive” matters in its 2026 budget.Despite these fairly abysmal figures, though, there’s some optimism in Russia-supporting circles right now, in large part because the conflict in Iran, and Iran’s near shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz, which is an important channel for the flow of international energy assets, that’s goosed the price of oil and gas, which in turn has goosed Russian income substantially.What I’d like to talk about today are the interconnections between the conflict in Ukraine and the conflict in Iran, and how Ukraine being invaded seems to have put them in a position of relative influence and authority in this new conflict in the Middle East.—From the moment Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military, and its government, industrial base, and pretty much everyone else, scrambled to find an asymmetric means of keeping a far larger, wealthier, and ostensibly more experienced and better backed foe from just steam-rolling over them.They found that by leveraging lower-cost deterrents, like cheap rockets and drones, they could pay something like $10,000 to take out a tank or other weapons platform that cost Russia a million or ten million dollars. That’s a pretty stellar trade-off, and if you can do that over and over again, eventually you make the cost of the conflict just ridiculously unbalanced, each trade of hardware costing you very little and them a whole lot, which with time can making waging war unsustainable for the side paying orders of magnitudes more.Russia is of course making use of inexpensive drones and rockets, as well. That’s become a norm in modern conflicts, especially over the past five years or so, as cheap but capable and easy to produce models have started rolling of manufacturing lines in Iran and Turkey, allowing them to become popular sources of single-use but quite agile and deadly aerial weaponry.Ukraine has gone further than most other entities, though, as they’re immensely incentivized to get this right, and to put their full support behind anything that gives them the upper-hand against what’s still a powerful and otherwise overwhelming invading force. And this patchwork of companies, independent and government supported, large-ish and tiny enough to operate under constant fire and in wartime conditions, has since scaled-up so that they’re expected to manufacture about 7 million drones of many different varieties in 2026.This scaling has attracted a lot of outside investment, and Ukraine is now considered to be not just a bulwark against current Russian aggression in Europe, taking the brunt of the damage so that Russia isn’t able to turn its attention to the Baltic states and other potential, future targets. It’s also considered to be a vital resource for future protection against Russia, as the US has become a less reliable ally, and NATO, which until recently has been mostly funded and armed by the US, is still getting its legs under it, more members contributing both money and other resources, but possibly not fast enough.If Russia were to either win in Ukraine and then turn its full-tilt military machine further west, toward other parts of Europe, or if it were to come to some kind of stalemate or peace agreement in Ukraine and then do the same, many leaders throughout Europe believe that Ukrainians, grizzled and scar from this current invasion, will be the ones to train up comparably inexperienced NATO and European Union forces, and to provide the best new, asymmetry-focused military hardware, like drones of all shapes and sizes, as well.They’ll be not just the arsenal of NATO and the EU, they’ll also probably be the training officers and commanders.We already see evidence of this probable future demand for Ukrainian goods and services in Gulf states that were attacked by Iran shortly after Israel and the US launched their own attacks that killed Iran’s leader and caused a great deal of damage throughout the country.Five Iranian neighbors have reportedly made deals with Ukraine to help them defend against future attacks from Iran, especially drone and missile attacks against their energy and water infrastructure.This help comes in the form of Ukrainian technology, which has been forged by their war, defending against Russia’s incursion, but also training by Ukrainian experts, who are a lot more informed by those war-time realities, and know how to keep infrastructure safe while at the same time taking out the enemy’s capacity to attack in the future.Ukraine’s hardware is also super cheap compared to comparable alternatives. Ukraine can produce a long-range strike drone for about $200,000, compared to similar drones made by companies in other western countries that cost between $5-10 million. Ukrainian companies also produce far cheaper anti-personnel drones, and interceptor drones and rockets that can flip the cost considerations in some types of conflict.Often the attacker will launch a bunch of multi-million dollar rockets, alongside a bunch of $10,000 decoys. If your anti-rocket interceptors hit the decoys, and your interceptors cost more than those decoys, maybe a few million dollars apiece, you very quickly end up spending more than your attacker. Reducing the cost of those defensive materials, then, can give the defender the cost advantage, which makes holding out over the long-haul, but also producing enough interceptors to prevent infrastructure damage and save lives, more financially feasible.There’s a strange interconnectedness between these two conflicts, then, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned Ukraine into a military product and services powerhouse that’s only just now beginning to scale up, but already in high-demand, while at the same time, Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off energy product flow through this vital channel, is boosting Russia’s income dramatically at a moment in which it desperately needs that income to keep invading Ukraine.That influx of resources could help Russia maintain its invasion for longer than they could otherwise manage, and it could give them a leg up, an even bigger advantage than they already have, which in turn could force Ukraine to become even more skillful and experienced, even better at what they do, leading to even better weapons and tactics that they then share with clients and allies in the Middle East for use against Iran.Show Noteshttps://www.cfr.org/articles/securing-ukraines-future-in-europe-ukraines-defense-industrial-base-an-anchor-for-economic-renewal-and-european-securityhttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-ukraine-drone-defense-ecosystem-205253252.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/world/europe/ukraine-middle-east-oil-and-gas-drones.htmlhttps://gssr.georgetown.edu/the-forum/regions/eurasia/a-first-point-view-examining-ukraines-drone-industry/https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2026/02/01/ukraine-is-winning-the-economics-battle-against-russian-geran-drones/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/europe/ukraine-drones-china.htmlhttps://spectrum.ieee.org/drone-warfare-ukrainehttps://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraines-interceptor-drone-makers-look-exports-gulf-iran-war-flares-2026-03-07/https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/what-is-ukraines-interceptor-one-of-the-worlds-most-in-demand-drones-17055https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/4-years-of-war-counting-russia-s-costs/3838920https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/23/the-ukraine-war-in-numbers-people-territory-moneyhttps://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukrainehttps://news.sky.com/story/putin-asks-oligarchs-to-donate-to-budget-as-cost-of-ukraine-war-soars-13524940https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-asks-oligarchs-donate-russias-budget-cost-ukraine-war-soars-bell-media-2026-03-27/https://apnews.com/article/turkish-oil-tanker-attacked-black-sea-2998c366a90ed280e9781a8b030a050chttps://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-offensive-drones-c9976319f077c743317edec8a20f57f3https://apnews.com/article/war-russia-ukraine-drones-innovation-interceptor-shahed-e9de7db6437d3cbb428a6bacac326fb3https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-us-talks-iran-drones-40ad8f5481d954fe8207c3d576d540f7https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/russia-blackmail-us-zelensky-ukraine-trump-b2945767.htmlhttps://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-nato-rebuke-iran-war-11738554https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/26/pentagon-mulls-redirecting-ukraine-military-aid-to-middle-east-reports-claimhttps://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ukraine-using-strikes-pressure-russia-after-oil-sanctions-eased-zelenskiy-says-2026-03-26/https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/27/ukraine-fends-off-increased-attacks-strikes-russian-oil-revenue This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and decapitation attacks.We also discuss Venezuela, Iran, and the Platt Amendment.Recommended Book: The Will of the Many by James IslingtonTranscriptCuba is a large island nation, about the same size as the US state of Tennessee, which formally gained its independence from Spain in late 1898, following three wars of independence, the last of which brought the US, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines into play against the Spanish when the Spanish military sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, triggering the Spanish-American War.That conflict, which Spain lost, led to the US’s acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and it led to a piece of US legislation called the Platt Amendment, which redefined the relationship between the US and Cuba, following the war, making Cuba a protectorate of the United States, the US promising to leave, withdrawing its troops from Cuban soil, only if seven conditions were met, and an additional provision that Cuba sign a treaty indicating they would continue to adhere to these conditions moving forward—making them permanent.Most of these conditions relate to Cuba’s ability to enter into relationships with other nations, but provision three also says the US can intervene if doing so will preserve Cuban independence, and that Cuba will sell or lease to the US the land it needs to base its naval vessels in the area, so that it can intervene, militarily if necessary, to keep Cuba independent.The other provisions are largely related to ensuring Cuba stays financially solvent and clean, the former meant to help maintain that independence, so Cuba doesn’t make deals with other nations, perhaps US enemies, in order to bail itself out when financially in trouble, and the latter meant to help prevent the bubbling up of diseases in a not well-maintained Cuba, that might then spread to the US.These concerns were concerns for the US government because Cuba is very, very close to the US. It’s just over 90 miles away from Key West, Florida, and that means in the mind of those tasked with defending the US against foreign incursion, Cuba has long represented an uncontrolled variable where enemies could conceivably base all sorts of military assets, including but not limited to nuclear weapons.That makes Cuba, again, in the minds of defense strategists looking to help the US secure its borders, long-term, something like an aircraft carrier slash nuclear submarine the size of Tennessee, located so close to the US that it could take out all sorts of major assets in a flash, long before the US could respond, getting the same sorts of strike craft and missiles to the Soviet Union.This framing of the situation, and this collection of concerns, is what led to the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962, when the US deployed nuclear weapons in the UK, Italy, and Turkey, all of which were closer to major Soviet hubs than the US, and that led to a tit-for-tat move by the Soviets to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba, both to get their own weapons closer to the US, just as the US did to them with those new deployments, but also to deter a potential US invasion of Cuba, which was a staunch ally of the Soviet Union.The crisis lasted 13 days, and though then US President Kennedy was advised to launch an air strike against Soviet missile supplies, and to then invade the Cuban mainland to prevent the basing of Soviet nuclear weapons there, he instead opted for a naval blockade of Cuba, hoping to keep more missile supplies from arriving, and to thus avoid a strike on a Soviet ally that could accidentally spark a shooting war.After this nearly two-week standoff, the US and Soviet leaders agreed that the Soviets would dismantle the offensive weapons they were building in Cuba in exchange for a public declaration by the US to not invade Cuba. The US also secretly pledged to dismantle its own offensive weapons that it had recently deployed to Italy and Turkey, and the weapons they deployed to the UK were also disbanded the following year.This sequence of events is generally seen as a minor victory for the US during an especially fraught portion of the Cold War, as that secret agreement between Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev meant that the Soviet people and leadership perceived this agreement as an embarrassing loss, and an example of Soviet weakness on the international stage—they blinked and the US got what they wanted without giving much of anything, though of course, again, the US gave a fair bit too, just in secret.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent escalation in the US’s posture toward Cuba, and what might happen next, as a result of that change.—In early January 2026, the US military, ostensibly as part of a larger effort aimed at disrupting a network of watercraft that carry drugs from mostly South and Central American drugmakers across the border, into US markets, called Operation Southern Spear, the United States implemented a new blockade aimed at sanctioned oil tankers carrying fuel from Venezuela to, among other destinations, Cuban ports.Shortly before this blockade was declared, the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, then harassed, boarded, and intimidated other tankers, including one from Russia, that were also dealing in Venezuelan oil—something that US sanctions disallowed, and which the Trump administration had decided to focus on, ostensibly as part of that anti-drug effort, but also seemingly as part of a then-impending mission to kidnap Venezuelan President Maduro, who was then secreted away to the US to face trial, which is where he is, today.These seizures hit Cuba especially hard because the country is highly reliant on all sorts of imports, much of its income derived from tourism, not manufacturing or raw materials, and fuel coming from Venezuela was especially vital—about 72% of Cuba’s electricity generation comes from oil-fueled power plants, and basically its entire transportation section is reliant on the same.Venezuela under Maduro also provided oil to Cuba at a discount, subsidizing it because those US sanctions didn’t allow Venezuela to have many other reliable customers, and because the authoritarian governments of these two nations saw each other as fellow-travelers in the region, and thus wanted to keep each other propped up against constant pressure from the US and other democracies in the Americas.As of March 2026, Cuba has gone without crude oil deliveries for three months, and this has led to waves of flight cancellations and a depletion of tourism, which again, is the country’s most vital income source. As of mid-March, Cuba’s energy grid has also collapsed, which has left about 10 million people without power most of the time, amplifying existing problems caused by the country’s antiquated energy generation and distribution systems.All of which seems to be according to plan for the second US Trump administration, which announced, as far back as January of this year, that it was seeking regime change in Cuba, and these blackouts have triggered exceedingly rare violent protests against that regime by Cuban citizens; these protests haven’t led to any real change or consequences yet, but they could, with time.For their part, the Cuban government has said they’ve entered diplomatic talks with the US, and they’ve already agreed to release 51 political prisoners, just as an up-front, good will gesture. But they’ve also said changes to the Cuban political system or government—which is an authoritarian regime with absolute power, and which, like most such regimes, is openly corrupt, those in charge enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, while keeping control via state-sanctioned violence against its own citizens—they’ve said changing that is non-negotiable, also noting that if there is direct aggression against Cuba by the US, they’ll fight and offer up “impenetrable resistance.’The change that the US government seeks is reportedly similar to what was accomplished in Venezuela: booting the current leader, but keeping the existing regime, the power behind the publicly visible throne, intact, and then the US government influencing that existing regime from afar.This deviates from the assumed model, attempted by previous US and other governments throughout history, to boot the leaders of opposing government types and then replace them, and the local system, with something closer to their own. This new approach is possibly what the Trump administration is aiming for in Iran, as well, though it’s difficult to say how well the model will work even in Venezuela, where it’s still early days after the US’s seemingly successful decapitation attack, much less in places like Cuba, where there’s no single central power in the public-facing government, much of that power spread between Communist Party leaders, rather than hoarded by a single individual—a far cry from how things were under Castro during the Cold War.As of the day I’m recording this, there’s a new wrinkle in this blockade: a Russian oil tanker has been tracked heading along a trajectory that would seem to lead to Cuba, which, if accurate, could put the US and Russia at odds over deliveries to the island once more—though in this case it would be oil instead of offensive nuclear weapons that are on board the incursionary vessel.This ship may veer off that current course and head elsewhere, or it could be meant to test the US oil blockade, intentionally poking at what seems to be an impenetrable barrier, to see if it’s all just talk. Even if just that one tanker makes it through, it’s carrying enough oil to provide about a week’s worth of energy to the Cuban people, which could serve as a sort of release valve on the pressure-cooker stress that has led to the aforementioned protests against the government.Most analysts expect this and future vessels will turn off when formally confronted, though, and this isn’t the first ship that’s attempted to break this new blockade of Cuba; and previous attempters have indeed pulled off before a shot was fired by the blockading fleet.Trump has in recent weeks said that he believes he’ll be able to take Cuba, and/or do whatever he wants to the island and its people, and that could just be talk, or it could be that, like in Venezuela, and to some degree Iran, many of the locals would welcome that kind of change, despite the violence and suffering that would no doubt come with it.In the meantime, though, millions of Cubans are going without reliable energy, food, medical care, and other modern necessities, which could push them to take the risk of revolutionary action, but it could also turn them against the outside enemy, reinforcing support for the tyrannical Cuban government against the harmful and oppressive actions of the American military, rather than nudging them into government overthrow.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platt_Amendmenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_Cubahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Cuban_crisishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisishttps://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cubas-national-electric-grid-collapses-says-grid-operator-2026-03-16https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/world/americas/cuba-fuel-blockade-aid-convoy.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/travel/cuba-flights-travel-advice-power-oil.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-says-its-presidents-term-not-subject-negotiation-talks-with-us-2026-03-20/https://www.dw.com/en/cuba-faces-economic-collapse-as-us-oil-blockade-hits-tourism/video-76398387 This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about BYD, Tesla, and the Blade Battery 2.0.We also discuss EVs, internal-combustion engines, and autonomous vehicles.Recommended Book: Blank Space by W. David MarxTranscriptPetroleum-powered vehicles, cars and trucks and SUVs of the kind that have become the standard since the mid-20th century, work by mixing fuel that you put in the tank when you fill up at the gas station with air, in the engine, and then creating a controlled explosion—in modern vehicles using what’s called a four-stroke combustion cycle of intake, compression, combustion, then exhaust—in order to move pistons which, in turn generate mechanical power by transferring that movement to the vehicle’s wheels.An electric vehicle, in contrast, functions by using electricity from a battery pack to power an electric motor. So rather than needing fuel to combust, which then moves pistons which then moves the wheels, EVs are a straighter-shot with less conversion of energy necessary, electricity powering the motor which powers the wheels.That simpler setup comes with many advantages, and that difference in the conversion of energy is a big one. Because most of the energy injected into the EV’s system is converted into mechanical movement for the wheels, this type of vehicle only loses about 11% of the energy you put into it to that conversion of electricity to mechanical energy process—around 31-35% is initially lost while charging, converting electricity to motion, and so on, but about 22% is recaptured by the vehicle’s brakes during operation, leading to that 11% average loss.A gas-powered vehicle, in contrast, because of the inefficiencies inherent in converting fuel to combustion to movement, loses somewhere between 75-84% of the energy you put into it at the gas station, much of that loss in the form of heat that is emitted as a result of that conversion process; this is an inevitable consequence of the thermodynamics of burning fuel to create motion, and one that means operating a gas-powered vehicle is inherently lossier, in the sense that you can’t help but lose the majority of what you put into it as waste, compared to an electric vehicle, which is less lossy to begin with, but even more efficient when you include that in-operation energy recovery.That baseline reality of energy usage means that modern electric vehicles will typically be cheaper to fuel, to power, because it requires less energy input to get the same amount of travel. This cost-benefit comparison shifts even further in favor of EVs when gas prices are high, though, and though currently the cost of EVs tend to be higher than gas-powered vehicles in most countries, EVs also offer substantially lower lifetime maintenance costs—an average of 40% lower than gas-powered vehicles, due largely to the dramatically reduced number of moving parts in EVs, and the lack of regular, recurring engine-related maintenance tasks, like oil changes and replacing spark plugs.Not even considering the externalities-related savings of owning and operating an EV, then, like the environmental costs of fuel emissions, such vehicles can save owners tens of thousands of dollars in costs over the span of their ownership—though gas-powered vehicles are still more popular in most markets in part because they’re just more common on car lots, their infrastructure—gas stations versus charging stations—are also more common, and because there are numerous convenience issues, like it being quite a bit faster to pump a tank full of gas than to charge EVs, which is more efficient, but also a piece-of-mind sort of benefit.What I’d like to talk about today are some recent innovations in the EV and especially EV-scale battery space, and what it might mean for this market in the coming years.—After a relatively boom-y period in which EV sales saw a significant uptick, that uptick the consequence of friendly policies and subsidies from successive federal administrations and the rapid-fire innovations arriving in each new generation of EV model being pumped out by US makers, especially Tesla, the US car industry has in recent years pulled back from electric vehicles substantially—the most recent evidence of this being Honda’s recent announcement that three EV models they were planning to manufacture in the US will no longer see production.This was mostly a money decision, the raw and partially manufactured components necessary for US-based car companies to produce EVs are now burdened with new, Trump-era tariffs, that make producing finished products of this kind in the US all but impossible; simply too expensive to make.This is also an acknowledgment, though, that Chinese EVs have just gotten so good and so inexpensive for what you get, that it’s simply not possible to compete, not within the current economic and regulatory climate, but also not in the immediate future, even lacking those tariffs, because of how much of a lead Chinese car companies have earned for themselves in this space.New impositions by the second Trump administration, including those tariffs, but also the killing of EV incentives, and a recent decision to cease enforcing emissions and fuel economy standards, basically telling the industry to make vehicles that pollute more, if they like, have absolutely influenced this state of affairs.But the quality of new Chinese EVs, the speed at which a large quantity of them can be produced, and the affordability of these vehicles is simply too much for even the world’s most otherwise competitive and industry-owning companies, the most renowned car brands, to match.There are a few serious EV players in other parts of Asia, and some US companies, like Lucid Motors, are still trying to carve out a space for themselves, pivoting toward skateboard-style platforms that will allow them to use fewer scarce products, like expensive wiring, by using essentially the same base for all of their models, allowing them to ramp-up efficiencies of scale faster, and Rivian, which is trying to claim the outdoorsy, Jeep-esque facet of the US EV market; and Tesla of course continues to own a lot of mindshare in this industry, despite seeming to be pivoting toward AI, autonomous vehicles, and political concerns in recent years.But this is increasingly China’s domain, and that dominance is the result of a multi-decade push to own basically all the infrastructure and technologies required to electrify their economy, from the ground-up.As a consequence of that dominance, and all the renewables and battery-making facilities and investments in the relevant companies made by the government for the past few decades, we’re now seeing impressive technological feats coming out of China, like the recently successfully test-flown Sky Dragon electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, which looks something like a drone combined with a helicopter, and which can reportedly carry either 10 passengers or a ton of cargo up to 155 miles, which is about 250 kilometers, on a single charge, taking off and landing from helipads, so no runway necessary.But the already on-the-market, everyday applications of this tech are arguably even more impressive, considering that car-markers in other countries cannot accomplish anywhere near the same, and maybe won’t be able to do so for years.Chinese carmaker BYD is the top entrant in this space right now, in China and globally, by many metrics, and in early March of 2026 they announced a new battery, called the Blade Battery 2.0, which allows the vehicles it powers to be driven more than 621 miles on a single charge.That’s compared to the around 400 mile range most large-tanked gas-powered cars can claim. Though even as batteries have gotten larger and more efficient, in terms of their energy storage and expenditure, charging them up has still taken quite a bit longer than filling a tank with gas, often requiring a wait of 30 minutes, though that’s usually just for a small top-up, and only if you have access to a fast-charger. A full-charge sometimes requires as much as 24 hours, if you’re using a small, non-fast public or a home charger.This differs quite a lot depending where in the world you are, the nature of your EV, and the capacity of the charger you’re using. In general, Tesla superchargers can take a Tesla’s battery from 20% to 89% in around 15-30 minutes, which on average provides another 200 miles of travel; topping it up to 100% usually takes about an hour.This new battery from BYD, though, which has that 621 mile capacity, can be charged from 10% to 80% in just 6 and a half minutes—and that’s not theory, that exact feat was shown in a public, onstage demonstration.This isn’t a claim about a technology that will soon arrive, in other words, this is a technology that’s already here, for BYD vehicles, at least. And at six and a half minutes for around 300 miles of range, that brings EVs into the same convenience range as gas vehicles, just a minute or so longer than the average stop at a gas station.This of course will require specialized charging stations, and those stations will take a while to roll out. The company has said they’ll have 15,000 of their so-called megawatt charging stations available across China by the end of 2026, building 4000 of them, themselves, and the rest through joint ventures. They’re also planning to have about 3000 of these chargers built across European by the end of the year.All of which will likely further reinforce and lock-in BYD’s advantages over its local and foreign competition, at least for the next several years.Now, it’s worth mentioning that China’s ’s EV industry is currently a bit tumultuous, the stock prices of companies like BYD tumbling due to wild competition on the Chinese market that until recently has been encouraged by the government, which favors a brutal sort of evolutionary business environment for its favored industries, most of the entrants eventually dying off and leaving fewer, but very strong and internationally competitive companies once the melee has died down.It’s generally assumed that companies like BYD will cope with this crisis of too-low prices and vehicle overproduction—they and their Chinese competitors are making a lot more EVs than their existing markets can bear—they’ll cope by becoming more aggressive with their international expansion, dropping gobs of these incredibly competitive vehicles in more markets, hoping to offload all that stock, but also to suffocate inferior but more expensive local offerings and, consequently, create more lock-in with international customers through those superior products.There’s a parallel push for autonomous EVs in many of these markets, which is several years behind the evolution of EV tech, but is also evolving rapidly within China, using that same ultra-brutal competition tactic. These companies are thus quite a bit further along than most of their global competitors, and it seems likely that the semi-autonomous tech built into these newly exported vehicles will help give Chinese companies a leg-up when it comes to exporting autonomous tech to the world, in the next few years.All of which demonstrates the Chinese market’s major head-start in this and connected technologies, and which points at a serious concern, not just for the US, but for pretty much everyone, as most of these technologies, like better batteries, are relevant not just for the consumer car industry, but also basically every other field, including future military technologies, and tech related to the AI and broader semiconductor industries, which could lead to still-more, and more varied advantages in the near-future.Show Noteshttps://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles-use-half-the-energy-of-gas-powered-vehicles/https://www.nrdc.org/stories/electric-vs-gas-cars-it-cheaper-drive-ev#lifetime-costshttps://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/how-do-all-electric-cars-workhttps://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1360-sept-16-2024-typical-ev-87-91-efficient-compared-30-conventionalhttps://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/facing-heavy-losses-honda-cancels-its-three-us-made-electric-vehicles/https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/rivian-reveals-pricing-and-trim-details-for-its-r2-suv/https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/lucid-announces-midsize-ev-platform-says-profitability-lies-with-suvs/https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/giant-10-person-flying-taxi-passes-first-flight-test-in-chinahttps://www.fastcompany.com/91503415/byd-ev-battery-competes-with-gas-engineshttps://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/byds-latest-evs-can-get-close-to-full-charge-in-just-12-minutes/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/business/china-electric-vehicle-troubles.htmlhttps://www.kbb.com/car-advice/how-long-charge-tesla/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Khamenei, Trump, and Netanyahu.We also discuss Venezuela, Cuba, and cartels.Recommended Book: Plagues upon the Earth by Kyle HarperTranscriptAli Hosseini Khamenei was an opposition politician in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution that, in 1979, resulted in the overthrow of the Shah—the country’s generally Western government-approved royal leader—and installed the Islamic Republic, an extremely conservative Shia government that took the reins of Iran following the Shah’s toppling.Khamenei was Iran’s third president, post-Shah, and he was president during the Iran-Iraq War from 1981-1989, during which the Supreme Leader of Iran, the head of the country, Ruhollah Khomeini sought the overthrow of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Khomeini died the same year the war ended, 1989, and Khamenei was elected to the role of Supreme Leader by the country’s Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for determining such roles.The new Supreme Leader Khamenei was reportedly initially concerned that he wasn’t suitable for the role, as his predecessor was a Grand Ayatollah of the faith, while he was just a mid-rank cleric, but the constitution of Iran was amended so that higher religious office was no longer required in a Supreme Leader, and in short order Khamenei moved to expound upon Iran’s non-military nuclear program, to expand the use and reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in-country and throughout the region, and he doubled-down on supporting regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, incorporating them into the so-called Axis of Resistance that stands against Western interests in the region—the specifics of which have varied over the decades, but which currently includes the aforementioned Hezbollah and Houthis, alongside smaller groups in neighboring countries, like Shiite militias in Bahrain, and forces that operate in other regional spheres of influence, like North Korea, Venezuela, and at times, portions of the Syrian government.Khamenei also reinforced the Iranian government’s power over pretty much every aspect of state function, disempowering political opponents, cracking down on anyone who doesn’t toe a very conservative extremist line—women showing their hair in public, for instance, have been black-bagged and sometimes killed while in custody—and thoroughly entangled the functions of state with the Iranian military, consolidating essentially all power under his office, Supreme Leader, while violently cracking down on anyone who opposed his doing whatever he pleased, as was the case with a wave of late-2025, early 2026 protests across the country, during which Iranian government forces massacred civilians, killing somewhere between 3,000 and 35,000 people, depending on whose numbers you believe.What I’d like to talk about today is a new war with Iran, kicked off by attacks on the country from Israel and the United States that led with the killing of Khamenei and a bunch of his higher-up officers, how this conflict is spreading across the region and concerns about that spreading, and what might happen next.—On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a wave of joint air attacks against Iran, hitting mostly military and government sites across the country. One of the targets was Khamenei’s compound, and his presence there, above-ground, which was unusual for him, as he spent most of his time deep underground in difficult-to-hit bunkers, alongside a bunch of government and military higher-ups, may have been the rationale for launching all of these attacks on that day, as the attackers were able to kill him and five other top-level Iranian leaders, who he was meeting with, at the same time.This wave of attacks followed the largest military buildup of US forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and while military and government targets were prioritized, that initial wave also demolished a lot of civilian structures, including schools, hospitals, and the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, leading to a whole lot of civilian casualties and fatalities, as well.In response, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and at US bases throughout the region—these bases located in otherwise uninvolved countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iranian missiles and drones also hit non-military targets, and in some cases maybe accidentally hit civilian infrastructure, in Azerbaijan, and Oman, alongside a British military base on the island of Cyprus.The Iranian president apologized in early March for his country’s lashing out at pretty much everyone, saying that there were miscommunications within the Iranian military, and that Iran wouldn’t hit anyone else, including countries with US bases, so long as US attacks didn’t originate from those bases.Despite that apology, though, Iranian missiles and drones continued to land in many of those neighboring countries following his remarks, raising questions about communications and control within the now-decapitated Iranian military.This new conflict follows long-simmering tensions between Iran and Israel—the former of which has said it will someday wipe the latter from the face of the Earth, considering its existence an abomination—and long-simmering tensions related to Iran’s nuclear program, which the government has continuously said is just for civilian, energy purposes, but which pretty much everyone suspects, with a fair bit of evidence, is, in parallel, also a weapons program.Iran’s influence throughout the region has been truncated in recent years, due to a sequence of successes by the Israeli military and intelligence services, which allowed them to hobble or nearly wipe out traditional Iranian proxy forces like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which have collectively surrounded and menaced Israel for decades.Those menacing forces more or less handled, Israel has become more aggressive in its confrontations with Iran, exchanging large air attacks several times over the past handful of years, and the US under Trump’s second term continues to see Iran as the main opposition to their efforts to build a US-aligned counterbalance against Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and increasingly entities like Qatar and the UAE playing ball with the West, while Iran and its allies stand firm against the West.Trump has regularly threatened to act in Iran, usually waiting for the Iranian government to do something really bad, like that recent massacre of civilians following those large anti-government protests in late-2025, early 2026, and that to some degree has served as justification for the massing of US military assets in the region, leading up to this attack.Now that the attack has launched, a new war triggered, the question is how big it will get and how long it will last.For the moment, it looks like Iran’s government and military is very much on the back foot, a lot of their assets taken out in that initial wave, and they’re still scrambling to put someone in charge to replace Khamenei and those other higher-ups who were assassinated at the outset of this war—that’ll likely change soon, maybe even before this episode goes live. But whomever takes the reins will have quite the task ahead of them, probably—according to many analysts, at least—aiming to just hold out until the US runs out of ammunition, which is expected to happen within a week or so, at which point Iran can launch surgical attacks, aiming to make this war too expensive, in terms of money and US lives, for the Trump administration to continue investing in, as money and lives are especially expensive in an election year, which 2026 is. So the idea is to grind the US down until it makes more political sense for Trump to just declare victory and leave, rather than allowing this to become a Vietnam or Afghanistan situation for his administration.It’s also generally expected that when the US pulls out, Israel probably will too, as they’ve already made their point, tallied a bunch of victories, and set Iran back in a lot of ways; they could walk away whenever they like and say they won. And Iran would probably be incentivized to, at that point, avoid doing anything that would lead to more punishment, though they would almost certainly immediately begin rebuilding the same exact centralized, militarized infrastructure that was damaged, the only difference being they would have someone else on top, as the Supreme Leader. Relations could be even worse moving forward, but it would probably be at least a few years before Iran could do anything too significant to their regional enemies, which I guess if you’re Israel does, in fact, represent a win.But considering the unlikelihood of permanent change in Iran, the big question here, in the minds of many, is what this war, this attack, is even for.For Israel, the main purpose of any attack against Iran is to weaken or destroy an enemy that has made no secret about wanting to weaken and destroy them. For the US, though, and the Trump administration more specifically, the point of all this isn’t as clear.Some contend that this is another effort to steal attention and headlines from the increasingly horrifying revelations coming out of the investigation into the Epstein files, which seem to indicate Trump himself was involved in all sorts of horrible, pedophilic sexual assault activities with the late human-trafficker.Some suspect that the apparent victory in grabbing former Venezuelan president Maduro from his own country and whisking him away to the US without suffering any US casualties has emboldened Trump, and that he’s going to use the time he’s got to take out anyone he doesn’t like, and may even specifically target authoritarian leaders who will not be missed—who oppress and kill their own people—because then it’s difficult for his political opponents to call him out on these efforts.Most Venezuelans are happy to see Maduro gone, and many Iranians celebrated when Khamenei was assassinated. Trump has publicly stated that he intends to go after Cuba, next, and continues to suggest he wants a war of sorts with Mexican and south and central American cartels, which follows this same pattern of demonstrating a muscular, aggressive, militarized United States doing whatever it wants, even to the point of kidnapping or assassinating foreign leaders, but doing so in a way that is difficult to argue against, because the leaders and other forces being taken out are so horrible, at times to the point of being monstrous, that these acts, as illegal as they are according to internal laws, can still seem very justified, through some lenses.Still others have said they believe this is purely an Israeli op, and the US under Trump is just helping out one of Trump’s buddies, Israel’s Netanyahu, who wants to keep his country embroiled in war in order to avoid being charged for corruption.The real rationale could be a combination of these and other considerations, but the threat here, regionally, is real, especially if Iran continues to lash out at its neighbors.This part of the world is renowned for its fuel reserves and exports, and every time there’s a Middle Eastern conflict, energy prices rise, globally, and other nations that produce such exports, like Russia, benefit financially because they can charge more for their oil and gas for a while—gas prices in the US have already increased by 14% over the past week as a result of the conflict—and those increases also then the raises the price of all sorts of other goods, spiking inflation.Another huge concern here, though, is that this part of the world is highly reliant on the desalination of water just to survive; massive desalination plants, most located along the coast, where they are very exposed to military threats, are at risk if Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or Oman start firing at each other in earnest.About 90% of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from these sorts of plants, and about 86% of Oman’s and 70% of Saudi Arabia’s do, as well.Earlier in this war, a US strike damaged an Iranian desalination plant, and the Iranian foreign minister made a not-so-veiled threat against such plants in neighboring countries, saying the US set the precedent of attacking such infrastructure, not them.Worth noting here, too, is that many desalination plants are attached to power stations, located within the same facility, so attacks on power infrastructure, which are already common in any conflict, could also lead to more damaged desalination plants, all of which could in turn create massive humanitarian crises, as people living in some of the hottest, driest parts of the world find themselves, in the millions, without drinkable water.The potential for a spiraling humanitarian disaster increases with each passing day, then, which would seem to increase the likelihood that someone will stop, declare victory, and move on to the next conflict. But there’s always the chance the one or more of the involved forces will clamp down and decide that it’s in their best interest to keep things going as long as possible, instead—and in this case, it would likely be Iran playing that role, locking the US and Israel and their allies into a grinding, long-term conflict that no one would actually win.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Resistancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Ruhollah_Khomeinihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacreshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khameneihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Ali_Khameneihttps://www.eurasiareview.com/08032026-strikes-continue-despite-iranian-presidents-apology/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-rejects-settling-iran-war-raises-prospect-killing-all-its-potential-2026-03-08/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/irans-retaliation-began-us-officials-scrambled-arrange-evacuations-2026-03-07/https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/mapping-crisis-iran-visual-explainer-2026-03-06/https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-03-08-2026https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-us-march-8-2026-f0b20dbffaea9351ae1e54183ffe53ffhttps://apnews.com/article/iran-war-desalination-water-oil-middle-east-12b23f2fa26ed5c4a10f80c4077e61cehttps://apnews.com/video/trump-says-us-will-turn-attention-to-cuba-after-war-with-iran-91c3f239c18349fdb409f901c50b7e71https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/08/world/iran-war-trump-israel-lebanonhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/us/politics/trump-russia-ukraine-iran-war.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/us/politics/iran-war-first-week.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/08/opinion/iran-war-ayatollah.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and OpenAI.We also discuss red lines, contracts, and lethal autonomous systems.Recommended Book: Empire of AI by Karen HaoTranscriptLethal autonomous weapons, often called lethal autonomous systems, autonomous weapons systems, or just ‘killer robots,’ are military hardware that can operate independent of human control, searching for and engaging with targets based on their programming and thus not needing a human being to point it at things or pull the trigger.The specific nature and capabilities of these devices vary substantially from context to content, and even between scholars writing on the subject, but in general these are systems—be they aerial drones, heavy gun emplacements, some kind of mobile rocket launcher, or a human- or dog-shaped robot—that are capable of carrying out tasks and achieving goals without needing constant attention from a human operator.That’s a stark contrast with drones that require either a human controlled or what’s called a human-in-the-loop in order to make decisions. Some drones and other robots and weapons require full hands-on control, with a human steering them, pointing their weapons, and pulling the trigger, while others are semi-autonomous in that they can be told to patrol a given area and look for specific things, but then they reach out to a human-in-the-loop to make final decisions about whatever they want to do, including and especially weapon-related things; a human has to be the one to drop the bomb or fire the gun in most cases, today.Fully autonomous weapon systems, without a human in the loop, are far less common at this point, in part because it’s difficult to create a system so capable that it doesn’t require human intervention at times, but also because it’s truly dangerous to create such a device.Modern artificial intelligence systems are incredibly powerful, but they still make mistakes, and just as an LLM-based chatbot might muddle its words or add extra fingers to a made-up person in an image it generates, or a step further, might fabricate research referenced in a paper it produces, an AI-controlled weapon system might see targets where there are no targets, or might flag a friendly, someone on its side, or a peaceful, noncombatant human, as a target. And if there’s no human-in-the-loop to check the AI’s understanding and correct it, that could mean a lot of non-targets being treated like targets, their lives ended by killer robots that gun them down or launch a missile at their home.On a larger scale, AI systems controlling arrays of weapons, or even entire militaries, becoming strategic commanders, could wipe out all human life by sparking a nuclear war.A recent study conducted at King’s College London found that in simulated crises, across 21 scenarios, AI systems which thought they had control of nation-state-scale militaries opted for nuclear signaling, escalation, and tactical nuclear weapon use 95% of the time, never once across all simulations choosing to use one of the eight de-escalatory options that were made available to them.All of which suggests to the researchers behind this study that the norm, approaching the level of taboo, associated with nuclear weapons use globally since WWII, among humans at least, may not have carried over to these AI systems, and full-blown nuclear conflict may thus become more likely under AI-driven military conditions.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent confrontation between one AI company—Anthropic—and its client, the US Department of Defense, and the seeming implications of both this conflict, and what happened as a result.—In late-2024, the US Department of Defense—which by the way is still the official title, despite the President calling it the Department of War, since only Congress can change its name—the US DoD partnered with Anthropic to get a version of its Claude LLM-based AI model that could be used by the Pentagon.Anthropic worked with Palantir, which is a data-aggregation and surveillance company, basically, run by Peter Thiel and very favored by this administration, and Amazon Web Services, to make that Claude-for-the-US-military relationship happen, those interconnections allowing this version of the model to be used for classified missions.Anthropic received a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense in mid-2025, as did a slew of other US-based AI companies, including Google, xAI, and OpenAI. But while the Pentagon has been funding a bunch of US-based AI companies for this utility, only Claude was reportedly used during the early 2026 raid on Venezuela, during which now-former Venezuelan President Maduro was taken by US forces.Word on the street is that Claude is the only model that the Pentagon has found truly useful for these sorts of operations, though publicly they’re saying that investments in all of these models have borne fruit, at least to some degree.So Anthropic’s Claude model is being used for classified, military and intelligence purposes by the US government. Anthropic has been happy about this, by all accounts, because that’s a fair bit of money, but also being used for these purposes by a government is a pretty big deal—if it’s good enough for the US military, after all, many CEOs will see that as a strong indication that Claude is definitely good enough for their intended business purposes.On February 24 of 2026, though, the US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to remove Anthropic from the DoD’s stable of AI systems that they use unless the company allowed the DoD to use Claude for any and all legal purposes—unrestricted use of the model, basically.This threat came with a timeline—accede to these demands by February 27 or be cut from the DoD’s supply chain—and the day before that deadline, the 26th, Anthropic’s CEO released a statement indicating that the company would not get rid of its red lines that delineated what Claude could and could not be used for, and on the 27th, US President Trump ordered that all US agencies stop using Anthropic tools, and said that he would declare the company a supply chain risk, which would make it illegal for any company doing business with the US government at any level and in any fashion to use Anthropic products or services—a label that’s rarely used, and which was previously used by the Trump administration against Chinese tech giant Huawei on the basis that the company might insert spy equipment in communications hardware installed across the US if they were allowed to continue operating in the country.Those red lines that Anthropic’s CEO said he wouldn’t get rid of, not even for a client as big and important as the US government, and not even in the face of threats by Hegseth, including that he might invoke the Defense Production Act, which would allow him to force the company to allow the Pentagon to use Claude however they like, or Trumps threat that the company be blacklisted from not just the government, but from working with a significant chunk of Fortune 500 companies, those red lines include not allowing Claude to be used for controlling autonomous weapon systems, killer robots, basically, and not allowing Claude to be used for surveilling US citizens.The Pentagon signed a contract with Anthropic in which they agreed to these terms, but Hegseth’s new demand was that Anthropic sign a new version of the contract in which they allow the US government to use Claude and their other offerings for ‘all legal purposes,’ which apparently includes, at least in some cases and contexts, killer robots and mass surveillance.So the Pentagon tried to strong-arm a US-based AI company into allowing them to use their product for purposes the company doesn’t consider to be moral, and that led to this situation in which Anthropic is now being phased out from US government use—it’ll apparently take about 6 months to do this, and some analysts speculate that timeline is meant to serve as a period in which further negotiation can occur—but either way, it’s being phased out and it may even have trouble getting major clients in the future as a result of being blackballed.As all this was happening, OpenAI stepped in and offered its products and services to fill the void left by Anthropic in the US government.OpenAI’s CEO has been cozying up to Trump a lot since he regained office, and has positioned the company as a major US asset, too big to fail because then China will win the AI race, basically, so this makes sense. Its CEO released several statements and press releases in the wake of this further cozying, saying that they believe the same things Anthropic does, and that they’re not giving up any credibility for doing this because they have the same red lines, no killer robots, no mass surveillance of US citizens.But this is generally assumed to be bunk, because why would the Pentagon agree to the same terms all over again, and with a company that provides, for their purposes and right now, anyway, inferior services instead of the one they just chased out and blackballed, and which was helping them do purposeful, effective things, like kidnapping a foreign leader from a secure facility, today?Instead, what it sounds like is OpenAI is trying to have its cake and eat it too, saying publicly that they don’t want their offerings used to control autonomous weapons systems or mass surveil Americans, but instead of writing that into the contract, they’ve got some basic guardrails baked into their systems, and they are assuming those guardrails will keep any funny business from happening. So it’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement with their clients that OpenAI products won’t be used for mass surveillance or killer robots, rather than something legally binding, as was the case with Anthropic.The response to all this within the tech world has been illustrative of what we might expect in the coming years. Many people, including folks working on these technologies, are halting their use of OpenAI tech in protest, and in some (at this point at least) fewer cases, people are quitting their OpenAI jobs, because they are strongly opposed to these use-cases and would prefer to support a company that takes a strong stand on these sorts of moral issues.Some analysts also wonder if this will ensure the Pentagon only ever has access to inferior AI models because they intentionally threatened and disempowered a key AI industry CEO in public, saying that they had final say over how these tools are used, and many such CEOs are both unaccustomed to such stripping down, but are also doing the work they’re doing for ideological reasons—they have beliefs about what the future, as enabled by AI technologies, will look like, and they believe they will play a vital role in making that future happen.The idea, then, is why would they want to work with the Pentagon, or the US government more broadly, if that means no longer being in charge of the destiny of these tools they’re putting so much time, effort, and resources into building? Why would they take on a client, even a big, important one, if that means no longer having any grain of control over the future of the world as shaped by the systems they’re building?We’ll know a bit more about how all this plays out within the next handful of months, as this could serve as a moral differentiator between otherwise near-match products in the AI category, allowing companies like Anthropic to compete, both in terms of clients and in terms of employees, with the likes of OpenAI and xAI by saying, look, we don’t want killer robots or mass surveillance and we gave up a LOT, put our money where our mouths are, in support of that moral stance.That could prove to be a serious feather in their cap, despite the initial cost, though it could also be that the pressure the US government is willing and able to apply to them instead serves as a warning to others, and the likes of OpenAI and Google and so on just get better at speaking out of both sides of their mouths on this issue, creating sneakier contracts that allow them to say the same on paper, seeming to take the same moral stance Anthropic did, while behind closed doors allowing their clients to do basically whatever they want with their products, including using them to control killer robots and to mass surveil US citizens.Show Noteshttps://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisishttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/ai-nuclear-weapons-war-pentagon-scenarioshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/openai-agreement-pentagon-ai.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_autonomous_weaponhttps://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/885963/anthropic-dod-pentagon-tech-workers-ai-labs-reacthttps://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/886816/openai-reached-a-new-agreement-with-the-pentagonhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/trump-moves-to-ban-anthropic-from-the-us-government/https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-pentagon-ai-dario-amodei-hegseth-0c464a054359b9fdc80cf18b0d4f690chttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/whats-really-at-stake-in-the-fight-between-anthropic-and-the-pentagon-d450c1a1https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisishttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/ai-nuclear-weapons-war-pentagon-scenarios This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court, and negotiating leverage.We also discuss trade wars, Greenland, and the IEEPA.Recommended Book: Smoke and Ashes by Amitav GhoshTranscriptI’ve spoken on this show before about tariffs and about US President Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs as an underpinning of his trade policy. Last October, back in 2025 I did an episode on tariff leverage and why the concept of an ongoing trade war is so appealing to Trump—it basically gives him a large whammy on anyone he enters negotiations with, because the US market is massive and everyone wants access to it, and tariffs allow him to bring the hammer down on anyone he doesn’t like, or who doesn’t kowtow in what he deems to be an appropriate manner.So he can slap a large tariff on steel or pharmaceuticals or cars from whichever country he likes just before he enters negotiations with that country, and then those negotiations open with him in an advantageous spot: they have to give him things just to get those tariffs to go away—they have to negotiate just to get things back to square one.That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. What we talked about a bit back in October is TACO theory, TACO standing for Trump Always Chickens Out—the idea is that other world leaders had gotten wise to Trump’s strategy, which hasn’t changed since his first administration, and he has mostly been a doubling-down on that one, primary approach, to the point that they can step into these negotiations, come up with something to give him that allows him to claim that he’s won, to make it look like he negotiated well, and then they get things back down to a more reasonable level; maybe not square one, but not anything world-ending, and not anything they weren’t prepared and happy to give up.In some cases, though, instead of kowtowing in this way so that Trump can claim a victory, whether or not a victory was actually tallied, some countries and industries and the businesses that make up those industries have simply packed up their ball and gone home.China has long served as a counterbalance to the US in terms of being a desirable market and a hugely influential player across basically every aspect of geopolitics and the global economy, and this oppositional, antagonistic approach to trade has made the US less appealing as a trade partner, and China more appealing in comparison.So some of these entities have negotiated to a level where they could still ship their stuff to the US and US citizens would still be willing to pay what amounts to an extra tax on all these goods, because that’s how tariffs work, that fee is paid by the consumers, not by the businesses or the origin countries, but others have given up and redirected their goods to other places. And while that’s a big lift sometimes, the persistence of this aggression and antagonism has made it a worthwhile investment for many of these entities, because the US has become so unpredictable and unreliable that it’s just not worth the headache anymore.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent Supreme Court decision related to Trump’s tariffs, and what looks likely to happen next, in the wake of that ruling.—Ever since Trump stepped back into office for his second term, in January of 2025, he has aggressively instilled new and ever-growing tariffs on basically everyone, but on some of the US’s most important trade partners, like Mexico and Canada, in particular.These tariffs have varied and compounded, and they’ve applied to strategic goods that many US presidents have tried to hobble in various ways, favoring US-made versions of steel and microchips, for instance, so that local makers of these things have an advantage over their foreign-made alternatives, or have a more balanced shot against alternatives made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper and standards are different.But this new wave of tariffs were broad based, hitting everyone to some degree, and that pain was often taken away, at least a little, after leaders kowtowed, at times even giving him literal gold-plated gifts in order to curry favor, and/or funneling money into his family’s private companies and other interests, allowing him to use these tariffs as leverage for personal gain, not just national advantage, in other cases giving him what at least looked outwardly to be a negotiating win.Things spiraled pretty quickly by mid-2025, when China pushed back against these tariffs, adding their own reciprocal tariffs on US goods, and at one point extra duties on Chinese imports coming into the US hit 145%.Shortly thereafter, though, and here we see that TACO acronym proving true, once again, Trump agreed to slash these tariffs for 90 days, and around the same time, in May of 2025, a federal appeals court temporarily reinstated some of Trump’s largest-scale tariffs after a lower court ruled that they couldn’t persist.The remainder of 2025 was a story of Trump trying to strike individual deals with a bunch of trade partners, like South Korea, Indonesia, and India, in some cases via direct negotiation, in others with a bunch of threats that eventually led to a sort of mutual standoff that no one was particularly happy about.2026 was greeted with a threat by Trump to impose a huge wave of new tariffs on eight major European allies, those tariffs sticking around until these nations agreed to allow the US to buy Greenland, which was an obsession of Trump’s at that point, but a lot of Trump’s tariff posturing was derailed by a Supreme Court decision that landed in mid-February, in which the justices decided, 6 to 3, that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are unconstitutional, as setting and changing tariffs is a Congressional power, not a Presidential one.This was a serious blow to Trump and his stated policies, as pretty much all of his economic plans oriented around the idea—which most economists have said is bunk and based on fantasy, not reality, but still—that putting a bunch of tariffs on everything will allow the US to earn so much additional revenue that the deficit can be paid down.It’s worth noting here that, just as those economists predicted, the deficit has only gotten larger under both Trump administrations, and in fact the growth of the US debt has sped up, not declined, despite the additional billions being pulled into government coffers by these tariffs, because the Trump administration’s spending is massive, and because the losses related to tariffs are also significant. But tariffs remain center to his policy nonetheless, so this was a major blow.This ruling also seemed likely to defang a lot of Trump’s threats and drain his leverage at the negotiating table, as he could no longer threaten everyone with more tariffs, practically booting them from or weakening them on the US market.So Trump was pissed, and as he tends to do, he publicly raged about the decision, which was made by a Supreme Court that is heavily stacked in his favor; which gives an indication of just how unpopular and unconstitutional all of this has been.But immediately after that decision landed, he announced that, using alternative authorities—different powers—he would be imposing a blanket 10% tariff on everything coming into the US, and the following day announced that it would be a 15% tariff on everything, instead.This does seem to be something Trump has the power to do, but he can only do it under the auspices of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and these tariffs will only last for 150 days, max, and might also be challenged in court.Also notably, some entities, like Britain and Australia, will face higher rates than they faced under the previous tariff setup, because of how they are applied and compound with other trade barriers, or the nature of what they export to the US market, while others, including China, will see their tariffs substantially drop.Which could make things tricky, as that implies some of the previously negotiated deals have changed post-deal, or in some cases mid-negotiation; which means a lot more work to get things where everyone wants them, but also a loss of legitimacy and credibility for this administration, as they seem to be negotiating using powers they don’t actually have and making promises they can’t keep.All of which, rather than simplifying and clarifying things for the US market and our international trade partners, actually further complicates them, at least for now, until the dust settles.It does seem likely Trump’s administration will continue to try to leverage whatever power they can in this matter, grabbing at levers that haven’t been previously used, or used in this way, and those attempts will almost certainly be legally challenged, which could lead to more court cases, and a lot more uncertainty in the meantime, until those cases are figured it.It’s also created new rifts within the Republican party, as Trump seems to be going after those who voted against his tariffs, or in any other way supported their removal, and he’s raged against the Supreme Court justices, even those he put into place and who are ideologically aligned with the Republican party almost always, which could also lead to more fracturing within his base, leading up to the November 2026 Congressional elections.One more thing that’s worth noting here is that Trump’s usual tactic of trying to distract from things he doesn’t want people to pay attention to is in full operation following this court case: as all this has been happening, and against the backdrop of increasingly serious allegations related to his abundant presence in the Epstein files, he’s been talking more about potentially attacking Iran and releasing files on aliens, on extraterrestrials on Earth and in the US.So we’re likely to see a lot more of that sort of thing in the coming months, especially if things continue to not go his way in regards to these tariffs and the hubbub surrounding them, but this story will shape global and US economics for years to come, not to mention on-the-ground realities for many people today, which should substantially impact Trump’s popularity and voter behavior come November.Show Noteshttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/supreme-court-trump-energy-tariffshttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariff-plan-section-122-trade-acthttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-scotus-tariff-refund-battlehttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/economy/trump-tariffs-trade-war.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/business/trump-tariffs-japan-indonesia.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-tariffs-takeaways.htmlhttps://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-updateshttps://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0l9r67drg7thttps://heatmap.news/economy/clean-energy-tariff-rulinghttps://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/20/us/trump-tariffs-supreme-courthttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/supreme-court-blocks-trumps-emergency-tariffs-billions-in-refunds-may-be-owed/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/20/what-will-happen-to-trump-tariffs-after-supreme-court-verdicthttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/economy/tariffs-supreme-court-global-busines-reaction.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/trump-deminimis-loophole-closed.htmlhttps://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-5b34aa80-2020-453a-bef1-8cf648e9b3c3.htmlhttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariff-plan-section-122-trade-acthttps://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-ieepa-john-roberts-brett-kavanaugh-90daf559https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdfhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/us/politics/supreme-court-tariffs-conservatives.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/economy/u-s-manufacturing-is-in-retreat-and-trumps-tariffs-arent-helping-d2af4316https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-scotus-ruling-updatehttps://www.kielinstitut.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications/fis-import/92fb3f30-07b8-4dcf-b2bc-fbefb831f1a1-KPB201_EN.pdfhttps://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-a-temporary-import-duty-to-address-fundamental-international-payment-problems/https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tariff-refunds-supreme-court-trump-rcna259968https://www.wsj.com/opinion/its-the-end-of-the-beginning-of-the-tariff-war-88a08d37https://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/trump-tariff-supreme-court-increasehttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/alien-files-conspiracy-theories-usa This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about mass surveillance, smart doorbells, and the Patriot Stack.We also discuss Amazon, Alexa, and the Super Bowl.Recommended Book: Red Moon by Benjamin PercyTranscriptIn 2002, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government created a new agency—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operating under the auspices of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was also formed that year for the same general reason, to defend against 9/11-style attacks in the future.As with a whole lot of what was done in the years following the 9/11 attacks, a lot of what this agency, and its larger department did could be construed as a sort of overcompensation by a government and a people who were reeling from the first real, large-scale attack within their borders from a foreign entity in a very long time. It was a horrific event, everyone felt very vulnerable and scared, and consequently the US government could do a lot of things that typically would not have had the public’s support, like rewiring how airports and flying works in the country, creating all sorts of new hurdles and imposing layers of what’s often called security theater, to make people feel safe.While the TSA was meant to handle things on the front-lines of air transportation, though, X-raying and patting-down and creating a significant new friction for everyone wanting to get on a plane, ICE was meant to address another purported issue: that of people coming into the US from elsewhere, illegally, and then sticking around long enough to cause trouble. More specifically, ICE was meant to help improve public safety by strictly enforcing at times lax immigration laws, by tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants from the country; the theory being that some would-be terrorists may have snuck into the US and might be getting ready to kill US citizens from within our own borders.There’s not a lot of evidence to support that assertion—the vast majority of terrorism that happens in the US is conducted by citizens, mostly those adhering to a far-right or other extremist ideologies. But that hasn’t moved the needle on public perception of the issue, which still predominantly leans toward stricter border controls and more assiduous moderation of non-citizens within US borders—for all sorts of reasons, not just security ones.What I’d like to talk about today is an offshoot of the war on terror and this vigilance about immigrants in the US, and how during the second Trump administration, tech companies have been entangling themselves with immigration-enforcement agencies like ICE to create sophisticated surveillance networks.—In mid-July of 2025, the US Department of Defense signed one of its largest contracts in its history with a tech company called Palantir Technologies. Palantir was founded and is run by billionaire Peter Thiel, who among other things is generally considered to be the reason JD Vance was chosen to be Trump’s second-term Vice President. He’s also generally considered to be one of, if not the main figure behind the so-called Patriot Tech movement, which consists of companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, all of which are connected by a web of funding arms and people who have cross-pollinated between major US tech companies and US agencies, in many cases stepping into government positions that put them in charge of the regulatory bodies that set the rules for the industries in which they worked.As a consequence of this setup and this cross-pollination, the US government now has a bunch of contracts with these entities, which has been good for the companies’ bottom lines and led to reduced government regulations, and in exchange the companies are increasingly cozy with the government and its many agencies, toeing the line more than they would have previously, and offering a lot more cooperation and collaboration with the government, as well.This is especially true when it comes to data collection and surveillance, and a great deal of that sort of information and media is funneled into entities like Palantir, which aggregate and crunch it for meaning, and then send predictions and assumptions, and make services like facial-recognition technologies predicated on their vast database, available to police and ICE agents, among others such entities.There has been increasingly stiff pushback against this melding of the tech world with the government—which has always been there to some degree, but which has become even more entwined than usual, of late—and that pushback is international, even long-time allies like Canada and the EU making moves to develop their own replacements for Amazon and Google and OpenAI due to these issues, and the heightened unpredictability and chaos of the US in recent years, but it’s also evident within the US, due in part to Trump’s moves while in office, but also the on-the-ground realities in places like Minneapolis, where ICE agents have been brutalizing and blackbagging people, sometimes illegal immigrants, sometimes US citizens, usually non-white US citizens, and the ICE agents are being rewarded, getting bonuses, for beating up and kidnapping and in some cases murdering people, whether or not any of these people are actually criminals—and it’s illegal to do that kind of thing even if they are criminals, by the way.All of which sets the scene for what happened following the Super Bowl, this year.Ring is a home security and smart home device company that is best known for its line of smart doorbells, but which also makes all sorts of security cameras and other alarm system devices.Even though smart doorbells, complete with cameras and other sorts of functionality, existed before Ring, this company basically created the smart doorbell industry as it exists today back in 2014, when it received a round of equity investment and changed its named from Doorbot to Ring. It was bought by Amazon four years later, in 2018, for a billion dollars.One of Ring’s premier features is related to its camera: you can use your phone or other smart home device to see who’s at your door when they ring the bell, but it can also be set to record when it detects movement, which makes it easy to check and see who stole your Amazon package from your porch when you weren’t at home, for instance, and resultingly Ring door camera footage has become fundamental to reporting, and on occasion pursuing, some types of crime.As a direct result of that utility, Ring introduced its Neighbors service in mid-2018, this service serving as a sort of social network that allows Ring device users to discuss local issues, especially those related to safety and security, anonymously, while also allowing them to share photos and videos taken by their devices. This service also created relationships with local law enforcement, and allowed police to jump onto the network and request footage from Ring customers, if they thought these doorbell cams might have photos or video of someone escaping with a stolen car, for instance, which might then help the police catch that crook.It’s generally assumed that Amazon probably bought Ring, at least in part, to entrench itself as the lord of the internet of things world, as it launched its Amazon Sidewalk platform in 2020, which allowed all Amazon devices, including Ring devices, to share a wireless mesh network, all of them communicating with each other and all using Amazon’s Alexa as an interface.In 2023, Ring was sued by the FTC for $5.8 million because it allowed its employees and contractors to access private videos by failing to have basic security and privacy features in place—so not only could any Ring employee view their customer’s private video feeds, hackers could easily access all this media and data, as well. Just one example surfaced in that lawsuit shows that a Ring employee viewed thousands of video recordings of at least 81 different female users over the course of a few months in 2017.So Amazon was building a surveillance network that worked really well, in the sense that it was predicated on popular, at times quite useful devices that people seemed to love, but which was also quite leaky, giving all sorts of people access to these supposedly private feeds, and it was shared with law enforcement via that social network. It’s also been alleged that Ring (and Amazon) have used users’ footage without further permission for things like facial recognition and AI training. Their partnership with police agencies also allegedly created incentives for the police to encourage citizens to buy Ring cams and other security devices for their homes, creating perverse incentives. And again, these devices connect wirelessly to other internet of things devices, expanding their reach and the potential for abuse of collected user data.In late 2025, Ring announced a new partnership with Flock Safety, a company that’s best known for its security offerings, including automated license plate readers and gunshot detector systems.These are mass surveillance tools used by some governments and law enforcement entities, and they use cameras and microphones to capture license plates, people’s faces, and sounds that might be gunfire and aggregate that data to be used by police, neighborhood associations, and in some cases private property owners.This sort of technology is incredibly useful to companies like Palantir, which again, aggregates and crunches it, on scale, and then shares that information with police, ICE, and other such agencies.These tools can sometimes help flag areas where guns are being fired or where crimes are being committed, but they’re also imperfect and at times biased against some groups of people and areas, and some data show that not only is crime not reduced by the presence of these systems, but there’s a fair bit of evidence that this data often falls into the hands of hackers or is used by employees for nefarious, stalkery purposes, as was the case with Ring’s cameras. So most civil liberties groups, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are vehemently against them, but governments like the second Trump administration like them, because they create a surveillance mesh they can tap into and use for, for instance, figuring out where to deploy ICE agents, or, in theory at least, spying on your political enemies or ex-spouses for abuse or blackmail purposes.Ring’s late-2025 announcement wasn’t widely reported, but in early 2026 the company bought a Super Bowl ad to announce a new feature called Search Party, enabled by their partnership with Flock.The ad showed a neighborhood coming together to find a lost dog, using the web of doorbell cameras on all the homes in the area to track the dog and figure out where it went—all the cameras activated at once to create a surveillance mesh of live footage.This ad landed with a resounding thud,, as to many people it felt more menacing than heartwarming, the new feature overtly raising the potential that government agencies, including ICE, could tap into it to surveil and track their neighbors. The response was so negative that Ring quickly issued a statement saying that it was no longer moving forward with its Flock partnership, attempting to reassure its customers that “integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever send to Flock Safety.”This result is notable in part because it’s a rare instance of a major tech company backtracking on a major feature decision due to public backlash, but also because it suggests backlash against ICE is reverberating through other aspects of life and interconnected industries.Ring device users mostly buy these things for their surveillance capabilities, but the increasing, and increasingly hostile and violent acts committed by members of ICE seem to have nudged the conversation so that folks are more worried about these agents than about the porch pirates and other criminals that these devices and this partnership could ostensibly help them identify.It’s too early to say what this might mean for the burgeoning patriot stack of tech companies and government agencies, but it does suggest there are limits to what people will put up with, even when those in charge are adhering to a playbook that has typically worked well for them, in the past, and the devices and services they’re using to build their surveillance network are otherwise beloved by those who use them.Show Noteshttps://restofworld.org/2026/big-tech-backlash-alternatives-upscrolled/https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/trumps-power-switchhttps://www.authoritarian-stack.info/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/realestate/smart-home-cameras-nest-ring-privacy.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/platforms-bend-over-backward-to-help-dhs-censor-ice-critics-advocates-say/https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problemshttps://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceledhttps://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcementhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/children-of-color-projected-to-be-majority-of-u-s-youth-this-yearhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safetyhttps://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-appointment-details-ice/https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-ring-kills-flock-safety-deal-after-super-bowl-ad-uproar/https://www.wired.com/story/ice-crashing-us-court-system-minnesota/https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-employee-questions-on-ice/https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-ice-forum-where-agents-complain-about-their-jobs/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about OpenAI, nudify apps, and CSAM.We also discuss Elon Musk, SpaceX, and humanistic technology.Recommended Book: Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith ButlerTranscriptxAI is an American corporation that was founded in mid-2023 by Elon Musk, ostensibly in response to several things happening in the world and in the technology industry in particular.According to Musk, a “politically correct” artificial intelligence, especially a truly powerful, even generally intelligent one, which would be human or super-human-scale capable, would be dangerous, leading to systems like HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He intended, in contrast, to create what he called a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that would be better at everything, including math and reasoning, than existing, competing models from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.The development of xAI was also seemingly a response to the direction of OpenAI in particular, as OpenAI was originally founded in 2015 as a non-profit by many of the people who now run OpenAI and competing models by competing companies, and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk were the co-chairs of the non-profit.Back then, Musk and Altman both said that their AI priorities revolved around the many safety issues associated with artificial general intelligence, including potentially existential ones. They wanted the development of AI to take a humanistic trajectory, and were keen to ensure that these systems aren’t hoarded by just a few elites and don’t make the continued development and existence of human civilization impossible.Many of those highfalutin ambitions seemed to either be backburnered or removed from OpenAI’s guiding tenets wholesale when the company experienced surprising success from its first publicly deployed ChatGPT model back in late-2022.That was the moment that most people first experienced large-language model-based AI tools, and it completely upended the tech industry in relatively short order. OpenAI had already started the process of shifting from a vanilla non-profit into a capped for-profit company in 2019, which limited profits to 100-times any investments it received, partly in order to attract more talent that would otherwise be unlikely to leave their comparably cushy jobs at the likes of Google and Facebook for the compensation a non-profit would be able to offer.OpenAI began partnering with Microsoft that same year, 2019, and that seemed to set them up for the staggering growth they experienced post-ChatGPT release.Part of Musk’s stated rationale for investing so heavily in xAI is that he provided tens of millions of dollars in seed funding to the still non-profit OpenAI between 2015 and 2018. He filed a lawsuits against the company after its transition, and when it started to become successful, post-ChatGPT, especially between 2024 and 2026, and has demanded more than $100 billion in compensation for that early investment. He also attempted to take over OpenAI in early 2025, launching a hostile bid with other investors to nab OpenAI for just under $100 billion. xAI, in other words, is meant to counter OpenAI and what it’s become.All of which could be seen as a genuine desire to keep OpenAI functioning as a non-profit arbiter of AGI development, serving as a lab and thinktank that would develop the guardrails necessary to keep these increasingly powerful and ubiquitous tools under control and working for the benefit of humanity, rather than against it.What’s happened since, within Musk’s own companies, would seem to call that assertion into question, though. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: xAI, its chatbot Grok, and a tidal wave of abusive content it has created that’s led to lawsuits and bans from government entities around the world.—In November of 2023, an LLM-based chatbot called Grok, which is comparable in many ways to OpenAI’s LLM-based chabot, ChatGPT, was launched by Musk’s company xAI.Similar to ChatGPT, Grok is accessible by apps on Apple and Android devices, and can also be accessed on the web. Part of what makes its distinct, though, is that it’s also built into X, the social network formerly called Twitter which Musk purchased in late-2022. On X, Grok operates similar to a normal account, but one that other users can interact with, asking Grok about the legitimacy of things posted on the service, asking it normal chat-botty questions, and asking it to produce AI-generated media.Grok’s specific stances and biases have varied quite a lot since it was released, and in many cases it has defaulted to the data- and fact-based leanings of other chatbots: it will generally tell you what the Mayo clinic and other authorities say about vaccines and diseases, for instance, and will generally reference well-regarded news entities like the Associated Press when asked about international military conflicts.Musk’s increasingly strong political stances, which have trended more and more far right over the past decade, have come to influence many of Grok’s responses, however, at times causing it to go full Nazi, calling itself Mechahitler and saying all the horrible and offensive things you would expect a proud Nazi to say. At other times it has clearly been programmed to celebrate Elon Musk whenever possible, and in still others it has become immensely conspiratorial or anti-liberal or anti-other group of people.The conflicting personality types of this bot seems to be the result of Musk wanting to have a maximally truth-seeking AI, but then not liking the data- and fact-based truths that were provided, as they often conflicted with his own opinions and biases. He would then tell the programmers to force Grok to not care about antisemitism or skin color or whatever else, and it would overcorrect in the opposite direction, leading to several news cycles worth of scandal.This changes week by week and sometimes day by day, but Grok often calls out Musk as being authoritarian, a conspiracy theorist, and even a pedophile, and that has placed the Grok chatbot in an usual space amongst other, similar chatbots—sometimes serving as a useful check on misinformation and disinformation on the X social network, but sometimes becoming the most prominent producer of the same.Musk has also pushed for xAI to produce countervailing sources of truth from which Grok can find seeming data, the most prominent of which is Grokipedia, which Musk intended to be a less-woke version of Wikipedia, and which, perhaps expectedly, means that it’s a far-right rip off of Wikipedia that copies most articles verbatim, but then changes anything Musk doesn’t like, including anything that might support liberal political arguments, or anything that supports vaccines or trans people. In contrast, pseudoscience and scientific racism get a lot of positive coverage, as does the white genocide conspiracy theory, all of which are backed by either highly biased or completely made up sources—in both cases sources that Wikipedia editors would not accept.Given all that, what’s happened over the past few months maybe isn’t that surprising.In late 2025 and early 2026, it was announced that Grok had some new image-related features, including the ability for users to request that it modify images. Among other issues, this new tool allowed users to instruct Grok to place people, which for this audience especially meant women and children, in bikinis and in sexually explicit positions and scenarios.Grok isn’t the first LLM-based app to provide this sort of functionality: so called “nudify” apps have existed for ages, even before AI tools made that functionality simpler and cheaper to apply, and there have been a wave of new entrants in this field since the dawn of the ChatGPT era a few years ago.Grok is easily the biggest and most public example of this type of app, however, and despite the torrent of criticism and concern that rolled in following this feature’s deployment, Musk immediately came out in favor of said features, saying that his chatbot is edgier and better than others because it doesn’t have all the woke, pearl-clutching safeguards of other chatbots.After several governments weighed in on the matter, however, Grok started responding to requests to do these sorts of image edits with a message saying: “Image generation and editing are currently limited to paying subscribers. You can subscribe to unlock these features.”Which means users could still access these tools, but they would have to pay $8 per month and become a premium user in order to do so. That said, the AP was able to confirm that as of mid-January, free X users could still accomplish the same by using an Edit Image button that appears on all images posted to the site, instead of asking Grok directly.When asked about this issue by the press, xAI has auto-responded with the message “Legacy Media Lies.” The company has previously said it will remove illegal content and permanently suspend users who post and ask for such content, but these efforts have apparently not been fast or complete, and more governments have said they plan to take action on the matter, themselves, since this tool became widespread.Again, this sort of nonconsensual image manipulation has been a problem for a long, long time, made easier by the availability of digital tools like Photoshop, but not uncommon even before the personal computer and digital graphics revolution. These tools have made the production of such images a lot simpler and faster, though, and that’s put said tools in more hands, including those of teenagers, who have in worryingly large numbers taken to creating photorealistic naked and sexually explicit images of their mostly female classmates.Allowing all X users, or even just the subset that pays for the service to do the same at the click of a button or by asking a Chatbot to do it for them has increased the number manyfold, and allowed even more people to created explicit images of neighbors, celebrities, and yes, even children. An early estimate indicates that over the course of just nine days, Grok created and posted 4.4 million images, at least 41% of which, about 1.8 million, were sexualized images of women. Another estimated using a broader analysis says that 65% of those images, or just over 3 million, contained sexualized images of men, women, and children.CSAM is an acronym that means ‘child sexual abuse material,’ sometimes just called child porn, and the specific definition varies depending on where you are, but almost every legal jurisdiction frowns, or worse, on its production and distribution.Multiple governments have announced that they’ll be taking legal action against the company since January of 2026, including Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Britain, France, India, Brazil, and the central governance of the European Union.The French investigation into xAI and Grok led to a raid on the company’s local office as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations that the company is knowingly spreading child sexual abuse materials and other illegal deepfake content. Musk has been summoned for questioning in that investigation.Some of the governments looking into xAI for these issues conditionally lifted their bans in late-January, but this issues has percolated back into the news with the release of 16 emails between Musk and the notorious sex traffic and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, with Musk seemingly angling for an invite to one of Epstein’s island parties, which were often populated with underage girls who were offered as, let’s say companions, for attendees.And this is all happening at a moment in which xAI, which already merged with social network X, is meant to be itself merged with another Musk-owned company, SpaceX, which is best known for its inexpensive rocket launches.Musk says the merger is intended to allow for the creation of space-based data centers that can be used to power AI systems like Grok, but many analysts are seeing this as a means of pumping more money into an expensive, unprofitable portion of his portfolio: SpaceX, which is profitable, is likely going to have an IPO this year and will probably have a valuation of more than a trillion dollars. By folding very unprofitable xAI into profitable SpaceX, these AI-related efforts could be funded well into the future, till a moment when, possibly, many of today’s AI companies will have gone under, leaving just a few competitors for xAI’s Grok and associated offerings.Show Noteshttps://www.wired.com/story/deepfake-nudify-technology-is-getting-darker-and-more-dangerous/https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867874/stripe-visa-mastercard-amex-csam-grokhttps://www.ft.com/content/f5ed0160-7098-4e63-88e5-8b3f70499b02https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/29/millions-creating-deepfake-nudes-telegram-ai-digital-abusehttps://apnews.com/article/france-x-investigation-seach-elon-musk-1116be84d84201011219086ecfd4e0bchttps://apnews.com/article/grok-x-musk-ai-nudification-abuse-2021bbdb508d080d46e3ae7b8f297d36https://apnews.com/article/grok-elon-musk-deepfake-x-social-media-2bfa06805b323b1d7e5ea7bb01c9da77https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/technology/elon-musk-spacex-xai.htmlhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557johttps://techcrunch.com/2026/02/01/indonesia-conditionally-lifts-ban-on-grok/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr58dlnne5ohttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon-musk-deepfakes.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAIhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPThttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipediahttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/10/musk-and-investors-offering-97point4-billion-for-control-of-openai-wsj.html This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about the European Union, India, and tariffs.We also discuss trade barriers, free trade, and dumping.Recommended Book: The Kill Chain by Christian BroseTranscriptA free trade agreement, sometimes called a free trade treaty, is a law that reduces the cost and regulatory burden of trading between two or more states.There are many theories as to the ideal way to do international trade, with some economists and politicians positing that complete free and open trade is the way to go, because it allows goods and services to cross borders completely unencumbered, which in turn allows businesses in different countries to really lean into whatever they’re good at, selling their cars to countries that are less good at making cars, while that recipient country produces soy beans or computer chips or whatever they’re good at making, and sending those in the other direction, likewise unburdened by stiff tariffs or regulatory hurdles. Each country can thus produce the best product cheapest and sell it to the market where their products are in high-demand, while they, in turn, benefit from the same when it comes to other products and services.This theory leans on the idea that everyone is better off when everyone does what they’re best at, rather than trying to do everything—specialization. But those who oppose this conception of international trade argue that this creates and reinforces asymmetries between different nations and businesses: a country that’s really good at producing soybeans may be at a substantial disadvantage if the country that makes cars ever decides to go to war, because they won’t have the existing infrastructure to build tanks or drones or whatever else, while the country that specializes in computer chips might hold all the cards when it comes to generating economic pressure against its enemies or would-be enemies, because such chips are in everything these days, from military hardware to kitchen appliances.This also creates potential frailties for countries that specialize in, say, buggy whips, only to have a new technology like the automobile come around and put a significant chunk of their total economy out of business.This theory may also leave local businesses that don’t lean into a regional strength kind of in the lurch. If a country with a decent-sized automobile industry decides leaves their borders completely open to international competition, there’s a chance that could light a fire under those local producers, forcing them to become more competitive, but there’s also a chance it could collapse the market for local offerings—their cars might no longer be desirable, because the international stuff flooding across the borders from a nation that has heavily prioritized making cars are just so much better and cheaper, whether naturally or artificially, because of subsidies by that foreign government meant to help them take out international competition.This is why most nations have all sorts of tariffs, regulations, and other trade barriers erected between them and their trading partners, and why those trade barriers are ultra-specific, different for every single possible trade partner. The goal is to make international options less appealing by making them more expensive, or making it trickier for foreign competition to smoothly and quickly get their products on your shelves, while still making those things available in a volume that aligns with local consumer demands. And then ideally making it easier and cheaper for your stuff to get on their shelves.The negotiation of all this is massively complicated because Country A might want to favor their soybean farmers, who are an important voting bloc, and Country B might want to do the same for their car industry, because tax income from that industry is vital, and these two governments will thus do what they can to ensure their favored local industries and businesses have the biggest leg-up possible in as many foreign markets as possible, without giving away so much to their trade partners that they create worse situations for other industries and businesses (and the people who run them) on the home-front, as a consequence.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, massive and potentially quite vital trade deal that was struck in early 2026, and what it might mean for global trade.—At the tail-end of January 2026, the European Commission announced that they had struck what they called “the mother of all deals” with India, this deal the culmination of two decades worth of negotiation, its tenets impacting about 2 billion people and around a quarter of the world’s total GDP.The agreement, as is the case with most such agreements, is fairly complex. But in essence it reduces or eliminates tariffs on 96.6% of all EU goods exported to India, which means about 4 billion euros of annual duties that would have otherwise been paid on European products in India will disappear—a savings for Indian consumers, and a boon for European producers whose products will now be cheaper in India.This is expected to be especially beneficial for European automakers like Volkswagen, Renault, and BMW, which have long been weighed down by a 110% tariff in India; that tariff will be reduced to as little as 10% on the first 250,000 vehicles sold, following this agreement. Lower priced vehicles will still face higher tariffs, to help protect India’s local carmakers, but electric vehicles will benefit from a five-year grace period, as India has been focusing on allowing as many cheap, renewable energy assets and infrastructure into the country as possible, regardless of where they come from.Tariffs on machinery, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals coming from the EU will be almost entirely eliminated, down from tariff rates of 44, 22, and 11%, respectively. Wine, which has long been tariffed at a rate of 150%, will be cut to between 20-30% for many varieties, and spirits from the EU coming into India will see 150% tariffs cut to 40%.On the other side of this deal, the EU will also open its market to Indian goods, reducing tariffs on about 99.5% of all such goods, including seafood, textiles, gems and jewelry, leather goods, plastic products, and toys. Several of these categories, like Indian seafood, textile-making, and other labor-intensive industries, have had a rough time of late, because of high US tariffs enforced by President Trump’s second administration, so this is being seen as a significant win for them in particular.Interestingly, while the reduction in trade barriers is substantial here, and the number of people and industries, and amount of money that’s involved is massive, this deal doesn’t include, and in some cases explicitly excludes, any agreements related to labor rights, climate commitment, or environmental standards.This means that while the European Union has thus far been pretty strict in terms of ensuring incoming products align with their policies and values regarding things like carbon emissions and ensuring goods aren’t produced by people laboring in slave-like conditions, this deal falls short of such enforcements, allowing India to operate with relative impunity, with regards to those issues, at least, and still sell with dramatically reduced barriers, on the European market. That’s a big deal, and is perhaps the biggest indicator of just how badly the EU wanted to make this deal work.The EU was also able to keep significant protections in place for important local sectors like beef and chicken, dairy, rice, and sugar—all industries in which India would have liked to compete in the EU, but which, because of those maintained barriers, they practically can’t. That would likely have been a feverishly negotiated topic, and it’s likely an indicator of how much India wanted this to work, too.On that note, both India and the EU were apparently especially interested in making this multi-decade deal work, now, because of increasing pressure from China on one side and the US on the other.China has been rerouting many of its cheap products that would have previously gone to the US market, elsewhere, engaging in what’s often called ‘dumping’ which slowly but surely puts businesses that produce comparable products at a profit in those local target markets out of business, at which point these Chinese companies can then ratchet up their prices and profits, operating without real competition.The EU and India have both been targeted by Chinese companies taking this approach, because they’re still producing at a feverish pace and because of US tariffs and the general unpredictability and irregularity of US policy overall under the second Trump administration, they’ve been firing that cheap product cannon more intensely at other large markets, instead—and India and the EU are the next two big markets in line right now, after the US and China.On the US side of things, those same tariffs have been hurting companies in both the EU and India that would otherwise been shipping their goods to the rich and spendy US market, and in many cases these tariffs have been fine-tuned to hurt important local industries as much as possible, because that’s one of Trump’s main negotiating tactics: lead with pain and then negotiate to take some of the pain away.This deal, then, serves multiple purposes in that it creates a valuable, newly polished trade relationship between a rich and powerful existing bloc and the newly most-populous country on the planet, which is also rapidly expanding economically and geopolitically.One last point to note, here, though, is that the European Union has been trying to create these sorts of mutually beneficial deals with non-US partners for a while, now, and the two most recent wins, trade deals with a South American trade bloc and with Indonesia, in early January 2026 and in September of 2025, respectively, have borne mixed results.The deal with Indonesia seems to be moving forward apace, and while it’s a heck of a lot smaller than the India deal, only worth about 27 billion euros, that’s still important, as Indonesia is increasingly important, both economically and geopolitically, especially in a Southeast Asia that’s slowly reinforcing itself against China’s economically and potentially militarily expansionist tendencies.The deal with that South American bloc, however, was referred to the EU Court of Justice in mid-January for legal review due to its lack of alignment with other EU treaties, and that could delay or prevent its ratification.This new mother of all deals with India could likewise face holdups, or could fizzle before being implemented—though most analysts who are keeping eyes on this are seeing it not just as an economic agreement, but a gesture of solidarity at a moment in which China and the US are signaling their intent to carve up the world into hemispheric hegemonies, when those who might otherwise be forced into subordinate positions are scrambling to figure out who they can team up with and create counter-balancing forces capable of standing up against current and future aggression and coercion.There’s a chance that even if politics and propriety threaten to get in the way, then, India and the EU will figure out a way to work together, on this and potentially other matters of global import, as well.Show Noteshttps://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/27/eu-and-india-sign-free-trade-agreementhttps://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/eu-india-trade-deal-leaves-blocs-carbon-border-tariff-intact-2026-01-27/https://archive.is/20260127162349/https://www.ft.com/content/b03b1344-7e92-4d0d-b85e-5ed92fc8f550https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_agreementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_barrierhttps://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_184https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/en/ip_26_184/IP_26_184_EN.pdfhttps://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-indias-mother-of-all-deals-with-eu-wipes-out-pakistans-trade-advantage-10921011https://theconversation.com/what-the-mother-of-all-deals-between-india-and-the-eu-means-for-global-trade-274515https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-us-tariff-hikes-significance-trade-diversion-effectshttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260116IPR32450/eu-mercosur-meps-demand-a-legal-opinion-on-its-conformity-with-the-eu-treatieshttps://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/1/27/mother-of-all-deals-how-india-eu-trade-deal-creates-27-trillion-markethttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/trump-reaction-eu-india-trade-deal-fta.htmlhttps://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/inflection-points/the-mother-of-all-trade-deals-in-the-time-of-trump/https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/with-mother-of-all-deals-in-bag-minister-piyush-goyal-says-mother-will-be-compassionate-fair-to-all-28-children/articleshow/127821015.cmshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_Free_Trade_Agreementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_relations This is a public episode. 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