Pod Save the World - New year, new strain

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss Joe Biden’s latest foreign policy staffing decisions, the huge (likely) Russian hack of American government and private networks, Iran’s latest moves on uranium enrichment, a big win for abortion-rights in Argentina, Jack Ma mysteriously disappearing from public view, the latest coronavirus lockdown in the UK, the anticlimactic finalization of Brexit, and more.

Welcome back to POTSafe the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm still Ben Rhodes. Ben, it's great to be back, man. I hope you had a nice holiday. I hope everyone had a nice holiday. Also, happy election day. Yeah, I mean, we were locked down here in L.A., as you know. So it was a very quarantined holiday, but it was a holiday nonetheless. Yeah, somehow in Los Angeles, everything has gotten worse, despite us not having bad weather, but I don't know.

hopefully like fingers crossed praying for everybody. It's weird that it's election day. It's nice to know that democracy is happening in Georgia, even though, you know, as we speak, Republicans in D.C. are rejecting the concept. You know, look at you, Josh Holly, you insufferable blow-dried Ted Cruz wannabe. But Ben, I want to kick off the show with some personal news for you and for listeners, which is that I read my first John LaCarray novel over Christmas. Yes.

And now I'm addicted. and I'm nearly done with my second. Yes. We'll not let you down. And the best thing about it is like discovering a show with like 12 seasons. There's an infinite number

of John Licari books because he was incredibly prolific. So you have a lot to look forward to, Tommy. So, okay, I started with the spy who came in from the cold. Yeah. Unbelievable. I'm now almost done

with Tinker Taylor, Soldier Spy. Also fantastic. I'm really glad I read the Ben McIntyre books that I've talked about a bunch of times, which are these, the true spy. stories from that era, the spy and the traitor, spy among friends, because I feel like those really

gave me the context that La Care was writing in, right? One was about a KGB agent who became a British asset. The other is about the true story of Kim Filby, who was this notorious Soviet double agent in the British spy service. But like that context, I thought was like, I don't know, it felt like I could sort of feel it throughout. Well, now that you're in with Tinker-Taylor soldier spy, you're into the famous Smiley trilogy, which is deeply rooted in the Kim Filby story. But what I love about it is, like, he reminds you that there's human beings at the center of espionage, and, you know, there's both the intricate spying that that entails. But also he writes in the most riveting way I've ever read about, like, bureaucracies, you know, like how power

works inside of governments, like how people compete with each other, the tradeoffs people make, the kind of moral ambiguity. It's an amazing work. he creates that even though it's about the coal board feels like really constantly relevant, you know? Yeah. And like, I don't know, the guy is just such a good writer. I mean, imagine be able to write fiction like that and just kind of like being a, I don't know what he did in the service. I'm not sure if he's really talked about it in depth, do you know? Yeah, he was a spy. So he, he, for a few years, he was in MI6, the British version of CIA. And he was running agents in, in, in Europe. And I think.

that he was one of the agents who was burned by Kim Filby. That essentially his identity became revealed. His name is not John LaCarray. He adopted that as a pen name so he could start writing spy novels. And then over time, obviously, you know, got out who he was. But yeah, I mean, he gets kind of, you know, categorized as a spy novelist, which people think of as less, you know, literary. But he writes as well as anybody's written novel in the last hundred years.

years. He's going to age well, I think. Yeah, incredible talent. Well, anyway, if you want something that's really escapist, totally. I know I'm like, I'm like the billionth person to come to these, but for a world does at home, it's a great way to just kind of go into a different place. It's great COVID content. There's no question because it's escapism, but it's smart escapism. Yeah. Speaking of great COVID content, Ben, so today we got Biden's transition and some new announcements, the solar winds hack. There's all this chatter out there about tensions with Iran in the closing days of the Trump administration. A really big win for abortion rights in Argentina. A billionaire named Jack Ma was seemingly missing in China for a while. He appears to have been

found, but there's a broader story that we'll get into. The UK is dealing with a horrible COVID outbreak and lockdown. Brexit happened. Remember that. And then we got a little lightning around at the end. So lots of cover. And we're going to go guestless today because there was just like so much news that it seemed almost impossible to fit all this stuff into one show and to have a guest. But next week we'll be back to regular scheduled programming. So Ben, we're obviously like careening through the final days of the Trump administration. But I think we start with Biden because he's rounding at his national security team. And it is exciting for me, at least, to imagine, you know, having a competent foreign policy apparatus not filled with lunatics and morons.

So maybe we start there. So previously, we talked about Biden's choice for Secretary of Defense. Lloyd Austin, Tony Blinken, was nominated to be Secretary of State. Avril Haynes is Director of National Intelligence. Linda Thomas Greenfield is an U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and Alejandro Majorcas to lead the Department of Homeland Security. So those were like the original folks that were rolled out. On Tuesday, Politico reported that Biden will nominate a longtime diplomat Wendy Sherman

as Deputy Secretary of State. Tori Ann Newland as the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three job. John Feiner will be named Deputy National Security Advisor, and Amanda Sloat will be the Senior Director for European Affairs. So, again, John Feiner and Amanda Sloat are the big winners here, the lucky ones, because they don't have to go through Senate confirmation to get NSC jobs. We've known John for years. He's got a really interesting background as a former journalist.

He also has a very close relationship with Biden that extends through most of the Obama Biden administration. I think that's going to serve him well in that role. Like he's going to have to manage some big people, some big personalities, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And I think, you know, having a close relationship with the president is really the key to doing that. So you have to lean on that access. I don't think I've met Amanda before. I think you have been though her resume is very impressive. Wendy Sherman has been on POTSave the World before.

you guys should check out that interview to learn more about her because she's incredibly impressive. She was the lead negotiator for the Iran deal. She had the number three job at state during the Obama administration, just like couldn't literally couldn't be more qualified for the job. Toria was the assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration as well. She's extremely experienced. I believe she's a career, you know, diplomat has been, you know, through Republican and Democratic administration. So, you know, Ben, all these people have impeccable qualifications. Like, they have forgotten more about foreign policy. that I will ever know. I've been lucky enough to learn from a lot of them along the way.

But so in my effort to hold Biden's team to as high a standard as we can, here's my question for you. So when you step back and you say, okay, here's all of the people that have been named by the Biden transition team to foreign policy jobs so far, who in your mind is the really progressive voice or voices that are going to disrupt the more established consensus on foreign policy, right? Like, who is going to piss off the Pentagon by arguing that their budget should be cut or that we should end all drone strikes or that we should cut the intelligence budget? Like, maybe that person is out there. I don't really know Linda Thomas Greenfield or Majorcas's views well at all. I don't think I've ever met them. But this is a sincere question because I do think sometimes on foreign policy,

like the center right position gets viewed as serious and acceptable while the left is not. And I think that's not a good thing. And I want to see a couple nominees for C.E. your roles who are going to be, like, we're going to upset Lindsey Graham, right? Who are going to be called, like, radical leftists. And I'm not sure we've seen that yet. Yeah, I think you're, you know, I agree with the premise your question. And I think it's just worth it for Worldose to situate these jobs a little bit. Yeah.

So John Feinerts, the Deputy National Security Advisor, what does that really mean in practice? It means that he runs what we've talked about before, which is the deputies committee, which is the group of officials from the State Department, from the Pentagon, from the intelligence community that meet to really figure out the wiring of American foreign policy, to figure out how to implement, you know, day-to-day foreign policy, but how to make recommendations up to the cabinet and the president about what to do. So to find rest of the chair those meetings. And John, you know, he came and board the Obama administration as a White House fellow. He ended up being a speechwriter, and he worked with Tony Blinken. And Tony was the guy he was really close to.

And he was actually Tony's top aide at the NSC when Tony Blinken had that job. Also, Tony, a former speechwriters. Speechwriters are running the show these days. It's a good, good tip. So it shows you this is a very tight circle. Biden is prioritizing people that he knows who have worked together. It's a very closed circle in a way, and I'll come back to that. Tori Newland is a number three job, Undersecretary for Political Affairs, that's usually the State Department person who sits in those deputies meetings, right? Right. And Wendy's deputy secretary is usually more out conducting diplomacy, helping to manage the building. Wendy Sherman negotiated, not just that Iran deal, but an agreement with

North Korea in the 90s under Clinton. So she's really a negotiator. Toria is, you know, someone you and I've worked with get along with, well, she's a pretty hawkish person, right? And I think there are two challenges. Again, I echo all your points about their imminent qualifications. They're well-motivated people. They're good people. They're a million percent better than the Trump people. I think they have two challenges that they have to watch for. One is what you said, which is I don't think I could look at any one of these people and say, well, this is the person who's necessarily going to be the one bringing some different perspective, be it a progressive perspective or a perspective informed by some other career path, you know,

being in Congress or being an academic, being someone like Samantha Power, right, who came in the Obama administration, mainly known as a journalist and a writer. And so they have to avoid the group thing that comes from having a collection of people who know each other very well, and I know them well, you know, being in rooms together all the time. And also thinking about how are they going to challenge convention, you know, and on issues that you and I have talked about a lot that we watch very carefully, like the Saudi relationship and the deference that's been paid to the Gulf States or like the Forever War or like trying to find creative and. new ways to promote democracy and fight authoritarianism around the world, they're going to have to work hard to make sure that they're shopping for those new ideas or willing to take new approaches that differ, frankly, from what might have been convention in the past. I think that watching this from the outside, most people have seen Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor,

as the one who has evolved his views in many respects. And if you, again, I'll plug this. Again, if you listen to the interview I did with Jake on Missing America, he is someone who really spent the last few years thinking about what does it actually mean in practice to reorient American foreign policy around climate change, for instance, to put climate change at the center of American farm policy, or to challenge some of the assumptions around trade agreements that seem to prioritize corporate interest over the interest of working Americans, or willing to look harder at America's relationships with some problematic partners. like the Gulf states. So I think Jake, in that role as National Security Advisor, kind of coordinating

and directing the apparatus, I think that's the person that a lot of this is going to fall upon in terms of trying to figure out where they can push the envelope, where they can be a little bit more unconventional. Because the team's strengths are very clear that these people, they know what they're doing, they're competent, they know how the government works, they know how the government runs. They frankly know people very well around the world. Amanda Sloat. I've been at, you know, conferences in Europe with her in the last few years. She's connected. She's plugged in. She's current. She knows how the Europeans are thinking about these challenges. But again, I think they need to make sure that they have in the additional personnel that they do name and just in their own

consultations that they do, that they're reaching outside of what is thus far a very tight circle. And I don't say that with criticism because it's like it's a circle that I've been in, you know, My organization, National Security Action, I chaired, co-chair with Jake, and almost all of these people were on our advisory council, you know, Tony Blinken, Linda, Ali Miorchus, on down the line. So, Ariel as well. So that's, I think the test for them is going to be, can they demonstrate that they're willing to challenge their own thinking? Are they listening to outside views? you know, people, you know, come to me and say, well, is this, is this just the blob? You know, look, these are people that have been in the establishment, but people in the establishment

can evolve. And so I think if you could have an expertise married with people willing to try new things, try new approaches to challenge convention, and yeah, I think the key things to watch are, what do they do on Iran, what do they do on the Gulf, what do they do on defense spending, what do they do that's different to prioritize climate? and the John Kerry appointment as envoy speaks, I think, a little bit to what they're thinking on that. So a competent team, but one that we should watch measured against your question. Yeah, look, I mean, I guess it's an open question is how unconventional or conventional does Joe Biden himself want to be, right? And to the extent that there is pressure on him to think outside the Bach, you know, break with traditional norms or approaches to countries like Saudi Arabia.

How incumbent will it be on outside groups, people like us? activists, think tanks to push him in those directions. We'll see. We'll see. Or Congress even, you know. Well, I'll give you a good example of this, Tommy. Yemen, right? So a lot of these people, myself included, were in the Obama administration when we grudgingly and wrongly provided support to the Saudi-led initiation of the war in Yemen, which then obviously escalated wildly under Trump, but we never should have done that. And early in the Trump years, There was a huge grassroots effort from civil society and from progressive members of Congress, like Rokana and Chris Murphy, to cut off U.S. assistance for that war in Yemen.

And I think that had a big impact on a lot of the people we just talked about. And, you know, essentially, I was involved in an effort to get signatures for a letter, supporting Congress's effort to cut off funding. All these people are almost all of them, I think, signed on to that. You know, and I think they were responding to looking at, obviously, the catastrophe in Yemen, but also you're right. Like the progressive mobilization on the outside had an impact on how people who are inside these rooms think about things. And I think Yemen's a good example. Hopefully that translates into government action. And hopefully we see very early on a movement to terminate U.S.

support for what the Saudis have been up to in Yemen. But people should know, you know, national security can feel opaque. It can feel like a club that you're not a member of. But Congress and civil society and activists, you know, can have an impact on how people are thinking. thinking about things, in part just by bringing them points of view that they may not be exposed to in the situation room. Yep, agreed. So the other big thing that happened in terms of the Biden transition over Christmas was President-elect Biden himself went public with the team's frustration about the lack of cooperation and information sharing between officials at the Department of Defense and his team. Biden called it nothing short of irresponsibility, and he also said

that there was a lack of cooperation from the Office of Management and Budget. And so, Ben, you know, like I found this alarming, but not remotely surprising, right? After the election, the Trump administration cleaned house a DOD. And they installed, like, literally the worst of the worst, like, nutbags and political hacks to manage the lame duck period, including, like, former staffers for Devin Nunes, who I think, was that today that he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, which. They basically put 8-Chin in charge of the Pentagon, you know? Yeah.

Exactly, yeah. Anyway, Devin Nunes is a fucking joke. Anyway, so, you know, the Trump folks have actually been pretty public about their obstruction of the transition process, right? Like these brand new DOD guys literally complained about having too many meetings and, you know, put a pause in place with the Biden team, and they said they needed rest around the holiday, which is just laughable when your job ends on January 20th. But, you know, Biden's team is really frustrated. They can't get briefed on big important things like the solar winds hack that we'll talk. about in a minute. So, look, it's my understanding from some of the folks in the Biden team that things have gotten a little better since he went public with this. Meetings are happening. They're not at the pace or the depth that the Biden team wants, right? It's like very easy for

the Trump folks to total up X number of zooms that have occurred or whatever it is. But if the content of those meetings are useless or superficial, like what's the point? But Ben, what kind of stuff and information do you think the Biden team is looking for? out of the Trump folks? Like, what do they need to get a transition going well? And how much do you think that lack of cooperation is actually going to hamper them in the near term? I think it's not just, you know, meetings.

Meetings are important. But it's also just the orientation of do they have access to all the information they might want? Can they walk into the Pentagon, for instance, and get information about what U.S. troops are doing everywhere in the world, you know? Here's what U.S. troops are doing in the Horn of Africa in places like Somalia. Here's the current force level in Afghanistan,

and here's how we're thinking about that. Here's the state of the Afghan peace talks involving the Taliban. Here's the dynamics that we're seeing on the ground in Iraqi politics. Here's what we're worried about in terms of the Russian hack potentially burrowing into our systems. And we'll get into some of these specific issues. But that orientation of just them being able to digest what is the U.S. military and the U.S. government and U.S. national security apparatus just currently doing around the world. and what are our assessments of how that is going? And what are the key decision points on the horizon? If they don't get that information,

if they're just kind of having perfunctory meetings and getting kind of scripted briefings that don't really share the good stuff, if you will, then when they get in after January 20th, they're going to have to do that for a few weeks and they're just going to lose time. I mean, it's just a matter of them at a time when they're all going to have to deal with COVID.

What is the role of the U.S. military, by the way, potentially, you know, as it relates to the dissemination of vaccine. You know, all these things, they're just not getting. And, and I think that's just going to slow their capacity to hit the ground running. Yeah. So I agree. Like, you know, lost time is probably, they're not going to be able to get that back. But one of the big issues that they specifically have mentioned in the press, at least, that they want to get briefed on, is this solar winds hack, which is probably the biggest story we haven't talked about or maybe the biggest story of last year.

And I say probably because, you know, we don't really know the full extent of the damage yet. So I guess, you know, just starting with the basics. So solar wins Orion. It's software. It's used to monitor computer networks, right? And you can basically think of it as like behind the scenes software and tools used by IT administrators to monitor data flow and make sure that your whole network is working properly. This particular system, this software is used by literally like 33,000 customers. And what these hackers did and everyone in the U.S. government, except maybe Donald Trump himself, seems to be. believe that these were Russian hackers was they hacked into the SolarWind system and they put their malicious hacker code into the SolarWinds-O-Ryan software. So later, when SolarWinds pushed out a software update to the product that had sold to all these customers, 18,000 of them ended up installing the malicious Russian code that had been embedded in the SolarWind software during that initial hack. So that creates a backdoor for the Russian hackers. to use to spy on anyone who's installed solar wind, Orion,

it might even allow them to install more malware on top of that. So this is a very, very sophisticated hack. The hacks that we were talking about forever over the last four years that occurred in 2016, those were just fishing attempts. Those happened on an individual basis. They're not really sophisticated at all. Basically, someone just gets tricked into giving out their password or clicking on something they shouldn't.

This was systematic and massive. So we're learning more about the extent of the hack. The New York Times reported this week that the hackers had access to these systems for at least nine months. And it's now believed that they have affected up to 250 federal agencies and businesses, including the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, which handles our nuclear weapons, parts of the Pentagon. And then Microsoft was a company that was disclosed. And Microsoft had to disclose that hackers actually viewed its most sensitive code, its source code. So officials don't yet know exactly what was taken. That list could range from nuclear secrets to blueprints of critical infrastructure to God

knows what. And, you know, embarrassingly for the U.S. government, this was uncovered not by them, but by a private cybersecurity firm called Fire Eye, which was also hacked. So the NSA may have, you know, missed this, you know, hack because, you know, the hackers use servers inside the U.S. And that helped them hide what they were doing and they made it legally difficult for the NSA to monitor what they were doing. The NSA isn't supposed to monitor activities from within the U.S.

The NSA also doesn't have the authority to defend private sector networks. So Congress probably needs to put in place better laws to help everyone be protected. That said, like the NSA had been very public in claiming they had preemptively placed warning systems inside foreign networks that would allow them to spot this kind of hack if it happened, and clearly that didn't work. So the New York Times had a detailed list of all the ways solar winds failed in its own security, including moving much of its engineering to the Czech Republic, Poland and Belarus, presumably to save money on staff.

And to make it easier for Russian hackers. I was going to say, yeah, of course you're going to be admiring some Russian Intel guy if your staff is in Belarus. Let me, come on. Just put our whole operation behind the old iron curtain, you know. It's just totally incredible. So far, you know, okay, silver lining. There are no reports yet that classified systems were breached, but, you know, we'll see.

So, Ben, you know, there were a lot of heated statements about what happened. Some senators, including Democrats, were calling it an act of war. I found that to be a little ridiculous. Regardless, this is a mess for Biden's team. That is indisputable. What was your general reaction to this story as, unfolded. And then can you talk about the process that you guys went through back in 2015 when White House email systems were compromised? And like, how big of a pain in the ass was it

to fix that? Yeah. So I think sometimes people see this and it's hard to understand, you know, they see these hyperbolic comments. This is the biggest thing in history. This is a nightmare. But nothing seems to be different. You know, like it's not like the economy collapses or people die, you know, so you don't necessarily know what the fallout is. And here's how I describe it. Number one, this is just the biggest, biggest hack ever. Like, it's everywhere, right? In the past, you know, the Russians got into one agency or another.

This feels like they're kind of everywhere. They're in all these U.S. government agencies. They're in all these major U.S. corporations. So the breadth of what they were able to penetrate is enormous. That's the first point. Then the second point is, well, what are they doing? One could just be espionage. They're just there.

They're trying to collect information. It may be that they timed this, knowing that there might be a new administration coming in. They want to learn about potential changes. in U.S. policy. And why is this bad? Obviously, the U.S. government doesn't want Russia to know what its deliberations are and what we're considering and what we're thinking. And so, therefore, to your point about 2015, you have to build a whole new network. You have to... Just unbelievable. You know, people, ordinary citizens don't see this or feel it, but the bandwidth in the government,

you know, everything from the number of people that have to work on building a new network and securing it to, again, not to sound, you know, not to sound too lame here, but the inconvenience, frankly, of people having to shifts all their work from one network to another. You know, all that just takes up time and attention that you're not spending on, you know, the things you would like to be doing in government. You're spending all this time like patching your network, you know. So there's the espionage risk and the mitigation has to be done. But then the danger also is that Russia could be inserting malware so that if they wanted to, they could crash US government networks or they could crash the networks of U.S. corporations, you know, or they could steal trade secrets from those corporations

or what have you. And that is a danger that's hard to quantify because you don't know when and why Russia might do that. But you just know that Russia has like a gun pointed at you and they could pull the trigger at any time. And so in the event of some escalation with Russia, in the event of some form of conflict with Russia, I'm not saying we're going to have a big war. But, you know, if you know they can crash all your systems, you know, that's just a card that they have to play, you know, never mind, frankly, just, you know, the information they've exfiltrated, they could use to try to leverage people, you know, the traditional blackmail like John McCaray novels, right? So there's a lot of ways that can play out. And the bottom line is

it's a giant resource suck, time suck, hassle, and potential national security risk to the United States. And just such a mess. The poor Biden people. So, That's like one, I think, real concern you're hearing in the press and you're hearing from transition. I think the other is primarily Iran. There is a lot of anxiety generally, a lot of chatter out there about what the Trump administration might do when it comes to Iran in these final weeks. And I think that concern, you know, it folds into the problem with just the terrible

people we've talked about currently working at DOD. So I guess maybe they'll divide this into two parts, right? So January 3rd was the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. by the Trump administration. He was the top general in Iran who oversaw their support for terrorism and handled all their bad guys. He was a bad guy. I don't think we should have be assassinating foreign leaders, but whatever. He was a real concern. So many people were worried that Iran would retaliate against the U.S. for the Soleimani assassination around that date. That doesn't seem to have happened. Then there was the Trump tweet threatening to hold Iran responsible if there were more attacks

on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. That's been an ongoing problem. that sort of Iran-aligned militia groups in Baghdad have been attacking our embassy there to the point where we almost evacuated the thing. Then the Pentagon reversed their decision to bring home from the Gulf, an aircraft carrier called the USS Nimitz, massive aircraft carrier. A Trump official told the New York Times that they were bringing home the Nimitz to send a de-escalation signal to Iran. So when that was reversed, it seemed like maybe it was an escalation signal to Iran and raise some eyebrows, right? So that's like one bucket of issues. The more tangible news was, one, Iran announcing that they have begun enriching uranium to 20% purity.

That's a consequential step towards making it weapons grade. We'll explain more about that. And then Iran seized a South Korean tanker near the Strait of Hormuz, and it's probably self-evident why by seizing a tanker could be a problem. But the 20% enrichment point requires a little bit of explanation. Ben, you had to become an expert on this stuff during the JCPOA negotiations, the Iran deal negotiations. Can you remind us why we might be anxious to.

Iran enriching uranium to 20 percent. And then like, what's your general level of anxiety around like some sort of U.S.-Iran conflict in the waiting days of the Trump administration? I think it's obviously impossible to predict what he will do. But I'm hearing this concern over and over again. And while, you know, Trump has been vocal about not wanting to start new wars, he has been totally okay with assassinating Iranian officials, seemingly conducting operations with the Israelis in Iran and then just destroying their economy with, sanctions. So it seems like he has them in a different class here. Yeah, I think so first of all, the questions you asked are all connected in the sense. I remember we did a bonus pod,

you know, one year ago today, which feels about like a, yeah, maybe it wasn't one year ago today, but it's right this week. On the third, yeah. After the Soleimani assassination, we were talking about what would the Iranian response be. And this gets to the Soleimani anniversary. And I think in a lot of people's minds, you know, they were anticipated. you know, like some terrorist attack somewhere that was, you know, a huge escalation, or something like when they launched all those ballistic missiles into Iraq. But we said at the time that, you know, the most likely areas where they would respond would be in their nuclear program and in Iraq.

And that's what they've done. You know, if you look at the state of the nuclear program a year ago and today, they've advanced it significantly. And the 20% enrichment is a piece of this because essentially, if you have a peaceful nuclear program. If you have a nuclear program that you're using to produce, you know, medical isotopes, you know, for some humanitarian medical purpose, you don't enrich uranium up to 20 percent. That that is taking that material and enriching it to a level that could be utilized for a weapon. And so what you've seen Iran steadily doing in

terms of installing more centrifuges and enriching material to a higher level is beginning to move their program back in the direction of being usable for the production of a nuclear weapon, right? And so that's what they did. And I assume that the timing of it around the Soleimani anniversary, Iran doesn't do anything by accident, was meant to be part of the response to Soleimani's assassination. in the same way that we've seen their proxies begin to get, again, more aggressive inside of Iraq against U.S. forces or U.S. positions or places where the U.S. is present. And so that's been the Iranian escalation, which candidly has been pretty calibrated. You know, they're slowly turning the dial up on their nuclear program. They've turned the dial up in terms of what they're doing in Iraq.

They seize a tanker. They do that not because that one tanker is that important. They're sending a message that we could try to shut down the flow of tanker traffic through the Straits of Hormuz, which is this incredibly important waterway for essentially the global supply of oil, right? Because a lot of the oil and gas that shipped out of the Persian Gulf goes through the Straits of Hormuz. So all Iran is doing is they're signaling, hey, here's the menu of stuff we have available to us. We could go back to the brink of having a nuclear weapon. We could shut down tanker traffic, and we could try to chase you out of Iraq.

And we're not going to go all the way, but we're just moving in that direction to show you that we have these options available. I think I saw before the show that they also put out a red notice interpol to arrest Donald Trump for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, which is like a kind of classic Iranian trolling thing that they're doing. So that's what the Iranians are up to. In terms of the U.S., look, I mean, we just pause on that. You got to respect that that's kind of funny. I mean, like, under international law, probably kind of legitimate. I understand why they would do it, but also, like, good for them. Also, one other note for just for listeners.

I mean, Iran would have to enrich enough nuclear material to 90% level enrichment before it's useful in a bomb one. And the other thing I guess they could be doing then is, like, they might be just sort of like collecting a bunch of different points of leverage right before Biden comes in that they could use to then try to extract some concessions. But sorry, you were saying on the Trump side of this. So, yeah, you know, you're right. 90% is weapons grade.

But under the deal itself, the Iran nuclear. deal that Trump pulled out of. They were only allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67 percent. Because 20 percent is useful for a type of research reactor. It moves them in the direction, again, of pursuing a weapon. But I think in terms of the U.S. side, look, every day that Donald Trump's in office, like, you're stressed that the risk of a conflict with Iran is higher. When you've got a bunch of eight-chan conspiracy theorists nut jobs running the Pentagon, like, you're stressed. You're You're a bit worried about the chain of command. If there's any escalation in that region that the kind of people that might make quick decisions are exactly the wrong people.

I think we have seen that, like, Trump just doesn't have as much interest as some of the nut jobs around him in a war with Iran. Yeah. But I think the risk for the next, yeah, two weeks is essentially like if there's any escalation, right, if something happens in that region and, you know, that there could be an overreaction from the U.S. and we could find ourselves in a conflict. I don't personally feel that much more alarmed than I have most days of the Trump administration about this conflict. And I do think, yeah, I mean, some of this is the Iranians get to do two things at once. They get to give one big last middle finger to Trump on the way out. You know, like you left this deal and look, our nuclear program is advanced. We have more centrifuges running. We're enriching uranium at a higher level. We're, you know,

we're lobbing mortars at your guys in Iraq. Your policy failed Donald Trump. Oh, and by the way, we have a red notice out on you. And, yes, anticipating that there'll be diplomacy with the Biden people saying, you know, this is the stuff that we have to negotiate from. We want to establish our baseline for those negotiations. And the baseline is much higher than it was, certainly when the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, was in place. And the trick for the Biden people is the cleanest thing to do here is just say compliance for compliance. If Iran starts complying with all the limits, of the nuclear deal, and then the U.S. will comply with all the sanctions really front of the nuclear deal, and we just skip any intermediate step and just get back into it. And that, I think, is what

I hope will be the course it is taken here. And I think that the Iranians, you know, it's not a foregone conclusion that they would accept that deal, but they have a lot of incentives to do so. And I think the U.S. should certainly be trying to push in that direction as fast as possible to just get this off the plate. I mean, we've got COVID. We've got China. we've got climate change. We've got a whole bunch of stuff. We can't keep living this Iran drama in perpetuity. Yeah, it is tiresome.

Okay, a little good news here. So right before the new year, Argentina legalized abortions without restrictions during early pregnancy, up to a bit 14 weeks, I believe, becoming only the fourth country in the region to do so after Uruguay, Cuba, and Guyana. So previously, Argentina had allowed abortion in cases of rape or if the pregnancy posed health risk to the mother, but in practice, it was very difficult for women to actually get the procedure done. So this is a big step forward. So, you know, again, it's a huge deal for not just women and activists in Argentina, but across Latin America, where protests for women's

rights and against gender-based violence have been growing in strength. Argentinian abortion rights activists lost a similar vote in 2018, and they had to fight against some really serious opposition this time around as well, including from the Catholic Church and from Pope Francis, who is from Buenos Aires. He's an incredibly influential figure globally, but especially in Argentina. But what's important to understand is that this vote and this major change is the direct result of sustained protests and activism. And it was so successful that these protesters and activists helped change the mind of the current vice president, Christina de Kurchner, who was actually the former president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015. And she opposed abortion rights for most of her

career. So, you know, Ben, it's interesting that I didn't really realize that Argentina had been headed the curve on a lot of what we in the U.S. sort of bucket as social issues, right? Like, they approved same-sex marriage in 2010 before most of the region. They passed progressive gender identity laws shortly after. You know, we want to get some of the people behind this movement on the show in the near future because this work is likely to become a model for others in Latin America who are fighting for social justice, who are women's rights or public health, but, you know, really inspiring stuff, a great way to close out 2020. Yeah.

I mean, I think, look, obviously this is a huge step forward in a region that is, you know, heavily, heavily Catholic and, you know, in some ways culturally conservative, but changing and evolving. And Argentina is a bellwether for that. And so Argentina taking this step, likely for. foreshadows other South American countries, you know, potentially moving in this direction. I think what is really exciting to me about it is, you know, we've seen movements, kind of social justice movements in Latin America really gaining some traction in recent years.

We've talked on this show about the movement in Chile that was really begun because of inequality that led to changes in the Constitution in Chile. We saw huge protests around inequality in Colombia. We see this movement in Argentina. And it feels like a left that is committed to fighting inequality and pursuing social justice in a new way, you know, through mass mobilization, and frankly not just through the traditional prism of kind of left-right politics in the hemisphere, right? Where it was like there was the U.S. and our right-wing buddies down in Latin America. And then it was like the Cubans and people like Maduro and Venezuela. This is a younger dynamic social justice, equality set of movements that is beginning to rack up some wins. And I think potentially

beginning to model a brand of mass mobilization that leads to political change, that is what is needed globally. Right. And so abortion is one issue and one issue where it's obviously hugely important to a woman's right to choose and the type of society we live in to see that change. But it's also indicative, I think, of a broader set of changes that could be on the horizon here if this kind of activism continues to succeed. Yeah, really, really inspiring stuff. So the flip side of that is actually, unfortunately, happening in China. So we are going to turn there for a minute and talk about a guy named Jack Ma to help tell this story. So Jack Ma is the billionaire co-founder and former chairman of the Alibaba group.

and for a while it seemed like he might have gone missing. So Jack Ma, he's one of the richest people in the world, often considered one of the most powerful people in the world. Alibaba, his former company, had been one of the most valuable companies in the world. So he retired from Alibaba, but the story becomes current because while he was chairman, he spun off a subsidiary of the company into its own company back in 2011. It's called the Ant Financial Services Group. It was the part of Alibaba that did lots of lending and services.

banking-like services. And that move and the growth of Ant Financial Services has created tension with the Chinese government, even in Ma's so-called retirement. So this, this, we're just going to call it Ant for now. It's a payment service. And it has grown so massive. And it has taken so many customers and deposits away from Chinese banks that they started having to raise their interest rates to actually catch up and make up the revenue. The company itself raised money at $150 billion valuation in June of 2018, so it was just massive. And they were set to go public at the end of last year. And if that had happened, it would have likely been valued at over a $300 billion company, which would have made financial more valuable than most of the biggest banks in the world.

And Jack Ma controls more than 50% of the voting rights for the company, despite actually never having held an official position there. So it would have made him even more powerful. But right before that IPO, Jack Ma pissed off the Chinese government. He accused Chinese regulators of basically being risk-averse. He said they had a pawn shop mentality. That didn't go over well. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping personally made the call to block Ant's IPO. So fast forward to today, people were starting to notice that Jack Mott was just nowhere to be found, right? He hadn't done a public appearance. He wasn't on social media.

He actually pulled out of being a part of one of his own charity events. He was just gone off the radar. And no one knew if he was laying low or he was in custody or what. Just before we started recording, CNBC reported that someone close to him said he's just kind of laying low. But it seems like the financial IPO is still in limbo. and so were all of its investors. So then, you know, we don't really know what happened here. We can kind of speculate.

But what it made me think of was a guy named Mikhail Kodorovsky, who was the richest man in Russia until he criticized the state government for corruption during a meeting with Putin in 2003. And not long after he was thrown in jail for basically a decade. And again, like, at this stage, it's an unfair comparison because obviously she has not gone that far, not even close. But it does seem like she has decided to flex some muscle and remind everyone inside and outside of China in Hong Kong, in the business community, in the U.S., that he is boss, that he is the most, he is the power center and to not fuck with him in any way, shape, or form, or he will come for you. So I don't know that it bodes well

for dealing with him in the long term. Yeah, so I got an interesting story here, which is, I got to know Jack Ma. I set up, like, some event he did with Obama in Southeast Asia in the second Obama administration. And then in 2017, I went with Obama to China. And we had lunch at Jack Ma. It was me and Obama and Jack Ma. I'm like Jack Ma's guy. And a couple things of note.

One is Jack Maude seems very familiar to an American. You know, he's a kind of frenetic energy entrepreneur guy. You know, he's the kind of guy you'd expect to see. in like Silicon Valley, you know, like picture Steve Jobs, you know, at the front of the auditorium, you know, with a wireless mic. He's clearly like sees himself as a global entrepreneur and not just like a Chinese businessman, you know, aligned completely with the Chinese government. The stuff he does in Africa, it's kind of shark tank stuff. It's like he sponsors different entrepreneurs across Africa and he's like the judge of the show and he picks the idea and he gives them capital. And that's,

the kind of guy is. And even in that lunch, he was describing Ant. And it was simultaneously thrilling in the sense of an entrepreneur who's clearly seeing things in the world and terrifying, because what he was describing essentially is Alibaba's like the Amazon of China. And so they're delivering, and they're ahead of Amazon. They're delivering stuff with drones out in villages and basically the whole economy of pieces of China depend upon Alibaba's commerce. And he was turning that into a bank product, which is essentially, you know, all your money runs through ant and all your purchases for Mali Baba run through Ant. Massively powerful. And then essentially he was describing your credit report, you know, could run through Ant. And literally describing

like people getting married where before they agree to the marriage, like they get kind of this ant score, you know. And by the way, a version, we've talked a bit about the Chinese government social credit system where they wanted to evaluate their citizens based on, you know, what internet searches they do and where they travel and the rest of it. And what does that add up to? That adds up to this guy risks the total control that Xi Jinping wants to have over the Chinese economy. And I don't want to make Jack Ma to be some dissident. He clearly has played ball with the Chinese government. You don't get to become like the richest guy or one of the richest couple guys in China without, you know, making sure that you're not getting too far ahead of the government

here. So clearly he's, and that's opaque, I've never seen that. But clearly over the past, he's been, you know, making certain accommodations, I'm sure. But, you know, he retired and he kind of moved out Alibamba, and you sense that he was someone who wanted to have some freedom of action in the world and wanted to not be kind of crushed under the weight of this system. And the speech he gave, he was criticizing Chinese regulators in the same way that, like, Elon Musk would probably criticize American regulators. Except not as bad on Twitter. But yes. It's not as bad on Twitter.

And look, I think you're right. The Kodokovsky analogy is an interesting one because the point of that move by Putin was to show, I run this economy. I run this political system. If you want to be rich in Russia, you have to do everything I tell you. And if you criticize me, you could lose everything, you know? And Putin literally took that oil company from Kodokovsky and gave it to Igor Setschen, one of his childhood friends. he just gave it to him. Like, hey, here's this multi-billion dollar oil company.

You take it over here. And that, I think most people, most analysts see is like the defining moment where he sent a message. There are no oligarchs. There are no people that can have independent wealth and privilege in the society unless they do everything I say. And I think this jack-a-mouth thing is very important for that reason, because Xi has been moving the direction of wanting to assert not just kind of dictatorial power, but total control,

total social control, total economic control, total political control. And taking the most famous, far in a way, the most famous Chinese businessman and entrepreneur in the world, I mean a global figure, Jack Ma. And essentially, I don't abide that he just wanted to take a break and get some catch up on some sleep here. Like something happened. Like, I don't know what, you know, but there was clearly some conversation, you know. I think it does send a message that, you know, Xi Jinping isn't messing around. here and that a guy like Jack Ma who might have thought that he could push boundaries because of how much wealth he generated because of, you know, a business. He created a parallel business of

Chinese tech that was beneficial to the Chinese government, that there's a Chinese technology company like Alibaba, not just Amazon. You know, that's been helpful to China. I think, you know, that might have insulated him for a time. But this shows if Jack Ma's not beyond the reach of this kind of intimidation, then there's nobody in China that is. And I'm pretty sure that she spiked the financial credit score system that you had mentioned earlier, too, because that's something he wants controlled by the state. Yeah, it also sends a hell of a message to any foreign business entity, right? Like, I mean, if you're like Airbnb and you want to do business to China, you basically have

to set up a subsidiary with some princeling, you know, in the country and sort of like have a jointly owned venture to do business that way. Like all these investors who thought they could get rich just investing in Jack Ma or in financial are now sitting in limbo wondering if their payday is dead forever. I mean, we don't know yet. We won't know for a while. Yeah. And like, for instance, there was, there have been other changes since you took over.

Like, Alibaba is a private company, a non-governmental company. Got it. I should be more specific. But the Chinese Communist Party mandated, essentially, a few years ago, that they get aboard seat on all these on all these companies. Trump wanted that too. Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly.

I'm sure you would. You know, so it's just sending a message that even if they're public companies, right, even if they're publicly traded companies or private companies, you're not really non-government. The Chinese government, if it wants to, can have a say in not just a regulatory say, but like a very direct controlling kind of stake in what you say and do. And that runs counter to the direction of. economic reforms that, you know, people thought China, you know, people thought in the early

2000s that China was evolving into this, you know, more capitalist economy. It has, it's now an economy that has all these capitalist elements. There's lots of venture capitalists washing around. There's publicly traded companies. But at the end of the day, it's a state-controlled capitalism. And the same way that Putin has set up kind of a new model of how to have, like, you know, essentially a cabal run the natural resources of the state in Russia, Xi is kind of creating this new model of capitalism blended with complete state control. So you look at the Chinese economy and pieces of it look familiar to open capitalist, you know, market-based economies.

But at the end of the day, the ultimate decision maker is Xi Jinping. Yeah. You know, I think it was TikTok where Trump wanted the U.S. to get a cut of the deal or have a board seat or something. So, you know, we know who he's looking to for guidance and leadership. Yeah. And by the way, it's not like the U.S. is pure here. Everybody has their version of this. You know, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you know, like it's just kind of funny that Trump. Trump was like, oh, I want that. I want a board seat. Let's talk with the UK for a minute because on Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared a national lockdown in all of England. This is going to mean that schools are closed, colleges are closed. It means Brits are forced to stay home unless they're traveling for essential work or to buy food or medicine. The restrictions are going to be in place until mid-February, which,

it's a long time, but it's when the UK thinks they can vaccinate the most vulnerable segment of the population. It comes, as there's all these reports about a new strain of COVID, that is more transmissible and that has been just found racing through London in Southeast England and contributed to a massive spike in cases. Johnson's announcement came shortly after a similar announcement from the First Minister of Scotland, Nicholas Sturgeon, who's been on Pod Save the World before. Yeah, great, friend of the pod.

you know, but look, again, Boris was late per usual. The good news is that the UK has started rolling out the AstraZeneca vaccine as well as the Pfizer vaccine, but like they're racing the clock against an overstretched healthcare system like everybody else. I mean, you know, you bet you got to wonder how much this new COVID strain is impacting things. Like I have no idea. That said, like we live in L.A. County that is an unmitigated disaster.

ICU's are totally full. and we've seen no indication that the new strain is the reason for that. But one note, Scottish authorities are particularly worried about a potential super spreader heading to Scotland. We're going to play a clip here from Nicholas Surgeon, the First Minister of Scotland. I think this is from today. Let's give it a listen. I've no idea what Donald Trump's travel plans are.

You'll be glad to know. I hope and expect that as everybody hopes and it's what is everybody expects not everybody necessarily will hope that the travel plan immediately that he has is to exit the White House but beyond that I don't know but it's not you know we are not allowing people to come into Scotland for without an essential purpose right now and that would apply to him just as it applies to anybody else and coming to play golf is not what I would consider to. to be an essential purpose. Credit to whatever reporter asked that. That's a great question. And she was just like, oh, shit, I'm going to step it in, no matter what I say. Oh, it's great shade.

I mean, great world, though, response. I mean, look, I take a few things away for this before I go to the COVID real quick. Like, it just shows you how the beauty of our system that come January 20th, this guy has like no fucking power. You know what I mean? Like, like, he's the president. United States. If he wanted to go to Skowland this week, like, he'd get into Scotland. But he's just some schlub with a plane on January 20th. And Nicole Sturgeon can be like, sorry, non-essential, you can't

come play golf at your own resort. Yeah, get out of here. So I love that part of it. I also love that at the same time that we've got, you know, airbrushed, Ted Cruz, Josh Holly, all these like sycophantic accolates of Donald Trump's narcissism and authoritarianism, like falling over themselves to kiss his ass. Foreign leaders are just like laughing at this guy and like making jokes at his expense. So thank you to Scotland, a country that has given us so much already for giving us that. I will say what's happening in the UK is pretty scary. And they, even with the vaccine, whether they've been out front, like they're just completely locked down. And I really resisted playing armchair epidemiologist Tommy. But like, you look around the numbers in LA and you hear

these reports of the new variant, the UK variant, the English variant being in Colorado, being in New York, like, I think we're going to find that this variant is kind of all over the place. And maybe here in L.A. Because the Brits have a better, you know, better diagnostics on this stuff. And it just feels like the speed with which things, you know, have been moving through England, mirrors very much kind of what we've seen in different parts of the U.S. Yeah, it's scary. It's scary. Yeah, we didn't need this twist at the end, but hopefully we can all get these vaccines soon enough. Also, Ben Brexit happens.

The UK and the EU finally agreed to a deal that's going to define workers' rights, travel, environmental regulations, financial services, fishing regulations for a while. UK nationals now need a visa if they want to stay in the EU for more than 90 days in an 180-day period. A big concern that seemingly was preventing this deal from happening was trying to figure out how to prevent a hard border, Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the EU. Getting rid of that hard border was a big part of getting to a peace agreement in the region. So to get around that, Northern Ireland is going to continue to follow a lot of the EU rules, basically. So, you know, Ben, like credit to them, they got this done right at the deadline. Like, I think they were, like, negotiating this thing on New Year's.

It's sort of weird because, you know, this is another one of those problems that it's sort of been, like, seen as catastrophic and looming, and there's been lots of doomsday reporting, including from us, about all the ways that could harm the economy. But the actual impact and harm is always going to be slow rolling and on regular people. So we'll see how it unfolds. But it's done. Yeah. I think, and look, I think the honest truth is we just don't know. Because first of all, on the big picture, you know, COVID has shut everything down. It's just kind of hard to evaluate, Like what the real economic difference is when the economy's already kind of ground to a halt. And the British economy is in a really difficult state, but it's in difficult to take because of COVID.

And so it's going to be hard to evaluate. It's going to take time to evaluate like what's a Brexit effect, what's a COVID effect. The second point, though, that's ironic. And where I do think we have been right about this is this is not the end. Because this is some like voluminous agreement that nobody's read every word of it. they're still going to be negotiating with the EU. Like their economy still is totally entangled with the EU. So just the implementation of this agreement is going to be more negotiation for more years

with quote unquote Brussels bureaucrats. What are the fishing regulations and the commercial, you know, blah, blah, blah. What's the follow-on trade relationship actually look like in practice? So in a weird way, everybody, including us, right, has been so focused on the moment of Brexit, but this is a much more of an ongoing story that's going to continue to play out in terms of economic fallout and negotiation. The one thing I will say is just anecdotally, like I've got a lot of friends whose lives have been really screwed up by this, you know, like people who have, you know, British citizenship and are working in Europe and have had to figure out what to do, people in

relationships with, you know, people of different status. Like, this is going to have, it's just the the initial chaos is going to be felt by individuals, right, who no longer can keep doing what they were doing, whether they were Europeans who lived in the UK or whether they were British citizens living in the EU who lost that citizenship. So this is going to be disruptive. It is a pointless mess.

And but, you know, it's going to, the good lesson, as you say, is like, we're not really going to know how this all looks for a few years, really. Does Britain become less and less important to world affairs because the U.S. and other countries are dealing with Germany and France and the EU? Or does Britain, you know, stay in the mix because, you know, they figure out a new way to be relevant. We just, you know, it's hard to tell. I will say that Germany just finished a giant trade agreement with the Chinese on behalf of the EU, you know. And so, like, that's a big piece of business that excludes the UK, right?

I mean, so you're going to start, that's where I think you're going to start to see impacts, too, of just when the EU is doing things without the UK, well, what is the UK going to do? And the UK has got a negotiate trade deal with us, too. Yeah. Yeah, no, and again, like, we'll see. I don't know, I don't know exactly how it's going to play out, obviously. Yeah, I don't either. Lightning round to close. I'm just going to read through sort of four quick updates and then please sound off on any and all of it.

All 10 living former defense secretaries wrote an op-ed warning Trump against involving the U.S. military in any effort. to resolve the presidential election. So that's unnerving. Right before we started recording, a British judge ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be extradited to the United States to face trial, citing mental health risks. There's concern about him committing suicide, according to the judge. I'm not sure what the appeals process looks like, but this is a win for Assange, who could face a sentence of up to 175 years in prison if he was brought to the U.S. and convicted on all

charges. The judge did, however, reject Assange's claim that the U.S. extradition effort was an attack on press freedom. They did not buy that line. So, you know, there's also this ongoing effort in the U.S. to get Trump to pardon Assange. Three, French President Emmanuel Macron contracted COVID in late December, but he seems to be doing okay now. It was a mild case. Finally, Ben, and this one really bothered me, President Trump pardoned four American men. And, and he accused of murdering Iraqi civilians while working for a defense contracting company called Blackwater back in 2007. The short version of the story is these guys opened fire at a busy intersection in Baghdad and

killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians. It was disgusting. It created an enormous crisis between the U.S. and Iraq and citizens of Iraq, understandably. It seems like this pardon was a favor for Eric Prince, who is the former head of Blackwater, a close Trump buddy and the brother of Betsy DeVos. So please, sound off on any and all of that. Well, I mean, I'm really looking forward to the moment when I just don't have to think about Julian Assange at all. So I don't have like a strong view. I'm not one of these people like, you know, thinks like that the world revolves around throwing him in prison for 175 years, but nor do I find

anything particularly redeeming about Julian Assange. Yeah, I hear that. I will say, on the other two of the sect-defs and the partons. On the sect-deff letter, you know, I will say I think it points to the fact that there really were people in the Pentagon apparatus who were exploring this idea that you heard Michael Flynn talk about of martial law and using the military to somehow rerun the election. And as insane as it sounds to us, like I have friends who are in the military who are like, no, no, some of these people are actually talking about this, you know. And so I think that filtered up, you know, if I'm hearing that, I'm sure all these sects are hearing that. It doesn't mean it's likely. It doesn't mean that they were really going to, you know, it just

means that there were enough people talking about this stuff, including maybe some of these nut jobs that Trump put over there and asking questions about it, that it compelled even like Dick Cheney to sign a fucking letter like this, right? So, so that's worrying. And it's connected, though, to the Blackwater thing for this reason. One of the things I worry about is what kind of contracting is happening right now? You know? I don't know. Like, all these guys that Trump is putting over there could be, you know, signing huge contracts for Blackwater or it's not called Blackwater anymore.

But Prince still runs a giant intelligence and military contracting apparatus, right? Prince was trying to privatize the Afghan war, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. Exactly. Let's get paid. Well, I'm saying, like, you pull out of Afghanistan, you pull out of Somalia and just pay my guys to go be the U.S. troops there. And so I really want to know, and I hope that Biden people, like, what contracts have been divvied out to Eric Prince and to private contractors in these final months? Because some of these guys who are over there doing that for Trump might then go work for Eric Prince and get rich off the contracts that they corruptly made, right? So this is something that bears watching.

And then just in terms of the moral piece of this, that Blackwater Instest, in Iraq is emblematic of atrocities that America committed in Iraq. It is the kind of my-line massacre, just totally unaccountable military contractors killing civilians. And it took years to prosecute. I mean, this is erasing a lot of hard work done by really good people to have some accountability for the loss of civilian life in Iraq. So the message descends to Iraqis, the message descends to the American public servants who worked on that case is essentially, F you, like, because Eric Prince is well connected with a bunch of Trump, crony, and grifters, like, we're going to, like, let these guys off in the same way that we, you know,

have let off other war criminals under Trump. So I just, it's appalling. But again, it makes you wonder about the combination of the sect of Lever and the Blackwater Partons, you know, what's happening in corners of the Pentagon and military that need to be looked at. You know, we talked about this a little bit, but like Mike Flynn is fucking crazy, you know? Crazy. It was a national security advisor. It was a national security advisor. It's terrifying.

They're Flynn allies and acolytes in this bureaucracy. And like they're not going to be constructive forces under Biden. And I'm, you know, obviously you don't go in and like purge people. But like, like you go. Oh, no. Purge them. I'm pro purge. No, that's what I'm saying.

If there are people at the Pentagon who subscribe to this kind of eight chain worldview of Trump and Mike Flynn, and we're even looking into using the military to declare martial law, or we're trying to get this Blackwater pardon done. I don't think those people should be like in the U.S. government, you know? No, no, they don't deserve to be. Last thing, real quick, the CIA got a rebrand. They redid their website. They redid their logo.

No surprise, Penn. The internet has been roasting them because a lot of people think it looks like the new logo looks like an ad targeting millennials on Instagram. and trying to get them to go to a concert. I don't have strong opinions about the CIA design either way. I might have stuck with like CIA classic, although, you know, some baggage there. That said, there's probably no CIA redesign that isn't going to get destroyed by the internet. Interestingly, no CIA director nominee yet.

So maybe he or she will take this on and redo it. One rumor, just to chuck a totally irresponsible rumor out there into the rumor mill, was Bill Burns for CIA? I heard somebody float that today. That was interesting. Lifetime diplomat, former deputy secretary of state. It would be really cool and interesting to put a lifetime diplomat, a career diplomat, in charge of the CIA for a totally new perspective.

I don't know how it would go over, but it would be really interesting to me. I think it's a cool idea. I mean, it definitely signals a shift in tone from Gina Haspel, you know, who presided over black sites. And I want them to appoint somebody because, you know, you need, you get your own person in there. You know, I mean, hurry up. I had concerns about Gene Haspel's nomination to begin with. And then there's not a lot of indication that she's stood up to Trump.

I don't know what's happened behind closed doors or not. But they need someone new in there more than they need a new website. Let's just say that. And whatever Bill Burns is going to do in government, I'd feel better about Bill Burns doing it. So I heartily endorse Bill Burns for. that job or any job if you wants it. Another name that's been floated out there is David Cohen, the former deputy director, great guy, someone we worked with very closely, would be great at the job.

I just thought Bill Burns was an outside-of-the-box unconventional choice in a way that was interesting. The David Cohen then gives me a chance to say one thing, because what David Cohen did at Treasury was kind of cracked down on sanctions and, you know, illicit finance. There was a great provision that passed in the veto override of Trump banning anonymous shell companies in the U.S., right? So this is the ability to set up like an LLC, a corporation in the U.S. with anonymous ownership, which has been utilized by everybody from Russian oligarchs to, God knows who, to like, you know, launder and move money through the U.S. financial system.

It's a great tool that is now available to the U.S. to fight corruption and, frankly, I think, authoritarianism, because, you know, just look up at New York skyscraper with a bunch of empty apartments, you know, registered in the name of some anonymous LLC owned by some. Putin crony. This is the kind of thing that can allow you to track money more effectively. Yeah, that was great. That was in the NDAA that passed recently, despite our impotent lame duck president pretending he was going to veto it and then not because he is, in fact, a weak little baby. So that's it for us today on the show. A lot of stuff, a lot of fun. Good to be back. Good to see you, buddy. And I don't know, talk to Worldo soon. Hopefully I'll be on

my third La Caree book by the time we, we taped next week. Yeah, let's do it. And a nice backdrop, Tom. Thank you. For those watching at home, you know, Tommy's got a new backdrop here. Yeah, my wife, Hannah, who you know well, absolutely hated the fact that I would record in our bedroom. So we'll see. You know, usually what happens is I record in this room my office. We changed the angle, so it looks a little better and it's not just a disgusting wall. But usually someone starts one of those. leaf blower things the minute we start recording, and luckily that didn't happen to the show. It sounds. L.A. All right, man. Talk to you soon.

See it. Pats of the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Quinn Lewis for production support. And thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.