I'm just thinking here. If I'm wearing one of these shirts, it says, you know, only your politics scare me. What are you going as for Halloween?
Well, I wouldn't suggest it as a costume. Just sort of in the spirit of... I just think that like as you're vibing, you'll see when you guys get into the kitty game and you're going out with trick-or-treaters, you don't really want to be in costume after like the first... Yeah. Okay, I got it. It's a vibe thing. And but by the way, I'll give them to you. I know what you're really doing. You're asking for one and I'll give it to you. All right. You could have just said it. Yeah. Okay. Well, think what you want. Whatever makes you feel good about it.
Welcome to the program, folks. I cannot stress to you how close we were literally seconds away from today going down as the next 9/11. Thanks to a small group of brave passengers and crew members, we ended up today with a story that is a combination of Flight 93 from 9/11 and the miracle on the Hudson. Sully landing that US Airways plane on the Hudson. Here's how President Trump described the sky over the Middle East today.
An Israeli plumber saw what was happening and strong. You know when you lift pipe all day, you're strong. And he saw what was going on. He heard the screaming, but he ripped this guy out of the seat, threw him back. The crowd got him, the passengers got him, grabbed him, and having never flown a plane, he took the stick, lifted it up, and leveled out the plane.
The Fly Dubai flight headed to Tel Aviv was hijacked by the co-pilot, a new pilot from the Arab Gulf state of Oman. He stabbed the captain and sent the plane into a 16,000-foot nose dive. The plane plunged almost 700 miles an hour, going so fast it literally ripped off part of its rudder. This is the plumber that President Trump talked about. In a scene you will soon see in the next Hollywood blockbuster, the wounded pilot, laying in his own blood, was able to unlock the cockpit door, allowing the passengers to come in for help. Yaniv Haim was the Israeli plumber. You can see him there walking out at Ben Gurion Airport. He heard the screaming and led the charge into the cockpit. He says he choked the hijacker and pulled the controls up and stopped it from diving. Other passengers tied up the hijacker with headphone wires. Yaniv, with bloodstains still on his shirt, went to speak with Prime Minister Netanyahu after landing in Tel Aviv. He says he knew what to do because he watches something called Air Crash Investigation. He and my wife are evidently fans of the same show. It's a long-running documentary series that reconstructs plane crashes. Let's go back through the last week. We now had an Iranian agent try to bomb a US base in the United Kingdom. An Omani co-pilot tried to 9/11 an airliner into Israel. Something is next. We are forgetting, or maybe even worse, we have forgotten the lessons of 9/11. Clearly, the terrorists have not. In a moment, Chris Wacker, assistant director heading criminal investigations for the FBI, now retired, served as scene commander for the FBI operations in Iraq, tracking Hezbollah cells. Doron Kemple, former IDF commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal Special Forces and Hostage Rescue Unit, roughly equivalent to America's Delta Force. And Captain Lonnie Campbell, former military pilot, 777 captain for a major US airline. We start with NewsNation's Libby Dean in Doha, where the sun is coming up, which will mark just about 24 hours since that plane took off. Libby, good morning.
Good morning, Leland. This terrifying incident coming at really already a very tense time here in the region, and we're hearing differing accounts from the Israelis and the Saudis. Israeli officials quick to describe this as a thwarted potential terror attack, saying that pilot wanted to crash this plane with all of those passengers on board. The Saudis have not said that at this point. Regardless, what we saw today remarkable in multiple ways. Not only what they did on this airliner, bringing it to safety, but also the fact that the Saudis allowed a plane full of Israelis to land in Saudi Arabia. But what they didn't allow was the Israeli military to send a plane to pick up those Israeli citizens. Instead, we saw these passengers get on this other Fly Dubai flight. Ultimately, they did luckily land safely in Tel Aviv, which was their original destination. We also know that what you mentioned, Leland, an Omani citizen is the one who allegedly stabbed the other pilot on this plane. He was arrested as he got off that flight in Saudi Arabia, and he's being currently questioned by Saudi authorities. Also, Fly Dubai tells us that they are not going to be operating flights to and from Israel as this investigation plays out. And Leland, I just spoke with a State Department official who told me on board that Fly Dubai flight there were four Americans, and they're dual citizens. Leland.
All right, Libby Dean, thank you very much. Thanks for staying up late. Chris Wacker, Doron Kemple, Captain Lonnie Campbell, gents, good to see you. Chris, start with this for us. How do you figure out whether this Omani acted alone? Who inspired him? If he was talking to anyone, what are the Saudis doing? What's the FBI doing? What is the Shin Bet, the Israeli FBI, doing?
FBI, well, they're all in overdrive, and the international investigations are governed by treaty between those countries, but generally there's pretty good cooperation. Israelis and the Saudis a little bit problematic, but under these circumstances, I think they're going to get their answers that they need. You look at the overall context here. The overall context is a plane full of Israelis is hijacked by someone who wants to take that plane down and kill everyone on board. So you kind of start from the position of this is a terrorist act, keeping an open mind throughout the process, but you sort of start from that position and you dissect this guy's life, financial transactions, who does he communicate with, who did he meet with, what is he posted on social media, what does his family say, what do his friends say? You're going to take his life apart and figure out what his motive was and did something just happen in his life that triggered this event. I don't think it'll take long to get to the bottom of it, but it is an international investigation.
Yeah, if I'm going to trust anybody to sort of just go to ground on this, it's going to be the Israelis in terms of their forensic capabilities and the like. But Chris, I'll stick with you for one second. What as the FBI, as the Shin Bet, as the Mossad, as the Saudis, are you worried that this is part of a larger plot that taking off from Dubai today, tomorrow, maybe other planes with pilots who have been, I'll use the vernacular, radicalized?
Well, it would be professional negligence not to be worried about that. Not just for me, but for any intelligence service, any counterterrorism service in any of these countries. I mean, there are high tensions in the Middle East. There's precedent for this type of attack if it was indeed an attack. So, you know, this is... I've said for several years now that I think we've gotten into a state of complacency, and I hope this jolts us right out of it.
Yeah. Captain Lonnie Campbell, pardon me, want to start in terms of what was happening on the plane. You have a plane that goes into a dive, reaches 700 mph, nearly breaks the sound barrier, drops 16,000 feet in two minutes. At that point, when we understand the plumber started pulling back on the control stick, how long would it have been until that plane was in the ground or unrecoverable? Number one. Number two, take us through what it takes to land that plane after the rudder broke off because of the dive.
Well, for one thing, those excessive rates, you could have caused even further damage critically to the stabilizers, the thing in the back of the airplane that makes it go up and down. If you over-G the airplane in the recovery, which fortunately I don't think this gentleman did, obviously he didn't further damage the airplane and put it in a state that was unrecoverable.
Huge kudos to this fella for studying Air Crash Investigation or whatever to know to maybe more gingerly pull it back up. Yeah, I'm thinking about all the time my wife spends watching that show. But after that point, right, there were pilots who were deadheading, may have been a relief crew, we're not really sure, who were on the plane as well. The captain had been seriously wounded. The first officer, the co-pilot, is the guy now in headphone restraints because he was the hijacker. What does it take for those pilots to try and figure out what the damage to the plane is and then find an airport to land at?
It would have taken some time depending on how much damage he did to the instrumentation, possibly even the throttle control where you have your speed brakes, your landing gear, and whatnot. They probably had to take a little bit of time to assess whether they even had control of the airplane using conventional methods. But fortunately, a deadheading crew qualified in the airplane probably got up there. And, you know, the other issue is blood. It's very slippery. It's sticky. It gets on surfaces. How much damage did this guy do to instrumentation that you can't recover? I give them a lot of credit for finding the nearest safe airport to land at and doing a fantastic job. And by the way, Captain Smith Marchard, we should all be thankful that he fought hard enough and still had the wherewithal to open the door so that they could come in and help him. Otherwise, we...
Yeah, that's the gentleman we're looking at, who was the captain of the plane, that he unlocked the cockpit so the passengers could come in and help. Doron, I think about the passengers in this situation. You were the commander of Sayeret Matkal that trained day in day out for this kind of scenario, others for hijackings, for hostage rescue. And somehow it was a group of passengers with a plane falling at 8,000 feet per minute going 700 miles an hour that are able to pull off the rescue or retake the plane. What do you attribute that to?
Courage, which is one thing that we talk less about in an age of AI, what AI can do and can't do. This is a story about courage, right? It's the courage of the pilot that, bleeding, is able to open the cockpit. If he doesn't, what a tragedy. And then it takes a few. It typically takes one out of the whole plane, one who decided to take the first step. Courage, initiative, focus, getting into the cockpit and saves everybody. So this is a story about courage, and courage at the end of the day is a personal trait of challenge, but it starts with individuals.
Yeah. You can't teach it either. Here's some of those passengers after they had been flown from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv talking to Israeli media.
Suddenly the aircraft dropped like a massive, like a massive turbulence for 20, 30 seconds, then balanced, and then once again dropped for 10 seconds and bounced again.
And I will be always grateful for this act of bravery for the pilot and for all of the heroes that jumped into the cockpit and fought with bare hands.
First of all, we are people of action. We are looking to do the right thing, and the right thing was to calm everybody.
Doron, you talked about courage. I think about another Israeli, also Sayeret Matkal, Danny Lewin, who just about 25 years ago was the first victim of 9/11. He was a tech entrepreneur after having served in the Israeli military. He was on one of the planes that had been hijacked, heard the Arabic of the hijackers, knew what they were planning, followed him up to the cockpit, and one of the hijackers followed him and slit his throat. It speaks to how Israelis have learned the hard way to always be vigilant, to always sort of be ready to react to a terror attack. You've now moved to the United States from Israel. Do Americans have to start thinking that way, Doron?
Hopefully not, but all of us should always think about what we would do in these situations. And just going through your mind, what you would do would ease your transition from sitting calmly in seat 17A to rushing to the cockpit. By the way, had there been Marines on the airplane or anybody who's trained, I'm sure they would have done the same. It starts with a person, some skill, culture. Hopefully, we don't get to that in the US.
This is broader. And the president's made this point, others have. There was the plot in the UK allegedly linked to Iran to bomb a base that B-1 bombers were based at. There's some very, very suspicious parts about how the UK police found out about that plot. Again, would the FBI have to right now be thinking about aircraft coming from overseas that this wasn't either a dry run or the beginnings of some kind of larger plot, right?
Yeah, you bet they are. You know, they don't have much control over the vetting process for pilots. I mean, they rely on intelligence sharing between intelligence services across the friendly nations, but you know, really and truly, it's a hit-or-miss process as to how thorough those investigations are and how updated they are and whether, you know, and I think a lot of things are not looked at. They don't look at social media postings and that sort of thing. They don't go out and knock on doors. What a Turkish couple years as an FBI agent.
Yeah. I got a thorough background reinvestigation and they knocked on doors. Yeah, they don't do that. So it doesn't happen for airline pilots.
Lonnie Campbell, just want to... There's a lot of Chens we talk to all the time. Lonnie Campbell, pardon me. Help us at the final point, right? At some point, how do you prevent something like this? There's two pilots in a cockpit. At some point, you have to trust somebody, right, Captain? If you're not going to trust the pilots, what can prevent this?
We pay particular attention to the dynamics in the cockpit between personality, and that's another aspect of this that people haven't been talking about. Fly Dubai hires a lot of expats. So you have a lot of different cultures, a lot of even different native languages from the pilots that are working together. Maybe they got into a spat, maybe somebody was depressed. But as captain especially, I try to pay particular attention to my fellow crew members for any clues of fatigue, upset. We talk about home a little bit. How's everything going? Those are all highly relevant in today's type of flying because it's just such a vulnerable place. The cockpit has to be secure at all times.
Yeah. Once the door is locked, as you point out, it is sort of a sanctuary in a good way and a bad way. Captain Lonnie Campbell, Chris Wacker, Doron Kemple, gentlemen, thank you all very much. From the hijacking of that plane now to what Doron was talking about, the threat of AI. Call it the carrot and the stick. Yesterday, President Trump played nice with the AI Bros. We all watched it. Today, the AI Bros learned what happens if they don't live up to their moral constitution.
Superintelligence. We've changed the name officially, by the way. I signed the document. We don't call it artificial intelligence because it's not artificial. It's real. This is bigger than the industrial revolution and largely for good. And they're going to police and they're going to police each other and they're going to self-police. They're going to police themselves. It's going to work out very well.
Understandably, the AI Bros probably had a drink last night celebrating after they met with President Trump. Then the phone rang this morning and Trump is taking a page from Reagan's trust but verify. The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, launched a sweeping probe of AI giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, and others to, quote, uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers. It is the start of Scott Bessent's promise to treat AI companies like every other company.
A sitting employee came out and said there's a 10% chance of an extinction-level event. But then the labs also said, take the liability off of our hands and we will not do that.
Nate Soares is back with us, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. And Nate, I would remind our viewers, you are backed by popular demand. Friday night's segment was one of the highest rated we had. We heard from a lot of people about it because of your expertise. Interpret for me how Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and others are seeing this carrot and stick, the carrot from President Trump of saying, hey, we all signed on to this moral constitution. This is great. And now a concerted effort by the federal government to hold them to account.
You know, I don't really know what's going on in their heads. I'm glad to see efforts to hold them to account. My guess is that they're both trying to avoid some of these dangers that they see themselves and trying to sort of play any circumstance towards their own advantage. I think they probably have some concerns about, you know, what if other countries get there before we do, but frankly, they probably have a lot of concerns about, you know, what if one of the other three of them gets it before they do. You know, we know that the relationships between Elon and Sam and Dario are all somewhat strained. So, you know, I think it would be great if these guys could self-police. I wouldn't really trust them as far as I could throw them. And I'm very happy to see, you know, Scott Bessent deny taking on the liability of these companies that are doing these very risky things.
Right. One of the issues here is who is able to police them. And if you read the moral constitution, there's this idea that they're going to sign on with independent auditors. One of the groups that people have talked about is this group called METR, which seems to be very aligned with Sam Altman and especially with Dario in this idea of effective altruism, which is kind of two lies for the price of one. It's neither effective nor altruistic. But it certainly feels like the fox guarding not even the chicken coop, but like one of those huge chicken farms. The only thing it seems that could be more dangerous than letting them police themselves is giving them cover of, quote, unquote, regulators or police that believe in this doomsday-like scenario.
Yeah. You know, I mean, I believe in the doomsday-like scenarios. And so, I think that even above and beyond all of these questions of who can you trust to do this or that, which I think are important questions, I think we ultimately need to ask, are these doomsday-type scenarios real? And I agree that we sort of shouldn't trust people from any particular ideology to tell us one way or the other. The thing I would be looking for is how can we bring a lot more of what's going on inside these companies to light. And the standard I would sort of try to hold METR to is if they send people in, are they able to sort of, in a neutral way, expose a lot of what's going on for scrutiny among a lot more people rather than just, you know, people who have known each other for a long time sort of closing the doors and then coming out and saying, don't worry, everything's fine, we just need this, we just need that. And I have some sympathy for folks who say, you know, 10 years ago there weren't a lot of people caring about this AI stuff and so a lot of them knew each other, right? I knew a lot of these guys back in the day. I'm a little bit more of the black sheep of the family who was like, hey, maybe you guys shouldn't be doing this.
But I have some sympathy for like, oh, there's connections. Well, of course there's connections. These were the only people who were thinking about this issue 10 years ago. And I hope that with the visibility we have now, we'll have more people coming in. It feels like there is a difference between the people who are thinking about these things, who understand this stuff, and this ideology that we need to build it, but at the same time you need to trust us to stop it, but at the same time, we shouldn't be held responsible for it because AI, at least at Anthropic, needs to have its own rights or Claude needs to have some kind of agency.
And then you put it here. This is a report now that co-founder Daniela Amodei and husband Dario used stuffed animal advisory council for workplace conflicts. That's from the New York Post. Again, I'm trying to give these people the benefit of the doubt. And yet, and maybe you can speak to this because you were around this group, there also seems to be something kind of profoundly weird about them.
It's definitely a weird group. I think Dario and Daniela are actually brother and sister and Daniela's husband is someone else.
But otherwise we'd be an even weirder group. But I think you're exactly right that we sort of should not be trusting these guys. You know, there is a lot of sort of self-dealing here. I think it's sort of a bit of a delicate situation, you know, because I sort of agree that we should have independent auditors in these companies, but I personally think that we should have independent auditors who check whether or not it's really as dangerous as they say and then come back and are like, yep, shut down that area of research. You know, we saw the Florida AG the other day be like, hey, you know, you guys say that you're doing this stuff that's so dangerous that it would endanger everybody, which includes the Floridians, and that you can't stop unless the government stops you. So, yeah, here we go.
Good news. The sister of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and her husband Holden Karnofsky. And this was originally in The Atlantic reporting. Nate, always a sober, thoughtful, and we learn something whenever you have you on. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Yeah, it's a crazy situation and I think you're right that a lot of it should really stop instead of listening to them try to police themselves.
Yeah. Well said. All right. Thank you. We've heard the blue wave is coming. Yeah, but a safely blue state is in play after years of Democratic control. The new pitch by Republicans that is changing the midterms.
Today we are announcing that a federal grand jury returned indictments against 10 foreign nationals alleged to have committed unlawful voting and registration offenses in the state of Minnesota.
10 illegal immigrants caught voting in Minnesota elections, casting ballots in 2022, 2024, and this year's August primary election. Something we were told unequivocally never happened. Coupled with the rampant fraud charges against the Somali community in Minneapolis. Well, a lot of Minnesotans have been saying enough is enough. A few billion dollars of stolen money will do that. Decision Desk HQ's polling average put sports star Michelle Tafoya just two points behind Democratic Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan. To put this in perspective, Minnesota hasn't had a Republican senator in almost two decades. Flanagan's failure to address the fraud in her state and her wildly progressive stances is probably why Tafoya has a chance.
I believe in Medicare for all certainly. And on our way to get there, I think we have to get rid of prior authorization. I think that we have to rip ICE apart.
Here with us now, Mike Nellis, former senior adviser to Kamala Harris's campaign, author of Endless Urgency on Substack. I feel as though there is starting to be a little bit of urgency on Democrats' part in Minnesota, in Michigan, in Maine, and in New Hampshire.
Yeah. I mean, I think there should be urgency in every state that the Democrats are running in right now. I think generally speaking, the polls look good nationally for Democrats. Obviously, we're ahead in places like Texas, but Minnesota is going to be closer than people think. Minnesota's always closer than people think. And...
Not really. They've had Democrats. You got Keith Ellison up there. You got Tim Walz. Explain to me, though. Let's be fair about this. Put this back up. All right. Michelle Tafoya is within two points at a time when we are told over and over that it's D plus 7, D plus 8 in a blue state. Is there another explanation for why it's so close and the one I got, which is people don't like woke, they don't like progressive, and they don't like fraud.
Well, I think it's hard to argue that they don't like progressive or woke when Minnesota's been voting for it. You made the counter argument there twice now. I think it's, look, you've got it. So, it's what, 45 to 43%. The question is where are those undecideds going to go? Assuming that polling is right, most likely in an environment like this, they're going to tilt towards the Democrat. It's usually how these things go in the end. That's the fear I think Republicans have in a lot of these other states where they're struggling too, like Iowa and Ohio and...
But you look at Peggy Flanagan with Salam Aleu and we need to rip apart ICE. That's not appealing to the undecideds in the middle.
