Pod Save the World - Alien Balloon Invasion

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Ben and Tommy talk about Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu’s attack on Israel’s judicial system, the ongoing US war against Chinese balloons and UFOs, Kim Jong Un’s likely successor, Saudi influence peddling, the latest in Ukraine as we approach the one year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, potential Cuba policy changes, India’s Prime Minister Modi raiding the BBC, and Melania Trump’s unexpected visit to the Situation Room. Then Tommy talks to USAID Disaster Response Lead Stephen Allen who is on the ground in Turkey about the earthquake devastation and how people can help. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, Ben, can I read you some of my favorite commentary about Joe Biden's State of the Union? Shoot, yeah. Okay. Here's a quote. If a Chinese military spycraft tried to violate U.S. airspace days before Ronald Reagan's state of the union address, I suspect that the Gipper would not only have ordered military to shoot it down before it entered our territory, but also invite the pilot who took it out to be his guest in the House chamber. But Joe Biden is no Ronald Reagan. the Gipper have known about the balloon before we discovered it. That's really good. Great technical question there. Not to raise, you know. Yeah, logic. That is from Bush speechwriter and torture enthusiast, Mark Thiessen, who remains the great shame

of the Washington Post and they employ that. They just let him like, you know, pop off every now and then. Right, the dumbest things. How did you feel about the State of the Union turning into prime minister's question time? I mean, I personally, like, find that to be more compelling television than the normal state of unions. Definitely. I don't think it, like, redounded to the benefit of the Republicans, so why not, right? I mean.

I think, tell me if I'm wrong. I think some of our British friends, I love PMQs. I think it's such a cool concept. I think in the UK, they find ways to script it or make it feel a little more stage and don't find it as cool as we do. But, God, I wish we had that. Well, the thing that is even better than the heckling in prime minister's questions is, like the affirmative grunts, like, I'm like, what?

Like, why is that, like, validating? I don't know. That's a really good point. I don't know. I would love to borrow some PMQs. May pass a law. You have to go down once a month to one of the chambers, take questions for an hour from members of Congress.

Seems like it would be good. Obama would have loved that. Yeah. Well, he tried to do it once. Or was that? The Republican retreat was on health care. And then they didn't let him come back in the next year. Yeah, it was streamed live.

They all were embarrassed. The civility police came after us because Obama happen to be smarter than them. But that's... Red hen. We digress. We had a lot to cover today, Ben. We are going to talk about the ongoing attack on Israel's democracy.

Thank you, Bibi Nanjahou. The latest on balloon Ghazi and speculation that aliens are involved. North Korea news updates on the Saudis buying influence in the Trump orbit. Prisoner release from Nicaragua, potential policy changes with Cuba, Ukraine, attacks on press freedom, and then some more fun stuff. And then, Ben, I talk with Stephen Allen, who is the U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID disaster response lead currently on the ground in Turkey. We talk about what USAID can do to help people impacted by the quake in Turkey. We talk about how this is different in Syria.

Some of the sanctions relief the administration has done to try to make that process a little easier. One small warning for the listeners here. This guy was talking to me from a tent in the field. in a place that had just been devastated by an earthquake. So the Wi-Fi wasn't perfect. Please forgive us if the audio is not totally pristine, but these guys are doing the Lord's work, truly. Reminder, you know, most in the running for most underrated agency of the U.S. government,

the men and women, you've got there doing good works. That is very true because they don't just do the long-term development stuff. They do these like dart response teams where they literally fly people from Fairfax And then I think LA is the other team that's in Turkey right now who are just crawling through rubble and don't sleep for weeks at a time trying to save people's lives. Yeah, just surging capacity. Yeah. Just amazing stuff. Before we get to the news, though, Ben, we got some big news here at Crooked Media.

We are excited to share that the first book from our very own crooked media reads, what do you call that? Imprint. Thank you. Imprint. Thank you. Is available for pre-order today. It's a novel called Mobility by Lydia Keesling. She also wrote an incredible book

called The Golden State. Dan Pfeiffer was talking about it this morning. He read it and said it's great. Been big fans of Lydia's for a long time. We think that Friends of the Pod are going to love this book. So if you're interested, go to crooked.com slash mobility. You can read more. You can pre-order and be the first to read it

when it comes out on August 1st. So exciting stuff. Well, summer reading, yeah. Summer reading, yeah. It's funny how long these pre-order your guitar for books. But it's great. I've been there. enthusiasm build.

Speaking of enthusiasm building, let's start in Israel, Ben, where BB Netanyahu, prime minister, old but new, and his right-wing ultra-nationalist coalition is working overtime to make it so that Israel is maybe no longer going to be a fully functioning democracy. On Monday, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval to bills that would radically alter their judicial system. One would give the government more power to point judges. The other would reduce the Israeli Supreme Court's power to override, laws passed by the Knesset. So, reminder in the Israeli system, the party that has the majority in parliament picks the prime minister and runs the government. So what Netanyahu is doing is pushing for changes that could lead to a system where the people in charge pick the judges, override

court rulings they don't like and basically rule unchecked. Sounds terrible. A lot of Israeli citizens are not happy about this on Monday. An estimated 100,000 protesters took to the streets in Jerusalem to protest Israel's president, Isaac Herzog said, was quote, on the brink of constitutional and social collapse and could possibly see a violent clash. Unfortunately, the president in their system has no real power. He's more ceremonial. A lot of people think that Netanyahu is not just doing this because he wants more power. It's about giving the parliament the power in the future to stop the many corruption cases against him.

So, Ben, it's great to see these big protests and people out on the street. There's also been weeks of demonstrations in Tel Aviv. but I don't know really what the path is to stop BB if he wants to ram this through. Like what's your level of hope here for, I don't know, some sort of way to stop this or get a deal? I don't see one. I mean, first of all, this is a pretty familiar playbook. We've talked about this playbook in other contexts on this podcast. I mean, Victor Orban, for instance, a key part of his effort to turn hungry into kind of a single-party state was to pack the courts and make judicial reform.

and essentially create a compliant judiciary so he could do whatever he wanted. And so it's kind of like right out of the first page of the playbook to essentially got the power of the judiciary, which, as you point out, serves Bibi's personal interests in terms of avoiding prosecution. Buzzi Herzog, the president, you know, has really tried to mediate this, slow it down. Like, you know, it's a ceremonial role, but it's supposed to kind of be a safeguard for democracy. there's very little interest here. I think that the main point that I would underscore that we've talked about a couple times, but I think it bears, you know, emphasis here. There's not any evidentiary basis for thinking that like Bibi's somehow going to moderate the actions of this

government, you know. So whether it's with respect to Israel in its democracy, whether it's in its conduct towards the Palestinians, whether it's in the kind of impunity given to security forces to kind of do whatever they want. I mean, there was a video making the rounds at Larry Wright from the near, did you see that? So Larry Wright, one of the most prominent journalists in the world, um, was literally talking to a pretty prominent Palestinian activist in Hebron. And like some IDF guy just came and beat the shit of a guy right in front of right to the ground. And so I just think across the board here, um, we have to expect that this government is going to do what they say they're going to do. I mean, these, these are things, they're not trying to like hide it, you know.

And the question, of course, is if you have blanket support for anything you're going to do from the U.S. government, the assistance is going to keep flowing, the several billion dollars a year can keep flowing, the kind of diplomatic shield in the international community is going to keep being in place. Why wouldn't they do these things? Like they have the cover of the most powerful nation in the world. They have a small majority in the Knesset. The only thing that could make a difference is the kind of mass mobile. of the Israeli public, which we do see, which I think is very healthy. And so the hope is that this is at least kind of stirring something inside of, you know, that kind of middle, you know, between the kind of more progressive side of Israeli politics that is a shrinking number of people. But then the kind of larger middle that has kind of tracked center right, but it's pretty uncomfortable with this stuff. You really need to see that mobilizing if you want to have any check on the more extreme impulses of this government. Yeah, I mean, I think the Netanyahu coalition has 64 seats in the Knesset, but I think that

nets out to like 50.1% of the vote, right? It's the slimmest of slim majorities. The other thing I think that BB is likely to do if he gets these new powers to override the court is he tried to name some ultra-right-wing, ultra-orthodox guy to be a minister. The court said, actually, no, you can't do that because that guy's a criminal. Yeah, yeah. But that individual was a key part of his coalition. So I think Netanyahu could use this new power to reinstall those people.

to keep his coalition together. To the point you made about U.S. support and sort of impunity, Barack Reveed at Axios reported that Israel legalized nine West Bank settlement outposts and approved a bunch of new settlement construction, I think potentially up to 10,000 new building permits, just like an unheard of amount of settlement expansion. So, you know, again, the slow motion annexation of the West Bank continues. It's getting less slow motion, frankly.

And the U.S. response is still, like kind of talking points that we might have used in 2009 where, you know, the U.S. opposed to settlements were concerned, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's no. Deeply troubled. Deeply concerned. Seeking more information. But there are no actual consequences.

And everyone involved knows the game and knows there won't be. And, you know, Tony Blinken was just there like, you know, like a week or two ago. And so to do this that close after a visit from the senior most official. in US foreign policy is its own message, right, that they're sending that they just, because I'm sure that the message was one of like urging restraint, et cetera. And again, just to return to the authoritarian playbook, you know, having, you know, written a book after the fall should, you know, be ordered in tandem with mobility. Damn right. Pre-order. But actually, if you look at where Israel is on the spectrum, right, because

there are different areas of focus. And we'll get to India later in this show, too. Like, there's the judiciary, which you want to make compliant and kind of underneath the prime minister. There's the media. And already in Israel, you have a very pro-BB-friendly media. Then there's the kind of neutering of civil society. And you've seen certain NGOs targeted in Israel and certainly in Palestine. And so once you kind of weaken those kind of checks on the government, the media, the courts, and civil society, it's pretty open space for an autocrat like Beebe to do what he wants to do

to reshape the country, to kind of control the information people are getting, to kind of make political dissent seem almost meaningless because the courts are no longer an avenue. And in this case, what you have that you don't have in a Hungary is you have this territorial dispute with the Palestinians. And this package of settlements signals that they are kind of boiling the frog here. And for the U.S. to just say, like, the Palestinian Authority should be a better security partner for the Israeli defense forces is not, you know, that's kind of not what's happening, you know. Yeah. And you have no constitution. So, you know, the Israeli parliament could, you know, pass a law basically stripping away certain rights from a group of people. And there's no protections. There's no First Amendment. There's nothing sort of bedrock principles that will keep them safe. And you also have a Palestinian population that is completely lost hope for completely valid reasons that there will ever. or be a Palestinian state. And that tends to lead to very bad things.

And what you have, you know, people will also see that the U.S. is consistently, and this happened in successive administrations, it's happening the Obama administration. It's happening now. The U.S. blocks any Palestinian effort to pursue international justice, right? To take cases where there's been settler violence or there's been violence by these really state against Palestinians to try to take it to the international. criminal court or, you know, to aspects of the UN system. Keep in mind that the reason the Palestinians are doing that is they don't have any recourse in Israeli law, right? They're not seeing, you know,

settler violence punished by the Israeli legal system. That's even less likely, given what's happening with the courts. And so when you have a scenario where the U.S. is blocking any access to international justice, and then the Israeli government is blocking any access to justice through the Israeli legal system, where to, you know, there's a sense of like hopelessness, right? And that's what's creeping in. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the other, obviously, the biggest story of the week, Ben, is this, the war on balloons. Yes.

It continues. So over the last few days, the Pentagon shot down three unidentified flying objects over the U.S. and Canada that apparently posed a threat to civilian aviation due to their altitude. I think they're between 20,000 to 40,000 feet. This is on top of the Chinese spy balloon. But anxiety over these objects nearly achieved orbit when a U.S. Air Force General in charge of North American airspace refused to rule out aliens as an explanation for what the things were. And, Ben, I thought this was just such a great window into how White House jobs can just grind you down into a numb. Because you know these guys have been working on this stuff for weeks.

It's Super Bowl Sunday. You try to take a couple hours off to watch the Eagles lose. and instead some vague quote from a Pentagon official has like the entire world, the whole planet's speculating that we were under attack by aliens. It's like trending on Twitter and everything else. The White House tried to clear it all up on Monday. Here's a clip.

My understanding is that the top officials of the Pentagon when asked explicitly if they were ruling out any kind of extraterrestrial presence that they weren't ruling anything out, and yet at the beginning of today's briefing, albeit with her usual winning smile, Ms. Jean-Pierre seemed to rule out any extraterrestrial activity. I don't think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these craft, period.

I don't think there's any more that needs to be said there. So the journalist there was James Rosen. Remember, he was at Fox. Then he went to Sinclair. Now I think he's at Newsmax. So that, that. And that was John Kirby, our former colleague. Now, the National Security spokesman at the White House.

Great guy. Totally, truly fantastic guy. but like, boy, let me tell you what is not going to convince people from the podium is, you know, the government saying there are no aliens, like two-phase out of the tube there. Yeah, I get a few takes on this. So, okay, first of all, it is interesting. You mentioned working at the White House. Everything seems like a really big story when you're working on National District at the White House. What I always found interesting is that there be these things that we would work on for weeks, months, that would seem like really important stories that just my friends who didn't follow these things weren't even aware that these things were happening.

you know, like whole wars were taking place in other parts of the world. Then there'd be that story that would break through and like suddenly like your weird cousin is asking you about it. This is totally one of those stories. It's like it seems like a weird story, but it's probably like the top five things that have happened under Joe Biden. Right, because it crosses like the journalism Rubicon into like the BuzzFeed list Rubicon and like everyone's Facebook pages and stuff like,

at least back then. So this is out there, right? The truth is out there. They're out there, yeah. Clearly it's pretty obvious. obvious what happened here, right, which is this giant Chinese spy balloon drifts in air airspace. There's a complete utter freakout that we covered well you on helium last week. And so all the sudden, NORAD, which is responsible for the air defense of the United States

of North America, of the United States and Canada, kind of dials up the radar. Yeah, they change the filter. So they look at slower moving objects. Slow, yeah. And suddenly they're seeing, oh, shit, there's like thousands of balloons in the sky and we don't know which ones are Chinese. Some of these balloons, I think, have like flight plans. You know, they've kind of registered or something.

People are tracking these things. And some haven't. And by the way, there's a shit ton of balloons up there that might not be Chinese or Russian. They just may be like weather balloons or mapping balloons. Yeah, science experiment, et cetera. And now everybody's afraid of missing the next Chinese balloon. So they're getting a little trigger happy with the F-22s over there. And they're just shooting these things down.

That's what I think is happening. And so what they need to do, I agree it's kind of hard when they're not explaining this. They don't really know what these things are. They just know that they didn't know why they're out there. And it's going to take a minute to find them because one, it was shot down in rural, frozen Alaska, in a near a town called Dead Horse, which has got to be the best rural Alaska town name of Earth. And the other landed in Lake Huron. Yeah, yeah.

So it's going to take a minute. Pour one out for the horse here. And it's going to take a minute for them to tell us. Now, there are two questions. what information do they provide us about the things that they're shooting down? And as soon as they kind of recover this stuff, they should put that out. But then also, like, what is the criteria for shooting something down in the sky now? Because that, to me, is actually the bigger question.

For sure. And so what you're going to need to do here, and it's complicated. And we've been in white-dust situations like this where some of the agencies are involved are not traditionally, like, national security. So, like, the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, like, they're looking at stuff in the sky, too. And, like, so you've got to set up, like, an interagent. task force with like the military and the FAA. Biden directed them to do that.

Yeah, exactly. And what they need to do is then have like a protocol. You can't just shoot down everything in the sky that like is not like registered or something because there's drones up there. There's balloons up there. And so I think we've over corrected off of the Chinese balloon. And now we need to correct back to like a sustainable, hey, what are we shooting down? What are the criteria for shooting it down? And how do we tell people what we're shooting down?

I will say that if there is a civilization out there in the universe that is capable enough of visiting us, they're probably not doing it with like a rudimentary, like, early 20th century balloon. You know, like, I just, I don't think these are the aliens. I think that's right. I mean, and again, like, everyone's like, how could you not know what they are? Imagine you're an F-22 pilot. You're going like 600 miles an hour and you fly by a fucking balloon. How are you supposed to figure out exactly what that is? So you're right. In the interim, the military is overcorrecting, and they're now shooting 10-foot-long, heat-seeking, supersonic AIM-9X-sidewinder missiles that cost $439,000 each at glorified pool floats.

Yeah. Because we don't have a better system for dealing them. And by the way, like, this is funny. It's ridiculous. But there is risk. One of the missiles fired at the object that was over Lake Huron missed the target and landed in the water. Everyone is saying like, oh, Biden should have shot the thing, the Chinese spy balloon down over Montana. Well, a sidewinder missile could have careened into someone's house.

That would not be good if that happened. That would be bad. Yeah, the first F-22 kill is, you know, a civilian barn. That would have been bad. Yeah, Dead Horse 2.0 there, you know. Not good. So not good. Yeah.

So, okay, since last week's episode, we have learned a lot more about this initial Chinese spy balloon. So the U.S. says it was part of this large or is part of this large integrated Chinese aerial spy network. These balloons have been operating out of China for years. They've collected data on Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines. It's all according to the Washington Post. And there were previous balloons spotted near Texas, Florida, Hawaii, and Guam. So those are these sort of like brief U.S. airspace incursions. The Biden administration figured out what they could as quickly as they could and then decided to brief as many countries as possible on this new Chinese capability. So Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State had a briefing for 150 people from 40 countries.

or she laid it all out. In response, the Chinese accused the United States of running, quote, the largest spy network in the world and sending 10 balloons into Chinese airspace. It sounds about half true to me. Yeah, that's true. Maybe the first part is my may or may not be true. The White House denies floating balloons over China. Though Ben, it's worth noting that China has a rather creative and expansive view of what is their territory. So who knows what they're talking about. And what the definition of a balloon is. Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of things. thoughts. I bet the White House is a little concerned about potential Chinese retaliation. It would be bad if they're like, okay, you blow up our balloon. We're going to take out your satellite.

Yeah. That would be unnerving. Hopefully there's an off-ramp happening because I saw that Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, is going to meet with his Chinese counterpart in Munich this week at the Munich Security Summit. So that trip he canceled might be back on. Hopefully they don't want like a prolonged rupture. And then finally, Ben, like, I guess last week it was. all hysterics and yelling at Biden for not killing the balloon earlier. But it does seem like the net effect of this whole incident is that the U.S. exposed this Chinese source and method of intelligence collection to the entire world. And now they can't do it unnoticed anymore. It seems like a win. Yeah, at a minimum of Chinese loss, right? I mean, in the sense that you make a good

point about what they're defining potentially as places that are being surveilled by the U.S. because they claim the entire body of water at the South China Sea, including absurd, you know, maritime, like the coastline of multiple countries in Southeast Asia. Only ESPN recognizes those terms of Louis. You know, the only the Disney Corporation.

That's a deep, dorky joke. By the way, a good book, Red Carpet by Eric Schwartzel. What's that? It's about Hollywood, it's Hollywood China and the global battle for cultural supremacy. It's basically about China's influence in Hollywood.

I like it. So check it out. Check that out. because the Disney stuff comes in and play. But, you know, like, I think that, look, there's, what is legitimate is, you know, yeah, we want to, if these balloons could get more granular detail about the most sensitive sites in our nuclear program and our military, absolutely. You want to do whatever you can to deter the Chinese from having that capability.

And making all this noise and spotlighting it, never mind shooting down the balloon, you know, and getting other countries to pay attention to this. makes it harder for China to engage in that kind of spying. They're still going to spy. They have satellites in space. China has a very robust space capability. So let's be clear, there's no, like, foolproof way. And as much as we did make fun of, like, the hyperbolic rhetoric about things like TikTok

last week, like, it is also true. Like, there's an app on most, you know, phones in this country that technically the Chinese could make use of that data. And I think ByteDance or maybe the other parent company used TikTok locations. data to spy on journalists who are reporting on TikTok. Yeah. And a lot of these Republicans type being out there, furious historical tweets are doing it on an iPhone that was manufactured.

I'm not saying that you're, you know, I'm just saying that like there's kind of an absurdity to think we can protect ourselves entirely from this. But, you know, I think this attention has been bad for China's ability to crank this to another level. On the meeting point, I think Tony Blinken absolutely should be meeting his Chinese counterpart. And if anything, this scale of freak out in our politics. demonstrates why it's so important that we need to be talking to China. And I hope that that trip, look, it was right to postpone the trip that Tony Blinken was going to take to China because

if he went, he would have been compelled to kind of grandstand and only talk about the balloon. We need to be talking to China about all these different things. We, we, it's dangerous to not talk to each other and just be shooting shit down in the sky. You're right. They could reciprocate and shoot something down of ours. And then our Congress is demanding, you know, reprisals. That's not good. And I think at a certain point, it'd be the right thing for the administration to point out, look, Americans want to compete with China. But there's this kind of default assumption that Americans are like nothing but jingoistic and hawkish respect to China. I'm not sure that's true.

I think it's true about things like jobs and it's true about not wanting like balloon spying on our nuclear sites. I don't think Americans want to go to war with China. No. And so I think they certainly want to reduce the risk of it. So I think the administration needs to start kind of pointing out, hey, we've been really tough on China. In fact, we've been tougher in a lot of ways on these economic issues than anybody before. But these guys over here, the right wing of the Republican Party in this country, like, it's getting a little dangerous. And we need to be talking to these guys and own the fact that you're talking to them.

Don't look at all defensive about it, you know. Yeah. And it was unnerving to. read that right after the F-22 shot down the Chinese spy balloon, Secretary Lloyd Austin, our defense secretary, tried to call his Chinese counterpart on one of those special, like, crisis lines, right, that we had during the Cold War, and the Chinese refused to answer. So, like, that can't happen. We need those kind of lines of connectivity to be open all the time no matter what. That's not good. And because there have been incidents in the South China Sea where the U.S.

conducts naval operations, right, where, you know, there was an uncomfortably close, you know, interaction with the Chinese naval vessel. Or airplanes. There was another, like a close, like some Chinese pilot got within 20 feet of some U.S. aircraft recently. 20 feet. That's like Top Gun 1 when Maverick flips the bird to the Soviet mig, right? Yeah.

Those guys would have got the, they would have found the balloons. They would have. But like, all you need is like, you know, one of those incidents, there's a collision of planes or there's some exchange of fire at sea and you can't get the people on the phone and you haven't been talking and suddenly this thing is escalating. That's not good. And so I think we really need to prioritize the reestablishment of more regular diplomatic ties. Yeah.

And let's stop using half a million dollar missiles to pop balloons everybody. A couple interesting updates out of North Korea Ben. So first, North Korea watchers increasingly believe that Kim Jong-un is planning to install his middle school-aged daughter as his successor. This is because state media keeps releasing photos of this girl. She's like 10 or 11 years old. At official events, she's surrounded by military. goons with all their like metals on their chest. She attended a missile launch. Sport kid is like

11. One such event that she attended was a military parade where North Korea displayed at least 11 intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are believed to be capable of striking the continental U.S. Less funny. Analysts believe that they're also developing and starting to show off. Solid-fueled ICBMs, they can be deployed and launched a lot faster because you don't have to fill them with fuel, though, which takes time. Not good. Lastly, Shinzo The former Japanese prime minister who was assassinated last year said in a book released posthumously that he thought Trump was weak on North Korea and too eager to make a deal with Kim Jong-un. So yes, we agree. We noticed Shenzhou Abe.

Ben, is it time to float our own spy balloon over some North Korean middle school? Get some intel on this young kid. I mean, as someone who has like an eight-year-old daughter who would not be interested in attending military parades and this. launches? No. What does this kid, like, I feel bad for her. Like, what does she think she's doing? Or maybe they've just trained her for this to be fun?

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I think Kim Jong-un was tapped actually at eight years old. Yeah. Look how well that worked out for his mental health. Yeah, I did read that bio of him. I mean, he at least got to go overseas and study. Swiss boarding school.

Swiss boarding school. I guess Dennis Rodman, though, I forgot to write down. Is he like a godfather to this kid? Well, he held her when he visited there when she was a baby. I'm not saying her name because I feel like, I don't know, I just want to leave her out of this. But yeah, yeah, it's a weird, I mean, I can't imagine sort of being tapped to lead a cult of personality at age 10. Yeah, it's very odd. But I do think, I mean, look, they are blowing through all these thresholds, right?

So like over the years it was, oh my God, are they going to acquire and test a nuclear weapon? And they did that in 2006, you know. And then it was, you know, are they going to develop the capability? to put the nuclear weapon on a missile, and they blew through that. And then it was, are they going to develop an ICBN that is capable of hitting the United States? It's just bears noting that Kim Jong-un has consistently just blown right through these stated concerns.

And yeah, they are well on track to have a capacity to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic nuclear-tipped missile. That's a problem. And this is going to be hanging around. And it's going to get wrapped up, I think, in the U.S.-China tensions too. Because it's all part of this kind of tinderbox in Northeast Asia where you have Taiwan and you have North Korea. And so, you know, this is one that there's not much to be done about it right now. But at some point, there's going to have to either be some diplomacy here with North Korea, not like Trump summits and walking across the DMZ to take pictures or whatever, but actually just trying to put some limits on.

this or else, you know, we're living in an area of much greater risk. Yeah, it's going to be unnerving. Speaking of, you know, cult of personality despots, I was happy to see that The Washington Post had a big story this past weekend about Donald Trump and Jared Kushner's very troubling financial relationships with the Saudi government. Thank you, Michael Kranish at the Post for digging into this one. The substance of the reporting probably won't come as a surprise to listeners of this show, We've been like tearing our hair out about this stuff for years.

But again, the big takeaways are Jared Kushner, terrible at business, bought a $1.8 billion building in Manhattan at the peak of the market, left him in enormous debt. So he, when he left the White House, got this $2 billion lifeline to his investment company, in quotes, from the Saudis. That investment pays Jared's company $25 million a year in management fees alone, right? So he's just like, this is a cash cow for him. It's ridiculous. The Saudi live golf tours pouring money into Trump's clubs. There's this Saudi real estate company that's going to build a Trump hotel in Oman.

And then the interesting thing about the post story, Ben, even Trump's own staff thought Jared was just sucking up to the Saudis get richer. They quote John Bolton, the former national security adviser, saying, I think it was an obvious opportunity for them to build their Rolexes. And then I think they're probably hard at work at it, particularly Jared. Why should Jared be worried about the Middle East? It's a perfectly logical inference was that had something to do with business. absolutely John I hate agreeing with you so much this is infuriating I mean and we don't do that many I told you so is in this podcast but like any listener knows that we were screaming throughout the Trump years the payoff

was going to be on the back end you know the Saudi payoff is always in the back end you do their bidding in government you get paid off on the back end in the hopes that maybe you'll get back into government or your associates will and the message will be delivered that if you do what we want I mean keep in mind this is not just about owning Jared which they already own and owning Trump who they already own. It's a message to anybody else coming into government. Hey, if you do our bidding while you're there, maybe you'll get like some massive payoff on the back end. And that's how it all works, right? I think that in addition to journalism like this, look, the Republicans are about to

put us through two years of hearings about Hunter Biden to just try to squeeze some juice out of like a deeply troubled person's life to see if he was trading his name for some foreign money. meanwhile, look at this, you know. And what I'm saying is, I don't understand if I'm the Democrats in the Senate, I'm having hearing after hearing after hearing on this. So like, yes. So here's the interesting, the good part about the story, to your exact point, is that apparently Ron Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee have been looking into this.

Yeah. So this story ran, and there was a follow up where Greg Sargent at the Post talked to Wyden. And Wyden says the Biden administration has refused to provide them document. that they need to dig in. He says the cooperation we're getting from this administration has been only a slight improvement over the last. I reached out to Wyden's office too

and basically they're saying it's like, hey, it's been well reported that when Jared was playing like Shadow Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, all these other professionals, the Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State at the time, was pissed about it. All these like actual professionals in the NSC in the State Department, Department of Defense

were upset about it. They must have sent emails. They must have had notes from meetings, right? Like, there's got to be some documentation of this concern at the time. But I guess maybe they're not turning it over because of executive privilege, although if it's coming out of agencies you should. I don't know, but I agree with you. Like, we got to figure out the answer here.

The corruption of American foreign policy is a total valid area for exploration here. And some of this is legal corruption. But that doesn't mean that sunlight wouldn't benefit the public interest here. I would be having hearings on this stuff all the time, right? And to just force a public discussion of the fact that like the family of the last Republican president and potential future president is literally just bought and paid for by the Saudis. Like this is happening right before our eyes. Because the other piece of it is another reason why people like pull their punches on this stuff is other people are on the same gravy train. They're maybe not getting paid as well as Jared.

But a lot of these commentators who write these op-eds about MBS and the reformer, who do you think is building the. the city that goes on for, you know, there's U.S. contractors, there's U.S. defense contractors. General. You just got to plow through that, right? Because to me, those people should be ashamed themselves, too. It's the same thing, all these Democrats, including some former colleagues of ours, who talk about, well, we share all these interests with NBS. Like, I don't share any interest with someone who thinks that Jared Kushner's worth

the $2 billion investment. Or butchering a Jared investment. Well, yes. I mean, that should be the real thresholds here. Yeah. Yeah. Another interesting thing that I think people are noticing is the Qataris. were involved somehow in the bailout that Kushner got from this company called Brookfield

asset management for the 666 Fifth Avenue building that nearly bankrupted his family. It turns out that Charles McGonigal, the FBI counterintelligence guy who was recently indicted for helping a Russian oligarch get out the sanctions list, got hired at Brookfield after he left the FBI. The New York Post had reported that. So a lot of people are just thinking, that's weird. It's a lot going on here. I mean, there's a thread to pull.

I mean, this is not just about politics. Like, it is a very important subject of inquiry. Like the kleptocracy out there, the corruption of kind of everything out there, like bears more scrutiny. And this would be a very good use of time for Ron Wyden and others in the Democratic Senate. Absolutely. And by the way, the Saudi sports washing is increasing. The Visit Saudi Tourism Board is now a sponsor of the women's soccer World Cup. So that is about the most cynical thing you can imagine.

And Politico reported that the Saudis basically promised the Greek prime minister that they'd pay the entire tab for the World Cup for all Greece's stadiums, etc. If Greece agreed to join the Saudi bid for the 2030 World Cup, that's their way of trying to build a coalition that could steal the thing. Today it was announced that Saudi Arabia will host the Club World Cup. So like this sports washing element is just growing every day. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about Russia and Ukraine, Ben. So Russian fighters are reportedly getting closer to capturing the city of Bakamut, which is.

in eastern Ukraine. Bakhmut has been the site of some of the most brutal fighting over the past few months, much of it fought on Russia's behalf by the Wagner mercenary group. I don't get the sense when I listen to the actual military experts that Bakhmud is some absolutely critical strategic location. But the way Russians are trying to take it, I think speaks to this broader challenge the Ukrainian military is having and will have in the future, which is Ukraine now estimates that Russia has deployed 320,000 troops.

to Ukraine. That's after all their draft and their call-up. That gives them this huge manpower advantage. And they are just throwing wave after wave of soldiers at these Ukrainian lines and they eventually can overwhelm them. The Wagner Group says they have stopped recruiting prisoners, but there's a group called Russia behind bars. It's a prison rights group in Russia. They estimate that 50,000 prisoners have been recruited in the past few months to join this mercenary force. So like that alone, like the prison-based army that Russia has at their disposal alone is just like massive. Another interesting thing I saw out there, Ukrainian military is worried that SpaceX, Elon Musk Company, might restrict their usage of its Starlink satellite-based internet service. SpaceX is mad.

They don't want Starlink used to support targeting via drone. So, like, stepping back, I think the takeaway here is just that at the end of last year, it felt like the Ukrainian military was on the march and taking territory. Now it feels like the trajectory and the momentum has been, reversed and it's worrisome for Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, I was talking to somebody in Washington who had like a phrase. It's one of these like kind of ominous national security phrases, but I actually thought in this case it was apt, which is that the Ukrainians have all the watches. Putin has all the time, which is like if you're Putin, he's clearly not at risk, like this idea that there's going to mean uprising and he's going to be ousted. That's not happening.

the Russian public has kind of you know we don't really know it's happening underneath the hood but these call-ups are happening like sure some people are leaving but like some people are going they have a manpower advantage it's a particularly dystopian one with these prisoners they're selling their oil there've been stories lately about you know all the holes in the sanctions which were inevitable too by the way it's not even really a criticism you can't blanket enforce sanctions globally when a lot of the world doesn't feel like they have a stake in this fight. And so I think the reason you see Zelensky really emphasizing the need for higher quality of weapons is he recognizes it over time, they could get worn down by a manpower advantage

and that the Russians aren't being completely starved into submission in terms of oil revenues. So it's a pretty precarious moment. We will see in the spring when offens because the weather improves, whether or not, this is kind of a stalemate like it is in Bakhmud, right, which is suggested it's almost like World War I trench warfare or whether there's an advantage that accrues to the Ukrainians because they get some tanks and some new weaponry or whether this manpower thing translates into advantage for Russia on the ground.

It's a reminder not like people were kind of calling this war before it's over though. I mean, this could go on for a long time. Yeah, it could. One weird story that I was like a little hesitant to bring up, I think I should anyway, just because it's out there, is a piece by year. journalist named Seymour Hirsch, who reported that the U.S. Navy and the CIA in an operation ordered by President Biden were the ones who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September. The North Stream pipeline went from Russia to Germany. It carried natural gas.

It was very controversial. The story relies on a single source. It seemingly didn't go through any editorial process since Hirsch posted it on his substack. The White House denied it. They said it was utterly false in complete fiction. No other news outlet has confirmed the story. So you might be asking, well, then why the hell are you bringing this up? Because Seymour Hirsch is a legend in journalism. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalists. He broke some of the biggest stories of the last century, the Miley massacre in Vietnam, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, several more. He is a towering figure. But somewhere along the way, his journalism has become a lot more suspect. He blamed a 2013 chemical weapon attack in Syria on Turkey. No one seems to

believe that is true. The U.S., the U.S., the U.N., the U.N. OBCW, no one thinks that's right. In 2015, he claimed that basically every detail of the bin Laden operation was a lie and that bin Laden was a Pakistani prisoner, that the U.S. and Pakistan worked together on a raid, that bin Laden wasn't buried at sea. He was actually shot the pieces and dumped out of a helicopter. That's not true at all. Yeah, it's totally insane. Nonsense. We were there at the time. And again, like, what these stories have in common is thin sourcing lurid details and this guy's like towering reputation makes everyone give them a second look. Did you deal with him?

Did you talk to him? I talked to him a couple of times. I didn't. I guess just like, I'm loved to hear you think about it. I think the thing that people should just know about this is like, I think one lesson from my time in government is that there usually aren't big conspiracies because once a lot of people know something,

someone talks, especially once a story is broken, usually everyone is able to confirm it. And that has not happened with any of these last three examples. Yeah. Yeah, I read this story because you flagged it. Sorry about that. And it's kind of, it's like a good spy movie.

He like actually writes in like a compelling way. But but you're like even if you are, I think with Seymourche, like a lot of the stories he broke, Abu Ghraib, Miley Masker, kind of confirm some people's worst priors about the U.S. national security establishment. And some of that is true, right? That happened. Mylai, Abu Ghraib. Other other things happen that people like are. And to your point, like, justify, like, you should be paranoid about those wars, right? They were launched under false pretenses.

Exactly. The big but here is that doesn't mean that in every instance, the U.S. is responsible for the worst possible conspiracy theory. So, like, the two things are, one, I've never seen any, like, capacity within the U.S. government to execute conspiracy theories as complicated as the ones. Because even look at Abu Ghraib, like, that was not a sophisticated operation. There were, like, people taking pictures with, like, you know, brutalized inmates and like sending home, you know, like, so he assigns a degree of competency that usually exceeds what the U.S. can do. And again, he just assumes constantly the worst.

Now, what I think is kind of interesting about this, though, is like, we still actually don't know who up North Stream. It is weird. It is weird. And so he's sort of filling a vacuum here. Yeah, he's filling a vacuum. And I would hope that actually other journalists maybe they're not chasing this one single source story, but are actually trying to look into like, well, wait a second, like, who did blow up this pipeline? Because the Russians appear to be trying to rebuild it, which kind of suggests that they didn't do it. Why would they blow up their own pipeline and then try to rebuild it? None of the explanations make sense. Nothing makes sense. So the one explanation that I guess, look, I'm not saying this to Casas Persians. The one explanation that would make

sense would be the Ukrainian doing it somehow, right, because they don't want Russian gas going to Europe. But like, I don't know that they have a submarine capacity to, yeah. It seems like, well beyond what they're able to do. It does. And the risk is so great for them. Like, they're relying on the Germans to give them tanks, but then blowing up their pipeline, that seems crazy. Yeah.

But, I mean, there probably is a good story about who actually did this and nobody's raising their hand. So hopefully someone does some more digging on this. Yeah. In the interim, this, I'm sure, will be a part of far right and far left-wing conspiracy theories, Russian propaganda, you know, whether it's true or not, it will just be pushed around. Well, there is this interesting space. Where like the far right and the far left kind of come together. Yeah, and Tucker Carlson's show is kind of like the venue for that, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think he was talking about this a couple nights ago. Yeah. Ben, two interesting stories out of Central America in the Caribbean.

First, Nicaragua released 222 political prisoners last week and then flew them all of the United States. Many of these individuals are like opposition leaders, business leaders, opposition politicians that have been jailed by Daniel Ortega for political reasons. The release, their release is a very good thing, obviously, from these individuals. A former coworker of mine's father is one of the people freed. So I'm like, thrilled to hear this. But it's also a bit of a head scratcher because Nicaragua apparently just came to the U.S. and said, like, hey, like, do you want to take these folks? Right.

It wasn't part of some like negotiation. Usually I would think Ortega would extract something for this, but I guess he didn't. And then second, there's a lot of chatter in D.C. right now about potential Cuba policy changes. some of it is the result of President Biden saying to Bob Menendez, I need to talk to you about Cuba. Yeah, that would create chatter. On a hot mic at the state of the Union. Ben, what do you make in the Nicaragua deal? And do you have hope that we're going to get back to a less stupid Cuba policy?

So, first of all, Nicaragua, you know, we've been piling up. We, the United States have been piling on the sanctions on Daniel Ortega and his wife, too, kind of co-governance the place with them. As they've moved in an increasing autocratic direction, I think it may be a lot of, a couple things. One, Ortega may want to try to kind of open up space for something of a reset with the U.S. I wouldn't expect him to kind of moderate entirely. But like this is, you know, a signal that he's sending of like, okay, can we turn the page on this kind of deterioration? Maybe he wants to get some of these sanctions off his back over time. And then the second thing is it's kind of release valve. I think these people kind of gave up their Nicaraguan citizenship and coming here.

This included, by the way, one of his, a woman to try to run against him for president. in previous election, journalists, like you said, a lot of pretty prominent people. And so for him, it's like, can I get goodwill while also maybe just getting these people out of the country? Now, that's not risk-free for him either because now they're a functioning diaspora and there's a huge Nicaraguan diaspora or so interesting in bears watching. I think if you extend back, there's a lot of room for stuff to happen. We've talked about Venezuela where you'd like to see some break in the political impasse there.

We've talked about Lula now. The left is in charge. And a lot of these countries and the U.S. has an interest in working together with them. And that brings us to Cuba. You know, one of the things that we were most focused on in the Obama opening to Cuba was there's this private sector down there. And that means like even though it's communist country and the government controls a chunk of most of the economy, they did allow space for people to own their own small businesses, shops, restaurants, taxi services, things like that. Airbnb's. Yeah, Airbnb, particularly benefit from travel too.

These people interact with the travel industry. This was actually a great way of improving the livelihoods of Cubans because it's like direct money in their pocket. It doesn't run through the government. It was beginning to employ more Cubans. Some estimates are like up to half of Cubans could be employed in this private sector. Then Trump came in and, you know, the sanctions devastated these people, the very people that Marco Rubio and them said they wanted help. I know it's a big windup. The reason I say that is now the Cubans have been opening up more space for this private sector.

And so I think that the policy change that a lot of the way. of people would like to see is, hey, can we create gaps in our sanctions? Can we begin to go back to what we were doing in the bomb years so that these people can access banking, so that they can access investment for the United States, so you want to kind of help someone get their restaurant off the ground for a lot of reasons. One, the humanitarian crisis, that should be the main reason improving laws of the Cuban people. But two, the migration crisis spurred by this. I mean, you had something like five percent of Cubans trying to leave in the last couple of years, right? And so as we've talked about, the Biden people want to slow that push to the border.

One way to do that is to pump more money into this private sector. So just livelihoods improved and people are less desperate. I'm going to throw one more out here, Tommy, which I learned recently. Oleg Deripaska, the very oligarch that we've been kind of circling around, right? He's the guy that the FBI, guess where he's hanging out some of his time now? Where? Cuba. He has a think tank, the quote, center for economic transformation.

i.e. like, do you think he's genuinely interested in helping to develop ideas? Cuba could be turned into kind of like a hub for these oligarchs to launder some money, a Western Hemisphere hub. So if you're sitting here, I don't know how many reasons the administration needs to act here. Like, there's a humanitarian reason. There's a border reason. You got the Russians in their oligarchs kind of circling this island 90 miles from Florida. We have a lot of reasons to do this. I would say to make it really have an impact in addition to some of the changes that just allow and give license for investment in the private sector, you have to remove them from the state sponsor of terrorism list because that's like a blanket sanction that a lot of people don't

to fuck around with. And keep in mind, Mike Pompeo stuck them on that list like one week left in the Trump administration. And you should authorize Americans to just be able to travel down there individually, which we did in the Obama years. That would be the game changer. That's what I'd really like to see. They have no basis for being on the terrorism list. The Trump people hung it on some Colombians in the ELN, which is an old left-wing organization from Colombia. Petro, the new president of Columbia, said he weighed the extradition request. He doesn't want those, you know,

he's not asking for those people. Nobody says they're terrorists, so there's literally no reason for them to be on this list. Purely political. Of then Bob Menendez thinks they should be on the list. So hopefully that's what Joe Biden wants to talk to Bob Menendez about. And I don't know what it is. Yeah, I don't know either.

Hopefully it's about this. Look, when have a Russian president in Cuba ever caused us any problems? I'm not sure what you're so worried about. What? Yeah. This is such, staring at us in the face, you know? Yeah, I think I read that 25% of the population in Venezuela has left the country in recent years because of the humanitarian situation.

I mean, to the migration point. Just think about this. Massive number. Common sense changes, like just going back to where we're at the end of the bomb years, we can all travel down to Cuba. People want to do that. Cubans would have more money. Their lives would be better. That would mean that there are less people coming to the border.

That would mean less Russian influence than Cuba. But this is such a fucking no-brainer. And there's no reason other than Florida politics and there's no chance to Democrats to go in Florida. And one member of the United States Senate, Bob Menendez, sending the way. Yeah. A couple more things before we get to the interview. So, Ben, just two big, quite concerning stories about press freedom that we wanted to flag. The first is that Indian tax authorities, put that in quotes, air quotes,

rated the BBC's offices in Mumbai and New Delhi on Tuesday today and sees reporters' phones. This is almost certainly not a tax issue, but Prime Minister Modi's means of revenge or retaliation against the BBC for releasing a documentary that was critical of his role in sectarian riots that killed over 1,000 people back in 2002. This is the same documentary that Free Speech absolutist Elon Musk scrubbed from Twitter in India. And then in Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered a news outlet called Voice of Democracy. It's one of the country's last independent news outlets to be shut. down because of a report that his government and his son didn't like that was based on a direct quote from a general in the government. This outlet even apologized to him, but they said that was insufficient. This is clearly just a pretext he wanted to shut it down because Cambodia has

an election coming up and surprise, surprise, opposition leaders and others keep getting tossed in jail and now this independent news outlet is getting shut down. So not good stuff here for the trajectory of press freedom globally. No. I mean, Modi, like, Talk about thin-skinned, you know, BBC documentary. But, I mean, like, it's a real issue in the U.S. is kind of soft-pedaled, you know, concerns about Modi, but it's going to get harder to do that when you see him trying to kind of take total control of the Internet and the media there. Cambodia is a weird case because, you know, it's been autocratic under Hun Sen. He's just not exactly a friendly guy.

But there was a kind of weird duality where the government was autocratic, but there was a pretty vibrant civil society and still some independent media. And so concerning to see that, I think, you know, it's. just speaks to the trends not moving the right direction and the challenge to free speech not being whether or not Elon Musk's troll buddies in the U.S. can get on Twitter, but it's whether or not, you know, Twitter censoring documentaries in India and whether people get locked up in Southeast Asia. Yeah. And by the way, like every once in a while you read something about the Tories trying to gut funding for the BBC. Like the BBC is such a gift for people that actually care about global news. Like the BBC World Service Global News podcast is daily, something like, something.

multiple times a day. Incredible reporting. They got people on the ground in like Iraq, Sri Lanka, like everywhere you want to learn about, they have got it covered. It's really like a great resource. And, you know, just to dunk on the Tories again, like one of the last vestiges of the UK having this outsized role in the world. Big soft power.

BBC is a massive extension of British like soft power and the legacy of, you know, British influence around the world. Like cutting funding for that so that you can like empower. or like Rupert Murdox tabloids and whatever is such a self-owned. It's like the Brexit of media. It really is. Qatar are like launching Al Jazeera in the 90s and it's been enormously beneficial to them. And like the Brits are doing the opposite.

Cut it out. Come on, guys. Rishi Sunnock. A couple ones that close, Ben. This is a weird story. So you remember acting defense secretary Christopher Miller? Yeah. Remember this goon at the end of the Trump administration?

He apparently has a book out because acting secretaries need book deals. Is it on the crooked imprint? We'll find out. Pre-order now. In this book, he says that Melania Trump was in the situation room during the U.S. operation to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr Abaghdadi back in 2019. Miller writes, her presence was unexpected to say the least. I wonder how it would play in the press.

If word got out, the first lady had popped in to watch a major military operation. Well, thanks to you, Christopher Miller, you now get to find out. By the way, good for that. This is like the one secret they kept. I'm just surprised Trump wanted to spend any time like they didn't seem to like each other Yeah, they didn't seem to like each other It is like look, there's really

There's no harm to this, right? Like if Michelle Obama had watched the bin Laden operation like who gives a shit It was too late to like leak it But not that she would But like apparently Melania told Trump To talk about the military dog that was involved That cornered Al Baghdaddy

They got injured in the operations He blew himself up But it's just one of the situations Where like had this been Michelle Obama Obama you know that Lindsay Graham Would be calling for her to be executed Yeah You know, it's just such a weird thing.

Well, everything about that Baghdadi operation was weird, because I don't know if people remember this, but they released a photo, member of, like, Trump in the situation room with, like, some generals, but it was clearly posed, remember? Yeah, yeah. And what was weird about that is there was, like, the iconic photo of Obama in the situation room is like, okay, we need our photo. And then there was a dog on the bin Laden raid named Cairo, actually. So remember that.

And so we made a thing about this dog because everybody likes dogs. And so they're like, oh, we need a dog. Like the Obama obsession was like weird. Apparently it was Melania's idea. Because Trump hates dogs. He's not like a dog guy. He's the only president not to have a pet. Who doesn't hate it?

Who hates dogs? It just tells you everything you need to know about him. He's just the worst person in the world. Final story for you, Ben. This is just the, I want to read you the lead of a news article. Dateline Berlin. A German newspaper critic had animal feces smeared on her face in the city of Hanover by a ballet director who apparently took offense at a review she wrote.

The Hanover State Opera has had I was apologized for the incident and said Monday it was suspending ballet director Marco Goki, Gerke, with immediate effects. So I'm just wondering if you got any bad book reviews that you need handled. I mean, I wouldn't say that the thought never crossed my mind. To smear poop. Yeah, to smear some poop on some people who wrote poop your reviews. But that's kind of like, did you see Tarr, the Cape Blanchet, a tour de force?

Should I see it? Yeah, just because Cape Blanchet is like speaking German, conducting orchestras and stuff. But there's a vibe that's kind of like that. Like she, you know, she might have done that in that movie. She's smearing poop. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good story.

That's like, that's pretty intense, you know? That's, um, a psychotic reaction to a review of the ballet. Yeah. Like, that's like a, you know, our Australia's stories are usually a lighter. That's like a. Yeah, they tend to veer towards like tripping. Like, psyched out drugs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or, like, scary spiders. Or, you know, shitting yourself in a McDonald's. Right. Different than smearing poop on a viewer's face. I wonder if it was Prime Minister Scott Morrison. I mean, ooh, it's kind of gross. Yeah, it's a lot of force. It's the Germans take art very seriously, you know.

Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I went to a German museum once when I was over there for, it was the trip we talked about on the pod once. I was in Berlin by myself for like three or four days. I spoke at some conference. And then I walked like 12 miles to the most depressing memorial sites I could find. And then I went to a museum with some really weird art.

Well, there's a life. lesson here, which is don't write any negative reviews of German bellies. Ever, ever, ever, ever. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back. You'll hear my interview with Stephen Allen, who is in Turkey leading disaster relief operations for USAID. So stick around for that. My guest today is Stephen Allen. He is USAID's disaster response lead currently working on the ground in Turkey. Stephen, thank you again for doing the show and making time for us in the midst of this just like historic disaster. Yeah, no, thanks for having.

having me, you know, glad to talk about what we're doing. It is a historic disaster. It's been, it's been very intense, but a very, I guess, gratifying that we can respond in a situation like this and actually provide the help that we can. So thanks for let me talk about it. Of course. So I know you got to Adyjanban, Turkey pretty recently. The death toll keeps changing. The latest I've seen is that, you know, somewhere over 39,000 people in Turkey and Syria are dead. Can you just sort of like tell us what it's like where you are in Turkey right now? Yeah, so we're up in Adiyama, which is one of the hard hit areas of the quake. It's a town, a couple hundred, well, I guess several hundred thousand people.

And, you know, when we got up here, the initial sort of approach, it didn't look that bad, where we were to sort of work with the government on where we're going to set up our base camp for operations, which is where I am now. and we have a compound that's been provided by local company. It's great. We set up our base camp. And to be honest with you, I was looking at it like, you know, there's not that much damage, at least in this area.

But we drove, you know, in five minutes into the town, we all kind of looked at each other and realized, no, this is the right place for us to be. And the level of destruction that we saw is, it's just my body. It's really hard to convey how, how, how, severe the destruction is. So driving down town streets, a lot of the architecture is multi-story, so six, seven floors, some even more. And just building after building, reduced to rubble, or pancake on top of itself, or leaning, you know, really like leaning into each other, like dominoes almost. And just everywhere, you know, piles and piles of destroying

concrete, rebar, people digging with whatever tools they had, some professional teams, some not, some just neighbors, people huddled outside of their former homes, hoping for news of loved ones who were inside or neighbors or friends, just a very, a very desperate situation, honestly, for people here in this town, like many others in Turkey and Syria. I know that the USAID has pledged $85 million so far for Turkey and Syria. How is that money going to get to get spent? Yeah. So, I mean, part of that will go towards this actual response.

So we do, you know, we do have to specialize in-sertrescue response. But the vast majority of it, and that's just small operation stuff, and the vast majority of it will be to support either in-kind donations. So things like blankets and shelter material, things to help people get through a very difficult time. It's very cold. here, we're up sort of near the mountains and it really is very cool. So making sure that we're able to get those things we need it. In Syria, it's going to partners we've worked with now for years, unfortunately.

It's sad to say, but we have an amazing network of NGO and UN and local partners in Syria, particularly in that area of Syria that was hardest hit because we've been funding humanitarian work there for the past 10 years. So we are providing additional funding to those partners looking at some additional partners who are specialized so that they can do the relief work they need to do and pivot from what they were doing, which is unfortunately not all that dissimilar into supporting people who are now doubly affected by the conflict and the earthquake on top. Yeah.

So, I mean, I know it's been much more difficult to get relief in aid into Syria. So the UN's emergency relief coordinator was pretty blunt about this. He said the UN has failed the people in northwest Syria. So the Treasury Department has issued a general license for Syria earthquake relief that basically says, hey, you're not going to get dinged by U.S. sanctions for any transactions in Syria for the earthquake for 180 days. Does that impact your work? Is USAID able to have any direct role in Syria or is it all through these sorts of NGOs you just mentioned? Yeah. So our role in Syria really is through partners.

I mean, we're not present in northwest Syria as U.S. aid. So it doesn't impact our staff movements directly, no. But it does impact our partners and what they can do, the UN, what they can do to a certain extent. I mean, I want to be clear here, we have worked and been very loudly advocating in Syria that humanitarian aid is not restricted by U.S. government sanctions. That's at the point of the sanctions. The sanctions are there to sanction the regime. They're there to sanction individuals who are kept the regime,

people who are committing war crimes and things like that. It's never been intended to impact humanitarian aid. Some of the knock-on effects, our partners have come to us and said, hey, we can't do our banking transactions. We can't get certain materials to Syria. We need certain systems that are falling afoul of foreign asset control. So we've been working on this for a long time. The important one about this sanction's clarification of the license is it really does come

out and say, hey, there is no, like, you cannot blame the U.S. for blocking anything. We want to be crystal clear here. We are not blocking assistance to Syria on either side of the line of control. And that goes for people affected on the government controlled side, but also people on the opposition control side. So don't come crying foul about U.S. policy here. because we do want assistance to get where it needs to go. I want to be super, super clear on that.

And that's really the intent behind that, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I was in Haiti a couple days after the 2010 earthquake. And, like, I still, like, kind of get choked up when I think about the dark team members that I met, these, like, the men and women, literally doing 24-7 search and rescue, crawling through the rubble, working with dogs. I imagine it's actually probably some of the same teams, like the Fairfax County teams, right?

like heroes, right? Like we look at the people up in dictionary, they're heroes. I know, though, that the most agonizing thing for them is when certain rescue operations transition to long-term recovery or, you know, sort of digging through rubble. What does that mean for USAID's work? And like, what does the long-term piece of the mission look like for you guys? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I'm glad you could see them in action after Haiti.

I mean, let me just sort of divert for a second because, like, I really do have to acknowledge The search and rescue crews that we have out here are unbelievable. I mean, top notch. You know, they flew straight from L.A. and from Virginia on military charter flights to get here, right? Which we tried to mobilize very quickly. But they were in the air flying for over 16 hours. They stopped with fuel, didn't get much sleep, hit the ground here in Turkey, put them on a bus, with all their stuff on a truck, came up here to Adiama.

It took us all night to get him. because the road was partially destroyed. There was traffic that cars had broken down. It took us all night to get here, about 12 hours in the bus. We get here and these guys get off the bus and they're like, we're going out and starting. So part of the team set up our base camp,

so we actually have a base of operations. And part of the team went out immediately and began searching piles with their dogs, with their specialized equipment. And when you say that when you look about their heroes, that is absolutely the case. So, you know, as we're transitioning now, I mean, the search and rescue phase, you know, will come to an end. It's inevitable.

It's a very difficult time. It's tough for the government to make that call here in Turkey. They want that hope to continue. So making that call is very tough. It's equally tough on the teams out here. You know, our message here is that, yes, The search and rescue crews will go back to Fairfax, look back to Los Angeles. But USAID is not going on.

We have work to do here in Turkey, obviously, where we are currently physically located. We are looking at the next phase, which is continuing to support people, work with the government. We've mobilized the Department of Defense here to really help us get things out and transport relief items where they need to go. We've had flights going today working with Afad, which is kind of like Turkey's, Turkey's female, to put it for an American audience. So make sure that we're supporting them, but then, you know, looking at the next phase of, unfortunately, not what I would call immediate recovery, really just a continued humanitarian response to make sure people have what they need to survive, having lost their homes.

And we're doing that very closely with the government of Turkey. We want to be sensitive to their plans and how they want to do this. this, but really keeping the victims of the earthquake front and center first and foremost. In Syria, you know, I alluded to this earlier, we've been there for 10 years, through our funding and partnerships. We've been there for 10 years. This just compounds the problems in Syria so much more. And so we have a lot of work to do in Syria.

We're under no illusions there. Then there will be a sort of quick end of crisis phase. I mean, far from, you know, the political conflict, the continuation of, frankly, you know, the blockages of aid, all that stuff was there before the earthquake. It's going to continue after the earthquake under no illusions. So, you know, we'll keep doing that in Syria. You know, I can't put a timeline on that, obviously. Yeah, of course, of course. Last question for you. A lot of people listening probably want to help out in some way. Any advice for them? Look, the first thing I would say is in a situation after a crisis, after a natural disaster, or really, really anything we're trying to respond.

The best way to do it is to donate to a reputable organization, right? Like find an organization that speaks to you with their mission set. Maybe it's a medical mission. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's one of the red cross or red-enpressant chapters. You know, find something that really speaks to you and donate to them. Those are the professionals who are getting a job done. We have resources on our website at USAID that can help people find reputable organizations.

Andrew just wrote it down for me. CIDI.org is another one that can help people kind of parse out what is a good organization. What I would say is a temptation, right, and it's so well-meaning, is to go through your pantry and go through your closet and find things that you think will be helpful. that stuff clogs up runways and clogs up relief operations. People spend more time sorting and sort of doing that. Really the best thing is to donate to these organizations and find a way to help. And, you know, that's what I'd really encourage folks to do in a special situation like this.

Got it. Yeah. Find a great organization. Donate cash. Do it fast because people desperately need it. Stephen, thank you so much for the work you're doing. Thanks for joining the show. We really appreciate it.

Hey, happy to be here. And thanks a lot. to see even Allen for joining the show and all the work USAID is doing in Turkey again you know if you want to look for ways you can donate check out the show notes from last week we can put it back in for this one I guess too and then Ben you know I just held off on um any sort of preening or peacocking about the Super Bowl until the end because I didn't want to lose any downloads you're a chief sky or listen I was just I was a I kind of wanted to see the Eagles lose yeah I didn't mind seeing the Eagles lose. I, I, uh, the, the, the, what do you think of the call? It was bad. Although the, the, the,

the back in question, I think he was a Tia corner. Yeah, he said he came out and said he grabbed the jersey, but I guess there's a question of whether, I mean, what it, what that did was probably rob us of the potential for a comeback or a more exciting ending instead of like kneeling the ball until you kick. Yeah. That's, that's right. I mean, that, I think that, that's the main thing, right. It was a hell of a game. It was a good game. I mean. Really like one of the best games. one of the best Super Bowls I've ever seen. I mean, like, I'm a tiny bit older than you, but, like, there was that run for, like, I know, 15 years where the Super Bowl just, like, sucked.

It was, like, always, like, a blowout. Yeah, it was always, like, the bills getting... Yeah, those get hammered. ...ill goal. Now, like, these are some pretty good games, you know? Yeah, there were a couple... There were some great ones. There's some great, like, Patriots comebacks.

There was the Eli Manning helmet catch game. Well, you guys had... Your great wins were the Seahawks won, which was amazing, where, like, bizarrely, they threw the ball from the one-yard line. even though they had Marshall Lynch. Malcolm Butler with the pick. And then there was Falcons come back. At 23.

And then there were the Giants losses, which were great games. But yeah, there's been so good Super Bowl. Great Super Bowl. I'm now going to be in a real kind of destitute sports. See, I'm an NBA fan. So this is actually like I love this time of year because it's NBA leading into baseball too. Like this is my prime time coming up here. I got to get back.

You're Celtics. The Celtics are good. Solics are nasty. Jason Tatum's awesome. I don't know. I guess I never played basketball. So it's like harder for me to get pumped. but I will.

Didn't you guys start on the Ringer Podcast Network? Yes, of course. But here, you're right. We should pretend a little. Yeah, yeah. The guy wrote a basketball book. I think it also just helps me

that there's 17 games in the NFL versus... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Whatever. Well, you know, you should pick it up. All right.

I'm on it. Well, talk to you guys next week. See ya. Potsave the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seguin, Charlotte Landis, and Vesilius Futopoulos are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, D.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week and check out the Pots Save the World YouTube account. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.