Pod Save the World - Standing up to autocrats (and royals)

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Tommy and Ben talk about the ongoing protests in China, Ukrainian strikes into Russia, speculation over Putin’s health, Iran sending mixed messages on the morality police, and Bostonians greeting the royals as warmly as expected. Then, Ben interviews Maria Ressa about the evolution of disinformation spread and how to combat it in the face of autocratic regimes. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Positave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we're recording a little earlier this week for scheduling reasons. So if news happens on Tuesday and we don't cover it, I hereby absolve us of any responsibility. And I'm doing like the Catholic thing. I don't even know if I'm doing the right direction. That's quite ritualistic of you. Thank you so much. We'll see what we can do. And we won't lead with any sports news, even though I've watched 100 hours of World Cup and the Mets are making big signings left and right, but we won't even talk about that. We're definitely not talking about it right now.

No, we're not talking about the Mets upgrading. Justin Verlinder, a huge win for the New York Mets franchise. A little better off than the U.S. men's team, but proud of those guys. Yeah, proud of those guys. But it would be absurd to lead the sports because it's a foreign policy show. And today, we are going to cover the latest news on the protests in China and Iran, the war in Ukraine, TikTok and U.S. politics. Very interesting story in Forbes about that.

Our friend Elon Musk apparently still owns Twitter. He loves me. We interacted over the weekend. And then the royal family did Boston. And man, it delivered for all of us. And then, Ben, tomorrow you were talking with, I think one of our favorite Ponte of the world guests of all time on this show, Maria Ressa from Rappler News. What are you guys going to talk about?

I don't even done it yet. But what do you think in your focus on? Well, this is Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist and, you know, really. Certified badass. Yeah, certified badass and someone who's as smart as anybody on the planet about social media and what it's done to democracy. And she has a new book out, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, which is, I have to admit, a great title.

Great title. Which we'll talk about in which I think we can all get behind. It's kind of what we want to learn from one another on this podcast. She's awesome and inspiring. And one of the just, yeah, just like, she was on Colbert recently. It was really great. I saw that. Good clip, yeah.

Good, everyone, great clip. Everyone should buy the book. Also, speaking of reading, Ben, I read. I read your Bordane piece over the weekend. And it made me so sad. I missed him. You put me to a little bit of a funk at the end. I want him back.

Yeah, I have to tell you, I've written a bunch of stuff the last few years. I've never gotten as much feedback on anything I've written than in the Bordane. Clearly, there are other people out there that feel both this sense of loss with what he brought us and also this sense of mystery about how such a big life could end in such a sad way. and also a sign that maybe talking about things other than just politics and international relations can reach people closer to where they are. So I appreciate all the feedback I've got. And I have to say, Tommy, I'm just going to say something else here. I've been traveling a lot. Like, world-dos are coming out of the woodwork. I met world those everywhere from like the Yeasty Boys bagel truck on Abbott Kinney to the bookstore in New York City that I went by.

So thanks everybody for saying hi. And it's good. know you're out there. Yeastie Boys is an all-time great food truck name. All-time great. And like, there's some good ones out there. I was actually walking my dog yesterday and a guy, a very nice younger guy rode by me and was like, dude, I was just listening to episode seven of World Corrupt, the World Cup pot I've been doing. And I feel the same way. I love doing this show with you. I love talking politics on Potsie of America. But sometimes just like letting your brain go deep on something new. Like for me, soccer is such a nice relief. I don't know. You just sort of like new sim. snaps is start firing new pathways develop. You just like get to a different place and it's

incredibly rewarding. Yeah, well, with Bordane, and what was interesting is that it's different context obviously because you're writing about like a personality and a life and television show, but it's the same stuff, right? And the same way the world corrupt interacts with the same issues we talk about Bordane's life interacted with, you know, everything because he traveled everywhere. So yeah, it's a good way of stretching, stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of the usual topic list that we have here. Yeah, for sure. So let's go to China because that was the big story we did last week. And I think there's been some really interesting developments.

So last week we talked about the protests against China's zero COVID policy, which is where they were just doing these draconian lockdowns of citizens, tens of millions, about hundreds of millions of citizens across China, were getting locked in their homes, sometimes locked in physically or like welded shut in cities across the country. So there are these protests. They popped up everywhere. And I've seen a lot of reports since about. protesters getting rounded up, threatened, arrested, but it also appears like some of their demands

are starting to be met. Because in the last few days, a number of cities have relaxed some of the COVID restrictions. And the official in charge of pandemic response efforts, I think like the vice premier, seem to soften the government stance in a recent speech. So Ben, I mean, obviously Xi Jinping could walk these changes back and it could all end in disaster, any sort of loosening since China faces real challenges in dealing with COVID because their vaccines suck. and the country has not done enough to ensure that the hospital system has enough beds to deal with a major outbreak. But what did you make of Xi Jinping? Like, Chinese dictator for life actually bending to popular will here. I think it's really important because it demonstrates

that even a totalitarian government has to respond to public will to some extent, right? I mean, and let's be clear, he's not going to. as far as I think what a lot of Chinese would like and opening things up and accepting more, well, at least vaccines from abroad. But he did feel like he needed to be somewhat responsive and try to thread some needle here with the public discontent.

And so again, it's a reminder that public opinion matters even in places where it seems like it doesn't. I think it also speaks to the fact that this wasn't just a political issue. Let's say, I don't know, there was some political scandal and then there were some protests.

Well, those you could just, you know, crack down as hard as possible, round people up, throw them in jail, and think you solve the problem. But here, because it's this kind of social, economic and political issue, he actually can't do that, right? Because this isn't like some protest movement with a few leaders or a few student leaders. And so it shows that there's going to be this kind of probably tug of war for some time now, because this is not going to go away. A new part of life in China is there's an understanding that there's widespread discontent with the government and the government. government is going to have to try to thread some needle between cracking down and being responsive

to it. And that shows that we're in kind of a new new territory here with respect to the Chinese Communist Party. So that's the big question, right, which is whether a broad swath of Chinese citizens will understand that there were protests and they led to these changes or whether the censorship authorities can just like sufficiently wipe it all off the internet. I have some, It does seem like Chinese censorship, while incredibly effective, the most effective censorship regime in the history of the world, it showed its limits here. Like I think, you know, I heard some really interesting reporting about how the censors have a harder time dealing with videos and like videos of protests because ultimately, like, you need

a human being to watch some of them to see if something really is an edge case. And like people are getting savvier. I heard someone say that sometimes protesters are embedding protesters. protest videos within other clips. So it'll be like a SpongeBob clip, but SpongeBob is watching a protest on TV. I heard this on the Hard Fork podcast, a great tech podcast on the New York Times. So I don't know, that to me is the question, whether people will like, you know, tie these two things together. Well, and think about it this way, too. Like, if there's, let's say there's a political event that sparked the protest, like I was just saying. So let's, you know, a hypothetical, right? Like some

person is killed by security forces and people see that video and they get motivated, go out and protest. You can crack down on that. You can make sure that nobody sees that video. But everybody in China has been through this maddening fucking experience, being locked up. So you can't make people not be pissed about what they've lived through. And if they hear any ounce of information about this protest about this, well, they probably immediately sympathize with it. So you can't wipe away. They can control so much. They can control so much information flow and they can create so much voluminous propaganda. But they can't change how much it sucks. that the government has messed us up so bad, you know? And that's, that's to me, and never mind

the economic imperative of opening things up because, like, you can't just continue to be this outlier in a global economy where you're shut down like this. So they're going to lose some face, like as we said last week, they're getting cut down a notch here. And, and they're not out of the woods by any stretch because this problem's going to be around for them. I saw Chinese President Xi Jinping is going to Saudi Arabia to meet with Mohammed bin Salman. So, you know, I'm sure that'll be a blast. So related story, Ben, a protest in Iran, which started back in September because of an incident like the one you just described where a young Iranian woman named Masa Meena was murdered by Iran's morality police, the thugs who run around harass Iranian citizens

over how they're dressed, basically, especially women. But over the weekend, there's reports that Iran has abolished the morality police. Apparently, the attorney general of Iran said as much on Saturday. This was reported on Iranian state media. If it was inaccurate, it hasn't been corrected as of Sunday. So I did see a lot of Iran experts kind of questioning this news, wondering whether it was misreported, wondering if it was just kind of, you know, a lie to begin with. But there's also the question of whether this is just too little too late either way, since the protesters' demands have grown to include many other things, including regime change in a lot of instances. And people have been radicalized by the government crackdown in response. But what did you make of this news? And

about the morality police? Like, first of all, do you buy it? And what do you think it would mean if it were true? Well, first of all, it was interesting how it came out, because this was not exactly a full-throated announcement by the government, right? So, you know, this was not a fatwa from the Supreme Leader or like a coordinated statement across the government. What that kind of tells you is, you know, they're fissures in even a regime like Iran's. In fact, Iran's got this kind of strange system, right, that we dealt with where there's the Supreme Leader and kind of clerical establishment, the Iitolas. Then there's like the, you know, quote-unquote elected government, right, and people who run the kind of ministries. And then there are all these kind of quasi-power centers,

the Revolutionary Guard. Point being that there are probably differences of opinion in that government about what to do. And there are probably some people who are like, we should just abolish morality police. There are probably other people who don't want to do that. And so they made this kind of half-assed announcement. That speaks to me that the regime doesn't really know what it's doing. and they have divisions inside of that regime about what they're doing. And it may be that like somebody could be the fall guy when this doesn't work or somebody wants to distance themselves from this and not own it. And I saw even in the statement saying that they were abolishing the morality police,

they said that there would still be like social laws that were enforced, right? And so that gets to your other question. Obviously, this is too little too late. Like if they had done this at the very beginning, maybe it would have mollified some of the people, not all the people protesting, but clearly these protests have grown like a snowball going down a mountain. And the grievances are now not just a morality police. It's the entire nature of the Islamic Republic and the regime there. So the theme of this week, I guess, is like with China, like half measures, you know, might make things a little easier. Well, actually, in this case, I actually don't

think it will to tell you the truth. In China might make things a little easier for some people. But here, I just think this is too little too late. And I think the way they did it, that spoke to some weakness and some lack of cohesion on how they're responding to it. Yeah, you can't kill like hundreds of people and be like, all right, we'll give this much. Yeah, yeah. The other like follow-up item we wanted to talk about was a few months back, we talked about this Iranian professional rock climber named El-Naz Rakabi. She was competing in October in a climbing competition in South Korea, and she did it without her

head scarf on, which was broadly viewed as this deliberate act to show solidarity with the protesters. Now, after she got back to Iran, Rqabi said, no, this was an accident, right? But it's probably, that comment was probably made under duress or it's, I think it's fair to think it could have been. Now, over the weekend, a news outlet called Ronwire is reporting that her family's home was demolished. So it's not totally clear who did this and why. I have some guesses.

But it also comes not long after we learned that the families of Iran's World Cup soccer team, the players' families were threatened because they didn't sing the national anthem in protest and protestant, and solidarity for the protesters. So, you know, look, just a reminder of what these athletes and these protesters are risking, even the incredibly famous one. I mean, not only is she a famous professional rock climber, her brother is as well, and they just demolish the house, gold medals, trophies, and all. Yeah, I mean, first of all, this kind of makes the morality police announcement ring just that much more hollow. Totally. I mean, you can make announcements like that, but The thing is a lot of these morality police were kind of plainclosed goons, right, who were kind of quasi-regime-affiliated.

And if the goons are still out there, you know, demolishing houses and killing people and threatening people and intimidating people, announcements like the morality police one don't really matter for much. I think the other thing to kind of watch for here is you've seen some of these prominent Iranians who's spoken out, right, be harassed or, you know, retribution against their families. And, you know, I was looking at those World Cup players and thinking, are all those guys going to go back to Iran? Me too. We may start to see some more prominent Iranians kind of relocate in the diaspora growing. That's something that happens in these crackdowns. And in a way, the regime may want that, right? It may want the more prominent, like, liberally inclined people out of the country.

And so they may be making life miserable for a certain kind of Iranian who's prominent to, to just not want to stay, you know, so that essentially there's less organized or potential leadership of different opposition movements. And again, like sometimes, you know, diaspora can organize from the outside too and try to keep the pressure on, but it also can, you know, begin to to be a release valve that the regime is trying to essentially disincentivize people from staying there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So Ben, I don't know if you saw this, but there was a bit of a dust up between Iranian State TV and some of the men's soccer players. Like there was the moment where, you know, this reporter chastised the captain of the men's team

for mispronouncing Iran and, you know, our player was like incredibly graceful. Tyler Adams. Tyler Adams is like graceful and like poison like the answer was amazing. But I guess they were also harassing the coach about, you know, U.S. military movements, inflation, like just hilarious, like state TV propaganda shit that brought me back to the old days when we would have like, I forget the name of that Russian reporter. I was telling Roger about this, the Russian reporter in the briefing room. Oh, my God.

We all, like, no one ever saw the guy write a single article and people looked. And this was probably pretty clear that he was a spy. Well, he, so shit, I wish I could remember his name. But the funny thing about that guy, right, is that he got crazier and crazier with each year. Yeah. And if you interacted with him, like, you know, off camera. He was this kind of pretty reasonable guy, like, lived in D.C. and, you know, but then by the end, by like 2016, I would do these briefings and he'd come to them. And it was literally like,

you know, Sergey Lavrov was questioning these briefings, you know, like the U.S. sponsoring coups in Ukraine and everywhere around the world. I mean, you could see the degradation of this, this government through just how hostile and strange conspiracy theory laid in this one relatively a vuncular, you know, briefing room journalist got, you know. Yeah, the marching order has changed over time. Speaking of Russian marching orders, so lots of Ukraine, Russia news today. So the thing that remains constant is that Russia, their strategy is now just hammering Ukraine's energy grid in doing so as it's about to get very cold. There is no international plan seemingly been for a way to fix the energy grid in the near future. The New York Times, actually, the daily

had a great piece on all this today. And it's very worrisome because you just don't know what people are going to do. And there was another huge missile barrage today, Monday. And now we're at the point where Russia is just saying in press statements like, yeah, we're targeting Ukrainian power plants. They're not even trying to hide it. Now, Ukraine launched a pretty bold response to these attacks. They fired missiles at two Russian military bases that were hundreds of miles over the Russian border. The Russians said it was a drone attack. One of these bases is where Russian long range bombers are stationed. So that was pretty interesting. And the other thing that I think it's worth kind of bundling in this bucket is the European Union,

the G7, have agreed to put a $60 per barrel price cap on Russian oil. Initially, the cap was set at $65. They got negotiated down. But the idea, the hope is to reduce Russia's oil revenue while not pushing them to completely stop production. The hard part about all of this is that according to Bloomberg news last Friday, the $60 cap was well above the current price Russia is getting, which is closer to $45 or $48. a barrel. So we'll see if this is effective. But just pausing for a minute on this, like, these cross-border strikes by Ukraine and hitting targets into Russia has been a Biden administration

redline for a while now. The fear is that it might lead Putin to escalate things in some way. But I'm just wondering, like, at some point, if you're Zelensky and these missile barrages are raining down on Kiev and other cities day after, day after day, hitting civilian infrastructure, from planes that are often deep in Russian airspace when they're actually firing the missiles. How do you tell Ukraine not to retaliate or to try to take out those targets? I'm not sure that you can. You maybe just not arm them to do it. Well, I think the first thing is that these were drones, apparently.

And so that wasn't U.S. supplied weapons to strike into Russia and that Biden, I'm sure the Biden people seems like they would be like to discourage attacks into Russia generally, but their real red line has been like U.S. artillery and weapons being fired into Russia as escalatory. But the use of drones is interesting because this war, as it goes on, like we see drones becoming more important with the Iranian-made drones being these kind of kamikaze things launched at Ukrainian energy infrastructure, now Ukraine using drones to strike hundreds of miles into Russia.

And you're right, like the targets seem to be air bases. with the logic that this is where Russia's mounting these attacks from, so why should these not be targets? And the Ukrainians had a kind of classic, like, ambiguous trolling statement I saw, one of them put out today that said, like, Galileo said the world is round. And so if you fire missiles at us, they'll ultimately come back into Russia. Yes. Yeah, we're just, you know, like, cool. Yeah, it's cool, I guess. But what it speaks to is a mentality where it's like, how can we absorbed this degree of indiscriminate humanitarian violence directed at us and not hit back into Russia. And so I think it's inevitable that there'll probably be more of that. And you have to think

that, again, with time, the risks of escalation or the risks that Ukraine might be doing some things that makes the Biden administration uncomfortable, but Ukraine feels like they have to do it. I think that that could continue to be part of the landscape here that we're dealing with. And this winner is a kind of volatile time, right? Because Ukraine can't launch another offensive to try to recapture territory. So we're going to be in the space of like immense humanitarian hardship in Ukraine without a lot of good answers for it. And these kind of tit for tat escalations, it's just, man, the longer this war goes on, like obviously above all the most concerning things is suffering the Ukrainians, but it's also going to be a time. that, you know, something could escalate.

Yes, for sure. And like, you know, there's a lot of back and forth about talks and whether the U.S. should be pushing for more peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, there was this letter from progressives in Congress that we talked about that gently advocated for more emphasis from the Biden team for talks. People flipped out about it. And then we learned Jake Sullivan was already talking with the Russians, right? Last week, President Biden said he'd be willing to talk with Putin if Putin was, quote, looking for a way to end the war. Putin's spokesman suggested they were open to negotiations, but the starting point has to be the U.S. recognizing annex territory as Russians. So not a serious proposal from the Russian side if you're Ukrainian.

To that end, Ben, I saw today that Putin drove some sort of vehicle, a car, truck or something across the now repaired bridge from Russia to Crimea. Folks probably remember, the Ukrainian side had attacked that bridge and blown it up and rendered parts of it inoperable. I'm sure that Putin had like every Russian missile defense system available deployed to protect him for his little drive. But the fact that he'd get that close to the front line, I do think shows how important these annex territories are to him and his whole persona and narrative about the war. So I, you know, I worry that that red line is pretty firmly held. I don't know. Yeah. And Crimea is obviously the firmest of the firm red lines on the Russian side. But yeah, I mean, right now, Ukraine's position is

Russia has to vacate all territory, including Crimea. Russia's position is all of their annexations have to go through, which, by the way, includes areas of Ukraine that they've lost in subsequent fighting. And the U.S. position is we support the Ukrainian position, but we're willing to talk. And so there's just not really a window. It's very important, as we've talked about, to keep diplomatic lines open, but right now, nothing about the status quo of the war suggests that there's some middle ground here that could even be found, even if you wanted that, right? And so I just, I think we, you know, there's going to have to almost certainly be more chapters of fighting before like the balance tips for one of the parties to actually make talks

potentially lead to something. Yeah, we go in circles over whether that talks over here. and, you know, there's a very important actor named Vladimir Putin in Russia who was a pretty big say in the matter. But Ben, one thing I'd say, Tommy, is that like sometimes in wars, like, you can have talks about just kind of alleviating immediate humanitarian suffering. But in this war, the Russians don't seem to care about that at all. So, like, even, like, you know, temporary ceasefires

to allow people to move someplace or to get food to people, like even that doesn't seem like it's going to happen. So the only thing that they've been able to successfully talk about are things of, like, international dimensions, like the food crisis and trying to get some food out or getting some international nuclear inspectors into the nuclear plant. Some limited prisoners swaps.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, but you're right. Like, humanitarian suffering is very much part of the plan for Vladimir Putin and the Russian side. But he is learning, Ben, that even being a genocidal dictator can't protect you from American tabloids. So the latest fodder is just asking questions,

headlines like, did Putin fall down the stairs and poop his pants, basically. So this comes, the sourcing in places like the newer post who are running with this comes from a telegram channel called General SVR, which claims it is operated by an anonymous former Russian foreign intelligence service official. Let's be honest, it's probably some sort of intel op. I don't care. It's fun. The telegram channel reported that Putin fell down a staircase, landed on his tailbone, and then defecated himself involuntarily, they note. this is all part of broader speculation about his health and claims that Putin has Parkinson's or cancer or something very serious. So again, Ben, none of this is substantiated. But do you think there's a

chance that Vladimir Putin recently visited a McDonald's with former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison? I mean, the idea of pooping his pants like as being a part of this was a nice touch. It is like just, this thing about Putin's health has just been the great unknown because there's so much speculation about it. And there's a lot of smoke, right? He doesn't appear that much. He, you know, there's less of like the, you know, riding horses bare chested. There are these reports of him disappearing for weeks at a time. That's all true.

But we just don't really see under the hood like what what's actually there, you know. So in that, in that gray zone, like putting out, you know, that he fell on the stairs and pooped his fans. I mean, nothing wrong with that. I mean. And it traveled very far. I got a lot of pickup. Also, right before we started recording, I saw a news report that Putin has just signed into law, a law banning the expression of LGBT identity in Russia.

So just a reminder that while he is a genocidal monster in Ukraine, he's also a piece of shit back home. So he's got that going for him. Yeah. And that the LGBT crackdown started, you know, in early in Putin's return to the presidency. So like 2013, 14, it just shows you that these kinds of hateful ideologies can pretend like somebody moving in a much more aggressive direction. In other words, like what he's doing at home in the kind of regime he's built there is pretty connected to what he's doing in Ukraine. So Ben, turn me to Twitter and our friend Elon Musk. So I had a very lame weekend where I didn't

leave the house much. So I ended up listening to about an hour and a half of Elon's Twitter space. And I asked him a question. Somehow these right-wing goons let me. How did you do that? Do you like raise your hand or something? requested. I requested. All of a sudden, they were calling on me. And I was like, oh, my God, I, like, sort of hadn't, I didn't think it was going to happen. So I sort of had half prepared a thought. But basically, someone had asked him whether Twitter would do anything to support, uh, protesters in Iran in China. And he was just like, uh, the, uh, then just like ducted it, completely ducted it. So I followed up on that and was basically like, you say that freedom of

expression is critical to the future of humanity, does that include freedom of expression for Chinese people and Iranians? And will Twitter do anything to help them? And he got very annoyed with me and was like, it's a dumb question. You know, you can't even get on Twitter in China. That's a government's decision, blah, blah, blah. But like, hey man, you're the richest man in the world. You own a satellite company, a space rocket company. Now Twitter, like you could voice support for the protesters in China, but we all know you won't, right, because you need their manufacturing base and you want their market. it. He also got asked about Assange and Snowden and whether they deserve to be pardoned. It was really interesting, Ben, because he didn't take the bait. Like, he wouldn't say what they

wanted to hear, which was that they should get pardoned. He actually said something more like, I think that these are decisions that should be made by a jury, which really pissed everybody off because they all thought like, oh, no, he's going to get prosecuted. But then he put up a Twitter poll. He promised to put up a Twitter poll about it. So that was his like, get out of jail free. And then this one I really wanted to talk about with you because Elon tweeted the following. quote, I've seen a lot of concerning tweets about the recent Brazil election. If those tweets are accurate, it's possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left-wing candidates. So he was replying to someone who was suggesting that like the Twitter files and claims that the Biden team

was colluding with Twitter might have happened again with left-wing candidates in Brazil. And it just like struck me as like such an unbelievably dangerous thing because the transfer of power from Bolsonaro to Lula hasn't even happened. And he's just like opening this can. of wharbs down there. Yeah, a lot to say about this. I mean, first of all, you were on this Twitter space this weekend and that that is, you know, kind of sad. But I was watching LSU Georgia at the same time. I just want to put that up. Well, but here, here's going to say about it, Tommy, I guarantee that if you had over $100 billion, you'd find something better to do with your time over the weekend. Oh my God. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. So like, how lame is it? How lame is it that this guy

who could be like, you know, tinkering with rockets. Like, he wants to be in Twitter spaces, arguing with, like, people online, like, kind of, kind of weird window in his side. The weirdest collection of the right-wing trolls, too, man. It was, like, crypto people and, like, right-wing kind of dudes. Yeah, you know, he's gravitated to kind of the dregs of Twitter, you know, to be a part of his trolling army. Then on the China thing, his response is totally disingenuous because, yeah, like, Twitter

is not accessible in China. unless you have VPNs and things you can get around it. But it's also the case that there is a pretty dynamic, you know, conversation happening on Twitter around the world that includes, by the way, Chinese diaspora, Chinese exiles. Exactly. This information does flow around. Twitter is a global bloodstream, and he knows that.

And he's ducking it. And so the question is, would he go along with efforts to slow the spread of information about Chinese protest or what happens if Chinese bots are like spreading and spamming, which he claims to not want to have happened on Twitter, these stories about protest. There are lots of reports that that is happening. There are lots of reports that there's this flood of fucking Chinese Communist Party spam. There have been targeting of people's accounts who are pro-protests.

And yeah, Elon Musk has enormous business interests in China that are part of the Tesla supply chain, among others. And I have no faith whatsoever that this right-wing, I guess, or like techno-bro crypto-goober is going to take a stance for free expression. Free expression in him seems to mean the freedom to troll, like, random people on Twitter and let a bunch of discussing stuff back on this platform. And then that gets to the Brazil point. Like, first of all, what he said is incredibly dangerous. You're right, because don't think for a second that Bolsonaro and all supporters aren't going

to grab onto that and use it as part of their effort to delegitimize Lula, to kind of paralyze Brazilian politics. It's really dangerous what he's playing with. And it's also total bullshit because the reality is that Bolsonaro and his supporters have been like pouring disinformation and misinformation onto platforms like Twitter. So of course there's likely more content moderation directed at the people that are spreading the most misinformation and disinformation. So either he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about or he's so cynical that he's like just, oh, where can I light a match and light a fire?

Brazil. It was a time that I felt the most gross about this whole Elon Musk Twitter thing because it spoke to the fact that there's a fact that there's a lot. no bottom to the Hornets nest that this guy will poke just to get attention. 100%. And look, in fairness, Elon, right, Twitter is not the only platform that has problems. And it's maybe it's one of the most powerful, but maybe not the most powerful at the moment, Facebook obviously is. But TikTok is probably second these days. And Forbes had a fascinating story about TikTok and U.S. politics. So everybody knows TikTok is owned by Bite Dance,

which is a Chinese company. The authors found that accounts run by a company called Media Links TV have been posting videos about U.S. politics and politicians right before the midterms that got tens of millions of views. Ben, any guess who owns or controls Media Links TV? Well, I would guess some nexus to the Chinese Communist Party. Nailed it. CCTV, the Chinese Central Television. It's the Chinese Communist Party's news outlet. So Media Links is actually a registered foreign agent in the U.S. But there's no real way to know that or who's behind the accounts they control unless you click on the link on the account profile. file, which have other names like, you know, like Twitter news or it's like talk news or some shit

like that. And it says in the bio, quote, material distributed by Media Links TV LLC on behalf of CCTV, more info at DOJ comma DC. But like, a, very few people are going to click that bio to get that information. If you were going to know what any of that means, it's just like a blizzard of acronyms. So interestingly, the Forbes report found that the videos tend to favor Democrats criticize Republicans. It wasn't entirely the case that it was sort of like pro-democrat. There was a bunch of stuff critical of Biden. But again, like TikTok is owned by a Chinese company. Most major social media sites label content that comes from state-controlled media.

TikTok clearly does not. These, you know, the content, these accounts were pushing tended to be divisive. But so is like most political commentary, I guess. But it did feature clips with Alex Jones. And then clips from Victor Orban talking. about how the West was fighting with itself and about to collapse. So this seems like a real and growing problem here with TikTok. That frankly, Elon is actually distracting us from. They should be talking about this. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, the three most important platforms,

I would say, right now for the receipt of information, Google is a little different. It's obviously really important. But one is owned by the Chinese, well, not the Chinese Communist Party, but as this indicates like, let's just say there's a hand somewhere in the background of TikTok that goes back to the Chinese government because anything that is, even if it's privately owned in China, we've seen in recent years, that leads to the CCP. Facebook owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter owned by Elon Musk. Like the Chinese Communist Party, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are not the people that I feel the most confident about owning the information flow that is going to billions of people every day.

we have a big problem with the flow of information and who controls it and what incentives they have. And ultimately, there are going to have to be some solutions that involve the U.S. government in this. We've talked about TikTok and how it's hard for me to see the U.S. government allowing that to be such a prominent space, particularly for American young people, without any kind of knowledge about how decisions are made, how this algorithm works, or set of algorithms work. So, you know, this feels kind of unsustainable, but there's also not an obvious solution because if it's an American company, all you have to be is really, really rich as Elon Musk proves. And if it's a Chinese company, you've got to answer the Chinese Communist Party. So there's not a lot of great alternatives right now. Maybe we should have Rokana on Congressman Rokana and talk about like what is or could be happening in Congress to regulate these companies. Because I'm at the point where I like, I get to this point of the conversation and I have no idea who is actually doing meaningful work on the next step, which is like fixing it. There's work on regulation around the kind of the product design of how the platforms work.

Then they're the antitrust pushes to kind of break up big tech. Right. And those two things kind of have to come together, like the ownership structures and the product model. But getting that done in the kind of divided Congress feels almost impossible, but it's not a reason not to pursue it. The antitrust conversations to me are like important, but they almost always miss the elephant in the room, which is Apple. Right. Like the thing Elon's talking about, he acted like it was new information. Is this Apple 30% tax on all revenue that comes through the app store?

It's like, one, that's been known and reported on for many years. It's actually a massive fight going on in the courts between Apple and the creators of Fortnite. But two, like, yeah, you're right. It is like, that's a massive tax. And like, as a podcaster, I only imagine if, you know, what chunk of our listeners get episodes through the Apple podcast app, what if they one day decided they get 30% of our revenue?

Like, what would we do about it? We have no recourse. Or if we were an app, they could just decide to not let us be in the app store, you know? And so that's just enormous power. So this whole thing is out of whack. It does feel to me like people are also kind of fishing around for information wherever they can find it. You know, like people are getting a little tired of these big platforms, I think, but at least in the United States. But that doesn't mean there's a lot of obvious alternatives to it.

Yeah. Two things I wanted to just mention that we're watching before we get to our last topic. here that we'll probably get to these in a later date. I mean, Ben, I continue to be concerned about Israeli Prime Minister B.B. Netanyahu filling out his cabinet with some truly scary right-wing men in very key roles. It will be important to see what, if anything, the U.S. does or says about it. Indicators so far makes me think that they maybe aren't going to say anything publicly than any pushing that might happen will be behind the scenes, which will feel very frustrating and unsatisfying to people like us. And then the Guardian reported that NDTV,

which is one of India's few remaining independent news channels, is about to be taken over by a billionaire with ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which would be frankly like a pretty big step down the path. And it might be a long path in this case, but down the path towards kind of the Victor Orbanization of India's democracy if all these major outlets are tied to parties. So two trends I don't like. No, that's right. I mean, it is like the Orban model, right? It's like, you know, you pack the courts with judges. Modi's done that. You buy up the media and turn in a mouthpiece for yourself. Modi's done that. You turn social media into a massive tool of of intimidation against your critics. You know, Modi's done that. You know, he, you kind of had this

corrupt crony system where rich guys are financing your politics and you, you know, probably take care of them on the side. Like, this does look like the Orban model, you know, in a massive scale, a country of a billion people. And the common threat between India and Israel is that we see this democratic backsliding happening right in front of our eyes. But for geopolitical and political purposes, kind of the U.S. doesn't say anything about it, you know, and it makes it hard to kind unfortunately it's kind of why the democracy versus autocracy thing kind of feels mostly like a West versus Russia and China thing, you know, because the global, you know, fault lines of democracy are more in places like India and Indonesia and, you know, to some extent,

Israel. And the administration has always had a hard time finding ways to balance its interests once it gets beyond kind of, you know, Europe and the U.S. and, you know, maybe Japan and South Korea and Australia. Yeah, for sure. So those issues we'll come back to. So last one before we get to Ben's interview. Last week, we briefly discussed Prince William and Kate's visit to Boston. I basically used it as an opportunity to be an asshole and to rag on the royals for visiting Boston in the winter, which no one should ever do.

But I hereby take back all of that criticism because the good people of Boston have delivered just comedy for all of us. So William and Kate went to a Boston Celtics game where Bostonians greeted them with long USA USA chance. And I raised this not to offend our listeners in the UK or to be engaged in jingoism. But I just do love it Ben when a city completely lives up to a stereotype like that. It just like plays to type. You know, a bunch of fucking meathead Celtics fans chant in USA is very funny.

Yeah. I mean, because we've all been at games where, like, you've had a few beers and they show somebody on the Jumbotron that, you know, you have like a visceral mass response to. Yeah, the kiss can. The fact that in this case, it was like the, you know, the necks in line to the throne and his wife and just like a classic USA chant that did, you know, some demonstrative shows of patriotism, like, you know, got a little complicated in the Trump years. but like that's definitely one I can get behind. I will say to Tommy that Camilla got in trouble again around some allegations of racism based on an experience that somebody had with her staff. Now it's somebody saying that she inquired where she's from and she's obviously from Britain,

but the insinuation was like go back. To tell this story, there was an activist who visited Buckingham Palace, right? And someone on staff, a staffer for the palace said something really, really racist. Yeah, they were like vetting her. And, and, you know, part of it was, even though she's a Britain, where they were, like, pressing her on, like, where she was from, right? Which touches, like, the deepest chord of, like, the racism that I think a lot of people feel in Britain is that even if you've been there, you're born there, you're not seen as

from there, you know? Because you have dark skin. Yeah, exactly. And so I also noticed, too, just like putting a pin in it as a rural correspondent here, Harry and Megan dropped like the trailer for their Netflix documentary in which they tell their side of the story the same time that William and Kate were in Boston. Oh, that's good stuff. Like, hey, we're getting in this new cycle.

Harry's got a book out next year. We don't know much about it, but it's called Spare, which suggests to you how he feels about how he's treated. So there's going to be more content. The one thing the world family's always been good at is creating content for people like us to talk about. They were content creators. So, you know, look, admittedly some Bostonians, some fans were moved and quite emotional about the royal visit.

Let me play you a clip from Celtic star Jalen Brown real quick. I know you guys have played in front of a lot of celebrities, but what was it like to compete in front of royalty tonight? The Prince and Princess of Wales were in the building. It was just a regular game to me. So there you can hear it. You can hear the emotion in his voice. I don't remember that game forever, but the best coverage, the best thing I've read was a story from the Boston Globe, which ran a story with the headline.

The Royals were in Somerville. People were worried about what that meant for trips to Market Basket. That's a supermarket. Here's some key quotes, bad day to go to Market Basket, one resident wrote on a Reddit page for happenings around Somerville. I bet the traffic will be terrible. Another quote, I have always disliked the Royal Family. another person wrote on Twitter Wednesday, but closing down street access to market basket makes

their reign intolerable. And then the last one was a local city councilman named Jefferson Thomas Scott. He was just like learning about this in real time and trying to provide logistical updates to his constituents on Twitter about traffic and stuff. And he said, you know, he was trying to like outline the reasons it might be bad. And he noted that he couldn't estimate the number of quote, looky lose who might show up to gock at the royal family and add to the traffic woes and said, quote, sorry for the inconvenience. I didn't invite these people. I mean, when you consider, yeah, when you consider that this is the place where like kind of

the revolution started, right? You know, with like the Tea Party and, you know, Boston Masker. A lot of Irish people. And obviously Lexington and Concord. Well, that's the thing. So you have that. And then you have like, this is like the most Irish place I can think of. outside of Ireland, right?

Chicago might have something to say about that in New York, but to me, like Boston, so like, this is like a not uncomplicated place for the rules to visit. I don't know who, why did they pick this? They could have picked somewhere with like a slightly more obvious welcome party. But hey, you know, I guess they went right in the middle of it. Yeah, I think like some of the things they did, they visited like some climate tech thing. I don't know. Yeah, you're right. They could find this kind of, I don't know. They could have found message events all over the place and not gotten the, the Royals were in Somerville coverage

from the Boston Globe. Okay, that is it for the news. We are going to take a quick break, and when you come back, you will hear Ben's interview with Maria Ressa, one of the most inspiring people you'll hear from, so you will not want to miss that. Well, we are very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World Maria Ressa, who is the co-founder of Rappler, the Filipino news organization. She's also a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2021. And most importantly, for this interview, she recently released a book that all of you should pick up. It's called How to Stand Up to a Dictator, The Fight for Our Future.

Maria, it's so good to see you. It's good to speak with you. I want to start with a book and just a kind of a broad question. You know, what's interesting is you've been so in the middle of criminal charges, the fight for democracy in the Philippines, the fight for, you know, much healthier, detoxified social media globally, which we'll talk about. But, you know, this is also a memoir, and it covers your life story, but also kind of your life as a journalist through these changing times. And I just wanted to ask you to start, like, what was it like to kind of pull back the camera and look at the span of time in which so much

has changed? Did it give you a perspective that maybe you didn't have until you had to take on the exercise writing this book? Yeah, I mean, Ben, you know this from writing a book, right? All of a sudden, like, people kept asking why, why, why, why, you know, how do you have courage? When I felt like I wasn't actually doing anything out of the ordinary, like I felt I was only doing what I was supposed to be doing and what I have always done. And so pulling back reminded me of several things. And they, and even though my editor cut, like I wrote 400 pages and he cut 200 pages, I think you still get the whys, which is that in many ways, this is my love affair with journalism. What journalism is, how journalism's mission, the standards and ethics, really shaped the person I became. And then before that, how, you know, when you're a broadcast TV, when you're a television broadcast journalist in conflict areas, in a war zone. and you have to like kind of compress 400 years of history in the present moment and you have two minutes to do it and you have to do it in three bullet points. You know this. You get trained in a particular way. And I realize that the way I made those quick judgment calls came from these values that I had, you know, as a Filipino moving to the United States as an immigrant kid, moving a product. of the public school system in New Jersey, and then, you know, that very elite university that I attended.

And then finally, really, I was shaped by journalism. And I hated that this word objectivity was, you know, it's something that is part of the craft of journalism, which is the process of it, the very expensive process, that the Internet essentially hollowed out. But it isn't possible for one reporter to be, in quotes, objective because I replaced, for example, a six-foot-two white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male as a reporter in Manila. And here I am a foot shorter. I'm Filipino-American. I was really young compared to him.

The stories we chose were different. The way we attacked the stories. Even the way we interview is different, right? So all of that plays into this. And I think, and I guess the last part was. was that I became a journalist because information is power. And what I started seeing beginning in 2016, actually, if you go back to when the technology platforms

took over the gatekeeping role and abdicated responsibility for the public sphere, when news organizations lost our gatekeeping powers, everything began to turn upside down, very in slow motion. I mean, in the Philippines, I called it death by a thousand cuts, right? Like we keep getting gashed and we're kind of bleeding out. But each gash seems, you know, bearable so we keep going until you like fall down because you've lost too much blood.

That's the state of democracy globally. Yeah. Unfortunately, to get into the social media conversation, like after you leave CNN and after you're at a large broadcast in the Philippines and you start Rappler, one way to get into this conversation, I noticed something in the book that was really interesting to me, the mood meter. which is how you kind of measured the reaction that people would have to different stories. Were they happy? Were they angry? Were they sad?

And to me, it sets up this whole conversation pretty well. Like, what did you learn from the mood meter about how people were consuming and reacting to information in an increasingly social media age? I love the question. I mean, part of it was because I always knew, like all the studies had always told us that 80 to 90% of how we make decisions in our lives is not based on what we think. Rationally, it's based on what we feel. Even medical research has shown, right?

If different parts of your thinking brain was inaccessible, you would make certain choices. So this was the mood meter was like four or four years before the emojis of Facebook. But the goal here, and I got the idea from a really, research project that was at Harvard when students were given blackberries, a hundred students. And then in the data that they were able to get from that study, they were able to find, you know, the hottest night spots, for one, where people went. But so let me pull that back. The idea for the mood meter was that you would then, it's not statistical, it's not, but

you would click a mood. And then the moods we chose, I spoke to the statistical survey groups in the Philippines, and I was like, please tell me which moods. We have six moods that we can go in. And what I wanted to do was to be able to track a story and how it moves emotionally through our community. And that was exactly what we did. No algorithms, no nothing else.

It's just like a quick kind of, you know, you read the story, how does it make you feel? and you don't even really know exactly what we're asking you. So it's not rational thinking. So you click. And what we found, and this is part of what we saw, we could then track how certain stories move through society, what moods were there. And then at the end of every year, we would do the year in moods.

And this is part of what bolstered my idea that information operations had really shifted our society because from 2012 until 2016, the dominant mood every year was happy. You know, 80%, 75 to 80% of our audience were Filipinos. Then actually the United States was number two. Indonesia was number three. So these were, we could see these in the analytics.

And inevitably, it wasn't until moving into the 2016 elections where the spike in anger rose. And it was linked to the campaign of then-Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. And it has been angry until this year. That's so, okay, so that was the idea. And then the other thing that I wanted to do, and this is no longer on the site because we're revamping it. But, you know, how about if you navigate the site, not through topics, not through articles you're looking for, not through search, but through moods? You want to be happy today.

So then you can click and the mood navigator in the first. front page would bring you to stories that others judged to be happy. It was such a rudimentary idea of how we can organize differently. It was an experiment. And then I realized much later, when I saw the emojis come out on Facebook, and then I could see the way algorithms would work. We didn't do any of that. So this was pretty straightforward. Other academic researchers from Italy, from the United States, they went and looked at the moods, and then they came out with academic studies on it. But I just loved the idea that, you know, we could track the way a story, we could see how a story makes our society feel. Yeah, it's such an interesting concept, right?

Because, I mean, if I think about this, like when I consume news, I don't know, 15 years ago, right, when I was kind of starting out on the Obama campaign, you know, a good story is just something that would make you think, you know? Yes. And now, if I'm honest, like, yeah, like, anger is probably what is most likely to get me to click on something. And you've talked about this a lot. And we actually, it's funny, we talked about this earlier on this episode of POTC the world, that the social media companies, there's so much focus on content moderation now, particularly because of Twitter, Neil and Elon Musk. But anybody really looks at this, gets at the idea that it's the product design and the distribution, not the content moderation,

because if the entire platform is designed to trigger people, right, to make them angry, because they're more likely to click on something if they're angry, then information spreads, and then they make money on advertising. So to pull back, how do you address this product design? I mean, this is the big question, obviously, but like government regulation is hard to get through, say, the U.S. Congress. The tech companies have a profit model tied to advertising.

Yeah. How do you think that governments and tech companies and consumers, can try to alter this product design so that facts travel more than conspiracy theory, so that anger is not the only motivating force that's spreading sensationalist content. Oh, I love your question, Ben. I mean, so first of all, I think it's harmful to our health. I mean, you know, and it's not even what I think, right? Let me put it this way.

Why did we put regulations on alcohol? Why is there an age to when you can begin to drink alcohol? because at a certain point, you lose control, right? You, so, so why is this not age regulated? You know, why are, if you look at the documents that were released by Francis Hogan, the internal documents, it's more than 10,000 pages, they know the impact of this, of Instagram, on young girls. Yeah.

The impact is bad. There are healthful problems with this, right? You have increased anorexia. have increased suicide rates. So that's the first, right? Why is there not a better business bureau for our emotions and our minds? Because in the end, this business model manipulates our real-world actions through our emotions. And it's insidious. I think that's the part that is, that needs to be transparent. And I do think, I think part of the problem in the United States is it's seen through political lenses. When it's a biological problem, it's like drugs. Juri Andropov, you know, the former KGB

chairman, actually compared it to cocaine, disinformation. He said, disinformation is like cocaine. You take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you become a changed person. Well, all of us on social media are taking this all the time because that's the design. of the business model. I mean, the other thing that I would say is look at the values, right, that is completely, that has turned us into the upside down. Because essentially, when lies spread faster than facts, that is the design. You turn the entire, all of society's values upside down. Because it's like in your family, you tell your kids, lie. Lie all the time, and I'll keep rewarding you.

If you lie more and you double down more, I'll reward you even more. That's design, right? So I think that's part of it is the societal harms are now quantifiable. And you can't actually say that it's not because the research is there. We need to stop looking at it from political lenses, call a spade a spade. And just like with, I think we talked about this also, with genetic technology, CRISPR technology, the two scientists who discovered it, won a Nobel Prize.

But almost instantaneously, because we could act like gods by customizing an embryo, a baby, the Western world put laws in place for that. This is the same thing. We are literally creating the next, at a species level, So, okay, so we have the personal psychological. We're changing the way people act in the world. You saw how far it can go information operations and information warfare. Sociologically, in groups, were affected.

But the bigger one is emergent human behavior. We are creating species-wide behavior because of the scale of the tech that is actually taking out the best of humanity and encouraging the shape, of our species to the worst of who we are. So why can we not regulate that? It's not as simple as Washington makes it out to be, but it is biological.

It is health-related. There are other industries that we've done this to and successfully regulated, but of course the toughest one is the tobacco lobby. That's what you could point it towards. Yeah, no, I think, and look, and anybody really wants to think about this, just consider to the fact that social media companies describe users, right? Like, it's the same

language used for drugs, right? And so I take your point completely that the government, and frankly, these tech companies need to realize the public health impulse to regulate, not just content moderation, but the design of a product that is destroying our brains, whether it's making our girls and I have two daughters fill with anxiety or whether it's spreading disinformation that can lead to insurrections of the Capitol. I did want to ask you a question about journalism, in its role in this, recognizing that it's in an ecosystem. And I don't say this to impugn journalists in any way. I had an interesting experience in the later Obama years

when there was a lot of conspiracy theories are really catching on, you know? And there'd be these really good journalists that traveled with us that I'd known for six, seven years. And they're suddenly writing stories about some crazy, you know, conspiracy theory about it, Hillary Clinton's email server or something. And when I would go to them, they would say, I'd be like, why are you writing about this? You could write about policy.

And they're like, well, that's what my editor told me to write about. And then I was senior enough that I could actually go to the editor and say, hey, how come you're assigning this story to this really good reporter? And the editor would say, well, that's what corporate wants. And sometimes I could even go to corporate and say, why are you guys doing this? And they'd say, that's what the viewers or readers want. And they're not necessarily wrong. If you look at cable television, Tucker Carlson has the highest rated show.

So what do you do as a journalist in a world in which what sells is more sensational stuff, it might even be conspiracy theory, that creates a lot of incentives? How do you have a relationship between journalists and their audience that is not a race to the bottom? And Rappler, I think, has tried to do this. But if you learn things there that other media companies might take away. Yeah, no, it's a fantastic question. And, you know, of course, my friends and I both here in the Philippines, my journal, journalists friends, we grapple with this every day. So first understand how we got to this point,

right? Because the main delivery platform for news actually chooses lies, right? So it's beyond sensationalism. Like when it used to be television, you would be, you would be sensational, right? And I remember when a current affairs first came up and it turned the big three networks upside down, right? So that was just form. But then when, when social media came in, it became lies. And that means journalism, the journalism I do, the journalism that is mission-driven, the journalism that holds power to account, cannot compete in distribution. So what it did is social media, the tech platforms commodified news, turned it into page views, and then more than that made it conform to a system that rewards bad journalism.

Right. So there's that. And then if you're running, say, I mean, I would hate to be the one running CNN today. If you're running CNN, if you're running the big networks and you're trying, it's like your audience are on drugs. They already are and you're trying to give them vegetables, right? So how do you do that? Well, the way I dealt with it is in Rappler, we continue to keep our investigative journalism separate. Our reporters never see the page view numbers. It's actually mid-level management in Rappler that sees it. And then we understand that if we were only to follow what goes viral or what gets the widest distribution, that it would be kind of crappy journalism. Then we keep them separate.

So there's like the sugar. What is the sugar that brings them in? It's crime, entertainment. It's entertainment. Lifestyle. Right? So we bring them into our funnel. and then we try to do a recirculation that gets them to eat the vegetables.

So we lure them in with sugar and then give them vegetables. This is still an old world idea because I'm an old world journalist because I think that the mission must stand, right? So here's the problem. Given that, you can't dive into this slippery slope because the mission will die with it. Your journalists will die with it. Your mission will die with it. So that's part of the reason that I've really focused first on getting rid of the original problem.

If this is a polluted river, instead of like picking up a glass of water and cleaning up that water and throwing it back in the river and then trying to clean up, you know, that's content moderation. That's a whack-a-mole game. You go to the factory that churns out the pollutant and stop the pollutant before you can begin to rehabilitate the river. will take years. So this is the problem journalism faces because our audiences, especially the younger ones, you know, the ones who grow up on social media, the ones who get their news from social media, in the Philippines, everyone gets their news from Facebook, right? So that's, it's not a satisfactory answer right now, but I think that's part of the reason you've seen kind of a race to the bottom, because if we're only following page views,

which is what every newsroom now looks at, then you will, it is a race to the bottom because the way the social media amplifies those and gets traffic back to a website, a news website, is rewarding bad things, right? So again, it depends on the community, but short-term legislation, actually medium-term is legislation. In the short-term, what we did is we found,

found another sustainable business model. And in that way, I guess I kind of have to thank President Duterte, because when he tried to shut us down in January 2018, we lost 49% of our advertising revenue in four months. And so we wouldn't have survived if we didn't find an alternative model. That's the other reason that we can continue doing what we're doing. And news organizations have to do this because the old advertising system we used to have is nothing like micro-targeting the advertising system that is now used online. Yeah.

No, I think in your idea, I mean, there's talk about this in local news here in the U.S., like draw people in with sports coverage and then give them the investigative journalism. But it's a bridge to solving the structural problems. I did want to ask you about Southeast Asia because it's a region that I focused on a lot in government. I love, it's my favorite region in the world to visit. And I think it's so fundamental to the future of democracy. You know, I, when I was in government, I came to think of like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia is kind of like a good test for the global health of democracy.

Yes. Because they're these countries. Yes. They've been through relatively recent transitions. They have very vibrant civil society cultures, but then deep-rooted corruption. And you could kind of take the measure of the health of democracy in the same way that the treatment of journalists, I think, is a good measuring stick. As I look at it today, you're in the Philippines there where you've got the son of the dictator,

Marcos in charge, you yourself, I don't know, they've charged you with, you know, 10 times for crimes you didn't commit. That's obviously not looking too great. Malaysia is kind of bizarre because Anwar Abraham is now the prime Mr. Malaysia, which, if you told me that 10 years ago, I would have thought that was a sign of enormous positivity, although it's a little mixed. Inonesia, like, is kind of hanging on, but nobody quite knows who's coming after Jacoey. Like, what, you know, a lot of our listeners don't follow us that closely. Like, just describe how you see democracy, not just in the Philippines, but in Southeast Asia

today. And as a journalist, as a member of civil society, like, what's the picture? Positive and negative. I mean, like everything else, I guess, right? But the positive part, and this is, I do think where social media has helped is that the younger generation, much like the United States, are more progressive, far more progressive than I think, you know, my age group when we were growing up. That's when they see a global landscape. Of course, they also sometimes get targeted by information operations. China, for example, has targeted all these countries, right? There is Russian disinformation that has targeted these countries as well. But the negative part is that in so many ways, what do our countries have?

We strive for the ideal. And the Philippines is a perfect example. We are, you know, the history of the Philippines, 300 years under colonized by Spain and then 50 years under the United States. We spent 300 years, three centuries in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood. Our constitution is patterned after the United States. In fact, our first constitution had to be vetted by the, by a U.S. government. I wrote this stuff in the book. But what's interesting to me now is, you know, we have a bill of rights.

And then we're in a different place because we've reelected Marcos. Did you notice we're back to the future in all of the Malaysia elected Anwar Ibrahim. After former prime minister, Mahatir was reelected for what became prime minister again, right? And so so we're back to like kind of in Malaysia, 1919. 97 levels, except Anwar is much grayer and older, right? He was supposed to, he was a deputy prime minister in 1997, and he was supposed to succeed as prime minister. And then Indonesia, Indonesia's the last one, world's largest Muslim population, this, you know, but a country that is defining what free press means, but also has very strong religious, under almost 32 years

of Suharto, there were many things that were never talked about, including ethnic, religious, because this created violence. It hasn't been that way for a long time. Jokoi, the president, came as a governor and then has kept relative peace and prosperity. I think that we are, like the United States, in creative destruction, just in a different area. Like, the way that we saw the world before, there's still strands of that. And sometimes, you assume that it's still the old world, but it's really the, we have to create something new. And the hard part is we keep going back because as the world becomes more uncertain, this is also a trend we saw starting in 2014, especially in countries that had strong man rulers.

When the world becomes more uncertain, there's a nostalgia for the past and names that are familiar and promises that you know probably won't happen, but the names, this kind of strongman, when it is too confusing or too complex or too hard, that you just want someone to make the call for you. I think we're somewhere, we're navigating this. I mean, we've elected President Marcos again, well, not the son, but we have another Marcos. 36 years after the People Power Revolt ousted the family charged with, you know, stealing $10 billion U.S. dollars in 1986. So one of the things that's happening in the Philippines now is the government, President Marcos, has proposed a sovereign fund. Talk about all the countries. A sovereign fund that, you know, the critics are just pointing

out, this could be just like Malaysia's one MDB, right? So what are the safeguards in place when corruption? Oh, last, our institutions are weak. Corruption is endemic. Law. Law. and order is weak at times. So what a long way. I'm really glad our countries are your, our favorites of yours. I think the reason I chose Southeast Asia is because I thought it was a time of creation. And we're still in a loop, you know. And when the U.S. gets lost, I mean, you know, it has a global impact. Yeah. Yeah. When the U.S. gets sick. I mean, I, it's such a dynamic region, it's so young in population, it's so diverse. And so, and it's nestled right between the U.S. and China. So all of the, you know, if you care of, and climate change, I remind you, you know,

the essential role of Southeast Asia. So if you care about democracy, climate, great power politics, like where young people are headed, I always look at Southeast Asia's bellwether. Well, the last question I'll just ask you then is, I actually find some optimism. What I like about use it, you don't sugarcoat the problems, but there's optimism that we can deal with them. And even in your answer just now, I mean, it could be a lot worse, right? In other words, like, given how bad things are, like, there are still laws and institutions, even if they're weak and or sometimes violated, there's still young people that are not succumbing to kind of the cult of Duterte or whatever. And you have this phrase that you kind of end on in the book, hold the line, which is where I kind of

wanted to end this interview? Because to me, it means, like, if we can just weather the storms for a little while longer, we can come out on the other end, you know, with something other than back to the future, other than like a Marcos or Trump or, frankly, even a Biden here, right? You know, the generational change needs happen. What does hold the line mean to you? You know, I, the graphics that I thought of about this was I didn't know how to push back against the government that was attacking us because I didn't want to be an activist. I, you know, I wasn't trying to tear Duterte down. We were just telling those stories. And so hold the line. The line is where the Constitution draws our rights. And I felt like the government under Duterte

was trying to push us, was using a bulldozer to push us to get off the line, to voluntarily give up our rights. And so, you know, when I was talking to Rapplers, it was like, we link arms. we hold the line. And I think we have. And I think that's the, because in the end, it's such an uncertain world, you know, you don't want to push in any direction. Because as a journalist, you're actually telling people what is, what the governments are doing. And frankly, I feel empathy for government officials today. When the information ecosystem is as corrupted as it is today, how do they get their messages out? How do they lead? Right. That means you must be far more inspirational than you have ever been to cut through this and to try to pull people together.

So hold the line for me as a journalist is about sticking to what the Constitution says, giving our people, giving our citizens what they need. And it's actually exactly what you said. The platforms calls us users, consumers. We need to move away from being users, meaning you're passive, to actually redefining civic engagement in this. of exponential lines. I am optimistic. I mean, I have no choice but to be it. I think you're optimistic, too, because we are creating what the world is going to become. And I think that's what's exciting to a young journalist today. They don't have to go, you know, when I was starting, I'd go get coffee. There's so much I needed to learn. I didn't have real power. I couldn't choose a story.

Well, they can do all of these things, but it's a far more chaotic world. But everything they do, if we can actually organize ourselves, then we can make a dent and begin to create. But see, I have kind of like this timeline, right? In the long term, it is education. In the medium term, it has to be legislation. And in the short term, it is just us. You know, and this is, I think the reason I've been in the book, what you get, and in everything I've said is a sense of urgency.

because what I don't like is when we talk to, you know, big government agencies, it moves at a glacial pace. But information is at lightning pace today. And that information is literally reshaping what humanity is becoming. So I feel like, you know, we have these last two minutes. I play basketball. Yes, I'm tall. No, I'm short. But, you know, it's the last two minutes and I think we can still win it.

But I think what we stand to lose is so much of who we are. And I mean that globally. You know, you so. Mostly, I feel like Paul Revere, you know, it's coming. Well, look, I love that answer. And I love that concept of linking arms and holding the line. Everybody should check out how to stand up to a dictator. It's a phenomenal book from a phenomenal person.

check out Rappler, and we're so glad you could join us today, Maria. Oh, thank you for having me, Ben. It is always good to speak with you. Thanks again, Maria Ressa for joining the show. Ben, thank you to William and Kate for making us laugh. Yes. And the good people of Somerville. Well, yeah, the first and foremost, the good people of Somerville. Thanks to Justin Verlander for signing with the Mets. Amen. I think Cody Keenan told me this was his market basket when he lived in Boston, actually. Was it really? There's nothing more peculiar than like big northeastern cities and their like weird supermarket chains or convenience store chains.

Like it's different, you know, Philly and New York and Boston all have like wildly different ones that like everybody knows and shops at but nobody outside of those cities is aware of. Including Dr. Oz. Yeah. You can get you in trouble. Yeah. Exactly. You can get you in trouble. You can lose your center. Yeah.

Yeah, you're fucked. All right. All right. Well, that's it for us. But talk to you guys next week. POTS of the World is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse.

Saul Rubin is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montuth. Upload our episodes and videos at YouTube.com slash crooked media.