Running On Empty - August 4, 2026

**Cenk Uygur** (0:00)
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**Cenk Uygur** (1:13)
Welcome to The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, Joe Kent with you today. Joe is not a guest today, he's a guest host with me for the first hour. So it is going to be a fascinating show today. Joe, we also have elections today. I don't know if that affects your side of the ledger at all. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
But huge elections, including in Michigan tonight. And so Joe and I will do the first hour. We'll talk about the Iran war. We're running out of a different kind of missiles now.
Is Joe and a couple of others going to start a third party? Very interesting conversation. How much is APEC spent in this cycle already before we even got to the general elections? A lot of amazing topics in the second hour. Elliott Morgan joins me, we're gonna talk about the APEC collapse. And then at 8 o'clock Eastern, the election coverage starts and John Iderola joins us. So it's a guest hosting extravaganza at TYT. So look guys today, do we have the APEC tiers mug ready at shoptyt.com? We do.
Are we gonna drink from it tonight? We don't know. We don't know. But about as big a non presidential election as there has ever been in my lifetime. That's Abdullah al-Sayed, Haley Stevens race in Michigan.
The Republicans lost their stand in Kentucky. It was a valiant fight by Tom Massey. But APEC won that one. Now we're gonna find out what happens on the Democratic side in Michigan. So that's at 8 o'clock Eastern. But let's get started with today's show. So let's go to Iran.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:48)
Mr. President, this is at least the fifth time you've turned off airstrikes against Iran since April.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:53)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:53)
To negotiate. What is your message to the American people who are wondering what has changed this time? Why should it be today?

**SPEAKER_6** (2:59)
Well, you don't know, I don't know. I think we're gonna maybe get something, but I wanna give them every last chance before decapitation.

**Cenk Uygur** (3:08)
Here we go again, Trump visiting the Waffle House. We're gonna make peace, we're gonna decapitate them. Joe, I'm gonna ask you about that in a second, but I wanna give you two quotes from Reuters today that are so important about how we're running out of missiles and get your reaction to that as well. So Reuters are reporting today, the US Army has used up much of its global stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran. According to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military's readiness for future conflicts. I'd imagine so, here's some details. The missiles are principally the Army's surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems and Precision Strike Missiles. The US has used virtually all of these weapons according to two other sources. And of course, the administration says, no, no, no, that's nonsense. Of course, that's what they said about casualty figures. That's what they said about defensive missiles. But they say the United States has far more munitions than anyone in the world, far more than we need. Our defense companies are at this moment making more munitions than they have ever made before.
Well, I wonder why. In addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels. So Joe Kent, you were the former Director of National Counterterrorism.