The AI Search Wars: Google vs. Microsoft, Nordstream report, State of the Union

The episode opens with a speaker complaining that his thirteen-year-old son does not know how to answer the phone. He says he set a rule that the boy must greet him properly, as practice for dealing with other people, and describes a run of repeated hang-ups when his son still answered with a bare "Hello." His son replied that none of his friends answer that way.

The speaker adds that when he calls his son, the boy answers with a grunt, the minimum number of syllables, and asks whether the other hosts' children are the same. One host says he has never heard his own child pick up and should test it. A short sign-off bit follows with the usual "open source it to the fans" joke.

A speaker says he was criticized on Twitter for not denouncing the Chinese balloon strongly enough, and the group jokes about the word "errant" he had used. Pressed on whether he thought the balloon was off course or sent on purpose, Sacks says the Occam's razor explanation is that China lost control of it, because deliberately flying a balloon over US territory would be a stupid and obvious plan. He allows that it could have been intentional and says he does not know.

Sacks's main point is about the reaction: in his view the nation hyperventilated and the media showed how reflexively hawkish it is, and he asks whether the Ukraine war could be wrapped up before another war with a more formidable superpower is started. Others note that the two countries spy on each other anyway, and one jokes that spy satellites already see everything.

One speaker says the balloon got more attention than the destruction of Nord Stream. Another explains the coverage through the nature of live television: an ongoing event that can be updated, like children trapped in a mine, is ideal for cable news on a slow news week, while Nord Stream is not an ongoing story. Sacks disputes that and argues the mainstream media has already taken a side.

Sacks argues that the administration and media quickly blamed Russia for blowing up Nord Stream, which made little sense to him because the pipeline was a vital Russian asset and its main leverage over Europe. He says the rush to that conclusion suggested a cover story, and that a new report by Seymour Hersh lays out in detail who did it and how, claiming the US was responsible.

Sacks describes the reporter as an eighty-six-year-old Pulitzer winner who broke the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses, which the military denied until proven. He concedes it is not known whether the new story is true, but says it looks bad. The host notes the administration has called it false, and a speaker adds that the line from the spokesperson was that it is pure fiction. These are the speakers' descriptions, and the Hersh claims are unproven.

On who could have carried it out, a speaker says Ukraine lacks the capability for an undersea mission, while the Norwegians have it, and the Hersh story said the US worked with them. If it was a US operation, the speaker guesses it was kept to a very small group, which would make it hard to prove more definitively.

Asked to answer the argument that this would be a huge provocation, Sacks points to Biden and Victoria Nuland (named as a deputy secretary of state) saying before the invasion that Nord Stream would end if Russia invaded, and to later official remarks on the benefits, including a shift of European dependence from Russian to American gas. In his view, they telegraphed it and had capability and motive, so the story is plausible. He admits it is a single-source story and that, as it stands, he finds Hersh's account more convincing than the denial, while another speaker says that on this nobody can possibly know.

A speaker says he leans toward the Hersh account being more plausible than not, since it is hard to see who else had motive, means and opportunity. He stresses that if the US did it, it would be an act of war against a country with thousands of nuclear weapons and would contradict Biden's early promise to stay out of direct involvement. In his words, that makes it a very scary situation.

He offers his own theory: the CIA knew how to do it, Biden and many Republicans wanted Nord Stream stopped, and the US might have facilitated Ukraine and collaborators such as the UK, Norway or freelance former Navy SEALs. That, he says, would sit between Hersh's story and the CIA's denial, giving the agency plausible deniability. He presents this as a prediction, not as evidence.

Sacks answers that if his counterpart can produce a competing account with the same detail as Hersh's, on meetings, approvals, timing, explosives and divers, it would be worth considering, but invented theories are not at the same level. One speaker says Hersh had numerous sources, and another disputes that, saying there is one main source, with no one on the record, who provided a great deal of detail. Neither speaker has verified how well the account was corroborated.

A speaker wonders why a one-source story is not running in a major outlet that previously worked with the reporter, since a well-sourced blockbuster would be welcome. Another suggests, citing the Valerie Plame affair, that big publications sometimes have a back channel to the national security apparatus and may be told not to print, leaving a reporter to self-publish. Both are speculation about unnamed publications.

Sacks returns to his core complaint: other theories could be laid out, such as Poland or Ukraine with the British, but the media entertained none when the news broke and instead blamed Russia very definitively, even though that story made no sense to him.