Pod Save the World - Fighting climate change, coronavirus, and capitalism

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss President Biden’s ambitious new climate goals, the coronavirus outbreak in India, American recognition of the Armenian genocide, Chloé Zhao’s Oscar win and censorship in China, leaked audio from the Iranian foreign minister and more. Then Ben talks to Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen about cultural depictions of the Vietnam War and the links between colonialism and capitalism.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTSaved the World. I'm Tommy Ditor. I'm Ben Roads. Ben, we have a lot of good news on the docket today. This is a feel-good kind of show for POTSave the world. Because we have, I know, we have big news out of the Biden team about climate change, some good news out of the Biden team about effort to help countries like India that are really suffering from COVID. And then we have Biden's decision to recognize the Armenian genocide and why that was such a big deal. And we're also going to talk about why China was censoring coverage of the Oscars, another big vaccine breakthrough. some interesting leaked audio out of Iran, and then, again, some rare good news out of Russia and Ukraine. And then I have a little section I just called Maga Idiots that I hope you'll enjoy. Yeah. And then an update on the Super League and, you know, some workplace heroes. So look, on balance, it feels like a weirdly positive show for us. I mean, Maga Idiots could have been the name of the show for like two years, you know. Yeah, maybe four.

Maybe four, yeah, yeah. And then you did our interview this week. What are folks going to hear? So this is like a very special interview. I talked to Vietan Wynne, who is an author. He wrote The Committed, which recently came out. It's the committed is a sequel to the Sympathizer, a novel that kind of cleaned up every award, one of the best. Pulter Prize, right? Yeah, yeah, one of the best American books of the century, really. I should say to people, too, by the way, you can read the committed even if you didn't read The Sympathizer. But it's a fascinating book, but also he's a fascinating guy. He, he's, we talk about his books, but we obviously also talk about violence against Asian Americans, the role of the writer and kind of addressing political questions, like how to have better conversations about issues of war and colonialism. These books, the committed and the sympathizer are about the Vietnam War. And from the perspective of someone who was a double agent serving the Communist Party, but also, you know, working for the South Vietnamese and the Americans and the French. So all the themes of colonialism and war in peace are in this interview.

Oh, nice. I cannot wait to hear this interview. I've never had a book recommended to me as many times as that one. I think I made the mistake of buying it on my audio books, and then I didn't leave my house for a year and a half. So I'm just going to go on buy the book for my Kindle later today, I guess, and just read it. I mean, not to sound like a total nerd, too, but if you listen to the interview, like, Viet is just, you know, he's like a throwback public intellectual kind of guy.

He's just smart. And, but a different kind of voice, right? I mean, he's written about the refugee experience. He obviously has the Asian American perspective and the current environment, which is important to hear. So people should definitely check it out. Also, President Biden is giving his first joint session speech on Wednesday night. Why do you call it a joint session the first time and not the state of the union?

Do you know? You know, it's really weird. I worked on the first joint session with Favro, I remember in 2009. And it's exactly the same as the state of the union, literally the exactly the same. I'm like you, you know, you speak to both houses. You walk in with the pageantry. Everybody's there. It's like a one hour laundry list of your whole agenda.

I think the idea is just that the president needs to be in office for a year before filing his state of the union. Remember the state of the union used to actually be like a written document. Yeah. Good old days. You know, the good old days before we had to write a speech. And so I think it's tied to that, but don't hold me to that. I mean, I think the idea is that like,

You know, but I guarantee you there'll probably be some landing line where he says the state of the union is getting stronger or something like that. Yeah, wait for it. Right. Well, if you want to watch, but you don't want to watch alone. You guys should subscribe to the Crooked Media YouTube channel and watch our group thread. Do you miss getting handed like a page and a half and saying, hey, Ben, fill in all of the foreign policy section for the United States. Was that a fun task? So I worked on eight of these. Um, Jesus. Again, I think it's, I think I've used this analogy here before with the UN speeches. It's like a, it's got to be a record.

I doubt anybody else has worked on eight of those. But it's like a crash Davis from Bull Durham record. It just shows that I never left the same job. Um, but, um, great reference. It was, it was, it was rough because basically, yeah, like all the political advisors are like, don't talk about foreign policy. Like nobody cares about foreign policy. Americans don't care about it.

Dan, Dan. Yeah, Dan, Thursday Pod. But, like, there's like a chicken and egg thing, too, by the way, which is, like, maybe Americans don't care because, you know, nobody tries to make them care. But anyway. Right. What was really hard about it, though, is that the rest of the world watch that speech really closely because they assume that if you cared about them, they'd be in the speech somehow.

And so everybody in the NSC, and you'll remember this, Tommy, would come to me with the thing they wanted in this speech. And I'd have like a list of like 50 things, you know, we have to mention this program that we just launched in X country. I don't want to insult a country or something. I know. And if we don't, it'll send a huge signal that, you know, and so you had very little real estate to deal with the whole world and no time to deal with like thematics of your foreign policy. And if you left out, like I remember one year we didn't mention, you know, Latin America. And it was like, a year of problem. It was like, they don't really care about Latin America. It didn't make it in this speech, you know. Um, so it was, it was really, it was really tricky. But you could also like,

as you get older in the job, you figure out you can slide stuff in. So I used to always go to USAID. Um, this is a lesson for Sam Power. And like, hey, you guys have anything you really want to like juice in the budget? Like, and I'll slip it in there. Like, I remember like the, the last year we, we, we set a goal of ending preventable deaths from malaria. And, you know, like suddenly that creates a lot of momentum behind funding and NGOs get excited. So you can do really good stuff with it. But let's just say it's not my proudest writing because it's not a lot of space. Yeah. Well, actually, we have some interesting news on malaria later in the show. But, you know, speaking of a limited real estate, so Ben had this one office where a door could close and then Fariel Govashiri and I sat outside of it

in another office. We would constantly be knocking on Ben's door. around State of the Union time, be like, hey, Ben, the entire Middle East North Africa director and is here to see you in like 12, like, super earnest, you know, like mouth-breathing wanks would like crowd into your office and like beg for a, you know, sentence fragment or something. It was very sad. But all wonderful people, well-meeting people, but that's how it goes in the White House. Yeah. And I remember actually the State of the Union in 2011, and Obama writes about this in his book,

like, was right when the Arab String was taking off. And there was a huge debate, like, do we mention this? Do we embrace it? Do we embrace Tunisia and Egypt? Or just, you know, and you're making these decisions like on the fly, you know. But that was his first comment on the Arab Spring was it was in the 2011 State of the Union. Who knew it was like one line that we negotiated carefully. So you also don't know. I used to love to go back and read the old state of the unions. So it's actually, if you're a world though who wants to nerd out. It's pretty interesting because it shows you what the America's obsession was at the time. Yeah. So like in the 80s, Reagan would go on forever about Central America, you know, and anti-communism and all this stuff. And the same way that, you know, in the 21st century, it's been the Middle East, you know, so you get this little window into what America cares about. Yeah.

A bunch of right-wingers pretending that, you know, the Russians had thousands more ICBMs and nuclear warheads and they actually did. Yeah. But yeah, we'll look forward to this speech on Wednesday. Also, don't miss what a day this week because you've got lots of fun stuff. You have Aquila and Gideon's live reactions to the Oscar results. Then on Friday, Rubicon host Brian Boiler joins to review Biden's first 100 days. So it's always a great show, especially great this week. Let's start with Biden's climate change announcement because it's legitimately a big deal. So last week, as they do in the COVID era, Biden hosted a virtual summit of world leaders focused on climate change. At this event, Biden announced a new, U.S. goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, specifically he called for a 50 to 52 percent reduction below the 2005 emissions level. So that's a big, bold target that basically doubles the one set by President Obama back in 2015 at the Paris Climate Accords. But as we've talked about on the show, I mean, 85% of the world's emissions come from outside the U.S. So, you know, a lot of experts were watching to see what other countries would roll out at the summit.

And I would say it was a mixed bag, right? So you had, you know, the Canadians had a big target. Thank you, Trudeau. The UK had a good target. The European Union put forward a pledge to cut 55% of their carbon emissions by 2030. But they compare their cuts to 1990 levels just to make it super confusing. I guess it's their version of not using the metric system. But, you know, Ben, a lot of experts, I think, were a little disappointed by the lack of new targets or announcements from China and Russia. But I'm curious what you made of the summit about Biden's announcement and sort of what it says about our ability to achieve our goal here, which is to prevent, you know, catastrophic levels of global warming. I'm not, I mean, look, the target was good. These targets are all, you know, a bit vague in the sense that, like, Biden's target is kind of pricing in that he'll get his infrastructure and climate change bill done probably. And his regulations won't be overturned by the courts. But it's, it was the goal of Paris was that every five years, countries would revise up their ambition.

So exactly what Biden did. That was a design, is that we're going to get more ambitious with time, in part because the markets can be shifting to clean energy, new technologies are going to be developed. And so there'll be this kind of momentum that is building over time that allows everybody to get more ambitious. I'm not surprised at the lack of new bold targets from these other countries because, number one, we just exited the stage for four years. And so the idea that the U.S. calls a summit and then everybody else uses the American-led summit to put their pledges on the table is kind of asking a lot. I think also like, no surprise, like a close friend and ally like Trudeau is like, okay,

I'll do this at the U.S. summit, but the Chinese are going to hold back, and they're going to do this later in the year, you know, hopefully as we get closer to the formal summit where Paris is meant to be kind of re-upped. In November. Yeah, November in Glasgow. So, but it does show you that like this gets harder. Like a lot of these countries have done the bare minimum in terms of their goals of like, you know, China's goal is just, it's going to peak admissions in 2030. and it's not that specific about exactly then how fast and how it's going to make its emissions fall, you know. And so it just goes to show that there's a ton of work that has to be done and everybody has to be moving in the same direction because, as you say, like America, Europe, Canada, Japan could all do the right things. But if China and India and all these other big emitters are not, then, you know, we're not going to solve this problem, you know. But the good news is America doing this and catalyzing this, it does create pressure. It does create a sense of momentum. It does create a sense of inevitability about increasing ambition on climate change. And so just seeing America and Biden using this forum as kind of his first big global summit, I'll be a virtual one, I think was a very positive sign. But now there's a lot of hard work to be done by John Kerry between now and the fall to see if we can help other countries raise their ambitions. Yeah, I mean, you touched on an important point here, which is that, like, Biden's team is really completely banking on this infrastructure bill to put forward their climate agenda, right? Because it includes billions of dollars in investments in renewable energy, battery storage, new transmission lines to move power around.

Like, the big focus is on our energy grid in our energy production systems. And then there's a provision called the Clean Electricity Standard that would call for an 80% of electricity to come from clean energy sources by. 2030. And Ben, you know, the New York Times' analysis and take on this was basically, like you said before, the world is frustrated with us flip-flopping on climate policy every, you know, four to eight years. And they're waiting for Biden to pass this clean electricity standard into law before they're willing to up their commitments at this next summit in November. Does that sound right to you that we kind of have to put a money where our mouth is before other countries are going to come along? Yeah. So to give people a sense of this, right, every country is trying to figure this out on their own

way. And so some of the European countries have like a carbon tax essentially, like what we used to call a cap and trade, but essentially you're putting a price on carbon. America can't pass that, right? And so in 2009, there was an energy bill in Congress that had a cap and trade system. And when that failed to get through the Senate, we went to Copenhagen, which was where the climate change conference was in 2009. And one of the reasons why that didn't work is because America, couldn't really put forward an ambitious target yet. So other countries are like, well, we're not going to do this yet. And it took, by the time of Paris, Obama had to basically do everything he could through executive action, you're raising fuel efficiency standards for cars, you know, clean power plant rules so that you're

doing, you know, dirty power plants. Like to then we could go to Paris and credibly say, okay, look, we can put forward this ambitious target like you guys come with us here. And and that brought along the Chinese and some other countries. I think that the challenge for Biden is there's a few ways of, you know, irreversibly changing kind of the nature of your economy. One is like the price on carbon. I'm oversimplifying here, but one is like carbon tax or kind of border taxation on climate-related emissions.

Another is regulation. But the challenge for American regulation is Trump has packed the courts with right-wing judges. And so Joe Biden could theoretically have a really strong regulatory regime that slowly gets undone by this right-wing Supreme Court that's never going away. So what does that leave you? It leaves you the idea of just spending so much money on investments in clean energy and subsidies for clean energy that the economy just remakes itself into a clean energy economy because of the amount of, you know, resources the government has put into that. So, you know, the combination of, say, raising fuel efficiency standards on cars and investing in, you know,

electric cars and chargers and charging stations and states and local governments shifting all of their fleets to electric cars, like suddenly you're in business here, right? So because it's harder to pass through legislation in America regulations or to defend regulations in front of the courts, we are left with this kind of spending approach to transforming our economy. And so, we are left. And if we spend sufficient amounts of money, I think the world will see, oh, the market is just going to shift in the direction of these clean energies because America is moving so fast in that direction. And that's what we need to get done by hopefully the end of the – by the Glasgow Summit later in the year. It's a big bet. Let's hope it works. Let's turn to COVID because last week we talked about the truly dire situation in India.

And unfortunately, things have gotten worse. the country is now averaging over 300,000 new reported cases per day with a high of around 350,000 new cases on Sunday and over 2,700 deaths. Now, you know, like experts believe that the official case count will soon hit half a million new cases per day. But again, all of these statistics are likely a massive undercount. And I've heard some estimates that the real numbers could be as much as 10 times higher. So imagine that. On Monday, President Biden called Prime Minister Modi of India to offer assistance. There were lots of other lower-level contacts.

And the White House announced its work in to identify materials that India needs the manufacture vaccine doses, oxygen generation equipment, and they're going to send test kits, PPE, and other equipment over to India. Other countries, including Singapore and Germany, have already sent some aid. So lots of folks are pointing to Modi's failed leadership is among the many reasons for this massive surge in cases. That includes his decision to allow his political party to hold these massive rallies. In response, Modi's government asked Twitter to censor its career.

critics or critics of their COVID response, including tweets from opposition politicians and journalists. So really learning a lesson there. Relatedly, on Monday, the White House said it would share as many as 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine once that vaccine is authorized by the FDA. So it's something we've talked about then before. The challenge still remains that, you know, those doses aren't manufactured yet. They haven't detailed where they will go. But I think we're talking about like a May or a June timeframe. So not really something, there's nothing the near horizon that can help India deal with this acute, acute outbreak. So pretty harrowing stuff here. Yeah. I mean, when you when you look at the population density in India and then you

have the sense of these new variants. And yeah, like Modi deserves plenty of criticism here. They were passing resolutions, you know, through the Indian parliament, like celebrating Modi's defeat of COVID a few months ago. You know, like this, so this guy was spiking the football, you know, on like the 20-yard line. And now you have this awful, like, dystopian scenario. And we should do everything to help. Whether or not, you know, like we talked about, like whatever you're concerned about Modi is, like,

this is about public health, public safety saving lives. Yeah. I think it's very positive. You can feel that the administration is moving the Biden administration to do more. Yeah. Keep equipment, AstraZeneca vaccines. That said, I think there's a couple of problems that I see on the horizon.

here. One is just like there's a creeping moral problem. I talk to people around the world a lot, and it's interesting. You talk to someone in Britain, and they're like us. They've gotten their shot or their schedule to get their shot. Some European countries, like, it is just not morally sustainable to have a circumstance where we're going to look up and like basically the white majority white countries in the world, like everybody's vaccinated back to normal. hanging out. And it's not just a COVID still out there. COVID could explode with particularly new variants as we're seeing in India. And secondly, India has a big problem. India is geopolitically important, right? They're like, you know, part of a kind of anti-China strategy that we may have.

Like, it's going to be harder and harder to choose, you know, who are you giving vaccines to? Why are you giving them to this country, not that country, if they need it? Well, all of which, is to say that there needs to be a global comprehensive plan here. And there already is some architecture around this. There's like a consortium. Covax and stuff. But I think that the Biden team's going to have to take a step back here and be like, okay, we, to spare them the difficult choice of being like, well, we'll give this, you these vaccines and you this PPE. Like, this has to be routinized and systematized in a way that like there's a huge amount of resources going into a pool that can go out to other countries. And again, I still think the intellectual property concerns are going

to have to fade away or the hoarding of these natural resources that go into vaccines. There's good and complicated reasons why that's hard to do. But at the end of the day, like, we just can't have a scenario where there's this kind of bifurcation between the developed world and the developing world that could go on for like two or three years, you know? Yeah, I mean, the current framework where it's like some really bad outbreak spikes up and then the machinery of guns. government gets going, starts to send them stuff. It's like you're already so far behind the curve that you can't prevent these outbreaks. We have to systematize and like make fair the distribution of these vaccines. So we're preventing these outbreaks all over the place. I don't know

if you've also noticed this, Ben, this is driving me crazy, which is the kind of like smart thing for like center right people in Washington to say if they decide that the U.S. should do more to fairly distribute vaccines, et cetera, is that like we're losing some global competition with Russia and China, and they make it about this, like, geopolitical, like, great power competition. It just feels so, I mean, I guess if that motivates Republicans, that's one way to frame it, but it just feels so amoral to talk about it in that way. Like, maybe we don't want lots of people to die for no reason, regardless of where, you know, Russia is sending the Sputnik V vaccine.

I just, I hate it. Yeah, there's this creeping thing. We should, you know, we'll probably talk about this a lot, where every. China is going to become a reason for everything. You know, like, the reason we should spend money on infrastructure is because of Chinese infrastructure. The reason we should spend money on, you know, research and innovation is so the Chinese don't beat us. And look, that's some of that's just politics and like that's going to be part of the landscape. But I mean, we should be able and willing to do things for

reasons other than like beating the Chinese. And the irony of that is like, you know, to take that logic and complete the circle, if we really are, a competition of models with China. One way to win that competition is actually to do things because they're the right things to do, not just because that's supposed to make us different from China or Russia. We don't look at the world as zero sum. We look at the world and say, okay, we want to be a world leader. So we're going to try to help the world deal with COVID, not because we want to beat the Chinese, but just because that's what we do. And so I think America embracing that role is one way, again, to claim back some of the credibility that we've

lost so much the last not just four years, but a few decades. Yeah, God, you know, just make people feel good about it. Like, you can, you can celebrate being a good country that's altruistic, that wants to save lives. I promise you, you can make that a political winner. It doesn't have to be about beating China and everything. I think most, you know, look, we did that too. We did that too. We did that too with Obama. I think we did, no, we did it too. I get the impulse. But like, most Americans, look, I mean, as long as you can tell Americans, look them in the eye and say, we're not taking a vaccine away from an American to give it to somebody else, which I understand. Like, you're the U.S. government. That's got to be your first party. But if this is all additive,

if it's like we can take care of our people, we have enough PPE and vaccine to take care of our people, but we need to do this because it's the right thing. I mean, yeah, there's like the 35% America first deadenders are going to be like, that's horrible. But I think most Americans would be into that. Like, that's kind of what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to do big things. Yes, agreed. One other big, piece of Biden news is over the weekend, President Biden became the first American president to formally recognize the Armenian genocide. And so that follows through on a campaign promise he made, despite lots of fears that this designation will anger Turkey. So for folks who aren't familiar, the Armenian genocide began in 1950 when the Ottoman Empire ordered the mass deportation of Armenians.

The Ottomans were allied with the Russians in World War I, and they were worried about the Armenians collaborating with Russia or pushing for independence. And so they forcibly marched millions of Armenians into Syria and other parts of the Middle East, killing an estimated 1.5 million people. So it's just a truly horrific evil event in world history. Past presidents, including President Obama, have avoided making this formal declaration or designation because of concerns about how Turkey would respond. Turkey's a NATO ally. Someone can always make an argument that, you know, the U.S. needs Turkey's cooperation on like fill in the blank issue. We can't piss them off, right? You and I were in meetings where we heard this. You and I have also talked about the fact

that we believe it was a mistake for President Obama not to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Samantha Power has said as much too. Why do you think President Biden finally made this choice and what kind of response do you think we should anticipate from Turkey? Well, I think it was like the right call. We should have done it. We've talked about this. It's right to recognize history. It's right to valid. the experience of like a whole people, the Armenian people, including the Armenian American community that is lobbied for this for many years. This is central to their identity. And it's so part of this is just about seeing them. I mean, a lot of the Armenian American community that's here,

they're here in part because their ancestors were driven out of their homes and some cases killed in that genocide. And if you credibly want to claim that you want to prevent these types of crimes in the future, you have to recognize what happened in the past. I think, think that like, look, Joe Biden has been, you know, involved in this issue from when he was in Congress, so he knows it well. I think also, like, Erdogan's star has faced it, you know, like, let's face it. Like, some of this is. In 2009, it was like, oh, you know, this, you know, with the jury's still out on Erdogan, we want to encourage him to move in a better direction. And, you know, by now, it's pretty clear that he is like an autocrat and a problematic autocrat,

not often in line with American values and often not even in line with American security interests. So that probably made it easier. But still, it's like a big move that Biden deserves credit for. And I think the lesson I take from this is kind of what I learned later in the Obama years, right? There's a lot of taboos in foreign policy where it's like, you don't do something because, like, you just don't do that, you know? I remember being in like a meeting in Jim Jones's office, National Security Advisor. And he's literally looking at us like we're crazy. like, why are you doing this?

Like, you know, Turkey's important. And we're like, because it's right and because he said he would do it. I mean, Obama broke his promise. And a lot of these taboos, I realize this, like, the sky doesn't fall, right? Like, this happened with Cuba. Like, we just came out,

announced we're going to normalize relations with Cuba. Guess what? The next day, the sun came out, like, like nothing. You know, like, they've got some angry statements from Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio, and like, everybody else is like, this is great, let's move on. And this same thing, like, Biden did this.

I don't, are we at war with Turkey? Like is something, I don't think so. Yeah, not yet. They seize our nuclear weapons. Like, I saw Erdogan put out a statement saying that in response, he's going to recognize the genocide of Native Americans. I'm like, good. Good.

Let's do it. Let's, let's have that discussion, you know? So I think it's a very important lesson that I cannot stress enough. There's this kind of straight jacket that the American foreign policy establishment puts on itself on some things where it's like, we can't possibly do that. And then often when you just do it, Like nothing changes, like, except for the fact that things are better because you've done the right thing, you know. So that's the, I hope they take that lesson. Just do it, you know.

It's a good lesson. And again, credit to Joe Biden for taking this step. Yeah, I mean, look, of course, General Jones, former Supreme Allied commander of NATO is thinking of this from that sort of securitized perspective, right? And like, that's kind of why he's in the job. But again, like, we're letting our morals take a backseat to some hope for more. more cooperation. I also bet didn't totally realize until I started digging into this even more for today is how turkey has really spent like an entire century denying these events, gaslighting its population, gaslighting those around it to try to deny that this was, you know, a genocidal campaign and that it was really just sort of like routine warfare. There were atrocities on both sides, etc., etc. I mean, this is like a deeply ingrained cultural thing within Turkey. So there there probably will be some sort of ramifications, but to your point, we just haven't seen some sort of like geopolitical schism yet, like the doomsday people predicted.

Yeah, and I think that, like, people just, you know, this honesty, like political language is so disingenuous at times. And look, and this is not a strike, because I used to write all these statements, right? To this day, you see statements sometimes from the U.S. government, you're like, what are they talking about? Just tell us what you think, right? And so I used to write this statement every year, and I hated it, because we'd refer to, like, the tragic events of 1915. And Samantha and I would always have this kind of a dark, you know, not humor, but just dark conversation about, like, events, like the people just died, you know, like the million Armenians just, you know, like the language invalidated their experience because it just kind of described a

tragedy that just seemed to happen, not like these people were systematically killed and displaced because of who they were, I think just across the board on foreign policy, I'd like to see the U.S. government just be like a little more honest, just like straightforward. And once you do that, it makes it less, I don't know, unusual, like to just be straight about something, you know? Yes, yes. There's a lot of issues where there's a cottage industry of people policing your language, a lot of it around the Israeli, Palestinian conflict, the Armenian, genocide is another. But yeah, but this kind of honesty and candor does feel, look, look at any Armenian community in the U.S. and their reaction to know how important this was to them. Also, I think in the wake

of the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where, you know, innocent people were just massacred. I think, you know, taking this step does feel like it has some sort of added currency and relevance. And so, again, credit to the Biden team. Good for them. Totally. Speaking of wildly over-sensitive countries, let's turn to China, because on Sunday night, An incredible woman director named Chloe Zhao became the first woman of color and the first Chinese woman to win an Oscar, the Academy Award for Best Director for her film Nomad Land. And normally you would expect that Chinese state-run media would be just like roadblock coverage of her success. Think about, you know, for example, the way Yao Ming's basketball success was celebrated in China. But oddly, the opposite happened, right?

Chinese state-run media barely covered the Oscars. Chinese censors scrubbed any mention of it or her from social media. And it's not totally clear why, but people suspect that it has to do with past interviews she had done where she was kind of mildly critical of China, said it's like full of lies. And then there was another interview that seemed to suggest that her home was America now, although that might have been a misquote in some Australian publication. So regardless, this is the latest in a series of ridiculous. And, you know, in this case, I would say kind of baffling overreactions by nationalists in China

that can lead to censorship and then economic consequences for Hollywood because if Chloe Zhao wants to go on, which she's supposed to, like, direct some big blockbuster, like, Marvel-style movie. There's questions now, like, can we release this in China? And is that going to leave hundreds of millions of dollars on the table? So, you know, Ben, we've talked about Chinese censorship before when it comes to the NBA, ESPN, like conversations about Hong Kong movies that studios want to air in China. But this one is so confusing to me because you really could have seen a scenario where Chinese state-run media embraces her, frames the movie as a critique of capitalism,

which is, like, makes this a celebration. I don't get it. What did you make of this? I mean, it shows the extreme sensitivity because you're right. Like, you go back and you look at these interviews. She did not, you know, criticize the Chinese Communist Party. She did not advocate for democracy. I mean, she talked about basically, like, she's, you know, able to have more creative freedom

in the United States. I mean, but in a very mild way. So what's so interesting to me about it is it speaks to how totalitarian the Chinese system is. And this is something I really, really dig into in my book. It's not just that they don't want you to have certain political views, right? They don't want you to support a democratic, multi-party system of government. It's that they don't even want you to think in a certain way. You know, like Chloe Zhao is a storyteller.

And to be a storyteller, you know, she is, she's creative and she's open. And I love Nomad, but if you watch it, it really celebrates the individual, you know, which is kind of subtly not, you know, the Chinese model is very collective, very subtle, you know, and I doubt that she sat down and was like, I mean, if anything, like you said, I saw it as a pretty stinging critique of like financial crisis. era American capitalism, like these people working seasonally at Amazon, you know, putting together Christmas packages and then moving to some harvest because they can't hold down a job. So to me, just shows both the sensitivity, but also that the sensitivity doesn't just encompass

politics. It kind of encompasses like what is your worldview and how do you create? And what is the purpose of art? Because, you know, Chloe Zhao, if you look at her films, like, You know, it's a classic purpose of art. It's to hold a mirror up to the world and to understand ourselves better. The Chinese Communist Party's version of art is like to celebrate the Chinese Communist Party or like the Chinese collective, right? Yeah, or Xi Jinping. You know, and even the movies, the war movies or they're all nationalism infused, right? And I, you know, I think it's, it just shows you how broad this question. of what China's influence is going to be on the world for the next 10, 20, 30, 4 years.

Because as you say, the darkest version of that is, as China becomes the biggest market and the biggest economic giant in the world, like creators, whether they're musicians or filmmakers or athletes, like, just have to conform to no longer, you know, addressing certain subjects. You're not there. Yeah. Exactly. And that's going to be really tricky, you know.

And I hope that, like, people, you know, who are creative everywhere kind of stand up for the principle. Not everybody has to make movies that are critical of the Chinese-Kinist Party, but you should be able to make a movie about Francis McDormand, you know, like traveling around at a van, meeting interesting people, and kind of wrestling with what it means to be alive in 21st century America, you know, in kind of the post-late capitalism. You know, like, how is that not okay, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's very, very odd. Also, now is your time to pause the podcast. Pre-order after the fall, Ben's new book and dig deeper into this because it will be very, very good.

Okay, more good news. Ben, I think, actually, I think this might be some of the best news we've ever talked about this on this show, and I want to see if you agree. So a study released by Oxford University shows that a new vaccine that's designed to prevent malaria has an up to 77% efficacy rate in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso. So the next step will be a much larger phase three trial with like, I think, nearly 5,000 kids that will assess the large scale safety and efficacy of this drug. But if it works, the impact is just like seismic, right? So according to the World Health Organization, there were 229 million cases of malaria in 2019 and 409,000 deaths.

That was just 2019. Tragically, tragically, two-thirds of those deaths were children under five. And so half the world's population is at risk of catching malaria, but 94% of those cases and deaths were in Africa. So this is a game-changing drug. I think this next trial will probably take another year. The phase two trial took about a year, but really, really exciting stuff. And, you know, thank you again to all the vaccine makers out there because we need you. Yeah. And I mentioned earlier, like I kind of got into the... this in 2016 when Obama made this commitment to try to eradicate malaria in the state of the union. But what was so interesting about it then is, obviously, vaccine is what you want,

but you could make a huge difference in at least ending deaths with simple things like mosquito nets, right? And just simple ways to reduce the risk of malaria. This is such a game changer because it's such a drag on certain communities that just live with the ever-present danger of this disease. which can be incredibly debilitating, right? And so, yeah, it does show that, like, a lot of these diseases, I mean, look how fast you develop the COVID vaccine, right? When it threatened us, you know, like we kick into gear, it does make you real. And look at HIV. When the U.S.

government took that seriously with PEPFAR, we were able to really help Africa, not just bend the curve, but, you know, stamp out the worst, certainly the worst effects of it. I think it goes to show that like we can solve these problems, particularly these health problems, but we have to be willing to put some resources into it. It's worth it for humanitarian purposes. And ultimately, again, that's the kind of leadership of America should offer the world, right? The leadership to make, make the world healthier, safer, more prosperous. And if we're doing that kind of stuff, like, it's not a frame as anti-China, but if we're doing that kind of stuff, like, then people trust you on other things, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Look, and this is with the Oxford group that, uh, helped us,

develop one of the COVID vaccines. But yeah, this was such a global health problem that you had people talking about, you know, editing the genes of mosquitoes with a technology called CRISPR to try to eradicate them. And like, this is such a serious problem that a vaccine like this is just an unbelievable game changes. It's a game changer. Yeah. And no, I didn't mean to suggest that America had done this.

No, no. I was suggesting that we should do it. You know, like, we should do more of this, you know? Yeah, more like cures like this, more vaccines, more preventions. Ben, leaked tapes are once again making big news. So this time it was audio of Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif talking with an economist, an Iranian economist named Saeed Lelaz, who is, I think, widely considered to be the Billy Bush of Iran. Just kidding. So here's some of the revelations. The Iranian military, specifically the IRGC, calls most of the shots

and often overrule civilian leadership. No surprise there. Zerif also said the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, who Trump assassinated in January of 2020 was an enormous blow to Iran. More damaging, you know, this was like some big deal is more damaging the wiping out an entire city, according to Zarif. So I'm sure Mike Pompeo will love that. Zerif also said that Soleimani tried to work with Russia to kill the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. And he also criticized Soleimani for many of Iran's interventions into Syria. So Ben, like I didn't find myself surprised by Zareef's claim that the IRGC is pulling the strings. I think maybe I was a little surprised at the extent with which he says Russia was trying to undermine the Iran nuclear agreement.

I was very surprised that he would sit for this interview, even if it wasn't intended for publication. But, you know, there's a lot of speculation about how the tape got out. Some people believe the leak was designed to weaken Zerif in script and nuclear talks. Friend of the pod, Jason Rizyan, suggested it could be the opposite, that this helps Zaref distance himself from some of the government's failures over the past few years before he makes his own presidential run. And Jason kind of points to the fact that, look, the JCPOA got done. And that undercuts Zareef's claim that he was just a pawn getting pushed around by Qasem Soleimani and the military. I don't know. What did you make of this tape and how it might have gotten out and sort of assess the impact here?

Nothing was surprising to me about this. I mean, this would have been basically our assessment, like in the Obama years of the power dynamic inside of Iran. I also thought, you know, the IRGC, like, they know what Zareef thinks. So, like, he's said stuff like this, I'm sure plenty of times. And I'm sure they've got to, you know, they've probably been monitoring ZReefe too. So it's one of these situations where it's just like a public record of kind of what everybody knows the deal is. Yeah, I did think that the stuff about Russia undermining the JCPOA was interesting.

I don't think that they meant to. to kill the deal. I think what they meant to do at that time, and this is certainly how we experienced it, is our assessment was that Rahani and Zarif had been kind of given the nuclear file, if you will, by the Supreme Leader. Like he had said, you guys go see what you can do on this. You actually have responsibility for this issue, but that the IRGC had responsibility for kind of Syria, Iraq, you know, all this stuff happening around the region. And so the way we lived that at the time was we got the nuclear deal done. There was a world in which that might have led to a diminishing of tension across the region. But instead, the IRGC and Russia were ratcheting

up their provocations across the rest of the region. So if you'll remember, things got worse in Syria, right? The Russians started bombing in Syria. The Iranians, obviously, were continuing their fighting in Syria. And I think it was meant to kind of undermine the environment around the nuclear deal. Not necessarily, if they wanted to kill the nuclear deal, they, the Russians could have done that, right? They're in the P5 plus one. So that's how I took it. But I think it does to show you that there's, we make this mistake of viewing every government that we don't like as a monolith, you know, as if every single person in the Iranian government is the same, and they're all the same fanatical. And I've gotten just raked over the colds

over the years for even suggesting that there's such a thing as a moderate, you know, inside of Iran. A moderate on a relative scale here. You know, like we're not saying they're moderates in terms of like an American context, but like Zareef's views are different than Szilomani's. That's just a fact. And we should take that into account when we make policy, not because we're, you know, to help Zarif, but just because, like, we have to recognize, okay, well, how do we navigate that they're these hardliners and then there are these people who want to potentially engage with us, but what do they want? To me, that's the main takeaway. It's like, let's not forget Iran like any other place has politics. Yeah, yeah. Of course, the dumbest thing possible sort of

spins out of this in the right-wing world, which is there's a suggestion that John Kerry told Zarif, the foreign minister, that the Israelis had sort of intervened against their nuclear program 200 times. And people were acting like this was some sort of treasonous disclosure when, in fact, there are news reports quoting Israeli officials saying that they had intervened in Iran's nuclear program 200 times. So maybe Zerif just like read the AP wire if this was something that came up. This is the dumbest fucking thing in the world. And I'm glad you bring this up because like this is such classic American right wing gaslighting bullshit, right? Because number one, this is already publicly known, right? And by the way, not just when the Israelis went out and

literally said, we've done this 200 times. Like, we were there in the Obama years. They would, they would bomb stuff in Syria. Everybody knew it. It was like not some secret. Like, that's the first thing. Second thing is the right wing like brags about this. Like, like, over the years, you constantly heard American right wing politicians be like, well, the Israelis are much tougher than us because they hit these Iranian targets in Syria and all stuff. And so then John Kerry's just saying the same shit that like some right winger would say to kind of praise like taking out Iranian targets. and suddenly he's treasonous, it's an absolute bullshit play where they know, they know it's not

true. And this whole set of issues is full of lies, right? Like, it wasn't true that we gave around $150 billion. That's bullshit. But the right wing repeated that for years and years and years until like more people probably think that happened than not, you know? And you could go down the list on this stuff and they get away with it because like people don't call bullshit. on it enough, you know, and the mainstream media covers it because they're not covering the underlying allegation. They're covering the controversy. Like, multiple Republican members of Congress called on John Kerry to resign today. It's a convenient way for them to cover the story without laundering the disinformation. Well, guess what? You're still laundering the disinformation.

So we need to call this shit out when it happens because it's going to keep happening. There's literally a Reuters headline that says Israel says struck Iranian targets in Syria 200 times in the last two years. So it seems like that might be the source. But yeah, you're right, didn't stop Nikki Haley or any of the so-called serious people from attacking carry. Real serious. Same morons were pretending that Joe Biden said that you weren't going to be allowed to have hamburgers anymore, even though, like, he literally never said that it was some other random study by, I think, Michigan University reference that cutting down a red meat could help climate change. You really are seeing this week, not right-wing reporting or misinformation,

but like out and out disinformation, just like lie after lie after lie, just going super viral. And this carry thing is right at the top of the list. It's infuriating. Tommy, I'm going to actually like help with the transition to the MAGA idiots, right? Because it's getting worse, you know? It's so funny because I do like international speaking and stuff. People like, is it a Republican Party in a recover after Trump? No, it's actually getting dumber.

It's getting dumber today than it was in like the first year of the Trump presidency in terms of these bullshit controversies, the lies, the gaslighting, the disinformation, like the, you know, like this is not improving. And by the way, you can remove Trump from it entirely. And it still happens, right? It's not about Trump. Like, Trump can just sit in Mar-a-Lago and his fat ass and do nothing. And this would all still be happening. Yeah, it would be. One good news thing before we get to Magh, so just we talked in the last couple shows about how there was this huge massing of Russian troops on the border of eastern Ukraine. They have reportedly pulled a lot of those back from the border. Huge side of relief to Ukrainians, NATO, U.S. officials, because this was believed to be the largest buildup

of Russian forces in that area since 2014. It doesn't mean they pulled out of Crimea or, you know, there won't still be this like low-grade warfare there, but it's a good thing. Tony Blankin, the Secretary of State is apparently going to Ukraine next month. And CNN reported that the White House is considering or preparing for a potential meeting between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin sometime early the summer. So, you know, this will get to discussed. The other good news out of Russia is that opposition leader Alexei Navalny said he is ending his hunger strike over his medical treatment in prison because they'd sort of done enough to satisfy him. So that's great news. Unfortunately, there are also reports of Russia detaining journalists who have

been covering protests in support of Navalny. And then the Russian Justice Ministry added Medusa News, one of the few remaining independent news outlets in Russia to the point where some of their journalists have come on this show to its list of foreign agents. media outlets. So that's a very bad sign, these attacks on the media. But I don't, Ben, I guess the question I had for you is, like, do you think a Putin-Biden meeting sometime early this summer makes sense or is a good idea? I mean, look, I mean, first of all, this is welcome news, but I think Putin likes to remind you, I can invade Ukraine if I want, or I can kill Lexington and if I want. So I ratchet up and I dial it back, but I'm sure he'll ratchet it up again, right?

But it's better to be ratcheted down, that's for sure. Look, it can never hurt to try to talk to a country, even a foreign adversary. So I understand, you know, why Biden would potentially have this summit. I would be furiously lowering expectations for what can come out of that, having been in a lot of meetings with Putin over the years. Like, like, the main reason to do it in some ways is to show Europe, like you're open to it because the Europeans sometimes get a little squish. on, you know, standing up to Russia on some of this stuff. And, um, and, and again, rightly, I don't mean to, to be negative about it. Like, they, you know, urge diplomacy. I'm all for diplomacy. Um, it's just Putin is not, he's not reciprocated to pressure and he's not reciprocated

to an extended hand. You know, we've tried everything with this guy over the last 20 years. And the results are kind of always the same. Um, so it's, it's worth trying. And hopefully you get something out of it. And we have had meetings with Putin and the Obama years that made things incrementally better for a period of time without solving underlying problems. But I would not set this up to be, you know, the danger is you raise expectations that you're going to solve all these problems in some meeting and then nothing happens, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Biden also announced that his first overseas trip will be to the UK and Belgium, so that makes a lot of sense. So just the Magadious thing I had been, which is basically very briefly, first, you know,

like right-wing ass and full-time Brexit arsonist Nigel Farage has announced that he's planning a tour of the United States with a group called Freedom Works, which is this like right-wing advocacy group propped up by the Koch brothers. So if you really missed like jeering terrible people during quarantine, this is a chance to get back out there. Second, I just wanted to point out that Trump decided to fire off one of his new statements in this time. It was on foreign policy. So, you know, it propped up Kim Jong-un. It attacked. Mung Jayin, the president of South Korea. He dusted off one of his old rants about wanting South Korea to pay more to the U.S. for our U.S. true presence there. And I just wanted to note

that he was completely wrong because Biden has negotiated a 13.9% payment increase for 2021 and a 6.1% increase per year after that until 2025. So it turns out, you know, if you're just a decent human being to your allies, you can actually get the thing you want. So that's MAGA ideas for you. I'll say about Nigel Farage's, I hope that, you know, if there could be a Borat 3, like Sasha Baron Cohen needs to, like, or just like a short, like there needs to be a Sasha Baron Cohen, Nigel Farage interaction of some sort, you know. And then on Trump, like I, I just like, like the Kim Jong-Lun thing, it's literally like, it just shows you that nothing matters. I mean, like, we, I usually, I used to say I only get to do this once a podcast, but because it's Trump, we don't do that much.

A Democratic president or Barack Obama, for instance, like praising Kim Jong-un and just eviscerating our South Korean ally would have, like, spontaneously combusted America if Obama had said anything remotely like that. It just shows you, like, how disingenuous, and the reason it matters is because people like Nikki Haley, All these people, Rubio, who are going to be running next time if Trump doesn't, are going to be putting themselves up as these hawks, as these tough people who will defend America. They literally held the code of the guy who was trashing one of our closest allies in the world and embracing a dictator. And also reinforcing the positive media tension he got, including from a totally credulous

American political media around that first summit with Kim Jong-un is still, he's still high on Like, he still thinks, he still thinks it's like a great credit to his presidency that he was buddies with the most murderous, awful dictator in the world, like less in American media. Like, that was the wrong prism to cover that summit. Yes, it was absolutely outrageous. Speaking of allies, let's talk about Europe for a minute, because last week we told you about a proposal to take 20 of the best soccer clubs in Europe and form what was called a Super League that would earn a massive payday for the teams included in said Super League,

but basically destroy European soccer as we know it. Fortunately for the Super League participants within days of this idea getting floated, most of the teams pulled out in the Super League imploded upon itself. Ben, again, this is a very 2021-2020 lesson here, which is that protest work. Fans across London had taken to the streets to protests. Some even blocked team buses and delayed a match. So the story might not be totally over. There were reports that some of the Super League leadership might sue teams that withdrew.

There are also questions about whether existing leagues like the English Premier League or the Champions League might punish the teams that try to withdraw. Here's what we do know, which is that the rich American owners are getting destroyed and shouldering lots of the blame. And look, it's kind of funny. It's fun to see billionaires get their asses handed to them by, you know, chanting mobs of Arsenal fans. I like that a lot.

I'd like to say that we had something to do this time. I mean, obviously, our segment on Ponce de the World was right about when the tide turned. But it just goes to show you, activism works and the grossest form of late-stage capitalist excess can ultimately be defeated or at least contained for a period of time. And I hope, you know, it makes people think again about the economics of how these sports are set up. because it's absurd that basically American billioners look at sports clubs that are so important to the identity of communities as no different than any other product that they're just trying to squeeze like every single cent of revenue out of. That's not how like, you know, it's all well and good to make some money in a sports team,

but like it's about, you know, these communities that really are invested in. Yeah, I mean, talk to any like Brooklyn Dodgers fan, uh, fans, from Cleveland, Baltimore, who had teams ripped away from them and their identities just destroyed because someone wanted to make a buck. It's pretty brutal. Pretty brutal. Last thing, before we get to your interview, I wanted to end with a quick tribute to some heroic workers around the world. Today, we are not talking about doctors, firefighters, aid workers, although we do love them very much. Today we are saluting an employee in Italy who is accused of skipping work for 15 straight years while getting full pay and just exploiting the system.

And then there's a couple in Taiwan that got married four times and divorced three times to exploit the country's paid time-off policy for couples that get married. So I just want to say that we hear at Ponce of the World salute that kind of creativity and, you know, good for you. Well, some people can take it too far, Tommy, because you and I are on the text chain where it was flagged the guy in Japan who went on, dating sites and kept changing his birthday. Did you see this? Right. Yes. Didn't he get arrested? Yeah, he got arrested. So this dude, like, would go on dating sites and he'd date people and he would set his birthday as like right away, like a week after they'd started dating. And somehow he leveraged this into getting like 40 something women to give him birthday presents.

That's incredible. And then he got, he got thrown in the can. I mean, like, he got arrested. And like I didn't wonder what like Japanese law. I guess it's fraud? I don't know. I guess. But like, I mean, part of me was kind of like, well, that's an interesting take that this guy's got. You know, I mean, but, but yes, we'll we'll end the salute with the Italian and the Taiwanese. Don't take it as far. Don't take that logic as far as our friend in Japan did. You know, because hey man. Could land you in the slimmer. If you haven't been to like a Chili's or something and said it's your friend birthday so they get a free cake and, you know, the wait staff sings to them, you haven't lived. So I also salute this gentleman in Japan for his great TV. Well, we don't know

the details. We had to reserve judgment because maybe there's something. Yeah, fair enough. But the headline made it seem like, you know, this is just a guy who had a scan that worked for a while and then he got caught, you know. Here's the birthdays. Okay. When we come back, we'll have Ben's interview with Vietan Wynn, so stick around for that. I am very pleased to be joined now by Vietan, who is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathor and the Errol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His new book, The Committed, is out now. Viet, thanks so much for joining us.

Hey, Ben, good to talk to you again. So, look, I just want to start by saying, like, this is a phenomenal book. Like, people need to go out and buy it. I have to admit, I was skeptical that you could match the sympathizer. I think this, in some ways, even exceeds it. If you haven't read the sympathizer, you can still read the sympathizer. you can still read this book. But I want to start with a broad question that I kept thinking because the book is many things like the Sympathizer.

It's a crime thriller set in 1980s Paris. It's kind of propulsive plot with very colorful characters coming in and out. But it's also this novel clearly of ideas about colonialism and identity and believing in something or not believing in things. And I think if the readers pick it up here, what you'll find are these amazing vignettes of dialogue. and discovery along the way where, you know, you stop and you have to process what's coming at you. The question I have for you after that intro is when you sit down to write a book like this, a novel like this, that is such a novel of ideas, did you begin with like the particular story you wanted to tell? Or do you have these ideas that you want to communicate and you build the

story around it? How do you go about setting up to write the sympathizer or the committed? Well, I think these, well, first of all, thank you for being skeptical and for keeping your skepticism to yourself. I'm glad I didn't know about that. But, you know, I mean, each book is different. And so the sympathizer and the committed evolved in different ways. And in the sympathizer, you know, it was very important for me to have a plot that would work very well and seduce readers along the way. And that was a novel of ideas as well, but probably not quite as explicit a novel of ideas as the committed. So I thought the sympathizer was more kind of a, a satire and wanted to set up a lot of plot points along the way that would allow my narrator to get his punches in against the Americans and the French and the various Vietnamese factions as well. But with the committee, it was certainly going to be more of an explicit novel of ideas because it's a different situation that our narrator finds himself in. In the sympathizer, he's a spy, he's on a mission. In the committee, he's no longer a spy, and he's destroyed psychologically after everything that happened to him in the

sympathizer. And he has to rebuild himself. And this is where the novel of ideas part comes into play, because here he has to reconsider everything he's ever thought about himself and about the world and his own vision of himself as revolutionary and all the theories and philosophies that have shaped him. So in constructing the committed, one of the things that was really different was the sympathizer had a two-page outline. And the committed had something like a 40 or 50 page outline and notes about various kinds of things that I wanted to investigate and have conversations about and a lot of it didn't make it into the novel, but a lot of it did. So I still wanted to be a crime novel and to work as a novel with a plot. So all that was working. And then it was really

crucial to try to figure out how does he get to have these exchanges about ideas? How does that, how does that work organically without it seeming as if here's a professor coming in to give you a lecture? And so part of the plot was, you know, the necessity of creating characters and situations where it would be sort of believable that he could have these kinds of exchanges about Saut or Camus or Phenon and Césaire and so on and so forth. Hopefully, hopefully it worked. Yeah. Well, I definitely thought it worked. And I mean, one of the things it's obviously about is colonialism. And it's interesting to me how, you know, you deal with kind of American colonialism and the sympathizer and French colonialism. And then this, you know,

just so the listeners know, we begin this book, you know, our narrating, you know, our narrating, has ended up in France. He's been through a re-education camp. He's been through quite an ordeal. He's been a double agent. He was spying for the communist revolution in Vietnam while working for the Americans, lived in America. So this is someone with multiple identities. But he's taken in by the French, who were obviously the original colonizers of Vietnam. And then what I thought it was so interesting is, you know, he makes his decision to essentially become a drug dealer. You know, he's peddling hashish to kind of this circle of French intelligency, et cetera. And I thought you, you seem to be blending capitalism with colonialism, like the decision

to become a drug dealer corrupts him in some fashion. It almost felt to me like I was reading this, like he was being colonized by the action of not being a drug dealer, per se, but just by the action of being dependent on money. Did you see those two things as blended as you're constructing kind of the circumstances for the narrator? Yeah, I think both of these novels is a sympathizer and the committed. And by the way, you don't have to have read the sympathizer to read the committed. I don't know why you haven't read the sympathizer, but in case you haven't, you can just read the committed. There's plenty of referrals back to the earlier plot. But I think of these two novels as certainly entertainments in the Graham Green sense,

you know, quite American and books like that. You read them for the thriller aspect. But I also think of them as indictments of colonialism, like you're saying. And my own thinking over the past the years has turned increasingly towards the necessity for thinking about how colonization hasn't really ended. I mean, we've lived through the period of national decolonization and wars for independence and all that. But the psychic structures of colonialism continue, like I'm mentally colonized, even though I'm trying to think against colonialism and the economic fallout of colonialism and the political fallout still continues. So it's crucial to foreground colonialism, how it operates, how it continues to shape our lives, whether we benefited from it or whether we were

exploited by it. And in my mind, colonialism is inseparable from capitalism. And colonialism is a form of capitalism. It's done specifically through racism and imperialism, but it's a way of exploiting entire nations and peoples for their resources and their labor, just a really naked and brutal form of capitalism. And of course, our narrator is a communist. He's opposed to all these kinds of things, but he's been disillusioned with communism at the end of the sympathizer. And so he does things he should not do, including, as you're saying, not just becoming a drug dealer, which might be personally morally reprehensible, but becoming capitalists, which in his view is actually much more reprehensible, because as he says, a drug dealer might harm a few people, but a capitalist

plunders from millions and is not apologetic about it. And of course, we're living through a time period where I think that's kind of explicit with the Sackler family. I mean, we're having a whole episode of capitalist exploitation of drugs happening right in front of our faces as a function and an outcome of capitalism. I don't think it's an aberration. I think it's a part of the system. And of course, this novel makes reference to the fact that the original drug runners in Southeast Asia

were the French, the French government, the French military. They cultivated opium. They forced the Southeast Asians to buy the opium and to consume it. So they weren't that different from the British in that sense. And so when we look at all this tangle of colonialism and capitalism and drugs, part of the point that the novel is making is that the real crime

is, again, not the individual crime. of the drug dealer or the criminal, but the larger systemic crimes of colonialism and capitalism. Yeah. And I thought, I mean, it was interesting to me how, you know, again, there's just, you know, people should know, and one of the many reasons pick up this book, it's kind of a propulsive crime thriller. And I really loved the kind of the glimpse into 1980s Paris. I made me want to visualize that. But it also has all these remarkable, you know, conversations and debates. And, and, And what's interesting to me is that the foil is often kind of French leftists, right? People who are seeking to make themselves kind of foreign fellow travelers or supporters of these

Vietnamese, but who cannot help being incredibly condescending. And I was wondering about that dynamic where often in the West, you know, it's the people who think that they're on the right side of these things who aren't doing enough to kind of question the prison. through which they're engaging on issues like Vietnam or name any other circumstance where you're kind of moving into post-colonial society. I mean, how did you think about these archetypal characters, these kind of French leftists who, you know, proclaim themselves as socialist or even Maoists or communist, and yet have such an impossible time connecting or understanding the people that they're trying to sympathize with? Well, I had a lot of fun portraying these types of characters. And

I think part of the point of these two novels is that, you know, they're novels that try to punch up. I mean, they're satirizing the powerful and the abuses of power and the hypocrisies of power. And part of the point is that we're all susceptible to that. It doesn't matter whether we're Democrats or Republicans or on the left wing or on the right wing. You can see these kinds of excesses and contradictions happening everywhere all the time. It's part of human nature that we take these noble ideals, whatever they're called. And then because we're human, we screw them up with our petty vanities and failures and greeds and all that kind of thing. And I speak from personal experience.

I'm a petty, flawed individual. And if you gave me that much power, I might be kind of a problematic human being myself. But, you know, in the sympathizer, there was a lot of critique, obviously, of Americans, and especially the American right wing and the militaristic part of American culture. But when it came to France, it seemed to me that, you know, it would be beneficial to point out how the left wing, everything from, you know, socialist to communists also do some of the same things as well. And it wasn't hard to find these examples in French culture and politics. of French leftists and intellectuals behaving badly

and having a particular kind of fetishization about the East and about Maoism and the potential revolutionary idealism. We see this in contemporary French history from the idealization of the May 1968 movement in Paris, and we see it even with what's happening today. So there's a character in the novel called BFD. He's a sort of a French left-wing politician

based on a lot of people, but certainly inspired partly by DSK, you know, the other famous guy with three initials. Like Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He was a socialist prime minister candidate for higher office in France. And this guy, you know, was alleged to have raped his black hotel maid, never convicted of that. But in the process, it came out that he and his high-flutin friends had a very expensive

ring of call girls that they resorted to. And that's alluded to in the novel as well. So it's quite a lot of fun to poke fun at our French allies as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, like one of the things that you do in both these books and also in another great nonfiction book that you wrote, Nothing Ever Dies, which I also recommend to people, is offer this experience of the war from the Vietnamese perspective. And you are a Vietnamese American. But what made me consider is, you know, coming of age the, you know,

the culture I consumed about that was kind of left wing, right? I mean, it was all those movies, right? Apocalypse Now and the deer hunter. But it was all about the tragedy of what the war done, like two Americans. And if the Vietnamese entered into the picture, you know, they were victims, but we didn't really see them. You know, they were on the other side of napalm or they were the statistic of three million dead, which dwarfed, you know, the 50,000 that obviously was tragic for Americans.

how much do you see the role of these books as identifying, hey, there's a different experience than the very narrow prism through which America has presented its version of the Vietnam War? I mean, how do we make sense of such a large event in our history that excludes the people, you know, the Vietnamese people who actually were there when the war was fought? Well, you know, I'm Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, born in Vietnam, came here as a refugee, and I'm also a writer, you know, which makes me a little bit different. different than a lot of other Vietnamese people who became doctors and lawyers and engineers. And, you know, my feeling is we need our storytellers. You know, we're living at a time of anti-Asian

violence and all of our doctors and lawyers and engineers aren't necessarily going to save us. But we need the storytellers to change the narrative, right? We need the storytellers to fight against anti-Asian hatred and how it's sort of fundamentally embedded in the narratives of the United States. And I'm also, you know, humbled by the fact that, you know, even a good novel, we'll have tens of thousands of readers, but a bad movie or a bad TV show will have millions of viewers. So this is what we're up against in terms of trying to change narratives and how they're embedded with power. So, you know, you brought up Hollywood and its ability to narrate a certain kind of a story. And I felt in the sympathizer, it was important to try to contest that because not just because they're American stories,

but because they're global stories. The reason people pay attention to these movies all over the world is because America has the capacity to export its movies as well as export its weaponry and influence. globally. So to try to contest that within an American novel would be a way to try to contest that within the circuits of the English language and of English language literature, which is global, again, because of America's global power. Now that being said, it's such an immense task because the entire weight of American culture, from presidential rhetoric to the Pentagon to foreign policy to Hollywood is designed deliberately and sort of just implicitly

to get Americans to see the world in a particular way. And, you know, part of the point of the sympathizer in particular is that this is a form of propaganda and it's a form of soft power that Americans absorb without knowing it. You know, Americans say, oh, you know, the Chinese or the Russians or the real propagandists, but, you know, we have our own form of propaganda that operates in a soft power kind of fashion. So the contradiction here is that you can have a left-wing Hollywood culture that silences Vietnamese people. and that at the same time you can have someone like me, a Vietnamese American writer, who's allowed to publish his books in the United States.

But how much change can these novels have against, again, this whole weight of American culture trying to get us to see things just from the American point of view. So I think it's crucial that I try to do it and that others try to do it as well. But God, it's such an immense task. And I don't know. I just, in my darkest moments, I fear that it's hard for something like literature to change the direction. of this gigantic American vessel of power and ideology. Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask how does, what is the role of the novelist or the writer or a novel in changing that?

And I guess a different way of asking that question, because you already kind of answered, is there any way to kind of break down some of these, you know, silos, right? Because, you know, there can be a whole conversation happening, you know, through novels that never enters into foreign policy where I used to work. You know, I mean, people weren't reading novels. They probably should have been, you know. I mean, is there any way if you, you live out in L.A., right? So do you see any hope, any possibility for a more constructive kind of cross-pollination

between the kind of ideas that can be explored in novel and what's being produced by popular culture or entering into conservation? Well, I mean, the couple of things, you know, which is, you know, besides being a novelist, I also do my best to be, you know, a pundit or whatever you want to call it by running op-eds and everything like that. And one of the interesting things that happened recently was I published an op-ed with my friend Janelle Wong in the Washington Post saying, hey, you know, there's anti-Asian violence happening, but we can't be naive and think that this is separate from our stances against China, for example.

If you elevate China to be the number one threat against the United States, you know, given the racist history of the United States against Asians, that's going to rebound on our Asian-American populations. Lo and behold, got an invitation to talk to the state. department about that op-ed. So maybe there is some hope there that if more writers were thinking about themselves not only as poets or noblists and what have you, but to think about ourselves as committed writers, which is partly what the novel the committed is about, maybe we could have at least some impact as a consequence of whatever minor cultural status we have as

writers and as intellectuals. And then the other side of it, as you said, is pop culture. And here's one of the most offensive questions you can ask a writer of a novelist like me, which is, so when is it going to be turned into a movie, as if that is the ultimate sign of cultural approval, not that you have a novel, but that it's going to become a movie. And so, of course, the novel has been option for TV production, hopefully it would happen, but it's very complicated path, as you know, to try to get anything to be made into an actual TV series in Hollywood. But, you know, there's, maybe there's some hope there that with the right collaborators, you know, you can make this TV show. people will go ga-ga because it costs 50 million to 100 million dollars to produce a TV series whereas with this novel it cost me it's like thousands of dollars whatever I'm worth it's like worth thousands of dollars and and maybe then you know people could see more of the critique that's

being made disguised as disguised as TV entertainment so it's a complex mechanism because you know and I think you're you've talked about this all kinds of compromises moral and aesthetic and political need to be made, the higher up you go into this chain of power and of money. And so there's no surprise that it's poets who are the first ones, I think, to take moral stances because all it takes is that your own life, whereas Hollywood is the last one to take moral stances because it's like hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. And of course, people are very reluctant once that money is involved to do anything courageous. Yeah, that's a great point. And the same is true in foreign policy, right? The higher up you get, the more, you know, you almost have to compromise something.

just to go to work, right? And I had a couple of questions for you on foreign policy because they're interesting echoes from your books. I mean, the first is Vietnam, right? We're in this kind of strange moment, and we were even in the Obama years where American Vietnam were getting closer together in some ways because of shared concerns about China. It's like history coming full circle around this question of, you know, Vietnamese discomfort with the Chinese discomfort with the Chinese encroachment on the South China Sea and their borders, American strategic interest in Asia. I was a part of that. I spent a lot of time with Vietnamese officials. How do you make sense of this world in which, you know, less than a half century after an incredibly brutal

war, you know, Vietnam is one of our closer partners in Asia. And it's not about democracy or any, you know, any value proposition per se. It's actually kind of about. sovereignty, right, the Vietnamese desire to be left alone and to have their independence. Like, how do you look at that? And do you, you know, do you see it as a positive or is it kind of, in some way, speak to the, you know, the failures of both the American and Vietnamese systems to see things beyond, you know, a pretty narrow interest? Well, I think from the American perspective, and this is, you know, I think we, Americans took all the wrong lessons from the war in Vietnam. I mean, from my understanding in the war, in the years after

the war in Vietnam, it was all about these kinds of strategic and policy decisions. You know, how do we fight this war? How do we fight the next war better, for example, with better weapons, better tactics, better cultural policies, this kind of thing. Whereas the question should have been, how do we not fight a war again? Because hindsight is 2020, but if we look at what happened in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975, things would have, if the United States had simply just let things unfold the way they should have. If the Americans had not sided with the French, if the Americans had not tried to interfere, the country probably would have, you know, unified under Ho Chi Minh, maybe it would have been communist. Maybe it wouldn't have been communist. Who knows? Most likely

would have been communist. But in the end, the result would have been the same. A unified communist Vietnam would still have come seeking American help as Ho Chi Minh tried to do in 1945 because the bigger enemy was China. And we could have gotten to that point, you know, without the loss of millions of people in Vietnam, but also in Laos and Cambodia, where the war spilled over as well. And so we can't change that history, but if we look at that history, then we can think, well, maybe if we had just let people pursue their own sovereignty and our intervention should have been to help them materially with aid, for example, versus with warfare and soldiers, we could have had a very different outcome, much less loss of human life on all sides, much less

expenditure of money, or at least our money could have been going to improve human lives rather than taking them away. So from my perspective, it seems again, we took the wrong lessons, and that's why we're in Iraq and Afghanistan and all this kind of stuff that's happened over the past 20 years. So, you know, in the current situation, it's just one of these brutal ironies of history and of politics that now these mortal enemies, the Americans and the Vietnamese, are, if not best friends, at least friendly and willing to let the past be the past. It's a kind of a reconciliation in some ways that is not a, I think, a real reconciliation. It's a reconciliation geared for geopolitical self-interest and strategies.

And what I mean by saying that it's not a real reconciliation is that I think the underlying issues that brought these countries into conflict with each other in both countries has not been resolved. So in the United States case, we're still the same kind of country we were, I think, getting into Vietnam. And hopefully Joe Biden has recognized that and is trying to steer both domestic and foreign policy in a different direction. And for the Vietnamese perspective, I think there's still all these kinds of contradictions of inequity within the country that was part of the reason that the Vietnamese wanted to fight a war of freedom and independence. And that's all been

papered over as well. So, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about what's happening. Well, and you kind of anticipated the question I was going to ask, which is Afghanistan, right? 20 years were finally leaving, leaving that place, probably with as little understanding of it as we had of Vietnam in 1975 in a lot of ways. And I guess that leads to the last question, which is less about foreign policy because your basic point of like maybe don't fight these wars is a good answer to the war piece of it. But it's interesting that America is a country that has. has people from everywhere, right? I mean, we have a large Vietnamese population here, despite the horrific anti-Asian violence we've seen recently that has, that population has thrived. But how is it that America manages to have people from everywhere and not be able to

incorporate the lessons of their experience and our own understanding of the countries where these people came from, right? And how could we do better to, as a nation, reflects our actual diversity in, you know, in our own conception of ourselves. I mean, your book is a lot on this question of how do you select what you believe in, you know? And I guess in a country like America that part of what you believe in is diversity, diverse views, diverse peoples, you know, having written and thought a lot about this, I'm just curious, like, what your sense is of how we construct an identity as a country that is able to draw on on that diversity rather than kind of fight against it.

All right, so I'm going to give you a short-term answer that's optimistic and a long-term answer that's pessimistic. Oh, I know. So the short-term answer is like, you know, around the question of diversity is that our recognition of diversity is always belated. You know, when the new population comes in, whoever that happens to be, let's say it's the Vietnamese in my case.

You know, in 1975, the majority of Americans didn't want to take in Vietnamese refugees. And then, you know, Congress did the right thing and admitted us. And then it turns out we were pretty good. It's like, hey, we've contributed to American society. Now, like, if we look at Afghanistan, what we should be doing is, like, rescuing as many Afghans as possible. You know, it's like, I agree. We should get the American military out of Afghanistan.

This was a total disaster. But we can't just, like, abandon all these people that we persuaded and strong-armed into fighting this terrible war. It's exactly what happened to the Vietnamese people. Vietnamese, a lot of Vietnamese did not even want the Americans there. They were to take an American aid to fight that war, but they didn't necessarily want. American troops in Vietnam. And then by the time the American was all broken down, you know, it was a total, you know, horror show in terms of trying to get people out. So we have a chance, again, to do history better by taking in as many Afghans who sided

with Americans as one to come to the United States. And I'm really kind of horrified that this may not happen. Again, taking the wrong lessons out of what happened during the war in Vietnam. So it's belated because, you know, obviously there are probably a lot of Americans who are like, we don't want to take Afghans in. They're this kind of foreign population. They may be terrorists, et cetera. And then 30 years down the road, if we actually had Afghan Americans, we'd be like, hey, you know, we love you guys. You know, you bring great food and great music and all those other kind of stuff to the United States. So that's part of the problem here. You know, we have a scapegoating issue like many countries do. We fear the other. And then once we get to spend time

with the new other, we're like, they're not so bad. So that's the optimistic answer, that the rhetoric of diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism is something that's necessary to trying to fine-tune this country's operations. Now, the long-term pessimistic answer, and this goes back to the colonialism question that the committed is committed to, is that I think the reason why the diversity issue is not going to solve things and why there's still endemic anti-Asian hate in this country is reflected in the fact that a lot of Asian Americans are going around saying, you know, in reception, response to anti-Asian hate, hey, we're Americans, we belong here, we've been here for a very

long time, many of us, and we're not going away. And that's a very affirmative thing from the perspective of diversity and American pluralism that a lot of us believe in. But part of me feels a little uneasy when I hear that, because part of what that narrative participates in is something that Asian Americans have said for a long time, we claim America. Well, if you claim America, you claim everything about America, about the United States. And by that, I mean, you claim everything, including the colonization that this country was built on. So if I was a Native American or an indigenous person, I heard this rhetoric, I'd be like, hmm, well, that sounds awesome, you know, to want to belong to America. But America colonized us, is colonizing us still.

And that colonization is, you know, genocide to violent conquest and so on. things that have continued arguably, from my perspective, into the way that we conduct our wars today. So there's a huge contradiction there between the desire to be diverse and to recognize people and to include them and all that being premised upon a colonizing system that is still a part of the United States. And unless we can actually recognize that contradiction and try to find a way to deal with it, and Americans have a very hard time recognizing this, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, to see a recurring pattern, both of American wars overseas, but also of problems of racism and violence domestically as well.

Yeah, I think the fact that we had something called the Vietnam syndrome referred to in foreign policy circles, it was actually about how we learned the wrong lesson because we got too hesitant to get into wars again, you know, and now we're, you know, obviously have a post-9-11 forever war syndrome. Hopefully this is a time where we can learn those lessons, but it really, but it really, we're requires vigilance. And it requires books like The Committed. I cannot recommend this book enough. Like I said, it's funny, intelligent, it's a crime thriller, it's atmospheric in 80s Paris. It's got characters you won't forget. And above all, it's this kind of novel of ideas that is situated

in kind of the tradition of the great American novel. So congratulations on the book. And thanks so much for having this conversation with us. Thanks for having me, Ben. And let's hope that there will be more readers in foreign policy and government in the future? The best thing I ever did, and I didn't do it enough, was I tried to try to read novels before we'd visit like a foreign country by someone from that country, you know? Like, if I could make a change in requirement, I think, you know, requiring people to read deeply in the fiction and culture of the countries that they're working with, you know, would be better than reading the Think Tank papers.

but hey, you know. Sounds like utopia. Yeah, exactly. It's a little utopian. All right, man. Well, thanks so much and good talk to you. Bye, Ben. Thanks for having you.

Thanks again to Vietang Win for doing the show. Thanks to the Super League for imploding. You know, you know what we didn't make fun of today that we very easily could have been was our friend Rick Santorum. Oh, yeah. For his brilliant views on colonialism and Native American culture. And just one of the most a historic takes on the founding of the United States

in its recent history that I've ever heard. And again, I would recommend to him and everyone listening to watch Exterminate All the Brutes on HBO Max if you actually want a realistic look at how that all went down because it's not quite how Mr. Santorum envisions it in his mind. Well, sometimes there are clips like this and people are like, don't spread the clips, don't look at the clips, don't want to give it more juice. I'm like, actually, everybody should watch this because for about a two-minute period, every single thing Rick Santorm says is stupid and wrong and unintentionally a self-own.

And yet he says it as if he's really smart, you know. And obviously the most egregious version is this outrageous comment about native cultures. But yeah, like it just reminds you that the kind of pseudo-intellectuals on the right are often like the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Yes, yes. And he is just not to be tribal, Tommy, not to be not to be politically polarizing. But, you know. I mean, I just think that if you're a U.S. senator, if you're a paid political commentator,

you should read one history book that isn't written from the vantage point of like, I don't know, Andrew Jackson's biography or like I'm trying to think of the most like white supremacist sort of broken version of history of the United States. You could think of that might be it for me. Yeah. Anyway, well, thanks to Rick Santorum from this little after the show. We dealt with him. Yeah, yeah. And talk to you guys next week. See it. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yelfried, Nar Malkonian and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.