Ben Rhodes

What role, if any, do you think the Israeli strikes on Iran and Hezbollah and then the U.S.

military strikes on Iran play?

played in kind of maybe emboldening or leading to these protests?

Yeah, right.

All right, let's get to your story that you memorialized both in Prisoner and 544 Days.

Can you just remind people of why you were detained all those years ago and kind of like remind us what happened?

I got to say, it's a great podcast.

It's an amazing story.

It's a story of your time in prison, but it's also a love story.

It's a story about America, kind of all the things that were happening behind the scenes, but also very newly relevant because it surely provides an incredible window into kind of what we're seeing now on the streets and what we're talking about now.

But since then, Jason, you've been...

very involved with these issues of wrongful detention for the last 10 years.

How are you seeing the number of these cases trending, how they're being handled diplomatically?

For a while, it definitely seemed like Trump

really liked hostage return.

It sort of, I think, scratched his itch for a headline, a discreet thing, a victory lap, a sense of success, even if it was kind of a piece of a puzzle and the rest of the puzzle is unsolved.

But what are you seeing?

I hope that is true.

I was talking to a friend today, actually, that one of the things that I will like tip my hat to Donald Trump on and say, you know, hope those changes stick is he does not care about this sort of like old, stupid, we don't talk with our enemies.

We don't talk to our terrorist bullshit like Adam Bowler, his special envoy for hostage affairs, talked directly with Hamas.