Pod Save the World - Mission: Impossible - Catering Truck (Starring Donald J. Trump)

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Trump evades Iran via catering truck, Pete Hegseth's Pentagon is a disaster, and Jared pays off a gangster and drug trafficker as part of his Albanian island takeover.This week Tommy and Ben cover shocking new info on how Trump hid from Iran on his way back from the NATO summit in Turkey, leaving his staff and the press behind as decoys. They shake off their déjà vu to dig into the latest developments in Iran and Israel before touching down in Yemen as the conflict between the internationally recognized Yemeni government and the Houthis heats up. In London, a brave Sudanese protester calls out the UAE’s prime minister for underwriting the war in Sudan. Over at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth continues to try to remake the military in MAGA’s image, but still finds time to blame an underling for our dire munitions shortage and cozy up to defense contractors. They dig into the strategy behind Ukraine’s attacks on Wildberries (the Amazon.com of Russia), Jared Kushner’s payout to a gangster in his quest to steal an island from Albania, the grim news on Ebola and Trump’s inaction on the crisis, and why Claude is coming for political speechwriters. Then, Ben speaks to Richard Horsey of the International Crisis Group about the state of play in Myanmar, how coup leader and now-president Min Aung Hlaing is making diplomatic inroads with his neighbors, and the recent—and rare—glimpse of Myanmar’s detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.To watch this episode with subtitles, click here and turn on closed captions (CC).You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

Pod Save the World is brought to you by Z-biotics. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, I do not bounce back the next day like I used to. I used to have to make a choice. I could either have a great night or a great next morning. That is until I found Zbiotics pre-alcohol. Z-biotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works.

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And you know what? What's the worst thing that can happen? You don't use it again. Mondays don't move for anyone. Pre-Alco works overnight so you can have a real weekend and still show up sharp. Go to Zbiotics.com slash PSTW for 15% off. That's Zbiotics.com slash PSTW code PSTW. Welcome back to Podzee of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, Ben, um, uh, Ennis Canter, former guests on this show, former NBA player. He's now kind of making it his deal to just attack trans people, I guess. He's suggesting he's going to join the WNBA. Yes. I don't really follow what the specific goals are that he thinks would allow him to join the WNBA of you. It's an interesting cautionary tale about me booking guests, uh, because Enis Kander reached out to me some years ago before he'd gone full match.

And he was on the Knicks. He was on the Celtics, too. So, you know, it was before Celtics. Don't blame yourself fully. No, but the world does know, like, you know, a Knicks player, like, sure. And so we have Monny. He has this story about authoritarianism and Erdogan. But, man, this guy's gone, I think, particularly as his MBA career is crashed and burned,

the remaining relevancy seems to be this maga swerve. But as someone who does kind of follow the WMBA discourse, like Ennis Kandert declaring himself eligible for the WMBA draft as a shot at trans people. It's pretty jarring. It's him and a guy named Royce White, who's another NBA player, who a judge found, this is from the Star Tribune, Minnesota Star Tribune, found that Royce White abuses ex-wife repeatedly, slapping her, grabbing her, pulling her hair, leaving her bruised and swollen, and then a child advocate assigned to the case found that Royce White's son is scared for his physical safety around his father. This guy was on Benny Johnson's TPUSA show, because

he decided to also declare for the WNBA and he wore a wig in the interview and they think this is fun and cool. So they're just having this guy who beat up his wife. You know what's so dumb about this too? He's like the WM is awesome right now. They don't need any other players. They've got great players. Like the quality of plays never been better. This is kind of trolling and like, oh my God, it's just it's exhausting. And Ms. Ginter was not that good. He wasn't. I mean, you could stand under the Basque and get some rebounds, but like that's about what he could do. Yeah, anyway, so we disavow our former guest. Sorry, guys. Probably a long list if we really thought about it. But some wonderful people, too. Yeah, some great ones too.

We got a great show for you guys today. We're back together in studio. It's great to see you. I'm here. We're going to cover this insane story about Donald Trump's secret flight home from the NATO summit last month. We covered at the time how they switch planes. But now it turns out the Washington Post had this great scoop about how Trump switched his plane, but then used the media and his own staff as a decoy.

So we'll dig into all of that. We're going to update you on the Iran talks, such as there are updates. We'll tell you about how the diplomatic effort to forge a path forward in Gaza are going. We'll talk about why people are scared of resumption of fighting in Yemen. And then we're going to talk about this brave activist who is calling out the leaders of the UAE for perpetuating the civil war in Sudan. I don't know if you saw this quote. I did see that. I saw it because you sent it all over my Twitter timeline.

It made me very happy. Then we're going to check in on Pete Hexeth, our Secretary of War, over at the the Pentagon. Always great to hear from Pete. We're going to talk about Ukraine's military campaign against a Russian e-commerce site in this blurry line between civilian and military targeting. We'll update you on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's effort to steal an island, basically, or at least a peninsula. Yes. Quick thing on Ebola, just so you guys know what's going on over there and some great moments in AI.

Then, Ben, you did an interview for today. What are we getting here? So I talked to Richard Horsey, who's been on before, and very good guest. He is a senior analyst for the international crisis group in Asia. He's led their work in Myanmar. And so we thought that there's actually been a lot going on in Myanmar. We wouldn't update people on where things stand five years after the military coup and civil war that's killed 100,000 people. The military government's going the extra mile to kind of create a sense of legitimacy,

a lot of diplomatic visits. The state of the opposition, we talk about Aung San Suu Kyi, who nobody had seen for years. For years, right. The Red Cross just Sar. Right cross just saw us, so Richard walks us through that, and then just kind of how people are feeling in Myanmar, what governments can be doing, not that the Trump administration cares that much. So it's an important update of people have just been kind of curious about what's going on there. This is a level set. There's a lot of things we've worked on in the Obama administration that are now depressing to talk about.

Myanmar might be number one. And there's nothing to do with Trump. Cuba is 100% Trump's fault. Cuba's 100% Trump's fault with a little Biden smuggled in. Yeah. Marr is just a horrific series of events. Yeah, yeah, really awful. I'm definitely going to listen to that interview.

I think it's a very undercover story, an important one. After Ben's interview, our friend of the pod subscribers will hear Ben and I answer some questions from the friend of the pod or the pod save the world Discord community. If you want ad free episodes of this show, add free episodes of Pod Save America and a bunch more. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. You'll also get tons of bonus content, including bonus Pod Save America episodes. Get discounted tickets to CricketCon, great newsletters, taste.

useful nudes of Dan. So go to crooked.com slash friends to learn more. Just kidding about the nudes of Dan. They're not tasteful. No, you don't get any. Just headshots. Speaking of nudes, did you listen to the Hunter Biden Tucker interview? No.

I listened to the entire thing. I downloaded it. I will listen to it eventually. It's interesting, I'm guessing, but, you know. Yeah. They spend a fair amount of time on the nudes. Oh, good. Wonderful.

Something to look forward to. All right. We are going to lead with this shocking scoop from the Washington Post about President Trump's secret flight home from the NATO summit last month. So again, we talked about this at the time. There was some sort of intel about an Iranian threat. It forced President Trump to abandon the new Air Force One, the one that was the bribe from Qatar, in ride on the old Air Force One, back from the NATO Summit, Ankara, to the UK.

At the time, Trump lied about it. He was like, we're sending the new Air Force One ahead so the troops can check it out in Britain. That was a lie. The old Air Force One has missile defense features. The new one does not. And Trump, they said, would be better defended on the old one. But it turns out the story is even crazier than that. The Washington Post reported that after Trump boarded the old Air Force one jet and the press was loaded up,

he was then secretly taken to another Air Force jet while hiding inside a catering truck that is normally used for like meals and supplies, very macho, very manly to hide in a catering truck. The media and Trump staff flew to the UK inside the jet that Trump had abandoned most of them unwitting, that he had left the plane. They were essentially treated like human decoys in case Iran did try to do something. Then when Trump landed and the other plane landed, Trump secretly reboarded the Air Force One. Everyone thought he was on and acted like nothing had happened. Then he gets on, I think, the Qatari bribe force one for the flight home to the U.S.

Gaggle with the media, was asked why he switched planes and he said, quote, well, I have a threat all the time. I'm number one on their list before you. but if I go, you go, right? Perhaps someday you want to change professions, which is an interesting comment. So just for context, everyone should know that this is not standard operating procedure. Presidents often use subterfuge for security reasons the White House will release like a fake schedule to cover for a real trip to a war zone. For example, there was a story in the post today, another story about an incident in March of 2000 when President Clinton secretly switched planes like Trump did before a flight from India to Pakistan. But the difference is in the cases in the past, at least some members of the

media are told about the plan in advance. Usually it's like the pool reporter that day or like the lead white house correspondent. You also get to learn about the risk to you personally. But in this case, our weak old, feckless, stupid president left his own staff in the media to fly alone as bait. And then he got to hide from the consequences of his own decision to go to war with Iran. So this is way bigger than just like breaking the rules of like pool coverage. It is like endangering others to save yourself, kind of a perfect Trump anecdote. Yeah, there's so many layers to this anecdote. Let's just first of all talk about how things normally work because you mentioned this. There are times that you engage in some

subterfuge. So for instance, I remember I had to be involved in the planning of all of Obama's trips to Afghanistan. When you don't announce a trip in advance, the plane takes off kind of undercover of darkness from Andrew's Air Force Base near the White House, you kind of land in the dark, et cetera. Now, what we would do there is we plan the trip. Then we would sit down in the White House Press Secretary's office with like usually the leader or leadership from the White House Correspondents Association back when that was somebody you talked to about things. And, and, you know, bring them into it and say, get your pool together for this time at this night. And you kind of plan in conjunction with the press.

And also, like, decide if you want to come on this trip where there's elevated danger. Yeah. Look, I was even on a trip, and I can't talk about in too much detail, where there was a threat that emerged, and we kind of had to evaluate that threat and make a delay something. But, you know, we went on with it. I mean, you can deal with these things in stride. This felt very much not in stride. And so look at the different pieces of this.

one, why were they using the Katari Air Force One in the first place? If it isn't capable of dealing with threats, just because Trump wanted to have like golden interiors faster than the, you know, Air Force could get that ready for him, like we had to kind of go through all this, you know, cost and danger. That's the first thing. The second thing is it is, it bears repeating that how insane it is that they've invented some cover story that they're going to fly this other plane to the troops so they could see it. He said, for old time's sake, we'll be taking the former Air Force One from Turkey to Mildenhall,

a short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our great military heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition to the Air Force fleet. That was your cover story? Yeah, I mean, that felt kind of weird at the time. And then one of the elements of the Iran War, there's so much of it that you have hard time kind of remembering these different threads. the fact that the United States and Israel assassinated the leader of Iran, right? Ayatollah Khomeini, is nothing to do with whether he was a good guy or not. He was not a good guy. But that is a dramatically new thing to do.

We've talked about this a couple times. And inevitably, that's going to increase the threats on the American president. And probably not just now, probably into the future too. You know, and so it does raise the question of just like, how serious are these plots from Iran? Was it really the case that how much danger was Trump in? This is a pretty extraordinary amount of length to go to. Yeah. It makes you wonder whether the information was specific or whether, more likely, they just have all this broad reporting that the Iranians are interested in doing something and we happen to be in that region.

Yeah, well, the Wall Street Journal said Israel briefed Trump and Intel that included a threat to use shoulder-to-air missiles to target Air Force one. I mean, I don't know. It seems pretty vague to me. It's, yeah. They also just resumed the conflict with the war. Like, the U.S. just started bombing. I also love this anecdote, Ben, which is that Marco Rubio stayed on the Air Force one where Trump was supposed to be, and Pete Hegseth got onto the other plane with Trump.

So the two people most responsible for the war were safe. And I guess my point, which is a little bit, you know, we're guessing here. I can't believe that the threat reporting was that specific if they let all those people get on the other plane, you know? So it feels like they went to some extraordinary length because Trump was concerned about this, because if the Secret Service really believed that there was dudes with shoulder-fired rocket launchers in the vicinity of the airport, I don't think they would have let that plane take off with Micro Rubio and Peteg Seth and everybody else on it. Couldn't you just fly a route that avoids a wrong? It's so crazy. And the other thing, for people who are just like, well, this frustrating why we're always talking about this.

Air Force One is not the personal property. It's not like Donald Trump's private jet. Like we pay for it. We pay for all this stuff. We pay for the Secret Service. And all these stories, I think sometimes what's missing is Trump treats all this machinery like his personal property when it costs tens and tens of millions of dollars to move all this stuff around. And we have no idea why they're making decisions. I will say, Tommy, just to bring different episodes together here, for those who listened, I wonder if that gift he got of the gun.

if he got in some trouble Erdogan gave him a gun. That gun with the bullets might have come in handy. Yeah, he's just sniping missiles from out the window. Yeah, the thing that bugs me about this story, it's like, I don't know, the lying is come to be expected from these people, but to put a bunch of journalists and your own staff at risk and basically send them up to be like the decoy to get shot at

so you can fly separately is genuinely shocking. All right, well, we're going to just quickly update you guys on the Iran talks this week because we are trapped in this like tedious endless cycle with no clear path forward. But it is still very important. So I don't know if you saw this over the weekend, Ben, but the president seems to be signaling that he just doesn't care anymore about all this. He told Axios, quote, we are low-keying it. This is about the talks with Iran.

We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money. And then he said, quote, it will work out. It always works out. It's like a chess game. So that inspires confidence. Last week, the Treasury Department announced some new sanctions. because sanctions are really going to stick it to them after we just let them sell, what, like $10 billion worth of oil?

Iran and Oman are working on a deal to determine control the straightover moves. Those, their demands include, quote, never threaten nor insult Iran in any language, permanently end the war against Iran and Iran's allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq, and the naval blockade withdraw military forces around Iran, pay reparations, release for us and assets, lift all sanctions. It's basically a big middle finger to Donald Trump. Trump was asked about Iran's negotiating position at a press event Monday. Here's his response.

Massive escalation. Is that still on the table? Well, we have that certainly, that ability if we want to do that. Yeah, you'll find that. You said you're low-keying it with that. You're semi-negotiating. What does that mean? Well, they ask for reparations, you might say, or they ask for money for the damage that we've done.

And I said, that's a good idea. Well, we're going to ask for money for the damage they've done over a 50-year period. whether you go SS Cole or whether you go all of the people that were so badly hurt, so badly wounded or killed, many thousands of people, and maybe damages for the 52,000 protest votes over the last four months that were killed in Iran. Can you give us an estimate of what you think the Strait of Ormuz will be... Well, it's open now. We're taking a lot of shit. It's open now. Look, the only one that has control of the Strait of Hamos right now is the United States Navy.

We have a blockade that's been infallible. it's a steel wall, but it's open for others. Now, a little bit complex because they will, on occasion, drop a mine and we find the mines. You know, we've mine swept the entire straight, as you probably maybe heard, maybe it didn't hear. But we control the straight 100%. Just making shit up. In Iran, the Supreme Leader, Moshtabo Hamina, he's added another hardline IRGC goon to his top decision-making counsel.

This is the Supreme National Security Council. They will oversee things like efforts to end the war or reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So, Ben, I just like, I don't know, I'm just wondering. My only question now is when he's just going to walk away from this mess and be like, yeah, straight's open, war's over, nukes are covered, we can watch it. He's getting pretty close. I mean, it does bear emphasizing that I think every single thing he just said there was not true. Like everything from like the 52,000 protesters in the last four months.

They haven't really been protesting last four months. Right. Also, that number keeps going up to- It keeps going up and I just, I've never seen anyone really back it up. Yeah, yeah. And it's not to diminish the horror of what happened. I just want to know it was coming from. Late last year, but but then also the straight's not open.

I mean, if the straight was open, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, like he's denying physical reality again, you know, the U.S. controls the straight. We do. Like, we've mindswept it all. We have. Like, the Iranians are firing at tankers. Like, they're still, you know, a fraction of the traffic getting out of that. straight. I take that the message from the Iranian demands is that their government is entirely in the hands of the RGC. It's the hardliner. So even some of these people that show up in Islamabad or

in Oman are not empowered to make a deal. And that's them saying to Trump, fuck you. That's not them expecting Trump to greet all those things. That's saying, we don't need a deal. We have the actual leverage. And if you look, the Iranians are quite specific, even in their unrealistic demands. And Trump is never even specific. He's all, we don't need a deal or we do need a deal. Like we don't even know what he's shooting for anymore. And I mean, art of the deal, you know, would suggest that what the Iranians are doing, which is you ratchet up your demands so that whatever you get is far more than you would have anticipated the beginning

because you made such maximalist demands. Look, at the end of the day, he's probably just going to have to accept us. certain point that the best you can do is the straight reopens with the Iranians making a bunch of money in that regime more entrenched in power and no nuclear deal like that's the best that we're going to get that's the most likely outcome I'd fucking take it like let's just get off this war this is stupid yeah this that is I think the most important point which is there's this sunk cost fallacy where it's like well we've sacrificed so much we can't stop now and it's like nope sometimes stopping now is your best option and that's what we should do here maybe the next hit of heron will solve my

addiction. Yeah. Yeah. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Built. Here's a question. Are you getting rewarded for paying your rent or mortgage right now? If the answer is no, you need to check out Built. Becoming a Built member means earning points on every housing payment no matter where you live.

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If I get a good night's sleep, I'm almost guaranteed to have a good day or at least be prepared to have a good day. I think better. I'm in a better mood. Generally happier. If I get a bad night's sleep, everything sucks. It just, it's really hard to bounce back from that. And I got to tell you, having a really comfortable bed, I won't make sure every night's sleep is great, but it's a really big help. And that involves having the right mattress. And the way you know which mattress is right for you is you take the Helix sleep quiz, and it'll match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. They have over 20 mattress models so you can pick the perfect model for you. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free

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slash world for 20% offsite wide. Helixleep.com slash world. We're going to do a similarly quick update on Israel and Gaza because last week we talked about Trump, like randomly announcing this 15-point plan for Gaza that included this process for disarmament. They said Hamas would disarm and then Israel would withdraw from Gaza and then the occupation. It was a bit of a head scratcher at the time. We predicted that the Israelis would not be okay with this plan. And as predicted, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu categorically rejected it over the weekend. He said, quote, Israel does not accept the 15-point document. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed.

When I say the disarming of Hamas, it means heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry. And we were talking about genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament. This outcome was obvious because Israel has an election coming up in October. Netanyahu only cares about appeasing the far right. So obviously he wasn't going to do anything that looked in any way soft in Gaza. Netanyahu also said, quote, as long as I am prime minister, a Palestinian state will not be established neither in Gaza nor in Judea or in Samaria, which is what they call the West Bank. So for those keep it scored home, then Hamas did reaffirm its commitment to the Board of Peace's

plan. I guess the only question I have is, why do you think Trump would announce this knowing the Israelis had not gotten on board and would never get on board? I think he had just met with then. That's the big mystery to me because even when they announced this, as we said at the time, like nobody really believed it. It was like, what? It didn't kind of come out of any process.

It just seemed out of nowhere that they're announcing this and like kind of demanding support for it. I will note that APEC, for instance, at the time, welcomed this plan and demanded that everybody support it. I'm wondering, I'm waiting for the attack Nenna. A statement attacking Nanyahu for not going along with it. I'm not holding my breath. Look, there's never any there there to this. It never seemed plausible that this was actually going to happen again in the physical world. The only thing I want to add, Tommy, is like, this foreign policy, they have no way out of the

dumb war they start in Iran. They've got no plan for how to deal with this. They're given away a nuclear weapon or nuclear program to Saudi Arabia, or maybe they're not. No concept of how to wind on the Ukraine war. Like, what are we doing? You know, I mean, like, I guess Marco Rubio can text Delci Rodriguez in Venezuela about her media appearance. This is a catastrophic failure of their entire farm policy on their terms. Like the things that they say they want to achieve, they're just doing the opposite. The thing that I've been

trying to figure out, so there was this great piece that's worth reading, I think it was by Graham Wood in the Atlantic. There was kind of like, what's up with Al Qaeda? You know, we're like, you know, what, 20, 25 years after 9-11, are they weaker? Are they stronger? Are they biting their time? Like, by what metric do you judge? You know, because there have been no catastrophic attacks on the U.S. homeland. With the exception, well, no, there was 9-11, right? Then there were basically no Al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. homeland, except for in 2019, when that Saudi pilot in Florida shot like three people.

But it was sort of a blip on the radar compared to how terrorists and he's usually covered and discussed. And there's a bunch of analysts trying to figure out, like, what the deal is with terrorism generally. And I think it made me think about this conflict. and whether the Palestinian issue is still going to be a driver of extremism in the way that it's been in the past, whether leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia clearly just not giving a fuck about Gaza or the Palestinian people will impact things.

And whether this could just kind of like annexation in the West Bank could become complete over the next couple of years. Gaza could just be occupied forever. I'm just like wondering when there will be blowback from that and where it will come from. Obviously, that's like trying to predict the future. Well, there's a lot of pressure in the system. Because if you look at the things that could happen in the next year or two, given the way things are going, you could have this kind of re-escalation of the war in Iran at any point. You could have a concerted effort to annex the West Bank, or you could have like an intifada in the West Bank that turns that into more of a conflict zone that gets very dangerous and potentially deadly. you could have like pent up you know Arab Spring type uprisings I mean Egypt and Jordan are not in the most stable place like you could have this Russia Ukraine war escalate either in that theater or somewhere else the Chinese in Taiwan like there's all these pots that are like you know boiling and like beginning to spill over a little bit and it does worry you that hey what's the thing that could happen that just tips this into kind of seeming chaos I mean because we're already kind of there.

if you look at the Iran War. Yeah, no, it's like a steady state level of violence and uncertainty and instability that would be kind of unimaginable a decade ago. Yeah. Yes, that's right. It's just crazy that there is a massive, like, hot war between the Russians and Ukraine that's just been going on for four years and the Iran war is not going on for so long. Yeah, just the backdrop.

Well, one of those pots that's kind of seeming to boil over right now is in Yemen. Yes. That's a good one, yeah. Yeah, so we've got the Houthis, and then there's the internationally recognized Saudi Arabia backed Yemeni government. The UN special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, warned last Friday that, quote, Yemen today faces a greater risk of renewed large-scale conflict than at any point since the UN broker truce of April 2022. As we've discussed on the show, that that truce was broken when the Saudis attacked Sinai airport ahead of this flight that

was arriving with a Houthi delegation in it from the Supreme Leader of Iran's funeral. The Houthis retaliated. They announced a blockade on Saudi ships in the Red Sea. And since then, there's been this tit for tat where it cheated up last week when at least 30 people were killed in Houthi attacks on Yemeni military bases during some morning training event. Also on Tuesday, Yemeni sources told Reuters that the Houthis hit a Tanzanian flagged ship in the Babelmandab straight, killing six people. And so what is so worrisome about these isolated events is that the civil war in Yemen was so catastrophic. You know, it was from 2015 to 2022, I think nearly 400,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, many of them from starvation or disease. And it could easily start back up

again if, you know, some red line is crossed either for the Houthis or the Saudis. And it feels like we're kind of dancing up to that red line. Yeah, because we've seen these strikes by the Saudis and these actions by the Houthis. And this is a good example of the fact that part of what's happened as the UN system that resolves conflicts has been weakened, but also as there's been, and this anticipates some of our upcoming topics, too, the normalization of violence, right? That if you're sitting in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or Jerusalem or Washington, you know, what's happening in Sudan is just, it's just happening and we don't really have to do anything to stop it. Or the situation, obviously, in Gaza or in southern Lebanon, or the situation,

situation in Ukraine. Like, you get to the state where, you know, a reversion to a conflict that could kill tens of thousands of people in this place, hundreds of thousands of people is happening in so many places that it's like, oh, you know, you're just kind of watching in slow motion and doing very little other than, you know, having a UN envoy put out these statements. But the problem is, first of all, the human suffering that would ensue. And also, like, all, as we talked about, like, you're beginning to feel all these conflicts merge into one. So the Yemen thing sparks up again. It's going to interact with the Iran War.

Oh, for sure. And it could impact red sea shipping, and it could kind of become one big theater where everybody's kind of fighting in different places. And this is, man, it's like watching a bunch of different, you know, to use a Southern California analogy, like fire is burning. And if they come together, you know, that's how you get something you can no longer contain. And we're kind of already teetering there and just have this tolerance, you know, because I don't have a lot of hope that, like, Marka Rubio's State Department has a big plan to kind of avoid a reversion to war in Yemen. No, not at all. Well, another one of those conflicts, as you said, of like just the sort of normalization or also getting used to just horrific levels of violence has been Sudan. Sudan has been ravaged by civil war for four years.

It's a conflict between the Sudanese government and a rebel group called the RSF. It is very difficult to know the true death toll of the war because it's just so hard to be. get there, but there are estimates into the several hundred thousand. And then between 14 and 15 million are believed to have been displaced most internally, but some across the border to Chad. The war is worsened and been prolonged because the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, has been funneling weapons to the RSF, the rebel group, which brings us to this hero in London, who was, I guess, just walking down the street when he spotted Baham bin Rashid al-Makhtum, who is the UAE's prime minister. He's also So the ruler of Dubai, he's just strolling around London with this massive entourage.

And so let's watch the clip of what unfolded. So as you can see, there's just one guy. This is a clip was posted, I think, by Middle East High. It's just one guy, this entourage of like 50 people with this Emirati royal. It's a little hard to hear, but he's yelling, you're killing Sudanese, Emirates in UAE. They're killing Sudanese people. And a member of the prime minister's entourage responds, fuck you and fuck your people, motherfucker, black bitch.

He then crosses the street to menace the man. Ben, I do wonder if things would be different if the Emirati, you know, cost-benefit analysis of supporting the RSF would change if more officials were treated like this in places like Washington instead of being invited to the White House or Cafe Milano for a nice meal. Yeah, it is entirely the case that this Emirati support for the RSF, which is well documented, has at a minimum contributed significantly to the levels of violence. and some loss of life inside of Sudan. And I have to say, like, there's been a pass on this. Number one, because the Emirates have a lot of friends, they have a lot of resources. I think number two, they did the Abram records. So it's kind of like, hey, we did this thing you like.

You know, don't look at this other thing we're doing, you know. But I think, like, the takeaway I... They pay a lot of bribes. I mean... They're giving the Trump family a lot of cash. Well, yeah, $2 billion investment in their... in their crypto. Yeah, they bought half of a business that didn't yet exist for, I think, $500 million. $500 million, was it? Okay.

Pretty good deal. Yeah. And other commitments, you know, these commitments they make to invest billions of dollars in the U.S. Oh, they bought $2 billion worth. One of the Emeraldi firm bought $2 million worth of Trump coin. They use like the Trump stable coin and investment. It's a finance of crypto firm. So the other thing, though, that's interesting me about this is you do get this sense that the gap between powerful people and accountability has just been growing the last 10 years, right? So to take your tenure kind of stepback day, the difference between what was kind of tolerable in terms of conflict and violence and loss of civilian life has somehow really opened up in the last 10 years. And there's a sense that powerful people are not

accountable. And I think what you're seeing increasingly is stuff like this happening. You know, like people are so frustrated and they feel like they have no outlet, you know, and you go to a place like London and all these people hang out in London and they, and you're right. Like I think discomfort beginning to show up in front of people is like that's just going to keep happening because people can see what's going on in the world. They see that nobody seems to be held accountable for it. And they also see, by the way, nobody even feels kind of bad about it. You know, Their reaction wasn't to be like, you know, no, we're not doing that. Or it's been like, shut the fuck up, you know.

And it's that mentality that I think is just the powder keg is just going to keep getting more and more pressure inside of it. When it's like the most shameless proxy war stuff you've ever heard of, it's like the Emirati's gold down there. Yeah, they're supporting the RSF. They're giving the RSF drones, which they're using to massacre civilians because the RSF has access to the gold mines. Yeah. That is some. Yeah. Gross shit. Yeah. Yeah. And gold's, you know, doing well because people don't trust currencies because they don't trust your governments.

I mean, all this stuff is kind of connected to basically powerful people wrecking things and hoarding power and resources and ordinary people feeling that they have less outlets to express themselves. So they end up just like shouting at people in the street in London, you know. And they're for that, we salute you, sir. Speaking of powerful people wrecking things, let's talk about Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth. You might remember Pistol Pete from his Fox News days. Drunk guy on the weekends. Now he's in charge of America's nukes and of its wars, which may be why the latter's not going so well. A couple stories about Pete that caught our eye. So we'll tick through these.

First, the New York Times did an analysis of military promotions under Heggseth and found that he really, really hates promoting women and people of color. The Times found, quote, eight of 201 candidates for high ranking posts this year have been women or 4%. less than half the average percentage of the past 10 years. The largest drop-offs have come from the Navy and Air Force. In July, the Times reported that Hegsef recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color to the two-star Admiral rank. This also comes after Hegseff fired a bunch of senior women and black officers,

including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was fired literally for filming one video about what it was like to be black in America. Ben, this just strikes me as, well, they also looked at the lower ranks where Hexseth is not part of the promotions process. And there are a lot more women and people of color are coming up. But it does feel like Hexath is creating like a generational problem within the military by promoting only white men for this period. Yeah, I think the alarming thing about Hexeth, or there are a lot of them. One of the alarming things about Hexeth versus Trump's first term secretaries of defense or war is that he's clearly trying to. to remake the military in MAGA's image. Like he's trying to turn the United States military

into kind of an extension of MAGA political interest and a reflective of the MAGA worldview, which is pretty white and male, right? And the problem for that is, well, one, it's wrong and unfair to people who are being overlooked for promotions. Two, I worry that that's so that the military will be more likely to follow more extreme orders as the Trump administration goes on so that by the time you get to year three and year four, and we're coming back at Greenland or coming back at, you know, deploying troops in America cities. Yeah, or the streets, right. Yeah, all of a sudden, you know, they've got a slightly more likely group of people to do that.

And then the last piece is what's going to be left at the end? You know, like you're going to come in and you're going to have this kind of maga military and, you know, rebuilding cohesion and a force that is representative of the United States will be hard to do after all this wrecking. You're not going to be able to just bring these people back. They're going to have lives and families and things going on. It's just not how the process works. The second story that caught our eye was we've talked a bunch of times about this critical

shortage of U.S. weapons and munitions thanks to the war in Iran. A lot of it is like interceptor missiles, but there's also offensive weapons. Apparently Trump finally learned about this issue too. And the Washington Post reported that he screamed at Heggsat during a meeting at Camp David. So Hexeth did whatever a brave leader does. He blamed his deputy, who then really. wrote armed suppliers a letter basically telling them they had 21 days to figure it out.

When all of this leaked, Trump posted a message calling the report both false but also treasonous, which it can't be both. But I mean, it's just, look, we've talked about this enough. We don't need to belabor it. But if Trump really did just learn that this was a problem and their response was to write a letter, like it just shows how fucked we are because the timeline for making some of these weapons is literally years and there's no way to change that in the short term. Yeah, it just shows that.

Because you and I are on some text threads with, you know, former national security types. Anybody who follows any of this stuff within the first three weeks of this war was like, oh, shit. Yeah. We're going to run out of munitions. And so if Trump is behind like every text thread that I'm on, you know, like by six months, like that's a little alarming. It is also the case that you, yeah, as you said, you can just like fire off a thing and be like replete, you'll replenish our patriot missiles. Like that takes years to do, not 21 days. Hegs up passing the buck, not surprising there at all.

And again, like, to be a bit of a natural security person here, Russia, China, like, they're looking around and they're like, oh, the U.S. doesn't have anything left. You know, like, this might be the time to escalate in Ukraine or to take a whack at Taiwan because there's literally nothing that they could do. That's a very real concern. Or if this thing with Iran escalates, as they've already demonstrated, they can fire it everywhere we are in the Middle East and we just don't have enough defensive munitions to protect things anymore. Yeah, Nordora Gulf allies. The irony of all of this, well, not really an irony,

it's that a lot of Trump administration officials oppose support to Ukraine because they were worried about this kind of critical munitions shortage. Now we went to war with Iran, which is making it exponentially worse. And that's the thing. And I wouldn't let them to blame the Ukraine thing, because let's be very clear. If you look at the numbers of defensive munitions we've used in the Iran more as against what we gave Ukraine, like the crisis has been called. caused by a dumb war. 100%. We could have weathered the Ukraine.

A war of choice. Yeah. Third, the Guardian had a report about corruption at the Pentagon, specifically the appointment of venture capitalists Mark Andresen and then failed Senate candidate Blake Masters to the Pentagon's defense policy board. It's a board that kind of like overseas. It's like a sounding board for Pentagon for Hexeth. But it gets you good access.

It gets you in the door there. For sure. Both have links to Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm 1789 Capital. They also have ties to big. defense contractors and companies like Anderil and SpaceX, ungodly numbers of investments on their own. So no conflict of interest there. It does feel like we're at the point of the kind of corruption cycle where everyone sees the President of the United States like gorging himself at the trough and they're running up to try to like catch one of his scraps in their mouth.

Yeah. And again, if we talk about the personnel version of remaking the Pentagon, this is the trillion and a half dollar budget version of remaking it, which is by the time that year and year four, the Trump administration, the, I mean, this is, there's limitless corruption available because if you have a trillion plus dollar budget and you can just do these massive contracts, you know, you can do it with Don Jr.'s company, you can do it with Silicon Valley oligarchs that you like, like Andresen. It also like spotlights, and we should come back on this defense tech issue because the new defense contractors are the Silicon Valley people, you know, as systems are shifting to AI and autonomous weaponry, it's less lockyed,

Martin and Boeing. They're still around, obviously, but it's more, you know, Mark and Marco Andreessen, he's one of these guys who, like, founded Netscape. Congratulations. Does that mean you know how to be the defense supplier? These guys think that they can just portable their, you know. Remember when he was kind of a lib, but he was like super online, which is like tweet all day. And then I think his firm made a massive bet on crypto. Democrats kind of came out against crypto. And he became anti-woke. It became anti-woke. Yeah, I think he tweeted something about how colonization was good for India and got hammered for it. And that made him mad.

Because these guys, he has like, he's one of these Silicon Valley guys with like the thinnest skin imaginable. Yeah. I'm waiting for the bad guys to start losing in this life. It's coming. I can feel it building. Yeah, let's hope. Finally, Wired had this remarkable story that caught our eye. So in May, a Madovac plane carrying two pilots and two nurses on a routine 30-minute flight in New Mexico crashed to the side of a mountain in an accident linked to military.

conducted GPS jamming exercises in the area. Leading up to the crash, the Air Force was doing an event where it brought together all of its electronic warfare units for these two weeks of exercises, including units to test technologies to block GPS. Tragically, this Madovac flight had its GPS blocked as it was trying to land in the dead of night in the middle of the desert and they hit a mountain. Like, we don't know. It was just a horrible story.

We don't really know the backstory and whether like incompetence played a role here or if you tie this to Hexeth in any way. But Jesus Christ, like, how does this happen? But what you also know is that there's not transparency about these kinds of events. Right. It was like secret forever. And so if you're going to stack up these things, you've got in Pete Heckseth the guy that is like promoting white people and trying to bring MAGA people in military, who's burning through our munitions in a dumb war, who is like facilitating rampant corruption and military contracting and is running the least transparent Pentagon of my life, kicking people out of their briefing room

and not sharing information about stuff. And that's why these things go together. It just shows the depth of the rot at, like, an agency that is the most powerful in the U.S. government. Yes, well said. POTTA of the world is brought to you by Haya. Back to school season is here again, and you want to give your kids the best shot

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The first strike on this wildberries warehouse created a cloud of smoke that was reportedly so large that you could see it from space. It's a lot of stuff burning. But this campaign against wildberries, it did not end there. Foreign Policy Magazine in the New York Times did great pieces on all of this. I'm going to draw from liberally in this section. They found that in the past month or so, at least 23 wildberries facilities have been hit by Ukraine and nine wild berries employees have been killed. This Moscow-based organization called

Data Insight estimates that wildberries has lost up to one-third of its warehouse space and nearly $6 billion in goods. And that's a big deal if you're an average Russian because more than half of the people in Russia use wild berries once a month and tens of millions of Russians use it multiple times a week. So the service being disrupted just has a big impact on ordinary people's lives and it brings the war home in a way that Ukraine hasn't managed to do previously to like sort of the Russian populace. But the strikes may also have a material impact on the battlefield. So the FP, the foreign policy piece dug into a bunch of detail about how Russian soldiers use wildberries for supplies. The Russian military, I think, can be quite incompetent when it comes to resupplying

guys at the front. So soldiers will end up buying stuff for themselves or they'll are these kind of like ad hoc groups that raise money and donate supplies to them and have it delivered via wildberries. Until recently, the Wildberry site had a dedicated section called Everything for the SVO. SVO stands for a special military operation. You could buy items like, or you still can buy items, but they were like sort of bucketed in this section. Stuff like body armor, drone components, fins for grenades. The list goes on and on. This reporter who did the piece for foreign policy at Lexi Kovalev said he counted 1,000

items that were military use only in about 4,500 that could be considered dual use. You also said that there were like, you know, you could find Russian military bloggers. talking about how important Wildberries is to guides at the front. So, Ben, I think these strikes raise some interesting questions about civilian versus military targeting and what's appropriate. Under international law, a target becomes legitimate when it's providing a military advantage to your enemy and destroying it would create a definite military advantage for you. I think the Ukrainians argue that the extensive military hardware on the Wildberry site makes

it a pretty easy call. I think they'd also point out that Russia has bombed the shit out of Nova Posta, which which is a Ukrainian delivery company. They're also, I think, honest, though, the Ukrainians went, that part of it is psychological warfare. Yeah. The commander of Ukraine's drone force said the strikes were about destroying, quote, the illusion of a comfortable peacetime. So, Ben, it's interesting. Like, these are obviously slippery slope arguments.

Walmart and Bass Pro Shop sell a lot of guns, including to service members. I wonder how people would feel about those suddenly getting bombed by an adversary in a war. But I do feel like in this specific case, Ukraine, their argument is pretty compelling. But I don't know what are you made of it? I find the whole thing worrisome. Look, I understand the Ukrainian mentality. Like, we need to get any advantage we can. These guys make no distinction between – or very limited distinction between civilian and military targets.

And so they're ratcheting it up. And so we saw them hitting energy infrastructure inside of Russia. Now we're seeing them hit this. I understand why they're doing it. I think they're blurring the lines because I think it's probably both. As you pointed out, it's like, sure, there's some military uses. It's also more like we have to bring the war home to the Russian people. If the Russian people don't feel the impact of this war, nothing's going to change,

which is a logical conclusion, but that is a slippery slope. And it's both a slippery slope to getting further and further away from clearly military targets. But what I worry about, again, is this escalation point that keeps coming up today. You know, the Russians could say, well, the Ukrainians get a lot of supplies from Europe. And so maybe we should start drone attacks on warehouses in Poland or Germany. Or if you imagine you decided, well, you have to feed your soldiers. Yeah. So what if we blew up every grain depot?

Yeah. And so I just, you know, the irony is that for all of the ham-hand. stupid diplomacy at the beginning of the Trump administration on the war, like it would actually now would be a good time to be trying to walk, you know, the Russians and the Ukrainians back from what feels like a potential escalation cycle that could get hairier and hairier. And you don't feel that happening. And so I think this will give the Ukrainian some advantage, but I have to think that Putin will find some way to escalate in return. And then we're just kind of keep going on this spiral of the world. And again, there's another example of the kind of,

There are these little escalatory steps happening all the time and they almost get brushed off now. Like I think it's a Moldova said that a Russian drone had landed on Moldovan soil that could trigger Article 5. Yeah, yeah. There's this report that U.S. intelligence believe Russia was behind an attack on a German airport. There was a drone loaded with explosives that I think was targeting a Ukrainian cargo plane at like in Leipzig in Germany. Yeah. So it's pretty scary stuff. There's a NATO Intel report that I think leaked that suggested Russia might try an attack of some kind, maybe hybrid or maybe cyber on a NATO ally in the coming years to kind of test the alliance.

That's what I'd watch. I mean, the thing I would watch for to be constructive only in terms of what to watch for is this, is like reprisals getting into Europe. Because the same logic. And again, let's be very clear. Russia is the aggressor here. Ukraine has our sympathy because they are being entrepreneurial in their defense. at the same time, it is what it is. And I think that the Russians could decide we got to bring this war into Europe under the same logic that they're the ones back filling the Ukrainians.

Yeah. Speaking of threats to Europe, a couple of months back, we covered this pretty wild story about Jared and Ivanka Trump claiming they discovered an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Albania. Ivanka told the story like it was kind of a real estate mute, but really it was just like a love story about colonization. Ever since there. On the Rothschild's yacht. On the Rothschild's yacht. That's when they discover the swim up.

The barren island. You walk to the top of the mountain barefoot. Everyone's like, it's not barren. It's a fucking wildlife reserve. So they cut this sweetheart deal with the prime minister of Albania to try to develop this area. Ever since there have been massive protests of the deal of the development of the region, which have been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution by locals because there's a bunch of

like endangered flamingo species that would be impacted by the construction. The Wall Street Journal added some incredible reporting to this firestorm over the weekend. The journal says that the development group that Jared Kushner is backing paid over $120 million to a man named Arthur or Artur. I don't know. He's a gangster who gets shit. Artur, Shehu, for the land that they're trying to develop. But there were a couple small issues with that.

First of all, Shea Hu may not legally own the land. The villagers who live there say they like saw Jared's like AI rendering of what this resort would look like, realized it was on top of their village and then reached out to say, hey, this dude stole it from us back in 2000. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is that Chehu is an alleged gangster and drug trafficker. This guy might be kind of overseeing gangs that are leading to people going in boats in the Caribbean that Pete Hexeth has then drone striking. Yeah, great. So that's cool. And then finally back in June, Albania's corruption office got in order to arrest Shehu for money laundering and racketeering. He currently lives

in Miami because he fled Albania because he was involved in like a shootout at a bar, maybe with a rival gang. So Ben, great reporting here by the Wall Street Journal. I'm not remotely surprised that Jared Kushner is kind of like in cahoots with a mobster in Albania since his father-in-law acts like one. And actually, his father acts like one, too. I remember he set up his own sister in a sting operation. It's weird.

A little weird. Crazy story. This story is so important because every single trend in the world. world that people are pissed about kind of converges in it, you know, like oligarchs calling shots, like Jared Kushner doing real estate deals, environmental degradation, like life not getting better for people while these deals are done over their heads. The reality is like I just don't see this. I'm sorry for Jared Ivanka. I just, I can't see this thing coming to fruition. It seems like this tapped into a level of discontent discontent with the Albanian public. But also just

it does make you wonder imagine if we had like a anti-corruption union at DOJ like what are the nature of these deals that are being made

by Jared and the Trump family around the world? How many people are there like this gangster on the other end of them? Like what like because there's so little I mean

when you think about the like colonoscopy done to like every business transaction Hunter Biden was ever involved in versus this stuff like it is insane.

This has to be like literally number one on the list for oversight for Congress. After you win, knock on wood and hopefully get certified, knock on wood. This corruption has to be. Do not wait. Please, just dive in. Sapinas. Do independent investigations.

Do whatever you have to do. Sapina Kushner. Sapina his business partners. Sapina the banks. Sapina like the partners. Like all of it. Day one. Yeah.

Don't wait. Please God don't wait again. You want to put Merrick Arlen on this case? Jesus. What's that guy up to you think? I don't know. Just wallowing. He's just, no, he's just abiding by norms wherever he is.

Yeah, just feeling good about himself. Two more quick things. So first, it's just worth mentioning that the Ebola outbreak that we've talked about a couple times in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then some parts of Uganda, it's now the second largest in history and the fastest growing on record. The Congolese government published some data on Tuesday showing the death count is now surpassed 2000 and there's over 4,000 additional confirmed cases. We say confirmed.

There's probably a lot of cases they don't know about. But there's a lot of problems that make this a harder outbreak. There's no vaccine for this particular strain of Ebola. The outbreak is happening in places where there is like ongoing warfare and very little health infrastructure. And there's lots of evidence that the virus is spreading in the community and not being tracked. I saw like one one health center found that 90% of their patients were not kind of registered

anywhere else or just new people, which suggests that there's a lot of transmission just happening in life. the Director General of the African CDC also expressed concern this week that the virus might be mutating. So other than that, it's going good. I just wanted to bring this up because it feels very scary. It's a great example of a problem that the White House is just, I don't think I've heard them talk about it or even pretending to try it to solve. Well, because the chief instrument for solving the Ebola epidemic in 2014 was USAID, which doesn't exist. and the chief international organization that we work with to solve that epidemic was the

World Health Organization, which the United States has pulled out of. So they don't even have the levers to try to deal with it. And this is one of those issues that's horrible for the people impacted. And it's also the case that if and when this shows up in the United States, people are going to freak the fuck out and not really understand why it's happened. Like, it's happened because we've dismantled the mechanisms that we have to deal with it. So things like this tragically happen in the world. but as is the case with like conflicts, we don't have a UN system that works. We don't really have an international global public health infrastructure,

which after COVID is pretty remarkable. Terrifying. Yeah. And everyone is even more distrustful of health officials, vaccines, Fauci. Well, you're all about Fauci, but we won't talk about Ebola, you know. Yeah, great. Finally, Ben, I want to see if you can spot what's wrong with Canadian politician Bill Oliver's speech to the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick.

This speech is from June, but the conference. clip kind of made the rounds last week. Let's play that. One of the dangers associated with creating advocacy offices is that citizens often develop expectations that exceed the powers actually granted to those offices. Here's a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker, one of my concerns with this legislation is the potential gap between what New Brunswickers may reasonably expect this office to accomplish and what the office will actually have the authority to do once it is established.

Okay, so as you could see there, like when he copied it over from chat GPT or whatever, Claude, he left in the AI's framing of his remarks, but he didn't just do it once. A few minutes later, he also read out, quote, here's a more developed and flowing version of the same section, and after that he started to read another one before catching himself and saying, excuse me. So Oliver has since responded, saying, quote, during the spring session of the legislature, I employed AI to help prepare speaking notes when printing the final version of my speech AI prompts were not removed, which were spoken by me and has caused much concern of many individuals. He says he learned

an important lesson. Ben, a couple questions here as a former speechwriter. How stupid do you have to be to anchorman yourself, not once, not twice, but three times in 40 minutes? That's question one. And question two, what percentage of politicians do you think have just fully outsourced speechwriting to AI at this point? This is the thing is, first of all, reading the prompts, it does suggest that I always tell people that it was one of the reasons it was useful that Barack Obama actually like read and edited his speeches is because he wasn't reading them for the first time in delivery. Right.

And as it's like you have Trump, he reacts to himself. He's like so true. Yeah, yeah. But that's the thing. You can tell when a politician is kind of reading something for the first time now he gives away the game. I'm surprised he doesn't have their like, would you like me to develop a five-point plan for how you can become a better, you know, legislator?

Was this answer adequately? Yeah, yeah. But then the bigger problem is beyond the fact that this is confirming like what people are scared about with AI, it's also kind of confirming what people are scared about with their politicians, which is that if you can just stand up there and do your job by reciting AI-produced text, what are you? Like what is your, what are you bringing in particular to this? Right. Oh, like you're like literally, look, everything we all do is. Derivative, right? Like, the words I'm saying right now are derivative of my life's experience and things I read to prepare for this show and stuff I learned in the Obama days, whatever. But it does feel like with AI, it's literally just like hunks of text fed into a machine that kind of like blends them together and spits out something new, but that is entirely derivative of whatever it was trained on. If no human beings are having new ideas or political thoughts or statements, like, what happens? Organic book plug, right? Because having done like, always say in looking at the history of political speech in this country, you know, one of the things

is very clear to me is that the thing that makes someone pay attention to what a politician is saying is when you say something that sounds different. Like, oh, here's a hard truth I haven't heard before. Here's an argument that is different from what I've heard before. Or here's just, you know, I was just profiled your doppelganger Rob Sand in Iowa. Like he's got like this style. He's not Barack Obama, but it's like very Rob Sand. It's his earnest. It's him, you know. And, I think part of what scares people about politicians is that they think that they're completely replaceable. It essentially doesn't really matter who you elect because they're just going to read the same talking points and, you know, reward the same special interest and operate in the same

system. And this is the worst version of what people are afraid of. I would imagine that a lot of politicians are using AI because it's a shortcut. But what AI produces is like literally the definition of the lowest common denominator. Like, what should a Canadian legislator who's, you know, from this region, say about X issue, and it spits it out. Like, well, okay, I'm glad that you have a machine that can look at a bunch of texts on the internet and decide what to say, but that's not what people vote for people to do for them. And so I caution against, you know, yeah, use AI for research or, you know, get some feedback, but you got to write your own fucking text.

We're also just like, we're not far away from someone recommending that AI agents actually govern us. That's the next step, because what's the difference? It's like the fever dream and also someone's going to propose it. Because what's the difference? And I'm sure that would make, you know, Mark Andreessen happy. Oh, Andreessen will be pumped. He would love that.

He'd love nothing more. Cool future we got going on here. All right, we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Richard Horsi about all the things happening in Myanmar. So stick around for that. Pod tape world is brought to you by Ridge. You know Ridge.

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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that Pod Save the World sent you. The What Today podcast you know and love is shaking things up. You already know that five days a week, I, Jane Koston, bring you the need-to-know news and expert analysis on the big stories shaping today and tomorrow. Stories like how social media warps our perception of the world and the strange reality of who is signing up to work for ice. All in less time than it takes to roast a chicken.

And now, What-a-day episodes have been able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be hitting your YouTube and podcast feeds in the afternoons. You'll get the breaking news even faster. Check out Water Day. Now dropping in the PM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I'm very pleased to welcome back to Podsaid the world, Richard Horsey. Richard is the senior advisor for Asia at the International Crisis Group, where he has long led their work on Myanmar. Richard, thanks very much for joining us. That's great to be on, Ben. So part of what we wanted to do here is catch people up with what's been happening in Myanmar to use a phrase. And so for people that have not been following this

closely, you'll remember that in 2021, there was a military coup which overturned the kind of nascent democratic reform movement in Burma and imprisoned, Don Sang Suu Kyi, the elected state counselor. And since then, there's been a civil war in which over 100,000 people have died. There are millions of people who are displaced. There's malnutrition and hunger across the country. Just to cite a recent report, the monitoring group armed conflict location and event data noted that, quote, Myanmar is the most fragmented conflict in the world with over 1,200 distinct armed groups reported have been involved in at least one violent event. But Richard, I just want to ask just how would you describe the current state of play?

This has kind of fallen off the radar with everything that's happening around the world. I know that the military has taken steps recently that we can talk about to kind of entrench itself deeper in power. But how would you describe the state of the civil conflict and who's in control in Myanmar? So as you said, Ben, after the coup, there was just this eruption first in peaceful demonstrations. And then when those were brutally suppressed, just, you know, huge swathes of the country and particularly young people took up arms, went to more remote areas, fought back against the military, joined up with longstanding. ethnic armed groups who've been fighting for decades for greater autonomy. And this really led to, you know, much of the country, perhaps more than half, perhaps much more than that, falling out of state hands. This is not a new phenomenon in Myanmar, right? This is not a country that was

united and where the central government has traditionally had control over all of its territory. You know, for eight decades since independence, Myanmar has been fragmented. But I think the situation we see today is the most fragmented that Myanmar has been over all of those decades. The Myanmar military has managed to stabilize the situation. If we were talking two years ago, I think we'd have been talking about can the military survive, will it collapse, did it face imminent battlefield defeat? But through the backing of China, diplomatically and militarily, through the military's own efforts to improve its drone warfare, enforce conscription for the first time, it's managed to stabilize the front lines.

But that's a far cry from recovering all the territory it's lost. And there are large parts of the country, including most of the international borders, that are still not under central control. It seems like the military's been trying to kind of seize on some of those gains you mentioned and kind of confer a sense that its ultimate resilience, if not ability to control the whole country. is assured since having a kind of sham election earlier this year. You've seen Minang Long, who's the general who led the coup, who is now the president of the country. You've seen him make these diplomatic visits to China and India and Thailand and trying to kind of send this message.

We're back in from the cold. What is the state of the ability of the military to kind of break its international isolation in places like ASEAN, the organization of Southeast Asian countries or drawing on its relationship with China or India. Is that working? So I think on Minong-Lang's terms, he probably feels he's won, but he's won at enormous cost to the country, of course. Now, winning on his terms means, you know, the coup was about removing on Sanssucci, removing that democratic experiment that you spoke about, putting the military back at the center of politics and the economy.

let's not forget as well. And in those terms, I think he feels like, you know, after a shaky few years where this coup could have actually failed, that he's managed to get through this. He's had these stage managed elections. He's now presenting himself as a civilian elected leader. And some countries have accepted that. China has accepted it. Xi Jinping, you know, literally embraced him in the great hall of the people a few weeks ago, giving very clear backing. India. has hosted him on an official visit, and just a couple of days ago, he was on an official visit to Thailand. So I think, you know, countries in the region are making a calculation that Minang Lai and the Myanmar military probably aren't going anywhere. They weren't keen to reach out to him. He was in, you know, very strong diplomatic isolation in the period where it looked like he may fall. But now that he's stabilized, now that he has China's very visible backing, India's very visible backing, other countries are making a calculation. These guys are going to be around for a while,

and we have things to discuss, we have issues, we have concerns. You know, we can't keep them at arm's length. And, you know, that hasn't broken kind of the West's general distaste for Myanmar, but frankly, Western countries have far higher priorities and are not paying a lot of attention these days to Myanmar. And in the region, some members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member country, are still kind of considering that normal engagement with Myanmar is distasteful and premature. But at the end of the day, you know, they also want to focus on other things.

They don't want Myanmar dominating their meetings and summits. And the feeling is that after Thailand has now hosted him, Laos has hosted him on a state visit, that it's probably a matter of time before he will be back, you know, at least in the region, in normal diplomatic circles. Yeah, in some ways it feels like we're all the way back to where things were, you know, before, say, 2010 or 11, you know, there's just kind of de facto engagement, even if it's unpleasant in some ways. I want to ask a couple questions about then the opposition.

The first is another story that has been making the rounds recently was concerned that Aung San Suu Kyi had not been seen in years. And there was kind of a proof of life effort to kind of establish that, She was in fact alive and in custody, but there has not been access for her lawyers or has not been any, obviously, media confirmation of her whereabouts. How would you describe the state of play as it relates to she's obviously very old? What do we know about her conditions such as they are? And how much does she still matter in the politics of the country? Like would her death be a potentially galvanizing event that the military might?

not want people to know about. Is that lurking in the backdrop here too? You know, the whole point of the coup for Menong Laiing was to remove Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy Party from the political landscape. You know, this was not just about him getting power. It was about her being removed from any possibility of playing a political role. And that's why she's been kept almost totally incommunicado for these last five and a half years. That has led to many concerns of her family, of her supporters of the world at large, what is her situation? And we know that for a time she was in very austere conditions in Napido prison in a sort of tin hut that got extremely hot in the

hot season. And, you know, for an old person with longstanding health issues, that's a concern. The military announced a few months ago that she had been moved to a house in the capital Napiador, but there was no other information. In the last few days, the Red Cross, has been given access to her. So she met with the delegate of the Red Cross in Myanmar, and photographs of that meeting and a short statement from the ICRC have been released. So that is the proof of life that not only her family were calling for, but also countries in the region. And even China was pushing for greater transparency over her situation. And, you know, there are a lot of leaders in the region who are very fond of Monsensuchi.

They worked with her for a number of years. They were dismayed to see what happened after the coup. they feel a certain loyalty to her. And so this is an important issue, you know, for the region as well. The demands that she'd be given access to the ASEAN special envoy to other diplomats have been rebuffed. And I think the ICRC choice was precisely to stop this becoming a kind of constant demand from different diplomats. You know, while you gave access to the Philippines who were the chair of the regional grouping, why not next year give access to Singapore, the next incoming chair.

It could have led to this kind of demands to see her and so on. And I think Melong Lang did not want to give her that kind of political role. So it was the Red Cross. There's the proof of life. She seems, you know, from the photos in reasonably good shape. And the Red Cross has had a chance to pass message from her to her family. But that's basically it. She has no access to lawyers.

She doesn't have access for her personal doctor. There may be other doctors seeing her we don't know. And so with her, you kind of removed from the stage, as, you know, you mentioned was Minang Lang's, one of his intentions, how would you describe the state of the organized opposition? You know, there was an umbrella group, kind of an umbrella put over this constellation of actors after the coup that included, you know, elements of the NLD, the democratically elected party, you know, but also young people and then all the ethnic armed groups that you mentioned too. How would you describe the state of that opposition? Is it organized? Do they continue to have morale that they could somehow prevail in this conflict? Or are they just trying to hold on to whatever territory they've got? What's your sense of it? I mean, I think there's an overwhelming feeling across large swathes of the country that the current situation is unacceptable. It's untenable. The military cannot be allowed to reinsert itself at the heart of politics in the country, that the reform period

of a decade was far from perfect, but was pointing in the right direction. And now, as you said, everything is pointing in the wrong direction. The clock has been turned back a generation, not only politically, you know, back to another closed authoritarian military regime, but economically as well. You know, there's a lost generation of development of childhood, of childhood health of education, of economic output. And so there is still a strong determination among many different walks of life, people I talk to, you know, to finish the revolution as they see it. But that's looking like a very long-term prospect. And just as the country itself is highly fragmented, so too is resistance and opposition to the military. You have very different kinds

of resistance. You have, as you say, the long-standing ethnic armed. groups who really just want autonomy. They don't care who's in control in the center. They just want to have the ability to have a greater say in their own lives and their own affairs. There is a young generation of politically active people, some who've taken up arms, others who are resisting in nonviolent ways, you know, the youth of the cities and the heartland who are determined to have a different future. And, you know, these people have different objectives. They're in different parts of the country, they have different strategies, so it is very divided, and that works to the military's advantage. After the coup, the government that was deposed established a parallel government,

the National Unity Government, with Aung San Suu, and President Wimint, her nominee president, at its head. The problem with that is that in the midst of an armed revolution, which it backed, it was never quite clear whether this national unity government was a government and was aiming to be a government or was a revolutionary organization aiming to overthrow, you know, the military in Napidore. And those kind of two roles kind of clashed a little bit. And, you know, I think there's a sense now that a lot of the momentum has been lost. A lot of the political momentum is more criticism of the parallel government. You know, the revolution was so close to succeeding and yet we failed. Where are the new ideas? Where is the new.

direction. And the reality is that the opposition government with Aung San Suu Kyi at its helm doesn't have leadership. Because if your leader is incarcerated in communicado, you don't have someone who is visible and there to kind of lead the charge. There is no Zelensky-like figure, because the Zelensky-like figure is Aung San Suu Kyi herself, and she's in communicado. So she remains incredibly important in that sense that she's the sort of touchstone for everybody. She's not important in the sense of leading things because she hasn't been able to speak publicly since the coup. But I do think that her death would be a trigger moment and something that the military would be very concerned about. They don't want her dying on their watch in their custody. She still is

the most influential political figure in the country, even after five years of incarceration and detention. One of the things that feels different to me than the past is the role of the United States, the West, whatever, form, you know, the United States and Europe. There was a lot of focus on Aung San Suu Kyi and democracy in Burma in the decades leading up to that moment of reform that took place from around 2011 until the coup. It feels like there's much more disengagement. Now, though, like, you know, the Trump administration, I'm not sure what their policy is. You know, so while there's a familiar, you know, trying to backing the military and some of the Southeast Asian countries being kosier,

what seems to be missing is any sense that this is even on the radar screen of the United States, or certainly not that there's a kind of pressure strategy to change the behavior or the government. I mean, is there a role to play for the United States, you know, recognizing the Trump administration is probably not going to be that constructive? And are there other interests, too, because I noticed, you know, these recent reports, too, of a huge kind of scam economy emanating from Myanmar, the kind of proliferation of this, you know, online criminality feels almost North Korean, right, that this military could just turn to, like, you know, crypto and scams and other illicit.

situations of income. Should that compel greater concern about what's happening here too? I think absolutely. I mean, you know, we live in a different world now, right, where we're quite inured to human suffering, where the humanitarian system is broken and broke, to put it frankly, and where international relations is far more transactional. And so that has, you know, been a huge problem for people who've been trying to, you know, increase global interest in what's happening in Myanmar, try to drive policy changes that could really have some effect, they're hitting brick walls, right? It's very hard to advocate for Myanmar on humanitarian grounds when you have Gaza, you have Ukraine, and where you have, frankly, not only in the US, but across the West,

governments who are much more concerned about other issues closer to home and are not focused on principles-based foreign policy. So this is a huge challenge, but it, As you say, Myanmar demands attention not only because we should care about what's happening because of the humanitarian costs, the human costs. It also matters because having a failed state in the heart of Asia is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Myanmar is the largest global source of synthetic methamphetamins, mostly going to East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. and it's probably the largest current scam center economy.

Now, these are many of them in parts of the country that the government doesn't have formal control over, but in many cases it's armed groups that it's somehow allied with on the battlefield that are controlling the territory near to the Thai border mostly, where these industrial-scale scam cities are growing up out of the paddy fields. And those are targeting people all around the world. So, you know, Myanmar drugs may not be landing on the streets of New York, but Myanmar scam centers are scamming tens of billions of dollars a year from Americans. They're targeting Europeans. They're targeting, you know, victims all around the world.

And this really matters. And it matters not only as a criminal justice issue, but I think it matters because the scale of this economy tends possibly hundreds of billions of dollars across Southeast Asia, these scam factories. They are developing, you know, dark financial systems, dark company registration systems, North Korean money has been laundered over exactly the same channels as the scam center money is being laundered. So this is a whole criminal ecosystem which is emerging, which is a threat to regional stability. It's a threat to financial integrity in the region. We should be very worried about that.

Yeah, I mean, it just feels like, you, I mean, to be blunt, have this kind of gangster military running a piece of this state with no regard for the human rights of its people, purely in self-survival mode and willing to turn to kind of all manner of schemes to enrich itself in what has to be an illicit economy. I mean, it's in the heart of Southeast Asia. So I just think there's a lot of reasons to care about this. Well, I want to end on the human one, which is, I'm just curious, Richard, you know, I know a lot of people from Myanmar, from my time working on it in more hopeful days. And it's so sad to kind of hear, you know, people are scattered. Some people are out of the country. People in places like Yangon

have kind of gone to ground. On the other hand, it is amazing. It's what you describe. Like, people are still talking about, you know, what lessons they could have learned from what went wrong in the last era of reform to get it right the next time. There's this kind of persistent, you know, sense at some point, you know, the future will be different. I mean, what give people a sense from your context of just what the mood is like for more normal people in the country, you know, who are just trying to make sense of this and trying to find some hope in it all? How bad is it economically and politically? And what is your sense of the remaining kind of hope for the future? So in the main cities, you know, Yangon, Mandalay, I think, you know, a lot of people are just kind of traumatized by these last five years and what's happened by the futures that they saw that was.

stolen from them. But at the end of the day, they have to put food on the table. They have to feed their kids. They have to get their kids to school. And so, you know, in a situation of acute economic distress where there's no jobs available, the economy is in decline, prices are very high. You know, it's a daily struggle just to make ends meet. And that is what a lot of people are focused on. And they don't have many options. You know, the options are you go to parts of the country where the illicit economy is thriving, because that's where the money is. Or you go into, informal labor migration routes, very dangerous risks of trafficking, risks of exploitation, to Thailand, to the Gulf, to other places, to try and send money back home. And that's how

people are coping. But what I take hope from is that everyone I speak to is, you know, still has a vision of the Myanmar that they want. They have a vision of the country that they saw a glimpse of 10 years ago and they really still believe that that is the direction. They have to go And I think that, you know, this new young generation is incredibly inspiring. They have put aside a lot of the political divisions of the past, a lot of the received wisdom about what kind of country Myanmar was, the racism, the division. And, you know, they've come to, they sort of come together as a generation, not as a group of Burman people or minority people or whatever. They've come together as a generation. And I think that while that may not be immediately successful in unseating a varn of brutal military, it's a template. for the future and it will resonate in the future. And when opportunities do arise, you know, what I hope is that it's that it's that multi-ethnic, multi-religious, hopeful vision that will dominate and not the sort of more narrow nationalisms that we've seen exposed, you know, at certain times in the past. Yeah. No, it's a great note to end on because

you do just get a sense that if this country were allowed to reach its potential and the potential of these extraordinary people that have so many ideas for the future. It would be truly extraordinary, and yet we've had to see people go through so much. So we'll keep an eye on this. People should follow your work. Crisis Group has always been excellent on Myanmar and Southeast Asia in general. So really appreciate you coming on and helping us understand what's going on. Thanks for having me on the podcast, man.

Great to talk. Thanks again to Richard Horsey for joining the show. And we will talk to you guys next week. Ponce of the World is a Cricket Media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethkoat, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffat, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. The What a Day podcast you know and love is shaking things up.

You already know that five days a week, I, Jane Koston, bring you the need-to-know news and expert analysis on the big stories shaping today and tomorrow. Stories like how social media warps our perception. of the world and the strange reality of who is signing up to work for ice. All in less time than it takes to roast a chicken. And now, What Today episodes will be hitting your YouTube and podcast feeds in the afternoons. You'll get the breaking news even faster. Check out Whataday, now dropping in the PM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.