Pod Save the World - Keir Starmer’s Last Stand?

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Tommy and Ben survey the wreckage of another week in global politics. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer clings to power after Labour was crushed in local elections. Tommy and Ben debate whether Starmer should step aside or stay and fight. Then they run through the latest with Iran, from the short-lived “Project Freedom” to why Trump says the ceasefire is on “life support.” They recap Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s softball interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, including Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is ready to wean itself off US military support and that social media is to blame for Israel’s tattered image. They preview Trump’s visit to Beijing for his long-delayed summit with Xi Jinping, mock some recent fawning coverage of Marco Rubio, and recap FBI Director Kash Patel’s grilling about his drinking habits by the US Senate. Finally, Ben talks with journalist Suzy Hansen about her new book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast, episode title, and episode date.For Friends of the Pod, Tommy and Ben answer questions from Discord about how the US can repair its relationship with Canada, and give insight on their favorite rappers and wines.Preorder Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches, subscribe to his Substack, and reserve a spot for his virtual book launch event on May 18 here.

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Fastgrowing trees.com code world. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use world to save today. Offer is valid for limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben, congrats on your New York. Nickerbockers. It's unreal, Tommy. This is the best that they've played in my entire life. Usually when they're good, it is still agonizing. I don't know what it feels like to have your team just like paste the shit out of everybody they play. Just crush the sex. Just crush and be fun and cool and have our fans take over Philadelphia.

Yon Bing Bong and people? Yeah. It was, you know, it was, let's put it this way, like a four-game destruction of Philadelphia was more fun than what would have been probably an agonizing Nick Celtic series for six or seven games. Would have been tough. Ben Stiller out there tweeting away. So bang, twin towers. A lot of tweets that are taken a couple different ways. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Stiller's, like I said, he's just living my text read online. Does he sit on the wood? Does he sit like a courtside? He's the courtside, yeah. That's so awesome. What do you think those costs?

I got to go. We on the wood? Yes. For the first time this year. And it's weird because you kind of look down this row and there's like Spike Lee, Salamey. Ben Stiller. You know, Shalomey wasn't there that day.

Tracy Morgan. And it's, you know, I actually like our celebrities. Like sometimes that's kind of nauseating, but like Spike Lee, come on. I mean, Spike's been going forever through thick and thin. He's a fan. They suck mostly. And yeah, he absolutely deserves to. Enjoy this.

Salome has proven himself to be a real sports fan, seemingly a pretty cool guy. I will say that they have the ex-players there, which is cool to see, too. I won't name names, but one of them walked by me, and the whiff of marijuana was like the one of most powerful smells. I got like a contact high on the court side, but it's good. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, and then Jim Dolan is like using AI facial recognition to kick out any critics. All right, just to give a wreck here, Pablo Tori did a find out a bad. Dolan. Dolan's the owner of the Nix. And he literally has his friggin security goons run around the stadium and chase people that chant things critical of him. He's that petty of a sad little man.

monitors people in the bathroom. It's really creepy. That is. Really? Kind of palanteer-esque. Gross. That's very palanteroesque. Okay. Enough about the Knicks. I'm happy for you. We have a great show today. We're going to lead with something new. We're going to talk about the recent elections in the UK, which were a disaster for the Labor Party and have led to, widespread calls for Prime Minister Kierist Armour to step aside and allow a leadership election. We'll debate whether that's a good idea or not. Then we're going to walk you through the last disastrous week in the disastrous war with Iran. We got abandoned missions, Ben, ceasefires on life support. We had ballooning economic consequences, all of it. Then we watched Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Dent Yahoo's interview in 60 minutes so that you don't have to. We're going to let you know about all the hard-hitting questions from the new and improved Barry

Y, CBS. We'll preview Trump's trip to China. He's going to use actually, I think he's in air right now. He's going to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. We'll tell you what both sides won out of the visit, what it means for Iran, what it means for Taiwan. We'll talk a little bit about some jockeying for the future of the Democratic Party on foreign policy. We'll bitch about coverage of Marco Rubio because that's all we have left. We're just whining little babies cry about stuff.

And then we're going to tell you about Cash Patel's recent testimony in the U.S. Senate that then you did our interview. I talked to Susie Hansen, who's a really great journalist who's written for like the New York Times Magazine, among other places. She lived in Turkey for 10 years. And she wrote a book essentially about one neighborhood, but it's really about the transformation of Turkey under Taip Erdogan, both inside of Turkey, but also this role it's played in welcoming millions of Syrian refugees in the Arab Spring and, you know, the rise of authoritarianism that Erdogan's been a part of. So it's both a conversation about Erdogan and Turkey, but also about understanding what's happened in the world through this place that all the trends converge in. I mean, like, there's

not one thing that hasn't happened in the world in the last 15 years. It hasn't run through Turkey. So it's a great conversation, great book. Cool. I always think about the day that there was that attempted coup. We talk about that fighter jets. Yeah. That's what, yeah, we were just, you came in and we were still talking about it after the interview because I have so many questions. Tanks rolling down the street and then just disappeared. And yet Aaron seemed to know about it, but did he? He's like Face timing from his phone on the plane. The whole thing was very strange. Fucking crazy.

Finally, after that, our friends of the pod subscribers will hear Ben and I take some questions from the friend of the pod subscriber community from our Discord. If you want to join, go to crooked.com slash friends. You get ad-free episodes of this show, ad-free episodes of Potsave America. You get bonus episodes of Pots Save America. You get polling deep dives from Dan Pfeiffer. And you can get discounted tickets to CrookedCon, our second annual jamboree of politics, fun, hot takes, cold takes.

light drinking, heavy petting, there's all of it. So crooked.com slash friends if you want to go. And by the way, subscribing is the number one thing you could do to help us grow as a progressive independent media company. And if that's a bridge too far for you, at least just subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, rate through the show, review the show. It really helps us grow. And we will appreciate it.

So all right, Ben, let's talk. Let's leave with the UK because we've been doing Iran stuff for like two months straight now. there have been some major political machinations in the UK. Prime Minister Kier-Starmers' tenure as Prime Minister could be over soon or not. We just don't know yet. The backstory here is last week there were local elections in England and elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. These were not elections to Parliament itself. It was not like directly impacting Starmor standing, but these council elections are seen as

Bellwether's to assess the political mood in the UK. And the mood is pissed. Voters are pissed. The results were really, really bad for the last. the Labor Party. Remember, Labor won an historic landslide in 2024, but in this election, just two years later, labor lost 1,400 council seats. So it's just a drubbing. And labor lost votes from both directions. They lost to the Greens on their left. They lost to Reform UK on their right. Reform is the right-wing xenophobic party run by Nigel Farage, the cameo star, Nigel Farage.

So Reform, they made big gains in England. Reform also did really well in Wales and Scotland. In Wales, the Welsh nationalist party won the most seats, but reform came in second in labor and the Tories last ground. This came after Labor was literally the leading party in Wales for 100 years, over 100 years. And then in Scotland, the S&P of the Scottish National Party, they're going to stay in control of parliament. And labor had its worst ever result in Scotland. It is now tied with reform. The Greens also did quite well in Scotland. So what does it all mean?

I think first we're seeing the total collapse of the traditional two-party. Yeah. And it's really becoming a five-party system. And you've got labor in the Tories cratering. The Lib Dems are doing better. The Greens reform UK. They're gaining ground. And then in Scotland and Wales, you also have like nationalist local parties. Second, you have voters just furious about the cost of living and a bunch of economic issues and labor has not made their lives better. They're getting punished for it. And there's lots of reports. that labor campaigners were on the doors, and they were talking to voters,

and the voters were like, we hate Keir Starmor, hate, like visceral hate for that man, which is interesting. So that gets us to the question of whether Starmor will step aside or be deposed. On Monday, he gave a defiant speech, taking responsibility for the loss,

but rejecting calls to resign. Let's listen to a bit of that. The election results last week were tough, very tough. We lost some brilliant Labor representative. that hurts and it should hurt I get it

I feel it and I take responsibility we are not just facing dangerous times but dangerous opponents very dangerous opponents this hurts not just because Labour has done badly

but because if we don't get this right our country will go down a very dark path. It seems like he's not feeling emotions, but performing them. So on Tuesday, he also had the cabinet meeting. He was again defined. He told his team he's not going anywhere. But it's not entirely up to him. There are reports that more than 90 labor MPs want Starmor to step aside.

That includes four ministers in his government. But crucially, Ben, no alternative candidate has gotten the support of 81 sitting labor MPs, which is what you need to formally challenge Starmor and trigger a leadership election. So, Ben, I'll pause there. Your thoughts on these results. And then after that, do you want to make the case that it's time for Kier Starmor to step aside? And I'll make the Starmor should stay case.

Yeah. Strawman, just for fun. Yeah. Yeah. And I could probably argue it both ways, but I would definitely tilt in the direction I'm going to argue for. Look, the problem here is that Labor won this massive majority. in large part because the Tories had self-immolated,

as we covered meticulously on this podcast. Over a decade. Over the course of a decade with Brexit and Liz Truss and all the chaos, Boris Johnson having COVID parties, all the rest of it. And so they get this huge mandate and have done fuck all with it. I mean, like, what was their program? Like, what is Keir Starmers? They got jobs for Jeffrey Epstein, friends.

Yeah. What is Keir Starmers? Well, this is part of the problem, is it, Their theory, Starmer's theory of the case was, I got to purge Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing previous leader of labor and all of his supporters, and move this party to the center to make it an acceptable alternative to the Tories and win. And that worked. But the problem is they had no program for when they won.

And this is a country that has an identity crisis after Brexit. This is a country that is desperately need of growth. This is a country that has xenophobic, rising far-right politics, but desperately needs immigrants to sustain their care economy and their NHS. So there's a lot of work to be done, and he's not offering any vision or any big ideas about what the UK is or what their economic future is. And that's showing up in the polls, you know?

And I know some of these, you know, someone I know, Paman Assad actually won by 30 votes, but, you know, 30 votes, it's tough, you know. And here I'll pivot to the case against Starmor. I know what he said, which is that we can't be as chaotic as the Tories and change of leaders, you know, in the merry ground. Let me have five years to have my full mandate. The problem with that is he has not shown any other gear. You know, you know when you see a politician.

I mean, first of all, does he get it? No. He looks like he's reading talking points. He was told to say, I feel it. He did a 10 speech preps where they said show passion. And he just can't really show. show motion or passion. He's like a well-meaning perhaps guy, but like he doesn't, but then beyond that, he hasn't shown that he has any new vision or any new program. It's all political positioning and

tact. Should I tack a little bit more to the right as they've done on immigration, which doesn't make sense because if you're anti-immigrant, you'll just vote for reform. Should I tack to the left? And look, the Green Party's done a lot to differentiate itself and actually stand on principle. That's why they're winning voters. I just don't think he knows what he wants to do as prime minister, other than state prime minister. And there's a kind of, you know, there's a kind of younger Joe Biden vibe here, too. I just want to stick around. And look.

He's the guy that did August. Yeah, well, it's true. To be fair. But he's not wrong about Reform U.K. being scary. I mean, this is a xenophobic far-right party led by Nigel Farage, who should be a punchline, not a prime minister. But precisely because of that threat, I just don't see him rehabilitating labor to be able to compete with Nigel Farage. And look, the biggest problem is there's not an alternative. Part of the problem is not alternative.

The biggest alternative is Andy Burnham, right? Who's a very popular mayor, but who would have to come into the parliament to become prime minister. was blocked from coming into parliament by Kier Starrmer and his allies. And so they prevented there from being alternatives. Again, echoes of the Democratic Party, how we've done primaries. And so I just don't, I just don't know that Kier Starmar has showed us that he can govern any differently than he already has. And we see what the results are of how he governs. And I just therefore think that, And look, take some time. If you're not ready today to find an alternative, you know, figure out a timeline to find one.

But if they're running three years from now under the next election with Kura Starmor, I just think that's a recipe for disaster. So let me straw man the case for why Starmor should stay. Because I actually think it's, then we'll talk about our own personal views. I have a fairly strong view, but it is, it's complicated. It is complicated. The case for why Starmer should stay is, like I said at the top, like this was not a landslide for reform or a total wipeout for labor. It was the political system really fracturing into this

new reality of multi-party, not just a two-party system. And I think we do adjust our expectations accordingly. Yes, Keir Starmer is unpopular. His polling is terrible. There's all these reports about, you know, visceral hatred of him on the doorsteps. But every single leader in Europe, is unpopular right now. In April, UGov did a big tracking poll. Kier Starmor is 44 points underwater. French president, Nomeno Macron, is 49 points underwater. German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz is 52 points underwater. Even leaders, I think, that you and I think of as more deft politically,

or at least more interesting or struggling. Like, Georgia Maloney is negative 22, her approval. Pedro Sanchez is 21 points underwater. So everyone's getting fucked. People are pissed everywhere. And then, again, like, getting rid of Starmer is the easy, part, figuring out who comes next is much harder. Have you heard of West Streeting, Angela Rainer, or Andy Burnham? Me neither. And those are the leading candidates to replace this guy, right? And

like if West Streeting wants to run, he needs to man up and do it. No one's, no one's manned up yet. And so to your point, Ben, like about Starrmer and his, what do you want to do with the job, I don't get the sense from anybody really what they want to do within labor. Like it's not about who comes next, is about what comes next. Like, and what are you going to do with the mandate? And like, no one's laying out an alternative vision. I know that's complicated when you're still in government, but no one's done it yet. And then in that speech,

we didn't play all of it, but like Starmer did try to lay out a bit of a path forward. He has like more direct intervention in the economy. He talks about like nationalizing steel plants, more partnership with the EU. He takes a more head-on fight with Nigel Farage. He blames the Iran war for a lot of his troubles. Speaking of which, you know,

the one thing this will do is it will be, mean that Starmer helps Nigel Farage deliver on his big election promise. Let's watch a clip of Svaraj ranting away after the election that already happened about the results. We fought this election campaign on a big national slogan. You might remember it. It said vote reform and and I tell you what, he'll be gone by the middle of the summer, the most unpatriotic, worst, least prepared Prime Minister we've ever seen in this country and we will have seen the back of him. We are directly taking votes from patriotic old labour in areas that frankly they've been pretty much able to take for granted since the end of World War I.

It all goes to show that over the course of the last two years since we made that breakthrough in the general election we have professionalised the party. We've done it at a very very rapid rate. Is there possible to have a phone call with your friend Donald Trump to maybe end this war in Iran? That would help prices over here. I think the war in Iran's very close to him. I've been heroin's just not my thing. First of all, way better backdrop for them.

Also, I love the guys who have the big broaches. Like this one, like a ribbon and like a horse jumping competition. But anyway, so if Stormer goes, he, you know, delivers for Farage. And I think that there's no way this ends with just a leadership election. There will be intense pressure to call for an early general election. I'll cover the worst time possible for labor. It'll rattle the bond markets. It'll create a permanent economic cost.

And so I think the only path forward, deliver on the mandate voters gave Starmor, fight it out. Also, very awkward that the King's speech, I think it's the day this episode comes out this Wednesday, and that's where the prime minister lays out his legislative agenda. So it's kind of a crazy time to make a change. But that's the case for Starmor. Yeah. I get the case being that. part of what, like, we made fun of the Tories for, you know, musical chairs, prime ministers,

and that's suboptimal. First of all, Nigel Farage, it's like a walking, talking pack of marble reds, you know, that voice is so funny. But I think that they're not easy answers to these problems. I'd say a couple things, though. First of all, yes, all those people are underwater, but you notice who's less underwater. Pedro Sanchez and Georgia Maloney. Wildly different politically, right?

Far left. Far left. Far left. But they believe things. Like, squishy centrism that Macron and Starmor embody, literally. And Mertz is a little bit more to the right, but, like, is not what anyone's looking for. They want to know that we are dealing in this country, but also in the UK, like, existential problems. You know, like the economy doesn't work.

anymore. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. The world doesn't work anymore. And this idea that you're just going to tinker and a little bit of a social program here and a little bit of a tough on immigrant rhetoric here and, you know, a tiny bit of money for the NHS, the National Health Service. Like that, that approach, that's the Starmerism is just not what people want. Yeah. And it's also creating problems. There's not like a clear faction that wants to get rid of them. It's not like the left of the labor parties all like get rid of Starmer. It's just like everyone kind of just not that into Yeah, because nobody really knows what, you know, what he is and what he stands for. And, you know, I don't, I'd have to go deeper on what the big, what big ideas they could have. What is an actual. Here's one. Brexit was bad. Well, that's what I was right to say. So you read my mind. It's like, why not just say, you know what? Like, this economy has been totally fucked just like was predictable it would be by Brexit. We have lost our place in the world stage because we're kind of an orphan now getting beat up by Donald Trump. Like, we should go back in the EU. Right.

Like, that's good to be better for our geopolitics and our economy. It'll be good for growth because we'll have more markets. Like, something on that scale. The speech hints at more with Europe, more something. Like hints it getting back, hints it undoing Brexit, but then his team was briefing, no, no, no, no, we didn't really mean that. He just wants more partnership with Europe or something like that. It's like, pick aside.

Pick aside and show people that you believe in something. And you know what? God forbid, maybe you lose. But at least you tried to do something you cared about, you know? And I think that's what's missing. And now, you know, Angela Rainer would have normally been the left-wing candidate. She, remember, had these tax issues and mortgage scandals that here, like, you know, nothing. And also, like, nothing compared to Nigel Farage.

I mean, it just came out that he took, like, $5 million from some crypto billionaire for some reason. He says it was for security. But, like, there's no, like, the British media treats him kind of like a fun person to book on shows and be a talking head, not like a serious. A guy who could be prime minister. Yeah. I mean, Zach Polanski, the Green Party, you know, is made real inroads because there's a kind of a mumdani dust that, you know, they have over there. But it's because, like, people actually know what the Greens believe in, you know. And actually on the centrism side, well, then you have the Lib Dems. Like, Labor's just kind of homeless now. Like it, what is it? You know, and I think Starmer is not the one he doesn't seem to be. And you could prove me wrong. He doesn't seem to have the answer. to that question. Yeah, I think Zach Polanski really screwed up recently and didn't seem to take seriously enough some very serious incidents of

anti-Semitism that have happened in the UK. So I don't know what that means for his future. I'm with you. He's Jewish, though. I know, that's a weird part about all this. I mean, the Starmer's speech, I watched the whole thing, then he did a little press conference. It was just, it seemed, it seems so weak. Like, it was

like someone was like tried to, you know, turn him up 20%. He had this refrain where he kept being like, And that's the labor way or like, that's the labor choice. It just, it didn't work. He also, you know, he started to blame Iran for a lot of the UK's problems. I think that, well, it's probably accurate. Yeah, yeah.

They're LNG. It's useful, but I don't know. Like, I think, I think no one thinks that Kierst Armour is going to be leaving the labor party into the next election. And the question is just like, when do you get rid of them? Yeah. Yeah, that to me is the question. Maybe take your time.

Make you a choice. Don't grab a laborless trust. the clock is ticking. They gotta start a process. They can't do what Biden did with Harris and the Democratic Party did and just seem to anoint someone. They need a process.

I don't know how long that is going to have to take, but they're going to have to have one. To your Biden point, I know this is unfair and silly and like an American thing, but I think Starmer said something about this being a fight for the soul of the country and I was like, oh, just screamed Biden.

Yeah, look, I think he's a dead man walking politically. I think he was the right guy to get them through that election. He was not the right guy. for this moment just because once you have a negative 50 approval rating, I don't know how you fix that. Whoever comes next is probably fucked as well. Yeah. Or like staunch the bleeding.

I don't know. Yeah. We beat Medicare. We beat Medicare. The scary thing is there's all these trends we're watching of the rise of the far right in in the UK, in France, in Germany. And we have the French presidential election coming up in 2027. The Germans have a bunch of elections coming up. You could see like AFD governors in parts of Germany.

It's just like the future. for the far right in Europe is bright, which is dark for us. Yeah. It's never a good mix, far right politics and Europe. No, not good. This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. When it comes to sending money abroad, many providers claim to offer free fees and competitive rates, but don't be fooled, this can be code for inflated exchange rates. With a Wise account, you can send, spend, and receive money in over 40 currencies without ever having to worry about hidden fees. Sending pounds, across the pond, most transfers arrive in 20 seconds or less. Spending Reals in Rio, the Wise travel card

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HIMS is not affiliated with or endorsed by Vieter. Okay, so the war in Iran, moving all over all of this, it remains a total mess. And depending on who you ask, Ben, the war with Iran could be over or not. Here's a little supercut that tells the story. Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation. Was it accurate to say you think the combat operations are over and done? No, I didn't say that.

I said they are defeated, but that doesn't mean they are done. Is the war with Iran over? And if it isn't, who will decide when it is? I think it accomplished a great deal, but it's not over because there's still nuclear material. So, clear his day. That was Marco Rubio, Trump, and then Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Den Yahoo, for those of you, lucky enough to not just automatically recognize their voices. So let's try to walk you guys through the last week in the disaster that it was, and then we'll talk about it. So first Trump announced Project Freedom.

That was this like PR bullshit plan to guide ships through the Strait of Homeland. moves. That mission lasted, I think about 36 hours until Trump pulled a plug on it. NBC News later reported that the Saudis and the Kuwaitis were surprised by the plan. They were mad about it and they pressured the U.S. to pull the plug because they thought it could unravel the ceasefire and peace talks. Then we had a bunch of breaking news and sirens from reporters quoting senior white house officials saying the U.S. and Iran were very close to making a deal. That, of course, was bullshit. There's still no deal. And according to the financial times, the two sides were very far apart. part, Trump's demands were a 20-year moratorium on Iran's nuclear enrichment program, transferring

the stockpile of uranium enriched to close to the 60% enriched stockpile, the so-called dust out of the country, and then dismanting their three main nuclear sites. And the Iranian response, I think loosely translates to get fucked. It was, and the war on all fronts, have Iranian management of the Strait of Hormuz going forward, suspension of sanctions. And then they actually gave a little ground on their enriched uranium stockpile. They said they'd chip half of it out, but like dilute the rest. But they gave Trump a little something. Here's how President Trump took their response.

Let's watch. For the time being, the ceasefire remains in place. It's unbelievably weak, I would say. I would call it the weakest right now after reading a piece of garbage, they sent us. I didn't even finish reading it. They said, I'm going to waste my time reading it. I would say it's one of the weakest right now. It's on life support.

They understand. These are all medical people. Dr. Oz, life support is not a good thing. Do you agree? That diagnostic. I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support where the doctor walks in and says, sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living. Free to allow the removal of all their enrichment.

Well, they did two days ago. They didn't, okay? They did two days ago. They said, you're going to have to take it. We were going to go with them. But they changed your mind because they didn't put it in the paper. So when they sent us this document that we waited four days for, that should have taken 10 minutes to do, it's looking very simple.

We get that. They guarantee no nuclear weapons for a very long period of time and a couple of other minor things, but they just can't get there. They think that, well, I'll get tired of this, so I'll get bored or I'll have some pressure. There's no pressure. There's no pressure at all. I love that, like, this sir construct for a story that he's totally making up.

Some of life support. Now is how the doctor talks to you in, like, the ER when your mom's side. And some random people have to stand there the whole time? There's one lady, Ben, who literally, someone told her to smile, and she did this the whole time. Anyway, things are going good. Things are going great. first of all, I'm just going to keep coming back to this because we have to, because our media doesn't do it enough.

This is why we have to support independent progressive media. Thank you, sir. They'll say things like, well, they're already defeated. At what? Like, soccer? Like, the regime is in place. They have all the nuclear material. They control the Strait of Horm Roos.

Like, they're not defeated. Like, let's just, like, not even let him just keep saying something that isn't true because he wants to repeat it until it becomes true. The fact that the Iranians aren't even offering. the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal terms, shows you that they believe that they have all this leverage. Like they control the straight-of-form moves. They've got – and the way he talks about – I can wait here all day. I'm not bored. I won't get bored.

I'm not bored at all. The person outside who's paying fucking $7 a gallon for gas, right? Tell that to the people in the UK who have shortages or the people in South Korea who have shortages or people in Bangladesh who, you know, have to ration energy. Like everybody is suffering. and Donald Trump's just sitting there on his fat ass being like, oh, I got all the time in the world. Well, and then he acts like... He's asked about his red line for the negotiations. He's like, I don't know, we're going to think about it on a flight to China.

Yeah, and here's the thing. Like, I've often, again, they will be willing to ship that stockpile out because they know that's not their nuclear program. That's just the product of the nuclear program. And so I just don't get why these, you know, he needs to end the war. He needs to show he got something. I just don't get why he doesn't make a deal where it's like they got to open

the Strait of Hormuz and they're going to ship out their stockpile and they're going to get some sanctions relief in a bunch of money because that's how this thing ends. And otherwise, it's like a frozen conflict but it's a frozen conflict

where the Strait of Hormuz is closed, you know, and the global economy will collapse within a matter of months if that's the case. The cost is unbelievable at this point. The Pentagon says the direct cost is $29 billion. That's bullshit. Double that, right?

Like it's... They ask for $2 million. 200 billion, so I don't know what planet there is. The real number is way more. Oil prices are still are way up. So J.P. Morgan said its analysts think that the oil prices will remain over $100 a barrel through this year. That's bad.

A Brown University study found that as of last week, American consumers had paid an extra $35 billion in gas and diesel costs since the war began. That's about $268 per household. Jet fuel prices are up 70%. Fertilizer prices are up 30%. By the way, us in California,

about we get especially screwed. Yes. These were more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than other states. And then the financial times was looking at the total cost of the war, and they found that a reasonable estimate based on the Fed's own models is that the war is going to cost the economy $200 billion and a loss of a million jobs in the U.S. for like a bunch of factors, including interest rates. And the Fed's like monthly gauge of global supply chain pressures is now at the highest level

since the pandemic. So like everything, the, the economy. me is like feeling like a balloon and something is going to pop very soon. He's just like, I'm not bored. I don't care. That's the thing. Because everybody can feel it, right? So there's already this discordance between, you know, the quote-unquote markets and the lived reality of everybody that has to pay for anything on earth and the shortages that are coming. And I guess he thinks that when the bubble bursts, he'll just blame Barack Obama or Joe Biden or something. But like, this is one where everybody knows that things were working.

one way and then this war happened and there another way. And I think it's going to take the rest of the world, you know, Xi Jinping in the next couple days, all these Europeans, they're going to have to go to Trump and be like, look, man, and the Iranians, for that matter, and just be like, just take the minimalist deal you can agree to. Trump, his willingness to spin anything should allow him to just get the hell out of this thing. I mean, just he's going to say he defeated them anyway. His morons who watch Fox all day and listen to like Mark Levin

will swallow that. 70% in the country will think this is a mistake. They already think it's a mistake. Look, yeah, and the right wingers, the FD think tanks and stuff, like they'll hate it, but eventually they'll shut up. Like the Hugh Hewitts, you know, the professional fluffers and propagandists. Like, they will

hate this deal. They're saying as much. But yes, I think that's where he's going to end up. And also, there's been all these reports about the way the war is kind of metastasized. and spreading across the Middle East. So the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates, UAE, had been carrying out military strikes on Iran directly. They were a direct combatant in the war. They hit a refinery back in April, for example. They had been targeted by, you know, 2,800 vessels and drones from Iran. So it was response to that. But still, we didn't know that. There was also a

Reuters report today that Saudi Arabia carried out a bunch of secret airstrikes during the war, too. So again, this wasn't just the U.S. and Israel, was a bunch of countries bombing Iran. And then the journal had this wild story about how Israel built a base in the middle of the Iraqi desert to support the military operation in Iran. And then I think it was like search and rescue and some sort of air force logistics. Then the story says at one point the Iraqi military tried to investigate what was going on there because I'm like, you know, sheep herder tipped them off to it. And the idea fired on them a couple times and killed two Iraqi soldiers. And like just nobody said anything. What is their basis for being there?

It's not their territory. crazy. I think that's even beyond Mike Huckabee's definition of Israel, which ends somewhere around the Euphrates. Ends in Kansas. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, look, first of all, on the regional side, we just, again, we have no idea the damage it's been done to our bases, to our facilities, to these Gulf countries. We, you know, people still can't, like, post pictures of Dubai. The Emirates are the biggest losers, or, I don't know, there are a lot of losers, but they're one of the biggest losers in this war. First, they threw all their chips in with the Abraham Accords, with Israel, with this idea that we're in, you know, form a United Front and stand up to the Iranians. And here

they are. They just got, you know, showered with drones. And their Dubai model got wrecked. And, you know, they're carrying out air strikes. And look, if you're feeling sorry for them, they fund the RSF in Sudan that is like committing war crimes on a regular basis. But, but there, All this is going to, I'm very interested to see how the backstory of all these things comes out in addition to the damage assessments. One thing in particular, that base in Iraq clearly seemed tied and it was reported to the Kurds, right, to the idea that the Israelis wanted to use the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds to be a ground force to do things inside of Iran. I think what probably happened there is, you know, the Kurds have partnered with Israel in the past some Kurds, not all Kurds. And they were probably waiting to see, like, okay, can Iran take this punch? We kill the Supreme Leader and drop all these bombs, and the regime, lo and behold, is not only still standing.

They're capable of closing straight to Hormuz. And it seems like the Kurds are like, thanks, but no thanks. We're not like going to war against the regime. I think the Kurdish play was if the regime collapses, you know, maybe we'll, or the regime is like literally on its last legs, maybe we'll get involved here. But it should be pointed out that failed. Like the Israeli pitch, as reported in the New York Times, in the situation room was the Kurds are going to rise up. There's going to be all these ground forces on our side. It res of Pahlavi, the son of the Shahs didn't come in.

None of those things happened. And we never hold Bibi Ninyahu accountable, not just for the fact that he convinced Trump to do this stupid fucking thing, but that his analysis, he was either lying or he was completely wrong that the regime would fall, the Kurds would rise up, that the Iranians would rise up, that Reza-Paul Avi was somehow a credible leader of Iran. Do you see Trump, like, directly bitching about the Kurds? He was like, we gave them weapons, and they just stole them, and they didn't do it. He was complaining about it. They got a covert action program. And it sets bold, first of all, like, it's such bold, the Kurds have done so much. They were the ground forced against ISIS for the United States in the Obama years and under Trump. You know, they were on our side in the Iraq war. Like, this idea that they're obligated to be our

fight our wars. To fight all of our wars. And they never get what they want, which is a state. Right. And for reasons that I can understand, given the complexity of that, but why would they fucking fight our war? It's crazy. And also him just like crying about a clear like covert action program in a oval office press phrase. It's funny. Also, the New York Times just posted a piece. It's a new like leaked assessment of, uh, the impact of the war in Iran. Uh, most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missiles, it maintains along this trade of war moose. But Pete Hex had told me that they were destroyed.

Which could threaten American warships and oil tankers. Iran still fields about 70% of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile. That is bad news. So they got a lot of kit left to fire at us in a lot of ways to do it. Also, Ben, do you see the DOD wants to apparently rename the Iran War Operation Sledgehammer if it restarts? and they're thinking that that means

they get to restart the 60-day war powers clock so they can just do another end run around Congress by giving it a new name. Well, that's what Little Marco is doing when he's like, Epic Fury is over. I mean, they think that a war is like the name that you give to something and not the state of hostilities

that you have with the country. I mean, I would argue that we've been at war with Iran since at least the so-called 12-day war. 1947. What was the Tom Cotton timeline? Oh, that was crazy. Oh, 979. But I mean, remember the 12-day war?

Like, this has all been one war. I mean, that's the point. These guys count on our attention spans being so destroyed by social media and technology that we like forget that we're still in a war or something. Because as a new name, what do we children? It's just rebranding. It's like restaurants that close down and reopen in the same spot in L.A. every six months. Just a new name.

My favorite taco place in Venice, Teddy's red tacos. It was, it suddenly, suddenly was different, different name. And I was terrified, but the menu's exactly the same. Kind of like they were on war except the tacos are good. Same, same spot. All right, you mentioned Netanyahu. Trump, the IRC, they're not the only arsonists in this conflict. We also have Bebbing in Yahoo.

He was on CBS's 60 minutes over the weekend. As Netanyahu watchers know, Netanyahu avoids speaking with Israeli journalists because they are actually knowledgeable about all of his failings and failures. and ask him about them. And so he instead launderes his message through the U.S. media, who tend to be softer than a, you know, baby skin and easily manipulated by him. And unfortunately, the new and improved 60 minutes under Barry Weiss's leadership was no exception.

I want to play one example that just annoyed the shit out of me, Ben, then we'll talk about some more substantive stuff. So this is CBS's Major Garrett, who, by the way, is a nice guy. He's a good reporter, not knocking him as a human. but this was not his finest hour or finest interview, I don't think. And it sounds like Weiss steered the interview to him as opposed to Leslie Saul. He probably would have been a little rougher. But by the way, Major, as you know, is capable of asking tough questions. So that tells you a lot about Barry Weiss's leadership. To give Major even further pass, although I would prefer people

didn't go along with Barry Weiss. Like, I've seen Major Garrett do tough interviews. So this is probably a direction from online. Yeah, it's very weird. So here's a question. Here's part of a question he asked about Israeli intelligence. that I thought was instructive. Mr. Prime Minister, the capabilities of Israeli intelligence within Iran allowed you to pinpoint the location of Supreme Leader and others. That is a kind of granular intelligence

that is borderline miraculous in the modern world. Why wasn't it sufficient to also foment a revolution? So, Ben, the- He was in his office. He was in his fucking office. It was on his house. He was working above ground. The home office, sorry.

On his own house. Yeah. So that would like be a miraculous intelligence to bomb the White House to kill Trump or drone, you know, the Gold's Gym in Venice to take out RFK Jr. The heavy breathing was good. Mr. Prime Minister, the granularity of that intelligence is just so remarkable. It's like bombing the poodle room. It's like Cash Patel. You're not watching like fucking Munich here. It's crazy. We're talking about a guy, an 86 year old man who was killed in his house. It's crazy. And look, like, this is a bigger deal. I mean, Then I know that it gets online attention, but, I mean, that doesn't count for anything these days. I mean, this is 60 minutes.

This is CBS News. This is like literally like the Cadillac of American journalism, right? And it gets purchased by David Ellison, whose kind of qualification for running anything is it his father is Larry Allison and you went to like USC film school and wants to play with the movies. and they're super pro-Israel and super pro-Trump. And so he hands the keys of 60 Minutes and CBS News to Barry Weiss, whose only qualification is running a blog where she tells rich billionaires that they're wonderful, Israel's wonderful, and DEI is bad. And essentially the feels you get when you watch Bill Maher are all right.

And we're going to bring those feelings over to CBS News. And then you have the prime minister of a country that literally convinced the President of the United States to do the dumbest thing since the Iraq war in launching an attack on a country. None of the things that Nanyahu said were going to happen, happened. We're in an economic catastrophe. Major Garrett and CBS News' own viewers are like not being able to afford their gas.

And he's sitting on there like blowing smoke up BB's butt about how wonderful and granular the intelligence is. What is going on here? Is that your job? This is Putin-level, And also, CBS didn't ask about Netanyahu's responsibility for October 7th until an hour and seven minutes into the conversation. It feels like that'd be something to be front center. And then he just brushed it off. There was lots of talk about Hamas violating the ceasefire in Gaza.

There was none, no conversation about or questions about Israel violating the ceasefire as far as I could tell. You had Netanyahu vomiting out the same talking points about all the ways the IDF avoid civilian casualties and text people. And it's like all the same shit we heard two years ago. And then we watch like 70,000 people get slaughtered. And it's just demonstrably false. And it just you didn't get, you didn't get pushed on any of it. And also, you know, like Trump sued CBS, right, for editing out a 60 minutes interview, like a Kamala Harris answer.

CBS cut from the broadcast version, Netanyahu was saying, we'll play this clip in a minute. He was asked about social media. And, you know, Ndb blames social media for all of Israel's woes. And he basically says, like, we're not going to fight the battle. on social media, but that got cut out. And I wonder why. They also cut Netanyahu saying that Americans turning against Israel also hate America. Again, like, why? It seems like those are things that are relevant for American viewers. And so, like, the whole thing, you're right. It, it's frustrating because the debate, like, the Barry Weiss's bad Twitter debate is, like, kind of

boring and reductive. And, like, I'm not interested in it. But, like, I do think, like, when there's a product like this that shows the fruits, of that labor, it's worth kind of like highlighting the harm it did to us as viewers. We're trying to get information. It's much bigger than just the kind of Barry Weiss discourse because it's about the fact that the premium brand in American journalism, 60 Minutes, like when it comes to Israel, it's like it makes RT look like a hard-hitting news source, you know. It is, and the problem with it is that it's not like there's,

a significant market for this. Like the problem, I mean, to be specific in a complaint here is they constantly come back to this idea that social media is bad and that's why people are turning against Israel. No, it's what people are seeing on social media, right? There's another story. Nick Christoph had a powerful story in the Times about the sexual assault of Palestinian prisons. Monday, sorry. And all these people are on, you know, this is outrageous.

How could the Times print this? as if the problem is the story and not the underlying conduct that the story's about. Well, there's some question about the veracity of some of the sourcing, but still, like, there's a lot of well-documented evidence

of rape and sexual assault of Palestinians and Israeli prison. This is not the first coverage of this issue. Look, this is, I've been to this rodeo. What you have is, let's say there's 100 instances, and this is not that story, but this is the hypothetical. Let's say there are 100 instances of sexual assault,

and 97 of them, are true, but they find the three that have some holes in the story and they're like, this whole thing is liable. Or, you know, they go after, you know, sort of one of the victims who's, you know, his cousin is in Hamas or something. I mean, but this major garrant thing, if Americans want to know, I had this long conversation with John Stewart today, I did his podcast, and we had a pretty interesting conversation about why do we keep doing these dumb things? And we talked about all the reasons. But one of the reasons why is that we don't of a media that tells us the truth, you know? Like, it makes it so much easier to give weapons

to Israel or to go to war in Iran. If we don't have media that will, like, 60 minutes viewers, those should be some of the more informed people in the country that can't be told the truth about what's happening. Yep. For the record, I think that Hamas raped and sexually assaulted victims on October 7th and that Palestinians are being raped and sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons. And both are true. And I wish there was like less attacking of reporters for talking about these things and more concerned, like you said, about the underlying issue. Two more clips we want to play from this.

So the first is Netanyahu saying basically it's time for Israel to wean itself off of U.S. military support. Let's watch that. I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have. We've come of age. We have a booming economy. after three years of war, you know, our currency is the strongest it's ever been in the last 50 years,

maybe more. We have a lot of talent here, which we share with our American friends, and we're going to share it with our Arab friends, too. And I think that it's time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support and go from aid to partnership. And then let's listen to the clip of him blaming Israel's image problems on social media and then talk about both of them. The proportion of civilian casualties, non-combatants to combatants, is one of the lowest in the history of modern urban warfare. So Israel is given a bum-rap. I'll tell you what happened.

We have several countries that basically manipulated social media with bot farms, with fake addresses, to break the American sympathy to Israel, to break the American-Israeli alliance because they think it's in their interests. and they do it in a clever way. So that on the military support part, like, I mean, first of all, I'll just, I'll believe it when I see it, you know, and also he cites like the $3.8 billion a year stat.

That's just the beginning of the support that U.S. provides Israel. Like there's always supplemental funding requests, emergency iron dome transfers, et cetera. Then there's the direct support when the U.S. is like literally shooting down, you know, missiles and drones. How much did we just spend on that? Right. So, again, like I just don't believe, like Benchurch. of heroes been saying this kind of thing too. Like, I just don't believe it.

Like, I'd like to see it happen. I just don't believe it's going to happen. And then the social media stuff, though, this is like, it's delusional and worrisome on a couple different levels. Like, the suggestion is always that those of us who are worried about civilian casualties or the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza, were just stupid rubs getting manipulated by algorithms who were not, couldn't possibly just be, like, sincerely horrified by day after day of these like horrifying images of like children suffering in Gaza, right?

These things like there's an eighth front in the war on fucking social media. Like, first of all, Israel is famously active on social media. Oh, yeah. I've been on the receiving end of it. Yeah, there's reports that they're paying influencers like $7,000 to post positive stuff about Israel. Like what does this mean? It's kind of ominous.

I don't think social media is a war. Well, first of all, on the military stuff, I mean, what that tells you is he knows he's losing the political argument in the United States. But importantly, that ship has sailed. They're not going to get further financing. Now, what they do is there are a couple of questions remained. One that you highlighted, which is whenever they're in a war, which is seemingly all the time, there are these supplemental requests that APEC pushes hard.

And so it's not in the 10-year memorandum of understanding where it's like they get a set amount every year. They've gotten way more than that in, you know, quote-unquote emergency situations. But beyond that, the debate has shifted so much that last week, or maybe two weeks ago, 40 Democratic senators voted against arms sales to Israel. This is the next front. The financing thing is over, I think. And he's just acknowledging that. You've got 40 Democrats, including everyone who might run for president, voting against even selling them weapons, which I think is the right position. And just to highlight one of those systems that was being sold to the Israelis was bulldozers. Armored bulldozers. What do you need armored bulldozers for? You need armor bulldozers to ethnically cleanse Southern level.

or to demolish whatever remaining structure exists in Gaza. Like, that's where this is moving. And people should be aware of that they're going to want to say, okay, fine, we don't need the financing. They're still going to want to be able to buy all the weapons. The partnership is some real weasel language. Yeah. What does that mean exactly?

It means we sell them whatever they want. And the thing is, if they're committing war crimes as they have, we shouldn't be selling them anything. You shouldn't be providing weapons either financed by the American taxpayer or sold full stop. The social media thing is rich and ominous. It's rich because these Israelis have done exactly what he says for a long time. They've got troll farms. They've got paid influencers.

They're not new to this game. They're not just these people that, oh, we just use social media to post government statements. And there's some other governments. I'm sure he's talking about, like, Qatar or something. They always, you know, hype this. I mean, if you have an Instagram account, you know that, like, most of the content, you get related to Gaza is not like state sponsored. You can see that a mile away. It's like somebody you know, like reposting a video. And by the way, you don't even need to aggregate

whether this or that video is accurate. You can look at just a picture of Gaza and it's destroyed. It's just flattened. Right? It's completely flattened. Now, going forward, I think what is kind of worrisome, it ties into the conversation we just had about Barry Weiss because lo and behold, Larry Ellison has also bought TikTok, right? And so I'm less worried about, sure, they can pay all the influencers they want. It doesn't really make a difference. Just look at Ben Shapiro's audience. The problem is if they start to leverage their friends who bought TikTok or Elon Musk and X,

although Elon seems pretty committed to his version of free speech, which is kind of a cesspool. And start manipulating the algorithm, start shadow banning accounts, start start. censoring content. That's, I think, where this is going. And that's pretty scary. Yeah, that is the scary stuff. Positive of the world is brought to you by Sundays. Is your dog's food created to maximize your dog's quality of life or to extend the food's shelf life? Think about it. And while you do, let me tell you about Sundays. Sundays was founded by a veterinarian and mom, Dr. Tori Waxman, but tired of seeing so-called premium dog food full of fillers and synthetics. So she designed Sundays.

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show name after checkout so they know you sent you. Helixleep.com slash world. All right, so let's talk about China. Speaking of censoring, Trump's on his way of China for his big summit meeting. He was supposed to go to Beijing in late March. The trip got delayed because Trump wanted to wrap up the whole war with Iran thing. So glad we got that all handled. He arrives in Beijing Wednesday night. There's a welcome ceremony Thursday morning.

There's a one-on-one the Shi. There's a tour of the Temple of Heaven, which is this amazing temple complex. It dates back to the Ming Dynasty. I think it was built in like 1420. then he attends a state banquet Thursday evening. Then he has tea and lunch with she again on Friday. And then he goes home. It's a lot of meetings.

So let's just speculate on what they want out of this trip. So for Trump, first and foremost, he wants to feel like the biggest boy on the biggest stage and special in the pomp and circumstance. Then I think he wants a trade deal or something he can sell back home as having some sort of economic benefit. Third, I'm sure he would enjoy some. help reopening the straight of Homoos or getting Iran to chill out. We could talk about what that might entail. And then fourth, I think we should just always assume that there's a big fat

corruption bucket sitting there that we'll learn about down the road someday, whether it's crypto or real estate. Don Jr. suddenly invested in Chinese robots. Yeah, Chinese robots companies, CEOs, Don Jr. For Xi, Xi Jinping, I would imagine he wants to get rid of U.S. tariffs on stuff. He wants to show the world that he can manipulate Trump and that he is actually as strong, if not the, you know, stronger party. I bet he'll try to ring some concessions at Trump on Taiwan, maybe try to get rid of some restrictions on AI chips. Who knows? So Trump on this trip is going to be flanked by a bunch of American CEOs. Elon Musk will be there. Tim Cook will be there. Remember when they almost briefed Elon Musk on the secret China war plan? Yeah. Yeah. It was a good idea or great

idea. Here's Trump talking about the China trip from Monday in the Oval Office. He's a great gentleman. I find him to be an amazing an amazing man. And when I say that, the press always says, oh, that's terrible that he called in a movie. He runs 1.4 million people with a pretty iron fist. He loves his country. I can tell you that, President Xi.

I look forward to being there. And if he felt anything, we wouldn't be doing it. But a lot of good things can happen. Now, we'll be talking about, I mean, he'll bring up Taiwan, I think more than I would. I have a great relationship with President Xi. We're doing a lot of business, but it's smart business. We used to be taken advantage of for years with our previous presidents,

and now we're doing great with China. We make a lot of money with China. I have a great relationship with President Xi. And I think you can see that with the fact that in Hormuz, they get a big percentage, 40% of their oil from Hormuz. There's been no ships coming in, no nasty ships coming in, that we end up in skirm. wishes with, he's been, he'd like to see it get done.

He doesn't want to see, I'll tell you what, look, I respect him a lot. And hopefully he respects me. He didn't respect our previous government, that I can tell you. All those clips are from an event rolling out of Moms.gov. These poor women are to stay there. She's watching. It's up there with the DoorDash lady. He started yelling out of that trans athletes or something.

He's like, do you like transports? She's like, I'm just here for the tip. I mean, this is completely insane. What do you think? What do you think? What's on the agenda for the meeting? Like, what's the best case, you think, in terms of an accomplishment, a deliverable? Don Jr. gets a robotics guy.

There's a deliberate for him and us. For real, though. Here's what I would. So, first of all, there's a problem, which is normally, these are huge summits. They usually happen like every two years. You spend two or three days. You know, we use this, for instance, in the Obama to come up with a bilateral agreement on reducing carbon emissions.

It became the Paris Agreement. You know, like we worked on that for a year. So, first of all, the fact that there's a war in Iran and Hormuz is still closed for business means that they're going to spend a big chunk of time just talking about that. And Trump is probably going to be asking the Chinese to pressure the Iranians to open the straight and make a deal. Chinese is going to be pressuring us to, you know, just wrap this thing up. I was talking to an Iran expert friend of both of ours who suspects that the Taiwan conversation. the Iran conversation will be like, Mr. President, how do you expect me to help you with Iranians and to not sell my good friends in Iran weapons when you're selling weapons to Taiwan

and giving them all this help? Yeah, wink, wink. Chinese are very good at what aboutism. And by the way, we get to do what you did to Iran and Taiwan. I think in, and yeah, Trump may want, you know, I think for him a win is like, you know, they agree to buy a bunch of soybeans or something, right? You know, like you can just say. He loves these deals where it's like the Chinese said they're going to spend X amount of money on American products.

By the way, they're probably going to buy anyway or something. You know, and the Chinese will extract some concession. Or they'll just lie about it. Or they'll lie about it. Everybody's done. I mean, if you add up the money, people claim that they're going to spend in these photo ops, Trump, it's like trillions of dollars and none of it's here. I would, here's what I would be doing. On Taiwan, what you want to do is you want to create like some diplomatic track that just kind of put.

puts this thing on a back burner and, like, slow rules it, you know? I don't think Trump is deft enough to do that. The Chinese will say don't sell them arms. We'll say don't conduct military exercises, and most likely it's just going to be what it is. Well, interestingly, there's been some big headlines announcements of arms sales to Taiwan, but I didn't realize that those have been very slow on getting delivered. There's like a $20 billion backlog on the delivery of U.S. arms to Taiwan. So that's kind of the rub there if you're...

Yeah. Well, and what's notable about that is that the Congress votes for these things, and then the executive branch has to deliver them, and they're probably slow rolling them to create positive atmospheric as she. In terms of what I think they should be doing, I'm not sure they're going to do, is they should be talking about artificial intelligence because we are the two AI superpowers. We have all these frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft, Google, etc. They have, their own AI models that, like, and here we should say, this is actually kind of a, I don't know, I want to say a failure of the Biden administration, but there was this idea that we're going to

put all these restrictions in place and export controls and sanctions and whatever. The Chinese figured out how to build the technology anyway. Yeah, we slow that we didn't stop them. Yeah. And so whether who's ahead, you know, someone might be head by six months, it almost doesn't matter because Chinese have AI, we have AI. In normal times, we would be sitting. down and saying, let's negotiate some norms and some guardrails around this new technology

before it's fully deployed out in the world. We want to make sure that nuclear weapons and command and control systems have human beings in the loop. We want to make sure that job displacement is cushioned by testing models. We have huge cybersecurity. You saw this incident with mythos, the next generation of Anthropics AI model, that when they shared it with some their customers was like nobody was ready to deal with this. It could literally launch a cyber attack and shut down, you know, the power grid of the country. Do you see the time story about how AI bots were telling these scientists how to make biological weapons? Exactly. Biological, you know, here's the recipe for biological weapons. Here's another pandemic strain, right?

And so what should be happening is we should be getting off this idea that there's some like AI race, like foot race and whoever wins gets the technology. No, everybody's going to get this technology. we should be putting strict guardrails starting with nuclear biological and chemical weapons dealing with job displacement, dealing with cyber security risks. The Chinese aren't going to want to negotiate around disinformation or information operations,

but that's part of this. I just don't think Trump's going to do that. If anything, he's gone the other direction. If Biden was building export controls, Trump is, for whatever reason, probably some corrupt reason, is greasing the skids so Jensen Wong and Vindia can sell

with advanced semiconductors of the Chinese. So the Chinese would love that. I'm sure what the Chinese would do is buy a bunch of chips, you know. So I'd love to see how AI is dealt with out of this thing. It's just the idea of Trump sitting down for tea in like the forbidden city with Xi Jinping and having like a deep substantive conversation about AI. So it's so impossible to imagine. Yeah.

They need to test models and set guardrails. It's just not how Trump thinks. No, it's what they, I mean, it's what you should be talking about. For sure. No doubt. There's no doubt. Or human rights. Remember that?

Or climate change? Yeah, there's a few things. Okay, we got a couple more things. So we'll get to those now. Obviously, next week we'll talk about how the trip actually went to these that we know. But first, we're going to be petty for a second because there was an article in the Atlantic last week with the headline, is Marco Rubio the happiest cabinet member that we wanted to discuss here? So this was almost entirely based off this one press briefing Rubio did at the White House.

It was like his only appearance of the White House briefing room since the war in Iran started. Here are some excerpts from that briefing. I mean, the top people in that government are, to say the least, you know, they're insane in the brain. I wish I knew your names guys. Can you put name tags on? Can I ask you in Spanish or can I ask you? Yeah, you can answer Spanish. They'll have to translate for them what you asked.

The politics of the United in this theme no, can be changed. You don't have black yet blue on it. I'm colorblind, but I know blue and black. Right there. Yes, ma'am. No, no, you. The first one I called on. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

This is chaos, guys. I wish I had like a dice. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, right there. Because I'm going to Italy. Wait Italia, I'm about with Senoretti. He's Italian. I know him.

He used to cover Capitol Hill. Secretary, many people want to know what is your DJ name? My DJ name? Your DJ name. You're not ready for my DJ name. They are facing real catastrophic destruction to their economy, generational destruction to their economy, generational destruction to their economy,

destruction to the wealth of their country imposed on themselves by the by the actions that they're taking they should check themselves before they wreck themselves in the direction that they're going with a cool cat uh there's also this video of uh rubio like stepping into the DJ booth in Mara Lago Trump's fucking catty turned deputy chief of staff Dan Scabino posted that and then this whole conversation kind of folds into this broader debate of will it be Rubio or will it be j d vance who takes like kind of the mantle of maga and becomes a Republican nominee in 2020 So this is petty media criticism then, but I did just want to ask reporters like, what are we doing here, guys? Because first of all, Rubio, I don't know if he's happy or not.

I don't wish him any personal unhappiness, but like he should not be happy about how his job is going if he's doing a briefing when the U.S. is stuck in a catastrophic war with Iran. And just like regarding that press briefing itself, Rubio was rolling out Project Freedom, that Strait of Hormuz escort mission that we just talked about, which Trump unwound, like I day later. So that is, that is humiliating. Any other, any other senior foreign policy official would be judged according. Like, that would be seen as a humiliating moment and defeat for them, possibly a like career ending. Yes. And on top of that, like the last time Rubio did a press conference, it was when he was on Capitol Hill that one day. And he basically like ran up to the

sticks and was like, the Jews made us do it. And he ran away. And he hid in a fucking up in a cave for a month. And so I was like, what is this article? My daughter, I remember she did A. YSO soccer. And I think she was, you know, six or seven. And at the end of the year, it was really nice, even though the team didn't

win a single game, it was kind of a bad news bearers kind of team. They all got trophies. Nice. You know, participation trophies. Literally. The eagerness with which most of the Washington Press Corps is intent on giving Marker Rubio a participation trophy is so embarrassing.

I mean, let's just build on what you said. The man is Secretary of State and National Security Advisor for a country that just lost and mounted one of the dumbest wars in recorded human history. He announced an operation that lasted 24 hours, let's just dig into his responsibilities. One of the reasons that that operation shut down is because the Saudis hadn't been notified about it

and we wanted to use their... Who would do that normally? The Secretary of State, right? I mean, he is failing utterly at his job. The National Security Advisor is supposed to be coordinating policymaking so it's smart. Did anyone ask Mark or Rubio why they didn't know that the Iranians would close the Strait of Hormuz?

Because it's his job as National Security Advisor to war game how the war is going to go. And they clearly did not know anything about Iran or the straight-of-war moves, did not consult allies, which is also his responsibility. So, like, he is directly responsible, more even than Pete Hegseth for the catastrophic failure of this policy and the fact that the whole world is suffering because of it. And they're all sitting there, like, having a grand old time chuckling about what he says. Second, these, sure, he doesn't do the, like, Dr. Seuss-Rime, weird Pete Hegseth voice, but this, check yourself, if I, It's just lame. It's not cool. Is he more charming than J.D. Vance? Sure. But like talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations, as George Bush once.

That's not cool. Check yourself. Like, I cannot believe the extent in this foreshadows the Cash Patel segment to which we are run, our country's run and apparently a significant slice for our media by people that just could not get anyone to sit next to them at lunch in high school. you know and now like years later he's like check yourself before you wrecked yourself like that that's like what is going on here and like look rubio is like seen as politically ascendant within the republican party like sarah longwell from the bulwark talks about his name's coming up in her focus groups all the time now there's this meme of like marco rubio on the couch in the oval office getting every job apparently that's like genuinely helping him because he's seen as competent but again it's like you know the land of the you know the one-eyed man is king and the land of the blind kind of situation where it's like yeah he's the most competent of a bunch of morons.

But what is what is his accomplice? Here's what drives me nuts. Then as well as seeing this is one accomplishment. But again, that is not a finished story. Yeah. And even if you just like accept the premise, the premise being that he's capable of standing at a podium and being reasonably articulate for an extended period of time, which by the way should be like the bar for like the deputy press secretary, not the future president or the secretary

state, even if that's some bar he clears, judge him on his results. Like, what is he, like, this is what, our politics, I mean, just today's media criticism day, like, don't the results matter? Like, just the optics, just the fact that this guy manages is not like vomit on himself or, or appear to be on Adderall like PXF? Trump's approval ratings in the toilet. Yeah. So what are we doing here? Why are we building this guy up for for for for for for being responsible for this policy it is enraging um speed of losers in high school ben uh FBI director trash Patel sorry cash Patel uh he's up on Capitol Hill this morning on Tuesday as our listeners know cash has gotten a little bit of unwanted attention lately because he's

because he drinky drink he was guzzling beers on camera at the Olympics the Atlantic reported that is boozing is a source of concern within the bureau and that Cash was once so drunk that his security detail couldn't wake him up and considered calling a SWAT team to get the equipment to use to bust down the door. Then he sued the Atlantic and this reporter in particular. And apparently the FBI might be investigating her. And then she drops another banger on his head. And we learned that Cash has created and distributes his own signature bourbon bottles. Not really beating the drunk rap there.

He's a logo on it. There's an eagle talon, his name on it. It's all very cute. And has a dollar sign for cash. Yeah, because that's his name. Cash, just like the dollars. Yeah. So, presumably you would think that, given all this context,

cash would want to delivery, calm, sober performance at front of the Senate to silence his critics. Let's see how it went. There have been no occasions when your security detail had difficulty waking or locating you. Is that right? No, it's a total force. I don't even know where you get this stuff, but it doesn't make it credible because you say so. I'm not saying it, Director Patel. It's been written and documented.

You are literally saying it. No, I'm saying that these are reports, Director Patel. Unlike for baseless reports, the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gangbanging rapist was you. The only person that ran up a $7,000 bar tab in Washington, D.C. This suggests to me. Was you. Okay. Yeah, that was with Senator Chris Van Hollen.

So that exchange actually goes on a while longer. Chris Van Allen doesn't strike me as. Some guys like really... A big boozer? Yeah. It's just not a credible attack. Well, first of all, yeah, I have no idea about the bar type thing. But like, remember, the Kilmar-Obrigo, Van Hollen went down to El Salvador.

He called them a rape as gangmanger. There's no evidence. Yeah. So Van Hollen went to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar-Obrigo Garcia. They had a conversation at the embassy. Diabu Kali's goons put these drinks in front of them to stage a photo op that made it look like they were drinking together. It was just like it was completely propaganda bullshit. Of course, Cash Patel is repeating that.

The second, as you noted, Kilmer Obrero-Garcia is absolutely not a convicted gangbanger rapist. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. He perjured himself. It's crazy. He's perjured himself. And mark it down. And then finally, buddy, like, button the top button. He looked like a groomsman who'd been at a wedding since, you know, the bar opened at five. He looks like he tied one on last night. Yeah. He's got like a bottle on me to the fucking table. Slouching forward. Yeah. Like, I know they all think that this is what Trump wants, which is like fight back, throw. a punch. How'd that work for Pan Bondi? Did that look good to you? It didn't look great to me. I mean, first of all, we just have to remember that the FBI director is supposed to be a nonpartisan official. Yeah. So it's just insane that anybody would be professional. Yeah, and he's supposed to like a, yeah, civil servant essentially.

And so the, and like, I get that the audience of one, but this makes him look ridiculous. Like, if his problem is he looks ridiculous to the point that the whole country is making fun of him and he's like becoming a thing on Saturday. live. Like, he just keeps dumping ammo out for everyone else to use because he looks completely absurd. And actually, he's just drawing attention to that Atlantic report. Like, you know, it's not even good communications. Like, no, the smart thing is, we're like, no, that report's not true. And just that's it. But by like, throwing a little tantrum, it's like, going to drive some more people to that article and be like, ha, ha, ha, ha, cash you like had to get woken up in the morning because he's so hammered. I mean, like, boy, this guy. I can't decide there's the content creator in me wants cash around, but like the American

is a little concerned about that that's a person running the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yeah. And by the way, I'm a little bit. Obviously concerned about the fact that nobody's mining the store and there's actually criminals and terrorists and all the sorts of people that the FBI is supposed to be dealing with. But that mentality, the way he talked to Van Hollen, the FBI has vast investigative powers. Yeah. It did not suggest someone who might not abuse those powers to like how does he know about the bar tab i don't know like i think someone that is seems that paranoid i mean there's all these reports right remember the other report and that wasn't in the atlantic that he got logged out of his computer and he freaked out and thought he was and he's polygraphing

every on his detail like he seems like a dangerous paranoid like kind of wounded animal who knows he's not up for the job who would do exactly what you're saying they're like kind of use the enormous power of the FBI to go after critics i like yes whoever comes next will be be terrible, but I think it would be good for the world to get that asshole out of there. Yeah, I think it would. We'll miss him. I guess we can cover. I'm sure I'll go back to podcasting. Him and Bongino can team up again, Batman and Robin. Yeah, it'd be great. Yeah. Okay, that's it for our boy Cash, drinks on us next time you're in L.A. Pre-order my book. It's out two weeks from today. Pre-order. And I'm actually going to be doing

my virtual book launch event next Monday, so I'll throw that link on my social channel. Awesome. There we go. But also, stick around for Ben's interview with Susie Hansen, a about Prime Minister Erdogan, life in Turkey, lots of big, important geopolitical issues. So don't miss that. Potsie of the world is brought to you by Remy. I'm sure we've all had those times in our lives when you wake up. You're like, why is my jaw hurt? What are my teeth hurt?

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Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by my friend, Susie Hansen, who is a journalist who lived in Istanbul for over a decade. She's written for The New York Times Magazine. Her first book, which I also recommend, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for Pulitzer Prize. Her new book, which everybody needs to buy, if you like politics, geopolitics, literary journalism, great writing, amazing personalities. from life itself, Turkey, Istanbul, and a neighborhood in the age of Erdogan. Susie, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Ben.

Okay, so this really is, you know, a unique book because you start it and you are reading the story of a neighborhood in Istanbul. Then you realize you're reading about the city of Istanbul. Then you realize you're reading about Turkey. Then you realize you're reading about Erdogan. And then you realize, and this is all within the first probably, you know, 40 pages, that you're reading a book about everything that's happened into the world. And so I want to begin by asking where you begin the book, which is you describe how the forces

that we've all become familiar with now, the kind of cocktail of nationalism, authoritarianism, corruption, chaos, how those things that we feel as Americans arrived in Turkey first. And in particular, in this neighborhood that you profile, you write, the dissolution of nations and borders and peoples and seemingly civilization itself was trained. transforming how many of us felt about our individual lives and our future, that sense that we are in history here and not the good kind. Can you describe how these forces became manifest in Turkey and in this neighborhood first? And it's really around 2015 or Arab Spring to 2015 that you begin. And why did you choose to write about those forces through this neighborhood?

So it was 2015. I had been witnessing, I moved to Turkey in 2007. So I'd been there for seven or eight years. And then I was there as all of these Syrian refugees were fleeing the Syrian Civil War into Turkey. And, you know, I'm sure you're aware of this. This was a kind of laissez-faire refugee management situation where Erdogan was just allowing people to come in, millions of people. And they sort of had to figure out their lives on their own. I mean, they had to find, they had to rent a place, they had to put their kids in school, all of that. So no one really had any idea how everyone was making this work.

And there were at that point, 2015, 500,000 Syrians in Istanbul. And one evening, I went to a friend's for dinner and they said, you know, after dinner, you have to take a walk down the main street of Kargamruc. All of the shops have become Syrian. And that was, I knew enough about Kargamruk to know why that was surprising. Kargamruk was a nationalist neighborhood. It was famous for the, for mafia, for thieves. It was famous for this right-wing party that Mejepa.

And so I knew that they were not going to be welcoming to Arabs. And I saw the opportunity to tell this larger story through how these people were getting along because when I started talking to them, they started talking about how the presence of the Arabs was challenging their Turkish national identity. And then as I was there for the next few years, all of these major events were happening. So you had the Syrian Civil War, obviously, you had ISIS. appeared in Turkey and they were flying into Istanbul and then switching to airplanes and going down to the southern border. You had a new war with the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, and you had Erdogan steadily becoming more repressive. And I suddenly recognized, okay, maybe I can see all of these events through these characters, but understand how they're seeing it from the street level, not from the headlines and not from, you know, the point of view of the West. So you shift back and forth between some of these incredible characters you find in this neighborhood and Erdogan himself, who's a huge character in your book. And I want to focus a bit on him because I'd never read a book that I learned as much about him from. He's a fascinating character. And one place I wanted to start, I did not fully understand this. You write about his kind of dual love of Islam and capitalism. And we in the West think of him as an Islamist. but you know, you write about how much he embraced capitalism and kind of, you know, development,

real estate development, for lack of a better way of putting it, in kind of the corruption, the playbook we've seen, right, where you're building things, but you're skimming money off the top and all the rest of it. It also got me thinking that as much as we don't associate Islamists with capitalism, I mean, in our country, the religious zealots, the Christian and evangelicals, are similarly bullish on capitalism and deregulation. Explain where this ideology of Erdogans came from. And how would you describe this melding of Islamist politics and kind of Uber 21st century capitalism?

I mean, this goes deep into Turkish Islamist history. It goes way back to the first Islamist parties and movements in the 1960s and 70s. But I think you have to put it in the context of, you know, Turkey's founding party was Atta Turks party. And the only way, and they had shunned religious people to some degree, they had forced religious brotherhoods to go underground, they had wanted Turkey to be a Western-looking, secularist country. And so the people of the countryside and the religious people were very much shut out from the halls of power, right? And so there were a number of old families that got a lot of the contracts from the government and were rebuilding Turkey after World War I and World War II. But

the religious people were shut out of this. And so slowly, slowly over time, they did see business and starting their own businesses as a way to build their own power in the country because they were shut out of the state and shut out of most of the business activities. Erdogan was the mentee of a man named Nijmetan Arabaghan who also saw the union of Islam and capitalism as a way of restoring Turkish pride because these were people who were very nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire and for this more grandiose sense of Turkey than what the Turkish Republic became. Erdogan learned from him, but also I think it was sort of deep in his blood in the sense that he came to power as the mayor of Istanbul. And Istanbul was a wreck at that time. It was very

poor. People were suffering. And what he recognized he could do, even though most of the of the secularists elites did not want him to be in office was he could actually improve the lives of the people, which seems like an obvious thing for a politician to do. But it's a little bit shades of Mamdani there. But he saw that, oh, I can clean up the garbage of the city. I can improve the water supply I can improve. But he needed to obviously to ally with business groups and other businessmen in order to make a lot of these things happen. And so I think it happened naturally. But I think a really crucial thing here also is when he finally becomes prime minister, he feels still threatened by the secular state, by the military and the judiciary who very much wanted to get rid of him. They put him in jail in the 1990s. And so he quickly had to build up his crony class, his businessman class. And that was the way he saw that he could solidify his power in the country. So one of the things that at listeners this show hopefully know is that over the years I've kind of really had to reprogram myself around or away from some of the assumptions that are kind of baked into American foreign policy or baked into kind of the commentary class about the world. And you go right at some of those assumptions about Erdogan. And I want to go through a couple of them. The first one is I remember when we came into office in 2009 and we went. went to, you know, Ankara in Istanbul in 2009, you know, from that period kind of through the Arab Spring, the trendy thing was Erdogan is a mediator between Islam and the West. He's a potential bridge because he has creed with these Islamists, you know, Muslim Brotherhood guys and places like

Egypt and yet he's modern and capitalist and wants to join the European Union. I kind of now see how like orientalists that was, you know, to just kind of improve. Well, well, he's Muslim. And So therefore, he can be a bridge. Yet at the same time, he's clearly an intermediary in other ways. This is a guy that can navigate between the U.S. and Russia, between Europe and the Arab world, between the bricks countries and NATO. Why is it – I mean, Turkey historically has always been this kind of bridge country between Islam and the West and the rest of it. So there's some of that history. but what is it about him that has allowed him to play this kind of mediator role or this guy that can kind of live in one block for a few months and then shift to another one?

I mean, I think in the beginning, first of all, that was how they were marketing themselves to the world, right? And it was not only Erdogan, but it was also this other Islamic Brotherhood, the Gulen movement, which was already very international. This is this global Islamic movement that was in the United States, knew lots of people on the hill, had schools in every country. And so he, these two allied together. And I think, again, you know, their fundamental fear was about the Turkish state, right? So they want to create a sense of them as big on the global stage in order to fortify their own power and counter some of the national forces that were against them. I mean, it's amazing because he came to power in the 2000s. It's like really globalization is, is firing on all cylinders.

And he becomes this kind of globally minded leader. And so I think he was very different from other Turkish leaders who were much more inward looking and much more almost defensive. And so I don't think it was all incorrect. But now what he has managed to do is something even more extraordinary. Because over these 20 years, what we have seen him do is extend himself in Libya, in Syria, in Azerbaijan. But also to stand up on the world stage with his rhetoric and say, no, we take care of our own country. We are regional leaders. We own our own Syrian refugee crisis.

We are not going to let the NGOs in and tell us what to do. He has overtime steadily made this into, you know, his position in the world. But with those refugees, if you remember, he was essentially able to say to Europe and the West, you can no longer tell me what to do. You can not criticize me in terms of human rights and everything else. He's putting leaders like Selahatyn Demirtash, the pro-Kurdish leader in jail, and all of these. He's repressing thousands of people after the 2016 military coup, but he had four million Syrian refugees.

And it gave him a card to play with the Europeans so as to say, you know, I can just let them into Europe anytime I want. And look at us. We are actually taking care of these people and you can't deal with them. I mean, in all of these different ways, he was able to assert himself, it's unprecedented. And now he's, yes, he advertises himself, I'm the middleman for everybody. Hey, Ukraine, hey Russia. hey, you know, Israel. I mean, he's, he's, he's, he's always projecting this sense that you need him, that all of the, but I think in some ways they do simply because of Turkey's geography. I mean, look, Europe is now speaking to him in these very kind terms because they might need him against Russia, you know, I mean, so he somehow manages to bounce back and reposition himself always. Yeah, no, you, and I mean, among many good things about, there are all these what-ifs of history that I found myself asking, one of which was, you know, You know, there was still this idea that they're going to join the European Union, which seems impossible now.

In 2009, 2010, and you rightly point out that Sarkozy is the one who, you know, truly tube that, although I think probably other Europeans supported that. That's a great what-if, what if, you know, they're in the EU. One other D.C. thing that you kind of take aim at is, you know, and I've been guilty of this, which is that, you know, he gets put in the creep club, you know, it's, you're rattling off the list of autocrats. who got elected through democracy and then dismantled it, you know, it's usually you're like saying Putin, Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Netanyahu, now Trump, you kind of push back against that. And I was really curious to kind of pursue that with you because on the one hand,

you know, the way you describe it, you know, really meticulously, you know, I see a familiar playbook, you know um you kind of enrich people through corruption and you build these power blocks and you slowly change the judiciary and then you you know you're you're you're starting to intimidate the media and make it pro government and and and then lo and behold you know we're changing the constitution and you know erdogan is you know going to be president after being prime minister or whatever um and you kind of push back against him being the same or kind of in a group with those guys and they're all guys I think I get why in the sense that Turkey has such an eccentric political system. But how would you position him relative to the autocrats who have kind of defined our age?

Well, it just never, when he was lumped in in that category, it just never rang true to me. And I thought it was a little bit lazy. I think now from the point of view of 2026, I'm seeing more and more of these similarities with the United States. So when I wrote the book, I finished it in 2025. I never would have compared the U.S. and Turkey, but now since 2025 and 2026, it actually, this current time period echoes the book a lot. Like there's a whole chapter about a university and the oppression of universities. But I think a few things are different. Number one, you know, he's, he wasn't, we weren't really referring to him as a populist in the beginning.

I think it's the first 10 years that is different about, that are different about Turkey and that you want to look at. he was not just praying on people's sense of victimhood or grievances the way that, say, Donald Trump does. The people who he appealed to actually had legitimate grievances, they were actually left behind. They were not folded into the system properly. They were people who felt that they had been looked down upon and left behind in terms of the economy and education and many other things. And so I think, and then the second part is he actually did improve the lives of people. This isn't, this isn't a superficial, you know, ruler. This is someone who actually everyone can talk about when he got the natural gas, you know, people's natural gas accounts

hooked up to the internet or when he made water supply easier or better, when he improved the electricity, all of these services, when he improved the health care, when he, you know, And then, of course, just what he did for people's self-esteem, which was all very real. So it was because of this genuine popularity that that's the basis for why he has sustained a lot of his role today. I think it's more interesting to consider, again, as you said, yes, the EU, what would have happened, but also all of these other regional and global events that were going on and how they affected some of these regimes. He had, okay, the Syrian civil war played a huge role in radicalizing Erdogan. I think that's worth looking at.

But I think at the end, which I'm sure you remember, I do think we have to consider how, for a regime in the Middle East, how the war on terror also just that environment led to this increasing radicalization. It's not to let him off the hook because we can talk about the second 10 years, very happy to do that. But I think that it is just worthwhile to consider. that there are other reasons why the world is going in this direction. Yeah, well, let's talk about the second 10 years. And maybe can I bring in a little bit of my history here? It might be interesting. So, and you write in part one, we kind of work up to 2015,

and Erdogan's consolidated power, the Syrian refugees are there, like these changes are in motion. Then you have this coup where I still don't, you know, people think when you're in the U.S. government in a role like mine, you know what happened. I have no idea what happened. I know that something fundamental shifted in Erdogan, and you obviously get in this in the book, I will tell you my experience, which is he used to be a fascinating guy to meet with because he would actually debate Obama and they liked each other and they'd go back and forth and he was nimble, flexible even. He might change his mind on something in the meeting. After that coup, Obama only overlapped for what like a year every meeting he would literally show up with files about gulen this is the

islamist that he fell out with who he blamed for the coup and demand his extradition and and just didn't want to hear about anything else didn't want to talk about anything else he kind of started presenting like putin you know like i i i believe what i believe some of it may be true some maybe conspiracy theory um and that was my experience of him i mean i mean you write about this transformation in him. I mean, what was your impression at the time that you have to reflect on about what happened? You know, something happened. There was some attempt to, you know, bomb the parliament. And yet, I also know Turks who think, like, that was all false flag, you know, you hear a million different things. But something clearly did happen. How did he change

because of this event that also, by the way, coincided with the year that Brexit and Trump happened, so the world is taking a pretty dark turn. I think he genuinely felt threatened. And then I think that he made use of a glorious opportunity, which echoed, you know, what happened after many military coups in Turkish history, which is that they sort of remake everything. They put people in jail. They start all over. But it was much worse with what he did.

But I think that, you know, if you look at the number of threats that in his mind he was facing, it was this war with the Gulen movement. Most people do believe the Gulen movement was involved in that military coup. I think that it's very, they suspect that, yes, he might have known about it earlier. He let it happen. Then he knew he could take advantage of it. But that war between Erdogan and the Gulen movement was absolutely real. And it was a lot of people in the country really resent the Gulen movement. So, I mean, there have been tons of things written about it.

it's just very difficult to understand. And I think get a weird movement. It's a very weird, fascinating movement. Trust me, I tried to sell lots of magazine stories about this many, many years ago. And it was hard because people couldn't really get their head around it. But by now, it's quite well known what they were about. But I think also, you know, he saw Muhammad Morsi in Egypt deposed in 2013. And he believed that it was possible. Turks believed it was possible that the Americans were involved in that as well. And this is a Muslim brother who. guy, you know, you have a belief in Turkey on the left, on the right, basically across the board, that the Americans have always been involved in military coups in Turkey or played some sort of role. So I think that just speaks to a broad fear. And then I think there were also in 2013 the Gezi Park protests, which, you know, might not seem that threatening from the outside. You know, you think, oh, he's a big guy, he's a strong man, whatever, he can just deploy the military and put them all down, it was deeply threatening to him. Yeah, this was like people occupying this green space.

It was going to be demolished. It was the last remaining green space just so people know. And it grew to thousands and thousands of people upset with what had been happening in Istanbul in the country. I see that. And I guess just to pull it up to today and then I want to get to the neighborhood with one more question, how do you know, you look at Erdogan today and look, you know, he's still a key player. and almost an indispensable man on the world stage.

In Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, a guy he backed, is now in charge of that country instead of Bashar al-Assad. At the same time, you know, Israel's making noises about attacking Turkey next after Iran. We'll see if that happens, given what happened in Iran. You know, he's, you know, barely skates through elections, but he does. the Kurdish issue is up and down, like there's a peace deal with the PKK, but there's still these concerns about the Kurds in Syria having autonomy, although Ahmed al-Shara is trying to put an end to that. The question, I guess, wanted to ask is,

is this a man who is realizing what he wants to do in power? Is he have a strategy that he's implementing in Turkey and in the region? Or is this a man that is just the survivors had to react to a million things in an opportunistic way, and some of them work and others don't. How much do you think he's building something and has this kind of idea of what Turkey is and should be in the region versus he's just a very cany political survivor? No, I think they had a vision for Turkey in the region. And as what if you say, middle power, I don't think they like that term, but as a regional

power, I think they've had a vision for a long time. I think they've been building up their defense industry. I think they've obviously, as I said, extending themselves throughout. the region. I think they also did that for business interests. I think they did that as a way to just shore up their power. And I think it works in the sense that I think some people in Turkey probably can imagine who would come after them at this point because he has successfully taken over basically all of the institutions of the country. He has repressed about 40% of the population. And at this point, he's now taken to meddling in elections. But I think in terms of the

bouncing back and being a sort of canny, flexible, domestic leader. I think he's just reacting to events at home. And he's happy to shift. He was a liberal looking leader in the beginning. Then he became allied with a right-wing party around 2015. And so, you know, he was looking at a Kurdish opening in his first eight years in power. And then he was, he turned against, wherever he saw the mood of the country or, you know, his own political fortunes shifting, he would shift also. And he'll do it again. I mean, he has now put the country just in a terrible, terrible economic situation. And that is the trap. I don't see the way out of that. I mean, I was just in Turkey in March. The people in my book who loved him for all of these years suddenly are shattered people, including one of my characters Hussein. Their self-esteem, their sense of self, and also their belief in Turkey's great future and their children's future is now gone. And I think that that is very, very new for him. And I think it's, I don't think he has a way out of it.

So I think it will be interesting to see, to see where we go. I think the question that you have and I have is, what about the opposition? What happened? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at this point, what exactly can they even do, given how much he's repressing, them. Well, the last thing I want to ask you is the neighborhood itself is fascinating. And one of the things I love about your writing and your journalism is that you don't exclude people. I know we just spent a long time talking about heroin. But we see what it's like for people to live

through all these changes. And the question I want to ask you is, I love this role of Mutar. So people understand this is kind of like you're, it's not just like you're the kind of mayor of the neighborhood. You literally, people come to you with every problem, like from, you know, I don't want my daughter to marry this person to, you know, where can I get this document? And it's a very old feeling for, but it's a form of democracy in a way. It's just people constantly trying to solve these problems and survive. I hesitate to say resilient because I know a lot of people who hate being called resilient because it makes it seem like it's not hard. But, With all this change, like you just see these people working it out, you know, and sometimes

they're helping each other. Sometimes they resent the, you know, New Syrians or what have you, but it is human beings just in a somewhat democratic way, just keeping this neighborhood moving. And the question I want to ask you is, we just talked about the, you know, the decline of democracy in some ways under Erdogan, which is undeniable. I changed how I think about democracy. There's no such thing as this is a democracy and this is a democracy. Like, everything's a spectrum. You know, like America right now is very not democratic in tons of ways and kind of democratic and others, right?

But did you learn something about democracy itself by just focusing in on this local neighborhood and now human beings experience democracy, you know, that human beings that may not have a stake in, you know, how Erdogan's policies going in Syria will be on the refugees. So maybe that's not the right one. But like, how did that local viewpoint of democracy changed how you think about the concept itself? Well, this was why I found this neighborhood interesting because they were a bit on the margins. No one in my neighborhood was a member of the media that was being oppressed or of the academics or the Kurds or maybe the judiciary, the judges who were all being fired or transferred. these people were a little bit on the margins and many of them supported Erdogan, about 75% of the

neighborhood did, and then there was 25% that did not. But they weren't, their lives were not directly affected. And what I think was the benefit of failing to finish my book in a normal amount of time was that I got to go there for 10 years. And I got to see how all of these people changed and evolved over those years. And what I found fascinating, and I think would be fascinating to Americans as well is that you might disparage some of these people who vote for the autocrat, but what you're not really prepared for is how they are actually processing what's happening to them and the moment when it strikes them that their lives have changed. And it does. And I think the chapter in the book that is somewhat hopeful, although it was, you know, a while ago now is

is 2019, because what happened in my neighborhood was that it was the Istanbul mayoral election. There was AKP was running their candidate. They had run Istanbul for 25 years, and then there was the opposition candidate, Ekram Imamolu, and he won. And it was the first time AKP had been defeated in a very important election in the Istanbul mayoral election. And then the AKP tried to claim that there were election irregularities, and they called a second election. And everyone in my neighborhood, even his supporters, were so insulted. You know, they said, what does he think we're stupid? Does he not realize? Does he not think that we realize what he's doing? And it was a very funny kind of macho reaction in some respects. And they started saying, you know, we're going to teach him a lesson.

We're just going to teach him a lesson this time. And then the neighborhood actually voted for the opposition party, which they had not voted for for maybe in all of their lives, just to show Erdogan that they were not going to lose their voice. And an interesting thing about Turkey is that it has always had free elections. And this is the one thing everybody has had, and they love to vote there. I mean, it's really a great pleasure to witness election day in Turkey. And so they fought back in that instance, Imammolu became mayor. Of course, Imamulu is in jail now. Now he's in jail. But I think that when we think about people's psychologies in the age of authoritarianism, I think, you know, the verdict is that we don't really know what's happening,

how people are feeling and what exactly they are going to react to. And you're right, in a neighborhood like that, in an old Ottoman, in these neighborhoods in Istanbul, they still work together to figure things out. They're out in the street. They're talking to each other face to face. I mean, this was also what was appealing to me because I was online all the time. Yeah. And they're still talking to, they're still passing on information in this face-to-face way, which I think is a lesson for all of us as well. So, you know, I do, I do have hope for Turkey. I just, I simply do. It's, I think also one thing to consider about characters like Erdogan, and this is really an open question. You know, he loves elections too. So he has put his main rival in jail. This was also an unprecedented move. But will he return the country to some sort of real elections? I think that's still a possibility.

Yeah. Well, let's, you know, let's hope so. I mean, you convey, like you say, this country's been through everything you can imagine. And yet Istanbul, all kinds of people are there, you know. And they regenerate, you know, Roma, Armenian, Greek, Syrian, you know, in addition to Turks, all these other people have kind of passed through and some have been expelled. and then some have come. And yet it all kind of keeps,

is what I love about cities. Like it just keeps regenerating and becoming something that is similar and different, you know. Yeah, and I think that if you look at what Erdogan was brilliant out of the beginning is that he took that creative chaos

and he created a new political movement out of it. I mean, it was by going into these neighborhoods. That's the whole reason also that I told the book through a neighborhood. But the question is, can the opposition now look at the world as it is? And the city, as it is and actually and actually say, okay, what is the political movement that needs to be created?

Created now. Well, look, the book is from life itself. It's just so rich with character, detail, history, politics. So people should check it out. Susie Hansen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Ben. It was really great talking to. Thanks again to Susie Hanson for doing the show, and we'll talk to you next week.

Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Alonamink. Mikhail Goldsmith and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.