“The More You DOGE” Edition
Rational Security
The Lawfare Institute
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2025
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower, Tyler McBrien, and Kevin Frazier to talk through the week’s big national security news, including:
- “Aliens vs. Predators.” Despite forceful legal pushback—including by the U.S. Supreme Court—the Trump administration is working hard to continue its campaign to remove foreign aliens it accuses of pursuing a “predatory incursion” from the country using the Alien Enemies Act. How far will it go? And to what extent can the courts (or anyone else) stop them?
- “Aye Aye Robot.” Both the Biden and Trump administrations were fans of artificial intelligence (AI) and set out policies to incorporate it into government decision-making. But while the Biden administration focused much of its efforts on guardrails, the Trump administration has increasingly torn them down as part of a broader push to incorporate the nascent technology into government decision-making. What are the risks and potential benefits of this sort of government by AI?
- “For Pete’s Sake.” Beleaguered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is more beleaguered than ever this week, after reports that, in addition to inadvertently sharing classified secrets with Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, he also passed them to his wife, brother, and personal lawyer on another Signal thread. Meanwhile, a former adviser (and established Trump loyalist) went public with allegations that Hegseth’s management has led to chaos at the Defense Department and called for his resignation. Will this be enough for the Trump administration to cut bait and run? Or does his support in the MAGAsphere simply run too deep?
In object lessons, Tyler, fresh from biking adventures abroad, hyped the routes, photos, and resources on bikepacking.com, if physical exertion is your idea of relaxation. Anna, finding other ways to relax, came to the defense of The Big Short in helping to soothe her anxiety amid more current market upheaval. Doubling down on the “no relaxation without tension” theme, Scott’s outie binge-watched Severance while on vacation. And Kevin, very on-brand, was quick to bring us a feel-good story of a new community partnership to support AI skill-building in Austin-based nonprofits.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Kevin, as our in-house AI guru, you'll be happy to know I have been playing around quite avidly on Gemini, having recently discovered that we, by virtue of our Google platform at work here at Lawfare, have access to Gemini and Gemini Deep Research. |
| 0:16.5 | I have to say, it's pretty impressive. |
| 0:18.0 | I've had it draft. |
| 0:19.0 | I've been a brutal, brutal partner to my digital junior associate in terms of the sheer volume of memos and meaninglessness of the |
| 0:26.2 | memos I've assigned to it. Maybe I should say junior summer associate. But all around, |
| 0:30.7 | I've been pretty impressed. Anna, Tyler, I know I flight for you guys. We have Gemini |
| 0:35.7 | at Deep Research Through the Work accounts. Have you guys gotten to play with it at all yet? |
| 0:39.8 | Well, first, I just want to be clear. This will not replace the Lawfare internship program for the foreseeable future. We still love our interns. |
| 0:47.1 | You got to add that caveat, for the foreseeable future. And I don't mean that to offend the interns. |
| 0:53.4 | I have not tried it yet. I'm kind of a Luddite, and I, like, don't really try a lot of new |
| 1:00.1 | technology. My friends tell me that I would be better off with a flip phone because I so often |
| 1:06.8 | just don't know how to do anything. But I did try chat GPT like two weeks ago for the first time, |
| 1:14.4 | just like the free version. |
| 1:16.5 | And it went terribly. |
| 1:21.5 | I decided to use it as I fed it like a bunch of court declarations about Doge because I wanted it to find |
| 1:30.7 | contradictions in the various declarations of, you know, what people were saying on one date |
| 1:38.6 | versus what they were saying in a different case on other dates. And so I gave it like a bunch of different exhibits and it kept making things up. |
| 1:50.0 | Like it would make up names that I would be like, wait, who's that? |
| 1:54.2 | And then I'd be like, are you sure that that's a real person? |
| 1:57.9 | And they'd be like, oh, actually, you're right. Maybe chat GPT knows more |
| 2:02.9 | than you do. We know they're using AI. Maybe they've got a little inside track. It may have |
| 2:08.0 | gotten the pronunciation of Judge Sini's correct well before anyone else. Who knows? I will say I did |
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