12 Day War, Socialism Wins in NYC, Stocks All-Time High, AI Copyright, Science Corner

The episode opens with banter about a White House video that one host calls the funniest post a White House has ever made, the "daddy's home" video. The group riffs on it as club music, imagining themselves popping bottles of All-In tequila in the VIP section.

The hosts give the backstory: Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general (transcribed as "Mark Ruta"), reportedly called Trump "daddy" at the NATO summit. The joke continues with talk of a weekend in Vegas and invitations to join, before the show formally begins.

After the welcome, the hosts recall a party on Saturday night at Delilah with all four of them present, including poker "bomb pots" in which one host is said to have lost money. Discussion turns to the tequila itself. One participant notes that the project first came up about two and a half to almost three years earlier and that the design and development process "took forever." Another says guests at the party were surprised by the quality because they assumed the product was a gimmick.

On sourcing, the account is specific. The team went to Tequila, Mexico, described as the only part of Mexico allowed to use the name, and found a distillery that had been aging agave in American oak whiskey barrels for five years. Extra añejo is normally aged for three years, so a five-year cache was described as rare, and the team bought essentially all of it. That supply was enough for 7,500 bottles.

But you know, this is not about creating some large new tequila label, this is more about creating something that we ourselves like, and that's what we did, sort of a small batch product.

The packaging gets considerable attention. The box slides open and is backlit, with a charging port so the light's battery never runs out, which makes the box a keepsake. The bottle is modeled on a stack of slightly offset poker chips, made of glass with black chip accents painted on. One participant estimates the bottle added about six months to the schedule, and another says it went through many prototypes.

The commercial details: the tequila is now on sale at tequila.allin.com. Before this it was only available as a preorder or reservation for people who had attended the All-In Summit. Of the 7,500 bottles, the hosts expect to sell only about 6,000 and keep the rest. There is a limit of two bottles per buyer. One participant concedes it is "not a a cheap product" and positions it against a competitor transcribed as "Clostazol Ultra," which they say sells for about $1,700 a bottle and sometimes for as much as $3,000. In passing, one host jokes that Uber hit another record that day, "past 88."

The segment ends with self-mocking jokes about being "elite," aimed at Politico's portrayal of the group as out of touch: room-service eggs with truffles or caviar, and pillows and socks embroidered with initials. Then the conversation turns to "the twelve day war between Israel and Iran."

The episode was taped on June 26, about two weeks after the war began, and a host gives a timeline. On Friday, June 13, Israel launched a surprise attack that killed a number of Iranian military officials and people working on the nuclear program. The two countries exchanged missiles for about a week while commentators debated whether this would become World War III. On Saturday, June 21, the United States joined in with "operation midnight hammer."

The strike is described as more than a dozen bunker-buster bombs dropped on two, maybe three, of Iran's key nuclear facilities, named as Fordo and Natanz. The bombs weigh 15 tons each and penetrate deep underground. Israel does not have them, and the host says this was the stated reason the U.S. was pulled in: only the U.S. could hit these targets.

The hosts discuss a video shown that Thursday morning by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (transcribed as "Dan Kane") of what they call a massive ordnance penetrator. As described, the weapon enters through a ventilation shaft, does not detonate on impact, burrows to its maximum depth and then explodes. Participants note the footage looks like a test or demonstration rather than strike footage. They add that before-and-after photos are hard to interpret beyond discoloration, since the targets were underground.

Iran's retaliation is characterized as a ceremonial response: missiles fired at a U.S. base in Qatar with "a ton of notice," none of which landed. After Trump said he had negotiated a ceasefire, the host notes, both sides kept bombing each other "a little bit," which upset the president.

The show plays a clip that the host introduces as the president dropping an "f bomb." In it, Trump says that as soon as the deal was made, Israel "dropped a load of bombs," the biggest he had seen, and that he was unhappy with both Israel and Iran.

You know, when when I say, okay, now you have twelve hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them.

One participant puts the outburst in historical context. Trump is not the first president to swear in frustration with Netanyahu: in the 1990s, Bill Clinton was reported to have asked who the superpower was, with an expletive, after Netanyahu rejected his plans. This participant argues that the reprimand went over well because enforcing a ceasefire means calling out violations, and compares the late strikes to fighters landing "last licks" after the bell.

A host then raises the obvious challenge. Trump's supporters, and Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard among others, had promised he would not start new wars, and some had opposed this action. How do they square that with the strikes? The defense is that no forever war happened. The U.S. is "not in a war with Iran," and commentators such as Mark Levin who wanted a regime-change war are described as "apoplectic" because Trump negotiated a ceasefire instead.

This defense relies on polling as the participant characterizes it. By "80 something percent," Americans do not want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, and by a similar margin they do not want a new, drawn-out war in the Middle East. The argument is that precise, targeted strikes followed by a ceasefire met both goals at once, which the participant calls threading "a very difficult needle."

Two pieces of support are offered. The first is a counterfactual: a President Kamala Harris might not have recognized that Iran's strike on the Qatar base was performative, telegraphed and meant for domestic consumption, and might have escalated as neoconservatives on social media were urging. The second is precedent from Trump's first term. After the Soleimani episode, Iran fired telegraphed missiles at U.S. bases, no Americans were harmed, and Trump ended the conflict there. The participant concludes that "a lot of presidents might have gotten sucked in." Both points are offered as judgment and are not backed by further evidence in this discussion.

Asked about the tension between not wanting war and not wanting weapons of mass destruction in Iran's hands, another participant widens the frame. They call this possibly the most important week, and perhaps the most important few months, in U.S. politics in thirty or forty years. Their claim is that Trump has "almost single handedly" restored the United States as the global superpower.

Technological supremacy comes first in the hierarchy. The participant cites the B-2 bombers as a tactical demonstration and notes that the world's largest companies are all American. Economic supremacy builds on technology. Evidence offered: the stock market back at all-time highs, and interest rates starting to come down even though the Federal Reserve is unwilling to act on the data, as the participant puts it. Military supremacy also builds on technology. The participant calls the past few weeks "a pretty clear cut case" of it.

On the red line, the participant says Trump made it "crystal clear": Iran cannot build nuclear weapons. They also openly limit their own knowledge. Whether Iran actually crossed that line is disputed by outlets such as CNN, and the participant relies on statements from Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.

All I can tell you is I don't know because I don't have access to the intel.

The participant says the decisive test of a superpower is what comes after force is used. As they describe it, Trump did not try to humiliate or dominate Iran. He said he wanted Iran to stabilize, to trade oil with China and to improve its people's lives, on the reasoning that a stable Iran means a stable Middle East. Together with the Israel–Iran ceasefire, the participant sees this as the closest the U.S. has come in a long time to being a "clear cut singular hegemon global superpower."