Pod Save the World - Biden’s Olympic Boycott

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Tommy and Ben cover the US diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, Biden's call with Putin and rising tensions in Ukraine, Myanmar's ousted leader being unjustifiably sentenced to prison time, Justin Bieber's shady concert for the Saudis, El Salvador's crypto game, UK Parliament's cocaine problem, and a "Mambo No. 5" performance amid Poland's deadly migrant crisis. Then Ben talks with New Yorker reporter Ian Urbina about Libya's secret migrant prisons and his time detained in one.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 Pottafe of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I wish we both were Shiv Roy, Roman Roy, Kendall Roy. Although the New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong plays Kendall Roy kind of bum me out because they made him seem a little type A and a little like his character. Yeah, yeah.

Well, maybe it's method acting to the extreme. But I mean, Shiv and Roman are the only two people that could go to that venue in Tuscany and have such a miserable time. That's a really good point. I hope you all are watching us a session because it's one of the most fun hours of my life every week. It kind of reminds me when we're in the dark depths of the pandemic and the MJ doc would come on for like a couple hours a week. And it just sort of it took me away for a little while. Speaking of taking our listeners away to a better place for a while, today we are going to talk about the Olympics, how democracies are fighting back against authoritarianism.

The latest on concerns that Russia could invade Ukraine, the latest from Myanmar. some points on the board for justice. Explain what that means. Gambling on Bitcoin in El Salvador. Cocaine in Parliament. It's not like a good time over there. Boris Johnson looking at you. It's a new segment.

I sketch this one out of it. We're calling This Week in Global Dysopia. We'll explain more about that later. And then, Ben, you did our interview this week. Can you tell the good people what they're going to hear? Yeah, I talked to Ian Urbina, who's a journalist that has a huge piece in the New Yorker recently about migrant prisons that have been set up in Libya for refugees trying to make it into Europe, subsidized by the EU.

Yeah, big time. And just horrific conditions. But the story is crazy. Like, he went to report the story. Then he himself and his team were arrested. For like six days, right? His ribs got broken. So it's a wild story of reporting a story

that is really important, doesn't enough attention. So it's worth checking out. Yeah, really, really good reporting by Ian Urbina worth reading the story. I'm excited to hear the end. interview. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of dystopia on the show today. Yeah, but I mean, some of it is like cocaine in parliament. And so it's like a more upbeat dystopia too.

Yes, but that is more upbeat. Speaking of upbeat ideas, Ben, if you're still looking for last minute holiday gifts, we have all kinds of holiday merch if you go to crooked.com slash store. The copy is trying to make me say, you can buy our, my ho-ho home is melting ornament, but I won't do that. I've got the OG merch on. You do have a pot say in front of the pod shirt. the pod, you know. They're kind of sure they could get you like a resistance wink back in 2018. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you were in the joke.

Okay, let's start with the Olympics because there's some developments here. We talked a bit about this on POTS of America on Monday, but on Monday Biden finally announced that America is going to stage a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. That means U.S. athletes will get to compete in the games, but no official U.S. delegation will attend. Historically, those delegations have included luminaries like the president, the vice president, Ben Rhodes, Reggie Love. Yes, I was the Summer Olympics 2012 closing ceremony delegation.

Oh, that's a sweet gig. George W. Bush attended the 2008 games in China in Beijing. So, you know, the diplomatic boycott, it's to protest China's human rights record, specifically the genocide against the weaker Muslim minority group in Xinjiang province in Western China. Ben, I asked Senator Chris Murphy about this decision yesterday on Ponce of America. He said he supported the move, but basically was like, yeah, it's not even close to enough to actually get them to deal with the problem, stop this genocide. He also, Murphy, supports Marco Rubio's proposal to ban all imports from Xinjiang province. The idea there is to prevent goods made with slave labor

from entering the U.S. How do you think this decision, this boycott of the Olympic Games, fits in with that broader effort to put pressure on China when it comes to human rights? Is it a big piece, small piece? Like, how are you thinking about it? I think it matters in terms of the psychological shift that is taking place out there. So this means, look, because it's a marginal step. We're not boycotting the whole Olympics, but it does mean that this will be part of the story of the Olympics. And frankly, the Chinese and whatever reaction they do will contribute to that story. And then all the coverage is likely to note, you know, that there are these concerns, that there's this boycott, assuming other countries join. And it will spotlight Chinese human

rights abuses, particularly with the Uyghurs. And so I think that that's a positive development. I also think that if you combine it with what we saw out of the WTA, where you actually had a sports league saying, you know what, we're not going to do events there. We're willing to take a financial hit rather than be associated with this kind of stuff. You know, it feels like something is changing out there, that fear factor that the Chinese government depends upon and the kind of illusion that everything is normal, that people may criticize us, but look, then they come to our Olympics. Well, now some people won't be going to their Olympics, right? Or, that no sports league or entertainment conglomerate or corporation will take a financial hit for values. Well, that's beginning to change the WTA. So it's not enough, I think, to change their behavior, but it is enough to maybe begin to change the behavior of the rest of us. And that's what it's going to take in the long run to make a difference. I've been reading Evan Osnows' book about his time in China as a reporter. He talks about how in 2008 there were all these protests and boycotts around the game.

games, the Olympic torch ceremony that takes it from Athens to the destination of the games. And the response within China was really nationalistic. It was a bunch of, you know, I think Chinese citizens rallied around feeling like they shouldn't be told what to do by the international media, that they're being unfairly singled out. I just thought that was sort of an interesting, you know, sort of interesting to know that could be the outcome here. It really mattered to them back in my book after the fall available for holiday giving. Damn right. I was. I talked about their way to Olympics and how central that was to their kind of proclamation that they'd emerge in the world stage. And they spent hundreds of millions of dollars and they changed the weather.

And they had the opening ceremony where it looked like somebody walked on air to light the torch and all this stuff. It was really cool. It was cool. But it was a flex on the world stage. And by the way, fascinating accident of history, it happened the same month of Lehman Brothers collapsed. Oh, wow. Yeah. So if you want to pick the moment when America started, it's, uh, it's, It's decline, and China kind of began to go up the escalator. It was kind of right there. But here's what's different. It is the case that there are some boycotts and there were some protests around Tibet and other issues back in 2008.

But when George W. Bush shows up smiling at the opening ceremony and everybody's there kind of paying tribute to this emergence of shine on the world stage, which is what happened. It undercut that more than I think it will be this time around because you won't have Joe Biden or even Tony Blinken. anybody there to kind of legitimize the political aspect of the Olympics. So again, it's not, yeah, I don't want to overstate it. But I think it is a sign of there being much greater concern today than there wasn't 08. And just quickly to conclude, me, you alluded to this. China threatened to take, quote, firm countermeasures. I don't think anyone knows what that means. I just wouldn't want to be an American diver with like a Chinese judge on my last die. That's a very good point. You can see it ranging from like China boycotting a U.S.

and citing America's history of systemic racism, which would be cynical. It would be trolling, but also they have a fair point, right? Or you could see it being something way over the top. I don't know. Do you have any guess of sort of how proportionate this might be? They're usually proportionate. So what they would usually do is cancel, boycott some number of U.S. hosted events. Beyond that, I'm not sure what they can do, right?

I mean, in the Olympics context, are they going to, like, ban American athletes from competing? That would look weak. That would look kind of bizarre and weak and would basically destroy their own Olympics. Yeah, that's a good point. So I think it's probably going to mean the proportional zone, but we'll see. So staying in this sort of fighting authoritarianism theme here, President Biden is hosting a virtual summit for democracy this week, later this week, I believe. I think 100 Democratic governments are coming together. They're going to share best practices, coordinate their efforts to push back.

on authoritarianism across the planet. One of the announcements that leaked out in advance of that event was a U.S. plan to work with allies to prevent the export of surveillance tools and technologies that are used to suppress human rights. This kind of technology that we're referencing here is used all across China. And the Wall Street Journal, a lot of outlets have reported on how U.S. companies like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, a whole bunch of others, have helped China develop its surveillance infrastructure in some instances like from the very beginning.

Ben, some of the reactions I saw to this announcement were basically like train is left to station guys. You know, like too late here. What's the point? Why even do this? I don't know. My gut is that that response misses the point that things could get worse. And then when you're talking about like spyware, AI, supercomputing, like those technologies advance quickly. China's surveillance state today is way more intrusive than it was a decade ago.

But like, what do you think it would take to make this kind of effort actually? work and have an impact, knowing, like, the technology that's sitting in places like China already. Well, look, and I think, first of all, it's good that there's a summit of democracies. There was kind of a summit of the nationalist right-wing creeps in Europe, like, in the run-up to this thing, which almost shows you the value of having a summit of democracies. If they need to counter-program it, then, you know, did Tucker Carlson speak? Or did he skip this one? Yeah, you sent a proxy, I guess.

Orban was his proxy. Great, great. But the, look, the good thing about this summit is if the agenda is focused on issues like corruption, There's going to be a big corruption focus in this. And yeah, like you're not going to put the genie back in the bottle with surveillance technologies. But I think the utility of summits like this or groupings of countries like this on issues like this is we're going to have to think through for the foreseeable future how we deal with this.

You know, we're in a position where China and others are beginning to export Israel, as we've talked about, right? Yeah. beginning to export tools of surveillance to foreign governments or in some case, private sector, like, how are we going to do with that? What are the protections we can put in place? How can we try to restrict the dissemination of this technology? When it is spread, how can we respond to that to protect civil society? So they may not solve all these issues with this announcement or at this summit, but I think that the idea that democracies need to start talking to each other in a very

systematic way about how they're dealing with corruption, how they're dealing with surveillance, how they're dealing with disinformation, all these aspects of the dystopian authoritarian playbook that are now kind of a part of the world and it's wiring, I think that's a positive development. I think some of the challenges with the summit, like the invite list, like Pakistan's on there, right? Like it feels too colored by other U.S. foreign policy priorities. You know, like, oh, like we need Pakistan's help on something, so we'll let them into the democracies club, you know, or, you know, the rhetoric is much tougher on Cuba and

Belarus than it is on Saudi Arabia or U.S. partners. And I think that's part of the challenge here is that to get, you know, to truly deal with the problems of the surveillance technologies. You have to look at not just China. You have to look at everybody who's doing that. You know, we've been very hard on the NSO group in Israel. for exporting spyware on this show and reading more about it

made me realize that we really need to clean up our own house here in the US too. Because from drone technology to cameras to software. Yeah, we sell weapons. So we should not be exporting. So yeah, this is not picking on Israel.

We should not be selling billions of dollars worth of arms to Egypt, one of the most dictatorial regimes on the planet, right? So to me, like the right agenda, the right impulse and good that they're doing this, I think that it's the intersection with U.S. foreign policy that gets complicated at times. Yeah, and I think like maybe as we are recording right now or a little later today,

there's going to be a vote in Congress on whether to sell a billion plus dollars or the missiles to the Saudis. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to cover the outcome this week. But, yeah, I mean, those are the kinds of things we need to be watching. All right, let's do an update on Ukraine. So President Biden called Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to tell him directly that invading Ukraine would lead to severe economic consequences. Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, briefed reporters after the call and said that the

White House does not believe that Putin has yet made a decision about whether or not to invade Ukraine, but if he does go forward with an invasion of some sort that Biden is prepared to do more in response than the U.S. did in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. For weeks, Ukrainian officials have been sounding the alarm about a buildup of Russian troops at their border. There's estimates of up to 115,000 of them. There's specialized equipment nearby that you wouldn't normally need for military exercise like military ambulances to evacuate the dead. So these are kind of things that are sounding alarm with people. There's still not the full scope of logistical equipment that you might see for a full-scale invasion.

So the reports are, look, people are nervous for a reason. Back in November, Biden sent CIA director Bill Burns to Moscow to send a similar message to warn Putin against an invasion. Ukraine wants the U.S. to give it more weapons. Hockish members of Congress also want the U.S. to sell the U.S. them more weapons. It's worth noting, Ben, that the U.S. hasn't had a permanent ambassador to Ukraine for more than two years because Trump had Rudy Giuliani fire Marie Yovanovitch and his like compromise on Biden plot in Hunter Biden and whatever that idiocy, remember impeachment a billion years ago. So again, like we talked about this a bunch of times now, weird topic

because these stakes are enormous. People are deadly concerned. This could be a real war. But we're kind of just waiting to see what happens. And like, I don't know what else to say about it to listeners. I mean, again, they keep going out of their way. The Biden administration to kind of warn us about this. And that suggests that the concern is very real and legitimate. You know, the one thing that is difficult here is that, you know, Putin doesn't seem that deterred by sanctions, you know, and we talk about doing more than 24. Of course, you can do more than 2014, because all those sanctions are still in place. So you do more sanctions on top of that. And I just Sometimes you wonder whether you need a paradigm shift as you're thinking about Putin and even how you think about sanctions.

There are sanctions about trying to impose this big economic cost on Russia, which is what they've generally been about in the past and which even things like Nordstrom too would do. Or can you really go after like the network of people that Putin depends upon? You know, would you rather have much more successful enforcement at drawing up the kind of core corrupt resource base of this kind of. oligarchic cabal that he sits at the top of versus just kind of throwing stuff at Russia at large because he seems to have learned to live with economic hardship in Russia, which doesn't impact what he needs to fund an invasion or the corruption of a few billion dollars in floating around Ukraine, you know? And so that that's always what kind of worries me when you hear the old toolkit.

It's arms of the Ukrainians and sanctions on Russia. I just don't know that that speaks to the kind of, you know, asymmetric moment we're in where Russia doesn't seem to be that influenced by those types of tools. Yeah, I think over time countries figure out how to evade sanctions. I was reading something the other day about how Belarus used to export cigarettes and then they got sanctions. So now they send them to Russia who repackaged them as Russian cigarettes and they sell them for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all these ways around it. Some State Department officials said today that they think that Germany will stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

if Russia invades Ukraine, that's the pipeline that goes from Russia directly to Germany that bring natural gas. My response to that was, I hope so. Yeah. That's not happening. Then we got bigger problems. Yeah, we got bigger problems. I mean, because you're literally talking about like a full-scale invasion of the country. Yeah, there's like a real war.

I mean, in 2008, NATO promised membership to Ukraine and Georgia that has not happened yet. I don't know if people are still pushing for that kind of NATO expansion. That seems like a big step. Look, you know, there was a steady enlargement of NATO, and then the three Baltic countries were brought in NATO after being Soviet republics, and that's great. I love the Baltic countries. But then these membership action plans are offered to Ukraine and Georgia by the Bush administration, kind of on the way out the door almost, knowing that they weren't close to being able to join NATO and knowing that, you know, this was going to be. incredibly provocative to Russia. And it doesn't justify things. And so don't add me. It's just a fact that Russia has subsequently invaded both Georgia and Ukraine and occupied and claimed parts of the

territory of both those countries. And the question is, if for Article 5 to mean something, the common defense commitment of NATO, would Americans go to war right now to defend Georgia and Ukraine? And if that's, the answer to that is not an unequivocal, yes. then this conversation is kind of pointless. Yeah. And some people have said like, you don't want to be seen to be making some concession to Putin. Okay, we're taking this up table.

But can you, do you want to try to draw him into some conversation about European security, etc? I don't think Putin wants to have that discussion. I don't think he cares. But I do think there are ways to kind of channel these tensions somewhere else than just this NATO question. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's, again, trying to get to a new paradigm. Like, that might be a good way to go. Let's talk about Myanmar because Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader of Myanmar, who's ousted in a coup in February of this year, was just convicted on two charges in a sham trial Monday and given a four-year sentence. She also faces a range of additional charges. They range from, like, improperly importing walkie-talkies to violating state secrets laws.

They found guilty on all of them. She could face 100 years in prison. Again, none of this is on the level. The goal of these quote-unquote trials is to prevent Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy Party from taking power after they fairly won the 2020 election. Ben, you know, she has a long and complicated career. She spent 15 years under house arrests, got out, worked with the military on a really, you know, important transition to democracy, ran for election, ran for reelection, disappointed a lot of followers by defending genocidal attacks by the Burmese military. on the Rohingya Muslim minority. Now,

on Sonsu Kyi is once again a political prisoner. I mean, there have been these huge protests. There have been acts of civil disobedience since the coup. Security forces have killed well over 1,000 people, some 1,300 plus. The trajectory for Myanmar and their democracy has been going south for a while. What do you think this sentencing means in terms of like inflection points on that broader struggle for, you know, the future of the country? Well, I mean, I think it kind of, you know,

calcifies where we are, which is she's now returned to being, ironically, the political prisoner that she was in the past and this kind of symbol of a lost democracy. I do think it's important, you know, to, she's the democratically elected leader of the country, you know, I mean, twice in two elections. Her party won overwhelmingly because of her. And look, she disappointed people, but you, and that's very important, and we've delved into that on this show. you also see the difference between what what things were like under her and where they are now you know i mean this is the most brutal form of military rule what stands out to me is a couple things the resistance including the arms resistance has been more resilient than people expected you've had defections

from the military uh you've had protesters kind of take up arms and go into the some of the ethnic border regions of Myanmar, where you've had ethnic insurgencies fighting the government for decades. So they know what they're doing. And suddenly now they're joined by all these Burmese and including some military defectors. And so you have the recipe for like an actual sustained kind of civil war failed state type circumstance, right, which obviously brings with the tragic human consequences and migration of people probably. But it also speaks to the fact that the Burmese people are not just accepting this result. Like if the government thought, the military government,

that they could just proclaim power and arrest her again and would go back to like it was before 2011, that's not happening because people got a taste of that freedom and they're fighting for it. There's also been decent diplomatic behavior in the region.

ASEAN, the group of Southeast Asian countries that they belong to, has refused to have the general Menang Long who runs the junta kind of brought in as a member in good states, So there's some signs that like this is not as open and shut a coup as the military would like it to be. And that's what we need to grab onto and we need to find whatever ways we can to support those, you know, who are pushing back against the military.

Yeah, it could be coup plus insurgency and, you know, recipe for a long conflict here. Okay, that's a very depressing story. Here's a hopeful one, some points on the board for justice. On Tuesday, France detained a Saudi man that France officials say has been accused of playing a role in the murder. of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. This guy's name is Khaled Al-O-Taibe. I was detained as he planned to fly from Paris to Saudi Arabia. His creep was one of the 15-member kill team

that allegedly traveled to Turkey for the murder of Khashoggi. The Saudi government is suggesting to press that this might be a case of mistaken identity. Reuters reported that extradition proceedings to send this guy to Turkey have started. So good news there. I assume it's the right guy.

I believe that they got the right guy, and I hope they prosecute the shit out of them. you know, one down, what, 14 to go, maybe more? Yeah, I mean, you want to send a message that, you know, you will be held accountable if you engage in this kind of activity. And look, there's been a lot of disappointment around Mohammed bin Salman's capacity to kind of crawl back into international standing, including meeting with President Macron, the president of France, which was kind of conspicuously, you know, around this time.

But it still matters because. Look, you want to protect journalists going forward to. And the degree of outcry around Khashoggi and all those who continue to insist on justice and then actions like this by the French authorities, which are very welcome, that should get in the head of whatever next group of people is considering killing a journalist like this. Right. I mean, so you have to keep the pressure up and the noise and the attention on this and ideally have justice for the people involved in order to prevent further attacks in addition to

accountability. You would hope that that would, how can you really prosecute the case, you know, when the mastermind and the guy who gave the order is like the future king, but you know, you take the wins you can get. Yeah, future king. And by the way, Ben, Bieber let us down. Justin Bieber. I was really pissed about this, you know.

Formed at Mohammed bin Salman's big party around the Saudi Arabia green pre-formul and run race. Did the world need that that badly? Don't stream your heroes, man. Why is the world a better place because Justin Bieber played at the F1 party in Saudi Arabia? And by play, we mean probably lip synced. Yeah, exactly. But it's not like, like, what good? I mean, even for the Bieber fans out there, the music is available for streaming, right?

Like, you don't need to go to perform like a gaudy F1 party. It's a really disappointing thing for him to have done. You just didn't care. You just didn't care. You didn't see our Snapchat, I guess. Yeah, you didn't get on, yeah, check out the Snapchat show. He didn't subscribe on that. He was a focus.

Asshole. Okay, let's talk about day trading. So, Ben, I loved all the stories from earlier this year about people on Reddit buying GameStop, AMC, all the fun meme stocks, sticking it to hedge funds that were shorting those stocks and making money, right? It was great. But the truth is that Wall Street almost always has an advantage over slubs like us who are, you know, on our little Vanguard account or whatever, and every trade has a winner and a loser.

In other words, it's fun, but it's risky, right? This is gambling. So that is why I worried when I saw Naib Buckele, the 40-year-old president of El Salvador, tweeting about how he just bought the dip. Now, Buckele isn't talking about buying stocks. He's not talking about that dip. He's talking about buying Bitcoin. And in this case, the people footing the bill are Salvadorian taxpayer.

He's doing this with Treasury funds. So Buckele's Buy the Dip tweet also included that. that like stupid fucking party hat emoji with like the little blower thing. And then he calls himself the CEO of El Salvador and his bio. So just like a lot of red flags here. A lot of things telling you this guy sucks. And he like live tweeted. I think he like he missed a dip by seven minutes.

And he was like, fuck, miss a dip by seven minutes. And it's like, you know, if you wanted to know what would happen if like the most aggressive crypto bro in your life. Like the person who's like constantly sending you. like obscure crypto podcast to listen to and, you know, Joe Rogan clips. Yeah, and Joe Rogan Clips and is is creating like NFTs out of like pictures of sports memorabilia from the 80s or something. Like what would happen if that person just got a country? Your friend who says things like Martin Shrelli has some good points.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You should really check this out. I've done some extra reading, right? Now that guy basically has like a country. Yeah, he's got like cash reserves and tax, you revenue and and he's just channeling into buying the fucking dip and it could go back up and then you guess what it'll go back down if he's his coin base what is he what's he do i just like this is like how is this not a bigger story like yeah because actually it's the intersection of a lot of things it's like authoritarianism crypto like institutions don't matter anymore like like douchebags douchebags he kind of is a kendall roy president he's kind of a kendalloy yeah he is He is. He is. He's probably got that person who he's like asking to monitor Twitter.

You know, like, what are the tweets saying after? I got some BoJack guys to write me to buy the dip tweet. Hey, you know, after I did my buy the dip tweet, you know, did anybody like did Elon Musk, you know, retweet me? Elon hit it with an RT. Here's the context, just so folks know. Back in September, El Salvador became the first country in the world that accept Bitcoin as legal tender. They also accept U.S. dollars. Bukaley says accepting Bitcoin helps modernize the country. It'll give people without bank accounts, access to financial services. critics point out that this could help smugglers, money launderers, and the quote-unquote currency, Bitcoin is incredibly volatile. He also proposed creating a Bitcoin city funded by billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin-backed bonds. Buckely wants the city to be circular and to have a central plaza designed to look like a Bitcoin

symbol from the air. And he says it will be... Was he on edibles when you came up with this idea? Well, it gets better. He says it will be powered by geothermal energy from a nearby volks. volcano, Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin transactions use up a ton of energy. So, Ben, a lot to digest here. Are you visiting or moving to Bitcoin City?

You know, like, you see those shows about, like, some lost city from a thousand years ago they find in the... Atlantis or something, yeah. Like, a thousand years to know, like, they're going to find the Bitcoin City. They're going to wonder, what was this a little detour? They barely built this thing. I don't know. I mean, like, I know there's, like, some crypto people out there who be in New York. at this discussion.

Crypto is clearly going to be around. There may be some benefits to crypto. Certainly it's everybody's like, you know, if you want to trade and that that makes sense. I just think that like hitching an entire country to it, you know, feels a little premature at this point. Yeah. I mean, the more I learn about cryptocurrency, the more I hear about actually interesting

potential applications. So like if you're an artist, you can code in interesting ownership rights. to your art, you can code an interesting payment structure so that if you paint something and you sell it, you can sell it again and again, you can get secondary sales in perpetuity. That's cool. That's interesting. That's great. But I think like no currency should fluctuate 10%, 20% a day at times. And I also think like the crypto community embracing Bucaly of all people shows that they need to think a little harder about that. He's not the guy you want as your frontman. Yeah. Like this is a guy's an authoritarian who can't provide basic services to his citizens. So they have one of the highest murder rates in the

world. He seems to think you can get power by like plugging your Apple charger into a volcano somehow, right? I mean, like, don't try to sell us on a literal volcano-fueled tech utopia city. Let's just like start a little smaller. Yeah, yeah. That's all on that. There's some people in El Salvador need pensions, you know. Yeah, about that. Yeah. How about running water, running, running, yeah, running water or electricity 24 hours a day. That'd be useful for a lot of people. Here's an interesting story. Britain's Sunday Times reported that nearly a dozen sites inside the palace of Westminster, which includes the House of Commons and the House of Lords, tested positive for traces of cocaine.

That includes 11 of 12 bathrooms, including the ones closest to Boris Johnson's office and the Home Secretary's office. Drug residue is also found near rooms used by the Labor Party, some fancy dining room in the House of Lords and some pub. Apparently there's a bunch of pubs throughout this building. I don't know. I think I've been there once for that Obama speech. Yeah, and I think they showed us one of the pubs. Oh, really? Yeah.

But here's my question. What prompted them to just test the whole parliament for cocaine? I don't get that either. It was just like, oh, I got an idea. Like, let's just test the U.S. Capitol complex for traces of cocaine. Careful if you do that. I mean, what do you think these guys were doing? It's like, you know, you step off like a robust prime minister's questions and you just rip a few lines.

Because it does make you realize if you watch Primester's questions and all those guys in the back, just like, literally my notes say, question time, why it's so rowdy? Exactly. That's what I was wondering. That's like, I didn't even know that. And I mean, because there is a little too much like testosterone sometimes. Yeah, there is. My money's on the House of Lords doing the most.

It's just those guys. Yeah. Cocaine. Yeah. It's, I mean, so I guess in the UK cocaine possession can get you seven years in prison. That seems like a lot. Dealers and producers. in face life. That's a lot. Again, this all came out as Boris Johnson was announcing an effort

to crack down on crime. So that's awkward. Cocaine is apparently the second most commonly used drug after cannabis in the UK. Boris Johnson himself has admitted to past drug use. I'm fine with all of that. I guess none of this really surprised me. What I hope doesn't come of it is the UK deciding to throw people in jail for life for drug use because we tried that here and it's not good. Yeah. Don't go that. You know, the House of Lord. can see to it that that doesn't happen. Yes, hopefully they will. Do you see that Boris is also getting beaten up because of reports that he held a staff party

at number 10 downing in December of last year when the rest of the country was in lockdown? It doesn't sound like a good idea. Packed crowd, no masks, speeches, drinking. No word on whether cocaine was served. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, 12 bathrooms is a lot of bathrooms. I mean, because that's not like one person going to each bathroom to, you know, get a bump. Yeah, and I think it was like bathrooms. I think it was like a restaurant, the pub.

I don't know. What's going on over there? What if it's just a bunch of false positives in this whole thing is bullshit? It could be. We'll find out. Last segment for Ben's interview that we're calling it This Week in Global Dysopia. Here is a clip. Okay.

That was Lou Bega singing Mambo number five at a Polish Air Force base. in honor of Polish border guards. The concert was hosted by Poland's Ministry of Defense and state TV broadcaster. Remember that these Polish troops were recently dispatched to their border with Belarus, where they brutalized migrants attempting to cross over the border

into the European Union. So they threw them a fucking Lou Bega concert with Mambo number five. But is a Lou Bega concert with Mambo number five really a reward? I mean, can we have... Maybe in 1999 it was. Can we have that kind of existential?

What's next? Like the Macarena is going to come over there? I mean, these guys are about 20 years out of date. Yeah. What has Lou been doing all these years, too, that that's the only gig he can get? Did you know that Lou Baker was actually born in Germany? And he visited Miami. I guess he reportedly found inspiration there for Mamba No. 5 is One Hit Wonder.

It debuted in 1999. Shout out Y2K. I guess he's released like six albums. I've never heard of the rest of them. And that Mamba No. 5 was actually a remake of an instrument. instrumental piece from 1949. You've learned a lot on this. I mean,

I wikied him. Is he, I mean, is he maybe like the David Hasselhoff of Poland? Oh, do we know if he's like a big there? I mean, look,

it's grotesque, right? It is grotesque, right? It is grotes. This kind of inhuman behavior at the border with Mamba number five. We should just note this. And there's like a, these Eastern European, like,

you know, fascist-adjacent governments have this weird trolling aspect. Like, this is clearly meant, Less to, like, entertain those troops in the room and more to, like, troll people that were upset about what happened, you know? Like, that's what's kind of – they're just trying to own the libs somewhere. That's a really good point because you can throw the concert without, like, broadcasting it globally. Yeah, I mean –

Very, very easy. She'd be like, oh, you're going to get Lou in here. Lou, you're up. Yeah. But if there is an authoritarian dystopia, that would probably be one of the performances. We got the soundtrack. It's like jock jams, 2000. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that was a weird error in music. Yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff. I mean, you went from kind of like really cool, grungy rock and kind of, I don't know, in my opinion, some of the best hip-hop ever to just absolute garbage. There were two good errors around it. And then there was this period of time when it was like Lou Bega and the Macarena and like Sugar Ray. You know, like that, I mean, I think Sugar Ray is a little bit better up, I'll be honest. But, yeah, like a win for the Polish law. Justice Party? I'm not, I'm not sure. They may have owned themselves in trying to own the rest of us.

I think they own themselves. Yeah, I think having Lou Bega play for a bunch of guys who are fresh off, like, shooting water cannons at freezing human beings in a forest is deeply fucked up. And hopefully, a lot of people understand that. Yeah. Okay, well, that's- There are attendees at the summit of democracies. Oh, fuck, are they really? Yeah, yeah. Look, being president's really hard. It's hard. It's complicated. You have a lot of flawed partners, including these guys. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll have Ben's interview with Ian Urbina about his New Yorker piece about migrant detention systems in Libya that are truly harrowing. So stick around for that. Okay. I'm very pleased to be joined by Ian Urbina, who is a reporter at large for The New Yorker. And he is here to discuss his new article, The Secret of Prisons that keep migrants out of Europe. Ian, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. So I want to just start by asking if you could describe the prison that is at the center of your. story. What is it? Who is there? What are the conditions like? Because I think it's important in driving home the humanitarian stakes in play here. So the prison at the center of the story is called Al-Mabani. In Arabic, that means the buildings. It's a pretty recently built or reconstructed depot, you know, and it's in Tripoli, Libya. It's managed and policed by a militia. in Libya and its purpose is to house migrants that are largely caught on the water, trying to make it to Europe and return to shore by the Libyan Coast Guard.

And then they're detained in one of these 12 to 15 prisons. And Al-Mabani is the biggest and the most notorious. And what's the scale of people that you guys can determine might pass through there? Well, on typical days, you're probably looking at 1,000 to 2,000 people in Alibani. There has been a huge uptick in the migrants there because in October, a bunch of militias went to the main migrant slum in Tripoli called Gargarech and rounded up nearly everyone there, you know, about 6,000, people. And the vast majority of those people ended up being taken to Mabani. And the overcrowding was so severe. You know, bad things began to happen.

And ultimately, the guards opened fire on the migrants ostensibly to prevent them from escaping and several were killed. And what about the other, like, day-to-day conditions that you detail here? I mean, it sounds almost like borderline concentration camp conditions. The conditions are pretty awful. I mean, so bad. Look, there have been six to, you know, half dozen to a dozen deep reports over the last five years from Amnesty International Human Rights, the UN, you know, detailing extortion, rape, murder, torture in these facilities. The hygienic conditions are awful. The overcrowding is severe. That was really, bad before COVID with TB and other issues got even worse with COVID, you know, severe malnutrition because what food does make it in tends to be non-dietary, so not vegetables, no fruit. And the migrants themselves, aside from the violence they face, there's a pattern of sale of the

migrants for forced labor, that labor is typically women being sold into prostitution of some sort or more often men being sold for agricultural work or construction work or even sometimes for military-related work, for militias, stacking arms or doing things in conflict zones. So all this adds up to the reason why the UN, you know, said that crimes against humanity were occurring in these facilities. And where did most of the migrants come from who end up in these facilities? You know, the migration waves started, there's always been migration, but the uptick began 2010, 2015. You saw a climax of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to the tune of half a million migrants.

The early waves of migrants, many of them were coming from the Middle East, from conflict zones in the Middle East. later waves, i.e. more recent to now, are sub-Saharan and West African migrants. And those migrants are, to a large degree, fleeing poverty, climate crisis, and also conflict. So I'm just curious, before we get into some of the policy ramifications of this and the role of Europe and other Western powers, how did this get your attention? I mean, because there's a story, an amazing story of how you report. of this that we can get to. But just what grabbed your attention about this particular story? You know, so I left the New York Times after 17 years and opened or created a non-profit journalism

organization kind of in a pro-publica model. It's called the Outlaw Ocean Project based on a book I wrote, and it focuses on human rights and environmental abuses at sea. And one of the, probably the biggest story I didn't do in the book was the Mediterranean crisis, you know, is if you're going to do lawlessness at sea, the notion of, you know, tens of thousands of people crossing the Mediterranean, seems like a pretty important story. But I couldn't figure out a way to do it. I then went. So I put out the book and then, you know, I figured I wanted to do something. And so I went and did a piece for the Atlantic, uh, where I got on one of these quarantine ships, which are huge cruise ships that the Italian government uses to house about 10,000 migrants to prevent them from getting on shore. And the stories I heard from those migrants were, mind-boggling, you know, about what happened to them when they launched from Libya. So at that point, I decided, yeah, I really got to get to Libya if I'm going to tell the story. So I went there with that goal. So in terms of why this is happening and how it interacts with, you know,

governments beyond the absence of one in Libya, what is the role of the EU and European countries in either, you know, directly subsidizing these kinds of camps or at least tacitly kind of encouraging the type of immigration policies that can lead to these kinds of abuses. I mean, forgive me to go, if I go metaphoric and meta, you know, but I think the way to, at least I think, to think about this is you have a war on migration, an EU-led war on migration. I'm not saying the EU is at war with migrants, but they are battling the challenge of migration. And it is like a war. And in that war, the EU has sort of three, if you will, metaphorically military forces, an Air Force, a Navy and an Army.

The Air Force is Frontex. Frontex is the border agency for the EU. And Frontex puts the planes and the drones over the Mediterranean. And their job is to 24-7 monitor the Mediterranean and spot and report. the locational specifics of any migrant vessels trying to cross. Those details get reported to Italy and Greece and that gets handed to the Libyans. That's the Air Force. The Navy is the Libyan Coast Guard.

The Libyan Coast Guard, you know, most Coast Guards face away from the nation's coastline to protect the nation from foreign threats, external threats. Libyan Coast Guard is a different creature. It faces inward. It's funded and created and equipped and trained by the EU with the main purpose of stopping migrants from reaching Europe. And it's Libyan manned, but, uh, and those boats face toward Libya. And they're trying to block migrants reaching, you know, international waters and getting scooped up by doctors without borders and these sorts. That's the Navy, if you will.

And the army to push this metaphor is what happens on land, those folks. And that's the gulag that is the detention system. And, and that, you know, that too is heavily, heavily funded by the EU. So, The EU is really driving an agenda that serves itself and largely funding the three different parts of this overall campaign. I guess part of what's striking is even with, you know, a relatively strict migration policy, you know, there's a more traditional or conventional model of refugee camps that have to meet certain international standards and have access for certain international bodies. And usually there's a heavy role for international international.

NGOs to play there. I mean, how is it that this infrastructure is so unrecognizable? It's not as, and I don't want to say that the traditional one is great, you know, the conditions in these refugee camps could be far better. But this is such an extreme version. I mean, how do you think that this kind of model got constructed? Well, the first question is why is it so distinct? And I think the answer to that is because Libya is a failed state. So Libya, in many ways, is a country. or a state in name only. And if you actually look at it, you've got two different governments in the north that don't recognize each other and don't get along and they split the north. And then the south is an all-out war zone.

And so most of the country, even the UN recognized government, is run by lots of competing militias. So you've got this insanely chaotic void that is barely held together. It's not unlike Somali in some ways. but it's even worse. That creates the precondition for what you're wondering. How is this detention system so much worse? Well, because it's not run by a government that is accountable and electable. And that's the major reason. And so what should the EU be doing differently? I mean, your main function here is to spotlight this, obviously not to make policy recommendations, but when you walked away from this,

because the quotes that were emailed to you by the, you know, kind of EU spokespeople basically acknowledge the problem, but don't really suggest much other than rhetoric about what to do about it. I mean, did you come away from this thinking about how things should be done differently? It did. I mean, again, as a journalist, as you point out, you're meant to be a conduit, but you size. up what stuff travels through you and so you choose the sources that you think are more trustworthy.

You know, the sources that I think are sharp and convincing put forward two ideas. One is that the notion of outsourcing one of the most difficult problems that even the U.S. faces on the Mexican border and doesn't do well by. And the notion of outsourcing these problems by Western wealthy governments to failed states or challenged states, Libya and Mexico, is a patently bad idea. So what entities shouldn't be doing, be it the EU or the U.S. is outsourcing this duty to countries that are not equipped to do it in a way that's ethical or legal. What they, in EU's case, specifically what I hear from folks that seem, know what they're talking about is those three entities I described, the Air Force, the Navy and the Army, you know, if the EU wanted to pressure Libya to clean up its act when it comes to treatment within detention facilities, the way to do that is to squeeze the Libyan Coast Guard and to squeeze it through financial means by saying, look, we're not going to give you the boats anymore and fix the boats. and the training and all that stuff, unless you can show that you've cleaned up conditions in the detention centers.

That would be what I'm told is an achievable tactic and one where there's actual leverage that you could exert and might get some outcomes. What these folks also say is the notion of the EU pulling out of the detention centers entirely and pulling back their revenue from those is probably not a great idea in the sense that what dollars do go into those detention centers are often to NGOs that are trying to do harm reduction, you know, the UN human rights agency and others. So just pulling their funding from the detention centers wouldn't make things better for the detainees. But squeezing the Libyan Coast Guard and the Libyan government to clean up their act and making it conditional

on revenue might actually work. And so you had this incredibly harrowing experience of you and your reporting team being detained for a period of days, who do you think arrested you? I mean, as you said, it's kind of a failed state. There's not like a very central governing authority. When you were taken and being held, like who did you think was holding you? Well, we know it was something called the Libyan Intelligence Service, if only because they told us, and we also signed papers on their letterhead, you know, when we, you know, signed our written confessions in there.

The Libyan intelligence services and arm of the UN recognized federal government, it like everything else, has a militia behind it. It's a militia called Al-Nawesi. There are two main militias and branches of this kind of secret police work in Libya, in Tripoli. And this is one branch that does counterterrorism, counter-espionage work. And in their view, we were not just journalists. We were also spies. And we were there by reporting on the migrant issue, really with the agenda of destabilizing and besmirching the Libyan government.

And so that was why they ultimately grabbed us up. And what did you, I mean, did you have doubts about whether you were going to get out? I mean, it sounded like, you know, really harrowing scenes of, you know, guns being waived and threats being made and, you know, forced confession. is being sought. I mean, did you have confidence you were going to get out of that situation? No, not in the slightest. I mean, it was a Sunday night at 8 p.m.

I was at the hotel. I had a team of three others. They went out with armed security to dinner. I was staying back because I had worked to do on the phone with my wife, knock on the hotel door, a dozen men from what I could glance, come barging in, gun to head, put me on the floor. hood me, beat me, break a couple ribs, do kidney damage and really work me over pretty good, then drag me out barefoot through the hotel lobby, still hooded, put me in a car,

take me to a secret prison. The three other reporters get hit in the middle of an intersection by a very well-orchestrated strike. The driver, arm driver, their car gets pulled out, pistol whipped. The three of them get taken again, blindfolded, and they also end up at the secret prison. And we were held there in two of us in isolation cells, and then two were put together in a prison cell for seven days, six days, I think it was, and hands down the scariest thing I've ever been through. And I thought that there was a good chance I wouldn't, that we wouldn't make it out. alive. I mean, you're on a, you know, you've been a reporter for a long time. You're, you're with a

pretty substantial team. You know, you clearly are, you know, engaged in reporting on selling this international news. I mean, do you think that that, this is, you know, a governing entity that receives money from the European Union, as we've discussed, like, do you think that there's a brazenness to the risks that reporters, like, is that a scene that is a signal of a world, that is more hostile to journalism itself, because it did feel like that was obviously a pretty extreme length for what is essentially a part of a government that receives international assistance to go to. I don't know. I don't have a meta sense of what it might indicate about the mood toward journalism writ large. I do think it might not be representative. It might more be indicative

of just how distinctly chaotic and unaccountable and dangerous Libya is. I think it's just more of that. Yeah. Well, look, it's an extraordinary story, your own story, and obviously the reporting you do and the story you tell. So thanks for doing that. And I think people need to, you know, at the end of the day, I hope when people read these stories, they also recognize that,

these are, you know, politicians are responding to public sentiment that is anti-immigrant, but that this is what it can lead to. So I think it's really important that you're shining a light on this, and thanks for joining us to shine a little more light to that. Thank you. Thanks again to Lou Bega. Thanks again to Ian Urbina for joining the show. Any of the things we need to give thanks to? Kendall Roy, I mean, it's late enough. Turn off the podcast if you haven't seen Succession yet. Yeah, watch it. But do you think he's dead? I mean, where do you stand on that question?

Is that a question? It's a question. Remember, he's like face down in the pool at the end and you see like... Oh, oh, no, I don't. I don't. I think he's just kind of laying there. Yeah. I mean, he's in bad.

He's definitely in a dark place. He's definitely in a bad way, yeah. That's a cool shot. It's a cool shot. Through this sort of like see-through float. The Logan dinner is one of the best scenes in the history succession. When Logan has dinner with Kendall, eviscerates him, makes his child taste his food.

because he thinks it's poison. And then I think it ends with fuck off kiddo, something like that. I love that actor. Brian Cox. Also, reading the long Jeremy Strong profile made me think,

sort of ironically think that Logan is maybe the coolest one of all of them. No question. Just like an interesting old British Shakespearean actor who like turns it on, turns it off as a normal human being.

And he's the one who's essential. Like you could actually remove any other character and the show would still work. It can't work. Yeah, he is, he is fascinating. I wonder, well, if the show goes on, what they do about him. You got to keep that guy around. Keep him around.

Keep him around. All right. Well, we will talk some more succession next week. And thanks for listening. Yeah, see you guys. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Mute.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes. as videos each week.