Angry Planet - The UN's Annual Circus Comes to Town

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Once a year, leaders from around the world leave their capitals behind them for a trip to the Big City, New York. What could pull these powerful men—and far fewer women—away from affairs of state? Is it the revival of Spamalot on Broadway? No, the opening is still a few weeks away. Could it be the glittering bars, restaurants, and hotels? The easy availability of the ingredients for every vice known to humanity? Is it simply the lights on Broadway?Nope.It’s the one, the only United Nations General Assembly, which comes to town every September and plays to rave reviews—if you ask the delegates themselves. In reality, many of these leaders are addressing empty seats or facing interns sharpening their pencils for notes they may never take.So, why come?We’re going to tell you why with the help of Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group, who knows the arcane, backroom secrets of this annual get together of the powerful and—if they’re stealing—the rich.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Today, we're here to talk about the United Nations, which actually makes sense since the UN General Assembly is happening in New York. I no longer live in Manhattan. And this is the one time of year that I'm really grateful for that with all the traffic and everything. Wait, what happens in New York during the UN General Assembly? How bad does it get for the people that don't live there? It never have. It shuts down Midtown completely, absolutely completely, just all these, you know, limousines and everything else. How's the traffic been treating you, Richard? Richard Gowen is joining us today.

He is at the UN, although not at the moment. Yes, the traffic has been absolutely dreadful. And it feels especially painful this year because since 2020, some of these big UN gatherings have been limited because of COVID regulations. But this year, it was back to a full-scale general assembly. And I think 131 leaders turned up. And they all have an entourage and they all have a lot of cars and they're all clogging up much of the east side of Manhattan. Can you tell people who you are? Yeah, I'm the UN director for the International Crisis Group.

The International Crisis Group is a global conflict prevention organization. I have colleagues who work in difficult and dangerous places like Afghanistan, talking to groups like the Taliban, trying to understand what motivates them, and how they could be persuaded to step back from violence. My job is a little lower key. I'm based in Brooklyn, actually. I go into Manhattan every day, and I talk to UN Security Council members

and UN officials about what we're learning and how we think that the UN could promote peace more effectively in difficult cases, be it Afghanistan or Syria or Sudan. So you've said that there are more than 100 leaders who showed up this year, but there are some real key leaders who didn't. So who showed up and who didn't? And what's the importance of it? Well, I think the number of leaders that actually turned up, 131, that's 131 presidents and prime ministers, is close to being a record. But what is notable is that the chiefs of some pretty significant powers stayed away.

Joe Biden was here. The U.S. President is always one of the star speakers. And this year, President Zelensky from Ukraine was able to come in person, which got a lot of attention. And I'm sure we'll talk about Zelensky's interventions more. But Putin was not here from Russia. Xi Jinping was not here from China. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, who's just been hosting the G20, didn't make it.

And perhaps even more surprisingly, Rishi Sunak from the UK and Emmanuel Macron from France did not attend. And it is unusual for the British and French leaders not to come to the UN. So there's been quite a lot of chatter in the margins asking, what does this tell us about the UN? do most big powers now really think that clubs like the G20 and the G7 are where they go to do top-level diplomacy and does the General Assembly not exactly fading away but becoming essentially

a space for the leaders of small and medium-sized countries to get their moment on the world stage but with less political impact than was once the case that's a huge difference though i mean the u.n which was uh hey that there are probably some people who don't know this was actually set up in the wake of world war two um to try to have some sort of transnational body to prevent wars like world war two um i mean it's been the unGA has been a really preeminent event every year is that right it has been and if you go back over history a lot of leaders have used the General Assembly as a platform to make big announcements about the direction of the world. I mean, back in the 1980s, Gorbachev used to come to the UN, and often he used his trips to the UN to sort of explain Glasnost and how he was trying to end the Cold War.

And so there is a feeling that perhaps the General Assembly is now losing out as a platform relative to clubs like the G20. I'm not surprised by the way that, well, I'm not surprised that Putin didn't come.

Obviously, he would have just been the focus for an incredible amount of condemnation and criticism. I'm also not hugely surprised that Xi Jinping didn't come. She has only actually attended the General Assembly once in person. That was in 2015.

I think the Chinese always feel a little on the back foot at the General Assembly because they see it as being a show where the US is dominant. But as I say, the fact that some key US allies like Sannac and Macron didn't show

is quite a telling sign of how the General Assembly maybe sort of dropping down the global pecking order. Well, in Modi, too, that's a pretty large, a pretty large country to not attend, right? I'm surprised Modi didn't come. I had assumed that he would come because

the Indians have just pulled off a pretty successful G20 meeting in Delhi against the odds. And you would have thought the Modi would come and do a bit of a victory lap in New York. I'm really not sure why he didn't make it. He was here earlier in the year, ironically, for the all-important International Day of Yoga. And Modi actually led this astonishing mass yoga exercise on the lawn outside the UN with all the ambassadors doing stretches following his every move. So he's been at the UN quite recently, but I mean, I think it's probably a bit of a missed opportunity for him not to be here.

I mean, it's possible that this is all related to the domestic politics of the country and countries involved. That's certainly probably true for someone like Rishi Sunak, who has been facing an enormous amount of criticism back in the UK over issues like problems with school buildings. I mean, I think at the present moment, for a leader like, for a leader like Sunak, there's only limited political gap. capital to be gained by going to one more summit, one more conference. There's actually quite a lot of demand for him to be back at home dealing with nitty, gritty domestic issues. So that could be a factor as well as whatever the status of the UN, maybe. But I love the excuses. I mean, my favorite, of course, is Macron. And you said, I think when we spoke briefly yesterday, that King Charles.

King Charles is apparently going to make a visit. And so this figurehead of great importance and lovely pomp, that's enough to stop Macron from coming here? I mean, what? Yeah, that does feel a little bit contrived. And it's odd that Macron didn't come here. I mean, he has spoken at the UN quite a lot. a lot. He gave a good speech last year, attacking Russia over the aggression against Ukraine,

framing this as Russian imperialism. Macron is famous for giving incredibly overlong speeches at the UN. I was joking to a French journalist that the general assembly will be about a day shorter because he isn't here to give his speech. But nonetheless, he normally seems to enjoy it. But, you know, perhaps again he thought that the visuals of him walking the streets of Paris with King Charles would pay off better than you know, him once again on a podium

looking serious at other world leaders. So with the UN General Assembly, was that ever really a place where, I mean, people gave great speeches? Is there a lot of work that gets on there too? Is there a reason for a leader to be there just simply to actually accomplish something? I think if you go back to the very early days of the UN, it was a working space.

And the leaders would come to the UN for very long periods, I think weeks at a time back in the 1940s and 1950s, because that was the way that they could meet up. Now, obviously, Any leader can jump on Zoom and speak to any other group of presidents and prime ministers that they like, and that has reduced the salience of the General Assembly as a working space. What the General Assembly does do is act as a platform for Joe Biden and his counterparts to try and send out some general political messaging about. where the world should be going over the year ahead. And so this year, the focus has been very much on international development.

A lot of countries from the so-called global South, Africa, Asia, Latin America, have been very critical of, you know, the West stepping back from development aid. They've been voicing a lot of concerns about their economic situations, about rising debt burdens and related issues. And what Biden and others did during this week was really pledged that they're going to try and work together to get more financing to poorer countries. They're going to put more money into organizations like the World Bank and the IMF to deal with some of these economic stresses. Now, the money doesn't sort of get negotiated here. It's something which has to be discussed in World Bank meetings and IMF meetings.

But the reason the General Assembly is useful is that the leaders have now given the political direction, which the technocrats can pick up on and turn into policy going forward. If you are someone like a Russia or a China or an India, do you think that the rise of the Internet has changed? to the usefulness of the UN General Assembly. I think specifically of Russia has done pretty good job of communicating to the West via the Internet, via other means. And instead of, you know, sending their top dog into a room to kind of pontificate before a group of people, and then that kind of gets disseminated, which feels like a lot of what they've used the UN General Assembly before and decades past, that's not needed anymore. right? Like all of that information can kind of be disseminated online.

Do you think the internet has changed the way the UN General Assembly is used by some of these nations? I think it has to some extent. And, you know, Putin can send the message about how he feels about the state of the world very effectively by, you know, meeting Kim Jong-un on the eve of the General Assembly. I mean, that, you know, The images of the Russian North Korea meeting just prior to the big UN gathering, I think, were quite pointedly tied to send some messages. What I would say in defense of the General Assembly, though, is that in addition to all the speeches and the top-level political messaging is that it is a space where very senior politicians can also quietly have bilateral meetings. And actually, a lot of diplomats will tell you that you should ignore most of the speeches, that the real action that happens around the general assembly

is inside rooms or in diplomatic missions where you have quiet face-to-face discussions being held that would be very difficult to organize in other settings. And one person who has made use of the quite effectively in that way this week has been Zelensky. Zelensky was in New York for most of two days, I think. And although he did give a number of major speeches, he was also huddling with a whole range of African and Latin American leaders. He met with Ramaphosa from South Africa. He met with President Ruto of Kenya.

he met with Borich from Chile. And I think what Zelensky understood was that just by being in New York, he could get FaceTime with some of the non-Western leaders who have been wavering a bit about how to respond to the Russian-Ukrainian war. And he was able to use these moments to lobby them to take a harder line against Moscow, or at least shift a bit away. from neutrality. And it was interesting. We did see that after Zelensky met Ramaphosa, Ramaphosa, who at times has seemed to be leaning towards Russia, actually gave a speech

which seemed to lean a little bit back towards Ukraine. So we shouldn't underestimate the personal diplomacy element, and you can't get that through the internet. It is striking that, the General Assembly that was held in 2020, which was only online, was a complete non-event because it didn't have any of that personal element to it, which is what the leaders really like. In addition, it's going shopping. I mean, it's also well known that a lot of politicians come here with a lot of empty suitcases that they fill up in the stores of Madison Avenue and take back home, which is, you know, another side benefit to being in New York. So where do they stay, actually? I mean, are there enough nice hotel rooms to host all these world leaders in their entourages? Some stay with their ambassadors, I think.

Some stay in hotels around Midtown, which only adds to the chaos. the the US president always used to stay at the Waldorf until I think the Waldorf was taken over by a Chinese company and I think Biden stayed stayed in another hotel

this is a time when you know trying to get or trying to get even an expensive hotel room in in Manhattan is almost physically impossible So I guess I'm thinking all of these leaders are there.

What do they hope to get? Is everybody looking for something other than something from Dior or Maze? If you're, let's say, a smaller country, if you're Soweto, you know, what, I mean, what are you hoping to get out of it? I mean, is there actually little bits of crumbs from the table of the great powers that you can bring home? I think that varies depending on the country and also depending on their priorities. I mean, if you take one particular group of small states that is always quite active around the General Assembly, that's the Pacific Island states. and the Pacific group have become quite skilled at coming to the General Assembly and lobbying very hard for other countries to make more pledges on climate change and limiting global warming

because the big annual UN Climate Summit is taking place in Dubai in a few weeks' time. And so for the Pacific Islanders who otherwise have very little access to leaders from other regions, this is a great opportunity to get together and make a moral case, frankly, for why we should be fighting global warming. Now, they've been making that case for many years. Clearly, UN climate diplomacy is badly off the rails, but we do see them quite intelligently. operating around the General Assembly to raise the profile of their case. I think for other leaders, it may be more about bilateral openings and opportunities, a chance to speak to the president of a neighboring nation about your problems quietly without

getting too much attention. And so many people may come here with quite specific diplomatic goals that aren't really related to the UN and don't really get into the news media. And then there is also publicity. A lot of leaders, especially leaders from Europe, for example, come with very considerable numbers of journalists. And they're often journalists who are not really foreign policy specialists, I mean, let alone UN specialists. They're basically there trailing the leader, just writing constant reporting about his

or her meetings. I remember once a few years ago going into the garden in the UN compound and dotted all around this quite large garden, you could see individual prime ministers with, in some cases, dozens of journalists around them, just asking them about their agenda, what they're doing. And of course, you know, it's a little bit of a coup if you can get some, photos of yourself with Biden or this year, I think Zelensky was

obviously a big photo opportunity target and have those spread all over the home media. I mean, you know, it is a good way of sort of trying to show your domestic audience that you matter on the world, the world stage. And you know, as a

someone who does quite a lot of media work around the General Assembly, I mainly field questions about about Biden, about the issues we're talking about now. But I'll also get questions from journalists sort of saying, you know, what did you think of the Austrian president's speech or, you know, how important is the Irish Taoiseach at this year's General Assembly? Because that's what home media markets want to know.

Well, they're the most important, of course. And their speech probably changed the world. I mean, what else could it be? I think there was a moment a couple of years ago when one Central American leader, I think it may have been, is it Bokele from El Salvador, actually stood on the podium in front of the diplomats and whipped out his cell phone and took a selfie. And he said, millions more people are going to see this selfie than are going to listen to the speech. And I think that, you know, that sort of does capture one of the truths about how these,

these big meetings function. Sorry, Matthew. There's something about the image of the leader at that podium, you know, giving that speech, right? When I think about the UN General Assembly, I think about that. It's sad. I only vaguely remember the things that were said, but I do remember those images.

When I think about Zelensky, I think about Zelensky, up there a few days ago giving that speech, right? The images are a powerful component of this. I just wanted to throw that out there. Yeah, and the UN is an iconic, you know, it's an iconic building. What you don't see because of the way they do, the camera shots, is that for most, for most leaders other than Biden, the room is half empty. Even for Zelensky, I watched his speech on the UN webcast, it looked to me as if the room was at least a quarter empty. There were certainly quite a lot of non-Western countries whose seats were not filled. And if Zelensky can't pack the house, then no one can pack the house. I mean, by the time you get to the later half of

the General Assembly week, you have presidents really talking to a bunch of interns who are there to take notes and that's about it. But that's not what the camera, the camera shows you. The camera shows you the leader standing and, yeah, but you know, you, I think you do in your subconscious, you'll remember photos of feet of Astro standing there, Yasser Arafat, um, Gaddafi. Can you bring in a gun? Am I remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, you think that sort of, that sort of, that, that triggers a memory. Um, yeah. And I think everyone, well, not everyone, as we say, some people like she didn't think are missing. But for a lot of leaders, you know, that's a photo you're probably going to have sort of on the wall of your restroom for the rest of your life.

I mean, even mistrust, even list trust, who was only prime minister of Britain for 49 days, managed to get one speech done at the General Assembly. And I bet she's got a photo of that somewhere in her office or her home. the British media is oh my god did they make fun of her oh wow she was they have more fun than the American media does the British media just in general they have a lot to make fun out right then that's fair can we talk a little bit about the UN itself as an organization as opposed to just the next couple of days Do you think, this I guess is sort of a large question, but do you think the UN's best days are behind it at this point? You mentioned that, you know, G20 and other groups are meeting BRICS.

Do you think the UN still really a force to be reckoned with? I think we have to be realistic. I mean, I'm someone I've worked on the UN for 20 years. And so I genuinely believe that UN peacekeeping operations, UN humanitarian missions have a lot of value. But you say are the best days of the UN behind it, well, let's remember that you go back three decades, and even in the post-Cold War moment,

when everyone was talking about international cooperation and talking about strengthening the UN, we had Treberinica, we had Rwanda, we had Somalia. Even in its best days, the UN was struggling with appalling disasters. And I think it's the nature of the UN that it almost always seems to be in crisis because there's always some conflict, some humanitarian situation, which for whatever political reasons the UN cannot solve. So when I started working on the organization 20 years ago, it was the situation in Darfur, the situation in Sudan. Then for another decade, it was the

situation in Syria. Now it's Ukraine. So the UN to some extent is built, built to fail. I think, however, we are in a moment where the sort of shifts in geopolitics are raising even more fundamental questions about where the UN will be headed. Clearly, the The breakdown between the Western Russia is poisoning a lot of diplomacy in the Security Council. That's not just over Ukraine. Recently, we've seen diplomatic breakdowns in the council over issues like AIDS to Syria or what to do about the new outbreak of fighting in Sudan. Nuclear weapons.

Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to cooperate with the Russians. And then there's also a sort of much longer-term fight going on around the UN between the US and China about who controls the organization. And for both Trump administration and now the Biden administration, countering Chinese influence at the UN is one of the big priorities in New York. And so I do think there is a big question mark hanging over the future of the body, which is can the UN keep functioning and keep working as a problem-solving space in a bipolar or multipolar world,

or will we find that actually the UN was at its best during the unipolar moment of American power because that actually sort of created a framework for multilateral cooperation, which is now going to at least partially disappear. Another thing about the UN, you're talking about who controls it. is it's a vast bureaucracy, right?

With lots of different, there's the High Commissioner for Refugees, there's part UNICEF, which everybody's heard of. When you talk about control, does it partially have to do with who gets appointed to what and how the various agencies get run? Yes, to an extent it is. I mean, I would say when you're thinking about the much bigger universe of UN agencies, You know, a lot of UN agencies are pretty technical. They're not based here in New York.

They're based in Geneva or Vienna elsewhere. And a lot of multilateral cooperation day-to-day is not that controversial. And I think we sometimes sort of forget that element of what the UN does, that the UN is working on everything from standardizing postal rates to monitoring nuclear power stations around the world. And a lot of that work, I think, sort of continues regardless of what happens on the podium in the General Assembly. I recently discovered that there is a commission, I think based in Vienna, there's a UN commission that standardizes descriptions of cuts of meat. So if you have a steak, there's actually some UN standard for describing that steak that is out there somewhere.

And that is not an issue that's on the top of leaders' minds in the General Assembly Week. What we have seen, though, is that there has been a growing political battle to control some of these agencies. A few years ago, China took the US by surprise by putting a Chinese official at the top of the International Telecommunications Union. Now, again, very few of us, even UN nerds had ever really thought about the ITU and what it does. but it turns out that it's the ITU, which was setting global standards for the rollout of 5G. And so the Chinese made a great push to get control of that. And then when the Chinese official ended their term, the US made a big and successful push to have an American put back on top of the ITU because they want to be shaping 5G in future technologies.

And so we've seen that in quite a lot of other UN agencies now. China is pushing for positions for authority, sometimes in quite technical bodies, because they can see that there are ways to use those technical bodies to their economic advantage. The US and Europeans were slow to recognize what China was doing, but they're now very alert to it, and they're now pushing back quite hard trying to get Western candidates. or at least Western friendly candidates running big UN organizations. So, you know, the geopolitical contest, it isn't just about, in the Security Council, it isn't just about Syria and Ukraine.

It's also a lot about the technical work that the UN carries on. So I think that actually, Matthew. Yeah, what would a world look like? where China has a more firm grip on the UN? I think that if China had its way unopposed, it would keep a lot of the UN technical agencies running, but tweak their work to support initiatives like the Belt and Road. It would also shut down a lot of UN discussions of human rights

and the Chinese have always been very negative towards a lot of the work of the Human Rights Council, which is the UN human rights champion based in Geneva. And they would really sort of focus cooperation on promoting a Chinese model of development through multilateral agencies. And China had been laying out that stall around the UN for the last decade. decade or so, and it does appeal to quite a lot of countries. A lot of non-Western countries are still resentful of the legacy of colonialism. They're resentful of Western countries not providing them enough development aid. They are drawn to the Chinese offer. But it's very unlikely that China is going to be allowed to shape the UN in this own image. The US and US allies are going to

keep on pushing back against Beijing. So what you're more likely to end up with is a situation where tensions between China and the West keep on gumming up UN discussions of all sorts of different issues. And multilateral cooperation becomes harder because cohabitation with China proves very difficult to sustain. And I think that is something which, for example, Guterres, the UN Secretary General worries about a lot. He worries that we're entering the world of block politics where you just won't be able to get universal agreement or consensus on how to deal with a lot of global problems. Guterres, for example, is really fascinated by artificial intelligence.

He's arguing that the focus of next year's General Assembly should be on building up a global governance structure around. AI, but we don't really know if the US and China as leading AI powers are going to be able to find common ground around this, or whether the division between them will just mean you can't have effective UN-based regulation of these crucial innovations. I think for AI specifically, you're going to have to have something specific and bad happen before there's any kind of large global movement on that. I'm sorry, Jason's laughing, but I think it's true. I think everyone's going to rush forward with it.

I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts about this because it is something I look at quite a bit. I think that it's in many ways a little overfeared and underbaked at the moment. Sorry, I was watching. I attended the arms control summit that was a couple days ago and Nancy Pelosi spoke. There was a lot of talk about, like, we have to make sure that artificial intelligence is not integrated into command and control around nuclear weapons.

And I'm just like, well, tell me, show me where the people are talking about integrating command and control with artificial intelligence. Like I need, like, when you say artificial intelligence, are you talking about like a large language model? specifically, I need specifics because these words mean, is it's a, it's a wide term that means a lot of different things. A lot of people are using it for a lot of different things. Anyway, sorry. No, no. I mean, it's also worth saying that this is now a fashionable topic amongst diplomats in New York, because AI is cool. But again, most, most of the diplomats would admit they don't have the

first idea about how these new technologies work. What is interesting, though, is that a couple of years ago, Microsoft set up a de facto embassy at the UN. Microsoft has a big office in actually one of the tower blocks near UN headquarters where the French and the UK and the Italians and others also have their embassies. And I think that's because a lot of the tech companies believe that at some point down the road, you are going to have to have international regulation of, you know, a whole range of technologies coming down the pipe, which AI is probably the most sensitive. And so they want to be here. They want to be in the conversation. You know, they want to have direct access to the diplomats who might be negotiating what future regulations look like.

And at a time when, you know, there's a lot of gloomy talk about is the UN an irreversible decline? And I find it quite interesting that you have some big, big tech companies suddenly coming forward and saying, no, no, we actually think that what you do is important to us. So, I mean, this is an intriguing new trend around the UN. So anything else that we should look forward to at this assembly or anything we should look forward to just going forward with the UN, anything to look for? I mean, look, this general assembly is already petering out. Zelensky has gone to Washington. The speeches go on until Tuesday, but...

now most of them important speakers are done and dusted. One thing to look forward to over the longer term is that on this AI point, Guterres, the Secretary General, is convening a special summit next September in the margins of the General Assembly, which he's calling the summit of the future. And he's trying to use that as a moment where leaders could agree on at least initial frameworks for discussing multilateral controls around artificial intelligence and biotechnology. I think that the US is interested in engaging on that constructively. I think the UK is interested in engaging in that constructively. So that could be an important event if it comes together.

but as we were saying, the political obstacles are high. And then the other UN story that will come to life at some point in the next year or so is, as Guterres has three more years of his term to run, the sort of contest to replace him is going to start to kick off. And it'll be interesting to see if there are any big international figures out there who believe that although the world is looking pretty bleak, they could be a great UN Secretary General. So for, again, for the UN nerds like me, that race is always fun. It's a bit like the primaries in the US election, although there's no sort of Trump-type guaranteed winner in the race to be UNSG.

maybe that actually could be his next job he might be less of a threat if he was running the UN yeah Trump would I would be a lot less scared um about Trump's potential impact on the world if we put him in charge of of the UN that actually could be a really great idea the funny thing about Trump and the UN is that he he never hated he's never hated the UN in the way that he hates NATO um or some other US commitments. He had a big battle with the UN, I think, in the late 1990s, because he wanted to build a tower block next to it and the UN objected. So I think he's always seen the UN as a real estate competitor, not as a, not as a threat to the US. So maybe he could take over the UN, he could

knock down this sort of old, old building, put up some really nice shiny towers. Yeah, that would be a good way for him to spend his coming years. It's all, you know, he gets to stay in Manhattan. He gets to go to fancy parties and, like, gossip and talk to people and give speeches. He'd love it. He did once, there was once a suggestion that he was going to try and make him, Ivanka Trump, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. Yes, I remember those.

I wrote, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece for Politico arguing that this would be a good idea. I have never received as much abuse in my entire life. I should be careful what I say because people do when you when you people start to take you more seriously than you were than you intended um Matthew got anything else no I think I think that'll see me out all right Ranger Gowan thank you so much for joining us to talk about the UN and just help us understand what the heck is going on over there. Well, I'm never sure I really understand exactly what's going on.

I've offered you my best guest. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Pon. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.angriplanet.com, it means the world to us.

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