Chapo Trap House - 336 - Neom 2049 feat. Glenn Greenwald (7/29/19)

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

We hear from Glenn Greenwald about the Intercept's work uncovering a massive judicial corruption scandal at the heart of the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil. Then to lighten things up, we take a look at Mohammed bin Salman's plan to do both the Jetsons AND the Flintstones in the middle of the Saudi desert, and read Toby Young's paean to the overt manliness of Boris Johnson. Show notes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUy5cuM4P28TeMlA2V_KDVw/videos https://twitter.com/Lowenaffchen/status/1129270085397426176 Plugs: Catch our live show at the Traverse City Film Festival: https://secure.traversecityfilmfest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=460935~4d61cd53-466a-4a38-9b0c-5dd9c77930d9&epguid=8fc1333c-62a3-467a-b51c-ada73714212e& We'll also be covering the 2nd Democratic Debates live from TCFF: https://secure.traversecityfilmfest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=460934~4d61cd53-466a-4a38-9b0c-5dd9c77930d9&epguid=5d6845f7-fad1-45f4-a148-d6945b2debaa& Finally, come to Providence R.I. to see our live play of Call of Cthulhu there: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chapo-trap-house-plays-call-of-cthulhu-live-tickets-62234533164 Amber's Article in CJR: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/monday-interview-lionel-barber.php

Hello, hello, friends. It's your Choppo. It's me, Will, and sitting in is Amber, Felix, and Virgil. But joining us on the phone is Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, what's going on? Not too much. Just hanging out, trying to stay out of a Brazilian jail, but otherwise things are pretty good. Just a lazy Saturday downplaying for an election interference. Well, Glenn, we're going to get into what's going on in Brazil, and not just with the country in general, but also you specifically. But first things first, wow. How about that Mueller testimony? I mean, I know if you're like me, you watched every second of that

on the edge of your seat, and I could not believe the drama and just like the moments that created like when he was asked a question and then said no or yes. Glenn, how red is your face right now? I mean, you know, first of all, as somebody who's been a skeptic of this whole saga for a long time, I was obviously pretty ashamed given how dynamic and compelling his presentation was. And also it really, it also made me more excited about Joe Biden's candidacy because it made Joe Biden seem extremely robust and cognitively functional for the first time. So I thought that that was also an interesting aspect to it.

Yeah. If Mueller wanted to retain some of that Biden charm, he would have made a weird clicking sound with his mouth and turned to like, Barbara Mikulski isn't in office anymore, but someone had gone, oh, honey, beauty pageants down the hall. I enjoyed the Mueller testimony from an artistic perspective because it was like a more higher, more high-powered version of about Schmidt that they're bringing in this fucking old man who for every two months to the last two years has been like, yeah, I can't arrest the president. And every two months they're like, when are you going to arrest the president? And he's like, I can't. And he just keeps getting older and older and older as it happens. It's very, very tragic.

I thought it had a very Abramovic feel. To me, it was really like the Wizard of Oz. Exactly. Just for three years, it was like this gigantic superhero who was coming to save the nation and then they opened up the curtain and there was just like, doddering, stuttering, old, weak, fragile man who could barely complete a sentence and had absolutely nothing of interest to say. I actually thought it was more like the Nintendo product vehicle, the wizard, because maybe we wouldn't win, but we went on a great journey and we sort of came of age. Well, yeah. I mean, for years now, it's just like we've been hearing, wait for the Molo

Report. Then that came out and it's just like, wait till he testifies. And now it's going to be like, wait till he testified and then said he can't do anything. And like, wait for us to do something. We're not sure what, but just keep waiting. It's going to happen. Again, the very Abramovic, it's anti-climactic and people stare into his face and start crying. The prosecutor is present. All right. Well, I don't want to waste too much time talking again about that just absolutely firecracker performance. I mean, like probably the most compelling thing on television since the moon landing. And it's appropriate because it was the 50th anniversary of that happening.

So, but let's talk about Brazil because this is a story that we haven't really paid attention to. Probably should have because it is legitimately astonishing and you were right at the center of all of this. So I was hoping you could help explain to us and our listeners broadly what's going on there. So let's start with what was the car wash scandal and who is Sergio Moro? Right. So just before I answer that specifically, let me just say that, you know, one of the interesting things about Brazil is how geographically important it is in almost every aspect. I mean, the size of it alone, it's the fifth most populous country in the world. It has gigantic

oil reserves and then it has the single most important environmental asset to protect against catastrophic climate scenarios, which is the Amazon, all of which are endangered. And so there's good reason to care about this country. And you know, it's the second biggest country in the hemisphere beyond just like the standard reasons to care about what's happening to, you know, a country of 220 million people. So the car wash investigation is actually something that is pretty interesting because for a long time Brazil has been driven by systematic corruption. So like if you talk about corruption in the US, you usually mean one of two things. You either mean like the illegal isolated kind where like some congress

person gets caught accepting a bribe, like an actual illegal bribe, not a legal bribe, but an illegal bribe, or you mean the kind of legalized corruption like lobbyists donate to PACs and donate to campaigns and then the members of Congress write the laws that benefit them. In Brazil corruption means like the illegal systemic kind. So just like every company that wants a contract from the government, a construction contract and oil contract knows that they have to factor in 8% or 6% into whatever they're paying because that's the amount that they send in cash to a Swiss bank account that the politician in charge of that committee of the Senator Congress has. And it's operated this way for decades and everybody

knows it. No one ever did anything about it. And what's interesting about Brazil is, you know, it's a young democracy. It's now 35 years old. So it's not so young. So there's like a new generation of people who grew up actually being taught that things aren't supposed to work that way, that you're supposed to have like a constitution and a rule of law. And there's this group of, you know, people in their 30s and early 40s who started taking that seriously and started investigating as prosecutors the kind of corruption that I just described that everybody knew and always accepted and they decided it's not acceptable and they started investigating and prosecuting and putting into prison like billionaires,

you know, things that you would never even see in the US and really powerful politicians from multiple parties. And so for a long time, almost everybody, including me and people on the left and everybody in Brazil thought it was a really positive, encouraging thing. They became kind of folk heroes. And then after a couple of years, people started noticing that they seemed much more interested in prosecuting left-wing politicians than right-wing politicians. And the judge who was overseeing all of these cases, so you had a kind of team of prosecutors called the Car Wash Prosecutors, Lavajato in Portuguese, there's this judge Sergio Amaro and he was the one who was just convicting one after the next and giving them really

harsh sentences. So they would like send billionaires to prison for 10 years or 12 years or a lot of times they would imprison them without charges and kind of pressure and force them to accuse other people of crimes that were even more powerful or richer. And so people started raising questions like, wait a minute, is this really this kind of apolitical, anti-non-ideological, anti-corruption crusade or is this a political operation by the kinds of people in Brazil who tend to be right-wing people, people who are highly educated, educated outside of the US, who are on the right to destroy Lula and the Workers Party, which has dominated Brazilian politics for 20 years, using the pretext of law in

order to destroy the right and put the left and put the right into power. And so the big event culminated last year in 2018 when there was a presidential election and all polls showed that Lula, who was the Brazilian president from 2002 until 2010 and left office with an 87% approval rating, so there's almost no figure as gigantic on the world stage as Lula. And he got term limited out of office in 2010. He was planning on running in 2018. All polls showed that he was easily going to win. He was leading by 20 to 25 points against everyone, including Bolsonaro. Suddenly, they charged him with a crime that even his critics thought was very dubious. It was a very simple case, so it allowed them to bring

the charges and prosecute him very quickly. And then Judge Moro found him guilty very fast with very little evidence. And an appellate court who is very allied with Judge Moro quickly within a matter of weeks affirmed the appeal, which meant that under Brazilian law, once you're convicted of a crime and then you have that conviction affirmed, you're automatically barred from running for office. So that removed him from the presidential race. And then once he was removed, Bolsonaro became the poll leader, ended up winning the 2018 election, this very, very far right figure, way beyond like Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen. Even Marine Le Pen has said, he's offensive and xenophobic and that gives you a sense

of how far off the spectrum he is. So once he won, he turned around and the first thing that he did was he created a new position that's called a super-justice minister and offered that position to Sergio Moro, the same person who removed his primary adversary Lula from the race. And so Sergio Moro, who was the judge overseeing this corruption investigation, has now been rewarded by becoming really the most powerful person in Brazil. You could call him the second most powerful person if you want after Bolsonaro. But all of these powers of surveillance and law enforcement and investigation have all been consolidated under his control. And he is now Bolsonaro's minister of justice and public safety and

obviously the most important person after Bolsonaro in Brazil. And the fact that he got that position after removing Bolsonaro's main obstacle to the presidency raised a lot of questions even among people who had long supported this investigation in Sergio Moro. But also by way of just a little background here, you mentioned that Brazil is a fairly new democracy only 35 years old. Prior to that, it was under a military dictatorship for something like 25 years, right? Yeah. So I think that context is crucial. A lot of times people compare Bolsonaro to some of these new right leaders like Trump or Marine Le Pen or what's happening in Italy and Spain. The big difference is that those countries

have been democracies for decades or centuries. Brazil in 1964 had a kind of center left left wing government, which was overthrown by a military coup backed by the CIA kind of like the classic, you know, CIA coup that they did during the Cold War all the time and installed a military regime that ruled Brazil brutally from 1964 until 1985, murder journalists, murder dissidents. Bolsonaro was part of that military regime. I mean, he was a young, you know, corporal and then a major, but he has spent the last 30 years saying that he believes Brazil was much better off under military rule than under democracy. He's an explicit proponent of returning to military dictatorship. So I think that is crucial to note is that

half the population in Brazil has lived under military rule before. And it's easy to persuade them that, you know what, things weren't actually that bad back then with a lot of time, people forget the abuses. And he's somebody who affirmatively advocates military rule and therefore the institutions in Brazil that protect democracy, unlike say in the U.S. that have developed over 250 years, the population inculcated with a lot of values about democracy. Things are much more fragile in that regard when it comes to Brazil than almost any other major country that is now governed by a far right leader. So then Glenn, who is Bolsonaro's base?

Well, so he, I mean, I, it is interesting in this regard, I actually do think there's an interesting comparison between him and Trump. So part of Bolsonaro's base is just outright, you know, irredeemable fascists like deplorables, I guess, for one of a better you know, just people who are devoid of any kind of ethical or moral sense, they're absolute racist. They tend to be like the upper middle class bourgeoisie, like the professional class, white, for sure, that's his base, like the hardcore ideologues who think that like the problems in Brazil stem from black criminals who live in the favelas, who should just be indiscriminately murdered, who think that, you know, homosexuals are pedophiles, like

that anti LGBT animus is a big, big part of the Bolsonaro movement, unlike the other new right movements. So that gets him to maybe like 15 or 20%. You know, Brazil is a white minority country. The majority of people in Brazil are non white. Also, Brazil has huge wealth inequality. So even if you want to use like a really broad definition of rich, maybe six or seven or eight percent of the country could fall under that. So if all you were attracting were like the fascist and the racist and like the rich white assholes, you would get to like eight to 10 to 12, maybe 15%, which is where everybody thought Bolsonaro was going to end up. Instead,

he ended up in the first round of voting with 42% of the vote. And then in the second round against the workers party with 55% of the vote. So a lot of the people who voted for him didn't vote for him because of his fascism or his admiration for repression or his homophobia, racism, misogyny, they voted for him despite that. They voted for him because the political class in Brazil has been neoliberal for the last 20 years, even though the workers party was supposed to be a left-wing party. It was very much like the Democratic party. It caused huge amounts of suffering, a big epidemic of violence, income inequality got worse, and people were just desperate. Like we know a lot of people in our lives, friends who are gay

or who are black or who are working class, who voted for Bolsonaro because they hate the political establishment so much that the more the political establishment warned them about how dangerous Bolsonaro was, the more attracted they became to him. Exactly like 20 to 25 or 30% of Trump supporters are irredeemable racists, and then a lot of them are just people who are desperate and decided that they wanted the person who was going to promise to burn down the system that has been so, so brutal to them. Just like, you know, one other thread to pick up here before we get into like what you and the Intercept uncovered about the car wash investigation is the person who came after Lula, Dilma Rousseff, also in the workers party, correct? Yes. She was impeached

in 2016 as part of this investigation as well, right? Yeah, I mean, more or less. I mean, and that's really when I started getting heavily involved in doing journalism in Brazil. I mean, I've lived here, you know, since 2005, and except during the Snowden reporting, when I did a lot of reporting in Brazil because Brazil was a big NSA target, I kind of stayed out of Brazilian politics until the impeachment debate, because that was really the first time when it became clear to me that these forces that have tried forever to beat the workers party at the polls and have failed made a decision that they were going to abandon democracy and just take the workers party out of power and put in a right wing party that they've always wanted to do really harsh austerity

measures to privatize the oil industry and to sell off the Amazon. And that was the impeachment of Dilma. I mean, she was definitely not a successful president. She made a lot of mistakes. She was incredibly unpopular, but they found this like very technical kind of law breaking that she did where she basically like borrowed money for longer than the law permits. And you had this band of like total criminals, you know, people with like $50 million in Swiss bank accounts leading the impeachment against her saying, we can't tolerate the kind of law break. It would be like if you had Charles Manson demanding that a president be impeached because of jaywalking or like, I don't know, like, or recording a bad record with the Beach Boys. Yeah, or like demanding

Donald Trump be impeached because he made a joke about the Russians finding Hillary Clinton's emails in front of cameras in the scheme of all the crimes that he committed. It was just such an obvious pretext to get rid of her in an anti-democratic way. And there was almost no dissent allowed in the Brazilian media. That was when I first started writing about Brazilian politics, created the intercept Brazil, basically to oppose impeachment, the impeachment of Dilma, because I knew that was the start of the unraveling of Brazilian democracy in the name of fighting corruption. And that's what actually did lead us to the point that we're at. I mean, I didn't anticipate how extreme it would all be. But I could see that that was really the decision on the part

of the establishment that they couldn't manipulate democracy the way they do in the US. And so they decided they were just going to abandon democratic pretext and just start working outside of the framework of democracy. And I mean, just like one other two other real quick things. The interesting thing about Dilma Rousseff is that she was actually tortured by the military dictatorship in Brazil. And I believe Bolsonaro has made comments to the effect of they didn't go far enough with her, basically. And but also just broadly, how would you describe Lula Rousseff? How would you describe the Workers' Party to an American audience? How would you describe their base and their politics? Yeah, so I mean, Lula is just a fascinating political figure. He was born into

like the most extreme poverty imaginable. He was one of 11 children. He was illiterate until the age of 10. He went to work in a factory and joined a union and he lost a finger in the factory that he worked in. And he became a labor leader, like a really radical labor leader and formed the Workers' Party as a sort of left wing political movement against the oligarchy that has always run Brazil and oppressed the Brazilian poor. The problem was that he was so left-wing that he ran for president three times and just was so destroyed reputationally by the media that's extremely dominant in Brazil that he came to the conclusion that he would never win the presidency unless he started assuaging and appeasing the banking class, the financial class, the family that owns

the global TV networks. And so in 2002, when he ran for president for the fourth time, he wrote a famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People in which he renounced his radical past. He promised that he was going to work with instead of go to war with international finance and international markets. He chose as his vice president this kind of like banker figure, this, I don't know, maybe like Jeb Bush sort of figure to basically assuage the forces that had prevented him from winning to at least not wage war against him. And that's what ultimately allowed him to finally win in 2002 and become president. And it's a really interesting story because for the next eight years, the rich in Brazil got much, much richer, the market soared. So there was this

kind of always this narrative that Lula loved of the workers party against the elite, but the reality was the elite came to love Lula. At the same time, using these kind of corrupt, compromising political tactics, he was able to institute social programs that did actually take millions and millions of people out of poverty. So it wasn't any kind of revolutionary war against income inequality, but it actually tangibly improved people's lives in very meaningful ways, you know, like really innovative programs like this program called Bolsa Familia, which means that like if you have children and you prove that they're going to school every day that they've gotten their vaccines that they're getting medical care, you get, you know, a certain amount of money each

month that lets you live a decent life to like have ownership of a house and like to get free college. So on the one hand, the actual dogmatic left in Brazil, including for example, my husband's party, my husband's a member of Congress and a political party that used to be part of PT and left PT in protest of its neoliberalism, that that left thinks that PT reinforced income inequality, entrenched the power structure. And while that's true, it's also true that Lula was so popular because he did actually help so many people nonetheless by preserving extreme levels of inequality. Dilma, who was his chosen successor, was even more badass and radical than he was. She was an actual Marxist armed guerrilla, like she took up arms against the military dictatorship.

She, you know, used weapons and and terrorism against the military dictatorship. She was imprisoned and tortured, as you said, and when Bolsonaro voted in this in the in the on the floor of the Congress in favor of her impeachment, he specifically did so in the name of the colonel who actually tortured her, like not the colonel who oversaw the torture program, but the specific colonel who like put the electrical prods on her breast, like he said, in the name of the honorable colonel, you know, who whatever, I vote to impeach her. That's the kind of mentality that is now running this country. So yeah, like so we have a situation where Lula and Rousseff and the workers party has essentially started out as a workers party, but in order to achieve power, essentially made

their peace with neoliberalism, and but like to do as much as they could do as far as like social welfare programs or whatever. And even though, like you said, the markets and inequality soared for the, you know, Brazil's right wing and its oligarchy and, you know, let's say certain elements to the US State Department or intelligence community, that is of course, you know, that's never going to be enough, right? Like they're not going to be happy with just that. So let's now let's now get into what you and the intercept uncovered about this car wash investigation and this Mora, the judge who was the justice minister who was presiding over it. Right. So Sergio Morrow over the last five years has more or less been treated as like a deity in Brazilian politics,

you know, you like walk anywhere in Brazil and you'll see murals of his face on the side of buildings. Had he run for president, he almost certainly would have won, even if Lula had won. That's how popular he became. He was always on the cover of magazines. They had like, turned him into this almost like high priest of probity and ethics in a country that, you know, in fairness to Brazilians who did that were really desperate for just somebody that they could trust and believe in. And as a result, the media just never questioned anything that he did. They were completely supportive of it in part because they really use the media. So they would like get, you know, some person that they had put into prison for 12 months with no trial who was

a multimillionaire or a billionaire in a Brazilian prison who it was basically torture, willing to say anything. And they would say, yeah, I gave Lula $500,000 in cash in a suitcase. And then they would leak it to Globo. And then Globo would, you know, spend a week with massive ratings, doing no journalism, just getting these leaks. So the media and everybody loved Sergio Moro and this car wash investigation at first for ideological reasons and then for kind of self-interested reasons. So there's been no transparency, no investigation at all of anything that they've done. No one could even question him. They were petrified of him because he was by far the most popular and beloved and revered figure in the country.

There were things that he did that Supreme Court justices knew were illegal, but nonetheless approved because they were afraid of what the population would do if they impeded him in any way. I mean, Glenn, I mean, he does like the way you're describing him and like as he's been received by the media and popular culture. I mean, he really does kind of sound like a Robert Mueller figure except someone who actually like got results. Someone who got shit done. Yeah, I mean, like the difference between him and Mueller is that like unlike Mueller, who I think, you know, as we just saw is just kind of like old and, you know, just tired and didn't really care about all the benefits like Sergio Moro's 41. And so he saw the opportunity and he

knew that like bringing down Lula would be the huge cherry on his massive cake. And he was, he's very ambitious and took full advantage. You know, he flew around the world. He was part of like the Time 100 list. He went to the Gala with his wife and a tuxedo and this like really expensive gown that I think I forget which designer lent her. He really reveled in this kind of like, you know, reverence and power in a way that, you know, Mueller never really did. And because of that, he was really motivated to do what was demanded of him, which was to put Lula and the rest of the workers party in prison. And he did that. So everything they did was never questioned by anyone. No one had the capability or the courage or the political capital to even

scrutinize anything they were doing. There was starting to be a lot of questions raised, especially on the left about what seemed started, what did start to seem like a pretty corrupt operation, but no one could prove anything. No one had any evidence for it until three months ago on Mother's Day when I was minding my own business on a Sunday and was contacted by a source. Oh, not calling your mother, Glenn. Wow. I had just spent six hours on the phone with my mother. Oh, now your story is changing. Telling how much I loved her and all the gratitude I had for everything she had done for me and telling her about my life. Well, you only call on Mother's Day? Spending the day with my mother on the telephone. I got contacted by a source who said

that he had in his possession all of the private communications, documents, emails, chats, audios, videos, photos of Sergio Moro, the head prosecutor of the Car Wash Task Force whose name is Delton Dallin Yall, who also became a kind of mini celebrity, somebody who was really revered, as well as every member of the Car Wash Task Force. And he told me that he's only gone through a small part of the archive because the archive is years of their communications internally, as well as all their documents, and has found immense amounts of corruption and said, I want to give this to you so that you can reveal just how corrupt Sergio Moro and this Car Wash investigation actually is. And I said, yeah, okay, that sounds good. I'm happy to take

that. I have some practice receiving things of that nature. And he began sending me the archive and it took about six full days. And after six full days of sending it, maybe 10% of it was delivered. We then set up a more sophisticated means of delivery that allowed him to deliver it all at once. And then with the team of young journalists that we've built here in Brazil, like all in their 20s and 30s, we began looking through the archive. And what we found was genuinely shocking. Even I as a skeptic of Sergio Moro was shocked by the stuff I found. It reminded me of how I always thought the NSA was spying on everybody, but was shocked by the extent to which they were doing it when I began reading the Snowden archive. We started seeing the two

things that we saw right away that became kind of the two most important beginning parts of the story was number one, the entire time that Sergio Moro was pretending to be the neutral judge presiding over these criminal charges, just like in the US, a judge is required to maintain neutrality between the two sides. He was secretly plotting with the prosecutors every day telling them how to construct the case, yelling at them about evidence that they should be getting and using, telling them that certain witnesses were weak and shouldn't be used. He was really commanding the exact prosecutorial case that he was then walking into court wearing his robe, pompously pretending to judge neutrally. And he did that particularly in the case of Lula,

like he was the chief prosecutor to the point where he would even direct them, tomorrow you need to issue a press release rebutting what the defense said. So that was one part of it was just how unethically, really criminally, he crossed the line of participating in the prosecution that he was pretending to judge. And then the second part of it was we just found not dozens but hundreds of examples where they would openly talk about the fact that the things that they were doing were explicitly designed to make sure that the Workers' Party lost the election in 2018. So of course, all along people would say to them, hey, it seems like you're more interested in prosecuting the Workers' Party than people on the right. They would always say that's outrageous, we're prosecutors,

we don't have political ideologies, we don't have party preferences, but amongst themselves in secret, they were constantly saying, oh my god, we can't let this happen. If we let this happen, PT is going to win the election. So that was just the beginning part of what we were able to reveal. But even that just those initial set of stories in the first week caused almost every major media outlet in Brazil that had spent five years applauding and revering him to editorialize that this showed grave corruption and required him to be fired or be removed from his position as Justice Minister. So I mean, essentially what you have here is this, yeah, Elliot Ness figure who's supposedly about just the facts and following where they, following them wherever they go,

is behind the scenes basically working for the prosecution in this case, telling them, hey, why don't you bring this up? Why don't you say this, you know, like scripting how this court investigation should go. And the net effect of that is, I don't think it's too strong to say, as you've described, that Lula would have absolutely beaten Bolsonaro in that election. What amounts to basically a coup by the far right in Brazil? Exactly. And I mean, Sergio Moro's wife, and you know, you can decide to what extent you think this is relevant, who's a lawyer was an explicit Bolsonaro supporter. So she was, you know, on Instagram and Facebook every day, openly supporting Bolsonaro. In the private chats,

there were all kinds of things we found where Bolsonaro, where Sergio Moro was saying all sorts of things about the urgency of convicting Lula in time for the effect on the election to be valid. And then of course, soon as even before Bolsonaro won, there was already conversations that Sergio Moro was having about which position he thought he was going to get or wanted in the new Bolsonaro government he was choosing between being appointed to the Supreme Court or becoming justice minister. So yeah, I mean, you can absolutely describe it as a judicial coup. In fact, I don't see how you could describe it as anything other than that. Okay, Glenn. So as this goes on, you were obviously famously associated with the Snowden

NSA leaks, which became one of the biggest stories, certainly in my lifetime, in America. And as a journalist, it's like you never want to become part of the story. But I remember at the height of the Snowden NSA leaks, you sort of became the face of that story in a lot of ways. And were sort of a, I don't know, it was about refuting Glenn Greenwald rather than Edward Snowden. But let's be honest, that was just basically some shitheads who wrote for the Guardian or Atlantic coming after you. This story, I would say, is as big to Brazil, if not the world, as the NSA leaks were. But what's happened with you now being sort of associated with this story, quite a bit more serious than, like I said, an angry

Jamie Kirchik missing? Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's a much more dangerous story for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, like during the Snowden story, stuff happened like you guys probably remember like the UK detained my husband under terrorism law and threatened to imprison him. But then they released him after 12 hours. They invaded the Guardian's newsroom and stupidly forced them to like destroy the archive, even knowing that it was saved in multiple other places, including in Brazil. And the US government occasionally threatened me that like if I came back to the US, I would be arrested. But and then there was that famous David Gregory, you know, question when I went on the Meet the Press about why shouldn't

I be in prison, but pretty much the entire US media, he was like, Hey, Mr. Greenwald, just wondering like, why shouldn't you also be in prison? I'm like, you know, because I'm like a journalist. The two big differences between what I'm doing now and what happened then. One is that the I was doing that reporting from Brazil. And the Brazilian government at the time viewed the reporting I was doing is very favorable, very valuable, because I was exposing in part how the NSA was spying on their population and on their institutions. And the bombs that were dropping and falling and the politicians who were angry about what we were doing were thousands of miles away. As opposed to right now, the bombs are falling very, very, very close to where I'm

sitting. And the people who are the angriest about it are the people who are actually the ones in power in the country where I'm currently existing. So that's one thing that makes it a lot more dangerous. And the people who are in power are people who rode to power based on more or less a promise to rid the country of these democratic protections and these basic liberties and to restore order, even if it means shutting down newspapers and things like that. So they're very dangerous people who are in close proximity. The other part of it that makes it very different that you perceptively observed is that I have become the face of the story in a way that wasn't even that the true in the Snowden story in part because of two things. One is that until two days

ago when the police claim that they arrested our source, for the last eight weeks there was no source. So the source is just invisible. So unlike in the Snowden story where a lot of the hatred got directed towards Snowden, like the people who wanted to say there was a criminal involved, usually accused Snowden of being in the criminal. And I just got to be like, oh, I'm just the reporter who like got the information and I'm doing my job as a journalist and reporting it. In this case, I became the only face of the hack of the leak. So I pretty much got depicted as not just the reporter, but almost like I was the hacker, like the person who had stolen the information. But even more so, it became the strategy of the Bolsonaro movement deliberately to personalize

the story to me, even though we like were working and we decided to work in partnership with the biggest newspaper in Brazil, which is Folha, with a right-wing magazine that turned against Sergio Morovesia. Even when they would publish stories, the Bolsonaroistas on purpose would always say Glenn Greenwald leaked more documents because I'm such a good villain for them because I'm number one, a foreigner, even though I've lived here for 15 years. Number two, I'm gay in a country where anti-gay animus is skyrocketed through the roof. And number three, I'm married to a congressman who's a member of a left-wing socialist party. So I check off every good box for them in terms of being a villain, not just for the hardcore right,

but even for that reasonable center. So they really did purposely make me the face of the story for strategic reasons in a way that wasn't even quite true in the Snowden story. To give people an idea of just how scary and serious this actually is, you mentioned your partner, David Miranda, is now in the Brazilian Congress, is member of a socialist party. But the person, I mean, correct me, the person who seat he filled, I think was someone named Marielle Franco. Could you talk about her? You hit on two separate things that were conflated, but both are important. So Marielle Franco is this woman who was black. She came from one of Rio de Janeiro's most dangerous favelas, and was also a lesbian, married to a woman. So exactly the kind of person

who never wields political power in Brazil. She was a single mother at 19. She ended up like going to college, getting a master's degree. She was just an extraordinary person, and in 2016 she ran for the Rio de Janeiro City Council and got this overwhelming vote. It was like all the black women in the favelas, people who just don't vote, all came out and voted for her, and she shocked the political establishment. 51 people are elected. She was the fifth most voted for candidate. Usually it's done by corruption. They just buy votes, and the corrupt parties get the most votes. Her vote was totally organic. No one had heard of her. She came out of nowhere, and at the same time my husband ran for Rio de Janeiro City Council as part of the

same party, and he also won, and he also was black and gay, and comes from, was raised in one of Rio de Janeiro's worst favelas. So the two of them sat next to each other in the City Council, became best friends, and in March of 2018 she went to an event that was publicly advertised called Black Women Changing Political Structures, and on the way out of leaving the event she was in her car being driven home by her driver, and a very professional team of assassins pulled up next to her car and pumped four bullets into her head and killed her instantly, and also three bullets into the back of her driver who also was murdered. So that was only 500 days ago, March 14th of 2018. It was incredibly traumatizing for us. She was one of our best friends. Her

wife is our best friend. So that already created a climate that was pretty terrorizing, that they could just murder someone like her who had such a high profile, who was so important to so many people. They did finally arrest after a year the two people who actually pulled the triggers, both of whom unsurprisingly were members of the police force and the military, but they still haven't found the people who paid them to kill her, who wanted her murdered. The other incident that you were talking about is that my husband, after being elected to the City Council, ran in 2018 for Congress, and the way it's done is each party gets a certain number of seats. His party got four seats, and he came in fifth. So we thought they were going to get

five seats, but because of the right wing wave, they only got four. So he became the first alternate. The member of Congress who was in his party, who was the only openly gay member of Congress ever in Brazilian history is named Gian Willis, and he was actually bullied in Congress. They would have generals in Congress and right wing members of the Congress who would pass by him in the hallway and bump into him with their shoulder and then call him a faggot. He couldn't even use the bathrooms in the Congress because of how physically intimidated and bullied he was. He was getting so many death threats in the climate of Bolsonaro, especially because of how important anti-LGBT animus was. They were sending in pictures of the front of his house, pictures

of the license plate of his mother, really severe death threats. So even though he won, was reelected, he decided he couldn't safely stay in Brazil, fled Brazil, went into exile in Europe, and so my husband automatically took his place as the next person in line on the party ticket, and so now my husband is the only openly gay man in Congress. So obviously a lot of the hatred and threats that were was previously directed toward Mariali, who they murdered, and Gian, who fled, is now being directed toward my husband. And as you can imagine, that has only severely escalated ever since we began doing this reporting. And you know, I mean, it can't be stress enough that Bolsonaro and the people around him have long ties to Brazil's former military dictatorship, and now many of the,

you know, paramilitary and just military death squads that, you know, are in Brazil. And like I said, assassinating politicians and others are, you know, people in the favelas whose names, you know, we'll never fucking know, pretty much with impunity. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Like, before we started doing our reporting, the big scandal was that it was discovered that Bolsonaro's son, who's now a senator, while he was a state representative, had in his cabinet the wife and the mother of the militia leader, who the police have said was responsible for Mariali's murder. So he's now a fugitive, but he his wife and mother spent 10 years working in Bolsonaro's son's cabinet, obviously not working, but receiving a salary. They have all kinds of connections to these

paramilitary gangs that have terrorized and rule Brazil through violence, who assassinate people with great regularity. And it's ironic that we're actually talking today, because I've spent the last, I don't know, six weeks being threatened by multiple high officials, including Sergio Amaro with prison. Today, Bolsonaro himself gave a speech in Rio de Janeiro, and afterwards he was asked about this weird thing that Sergio Amaro did, which was two days ago, just like randomly and out of the blue, he posted onto the website of the Justice Ministry this decree that said that he has the power to summarily deport or expel from Brazil any foreign citizen who is posing a threat to Brazil's national security. It was like this really passive aggressive and obvious threat toward

me, like, hey, I'm just randomly going to like remind you of this power that I have to expel foreigners from Brazil. But as it turned out, under this law, you can't actually be expelled or deported as a foreigner under any law if either you're married to a Brazilian citizen, or you have Brazilian children, both of which is true for me. I'm married to a Brazilian and we adopted two Brazilian children in 2017. So they asked Bolsonaro today, what is that thing that Sergio Amaro did? Like, wasn't that an obvious threat toward Glenn Greenwald? And Bolsonaro said, no, Glenn Greenwald and his husband are frauds. They decided to marry another man in order to avoid the ability to be, for us to deport them and then adopted two boys in order to prevent.

That would be very deep cover. Not only would it be deep cover, but it would be incredibly prescient of me because I married David in 2005 when I was still a lawyer and not even a journalist. So that would be incredible powers of being able to see the future that one day would be a journalist reporting on high level corruption on the part of a fascist regime and needing cover and protection from being deported. And as much as I love my children, as anyone with children knows, you don't fucking adopt two children because you want a little bit of an advantage under a law because it's fucking miserable half the time. So he said, you don't need to worry. He said in his speech, Glenn Greenwald doesn't need to worry and none of

you worried about him need to worry. We're not going to deport him and we're not going to expel him. He's not going to be in jail in any other country, but there's a good chance he's going to be spending some time behind bars here in Brazil. So that was the speech that he gave today. Glenn, receiving all these threats and insults from the president, is it fair to say you're the Bruce and Nelly Orr of Brazil? I can live with that. I can accept that. I know that this is a heated discussion, but can we not talk about the despicable awful Nelly Orr? All right. Well, Glenn, we've got to let you go, but I would say, again, please, everyone, check out your reporting on what's going on right now in Brazil that you've done

for the Intercept. Like I said, it is an equal import to the noted NSA leaks, in my opinion, when you consider, as you said, that Brazil is the world's fifth largest country, one of the largest democracies in the world that now basically has undergone now a transition into a right-wing fascist dictatorship or is quickly sliding down that road. And as well, and you mentioned in the beginning, the rainforest, like again, the people who the Brazilian oligarchs and the people who backed Bolsonaro are part of a lot of them are from the sort of ranching class in Brazil, which is stripping the rainforest bear at the moment. I mean, much of it is already gone, but just for some perspective, the Amazon rainforest provides

approximately one quarter of all of the oxygen that you breathe on Earth. So if you'd like to continue breathing air on this planet, it's of, I would say, huge importance what's going on in Brazil right now. The Amazon also provides 80% of our natural cures. Yeah, exactly. Well, and I'm super grateful that you guys took the time to talk about this. And I'm also glad I'm pretty confident that we didn't repeat Virgil's mistake from the last time of my not recording my end because he neglected to tell me that I was supposed to. I'm pretty sure. That wasn't my mistake. So yeah, hopefully Virgil's mistake has not been my mistake. Virgil is going to be deported from the trap house. But no, Glenn,

seriously to you and David and your children and friends and family and also your many dogs. Sincerely, please stay safe and please keep doing what you're doing. More lives from the phone. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank you, everybody. Really great talking to you, as always. Thanks a lot, Glenn. Thanks. Take care. I think a lot of griefing and general asshattery in this Gary's Mod server. I will not hesitate to call law enforcement. I do not think that the webmaster would like to be disturbed from his special time with his wefe to deal with the other gobshattery in this server right now. If I see people griefing other people's creations in Gmod,

IPs will be recorded and they will sit in a notepad in my very special folder on my desktop. Do you understand me? Felix's new character, the angry webmaster. He's not even the webmaster. He just brags about knowing the webmaster. OK. Reference fail. Reference fail. The webmaster will be quite tickled to you about this. All right. Well, thanks again to Glenn Greenwald. That was some heavy shit. So let's have some fun. I got two items here for you guys for the rest of the show. And what do you known it? Matt's in the house. We got a full deck. All choppers on deck. We're all here. We're all trying to step through the same doorway at the same time, like the Stooges. A wealthy Dowager has hired all of us to renovate her apartment. And things are not going quite as

planned, fellas. Don't you hate it when you see just a perfect 10 out of 10 flapper and you drop a safe on your friend's foot? All right. So the first item that I want to bring up is another one of these stories that I basically think we have willed into being through our lathe of heaven like abilities that have been granted to us by this podcast. This is a story that I swear to God we would have done as a joke maybe three or four months ago. But wouldn't you know it? It's all real. I'm talking, of course, about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plan to build Jurassic Park in the middle of the Arabian desert. You heard that correctly. He is going to build Jurassic Park in the most barren part of the most barren country in the world. I'm talking about a fantastic

futuristic city called Neom. Yes, the name of that city again, Neom. When you borrow a space ballion, it's like Neon, but with an M at the end. Okay, that is a brand of yoga pants. You know how like sort of deranged Victorian rich people would like reenact, just get obsessed with the fall of the Roman Empire? The Saudis are going to, they want to make dinosaurs to make them go extinct in a climate that has to be again. I mean, like everyone's always, you know, we always talk about like Texas and Southern California just being like, you know, in the, in the immediate, just being in the crosshairs of climate catastrophe. But there are a few places that are more fucked than Saudi Arabia in the next 30, 40 years. Well, that's why they're building Neom.

Yeah, right. I'm the city of Neom is like in Sim City 2000 when you built the city of just archaeology. Well, that's what they're going for. I mean, everyone's always talking about but with no water. Well, I mean, okay, let me let's think about this. Everyone's always talking about like banning straws or like cutting emissions and shit like that. No one's ever thought about fighting climate change by having a pterodactyl. You know, no one's ever, no one's ever done the math here. So I'm assuming this is just going to be a game preserve for them. They hunt the deadliest game. Yeah. I bet that I mean dinosaurs. I mean, it's going to be hilarious when like a T-Rex somehow shoots down a Saudi F-22. I can't wait for that. It won't even be

a T-Rex. It'll be a fucking Apatosaurus. It will be like a nonviolent herbivore dinosaur. Just fucking next to the F-22 flings it into a volcano. All right. So this year, according to a report this week by the Wall Street Journal, consultants hired to work on the Neom project built a list of ridiculous recommendations, including a hologram facility in schools, cloud seeding induced artificial rain, a Jurassic Park style island of robot reptiles, robot maids, robo cage fight entertainment, and flying taxis. This is of course, comes from the Wall Street Journal obtained 200, 2300 pages of documents prepped by Boston Consulting Group McKinsey and Company.

Shout out to all the scammers getting their bag. That is so I love going to fucking Princeton, Harvard and Yale so I could charge millions of dollars to tell just one of the dumbest fucking people alive. Like, yeah, what you need is expensive battle bots. It would be really difficult to like come up with something dumber than Westworld. But this is what Saudis do. This is fully automated luxury oil theocracy. Is that it? I mean, first of all, I love that McKinsey is involved in this. They're just like going to fleece this shithead for all that he's worth. I mean, they should be telling him to lay off like, I don't know, 80% of the royal family like they do to other American firms, but

I mean, they like they should be telling them like, you should just like go to a place that's going to not be uninhabitable in 20 years. But like, I mean, if you were really doing the full evil deed of advising just a family with possibly trillions of dollars of wealth, and you know, there it's just going to be no human life can be sustained there. That's what you do. But you know, they're about their bag. Yeah, so they're like rules. They're like the engineers around Homer when he was designing that car. That sounds good. Yes. It says, according to the journal, a source said NBS came up with the idea for Neon four years ago when he was mowing how to overhaul the economy and pulled up a map of his country on Google Earth and saw its northwest quadrant was

a blank slate. The rest of the piece is just as unflattering. In addition to plans for a giant artificial moon developed in partnership with NASA, the aforementioned robot maids and dinosaurs, and a project to modify the human genome to make people stronger. The journal wrote that the prince wants a beach that glows in the dark like the face of a watch. The moon might be made of fleets of drones, but engineers have no idea how to create the glow in the dark beach. The uranium dumbass. Yeah. Yeah. I could figure that out. Give me unlimited resources. I'll give you a glowing beach. I like how just in the middle of there, it's alter the human genome to make people stronger. Why do they need to be strong? The robots are doing everything. They should become weak little,

like they should just be brains and jars. Why do they need bodies at all? Well, have you ever tried to take a robot maids passport? They're pretty strong. NBS also reportedly became frustrated when advised to develop a road plan for the city, the journal wrote, a person who reviewed the minutes of the meeting between the prince and a deputy for former iconic incorporated CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, who was brought in to plan a met to plan a mega bridge between Neon and Egypt across the Red Sea has since left the project amid ballooning cost estimates of 125 billion said the prince responded by saying, I don't want any roads or pavements. We are going to have flying cars in 2030.

Hey, fuck it, man. What are we supposed to have flying cars now? I don't think we're getting the flying cars, man. I think we got to give the go up the ghost on that one. Also, I think it's just one of those things that sounds good in theory, but once you have a third dimension, you cannot control four traffic, smash into each other. There would have to be roads still. There would be the same basic road structure. Exactly. Not cool. If you if you've ever read like John Dolan talking about anytime he spent in Saudi Arabia, I think they like still got to figure out the road thing before they get to the flying car thing. Yeah, imagine, imagine the the terror of getting in a car accident, but added to that immediately dropping

10,000 feet, plummeting to the earth after a mild fender bend. I hate it. I hate it when I'm, you know, I hate it when I'm going for a cruise in the Saudi Arabia sky highway and I accidentally hit a family's pet Falcon. It would be very funny though if they had literal flying cars and women still weren't allowed to drive. Well, I love the idea. The fact that he just says we're going, we don't need roads. By the way, the flying cars will still run on gasoline. That's the most important thing. None of this works if we get off the gas. I know I said a bunch of them already, but I sort of like go through the list here of things of the Washington Wall Street Journal that were like the details about what's going to be in, you know, Blade Runner 2049. Okay,

flying taxis. Awesome. Driving is just for fun, no longer for transportation, e.g. a Ferrari next to the coast. The nice view, the planning document show. Number two, cloud seeding. The desert always won't. Is that a real thing? Well, he says, hearing about that. He says, you're the, yeah, that's real. Yeah, cloud seeding. How do you do it though? You jack off in the cloud. What is this? Well, we're better at preventing rain. The Chinese did that during the Olympics. Yeah. How do you make it rain? Do the opposite. But there's no precipitation goal. What they do is they suck up the clouds if you want to get rid of the rain. I think the science behind weather modification is theoretically possible, but my understanding is

that we're quite bad at it. We don't know really how to do it, like to make it. It's very difficult to make it rain. Yeah. Unless you're at the club, I'm not right, lady. You detonate a very small tactical nuclear warhead in the upper atmosphere. Well, the test for this is going to be the fucking World Cup in Qatar, where they said, because it's 140 degrees and they're trying to have them play outdoor soccer, outdoor summer soccer. The premise is that they were going to have some sort of giant floating clouds to block the sun. That was their pitch anyway, while they were just handing giant suitcases of money to FIFA, but I thought they were building domes. I don't think that would be the only way you can do it. I know they were not saying domes.

I mean, they're killing thousands of people building these things, but I don't think they're not going to be domes. So cloud seeding, the desert won't always feel like the desert. Cloud seeding could make it rain. So again, this is nothing in fact that they're going to deal with building yet, like a giant futuristic arcology in the middle of the most uninhabitable corner of the planet Earth. I mean, even if this was successful, though, like the desert is the desert because it's the desert. When the desert pours, there are mudslides. Has this person never seen David Attenborough? And also, it's going to be 140 degrees there soon. What about that? Is it under

a dome? What's the plan? Let's go have a dome. No, we're saying dome. There is no dome in this fucking. Well, how do you do it? It's just like, I get air conditioning. It's just pneumatic tubes between the buildings and you never actually go outside. Okay. Is this a giant mall? Again, I mentioned this before, but robot maids, don't worry about household chores. While scientists are at work, their homes would be cleaned by robot maids. But then who do I get? Who can I abuse? This is pointless. This sucks. Also, like, I think we've kind of like made one of the huge advancements for women has been that like just housing is more clean now. Like it's the entire house doesn't fill up with like soot from the fireplace and things are made of cleanable services.

And things don't really get that dirty unless you're will. Come on. Felix is sitting right here, Amber. Why are you looking at me? There is no way Felix's place is worse than yours at this point. Well, I'm moving. Come on. Edit this out, Chris. I'm just going to leave it. Will has like 17 boxes of Korean eel masks in place. They're not Catherine's either. So basically, yeah, they want to do the Jetsons and the Flintstones at the same time because if they make robotic dinosaurs, they're going to be using them for construction purposes. I guess slide down the back. It is a living state of the art medical facilities. Scientists would work on a project to modify the human genome to make people stronger. Okay. Yeah, I feel like I did. I feel like I did a

monkey spa thing where like metal gear solids becoming real, but the Saudis are doing it like genome alteration. They're going to make mechs. They're probably going to make a super soldier, but it's just these assholes. This sucks, man. But also world-class restaurants, there would be fine dining galore in a city with the highest rate of Michelin-starred restaurants per inhabitant. So it's like going to be one-to-one Michelin star. Everybody gets a Michelin chef. They should do one less than the people there. So it's like musical chairs and someone always gets left out of it. Yeah. Somebody's got to make ramen every night. Is this a theme park or a place people live? No, the idea I've read about this. It's the idea is it's supposed to

bring all of the world's brilliant, most brilliant scientists there to work is the idea. It would attract all of the most genius people, all the Nobel Prize people would all move here. Oh, so it's like one of those one of those libertarian Reddit projects where we're going to buy an island and all the enlightened intelligent IQ types will move there. It's Gulch Gulch for serious. Now this is Goon Island with unlimited resources, which it would still fail. There's going to be a $30 billion zipline zipline across the Red Sea. You just smash into the pyramid. They let like one of the guys out of the Hilton prison. I'll make the website. And it would also be and then people would visit. So that would be the thing.

It would generate it would generate its own economy through knowledge, bullshit, like the knowledge economy. And then it would also be a tourist attraction. That is a great. It's great because it's like if you're just like, you know, you're you're some STEM professional, you have a PhD, you can really like do go anywhere. You live in like, you know, fucking let's say like America or somewhere. And you're like, you know, my wife kind of wants to move to the Bay Area, you know, for the schools for the kids. I kind of want to, you know, I kind of want to stay like on the East Coast. But there's also this place that's 140 degrees run by a theocracy, but they have robotic dinosaurs and they'll

inject our kids with an enhanced genome. So they'll have 12 packs one day. I can't wait to get my ass kicked by my eight year old kid who's got like crisper swaldess. He's just off that crisper. I mean, but honestly, like at this point, like Saudi Royals don't understand what is attractive to normal people. Yeah. Like that's what I think. Like we have dinosaurs. If you want to have no idea. If you wanted to a city where you attract all the intelligent people, all you have to do is say, we're going to remake the new Star Wars movies. And that would cost you like a few hundred million tops.

Yeah. I mean, like if they, if they really wanted, you know, the top intellects in the world, they would make a giant, like 500 foot tall Pickle Rick. It's Saudi Arabia. You can't have depictions of Pickle. So we missed the dinosaur robots. Residents could visit a Jurassic Park style island of robot reptiles. Now you say that this Saudi Arabia is like out of touch with what, you know, normal people want or even just a nerd. They're out of touch with your average super genius. I would visit Neon if it had an island of actually genetically engineered dino. But they're just fucking, it's just that's just the Epcot center. It's their fucking robots.

It's like Chuck E. Cheese, who gives a shit. But if they made real dinosaurs, they wouldn't run on gasoline. They would eventually become gasoline though. So they should really plan for the future. My chakasaurus is rolling coal. And a patasaurus would be like a Prius owner. It's like that. There would be Saudi conservative comedians would be like, oh, nice co-exist sticker on the back of your herbivore dinosaur. Chuck E. Benchies. Glow in the dark sand. We said they haven't mastered that yet. The super super soldier is in robot dinosaurs, no problem. But glow in the dark sand.

Apparently that's stitching them up. What about algae that glows? I think that'd be fine. Pour out like a zillion glow sticks. Just a bunch of glow sticks. Yeah. I have figured out that technology at a rave. Oh my God. That's it. This is the world's biggest sober rave. Well, Felix, you say that, but number eight on the list is alcohol. Alcohol is banned in the rest of Saudi Arabia, but it likely won't be here.

Oh, so there you go. Well, you can't go into your Michelin star hotel restaurants. Yeah. Well, that's true. You can't have Michelin star restaurants without pairings without wine pairings. Robot martial arts robots. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So are you fighting the robots? Is it like battle bots or are they like mech? So you would say they're more like for more fives than battle bots.

Okay. Is it a rack of soccer robots? Do you do humans control them? Are they odd automated? I might be into that. Which version? Like the Rockham Sockham. Like if you were on one side of the arena and I was on the other and we had robots we controlled, that would kill each other. Like that sounds extremely fun to me. Do you see real steel with Hugh Jackman? Because that's basically the premise of that movie.

It wouldn't be martial arts because a robot couldn't create art. They're going to pay Ohioans like thousands of dollars to sequence like their thought patterns in their genome so they can create the perfect AI for an MMA fighter robot. It says robots would do more than just clean your house. They could also spar head to head in a robo cage fights. One of the many sports on offer. Are they owned by a robot Leonardo DiCaprio? Are the dinosaurs going to fight?

Because why would you have, I mean, I'd rather see dinosaurs fight than stupid human looking robots. I mean, Matt, if the city of Neon ever does come into existence, my guess is that there would be like all kinds of every imaginable blood sport possible would be on offer and display. Good. Okay. Security cameras, drones and facial recognition technology are planned to track everyone at all times. Oh, nice. I love that.

Yeah. And last but not least, the moon. A giant artificial moon would light up each night. One proposal suggests it could live stream images from outer space acting as an iconic landmark. Okay, but don't they already have the moon in Saudi Arabia? Like, like the one, do they just want one they don't have to share? Yeah, that's going to screw up the tides. Well, Amber, this is like, you know, the fucking world we live in where everyone's like looking

at their phones or just taking photos instead of just being in the moment. You know, why live stream the moon? You can just look up at the night sky. No, my question. Are they going to have a second moon? Yes. Will it be in orbit around Earth? No, no, because they're not giving us that moon for free.

Well, then once again, it's going to be small. It's going to have to be propelled then. It's going to have to be. I know, yeah. Because if you're not, because the moon stays up there because it's it's it's it's it's a flying cars. I assume they'll use the same technology to levitate the false moon. Just it's just got a giant exhaust pipe bellowing out.

Yes. It's like a fucking got a kind of smoke stack. It's just belching smoke. Jesus Christ. You just hear the engine going like a fucking giant. Lawn mower. They keep it just hovering above you. I mean, like we were just like fucking like Dubai is like already halfway to

Neum and like originally you asked a good question. We brought this up originally. Oh, yeah. Why the fuck do people go to Dubai? Like, no, that wasn't my question. My question was, OK, so they built this like giant city that has all of this space like all of these skyscrapers and shit. So are people in there or do people live or work there?

Because you look at pictures and like 15 years ago, that was just desert. There was nothing there. I don't think it's I think it's luxury Patonkin, I think. Yeah, that's why that's why I thinking of it. Like maybe there's some tourists and that's it. There are tourists. It's full of Falcons. There's tourists.

There's a lot of expats who work in money laundering, basically. Also, you know, people who are being trafficked for sex slavery and things like that. And then also they have a very they're now an airport hub for traveling. But mostly those huge skyscrapers are empty. I don't know. They got to be. I don't know. I have no idea.

I really think that he's right. I think they largely are. I think it's for show. I think also like the luxury value of the place is somewhat in the fact that it's so elite that you have none of the actual attributes of a city, which is the rabble walking around. Right, right. I mean, it's like more just looking at pictures of it.

It looks like more actual residential and commercial capacity than the entirety of lower Manhattan. But if you walk down the street, it would be eerily empty. Yeah, I think it's a Potomkin luxury city. Yeah. That's the thing is they're not going to do it because they always these Gulf states always say, oh, we're going to we're going to build this great thing and the whole world's going to see it.

And then you get some shit like Dubai. And it's like, you know, oh, here are some islands that look like the world, which you would like look at once and be like, all right, whatever. Yeah, those islands are so fucking stuff. You can play golf inside. Who gives a shit? No one can possibly like go to that, right? That can't be there.

I mean, like the only way you could appreciate it is from height. Right. If you're on the island, it's like, you know what? You're just like, this is an island shape like Africa. You know what? It's literally not even as cool as one of those roadside stops where you can all stand in four different states at once. Yeah, because it's just they just bulldozed a bunch of fucking stand up and like murdered

a million manatees. So they have a giant like indoor ski mountain. Yes, they have a giant. How is that? That is there's zero percent chance that is superior to any existing outdoor ski mountain. Yeah, but soon it's going to be the only ski mountain. So they'll be able to get a lot more action.

Remember when we saw? Remember the place we went to see pack in? Yeah. National Harbor, Maryland, but that awful mall city. Yeah. It's just going to be that. That's really it. That's true.

I mean, I mean, I'm just like, who's impressed by any of the shit in Dubai? It's like really stupid. It's like, yeah, no, that's what it is. It's like when we went to the Mall of America, we weren't like, oh my God, there's an indoor roller coaster. There's a whole roller coaster. OK, OK, where else in the fucking world do you think you can go to a T Vana and then get on a roller coaster?

Literally within fucking minutes. Do not compare it to this fucking monstrosity. Mall of America is great. It's one of the last communal spaces in America. Ball of America is our Dubai. Absolutely not. There's also an American military base there. Camp Snoopy.

All right. Well, you know, that's another sovereign state that America is invading. We need to get them out of there. We need to get America out of Mall of America. All right. So yeah, that is the city of Neom, an ecological disaster. Good old deal. I mean, it's also sort of disturbing that they're like,

how do we revamp our economy? Like what? Selling oil to the entire planet isn't good enough anymore? I guess they're running out. They are running out. No, they're absolutely not. I do like that they are, you know, oil barons, and then they're like, okay, but what if we were businessmen?

And then they came up with a business idea that sounds like a third grader came up. Well, it's an entire fucking, it's a 900 member ruling family of just Wyatt Koch's. It's just rich dipshit kids. And like, what do America's rich dipshit kids do for work? You know, it's sort of fashion brand. It's exactly for the boardroom and the discotheca.

Start a podcast. Yeah, exactly. It's all horseshit. It's all like brain damaged idiocy, just like a neon. It's like if a coke dealer got really into micromanaging his money laundering business. Well, you know, to put a cap on this, it's interesting how oil barons can become oil baron.

Damn. Jesus Christ. What's up? What's the problem? Okay, so moving on from Saudi Arabia to another country, talking about Great Britain, which just has a new prime minister. We talked about this while we were over there.

It was going on. Come on. There was never any doubt. The big beefy. It's the albino ape. Boris Johnson is now the prime minister of the UK. Kind of sexy with it. And I just was like to say,

like as a way of prevising this, if there is a general election and Jeremy Corbyn doesn't win, basically anything could happen to Great Britain and I wouldn't care. I'm already. I'm already. Having gone there, I mean, as long as they carve out the north

and it gets to be like a different place, like I don't care what you got. I get it. The People's Republic of Manchester. I don't know why, but ever since he got the got the big brass ring, I've been just thinking about his ass and what it looks like. And the thing I can keep thinking of

is that it's like an aquarium filled with vanilla ice cream. And I don't know why I keep thinking about it, but I can't stop. I would. I think it was because Quillette said that he has, he's an ubermensch. Well, OK, you already know where I'm going with this one. I would love that swaggering Superman to take his ass,

which is like a garbage bag filled with very heavy wet sponges and just use my tongue like a fucking car wash. So I'm not anticipating where I'm going with this. While we are on the UK stretch of our tour, we probably rung more material out of Toby Young than any of the other fucking absolute freaks in that awful island nation. Toby Young is back with a piece in Quillette that I mean,

I'm not going to read all of it because it's fucking interminable, but it has some really choice nuggets. Writing in Quillette, Toby Young, cometh the hour, cometh the man, a profile of Boris Johnson. And this does not disappoint. So let's just dive in here. I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983

when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother's, and he had told me to keep an eye out for him. What? Is this a riddle? Keep an eye out for this guy, I fucked his mom. But I still wasn't prepared for the sight and sound of him

at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates hone their public speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism. And Boris was proposing the motion with his huge mop of blonde hair, his tie askew, and his shirt escaping from his trousers. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy,

yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad Germanic forehead. There was also something of Nietzsche's ubermensch about him. Isn't he like five, five? Have you met a person over six feet tall? Not in England. Yeah, that's very tiny there. I want to meet Toby Young so that he just worships me

like fucking Kurtz in the jungle. He's just a fat guy for Christ's sake. I want to imagine taking Toby Young to like Ohio versus Michigan football games. He'll just be like, oh my god, this is Valhalla. You know what? I'm getting to think. He's tons of fat guys and windbreakers and aviators. You should kill me, sir.

I'm starting to think that like we don't actually have a fan base for the podcast in the UK. People just showed up to look at us because they thought that we were the hottest people they've ever seen. My god, they had nutrition when they were children. I would reckon that the bones are not hollow. I mean, you know, if you've ever seen a photo of Boris Johnson, I know you must have thought Nietzsche's Superman.

Absolutely. Definitely. But that's not enough. Listen to this. He goes, H.A. Chomo. Allegedly. Allegedly. Parody. Parody. So he goes on. He doesn't just describe his broad Germanic forehead

and that he's like Nietzsche's Uber bitch. He goes on with further imaginings about Boris Johnson. You could imagine you could imagine him in later hosin walking through the black forest. Yeah. DJ, DJ, run that back. DJ, run that back. If Boris Johnson wore anything approaching shorts, the sound that his thighs would make as they hit each other,

I think it would be like, you know, how like when cheese curds are really fresh and they squeak. Just that thigh meat bulging out of the leather pants. You could imagine, you know, coming down to get a glass of water at 3 a.m. and Boris Johnson just ass naked, his big baddy booty just waving in the glow of the refrigerator. What, W.I.D.? DJ, run that back.

You could imagine him in later hosin wandering through the black forest with an ax over his shoulder looking for ogres to kill. I don't think there were historically ogres. I mean, this guy was in charge of education. He's pretty fucking stupid. I mean, I mean, in the UK, there are grotesque hunchbacks who do eat the bones of children,

but they're just, you know, we're in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet in the 80s. This same combination, a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength of an almost tangible will to power was even more pronounced in his way of speaking. Folks, we got some coiled publicity. I would not be surprised if his dick were coiled like a pig's tail. These guys just love looking at guys whose skin is the texture

of a lace chip and being like, oh, this guy's preserving his strength. It's like the closer you look to death, the more they're like, oh, he's hiding. It was just an avalanche of volcano of power within that frame. He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics, theatrical, dramatic, self-serious, when a few seconds in, he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say.

He looked up, startled, where am I? And asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. What's the motion anyway? Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared over his head and he was off, this time in an even more oratun floored manner. Yet within a few seconds, he'd wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument

for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who'd been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plunked down in the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.

This is what Nietzsche talked about. This is actually the delirium of an advanced state of diaper rash. People don't know it can get that bad. This is like, if you saw just any fell son wake up at 5 p.m. and wandered down to family dinner and be like, uh, did I miss breakfast? You'd be like, oh my god. No, this is the next stage in evolution.

Like, A.J., Toby Young would be similarly enamored by A.J. Soprano. No, I mean, what he's describing, that is very Nietzschean. Like, when Nietzsche's brain was dissolved by syphilis and he was trying to fuck horses. Right, when he was talking to a horse. So, uh... He got curved by a horse, really sad. I mean, this does go on for about 10,000 words.

But I was like, one last thing here. He says, uh, to say I was impressed would be an understatement. So he just described about how he, like, just dotted on, not knowing where he was or what he was talking about. And then, like, argued against his own point to, like, the jeers of an entire room. And then Toby Young was like, this man will be prime minister. And you know what?

In the UK, that's probably a good fucking bet. Because he's dummy thick. At the end of the day, that's what matters. If you're... Look, the odds are, if you're listening to this show, you are also, like, a confused, husky boy. You have a bright future in the UK. The world is your oyster.

There's just a bunch of fail lords going to the East Coast to rebuild the Mayflower to go back to the United Kingdom. That's why webmaster guys, like, adopt British slang. Like, gobshite. Because, like, over there, they would be... Stop going to Japan to teach English. They're sick of you. They've seen it to tonish flubby Americans.

It's not impressed them anymore. That's the people that has their shit together, too. You need to go to a place where they have no standards. Yeah, if you're a fucking nerd, like, go to the UK... Like, you're probably over 5'10". You're towering over these people. Just go over there and teach the fucking Java or whatever. I don't know.

You will be a god there. You will be elected. You'll be given a life peerage. So he goes here, A few years before arriving at Oxford, I had watched the television adaptation of Bride's Head Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's Oxford novel. You notice he said he didn't read the book.

Yeah, fuck that shit. And had been expecting to meet the modern-day equivalents of Sebastian Flight and Anthony Blanche, larger than life devil-may-care aristocrats delivering bombos in between sips of champagne and spoonfuls of caviar. But the reality was very different. Warm beer, stale sandwiches, and second-hand opinions.

Lots of spotty students, all as gauche as me. Less like an Oscar Wilde play than a Mike Lee film. He's comparing it to a Mike Lee film because of all the rapes that happened by the way. So there you go. That's Tooby Young's Flight Some Fancy. He's convinced me. About now. The doddering oaf is he's going to definitely pull off

that whole hard Brexit thing. Way to go, buddy. It's going to be great. What's going to happen is they're going to have a bad deal on the table and he'll, because he thinks like he's settling a lawsuit with Tesco or so defamation lawsuit with Tesco, he'll sign it and then like his cuff link will latch on to the desk and slowly unravel

until he's completely naked by EU bylaws and validating the deal. Saving. That's the Mr. Bean loophole. Yeah. So there you go. Now British Prime Minister Boris Johnson full of coiled strength and potency, even as a young lad.

Futures looking bright, folks. That's not just the sun flashing off of his pale fucking skin. The only artificial moon that's been created. There are only a few people who could stand up to Boris Johnson's just, you know, looming strength and imposing Superman physique and charisma. Vito Spadafore's golf son is one. Fred Flintstone, Peter Griffin.

Oh my god. What if that guy who cosplays as Peter Griffith went to England? They would make the king. They would just overthrow the Wincers and make him king. That guy, well, that guy is like against racism. So that's a huge. He's did a PSA against racism. So like that's, you know, that's a huge liability.

For him. Yeah. And that guy have a falling out with the real life Lois Griffin. The real life Lois Griffin fucking, by the way, has no. Her resemblance to Lois is nothing like his resemblance. No, that guy is un fucking. That guy rules. She stole his YouTube channel.

It's such fucking bullshit. I don't know anything about this drama. There's a guy named real life Peter Griffin who looks and sounds exactly like Peter Griffin and he rocks. He's a good natured fellow. OK, but he was exploited by his sort of cosplay real life Lois Griffin wife. We took over his YouTube page.

You have to have a falling out. Yeah. She was nothing like. Like so fucking dude. It gets me so fucking mad. Bullshit. Horrifying. She looks nothing.

It's such bullshit. Is anyone doing anything about this president Trump? President Trump sir. We are. We are honored to fight on your side of this war against art of this fake Lois fraudulent Lois Griffiths. How am I supposed to beat off to this real real life Lois Griffin couldn't even play make.

It's really pathetic. It's terrible to see real life Peter Griffin is everyone loves him so big. Oh my god. Yeah. He loves big guys. Giant real life Peter Griffin is a fucking tank. Yeah.

All right, guys. We should we should wrap it up for this today. We should put a link to real life Peter Griffin. Yeah. So people don't know what we're talking about. Just go into the description. None of the no context for any of the Glenn interview or British politics, but give them a link to real life Peter

Griffin. So they have some context for this discussion. Absolutely important stuff. We're all about education on the show. We do have a few plugs. Plug away. All right. Okay.

Coming up this upcoming week. Traverse City, Michigan. We will be doing a live live. What? It'll be a couple of events. We'll be a new and Brandon actually. The trader, Brendan James print the trader. Brandon Rears his head again.

This is a diet worms type setup form. Yes, on I believe July 30th for the second of the second Democratic debates. We will be on stage live, you know, doing doing some goofs. That one is free. And then later that week on Friday, we are doing a live show. So come out for those ticket links are in the description. And then next month on a day that I remember in 23rd of August,

23rd of August in Providence, Rhode Island at Necronomicon, we will be doing live call of Cthulhu. And if you like reading, which you probably don't because you're listening to this. I recently am published again in Columbia Journalism Review, interviewing editor of Financial Times, Lionel Barber. Till next time, guys. Bye-bye.

Cheers. Bye. Hey guys, real life Peter Griffin here. You know what really grinds my gears? Racism. I mean the only things that I am intolerant of are giant chickens and meg. I think there's two things that we can all agree on. Number one, we all need oxygen to breathe.

And number two, 90% of Sean Paul's lyrics are indecipherable. And out of no circumstances should you ever say any words like Eddie, be healthy.