Pod Save the World - Ted Lasso with a bone saw

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Tommy and Ben talk about why US special forces were on a training mission in Taiwan, the Saudi government buys a soccer team, Biden’s Syria policy, stealing US Navy secrets, a breakthrough in the fight against Malaria, what a $20 million home in Beverly Hills tells us about Afghanistan, Iraq’s election results, Ted Cruz and the far-right in Spain, an Ethiopia update and gift giving in the Trump era.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Potsay of the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, the Red Sox are the greatest team in baseball. Exciting games. What a series. I mean, what a series. Two walkoffs in a row after beating the Yankees in a one-game playoff? This is like 2004-level, you know, breakthrough.

So before you all turn off the pod, delete it, and unsubscribe, I apologize in advance for being a New England sports fan. I know we are the most pampered, deplorable, horrible group of people in the planet for the last 20 years. It used to be sympathetic no longer. Yes. But seeing the Red Sox beat the Yankees like that in October is the greatest feeling in all of sports for a New England person. And it had a nostalgic feeling of bringing me back to the days when we were lovable-ish losers with bad accents.

Well, I can kind of turn you into an underdog perspective because as a Mets, Jets, and Knicks fan, I've not tasted a championship since 1986 against the Red Sox. But that also means that because I know that the Mets like are always going to end their season in complete disarray, I then turn to rooting for whichever team can beat the Yankees. See, I love that. So I'm always rooting for the Red Sox over the Yankees, so that was good. I really appreciate that. Hey, Ben, speaking of a good time. Oh, yeah. If you have not yet listened to 544 days.

I'm all caught up, man. I'm binging it. Jason Resion's amazing new pod. Listen, you're only hurting yourself if you not heard this show. So it's about his 544 days. It's in the title. In the hellish even Evan prison. The hellish Evan prison in Iran.

Keep it all in. So it's about his time there. The Obama team's nuclear negotiations with Iran, this massive effort to negotiate Jason's release. Ben was a part of this. He's interviewed in the show. All these senior Biden officials who wouldn't talk to us if we pitch them a hundred times today are in this show. But what really makes the pod so fun and hilarious is you get to meet Jason's mom. You meet his wife, Yegi.

They have this gallows humor, even when Jason is, like, literally before a judge nicknamed the judge of death. So check it out. It's only on Spotify. It's free. Give it a try. You'll love it. I knew Yegi, so I wasn't surprised that she's emerged as a podcast star.

Yeah, me either. I did not know Jason's mom, right? And just when I thought this podcast couldn't get any better, this, like, totally extraordinary woman pops up. Yeah. She, like, you moved to Istanbul. and when she was single after Jason's father tragically died. But then my favorite is that, like, they coach her to act like a kind of submissive Iranian woman when she goes to the prison and tries to plead for some access to Jason or Jason's case.

And instead, she just decides to be the biggest hard-ass mom in the world. And it's awesome. It's just so great. Imagine you're like a mom in Marin County. Like you go through this massive life chain. You're like, I'm going to move to Tehran for a couple years. I'm going to move to Turkey for years. She's like amazing.

I wanted to hang out of that one. I want a podcast on her. Also, there's a new season of Philip McCartney's podcast, Unholyer Than Thou. It's back for season two. This season is all about the little guy, Ben. It's all about the Mets in your life. People get knocked down, getting back up, navigating re-entry into this whatever reality we're in now, this hybrid hell. So check out Unholyer Than Dow, wherever you get your pods.

Ben, we got a lot to talk about today. In fact, we were going guest lists because we had too many topics. Topic list is too long. We just didn't want to shave any off. We got some good guests in the queue, though. Yeah, we do. We do. We're going to talk about why U.S. Special Forces were in Taiwan on a military training mission. Talk about the Saudi government's latest opulent acquisition, a Premier League soccer team.

The Newcastle bone saws. You know, I know how it fits on a jersey, but currently in Newcastle United. We'll explain all. Biden's Syria policy, why it's bad to steal nuclear submarine secrets from the Navy, a good idea, a breakthrough in the fight against malaria. a $20 million home in Beverly Hills and what it tells us about Afghanistan, Iraqi election results, Ted Cruz, and a far-right gathering in Spain

and Ethiopia update, and gift-giving in the Trump era. This is a great list. It's a fun story. That last one's a fun one. Let's start with China, Ben, because it's big, serious, it's important. So last week,

the Wall Street Journal reported that about two dozen members of U.S. Special Operations Unit in a contingent of Marines that had been in Taiwan secretly training Taiwanese military, forces for about a year. The timing of this report was not ideal. Part of me thinks that Chinese Intel has probably been on top of this one. Let's just be clear. This was not secret from the

Chinese. Yeah, they were on it. But the context is that the Chinese have been flying lots of threatening military flights near Taiwan. And then broader, you know, more broadly, the Chinese military is in the midst of this year's long military buildup that is incredibly alarming if you are, you know, 100 miles away from the mainland like Taiwan is. So interestingly, though, Ben, China's response to the reports of this U.S. training mission was, it's relatively muted. The Washington Post described their response as cautious, and I guess that just surprised me a bit. China called on the U.S. to cut off military support for Taiwan, but that reaction as compared to the total freak out about the Ocas deal providing sub-technology to Australia or this other

weird report that a U.S. nuclear submarine collided with an object in the South China Sea. It was just like didn't really compare. On Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping again vowed to achieve unification with Taiwan. This was in a major speech. He said that, quote, achieving unification through peaceful means is most in line with the overall interests of Chinese people, including Taiwan compatriots. But, quote, those who forget their heritage, betray their country, and seek to break up their country will come to no good end.

End quote. So that's intense. President of Taiwan is vowed to resist unification. So, Ben, two questions. Were you surprised that this response was relatively muted? And then, too, bigger picture, if someone is listening and thinking, why on earth would the U.S. ever risk getting involved in a war with China over Taiwan? Like, what would you tell them?

What's the interest here that leads us to do things like deploy special operations forces to Taiwan or sell them billions of dollars of military hardware? So I guess I wasn't that surprised at the muted response, in part because as we were kind of chuckling at before, I'm sure the Chinese knew about this training mission and the more aggressive military tactics that they've been engaged in. So they basically fly planes through Taiwanese airspace, kind of act like they have no regard whatsoever for Taiwan sovereignty. That was probably part of the response.

Oh, yeah. Like it's kind of messaging that goes back and forth between militaries, you know. And look, in terms of why to care, I mean, it's a big deal. I mean, so first of all, it's like a place with almost 25 million people who live there who clearly do not want to be united with China and lose the democracy that they've built. But I think it's also the case that the kind of U.S. presence, commitment, engagement, project in the region, in the Asia Pacific, in the entire post-World War II period, has at its core like a handful of democracies that we've been close to.

and supported, and that's Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, all of whom are very close to China, and then obviously some other countries that are further away. And I think that the basic judgment, you know, I usually don't subscribe to like the, and we've actually taken issue with the kind of credibility police, you know, if like one thing happens in one place, it's going to be that in other places, a message. I do think that if China rolled tanks into Taiwan and kind of extinguished a democracy of 25 million people right in the neighborhood of Japan and South Korea at the same time that they're militarizing rocks in the South China Sea and climbing that whole body of water. It is kind of like the moment at which like things are really

decisively tipping, not just away from like U.S. influence, but away from kind of democratic politics, away from countries making their own choices rather than having China make them for them. And so I think Taiwan is this kind of test of like not only just the U.S. support allies like Japan and South Korea, but just can countries resist the kind of gravitational force of China? And it's also the case that thus far, you know, we've seen China essentially swallow up, you know, extinguished Tibetan rights inside of, you know, what are their borders. We've seen them after the one country, two systems agreement with Hong Kong, kind of do the same there. This would be the most aggressive expansionist and probably militarized action that China takes. And, you know, once you start kind of conquering territory with your military and absorbing populations into your country, like the stakes are just higher in terms of where will that stop? And I'm sure that Chinese would say, well, we've always said Taiwan's apart China.

so it'll stop there. But, you know, they are building like militarized structures in the South China Sea here. There's there's a risk that Xi Jinping is a more classically strong man expansionist character. Yeah, he is troubling. So I'm sure this was a subject at a meeting last week between Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, in his counterpart. They met in Zurich, which is a cool place to meet just generally. Yeah.

I think they agreed to schedule a virtual meeting with Biden and Xi Jinping. Did you raise this on a recent show? There's these reports that she hasn't left China for like 600 plus days. He just hasn't left the country. Yeah. And very weird. You know, he has not met Biden yet, which is interesting. And, you know, presumably he'll go to the G20 summit.

I'm not sure if he'll go to Glasgow where, you know, you obviously want China to be more engaged in the climate effort. but you know it does speak to kind of an insularity that G has where you know he's just like he's now the 500 pound gorilla in the room but he doesn't even need to be in the room you know he can he can give strident speeches from China and everybody has to react to that I mean it's starting to play the role of you know a superpower more albeit a very insular superpower and I think there is a danger that you know my experience was Xi Jinping with Obama is in that system once Xi became the decision maker, like he was the decision maker. You know, like everything had to run through him.

And whatever you did with the foreign minister or the whatever diplomat, it was no substitute for direct engagement with Xi Jinping. And I think it is a little worrying that, you know, there just hasn't been a lot of contact at the leader level. And that's not Biden's choice per se. Some of it is clearly she's. But by the end of our first year, you know, we had a summit with the Chinese in Beijing. and there's this effort to try to disagree on some things and work together on others.

And that just seems to be absent right now. And that's potentially, you know, dangerous that you don't have the capacity to de-escalate things. Yeah. Not good. Get the guy like a Frommers or whatever the hell. It wants travel books. Yeah. Get a travel bug again.

Get a backpack. I mean. Some hostels. And I will say one other thing about Taiwan that's, you know, they offered, again, they talk about peaceful reunification. They talk about one country, two systems. Well. How'd that go? Yeah.

had that go in Hong Kong. That was the promise they made to Hong Kong. That was part of an international agreement with the United Kingdom when the handover of sovereignty of Hong Kong happened in 1997. And they totally violated that. And what happened after they basically swallowed up Hong Kong with those national security laws is the politics in Taiwan shifted away from wanting to even discuss, you know, closer ties with China. President Tsai, who comes from the, you know, kind of pro-independence party, she was re-elected with a much bigger mandate. the politics in Taiwan are moving away from an openness to one country two systems. So when Xi talks about a peaceful reunification, it's hard to see the path to that.

And where does that leave you? Well, if you're not going to have a peaceful reunification and then what's going to happen? Yeah, it's an invasion. It's a threat. It's totally a threat. Let's go from one tyrant to another in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. So last week, Saudi Arabia effectively became the owners of Newcastle United, an English Premier League soccer team.

Technically, it's the Saudi Arabia public investment fund or pick that purchased 80% of the team. It's their sovereign wealth fund. It controls a cool half a trillion or so dollars. Yeah. That's, you know. It's not bad if you can get it. Get some stuff done. So this deal went through shortly after the Saudis stopped blocking the broadcast of a Qatari-based sports network in its territory.

They had been blocking this network that shows Premier League games and then pirating the feed and then airing it on their own channel. And that commercial deal is clearly what held this. this discussion up of this acquisition for several years. When the deal was announced, the Premier League released this absurd statement that said, quote, the Premier League has now received legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle United Football Club. In other words, the Premier League wants you to believe that the Saudi government doesn't control the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, even though the fund is chaired by Muhammad bin Salman. Yeah, yeah. Okay, got it, guys. Thanks, guys. More cognitive dissent.

Good PR meeting you guys have. Yeah, really clever statement. So the Ponce of the World audience is probably pretty familiar with Mohammed bin Salman's rap sheet by now. In 2018, you ordered the execution of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. This was inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The Saudis are still waging a brutal war in Yemen. They're locking up dissidents. They suppress women.

Just the horrible stuff. But this purchase is actually part of a broader trend in sports that we wanted to talk about. So in the Premier League, Manchester City was bought by the deputy prime minister of the UAE back in 2000. Nate. He's reportedly invested $3.5 billion into the club. They are awesome. By the way, they're just a really good team now. Paris Saint-Germain or PSG, which is the best team in France, is owned by the Emir of Qatar. The 2022 World Cup will be played in Qatar, even though it's like a billion degrees there. Chelsea, another Premier League team, is owned by this Russian oligarch. So all of these guys figured out that if they buy a team, and it does well, that's what people

talk about. You're not talking about human rights. You're not talking about, you know, corruption. You're talking about who won this weekend. And the other sad part about the Saudi purchase ban is that most Newcastle supporters are cool with it. There was a poll. 96.7% of 3,000 Newcastle fans surveyed said they were in favor of the sale, although that probably has to do with the fact that I guess the team just, they hate the current

ownership and we're just willing to say yes to anything. Deep pockets, you know. Yeah, you can win games. So I guess the big question I have for you is, what role do you think the British government could or should have played here to maybe block this. Because even Kier-Starmer, who is the leader of the Labor Party, kind of ducked the question of whether the sale should be blocked. And he said, you know, well, really an independent regulator should look at this, blah, blah, blah, kind of wishy-washy. What do you think? Like, what's the role of government

here to protect essentially just sort of like a foul bad actor from becoming part of this, like, treasured institution? Well, and I should add, like, from a branding perspective, you're a bigger Premier League guy than I am. But I mean... Recently, though, barely. You know, like more people around the world probably see the word Emirates and the fly emirates jersey. I had no idea what fly Emirates or fly emirates meant for years because I didn't care about soccer.

Yeah. But that's why people think about the U.E. They think about the soccer jersey, right? Look, I love Brits. I love the United Kingdom. I believe in the special relationship. So I'm contextualizing a criticism I'm about to make. Then I would also apply, you know, obviously to the U.S.

and have in other cases. There's, you know, the UK, London has always been something of a destination for all manner of wealth, including ill-gotten wealth. Very true. No secret that like a lot of Russian oligarchs camp out there. They park money there. They have people doing the back office for them there, law firms, PR firms. There's kind of like an industry of managing ill-gotten wealth or stashing it in London. You know? And by the way, like I said, same thing happens to some extent in New York, but London in particular. Now, South Dakota, too. And, yes, South Dakota, too.

And look, I think that as you get into a post-Brexit UK, the idea that that's one of the comparative, I don't know if advantages is the right word, but it's one of the ways in which the UK connects with the world is that it's a funnel for all this wealth. And it's clear what the Saudis get from this. they get a branding exercise, they get a play thing, international soccer is kind of at the forefront of global pop culture, and all that's good for them. What do the Brits get from this? At a certain point, the balance of who's getting advantages from this kind of tilt in

the favor of the Putin's and MBSs of the world. And what happens intangibly to kind of small D democratic values if like the iconic cultural institutions of your country are kind of sold to people who murder and cut up journalists in consulates, you know. So I do think, you know, there should be across the board, like a greater reckoning in the UK with how much they want to be the kind of destination for this kind of wealth or a part of like the PR campaign in the West for autocrats. I just think like like that's a regulatory issue, but it's also just a decision that you're making as a country and as a society about like, hey, do we want our iconic, and look, we're going to deal with this

in the U.S. too. MBS came here. He wants to invest in the movies and, you know, like I just, at a certain point, like there's certain conduct that I think should be disqualifying for giving that kind of entry point into literally the national psyche, which is what, you know, Premier League is pretty central to. Yeah. And there's reports that Mohammed bin Salman warned Boris Johnson in a text message, which, by the way, don't take text messages from this guy as something we've learned because they pay for spy software? Yeah, Bezos, too. Yeah, I think there's a rumor that he got hacked in a text message.

Yeah, not ideal. But that he might have sent a text of Boris Johnson basically asking him to intervene and correct an initial decision not to allow the takeover back earlier. This has been something that's sort of been in progress for a while. So, yeah, it doesn't seem like government at all levels has kind of slowly acquiesced. And, you know, look, we're not blaming. Newcastle fans. I was listening to Roger Bennett's pod, Men and Blazers, he was talking about Newcastle,

and it's one of those, you know, sort of like, kind of like Ohio Steeltown, right? Like, post-industrial, like, has been on hard times. They had this horrible owner come in who promised to make the club better and completely shit the bed, and they just despised him and they wanted them out no matter what. That said, I mean, I don't know. You're right, though. There should be some kind of guardrail. There should be guardrails.

And like the Boris Johnson text exchange is an example of what I'm talking about where the leverage shifts and suddenly, you know, over time, there's more and more leverage in the hands of the people with this kind of money that's invested in your country. And then, you know, first you're acquiescing to the purchase of this team, but when does that enter into other issues involving the Saudis where you're acquies because they have so much money invested in the UK? And you're right. I don't hold it at all against Newcastle fans. I think the thing that people need to consider, though, is we talked. a few months ago about that kind of a boarded effort to create a super league, you know, that was going to screw soccer teams across, you know, Europe essentially by essentially having like a pay in league where you have to have like a certain amount of wealth.

Yeah, the best teams. That's where this all leads, you know. If it all becomes about like who can come with the biggest, you know, checkbook, you're going to end up with this kind of bifurcated inequality in sports and. And then you're going to end up with the lowest common denominator, you know, superhero movies and in pop culture. Like, like, if you're prioritizing money over everything else, it ends up backfiring on you. What you love about sports, you kind of, you lose to some extent, you know. Yeah, it is not good, man.

I would not want Muhammad bin Salman to own my team. I'd feel weird about it, you know. I don't love my sports owners in the U.S., but, like, they're, you know, we're dealing with kind of our set of assholes with like James Dolan and the Knicks and. Yeah, Woody Johnson and the Jets, you know, like kind of sucks. But like like the guardrails wouldn't exclude them. Yeah. They're just shitty owners, you know.

Start it. Start it. Start a murder. Yeah, exactly. Start a murder for our guardrails. It's not just an allegation. Like there were investigations. There's a UN rapporteur.

Like the murder is clear. Yeah. And so like that's what you are allowing is that person to kind of launder their reputation to this. Total impunity. Speaking of murder. order was laundering their reputation. Let's talk about Syria. So Josh Rogan, the Washington Post, had an interesting column about Biden's Syria policy. Here's the backstory. So King Abdullah of Jordan has been leading an effort for some time now to get countries in the Middle East to normalize

relations with Syria and the Assad regime. Jordan recently opened its border with Syria and then October 3rd Assad and King Abdullah talked on the phone for the first time and I assume what a decade, something like that. So Abdullah's case for normalization is basically, you've been trying to get ready this guy for a decade. That effort has failed. Let's focus on engaging him, trying to improve his behavior rather than deposing him. It's a argument that's, you know, it's worth debating. The Jordanians also have reportedly sent gas and electricity to Lebanon through Syria. That's important. These Lebanon is in dire financial shape. They recently went a full 24 hours without centrally generated electricity because they're out of fuel. So, you know, they had to sort of avoid

U.S. sanctions in doing that, right? So it's sort of a piece of this puzzle. So the question this column raises is basically how does the Biden team feel about Adullah's efforts? The headline of the post piece says Biden is tacitly endorsing normalization. I'm not sure that that headline is really backed up by the reporting and the facts in the piece. It sounds like it's more like the Biden team doesn't think they can stop Abdullah from doing what he's doing or they don't think the effort it would take to pressure him to stop is worth it. So Rogan also names Brett McGirk, who you know well Ben, top advisor to Biden and Middle East policy. As a proponent of normalization with Syria, points to a piece that Brett wrote in 2019, arguing that the U.S. should focus on basically

two priorities in Syria, preventing ISIS from coming back and preventing Iran from establishing a permanent military presence in Syria. So, Ben, I'm curious what you make of this debate. Because I read this McGurk article for 2019. I think his argument was basically that, like, in the immediate wake of Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria, that the U.S. needs to recognize that we no longer really have all that much leverage there. and that these Arab states are going to normalize with Assad no matter what we do. And we can either shape that process and be a part of it or let them just do it in secret and, you know, not have any control.

But I don't know what your sense of what Biden's position is and really what you think the better of the two options are, like with the caveat that this is one of the hardest decisions. I bet they're debating on a daily basis. Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the problems with the way in which it was framed is like this is new. My sense for years has been that that established collection of Middle Eastern leaders, you know, all autocratic leaders, Abdullah, Muhammad bin Zayat and the UAE, you know, Cici in Egypt, they've been doing this for a while. I don't think it's a new development that they're talking quietly.

to the Syrians and kind of accepting the reality that Assad is still there. And so I think that's to say, I think this is happening without Biden. You know, I don't think it took a Biden winking at them to do it, you know. In terms of what are they going to do about it, you know, if you look at their approach to the Middle East generally, it's clearly been that they don't want to try to do anything that ambitious in the Middle East. You know, they have very low expectations or ambitions about what they can achieve. And so I would expect that there'll be somewhat hands off about this.

I would hope that, look, at the end of the day, the idea of like dislodging Assad seems, you know, very unlikely in the near future, right? Brett points on his piece that, like, people are always like, sanctions, sanction, sanctions. Well, since 2011, Syria has seen the steepest GDP collapse of any country since Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. So it's kind of hard to make a sanction threat in that context. Yeah, and particularly when they get military support from Russia and from Iran. And so I think that the U.S. should just try to focus on what can we do to alleviate humanitarian suffering in this country. Right, right. Whereas Pompeo and Bolton would say, we're going to stay until all Iranian troops are out or set some wildly ambitious goal.

Yeah, I think it's just like, how can you get aid in across border crossings? Can you help improve the lives of people that have suffered enormously in the Civil War? Can you deal with neighboring states like Lebanon that have dealt with the spillover of that war? And can you in places that Assad doesn't control, which is not that much, but it is kind of eastern Syria in places where the U.S. has been active, is can you protect those people from kind of retribution and violence? I wouldn't expect to see the Biden team put a ton of effort into this. and I think, frankly, that the efforts like Abdallahs are, whether, you know, they are morally reprehensible to us. But, I mean, these are all autocratic leaders.

I mean, they're not evaluating small de-democracy and what they're doing. And I'm not saying I like that. I'm just saying that's, I think, what's happening. Yeah. I know Abdullah is busy. Keep it an eye on his Malibu-based real estate holdings or whatever we're landing in the Pindore papers. Yeah.

And I think a lot of these leaders made a judgment that, like, they would have liked to have seen Assad go at a certain point because he's aligned with Iran and he's a bad actor, but that they didn't want to take positions and take risks that suggested that their own rules, you know, or illegitimate too. And so forced to choose, you know, they'd rather swallow hard and choose normalizing the autocrat than continuing to support people that oppose autocracy because if they do that, Well, the logic gets a little complicated for them. Yeah, the slippery slope. Ben, a Maryland couple has been accused of trying to sell secret U.S. nuclear sub-technology to a foreign country.

This was probably a bad idea. He was a crazy story. This is a crazy story. So this guy, Jonathan Toby, he was in the Navy for five years. He's a nuclear engineer. Then he continued working on nuclear propulsion technology as a civilian. He and his wife, Diana, were arrested after a year-long FBI sting operation that began when Toby and his wife, allegedly sent a package containing U.S. Navy documents to some foreign country, along with

instructions for how to communicate with him on an encrypted basis. Whichever foreign country got this package, and we don't know which it was, did not take the bait. They didn't bite on his offer, and they said handed it over to U.S. authorities, and then they coordinated with the FBI with this sting operation. That included arranging some sort of signal from the country's embassy in Washington to the Toby's that was that was supposed to demonstrate that this response was legit. So for something like

open the fourth window to the left on the second floor on this day and old school John LaCarray shit. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. It was like the Americans,

you know, like go to a part. Like they were literally like, I think park benches involved and shit like that. Yeah. Yeah, no, they asked for, the Toby's asked for $100 grand in exchange of secrets.

And they delivered it via data cards that they hid in a peanut butter sandwich, a bandaid wrapper, and the chewing gum packs. Yeah. I mean, really an American's season, this whole thing. So first of all, again, nothing more than kind of amateur tea leave reading and listening to smart people.

Like the French seemed like quite a possibility as the country, right? Because it was clearly a friendly country. Like, I don't think Russia or China would have been like signaling with the open window or whatever. And also, I think there was a weird message that, like, someday we'll have wine together or something that these people sent. We don't know that for certain, but if it is the French, that puts the whole Ocas thing in a different light, too, because the French were basically helping us, rather than stealing our secrets, if they were helping us catch people who were trying to give them secrets. And then we turned around and gave those secrets to Australia at the cost of,

you know, tens of billions of dollars that might explain something. If they gift wrapped for us, a stolen classified details of a $3 billion Virginia class nuclear submarine and then we were just handing that over the Aussies under their noses. Yeah, they could see why they'd be mad. They have denied it, but I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's not them. I mean, but they're not that many countries that could receive this kind of stuff.

They enact on it, yeah. Yeah. I do want to say, is it John and Diane, right? It was Jonathan, Toby, and Diana. So I'm trying to picture this couple, you know, like suburban D.C. Live in Annapolis. She's a teacher. And they're like, you know what would be cool is to become like spies.

Yeah, she's like his lookout. Yeah, she's a lookout. Like we're suddenly going to live like the couple in the Americans and our life is going to be much more exciting. There was like a very weirdly human element to this that it felt like people just wanted to make their lives more interesting. which is one of the reasons, you know, if you read John LaCarray, too, like, that's why some of these people get into it. It does remind you that, like, hey, like, there are a lot of people who know a lot of sensitive shit, you know. That was my take was like, wow, we got real lucky here. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, what, they could have gone to the Chinese with this stuff and the Chinese would not have been opening the window. So, so, yeah, I mean, it points to that vulnerability. Kudos for catching it. It doesn't seem like this was the hardest target to apprehend with all due respect to the FBI and DOJ. Like, they kind of walked right into the sting operate. here. Look, the FBI does a lot of important work. I think we all are pretty well versed in the things they've screwed up. There are a lot of like sting operations that the FBI rolls out where some like 19 year old kid is arrested with an inert bomb who thought he was joining like al-Qaeda

or something. You're like, are we just catching the dumbest of the dumb? I never know. But this one we are catching people who at a minimum really did intend to commit pretty serious crimes. Yeah, highly educated access to top secrets. I mean like the top secret information that you and I Radu would be like, such and such leader believes this about a trade agreement. Like, this guy is handing over like schematics to a nuclear sub. That's a big deal. That's real deal, espionage. Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting. I thought back on that, like, you do realize that how much, because I saw the report that this guy was like basically bit by bit taking pages of documents out. We got like thousands of pages. And like, you know, we worked in offices and had printers. Like, we'd never occurred us to do that, you know. I don't think I know how to work at. Yeah, I never used that high side email that much anyway, the classified email.

But, like, it does, again, it's a reminder of how much, like, human buy-in is required to protect certain things, you know. Yeah, yeah. We haven't been great out of lately. We, the U.S. government. Well, as the U.S. government becomes a more and more distrusted institution and as people get more polarized, it may be that there's more and more of this because there's always going to be some president that a part of the workforce, you know, sees this, like, illegitimate or. something. Totally. Ready for a little unadulterated good news? Yeah, please. I know. It's been that kind of week. Okay, last week, the World Health Organization endorsed the world's first malaria vaccine for use in kids. Malaria is a parasitic disease. It's carried by mosquitoes. It kills more than 400,000 people per year.

And tragically, well over half of those deaths are African children under the age of five. There's been a huge trial or pilot program to test this drug in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi. It included over 800,000 kids. The initial findings found that the vaccine reduced severe malaria by 30%. Now, I know that sounds low in comparison to the effectiveness of the COVID vaccines, but at scale and over time, this vaccine could save millions of lives, especially super young kids. And that is a big deal. It's also, I believe, harder to make a vaccine for a parasite like this than it is for a virus. So hopefully scientists can build on the success, develop better vaccines, maybe using MRNA technology, and make them more effective to the point where we can eventually eradicate malaria.

So this is not going to fully replace mosquito nets and all the other treatments that they're out there. But great news. Yeah, like, and Obama, I remember in 2016 kind of launched this initiative to try to end malaria. And the thinking then was if you just evaluate like the impact on human beings, like ending malaria or curbing the excesses of it, we'll have more of a positive impact on life on earth for the biggest number of people as just about anything else, you know, in the disease realm. So we shouldn't understate how transformative this could be. It was always going to require a mix of drugs and vaccine and mosquito nets and basic steps, you know, disseminating the

kinds of things that can prevent people from getting in the first place. But huge good news and something that will literally just improve the quality of life dramatically in lots of places. If I can find something to critique here, you know, part of what we saw in COVID is that when we in the advanced economic world started to get hit with a disease, like, white people are dying. Boom, they had a vaccine in like a year, you know. And it does make you think what would happen if there was, look, not everything is going to be, you know, warp speed or whatever they called that thing. But like, it does make you think that if you put resources and a relentless focus, and the same way, by the way, that after PEPFAR, you got at least an HIV cocktail that could

save everybody's life, these diseases like malaria and dengue fever and other things that kind of ravage the developing world, like, I think it's a sign that, like, we should be doing more to address that. Yeah, like, we totally got lucky with COVID and that there was sort of, there was existing ongoing research into some of these coronaviruses, there was the MRNA technology was developing. But you're right. I mean, you could probably surge a certain amount of money in a certain amount of places with organizations and, like, really advance the ball a lot faster when it comes to malaria. Yeah. And because just think about the improvement in the quality of life in countries that have been ravaged by HIV-AIDS after PEPFAR. And so this is something

where, like, whether it's wealthy people, philanthropies, governments, this is an area to kind continue raising the ambition. Yes, agreed. Ben, so let's talk a little corruption news here. So we've talked a lot about how corruption, it was a huge problem in the former Afghan government, lots of corrupt officials there, sort of made the people view the government as not legitimate. Here's a good example. The son of the former Afghan minister of defense, his name was Abdul Rahim Wardak. his son bought a $20.9 million mansion in Beverly Hills, 9,000 square feet. Shit, man. Makes my house suck. I could drop it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That is on top of his $5.2 million condo in Miami Beach. Wardock's other son reportedly started a military transportation company in the U.S. Now, this key with Georgetown, I think he was a valedictorian. I'm not criticizing him as a human.

But that company Yeah, we kind of are You're going sure That company was reportedly awarded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts To take care of troops In Afghanistan at the time

This is back in the day So again, I want to stipulate That I don't really have any real insight Into what the Wardock kids do for a living How they make their money Yeah But boy does it look bad Yeah

Boy does it look bad Like a couple months after Afghan government collapse And this moron buys a $20 million House, what the fuck are you doing there? Yeah And that's like 20 minutes from here You know I

yes, I mean, what to say about this. Because it is kind of like the coda to the whole thing we just went through. Yeah, it really is. Because it's a perfect exemplar of the corruption. You know, one of the things I was singing about recently is that you'll remember at the moment when Ghani came to the U.S. And he met with Biden and he said, like, we're going to fight. And he said they're going to put together this kind of collection of they're going to get the band back together of like the Northern Alliance, militial leaders and war. lords and all these people and wardock would have fit that bill right um you know and these people

did you know some people have commented but like it's weird that the taliban controls all of afghanistan now when they never even did in the late 90s i think part of what happened is those guys all kind of said they're with the program we're going to fight the taliban what's changed in 20 years is these guys have all gotten phenomenally rich off the corruption of the afghan war and treated people locally like shit in many cases yeah and and therefore they had a an escape valve, right? Whether it's to the Emirates or whether it's to Beverly Hills, like, you know, why stay and fight when I can go buy $20 million home in Beverly Hills? Your cash was in London and you lost the legitimacy of the people in your region.

Yeah. And to those who rightly point out that this shows like the corruption of Afghanistan's leaders, it's also on the United States. Like this whole war facilitated this kind of endemic corruption. Yeah. It's not a coincidence that Wardox Kids started a company that got U.S. government contracts. Exactly, right? And so there was a lot of corruption priced into this, and the aftermath is, like, ordinary Afghans are screwed and living back on the Taliban, and this guy's, you know, and again, like, it's not his, like, personal, like, he's not the one who invented this system, but it is an example of what happened. Yeah. Speaking of countries we invaded, Ben, on Sunday, Iraq went to the polls for their national election. Your transitions

are even better than usual today. Oh, he's just speaking my language. So here's what we know about the results. Turnout was 41%. Not great. U.S. level turnout. Record low for the post that I'm saying era. The previous low was 44% in the 2018 elections. That doesn't suggest much faith in government or the electoral process. We know that populist Shia cleric Mukta al-Sadr's political movement was the big winner. It looks like he will now control 70 seats in the 329 member Iraqi parliament. That's up from 54 seats. Saunders candidates also appear to have edged out the Fatah Alliance, which the AP

he described is affiliated with an umbrella group of mostly pro-Iran Shia militias. Now comes the government formation process. So this election was held a little early in response to protests against government corruption. Those protests, protesters at the time in 2019 and 2020 were met with extreme violence. Hundreds were killed. Many of those protesters reportedly sat out of this election in further protests. But Ben, I mean, Muktaud al-Sauder is a name that's probably familiar to a lot of people who paid attention. of the first Iraq war invasion and resistance movement there.

Can you remind listeners who this guy is and what his political success means to you for the future of Iraq? Yeah, now, this is what jumped out to me. Because, like, in terms of what's going to happen in Iraq, I mean, their politics is just the kind of most bizarre coalition building across different sex and different characters who never go away. and it's usually like kind of a, like a tentative piece, essentially between rival factions. And hopefully you get a competent prime minister out of that. But to me, like McTadal-Sadr, to the world, those who weren't consuming the news in 2002 and 03, you know, this guy was like the boogeyman, right? So Sodr City is a huge, you know, swath of Baghdad, a more impoverished Shia.

part of Baghdad. And Sotter was an antagonist of the U.S. occupying force in the early days and was kind of like public enemy. You know, like you would think that like there were questions whether we should kill him and, you know, the neocons were breathing fire about Sotter. And since then, he's, you know, gone through multiple iterations. The original influence of Sotter was that they delivered services in their neighborhood. You know, they were close to the people on the ground. and they were seen as he came from a clerical family that had tried to fight poverty and tried to stand up for the rights of Shia. But he stood against the U.S. occupation. And I did think there was, look, he's not the Taliban by any stretch. And he's had shifting

alliances and he's worked with the U.S. and some things and opposed us and others. But if you had said in 2003 and 2004 that in 2021, the Taliban would control Afghanistan. And McTad al-Assadr would emerge as the most influential power broker. Iraq. That would be bad. Like people would, that would have been like, you know, John Bolton wept. Donald Rumsfeld would have like flexed and, you know, like this, this is a such a rebuke of the early hyperbole and exceptionalism of the American invasions of both these countries. There's just something very interesting about the fact that we're sitting or looking at solder as a chief power broker in Iraq and the Taliban controlling Afghanistan.

Yeah. And I. Not saying there's a direct side of is a different kind of, you know, politician than the Taliban. And he obviously exists within a like a democracy of sorts in the sense that there's kind of necessity of coalition building. But but yeah, like just go back in time and and dangle that one out there and see what the responses would have been on the Washington Post op-ed page. Yeah, Fred. I would have lit himself on fire. Let's talk about our friend, Senator Ted Cruz of Kantoon, because he popped onto our radar this week because he's, He took another vacation this time virtually to Spain, where he sent a video message to a gathering of the Vox Party in Spain.

Now, in the U.S., Vox is a bunch of smart, smart, nice nerds who run a great website, host great podcasts. We love Vox in America. In Spain, Vox is a political party that's very similar to the alt-right and has become one of the fastest growing political parties in Spain. So their slogan for a bit was make Spain great again, very original. It was a bit of trolling, I think, for attention, and it worked. But Vox is a little more Trump-adjacent than really Trump emulating because their nationalism is in part of reaction to Spain's Basque separatist movement. Some of these far-right policies that they believe in are a reaction to the financial crisis or a reaction to the rise of far-left parties or, you know, just sort of religiosity. They're anti-LGB rights.

They're anti-immigrant. They're Islamophobic. They're very good Vox is at using social media to attack the media and political correctness and get attention and build support. All this probably sounds familiar. What's most interesting to me, Ben, is this, the growing coordination between these far-right European parties, the far-right in the U.S. There was a great piece I read, Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post. It was in 2019.

She talked about Vox and the rise of Vox and how back in the day, these far-right parties were all kind of siloed. Like one with, like, in Spain, it was like sort of Franco descendants. In Italy, it was sort of like they looked at Mussolini. Now they found common cause around issues like opposing immigration, opposing gay rights. And, you know, no surprise, they've been welcomed at places like CPAC in the U.S. That brings us back to Ted Cruz in this video. So the concern here I had been was like these disparate far right movements, they're getting together, they're working together.

Yeah. They're both, they're all getting propped up by these kind of like bright bar like social media sites and kind of fake news sites that, you know, you're seeing a version of them in, um, uh, they're pro Bolsonaro. Yeah. Uh, then there's a very similar website that's popping up in Spain, right? So it seems like it's a piece of this bigger puzzle. And like, I don't know that it's totally been unraveled the way they're working together, the way like Marine Le Pen may be supporting out the far right in Spain or in Italy. And there certainly isn't a leftist equivalent happening that I've seen, even though that that's what, you know, these far right people accuse George Soros of every day. It's not very effective so far, whatever coordination might be

happening on the left. So I'm wondering what you made of the rise of Vox, of Ted Cruz, sending this message and sort of what it says about, I don't know, what's the thing. happening among these parties in Europe and anywhere else? Well, look, I mean, literally wrote a book about this, right? And I should add to Dutch World Goes Out There After the Fall, published in Dutch this week. Nice. Who does it translating for you?

Not me. Do they do an audiobook? I don't know if they do an audiobook. You get basically a local publisher, right? I've got a great Dutch publisher. Shout out to them. But actually, what's interesting to me about, because, you know, I really dig into Orbán.

interconnection with the U.S. far right. And we've seen that since my book was published with Tucker Carlson and CPAC and stuff. But, you know, when I was traveling around Europe and working on this book, what I kept running into was the degree of coordination. So I was in Spain in early 2019 when Vox was getting some momentum. Steve Bannon was had just been there, right? Steve Bannon had gone over and he, you know, kind of lent his racist blogger credentials to Vox. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and done the same thing in Italy with... You open that monastery, like, institute for a little bit. Yeah, Salvini in Italy.

And, you know, the National Front in France, the AFD in Germany, Orban's Fidesz party in Hungary. Don't forget Poland. Yeah, the Law and Justice Party in Poland. You know, Gert Wilders and the Netherlands, right? And all these parties, you know, have a common nationalist ideology, anti-immigrant ideology. But what they also have is, as we talk about on the show, like, they have common and financing sometimes from Russia. Like Russia's put some money into these places.

And literally, this is not like, you know, guessing the National Front in France has received financial support from Russia over the years. But what the U.S. far right is done is kind of lent its own, you know, media expertise, which is real. Best practices, yeah. Best practices and narratives and anti-immigrant politics. And kind of the veneer of look, Ted Cruz is a fucking asshole. But he was like the number two guy and the Republican. You won the Iowa caucuses. Yeah, yeah. And so him like saying, you know, and by the way, the Republicans, everybody in Europe thinks like could win again.

Yeah. You know, for him to kind of bless a far right movement like Vox, you know, is a sign that the Republican Party is a radical far right party. And so, yes, part of the problem is there's total coordination. There's common sources of financing. There's common media strategies. There's common methods of intimidation and surveillance. And whether it's, we've talked about Black Cube on the show, spying on people or the NRAC. and surveillance of activists, they're sharing a toolkit and they're sharing narratives. And social

media allows the same narratives to travel very fast. So what it could be a Breitbart line of argument on immigration in the U.S. can be, you know, portable to places like Spain. That's a, problem. They're far more coordinated than we are on the left. I would like to see in addition to the interconnectivity of kind of civil society, which is part of what sources try to do. You know, I'd like to see more Democrats, particularly young ones, like who have big international followings like AOC and others, should be talking to center left and green parties in Europe. Like, we should be building. And some of that happens, and I've been a part of some of that.

But like, there needs to be the same kind of understanding that we tend to think of what happens in the politics of other countries is a foreign policy issue. It's not what the Republicans figured out is it's a political issue. You know, like there's a shared identity politics. Totally. Right. And we should see the political success of center left and green parties and progressive parties in Europe as a part of our political project globally. It's not a foreign policy thing alone. And don't leave it to just foreign policy nerds to do it. I want to see the people in this country who are working on redistricting reform working with people who are doing that in Europe because guess what? They have the same fucking problems. People working on political corruption and finance in this country working with their Europeans in solidarity. Across the board. There should be that degree of coordination. And again, part of the problem is it's gotten siloed as someone who's been a part of these kind of transatlantic dialogues. It gets siloed as kind of a

foreign policy discussion where the people who really need to be talking to each other are like grassroots movement type folks. Like to use a crooked metaphor, please. Like vote save America coordinating is probably more useful than like, you know, pod save the world. You know, like it's how do you do activism, right? And I should say part of the reason why we have activists on this podcast, in my view, is we're platforming, hey, what are they doing? Can we learn from it? Can someone hear like something cool that someone's doing in Hungary and repurpose that strategy in the U.S. or somewhere else? We need to create that same kind of community of people that have access to best practices and good ideas and shared strategies. Yeah, man. And success begets

success, right? So like, Vox, they wouldn't make their slogan make Spain great again unless like right wing politics felt ascended because of the success of Trump. That's right. And when one of these far right parties like does well, it's like somehow like good for the Republicans, like we should feel the same way. Like we as American Democrats should feel like it's good for us when a social Democrats. The Greens did well. Yeah, the Greens. Like that's good for my politics, you know. And also like I just the number of times I've sort of had conversations with elected officials or like big donors and have had to explain the, media landscape in the U.S. and how unbelievably tilted it is on the right, not just with Fox News,

but with Breitbart and the Federalist and all these like right-wing websites that are not real media institutions. They're not businesses. They're not trying to like turn a profit, like the daily wire. They are political weapons wielded by the Republican Party and like billionaires who use them in service of like getting rid of regulations or a tax cut. We need to be doing the same shit. We can't dump like just $30 million worth of TV.

ads into the last week in Miami, Republicans are buying the radio station, Miami, for 250 grand, and they're doing it a couple years out. And they're converting all the programming to this right-wing, like, pro-Trump talk. And we're just getting our clocks cleaned by Sinclair News and cable news. I mean, like, even MSNBC, Rachel Maddo, the rumor is that she is going to be replaced by George W. Bush's former communications director. Now, I'm not throwing any shade in Nicole Wallace here. Like, she does a good job. But like, Rachel, Meadow was like the leading lefty primetime MSNBC person. Yeah.

Well, you couldn't be more right. I mean, and again, like read after the fall if you haven't. Because I described like what Orban did is he bought the local newspapers. He bought the local, not himself, but his cronies, the local radio stations, they dominated the information space. And then the far right in this country has perfected the use of Facebook and social media in ways that that's what Steve Bannon. When people would say, like, well, what use is Steve Bannon?

And it's political vice. Well, actually, like, he may be a fucking asshole, but, like, you know, he does understand juicing algorithms and spreading narratives. And so what they can do is communicate to them, hey, here's how you use social media, how you use Facebook to get your message out. And, like, to return to the beginning of this conversation, like, it's on a small scale, right? But I'd like to think that Vox and Crooked Media are useful homes for a different kind of

media. like the Vox that is needed in Europe? Yeah, the Vox that is needed in Europe is fucking Vox. Not like these racist, you know, Ted Cruz wannabes. Yeah, listen, Vox Media is fantastic. They do like super thoughtful, analytical, smart, well reported. They do journalism full time. But you need more than that.

We do hybrid journalism and activism. Yeah. They need all that. And we know it's coming from the left. Right. And it's just like the landscape on the left is like Crooked Media where we're hawking underwear, you know, during commercial breaks to try to fund this little. operation. We get the New York and the Times, you know. Yeah, we got some in the Financial Times. But, you know, and then on the right, it's like billionaires cut giant checks. And they're like,

okay, Charlie Kirk. Okay, Ben Shapiro, go, you know, like spread your propaganda with young college kids. And it's highly effective. And it's not sophisticated strategies. Steve Bannon says it. He says, we just throw shit at the wall. You just cloud everything up. Yeah. Well, and here it's a story about MS-13 committing some gruesome crime. There, it's a story of refugees. It's the same narrative, right? And half the time is made up and they don't care. And you couldn't be more right about this stuff. Like, if I could say, people always say, like, what's one thing that could happen that could be important? Like, beyond social media regulation, which I think is most important.

What they get, which I don't understand, Tommy. Like, I really don't have asked you this. But, like, Orban has some guys who are like, hey, for a few billion dollars, we can buy the whole media of this country and basically turn people into, like, right-wing foot soldiers. like I don't understand why progressives who care about democracy don't just buy the fucking media. And I'm not just talking about here. I'm talking about like all around the world, you know, in these places where democracy under threat, what is really neat is investment in. And I talk about boxing cricket media, but it's also newspapers and television stations. And by the way, I wouldn't want our narrative.

I wouldn't want our media outlets to be mindless propaganda. but I do think just, you know, giving people alternative fact-based news in and of itself is a value in pushing back against far-right politics. So this is hugely important. It's so important. Yeah. I mean, look, one of the Nobel Prizes just was awarded to this woman Maria Ressa, who has this independent media organization, the Rappler.

I wasn't even going to put this on the list today because I think we were going to try to talk to her sometime next week or the week after. But, you know, she is like this last vestige of independent media in the Philippines, and all around her in the Philippines, the right-wing forces, are buying up the other properties. And that's happening everywhere. And there's just no, like you said, there's no analogous situation happening in countries where, like, say, in Mexico, a bunch of, like, center-left or leftist billionaires, individuals are buying up media properties or launching media properties to get that point of view

out there. We're not talking about, like, censorship or locking out conservative voices. Somebody's just balancing out the ledger. No, yeah. this is what I get what about is and sometimes talking about my book about like what about Cuban Venezuela and I'm like look I don't like autocracy anywhere the left is not

the what like left wing autocracy is not what's buying up the media and controlling the information space around the world Maria Ressa she's so important if you haven't followed her case in the Philippines because Duterte is an incredibly intimidating guy he's politically popular there yeah they've cornered the media

there's extrajudicial killings there's intimidation of journalists yeah and they've been hounding her you know trumped-up bullshit charges. And the fact that she, this woman stood up to Duterte and refused to compromise her journalism was like the lifeline for other people in the Philippines. I've talked to people in civil society there who just like, she stands for all of them. And she stands for the power of truth and the power of accountability and the power of journalism. And just also the power of like standing up to a bully, you know? It's also the power of how Facebook can can really screw up the

media landscape. Totally weaponized in places like Philippines, totally weaponized. We could ran about this for hours. It's, yeah, it is so fascinating. So we got two more things. So let's talk about Ethiopia, because unfortunately we have some bad news about the Civil War in Ethiopia. So just remember, we've talked about this a bunch of times. The Ethiopian government has been waging a war against the Northern Tigray province. It's much smaller. But there is a faction in there called the Tigray People's Liberation Front or TPLF. That is a bunch of people who used to be in charge of Ethiopia, their enemies of the current prime minister. So they've been fighting for about a year. That fighting has included, you know, the Ethiopian military attacking

Tigray and the Eritrean military also joining in. And then they've been cutting off aid to the region, so just starving people to death. There had been sort of like a partial ceasefire or at least a stalemate for a bit. But yesterday, a TPLF spokesman said that the Ethiopian government has launched a major ground offensive into Tigray again. A friend of the pod, Nimma al-Baghir, reported that Ethiopia's government has been using its commercial airline to shuttle weapons to and from Eritrea, which is very, very illegal, a violation of international law. The Biden administration said they're prepared to impose some sanctions on Ethiopia. So, you know, again, more great reporting here by NIMA at CNN. Shout out to her. But then, again, like my question is like,

like, this reporting is happening in real time, right? Like major ground offensive, shuttling weapons on like, you know, commercial airlines. I'm still not seeing, uh, international national community come together to pressure Ethiopia to stop the fighting despite credible accusations of war crimes and even genocide. I realize that the security council at the UN is fucking useless because the Russians and Chinese will block everything. But I don't know. It's like it's very hard to watch knowing. Yeah, it's like a slow motion catastrophe. And I think first of all that that's a major air carrier in Africa. Like it's major air carrier. It's like how you get around Africa, right? And yeah, they're doing that. Like, you know,

sanctions like have a like are hugely overused but they do have a place and and shuttling you know weapons on on a major commercial air carrier is kind of the definition of sanctionable behavior. I do think I mean one of the other things you don't see is you know more African leaders on this right like like the one place for the Biden team to focus and I'm sure they're doing this to some extent but it's like you know it's not in in the interest of that part of Africa to have this kind of war that could spread out. God know. So like, you know, the Security Council, you hit roadblocks, like you have to find groupings of countries that care about this and don't want to see it escalate. And that has to include African countries as well as

Europe and the U.S. and others. Because this isn't, this just keeps getting worse. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about this with Nima. Like, you have refugee flows out of Ethiopia into Sudan, a country that has had enormous challenges over the past decade. Oh, my God. Yeah. You still have these unbelievably, like, kind and decent Sudanese families inviting refugees into their homes. Like, you can only imagine that. It's just staggering. Okay, so again, the call goes out to anyone listening in a position to say something, do something about this.

Do you like tweet us whatever you're working on, whatever statement's gone out? We want to highlight them because it's important. Okay, weird, dumb story to close out the show, Ben. We have talked before about the sometimes ridiculous gift exchanges that happened between heads of state or, you know, government officials, heads of state. You have a lovely story about the Saudis trying to buy you and everybody else on the Obama delegation off with. Was it jewels, watches? Suitcases full of jewels.

Yeah, Favro and I, like when I got to Saudi Arabia, there was a suitcase in 2009 with Obama. There was a suitcase full of like jewels, like waiting for me. And I thought for a second they were like trying to get influence with me because I was writing like the Cairo speech or something. But then Favre had the exact same suitcase full of jewels. Well, they might have been. Stay tuned. for the rest of the story. So like when it comes to the leader to leader gifts, in my opinion, way too much thought in time and work gets put into this. When it's great, it's great. I was reading

this fun NPR story from 2011 about gift giving. And they talked about how in the Clinton administration, the chief of protocol figured out that Nelson Mandela was a huge boxing fan. And so Clinton got all like the major living boxers in the U.S. to send memorabilia and letters to him. They wrote like personalized notes, put it in a book and they gave it to him. And he was so moved by it that he cried, right? Like amazing story. It's a win. It's a protocol win. I'm sure made like the meetings better. The flip side of that is when Obama got roasted for giving then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown DVDs. Yeah. We gave the Queen an iPod. Yeah. That didn't go to it. It's funny that that's what passed for like cutting edge, you know, in 2009, like DVDs in an iPod.

Apparently the DVDs didn't work on like the British players either. Yeah. So shitty. We weren't quite as hip as we I thought we were. You know, Obama was like, oh, here I am thinking that Gordon and I are supposed to be working on saving the global economy. Yeah. But I guess, you know, you have to give them some DVDs. Hopefully, like the notebook or something. Anyway, so here's where this story gets new and fun. The New York Times has had a big report on this.

So, Ben, you will not be surprised to learn that the gift giving or maybe gift receiving took a corrupt turn during the Trump years. We've talked before about how a $5,800 bottle of whiskey was given to Mike Pompeo. it went missing. I wonder what happened. The Times also reported that the State Department Inspector General is investigating whether Trump's staff took gift bags that were supposed to be given to leaders at the G7 Summit in 2020. They ended up getting canceled because of COVID, whether the staff just took them.

Gift bags meant for foreign leaders full of thousands of dollars worth of swag. They also reported that Jared Kushner, or Rasputin in a skinny tie or whatever his name was, paid $47,920 for two swords and a dagger who was given by the Saudis. Yeah, not trying to compensate for anything there. That's the way this works. So if you're given anything worth more than $415, you have to pay for it.

So I don't know that what do you want to bet that the list of gifts that just kind of happened to walk off from the protocol office is a little longer? This is my question. I mean, so first of all, so people know like with the suitcases, like what you do is you say, well, what do we do this? And they said, oh, you just get that to state protocol. You'll never see him again.

Yeah, they're used to it. And you're given the option of buying him. And unlike Jared Kushner, we don't like have the money to do that. But it makes you wonder, like, how many of these gifts just kind of walked off with Trump officials in those years, you know, what kind of accounting was done. Because it felt like from the story, there was kind of a breakdown in the, the routinization of, because by the end, what people understand is like, we don't even have the gifts. Like, the gifts are given, like they show Obama the gift and then they hand it to the State Department protocol person. Like, Obama never has the actual gift, you know?

And it feels like that evolved in the Trump years into something else. And, like, you know, there's not just the Trump visits. There's visits by other officials. And, you know, it's pretty clear why you don't want the corruption of that, you know, infecting decision making. Yeah. And the lead of the story is that the Saudis gave Trump some robes that they thought might have been

endangered species. Yeah, tiger. And it turned out to be a fraud. It turned to be fake. And like Bruce Riddell is in the story. He actually did some work for Obama and like Afghanistan. Bruce Radell's in the story mocking the Saudis for giving fake fur. I was kind of like, thank God.

I don't want them skinning a tiger. I'd rather some tiger didn't die for Donald Trump to have a rug or whatever the fuck it was. Yeah. It is amazing. Only Jared would drop 50 grand on a fucking sword in the dagger. Although, look, let's be honest. Some gifts might have walked away. but the real kickback is happening right now.

Yeah, it's in the back end. As we speak. It's always said it's on the investment fund you set up with a lot of Emeraldi money or something. Yeah. And that investment fund went from, you know, dialed in guy to a former president that we got to take care of to, you know, dialed in guy for the guy who's about to run again. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's definitely the case.

It's good every now and then to get these reminders of both the absurdity and gravity of the corruption of the Trump years, you know. It's just amazing. So one other thing. Tell me. I got this email this morning. I got this buddy in Australia, this guy named Dan Eilich. And forgive me, Dan, if I just puttered your last name. But Dan's a hilarious guy, and he hosts a podcast there called Rational Fear.

What are we got? So he reached out to me after one of our Australia segments. He's the guy that put the plaque near the McDonald's where Scott Morris and the Prime Minister was alleged to have, you know, shot himself. He said his pants, right? Yeah. said the latest thing that a bunch of Australians have done, I think there's overlapping circles with Australian Worldos, is they started like this kind of crowdfunded effort to just take out

billboards in places like Times Square, just like whacking Scott Morrison for his climate record. Oh, I like that. I had a Glasgow, you know, just internationally pressuring the guy. So it's like this is evolved from the plaque at the McDonald's to like a billboard in Times Square. So it's a good through line. So what's your buddy's name again? Dan, we're doing this in real time. We're building the coalition of left-wing Democratic forces. This is very pot-stayed-the-world view of the world.

I would be thrilled to work with him to talk with Scott Morrison or Murdoch. Or any British listeners want to have some fun with Boris Johnson? I keep seeing his build-back beaver videos like these weird things he's doing. Even like fish and chips and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Build back batter. That's the thing he keeps saying. That's my very bad impression of Boris Johnson.

I don't. I look, Donald Trump is a uniquely American catastrophe. Like, Boris Johnson, I just don't understand, like, the appeal. I get the appeal. I mean, I get, I, yeah, I shouldn't say that. I understand it. I understand it. It's an act.

But, like, when I see this guy, like, shoving a sandwich in his face and saying Bill Buck better, I'm like, God, this is the country that gave us, like, Shakespeare and, you know. And I'll say on the queen is a protocol thing. I meant to The one good thing we did do is that she's a big movie buff apparently. And so when we had a dinner

for her at the U.S. ambassador to residents, we had Tom Hanks at her table. She loved that. She was down with Hanks. Yeah, she was down with Hanks. The guy got COVID.

He shook it off in like 30 seconds. Hank's, you know, could be the solution to our presidential politics here. Do you know if the Queen likes like contemporary movies?

Everything. And she's a huge Broadway fan too. I guess she's got shit else to do. Show tunes and stuff. Yeah. Sitting around the castle. Well, yeah, if you're, like, a prisoner of the state with an unlimited bank account,

like you just watch whatever movies you want, you know? That's great. I'd love to watch a movie with the Queen. She should do, like, a Twitch stream where she just watches flicks and people hang out with it. God save the Queen. Like, you know. She just quietly sips tea for like...

Yeah. It makes you wonder whether she watches, like, the Crown and, like, that movie, that movie, The Queen, that was a good movie. Helen Mirren, star turn, Oscar turn. So the government, area is Whitehall, right, in the UK. What's it called? Like, where do the people who work for the Queen? What's that? Buckingham Palace. So there's like the palace staff. I wonder if we got

any listeners in the palace. Let us know. Prince Harry. Well, we, more likely in, and in the Santa Barbara camp. Yeah, yeah. Harry, come on the show, man. We'll talk about it. Yeah, that would be if you want. I don't want to. I don't need to ask. I don't want to visit the family stuff. I could care less. Talk about Netflix. Let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about what you did in Afghanistan. Yeah. is when he's doing the interview and he's like rips off the lob and sprints toward the helicopter. I'd actually be super interested what he thinks about Afghanistan. It's probably not something he wants to talk about, but like he was there. It's probably pretty hard for him. Yeah. Yeah. In the Brits,

I bet are especially pissed at the ending in the lack of consultation. Yeah. Yeah. Although I have to say, given they're fighting in Helmand. Yeah. Yeah. But they, you know, they, they largely got out a while ago, you know. That's true. It's some people there. That's very true. You got anything else? That's it. I mean, that was my, I was just like, uh, that, Like, you're right, that does cannot connect to the global anti-euvre. I love that. Have you watched Squid Game yet? No, I got to do.

Okay. I need a show, too, because I just finished Ted Lassau. So it's the opposite of that. It's Parasite meets the Hunger Games. And by the way, that's the opposite of Newcastle United. You know, you got like... That's true. Well, we should, no spoilers, I guess.

We can't talk about it happens. But the, yeah, like, it seemed like Hunger Games-E, you know? You will love it. Okay. It's so good. It's about... South Korean TV in general is really good. Yeah, it's about inequality and capitalism.

And I think sort of like the lack of humanity and the structures and processes and the influence of sort of bad Western white forces. It's great. It's super interesting which countries just kind of take off pop culturally. Like South Korea is, there's like between... K-pop?

K-pop and movies and TV. Like, there's just... It's a very dynamic. Like, something's going on them. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, you look at like the biggest movies in China, for example, one of the biggest markets in the world. And their big movies are still like, you know, Wolf Warrior, where I think the plot is basically the Chinese military kills a bunch of evil Americans doing something terrible in Africa or something like that. It's very nationalist.

You know what the weirdest thing was? Do you remember when like Matt Damon popped up in one of these crappy Chinese movies, like the Great Wall or something? Yeah, yeah. And it was like the same idea. but he's just like starring Matt Damon. It was like really... Yeah, that should have gotten there. I've heard him talk about it.

Like, he acknowledges it was kind of a crappy movie. But the director was apparently someone he admired, but... Someone should have flagged that in the notes meetings. Yeah. You know, these processes take a while. Seriously. Anyway, well, that's all I got, man. Could some American billionaire first do the progressive infrastructure stuff, then buy Newcastle.

Yeah. Throw a bone. I mean, you know, Tottenham. I'm a Spurs guy. Everton until I die, man. David Lammy's team. Oh, really? He's a Taun guy?

I rep Lammy's team. I would kill to go to the UK and go to a Premier League game. With Lammy. Lammy would be fun to tell. Although I wouldn't know what he was saying the whole time. It's all like I never understand the cheers and the songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just so fun.

Yeah, well, there's not that weird Joe Biden, Brandon cheer. That's, yeah, that's more of an SEC thing. Yeah, SEC NASCAR. It's not good. It's not really my milieu. Yeah, well, the civility police are coming for that one, hopefully. Red hand. Red end.

All right. All right, we're done. Okay, we're done. Thanks for listening. Rate and review, five star. Help me to find the show. Tell your friends about it. If you are in a, if you're taking like a foreign policy class in school, look at the back catalog. Yeah.

It'll help you cheat on a lot of things. We go deep on Korea. Come on. If you're Dutch by my book, and you're American by it too. You're American, buy the book in Dutch. Yeah. Try to learn Dutch. Okay.

That's it. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. is our sound engineer, thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale-Fried, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.