On this week's show: Marc Caputo, White House Correspondent for Axios, joins the podcast to help us understand how Trump and his advisers are deciding what to do with the Iran war, and how they are preparing (or not) for the domestic political blowback from an extended disruption in oil markets. We also get his view from south Florida on the ongoing Republican dominance of that state — what the party did right to win solid majorities of Florida voters, and whether they face any danger from Trump’s national unpopularity and a cost of living crisis that, in Florida, takes the particular form of high housing prices and skyrocketing homeowner’s insurance costs.

Plus, Megan came in for a two-minutes hate this week for describing how she uses AI in her writing process — primarily, in the way one would use a human research assistant. We talk about the right way to use AI as a journalist, and the roots of the anti-AI fervor among journalists.

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On this week's show Tyler Austin Harper joins to talk about his reporting on the Mellon Foundation and its role in pushing humanities academia in the direction of progressive social activism, his on-the-ground take from Maine on Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, what literature can teach us about the politics of human extinction, and why the commentariat is souring on all these polyamory memoirs we keep getting.

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On this week's show: congressional candidate Alex Bores — he’s a New York state representative and author of the controversial AI regulation law, the RAISE Act — joins us to talk about the fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, and about how rules should be made about how AI gets used in the public sector. We also got to talk with him about Ben’s “Free Willy” experiment, how to deal with the electrical demands of data centers, and what Manhattan in particular needs from Congress.

Plus: we have an update on Iran — Ben now thinks he may have been a little too optimistic about how this war would go, we check in again on the financial markets, and we discuss the rumors that the new ayatollah doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time in the straight of Hormuz, if you catch our drift. We also talk about the disappointing housing bill working its way through congress with a big, bad idea from Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, and we look at McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski and his pride in his hot new product, the Big Arch.

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