Pod Save the World - Chaos at the Pentagon

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Tommy and Ben discuss the latest scandal engulfing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and why even his defenders say the Pentagon is in chaos, a report about the FBI Director’s jet-setting lifestyle, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mindless reorganization of the State Department. They also talk about Pope Francis’ moral leadership on global affairs, how China is winning the trade war and concern that the impact of Trump’s tariffs might be irreversible, why US airstrikes on the Houthi rebels have failed to deter them, a new political crisis for Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu, the latest from Gaza, and why Swedes are Netflix and chilling to the Moose Migration.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.

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description. After you purchase, they ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Enhance your every day with Vaya. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. How's it going? Do you look good? You look good. You're not coming to D.C. this weekend. I'm not. I've been to eight white house correspondence dinners at which there were not at least that many fascists. So I'm glad you're going on my behalf, Tommy. The dress code this year is brown shirt. I know I'm not going to the dinner. I'm just going to see. Okay, okay. Good for you. Yeah, I have the same feeling you do of too many fascists, but also I think I just walk into

that room and just feel massive anxiety about running into people and forgetting their names. Well, even by the eighth year, I mean, I was pretty over it. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, picture like 1,000 people in like a gigantic windowless room with the least attractive, the kind of hotel furniture. You're at like a round table with, you know, half the people you don't know. And a bunch of journalists looking for celebrities. And it's just not. Every conversation, there's never eye contact. at someone looking 15 degrees to your right or left

for someone more important. That was kind of my experience in D.C. Yeah. The only good one was the night before we killed Bin Laden where all of us had to go so that they didn't notice that none of the national security people were there. Yeah, that's totally why I went to.

I was right into that thing. I just decided to go anyway. I remember walking around and every now and then I'd see one of the people who knew what was coming tomorrow and we kind of make an iconic attack and it was like a little head nod. Yeah, I could have used to steer

because I got fucking wasted until 5 a.m. Sorry about that. And it was just a mess when I got to the office the next day. Almost wore a Celtics jersey into the office when you called me. Did not compromise the operation, though. No, you did not. Not like Pete Hexon.

Unlike Pete Hexon. Our top story today. Great, segue. Thank you. So we're going to talk about the latest scandal engulfing Pete Hex-F, the Secretary of Defense, and just the general chaos of the Pentagon. It's pretty shocking, actually. We'll get into Marco Rubio's plan, in air quotes, to reorganize the State Department.

Pope Francis's life and legacy in what comes next, the latest on our idiotic self-defeating trade war. How things are going against the Houthis in Yemen. President Trump challenged us to check in with them, so we're going to do that. And a new scandal engulfing Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, the latest from Gaza. And then our interview today was a late scratch, as they say in the sports world. We're not going to name names. Yeah. But you're listening and you know who you are.

You know who you did. It's not good. It's like Lucy with the football. It's not, it's hurtful. Yeah. I'm excited to talk to this individual. But maybe, just maybe they'll come back on in the future. Should we start with Pistol Beat?

That's our pistol Pete, yeah. Okay. So the Pentagon is in complete and total chaos right now. And I feel like it's just not really getting the attention it deserves. So we just want to kind of hammer this home for folks. This latest mess comes via the New York Times, which reported that Pete Hexeth, the Secretary of Defense, was part of a second signal group chat where he shared what was clearly classified operational details about an upcoming military strike on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The Pentagon still says that it wasn't classified. They're just clearly lying about this, Ben. Listeners probably remember Signalgate 1.0 when Mike Waltz, Trump's national security advisor, created this Signal Group chat group to discuss bombing the Houthis. In this new Signalgate 2.0, Hegsseth shared basically the same information about the operation against the Houthis. On the same day as Signalgate 1.0, like he shared information like what time the F-15s or the F-18s are going to bomb their targets, It's like very specific details about the military plan. But this time, Hegsth shared that information with a new group that included his brother,

his wife, and his personal lawyer for some reason. The lawyer part really confuses me. So Signalgate 1.0. Maybe a good thing that that guy was ready on the front end. That's true. He made some work to you. You'll be doing some pro bono work on the back end. So Signalgate 1.0.

Remember, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic got looped in on that one. But in that case, Hexseth clearly screwed up. up by sharing classified information on a commercially available app called Signal, which you're not allowed to share classified information on. But he was on a chain that was created by Mike Waltz with individuals who have a need to know about that kind of information, right? They were actually debating whether or not to take this strike, kind of. They're sort of debating it.

But with Signalgate 2.0, Heggsath created this group himself. He did it on his personal phone and was sharing classified information with people who have absolutely no need to know about it. Like his wife doesn't need to know what time were bombing. the, you know, whatever, Hodea port in Yemen. So this is a huge security breach since Hegseth's personal phone is not at all secure. It is likely the target of all kinds of espionage efforts by foreign actors. It's also a completely improper dissemination of classified information. We learned from NBC News Bend that the information Hegseth was sending around

was basically copied and pasted from messages sent to him on a secure system by the head of sentcom. So this wasn't like, there's just no debate. for whether this was classified. So we'll get into this staffing chaos in a second. But this, I read this Ben and I thought, this definitely supports Ben's theory that this guy was just showing off. Yeah.

Yes. So first of all, let's start there, the temperament, what this tells us about the nature of the person who's Secretary of Defense. It's one thing to show off to J.D. Vance and Mike Walts and people that would need to know about the... Are in the PDB.

They're cleared. But there's no reason to show. share this information with your wife and your buddy and your lawyer other than to show off. Like, hey, look, here's when the F-18s are taking off. And that is a window into a person that has some serious problems, essentially. You know, like you do not want the person who's in charge of the strongest military in the history of the world to like to show off to his buddies or his wife when bombs are going to drop on people in another country. Just imagine what that could be like in a real crisis or, you know, God forbid, some war the Trump starts, you know.

So we're getting a window into Pete Hegseth's kind of personal demeanor. We know he's erratic. We know from reporting that he's had drinking problems, you know, yeah. And all this paints a picture of someone who's just fundamentally not fit for that job in a kind of dangerous and scary way. Then there's a question of just the security of this. And I just kind of want to reiterate for people. I mean, I had in my house, my wife used to call it the command center. I had a secure communication set in my house. There was this kind of giant cabinet with these phones and encryption wires and made all these weird noises. But I had to get on that phone just to talk to anybody about anything that was classified.

These are available to Pete Hexon. Pete Hexon has a plane that can fly after a nuclear strike on the United States. So that's my point. No one is better equipped in the world to communicate in a social. secure fashion. That's exactly my point is that this guy clearly has secure comms in his home. He has secure comms in his car. So this is just a guy what wants the capability to just jump on his personal phone, which is almost certainly been targeted and quite possibly been compromised, given what we know about the Chinese access into J.D. Vance's phone and Trump's phone during the transition.

I mean, you could buy off the shelf Israeli spyware like Pegasus and get it to people's phones. Of course the Chinese are doing this. So that that's alarming. And look, as things ratchet up with the Chinese, you know, maybe if they did have access to that, maybe they would pass something to the Houthis. It would be a huge escalation. We'll get to that. But we'll get to that. Then the last thing I want to say is, Tommy, it reminded me of the McChrystal event. And so for, you know, younger Worldos, Stan McChrystal was the lead commander of U.S. forces, of international forces in Afghanistan. While we were in office, there was a Rolling Stone article that came out in which he was. hanging out with the reporter, drinking with his team, and kind of just trashing everybody in the administration, particularly like Joe Biden and Richard Holbrook, who was at the State Department. And Obama ended up firing McChrystal over this. Now, the reason why he fired him, I'll never forget, remember our buddy Doug Lute? Doug Lute saying to me, look, we liked General McChrystal.

But he said, look, in the Army, if a private talked about a captain this way, they'd be disciplined, they'd be fired, and on up the chain. The point is, what message is this sending about things like operational security? This actually matters. Like, the reason the military is so vigilant about having kind of uniform codes for these types of things is that if, you know, the leadership is playing by a different set of rules, it sends a message down the chain to command to all the mini-year-old. to all the mini Pete Heggsess who might be in the military, like, well, I'll send signal messages about what I'm doing, you know. And so this could filter out through, you know, not everybody in the force. And I'm not going to impugn everybody.

And most people know better. But, you know, this is not the example you want to set. No. Yeah, exactly. Hegset's message is rules for thee, but not for me. Yeah. It's kind of the takeaway there. But it actually gets worse, Ben.

So Hegset has just been purging his own staff. Last Friday, three top Pentagon officials were fired. The official explanation for these firings was that they were associated with a leak investigation that we'll get into a second. But the guys fired were Dan Caldwell, a senior advisor to Heggseth, Colin Carroll, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Defense Secretary, and Darren Selnick, who was Hegset's Deputy Chief of Staff. So the leak investigation that apparently precipitated all of this was started by Hegseth's chief of staff, Joe Casper, who Politico says is also leaving the job in the coming days for some other kind of nebulous Pentagon position. So the leak investigation itself, according to Politico, involved reports about, quote, military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Elon Musk's controversial visit to the Pentagon and pausing the collection of intelligence to Ukraine. The Elon Musk piece of that was when he was apparently going to get briefed on the military plan to go to war with China. Yeah, take a minute on the Panama Canal.

I know. I don't really remember that story. Yeah, there were no military plans to the Panama Canal when we were there. So a little worrisome that they're drawing those up. Yeah, that's a weird one to have in your playbook. So after all this came out, Ben, then on Sunday night, Hegsa's former spokesman, like the guy he had tried to hire to be the assistant secretary for public affairs, he wrote this bizarre, but also very damning politico op-ed, where he talked about being a huge Trump fan, a huge Hegseth fan, but also said that the Pentagon was in chaos and that Trump deserved

better leadership. When Monday, NPR reported that the administration was shopping around for a new secretary of defense, But the White House in Trump himself quickly shut that down. Here's a quick clip of Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, commenting on this. This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change that you are trying to implement. Do you think the entire Pentagon appreciated being described as working against President Trump? I bet that went over really well.

Yeah, there's so much that's crazy about this. I mean, first is these were his guys, as you pointed out. These were not deep state guys. these were people that were brought in by one of these guys worked for Heg Seth for like a decade AstroTurf organizations so this guy is so erratic that even

people that have worked with him for years that he hired are like I'm out after a few weeks you know I mean it sounds like they were pushed out they were like frog marched out yeah when people went to their office and they were escorted out by securities

but so it sounds like Pete is so paranoid that he's firing his own buddies of like a decade I mean who could have foreseen that someone who has a had a drinking problem and is a weekend Fox and Friends host and has jumped on stage

at events and chanted kill Muslims turns out to be not the best personality you know but then also for the White House just being standing there

and attacking the entire Pentagon as full of people that should be fired these are people that are currently serving in harm's way these are people

that have served in uniform for decades like this is an insane their own appointees picking you know their own appointees so

that's not a great sign either. And let's be clear, the Pentagon is this massive organization in that front office where he's just had a kind of purge is the connective tissue between the Secretary of Defense and the uniform military, the combatant commands like Central Command in the Middle East, to acquisitions and these massive purchases of military systems, managing a trillion dollar budget, managing health care for millions of people. Like that front office, if that's in chaos, then the whole building can't function. Then the whole building is in chaos. You can't get decisions made.

And so this is not good. Yeah, because like the Pentagon is not full of a bunch of people who will just kind of, you know, make their best judgment and make decisions without orders. They are waiting for orders. By definition, there are people that follow orders. If it's not flowing down from the secretary to his chief of staff to everybody else. And, you know, so Trump got Pete Higgs at's back. I mean, of course, we know in Trump world that, like, you're in until he decides you're out. clearly though, Hegseth feels like he's fighting for his life.

Like he went to battle with a C-SPAN camera next to the Easter Bunny and his kids at the Easter Egg role on Monday. And then Hegseth went on Fox News Tuesday morning to defend himself. Ben, that interview didn't start out great. Catch the little slip up here. Here to set the record straight himself, the current secretary of state, Pete Hakeseth. Former secretary, current. So he got wrong, the current or the former part. You know why? He may be one of the people on the list.

He might be accident. Because I think Steve Ducey, Brian Kilmead, I mean, if Trump is shopping for New Secretary, he's going to be shopping on Fox and Friends. They're pushing them out, yeah. They may upgrade from a weekend host to a weekday host, too. Honestly, that's a pretty big upgrade. So a tough start to the interview for Brian Kilmead. But here's the gist of Pete Higgseth's defense of himself.

I look at war plans every single day. What was shared over a signal then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordination for media coordination and other things. That's what I've said from the beginning. We take the classification of information very important. It's very significant to us that we safeguard it. And so when we had leaks, which we have had here, we did a serious leak investigation. And through that leak investigation, unfortunately, we found some folks that we believe

were not holding to the protocols that we hold dear here at the Defense Department. When you dismiss people who you believe are leaking classified information, and again, the investigation is ongoing and that will take time. And when the evidence produced it will go to DOJ. Why would it surprise anybody, Brian, if those very same people keep leaking to the very same reporters, whatever information they think they can have to try to sabotage the agenda of the president or the secretary? So once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker. So one, it's weird that a former Fox weekend anchor kind of talks like the cat in the hat. Yeah. What are we doing here?

Tech second, he's screwing his friends over there directly. He's being like, these guys are leakers. They're still leakers. They're leaking again. And to your point about kind of the culture rotting from the head down, every single U.S. service member who saw that Atlantic report and saw what he put in those signal chats, knows that information is classified. And then they're watching their boss go on TV and lie about it.

And basically say there's a different set of rules for him because under classification protocols, he should be gone too. He should be court-martial. And look, the fish rots from the head. I mean, not to sound, you know, not to put on my MSNBC hat here. But, you know, when the President of the United States takes classified information down to the John at Marlago, like it said the message, you know. I do want to just come back to hearing that interview. this guy looks like Christian Bale from American Psycho, and he sounds completely unhinged.

And again, almost every Republican, not everyone, almost every Republican senator voted for this. So they own this, right? These people who say that they take American security seriously and the military seriously. I want you to consider that person you just heard in a scenario where in the middle of the night, our time, the Chinese have launched a multifaceted invasion

of Taiwan. And he's getting on a call trying to figure out whether to send the Pacific Fleet to try to prevent the blockade and amphibious invasion of Taiwan. Is that the guy you want in the room making judgment calls about potential? I mean... How many drinks? Three? Three or more.

Best case scenarios, he might be passed out and it goes down the chain of command. That's true. I mean, because the reality is that that is, even in that, that is, even in that, of you, he's bragging that he looks at war plans every day, which, by the way, I don't think is true. Like, I don't think Secretaries of Defense sit around. He just seems like he's living a fantasy camp, you know, with his pocket squares and his war plans and signaling his buddies when the F-18 stick off. He is so overdressed. Yeah, and he's just so far over his head that it, you can't even get your mind around. Uh, try getting a reservation to Dorcia now, Paul.

Yeah. With that attitude. Um, last thing, Ben, so Tucker Carlson has, Dan Caldwell on his show. That was one of Pete's, the senior advisor guy who was one of Pete's closest friends who worked with him for Agnews. Like Fox News Revenge every now and then. Uh-huh. Yeah. So, so, so this, like Tucker as always, like the conversation, whatever Tucker talks to someone in power from the Trump administration, it's always about how they have no agency and they're just like victims of the deep state and being sabotaged by the people around or whatever. But Ben, Caldwell had an interesting theory for who is really responsible for the leaks that led to the leak investigation. I thought this might interest you. As we sit here today, Tucker,

and this could change by the time this is aired. But as we sit here today, Susan Rice, Michelle Flournoy, Eric Edelman, are still in good standing with the Department of Defense. What? That is correct. Susan Rice? Susan Rice? Like the Obama Susan Rice? Yes. Susan Rice is still on the defense policy board. Right now? As we speak, sit here today by the time this is released, that might change. But as we sit here today, she is still on the defense policy board. Now, that doesn't mean she can go in the building and get access to whatever she wants.

But it means that she works with DOD employees. She can interact with them and has the credential and the affiliation of the Department of Defense. Well, that's shocking. That is shocking, huh? Should we call Susan right now? I talked to Susan last week. She didn't say she was making emergency inspection visits to the Pentagon. Yeah, why didn't she leak us to Panama Canal's war plan?

Something is telling me that Susan Rice is unlikely. I mean, I'm sure they just, the defense policy, no offense to defense policy board, but this is not like a daily job. Getting daily intel briefs. So my guess is they just haven't gotten to that over at PPO. I just love that Susan Rice has to become the boogeyman in every one of their conspiracy. Always. And also, this guy,

like, listen, I watched this interview with this dude. I kind of felt bad for him because, like... Wait, wait, you know who else is on this board right now? Who else? We got. Colin Call. Nice. A lot of libs. Our buddy, former colleague Dana Smith, remember Dana?

You're helping them do a purge right now. I'm sorry, yeah. Well, but because these people are not going to meetings with Pete Hegg said. No. So this is all mood point. No, I watched this interview with this guy, Dan Caldwell. It does seem like... Well, this just proves that he's not like a deep stater.

He's a nut. Well, he's a nut. Well, you're like, I came away kind of feeling like, he's being targeted for leaks he probably didn't do. And that would suck because you get prosecuted. I mean, it's pretty scary. But then he goes and accuses Susan Rice and doing it. So all my sympathy went away.

I mean, there is a question. Tucker makes the whole thing about whether Caldwell opposes war with Iran and whether he and others are getting screwed by like the traditional hawks. It does seem like there is that kind of like intra-party battle happening. But I don't know if it's relevant here. It doesn't feel relevant here. This feels like a chaos emanating out from the personality. Yeah.

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by visitingoraFrames.com to get $35 off plus free shipping on their best selling Carver Matt frames. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com. promo code world. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Cash Patel, the current director of the FBI. There's a big write-up of him in the New York Times. The headline was a different kind of FBI chief jet setting Patel loves the limelite. Just a quick overview of the story. It talks about how Cash Patel keeps just like hopping on the FBI private jet to go to MMA events with Trump, which is weird and not normal and not anything a FBI director has done in the past. It talked about a Cash Patel.

They've been going to NHL games and sat next to Wayne Gretzky at one of them in the box. Wayne Gretzky is getting some weird. Wayne Gretzky just gets worse the more you learn about him. Well, he's having some like real political issues in Canada because he's a big Trump buddy. Yeah, because he's a giant maga guy.

Yeah, and he won't just say like, no, they probably shouldn't annex us. It feels like pretty simple. All your childhood heroes, man. I know, it's tough. Not that he was mine, but I mean, somebody's, you know. A guy could see where the puck was going, you know. Uh, he, Cashmattel is apparently a member of something called the Poodle Room, which is a club at the Font Blu in Las Vegas.

Uh, it says that Cashmattel took three trips on FBI planes to visit his girlfriend in Nashville, glad we're paying for that one. Um, and he talked about how he's like releasing photos of himself, like dressed in camo watching FBI training exercises and how in Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, apparently hurt himself, like grappling with some FBI jiu jitsu instructor. down to Quantico. So it's, the whole story is worth reading, but it just does get at how like Cash Mattel, the kind of MAGA FBI director, it's just, it's, it's, the role is very different these days and it should be, it makes me very unsettled. It should. I mean, one of the things that we, we have generally focused on the harms being done by the Trump administration, rightly so, and there are many harms being done. But then there's also the question is, what is the U.S. government not going to be doing, you know?

I mean, Pete Hegseth, Cash Patel, what kind of threats, what kind of issues are just going completely undressed because these people are fantasy camping their jobs? I mean, the common thread between Hegset and Patel is it's like they're just living some childhood fantasy. Cash Patel lives in Vegas. He likes to fly around and dress and camo and go to, like, can you imagine, well, I'm not even to go to the like, oh, I mean, can you imagine like, you know, Chris Ray. MMA event or anything. But the point is, what is this all about? I don't get it, man. It's not good.

Speaking of terrible cabinet selections, make a wish, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, released a plan for a total reorganization of the State Department on Tuesday. He did it in a post on substack. Rubio said, quote, I am initiating a broad reorganization of the department to address the steady growth of bureaucracy, duplication of functions, and captured by special interests that have crippled American foreign policy. suspect that Rubio releases on substack because he knows he's going to be pivoting from

cabinet secretary to a newsletter guy soon. Yeah, he's trying to build some audience. Yeah, he's got some of the key changes he proposed. Here's some of the key changes he proposed. A planned 15% reduction of staff based in the U.S. The department is going to go from 734 offices and bureaus to 602. They're going to eliminate the position of the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. According to Rubio, this position, quote, provided a fertile environment for activists to redefine human rights and democracy and to pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense, even when they were in direct conflict with the goals of the secretary, the president, and the American people. I personally was a little more worried about democracy promotion,

human rights being used as code for regime change wars, but you do you, Marco. They're going to close the Office of Global Criminal Justice, which advises on issues related to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Why waste your time on that stuff, right? They're going to close the Bureau of conflict and stabilization operation, which works on conflict prevention, crisis response, stabilization activities, and more. And they also took aim at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which he says has become a platform for left-wing activists to go after all of our favorite leaders, like Victor Orban. Never felt like that when we were there. No. I'll come back to that. No. So Rubio's announcement came after the New York Times reported over the weekend

on a draft order that envisioned far more sweeping cuts to the department. So in a sense, This is a relief. Like, the proposal that was leaked got rid of the Bureau of African Affairs, which seems insane. Yeah. But Ben, just a few thoughts, like, I had in reading this first. Like, I obviously, I agree with some of Rubio's criticism. Like, there are lots of offices with kind of unclear mandates and overlapping authorities. And, you know, I don't have enough of a handle on the State Department's current organization to know if this reorg is a good idea.

But certainly, like, a lot of people thought that it could be reformed. Second, though, it seems very dumb to me that they keep making this about cost-saving. since the State Department budgets, its annual budget is about 6% of what we spend on the military. So you're not going to find a lot of savings here. Third, the whole thing is a huge flip-flop for Marco Rubio personally, since he used to talk about projecting American values around the world. And finally, it just seems so dumb that they seem completely hell-bent on retreating from Africa as the Chinese are very openly eating our lunch there.

And especially when we know that by the end of the century, 30% of the global population is going to be living on the continent of Africa. you feel like you maybe want to invest now. But any big takeaways from this treatise from Mr. Rubio? Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to reiterate that Marco Rubio was the kind of person that built his entire political identity on supporting the promotion of democracy abroad. That Bureau, DRL, democracy rights and labor, like Cuba money went through there, Cuba democracy money. So he was either completely full shit his whole career or he's so callous and self-interested that he's abandoning all of his principles. It just bears repeating.

I think one way to look at this is, yes, the State Department was kind of right perform. This feels like not the most thought out way of doing it. It does speak to that they have this belief that I've just not ever experienced that the State Department is full of like these ideologs. It just fundamentally was not my experience. These were pretty centrist people. But also, if you connected with what they're doing broadly. So just take the democracy piece.

And look, we can all say, and we've said on this podcast, like regime change, bad, you know, democracy in service of regime change. But we do a lot of other things. So a lot of what the DRL did is kind of advocate for political prisoners, for dissidents. If we were traveling to a certain country, here are the cases to raise with those governments, the people who are in prison who want to get out of prison. And part of what they're doing that is going to be very consequential is they're cutting all USAID funding. They're now got rid of this department. We will no longer take in clearly dissidents, right? So we've been a safe haven country for people, for refugees and dissidents.

And so what happens to all those people out in the world? Who is going to be advocating for the release of political prisoners? Who is going to be taking in dissidents? You know, who is going, there's a lot of rumors in. they kind of rumor mill Tommy that their next target after universities is civil society. NGOs, including potential funding for global civil society. And so the American kind of abrupt withdrawal from being in any way supportive of global civil society, even if you think there were some excesses there, that was a fraction of,

a lot of these people don't even work on political issues. They work on environmental issues. They work on labor issues. They work on the kinds of things that people care about in countries in the world. And the United States leaving that space is going to be pretty devastating to the kind of people that we would generally be rooting for around the world. Just on your Rubio point, do you see Tom Malinowski, who once led the Human Rights Bureau, pointed out how Rubio would have lost his mind if the U.S. government, if the Obama administration had stopped releasing the annual reports about human rights violations in places like Venezuela or China. And now I think they're just getting rid of the entire function. Or, you know, things that people on the rights seem to say they care about.

like, you know, trafficking persons, you know, there's all this other work. The conflict piece, stabilization piece, the U.S. with U.S. AD is no longer funding peacekeeping missions around the world. We talk about all these places where there's a need for some international peacekeeping force. With the U.S. getting rid of this part of the State Department, getting rid of the U.S. ID, that's going to be compromised. I think an important thing to watch, though, Tommy, is this is like a one-two punch, right? This is like a substack and an org chart that they put out.

We won't really know what they're doing until the budget comes out. Right. What do they want to fund at the State Department? I'm worried about exchange programs. I think international exchange programs are cheap, and you get enormous value on them. Americans have the experience in context of being in other countries. But importantly, we've educated world leaders, business leaders from around the world in this country through exchange programs. So there are things like that that I think could still be cut.

We may still have a Bureau of African Affairs, but it's clearly going to be deprioritized by everything they've done. So, yeah, this is just a secretary of state like gloating about it. essentially weakening his own department and the United States further pulling up the drawbridge from the rest of the world. Yeah, and just, again, like the U.S. military has something like 2.8 million total employees when he's like active reserve and civilian employees. The State Department is something like 80,000 and 50,000 of those are being local citizens abroad. So it's like 14,000 trained diplomats. So again, we're carving down to the bone a pretty relatively lean agency, all things considered. And people, a lot of people left in the first Trump term, people are probably going to be

fired. A lot of people are leaving now. The point is the foreign service is being decimated. And that is going to take a long time to rebuild. And these are specialized people. These are people that can speak like six languages who understand the politics and the culture and like niche issues, like non-proliferation and trade and are just like genuine, brilliant experts in all kinds of things. And they do it because they care deeply about the country. They're not making a lot of money. We know. bunch of these people who could have been making a lot more money. So much more. Than they were in the State Department.

Yeah, I did forget, though, that big balls had gone from Doge over to the State Department. So maybe he's leading this show. He was a 19-year-old, I think. Big balls have landed, yeah. Big balls have landed. Before we move on, Ben, here's a quick clip of Make-A-Wish Rubio talking about the administration's efforts to cut a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

We need to determine very quickly now, and I'm talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable in over the next, you know, few weeks. If it is, we're in. If it's hot, then we'll have to, we have other priorities to focus on as well. We're not going to continue to fly all over the world and do meeting after meeting after meeting if no progress is being made. So if they're serious about peace, either side or both, do want to help. If it's not going to happen, then we're just going to move on.

We're going to move on to other topics that are equally, if not more important in some ways, to the United States. Who is that threat for? The Russians are like, great, move on. And the Ukrainians are like, great. Stop attacking us in like uprating Zelensky in the Oval Office. And we'll just move on to try to get the support we need from Europe without you guys. Because you're abandoning us anyway.

And does he sound like scary or intimidating? And also, let me just say, your whole fucking job is to fly around the world and have meetings. I know, you whiny bitch. We're not going to fly around the world. You wanted this job. Meeting after meeting. What's the point of being Secretary of State? I don't know.

If you don't fly around the world and have some fucking meetings. You have a plane. Guess who's having meetings? Steve Wickoff is. Well, Rubio and Wickoff are skipping the latest round of talks in London, but Wickoff is going to Moscow again. Maybe get some extra paintings, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

They don't even give Marco the paintings. What? Oh, no, he's not getting a single painting from Putin. Do they? I just, I'm being too mean. Speaking of Big Balls, the What a Day newsletter from Crooked Media has recently dug deep into all the doge lobbying. Matt Berg and the news team, they looked at how AI is being used to spot. on federal workers in collaboration with the garden.

Last week, they wrote about how internal emails from the NSC showed the administration's really trying to achieve with tariffs. So if you're not subscribed to What Today, you're missing out on all kinds of great content. Big balls, small balls, informative takes, hot takes. Sign up for the What a Day newsletter at crooked.com slash daily. And I have one plug. What do you got? Which is I try, I always forget to share events I'm doing.

But this one will interest you because it's with our buddy, Peter Hemby. Nice. So I will be on a panel, me, Peter Hamby. And I'm from UCLA, awesome person, political scientists. Really smart political scientists. We will be doing the Penn America World Voices Festival next Wednesday here in Los Angeles in Culver City, Angelinos, at the Vendie Museum. So go online.

You can get tickets at the World Voices Festival website. Where's the pregame? Hamby's house. Okay. And actually, it should probably be a postgame. It should be a pregame and a post game. post game, but I'm not going to make. Yeah, we're not going to name it, but we'll have some fun.

Okay, good. We'll have some fun. You should be there. Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. Was there a moment in your life when you didn't feel in control of your money? Yeah, this week. This week, every day of my life until I was 35. April is financial literacy month.

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you want to buy a house or pay for school or pay off a bill or retire. So we highly recommend Acorns. Sign up now and join the over 14 million all-time customers who have already saved and invested over $25 billion with Acorns. Head to Acorns.com slash world or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non-client endorsement, compensation provides incentives to positively promote Acorn's T-R-1 Compensation provided. Investing involves risk, Acorns Advisors to LLC, and SEC-registered Investment Advisor. View important disclosures at acorns.com slash world. Okay, Ben, so as everyone probably knows, Pope Francis has died at the age of 88. The cause of death was acute J.D. Vance. I'm kind of kidding. You're a stroke and a heart attack, but J.D. Vance really was one of the last

people to meet with Pope Francis, which is kind of me to Pope Francis. Francis. It also just kind of defines the cavernous gap between the two individuals in question. Yeah. So Francis went from Jorge Murillo, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires to Pope Francis in March of 2013. That was after a strong showing in New Hampshire primary and then a comfort vine in South Carolina. I'm just kidding. So the Pope really did make history. He was the first South American Pope. He was one who was not afraid to mix it up on foreign policy. Pope Francis spoke out about climate change. He called for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. He called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and he would make nightly check-in calls to the Catholic Church in Gaza during the war just

because he's a good guy. And then during the Obama administration, which I hope you will talk about in some detail, he supported the Iran nuclear deal and played a key role in negotiations between the U.S. and Cuba on normalization. So the Pope was also clearly not a fan of Donald Trump or his attacks on immigrants and refugees. And then generally speaking, Francis, I think, tried to model a more decent, humane, humble way of being attributes, which are in short supply these days. So, Ben, the conservative critics of Pope Francis say he broke too far from traditional conservative doctrine and tradition and focused too much on social justice issues. The more liberal critics say that while Francis had a more moderate, decent tone when talking about, say, LGBT people, he didn't

make major changes to the church itself to make it more inclusive. And I think both sides are kind of weirded out by this deal. The church cut with the Chinese government. to allow them to have more of a say in the selection of Catholic priests in China. But big picture, I was a pretty big fan of the guy. I mean, I'm not a Catholic. I'm not a fan of the Catholic Church as an institution. But I just have felt for a long time that we got incredibly lucky when he emerged on the world stage after Cardwell Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, the one before him, because Benedict was

not exactly warm and fuzzy. He was more of a doctrine guy. And then Francis comes along and he has this, he models his approach where he's like, taking the bus and caring for the poor and caring for the planet and preventing wars. And it was just an incredible breath of fresh air. But you had actual experience working with this guy. What would you make of him? I mean, I would say as a headline, you know, he was a moral leader in a world that lacks

moral leadership. We're living through a time with a huge deficit. And I was saying you earlier told me, like, we were growing up, you know, Nelson Mandela was still around. You had the elders. You had people like Kofi Annan. You had people like Jimmy Carter. you know, the kind of people would kind of come into conflict zones or kind of people that

deliver messages that could reach broad audiences. Pope Francis, because of his character and because of his background, he's the first pope from Latin America, Global South, an institution in which the population of Catholics are increasingly in the Global South. That was so important to those people to feel represented in that institution. And then specifically, you know, he spoke out on climate change. he put out an encyclical, which is like the pastoral message the Pope sends, making essentially kind of a spiritual moral case for fighting climate change. He constantly spoke out on behalf of refugees, including at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, where he really took on some of the political sentiment in Europe to try to welcome refugees. And he's sitting there in Italy too, right,

in Vatican City. And so it mattered there. The voice for peace in places like Gaza, where my favorite line that he had is they asked him, you call the church every day, what do you say to people there? And he says, I listen, which is another thing that is in short supply. My own experience was President Obama, we went to visit Pope Francis in 2014. He was relatively new. And I'd been in these secret talks with the Cubans. And we knew, like me and Ricardo Zuniga, our friend who was in that negotiating team with me, that, you know, when you have two parties that don't trust each other, you need a third party to kind of, you know, make the commitments to and to have kind of a validator to the deal. And we thought, well, maybe the Vatican could be good. So when we went to the Vatican,

Obama spent like an hour with Pope Francis and he raised the fact that we were in the secret negotiations with the Cuba. This is the first world leader that Obama told that we were doing this with. And he said, we will be helpful however we can be. That's cool. This relationship needs to change. I will offer the Vatican as in any way we can support you. And what was interesting, Tommy, to just show what kind of figure he was is obviously he had a lot of respect in the United States. And we knew that the validation of Pope Francis would help with Catholic populations in the U.S. The Cubans have a weird history with the Catholic Church, right? Fidel, not a fan.

But when I raised this in the negotiations with the Cubans, I'll never forget. They kind of looked at him. Papa Francisco? Papa Francisco. Oh, yeah. And it wasn't him as a leader of the Catholic Church. church. It was him as a social justice committed person from Latin America. Right. Jesuit. And so it wasn't that the Vatican was playing this role. It's at Pope Francis, the person was playing this role. He could be

trusted by both Americans and Cubans. There's not many people who could do that. And we went, after we concluded the negotiation, we went to the Vatican. We met with Cardinal Perilene, who's a number two guy there. I think he's in the running, but he's coming forth in the New Hampshire polls right now. Yeah, he's his, his last. He's, he's, he's, he's, debate wasn't really good. And we had this incredibly powerful all, you know, multi-hour meeting where we met with the Vatican officials and the Cubans did. And then we all just sit around a table and read aloud our commitments. Some of these people on the Vatican side were in tears because they'd worked in Cuba and knew the suffering of the Cuban people there. And the literal blessing of Pope Francis not only built

political support in both countries, but it kind of lent a moral weight to what we were doing. that nobody else could have supplied, you know. And where else can you, I'm not a Catholic at all. So I'm not saying this is about even the church itself. I'm saying it was about him, you know. Right. And there are not many places you can go today

where you can find that kind of moral leadership. Dolly Parton. Keanu Reeves. Optimist Prime. No, I totally agree. And also, like, we look at the essence of the man, right? I mean, it's almost cliche to talk about how we would, you know, wash the feet of the sick

or ride the bus and our just, But if you go to the Vatican, if you go to St. Peter's Basilica, it's not particularly humble. You know, like, the takeaway for me was like power, money, wealth. Like, you know, that's sort of the feeling I got. He was just the, his approach in his public persona was entirely different. When I, I remember when we were walking in to the complex for those meetings, there was this really nice Irish priest walking us in. And the previous Pope Benedict Ratzinger had, you know, he had the prod of shoes or whatever.

And he pointed to this very simple apartment. He's like, yeah, that's where Pope Francis, you know, moved in. It was literally like a door, you know. Yeah. And so he modeled humility. And the last thing I'd say, I'm not an expert in Vatican reforms. That is a tough fucking institution reform. Right.

So 12 years is not a long time to kind of turn around the ocean liner. I will say, you know, he pointed a lot of cardinals from the global south, from conflict zones. And so it'll be interesting to watch. you know, his election, I mean, as we've learned, you can work for a progressive. And if the next guy is not progressive, your reform efforts can, but if that reconstruction of the Cardinals leads to a Francis like Pope, this could, we could look back and say, hey, Pope Francis was the guy who turned this thing around. I don't know if you heard the Daily today on this.

They pointed out that, so there's 135 Cardinals eligible to vote. Francis elevated 108 of them. Oh, I didn't know. 80% of the people voting. Yeah, so they owe their jobs to France. So hopefully, you know, this is like Dorson early in Iowa. Hopefully he'll get some, you know, someone that will follow in his shoes. But it does speak to the point.

Hopefully Joe Biden's not running. It does speak to the point you're making, which is like there's only so much you can achieve during your tenure. But it could be that he set the stage for more dramatic changes by appointing all these people. For an institution that is like literally seen as the heart of the West, the, you know, justification of. empire will become a global south institution. Yeah. So, you know, the other metric he's judged by, just to be fair, is whether or not he succeeded in growing the church. It doesn't seem like he was successful there. I mean, in 2023, about 20% of Americans identified as Roman Catholic. That's down from 25% in 2008. I think Catholic membership in Latin America dropped seven or eight points

during his tenure. This is according to, I think, Politico or Axios. Interestingly, Ben, And Francis never visited Argentina during his 12 years as Pope, even though he visited like 68 countries in basically all of Argentina's neighbors. So we never went back to his home country, which rubbed a lot of people there the wrong way. It's not totally clear why it's likely that he didn't want to get pulled into Argentinian politics and be used as a prop by whichever president kind of scored the visit. Obviously, Javier Mulei. Yeah, yeah. As we've talked about openly attacked him and called him an imbecile during his campaign. So I'm not going to go see that guy.

But also, Francis was criticized by some for not doing enough to stand up to the military junta in Argentina during the 70s and early 80s. There's allegations that Francis or maybe others in the Catholic Church in Argentina either turned a blind eye to some of the worst abuses like torture or the stealing of children from people that were executed by the regime or that they collaborated. Francis was never formally accused of collaboration. There's no known evidence, but, you know, that 20, 30,000 people were, like, just disappeared during the dirty wars. So I think there's a lot of understandable, like, lingering anger and resentment in anyone who didn't stop it. Yeah. No, I mean, very complicated history for the Catholic Church and a lot of those dictatorships. One thing I'd say is it is interesting that the Christian demographics, you see this in, like, a place like Brazil, this kind of growing evangelical,

movement. You know, the Catholics have been losing some people in that direction, which those people have become the kind of Bolsonaro supporters. So that's interesting to trend to watch. The last thing I I just say is that the Catholic Church in this country is like to his right. Right. The most extreme. So maybe one of the reasons why they're having problems with membership is that they're the ones who seem to be hung up on sex and, you know, LGBT issues and abortion and stuff in a way that Francis didn't seem to be. Like our country, as usual, is not exactly moving in the right direction. No, we are swinging back the wrong way. So last thing on this, so in terms of next steps, so 15 or 20 days after the death of the Pope, the Cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel and they're

sealed off from the outside world until they pick a new Pope. In college, Ben, we called that a lock-in. There's more about, you know, 30 racks of Natty Light and anyway. So all Cardinals under 80 get to vote. Do you think they do that at the Conclave? Probably, honestly, yes. Do you think they're shotguning beers? How funny would that be if you walked in. You got a window there. So if you're under 80, you get to vote. Again, funny. There's one vote the first day, then up to four votes every day after. You need a two-thirds majority to be elected the new pope. Black smoke comes out of the chimney. That means there's no news. White smoke means we got a new pope. Apparently, they add some chemicals to the paper that

they burn the ballots, but they add some chemicals to get that white color. Then the pope will speak from St. Peter's Basilica afterwards. And if you talk about what happens during the conclave, you can get excommunicated for it, even if you use signal. So just heads up to everybody. Technically, you can pick anyone, any baptized Roman Catholic male, but it's been all cardinals who have been elected pope since 1378. So I guess, you know, I don't have a chance. But Biden does. You're right. Is there an age 80 years old? I thought you said. Well, you can vote if you're under 80. Okay, okay. But I don't know if you can get the gig. Yeah. Might be a brief. Did you see conclave? I've not, but everyone says I have to.

I will see it now. Because the end is, you know, let's just say the end is questionable whether it's in line with those results. Okay. Good twist on it. Interesting. I'll have to watch that. Potsy of the World is brought to you by fast-growing trees. Did you know fast-growing trees is the biggest online nursery in the U.S.

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Ben, is the global trade war. Folks probably are watching the stock market go up and then down and then all over the place and it's because it's a stupid, self-inflicted global trade war that has not ended. So earlier today, the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, announced that thanks to the Trump tariffs, the global growth rate this year will only be 2.8%, which is down a half point from their projection that they released in January and below historical averages. So good one there. And again, because Trump's policy is stupid, the slowdown is going to hit the U.S. economy harder than most other places. The IMF says their U.S. growth estimate is a third lower than it was in January and a full point below last year. China is going to take a hit too, but a much smaller

one proportionally than we do. So again, none of this makes sense. Two weeks ago, Trump announced this 90-day pause on what they had described as reciprocal tariffs on basically every country except China. The White House wants us to believe that they're going to be able to negotiate dozens of new trade agreements before that 90-day deadline is up so the tariffs will go back into place. You should not believe them. The Wall Street Journal, reported the Trump strategy is to get commitments from U.S. trading partners to isolate the Chinese economy in exchange for the U.S. getting rid of our own tariffs and trade barriers. But the Chinese are openly warning other countries not to play that game issuing statements like

once international trade returns to the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak, all nations will be victims. That's pretty good quote. Yeah, they've got some good writers there. I, um, look, I think that the part of this I want to focus on is, is the China one. Because look, what's so dumb about this Trump thing is they'll get a couple like news cycle things, you know, like somebody agreed to this and they'll act like they won some big win. They've already lost the trade war to China. That's my hot take here, which is that the Chinese have been preparing for this since Trump's first term. They've been methodically like remaking their own economy.

And actually some analysts are like, what are the Chinese doing? Their growth is down or they're not rescuing their own housing. market, what they were doing is methodically making themselves a hub for certain sectors and for certain trade relationships. So, for instance, they are a leader in clean energy, right? And so they produce massive amounts of solar panels, EVs. But it's not just that. They dominate all these supply chains for clean energy, whether it's kind of the rare earth materials that we're always talking about or whether it's component parts. And so if, if you're, you're Europe, if you're somebody that wants to be plugged in to the clean energy economy,

you're going to choose China over the United States. Absolutely. Over Tesla? Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Like over some fucking lunatic who's truth socialing his trade policy, you're going to go in that direction, right? And the Chinese know that. And these are U.S. allies, Europe, Japan, South Korea, that get this. And they're not going to listen to Trump talking about liquid gold of American fossil fuels. They're going to want to be plugged into the Chinese clean energy ecosystem. AI.

Where are you going to want to buy your AI from? Like, you know, the Chinese who are like selling it cheaper for uses in areas like robotics and manufacturing that developing countries want or like the Americans who could like throw a tariff on you tomorrow. We, the Canadians, I mean, and you and our talking it's going in. The Chinese are now buying, they're not buying their energy from us. They're signing LNG deals. Liquid natural class from the Canadians.

And so we could actually succeed. What Trump is succeeding in doing is not only is there the low-hanging fruit, the Chinese have invested a lot more in Africa and Southeast Asia than we have. They're already ahead of us there and what Trump's doing is pushing those countries closer to China. I'm talking about Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, the countries that we would assume would usually be on our team. Sure, they may announce some news cycle things for Trump. But I think the Chinese have this thing wired so that over time they're repositioning themselves as a center of key sectors, clean energy, artificial intelligence, obviously, and a lot of manufacturing, and they're the more predictable partner. We may do some crappy things. We may subsidize our industries in ways

that give us a competitive advantage. We may steal your intellectual property, but at least you know the deal with us. Where it was Trump, I'll tell you, I talked to some people in other countries, Tommy, and this is not a surprise, but nobody knows what these Trump people are asking for. No. And I've talked to people in multiple regions who literally are like, we don't even know what they are asking us for because they don't know. Right. The Chinese have been planning this for like a decade, and Trump, they're planning it day by day. Who do you think is going to win that trade war? And we were just getting into a point where a lot of countries were getting frustrated with unfair Chinese trading practices, dumping steel, et cetera, et cetera. But now they're all pissed at us. And to your

point, Ben, I mean, Xi Jinping has been hitting the road. He visited Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia. And all those places he was met by the president or the king or the prime minister, right? like they're excited to see him. And the Chinese are, they're squeezing U.S. businesses, like you mentioned, not just with terrorists, but with other means. So China suspended the import of poultry from these specific American farms after suddenly finding a new health concern that they hadn't had for decades. In March, they've refused to renew the registration required for U.S. companies to export

beef to China. So all of that's on hold, billions of dollars worth of commerce. They stopped buying LNG, like you mentioned. And then China's minister of agriculture had a meeting with this kind of part in Brazil to discuss whether Brazil could replace the $12.8 billion worth of soybeans at the U.S. sells the Chinese per year. So like you said, this is like a methodical targeted strategy. And meanwhile, I think U.S. consumers are just unaware of how badly this could hurt us in what weird ways. And for how long? Yeah. So Derek Thompson, a great reporter at the Atlantic.

Mr. Abundance himself pointed how rough this could be for parents. So for example, 99% of child safety seats come from China. 96% of toys for pets, 95% of cooking appliances, 93% of coloring books for kids, 88% of microwave ovens, 70 plus percent of toys intended for children under 12. It's all coming for China. So to your point,

it's easy to get bogged down in these specifics, but I do think that the media, Wall Street, political figures, no one is like adequately reckoning with or explaining to the American people that Trump may have set in, motion, a reordering of the global economy that actually may be irreversible at this point. Irreversibly to the favor of China. And, you know, again, who would you bet on?

Like, I'm not a fan of the Chinese Communist Party, not a communist, but what those guys do is they plan. Right. And they've been sitting over there with people like, and they've been undergoing this economic transformation for years to plan for this. Do you think those guys have a plan? Or do you think, Howard Lutnik, who's going on TV and yelling about one interview, we're going to be building iPhones here. And the next, we're going to have robots building iPhones, but we're going to build the factories where the robots are. And Peter Navarro went to fucking prison over the January 6th?

Like, who do you think has a better plan? Peter Navarro and Howard Lutnik? Or the planning committee over in China? And the other thing I just want to say is the Chinese have also been working for years to sanctions proof their economy. They saw what we did to Russia. They don't want that to happen to them. We are massively accelerating this decoupling of the U.S. and China.

This is going to make it much easier for them if they want to invade Taiwan. Because the reason that they couldn't think about doing that 10 years ago is if we dropped the hammer on them economically with sanctions and we brought along, you know, some European and Asian countries in those sanctions, well, you know, that could absolutely bring the Chinese economy to its knees. We are doing them the favor of essentially making it. so that we have no economic leverage over them to not invade Taiwan and guaranteeing that other countries are going to be more likely to look the other way if and when they invade Taiwan. So another thing to mark back to this moment is if you see that happen in a few years, Trump will have just made it much, much easier for that to happen.

Wonderful. In which case the Chinese will control the 80% plus of the advanced semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan. Yeah, especially after Trump. Great job, Donald Trump. You're really sticking it to the Chinese communists. while he shreds the Chips Act, which is designed to try to incentivize the production of them here. Okay, a couple more things from us, Ben.

So we noticed that... Well, our guests canceled. Our guests canceled. So we can go real long today. So we noticed that during his defense of Pete Hex-F, Trump said, why don't you ask the Houthis how Pete is doing? So we're going to do that. We're going to check in on things in Yemen. So on Thursday, the U.S. targeted a port in the Houthi-controlled province of Hodea.

This port in the Red Sea is a crucial access point for fuel and fuel import taxes for the Houthis. The Houthi-run health ministry said, that at least 80 people were killed in the attack and almost 200 were wounded. And the UN said that the port infrastructure was severely damaged and oil is now leaking into the Red Sea. On Sunday, more U.S. airstrikes hit a neighborhood in Yemen's capital, Sena, killing 12 more people and injuring 30. It's hard to get good information, Ben, about kind of the efficacy of these strikes. But on the most important metric, whether the Houthis have stopped firing shit at ships in the Red Sea, it has failed so far. And Fox News, is Jennifer Griffin reported that six,

MQ9 Reaper drones have been shot down by the Houthi since March 3rd, five of them since Trump began his strikes on March 15. So these things cost 30 million a pop. So they're shooting back at us pretty effectively. The Houthis are also launching missiles at Israel, including last week, in the reportedly building closer ties with China and Russia. So the State Department said that the Chinese company with ties to the People's Liberation Army was, quote, directly supporting Iran-backed Houthi terrorist attacks on U.S. interests by giving the Houthi's intelligence. The U.S. had previously sanctioned that same company in 2023 for reportedly giving satellite imagery to the Wagner group. So these sound like a bunch of fucking assholes.

But the Wall Street Journal also reported that last summer Yemen intercepted a shipment of Chinese-made weapons tech that could increase the range of Houthi drones and make them harder to spot. So that partnership is clearly deepening. This piece also pointed out that some Houthis have been sanctioned by the U.S. for doing arms deals with Russians, including buying $10 million with the weapons from Victor bout, the known arms dealer. And then the Russian military is also apparently advised the Houthis and provided targeting data to attack Western ships. So there's also all this talk about a potential ground operation in Yemen, where you might have some Yemeni militias trying to capture this major port city. So what we're trying to get at here is things are not better. The problem is not solved. Things are escalating. There's talk of a ground operation. So I don't know that Pete Hegsat's

report card out of Yemen from the Houthis is actually all that good. And there's layers of what's fucked up about this. I mean, first of all, they can't articulate what they're doing. I mean, Rueh, make a wish Secretary of State Mark Rubio said, you know, they're going to restore shipping or something. Well, guess who doesn't believe that? The shipping companies, right? And even if they restored for a time, the Houthis will be back. And like, this is not going to work.

They can't, this is for Trump who said he was going to end the forever words, he's repeating all the mistakes, some which were made by Obama, made by Obama, most of which were made by Bush, some which were made by Biden, of launching a military effort with no definable or achievable end state other than just bombing some stuff. And that's morally problematic. It's strategically problematic because it also ignores the reality that they're incentivizing the Chinese. If you're going to try to launch this existential trade war with the Chinese, like, what incentive do they have to not, you know, start helping these guys under the table? These morons in the White House who talk about, literally talk openly about, like, all-in podcast listeners talking about how we're going to peel the Russians away from the Chinese. The Russians are wholly

dependent on the Chinese for their economy. That's how they busted our sanctions. That's where they get their technology. That's where they get all their shit. So the Russians have no incentive to cooperate with us against the Houthis. Putin thinks he's going to be there after. Putin, Trump. And so he's going to go the same way. The opportunity for Putin is not to like peel away from China and some all-in podcast, you know, 3D Chonof move. It's to say, this is my chance to beat the West. This is my chance to beat the Americans. And this is the kind of shit that we have to watch. Because you're looking at this and you're the Russians, you're the Chinese and certainly the Houthis. And you got, you know, Pete Hegstab signaling his wife of that F-18 attacks and Peter Navarro launching

trade wars, it's like, look at them. They're on the ropes in the U.S. Like, this is, this is not the time to like capitulate these guys. This is the time to hit them. Pressure your advantage. Two more updates out of Israel before we wrap. So first, we have talked about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu trying to fire Ronan Barr, the head of the shin bat Israel's domestic intelligence service. Last night, there was this crazy report where Ronan Barr said in an affidavit that he was pressured by Netanyahu to spy on Israelis to organize protests that were critical of the Israeli government and that Netanyahu demanded that Ronan Barr be loyal to him over rulings made by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Gee, sounds familiar. Barr says things went south between he and Netanyahu after Barr started investigating Netanyahu's aides for leaking classified information and for their ties to Qatar. Also for rejecting a demand that Netanyahu reportedly made that Barr signed some sort of document that would have prevented Netanyahu's corruption trial from going ahead based on some specious security argument that I guess Netanyahu manufactured. So Ben, I read this.

Reaction was similar to Erez, which was like, I really go up and down over who is the worst leader Israel or us. You know, on any given day, it could be one or the other. I don't know. Pretty tight competition. The neck and neck. It's neck and neck. I mean, this just,

for all the people here who think he's got some grand strategy, this guy is basically just relentlessly about his own political survival. It's flailing. And he will take Israeli democracy down with him. He will obviously take the entire Palestinian people down with him. He will take regional, and he's messing around in Syria. He's messing around Lebanon. He wants to bomb Iran. Like this, it's day, Bibi Netanyahu's imperative to stay in power to avoid prison is really dangerous. I think that's, you know, this, like everything else,

reinforces. Yeah. Speaking of which, um, after a brief reprieve during the ceasefire for, what, two months, things in Gaza are just beyond awful again. So, the IDF is just back to bombing the shit out of the place. On Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry said IDF airstrikes killed 90 people in 48 hours. We are once again seeing videos on social media of Gazans burning alive after some of these strikes because all of them are now 90% of the population is displaced and they're all living in tents. And the Israeli military is now occupying and are holding about half of the Gaza Strip and saying they plan to occupy it indefinitely. And there are still some like ceasefire proposals being discussed. There's one from Qatar and Egypt that would

entail like a five to seven year truce and hostage and prison releases and then the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. But there's just no reason to believe that Netanyahu would go for any of that. Also, Ben, a couple weeks ago, we talked about this awful incident where 15 Palestinian aid workers in clearly marked emergency vehicles were gunned down by Israeli troops. Initially, the IDF claimed that they were terrorists and that the vehicles didn't have flashing lights on, that was then proven to be just complete and total bullshit when investigators found a video on the cell phone of one of the executed medics that documented the entire thing and had his final, you know, his apologies to his family and his final prayers and just horrifying stuff. So despite this like cut and dry

evidence for this being a war crime, the only accountability we've heard of is like tepid statement of regret by the IDF, and I think they fired one commander and reprimanded another. But, like, no one's getting prosecuted here. Yeah, and those guys will pop up again somewhere else. Or, you know, I mean, there's just words fail because you essentially have like a stated policy of ethnic cleansing. You know, they're going to basically depopulate Rafa, the southern Gaza, as we've talked about. They're not letting food in.

They're not letting aid in. They're bragging about it. they're pushing people onto an enclave against the, like against the water. Like, this is really horrific. One thing to watch will, you know, Trump has this trip in mid-May to the Middle East. And I'm sure that they want to revise the old Saudi normalization talks, you know, and have some announcement and they can't get Saudi normalization without a ceasefire. So to me, the only pathway back to a ceasefire and just the people in Gaza being allowed to

stay there and live their lives is some regional play, but I don't know. It just doesn't feel good right now. And God help these hostages that are still there. Yeah. I mean, they're just, the only way they're getting out is through a deal. Yeah. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just, yeah, I don't, yeah. What is this doing to get the hostages out? Nothing. You know, I mean, this is not, this is not, this is not, this is not, this is not, the indefinite political strategy. Like, there's not, like, Hamas is, could not do October 7th today. No, they're decimated. Yeah. Anyway, finally. last story, Ben. People always come to us for book and TV recommendations. So here's an off the beaten path one for everybody. The Great Nation of Sweden. They've like kind of leveled up their soothing TV game with something called the Great Moose migration, if you heard of this. It's a live stream. This fills up your alley, a live stream of Moose making their annual trek north. So this program began in spring 2019. It's grown from an audience of one million to nine million. The population of Sweden is about 10.6 million. So presumably they're getting outside the wall.

at the country here, some international viewers. But hours can pass before a moose appears. But there will be a push alert to let you know that one is on one of the 34 cameras. They've set up in the woods for this occasion. The moose even have super fans. There's a 76,000 member Facebook group where they monitor every single river crossing and whatever else moose do. The BBC, they interviewed one of these moose super fans who actually takes time off of work

to watch the live stream for the three weeks it's on. and then they quoted another super fan in The York Times who spent six hours a day moderating the Moose Facebook group. So did that person seek help but everyone else if you need a break from the world and you want to chill, watch the Moose? I was going to say, I mean, it's actually a pretty rational way

of dealing with the world that we're in now. It's just, I saw some moose recently. In Wyoming? I was in Wyoming. Those are some big guys. They are big. I would not want to run into a moose anywhere. In the world?

Other than on a live stream, you know, I mean, I walk through an elk preserve, and that's scary enough because it's like, you're looking at those guys and you're like, what if one of those guys decides to make a run at me, you know? Yeah, if they make a go out, you're done. But I'll, the moose are majestic. I'll watch. They are beautiful. They're stunning.

And, you know, they get to escape their reality unlike us. Yeah. You're stuck in this one. Okay, that's it for us for this week. Thanks everybody for listening. Talk to you soon. Ponset World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alona Mikovsky.

Our associate producer is Michael Gors. Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Ditor, and Ben Rhodes. Say hi, Ben. Hi. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanner is our audio engineer, audio support by Kyle Segglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Heffcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Molly Lobel. Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content and more, consider joining our friends of the pod subscription community at cricket.com slash friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crook

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