Pod Save the World - The world gathers to fight climate change

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Tommy and Ben talk about the big news out of the climate change summit in Glasgow, the news out of the G20, the latest on the coup in Sudan and civil war in Ethiopia, a GITMO detainee details CIA torture, morally bankrupt billionaires flock to Saudi Arabia, the skeptical take on Havana Syndrome, Real Housewives of Dubai, Facebook is dead, and the JFK assassination. Then former Australian PM Kevin Rudd joins to talk about COP26, Australian politics and Evergrande.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 Pazade of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. So Ben, we're recording this on Tuesday. It's Election Day in Virginia and a bunch of places. Should we just do two versions? So one to use if Terry wins, one if Yonkin wins, so that we can be sort of like smug and self-righteous no matter what. I mean, or two versions, the exit poll version and then the final poll. Then the results that are totally different. The results version. Yeah. I don't like every election.

I love hate elections. Yeah. They all feel like existential now. That's the problem. Even off your Virginia gubernatorial elections feel like the future of democracy. All right. We'll try to focus our brains on the globe today because we have big news coming out of the climate change summit that's happening in Glasgow right now as we speak and about the G20 that just happened. We have the latest fallout from the coup in Sudan.

A Gitmo detainee details CIA torture in court for the first time. We'll do a section about morally bankrupt billionaires in Saudi Arabia. Stay tuned for that. It's a lot of fun. The skeptical take on Havana syndrome, real housewives of the Gulf. Facebook unintentionally makes us laugh. And then we dive into the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. Then our guest today is former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He joins to talk about climate change, Australian politics, and how a Chinese real estate company could impact the global economy. Good stuff. We just recorded that with him. He's always very fun to talk to. Ben, do not miss another great episode of Office. offline this week. John Favre talks with Monica Lewinsky about being patient zero in the rise of just brutal, public, internet shaming. It is a great conversation. She is so smart and thoughtful. I really just can't recommend it enough. Already listened, you know? I mean, actually, like, John may have really stumbled on something with that dropping Sunday morning thing. Yeah, no, I took the dog for a walk. Yeah, I went for a run, like, you know, threw it on. Yeah, it felt like I was with friends.

Also, if the crooked fans in your life want holiday gifts. We have new merch crooked.com slash store. This week we drop some gifts for your pets, toys, accessories, and more. So be doing that. Okay. Then there is a huge group of world leaders in Glasgow, Scotland. One last chance for me to get that name wrong.

Glasgow. They're talking about climate change. You're going to go there pretty soon. You're leaving later this week. Let's start with the bad news about what's come out. So as you asked the Prime Minister Rudd, neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin are attending in person. That's not good. China and Russia are the first and fourth biggest emitters of carbon dioxide by country.

We'd prefer them to be there. Also not great that the general scientific consensus is that the world needs to limit the amount of the planet warms to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. So far, we have warmed the planet by 1.1 degrees Celsius. But the emissions targets, the pledges from various countries that have been made don't get close to achieving that 1.5 goal. In some cases, most cases, really, I think they're only pledges and not actually. policies were lost. So that's the downside of what's happening so far. Bummer. Very quick round roundup of some of the good news. All the G20 countries finally acknowledge that we have to hit that 1.5 Celsius target. That actually is a big deal and gets everyone, you know, rowing the same direction.

India surprised a lot of people by announcing that they would get to net zero carbon emissions by 2070, and that by 2030, half of India's electricity will be from renewable sources. So that's great. More than 80 countries pledged to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Scientists believe that methane is responsible for nearly one third of global warming to date. So getting rid of that would be a big deal. So Ben, that's just a few of like the many pledges and side deals and, you know, conversations that are happening at this conference. There's more about financial support for developing countries, agreements to stop deforestation, right? Everybody's trying to do this while not creating some massive economic impact on their citizens that leads to another yellow vest

protest style, you know, problem in Europe. I find myself sympathizing with the least. I find myself sympathizing with the leaders who were inside the summit, just trying to move the ball forward painfully and get stuff done. I find myself sympathizing with the activists outside who are furious that not enough is getting accomplished this week. What do you make the event so far? Like, how are you feeling on your sort of like climate dread, you know, thermometer? I mean, they are lacking the kind of big new sets of announcements that kind of fell like domino

dominoes on the way into Paris, you know, so like there, there just wasn't the same momentum leading into this thing. But to your point, you know, they're tackling some of the structural aspects of the climate challenge. Methane in particular, the U.S. has clearly been focused on, and that's a very welcome announcement because this is one of the areas where you have to kind of focus collectively on how do we just get rid of this stuff. And it's like it's so achievable. It's like plumbing. You can tighten up the hose or pipe. Yeah, and really, this is one of those insane things where we were beginning to do this at the end of the bomb years and then Trump just, you know, rolled Zappack and then everybody lets their foot off the gas around the world. And so that's a positive.

There was an announcement around ending deforestation by 2030. And to me, this encapsulates in miniature the whole problem slash potential of this summit, right? on the one hand, you really do feel like everybody, with the exception of most of the Republican Party, like, gets it, right? Like, everybody at least feels compelled to make commitments and to be moving in this direction. Green parties are rising, like concern about climate's rising and all these polls that pew did around the world. Yeah. You know, and so something like saying we're going to end deforestation by 2030 is, like, important, but, like, do we have 10 years to cut down the Amazon? And, you know.

No, it could be irreversible. Yeah. So it's kind of like this, what's so difficult about judging it is that we're beginning to really fill in some of the details and make some more progress off of what the foundation was in Paris. But the time is just not there, you know. And so it's this kind of race against the clock. And I don't think any scientist, you know, believes that we are moving with enough speed to catch up with that clock. but we're moving, you know, and, and that's, you know, that's part of the complexity to this whole thing. And I think one of the challenges for activists is going to have to be, look, you're not going to get everything you want at the, at the summit.

But that's all the more reason to just kind of hold people's feet to the fire so that these commitments, because you're hearing a lot of commitments, you know, we'd do this by 2030 and this by 2050 and this by 2070, right? It can be a wash and what are the, what is underneath that, what is going to actually get us there. The basic philosophy that you guys have talked about in PSA, we've talked about, is that if there's enough momentum behind transitioning, that the global economy will just kind of, you know, course correct in that direction, clean energy will take the place of fossil fuels. But the question is, as that is happening, because that clearly is happening, how are you just getting rid of the dirty stuff faster? And how are you saving things like the Amazon faster, you know? And we're not going to know the answer to that, I think, at the end of Glasgow. Yeah, there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle. Credit to our British friends are making a full core press here, bringing out the big guns.

I got David Attenborough speaking. They got the queen delivering a message. Boris Johnson found religion on climate change over the past decade or so. He was kind of an asshole about it for a long time. Biden apologized for Trump's decision to pull out of Paris. Ben, putting on your crass political hack hat. Do you think that's going to be on Fox News nonstop for the next three years where we passed this apology tour, idiocy? I think we're kind of past it.

It was kind of funny, like seeing him do it and wasn't that big a deal. Yeah, no one seemed to care. And look, of all the insane stuff Trump did, you can lose side of the fact that, like, Republican climate denialism is going to be one of the things that looks just the strangest and most reckless and sadistic at the time. Yeah, like him standing up there and saying he cares about Pittsburgh, not Paris, is kind of hackish announcement. So, you know, I think, you know, that, that, that,

shows that things have changed, right? Like just going to a climate change summit was once like controversial in this country, right? Nobody's really questioning that anymore. Even Republicans who like don't even fully acknowledge the reality of climate change, they're not putting up much of a fight because they know that particularly demographically to young people, like this is issue one, you know? And you can kind of laugh at David Attenborough and all these people, but that's no, I'm not laughing. I love David. No, yeah, not you. I would never say that about you. Thank you. I know you like me share a passion for planet and earth and all the rest of it. But there's something positive about the like just culturally,

politicians can't evade at least trying to look like they care about this. You know, like even Aborz Johnson is talking about it's one minute to midnight. I do think there's a positive collective pressure from voters, first and foremost, but then activists and even like cultural figures. Totally. Just saying like, hey, this is the thing you guys can't get wrong. Yeah, this matters. This matters all of us.

So the COP 26th Climate Summit came right after the G20 summit in Rome, a lot of summits. Some big takeaways I saw from the G20. Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, met with his Chinese counterpart for about an hour to prepare for this virtual summit between Biden and Xi Jinping later this year. As we mentioned, Xi Jinping is not getting on planes anymore. I guess he needs like a jab and a Xanax to like get him going. We'll see what happens here. Everybody at this at the G20 tried to smooth over tensions with Turkey and President Erdogan. Seems like they've kind of papered over it, but none of the underlying issues are really.

resolved. The French are still pissed at the UK over fishing rights. The French are also pissed at Australia over the nuclear submarine deal with the U.S. that we've talked about a thousand times. This was the big thing. I think, Ben, more than 130 countries agree to set a minimum corporate tax rate at 15 percent so we can hopefully stop the practice of multinational corporations pretending that they're incorporated in like Ireland or whatever to create a tax shelter and not pay taxes. Leaders also pledge to vaccinate 70 percent of the world's population against COVID-19 by mid-22. Biden hung out with the Pope for like 90 minutes,

which I'm sure was hugely important to him personally. What do you think? What do you make of the G20? Like the corporate minimum tax seems like a big deal. Anything else worth highlighting that came out of this? I think on that one, like, you know, this has been kind of something that has been building over the course of the year.

They talked about it at the G7, then they wouldn't try to get other countries to sign up to it. And I think they deserve some credit on this thing. Yeah, I do too. Like they, you know, this is a big. deal like, you know, the inequality in the world is fueling a lot of the grievance that you see in politics everywhere. It's obviously just economically unfair. You got people, you know, tax cheats and tax havens. And they do seem to be using the architecture of, you know, the G7,

the G20, these international institutions to just methodically try to establish this kind of norm of a global minimum tax and then get enough people invested in it that it has some meaning. So, you know, there's more work to be done there, but I think the discipline they showed on this, you know, clearly is bearing some, some results. Yeah, you did see the hangover. I mean, you're talking with the apology tour. Like he kind of had to make nice, you know, told Macron that

it was clumsy, you know. I think that was necessary, right? Yeah, a hat and hand. Yeah, you know, and, but, you know, wasn't, again, that the, the Xi Jinping wasn't there, Putin wasn't there, you know, I mean, It used to be, you know, having gone to like 8G20s, one of the highlights, not because it was fun, but in terms of consequence, was usually there's a big meeting between the U.S. President, the Chinese president. Usually you see Putin there and there's some drama around that.

So there was a little less, you know, torqued up because that was absent, you know. The Pope thing was interesting to watch that, you know, that is, you know, I remember that's a singular experience of being president, you know, like to go visit the Pope. And I think it highlighted again that Pope Francis, I think Biden said something along the lines of like, this man is every reason why I'm a Catholic, which I thought was a powerful statement about, you know, Francis representing social justice. And, and, you know, sometimes you can forget he's there, you know, in this kind of pretty bleak political landscape out there. So hopefully got some moral support. I can't help but mention that the biggest project we did with them was the cube opening. So I hope Pope Francis put a little pressure, a little moral suasion there on, uh, Biden to kind of make life a little better for the Cuban people. But, but yeah, it was, it was a, it seemed a, it seemed a positive outcome, but it also seemed devoid of some of the drama that, that sometimes plays out in part because not all leaders were there. And the climate summit was a bigger of the summits. Yeah, the prickly customers weren't there. Since we're talking about an event in Italy, the G20, we should mention that Italy's Senate recently voted down a bill that would have made violence against LGBT and disabled people in misogyny, a hate crime. So we're talking about a Italian politics. The proposal came after a series of attacks on LGBT people and a rise in hate crimes that a lot of activists in Italy think has linked to an increased popularity of Mateo Salvini's far right league party. Unfortunately, the Vatican, Pope Francis, hope you're listening, has been an impediment to progress here on trying to label these attacks against gays and lesbians

as hate crimes. So thanks for hosting the summit Italy. Thanks for doing the fun little coin toss into the Trevi Fountain with all the world leaders, but, you know, maybe get your own shit together. Yeah. Well, and this is, I mean, like, there's been this troubling stigmatization of the LGBT community. You know, Putin has made them a target. And then you've seen, you know, Orban recently trying to make them a target in Hungary. This is kind of spreading around the European far right, you know, troublingly at times spilling over into some of the kind of Christian right parties that that may not normally be on the far right. So it's something that requires vigilance, really.

It just requires people standing up and expressing solidarity against that. I think in terms of the Vatican, this is one of those areas where, you know, Francis has not been exactly a progressive on these issues, but he has been a little bit ahead of the Vatican bureaucracy on this one and just in terms of how he talks about it. But it's a reminder that even the Pope doesn't have to be. control over everything in his own bureaucracy. And yeah, like that, that requires, I think, like a continued, you know, you can get complacent

because there have been so many gains for LGBT people in this country and other places. But, you know, you can't take your eye off the uglier dynamic that's playing out. Yeah. And how it folds into these far right parties. Let's do an update from Sudan. So about a week ago, the Sudanese military. stage a coup and took over the country. Since that time, there have been major demonstrations all across Sudan. The government has repeatedly cut phone and internet service, but despite that,

tons of videos and photos of the protests are getting out anyway. It's pretty amazing. The courage that's being shown, there's also some really scary reports that at least a dozen protesters have been killed. I've seen over 100 wounded. The U.S., as we discussed last week, has condemned the coup. The U.S. has held up 700 million in AIDS, Sudan, and has been talked. with Egypt and UAE, the UAE to try to push them to play a helpful role in resolving what's happened. This is an interesting anecdote here, Ben, there was a senior Israeli official quoted anonymously in Israel's biggest free newspaper. And this person was criticizing the U.S. response to the coup and basically arguing that, you know, although democracy is good in theory, the Sudanese military is more likely to cut deals with the U.S., cut deals with Israel and improved ties. So therefore, the U.S. should just pipe down about this coup being bad and just kind of back it.

I do think that speaks to, you know, kind of a post-Arab Spring, post-Abrah, ACHRAM Accords mindset that, you know, prioritizes stability with bad actors maybe over the messiness of democracy that might make unwinding this whole process even harder. The U.N., South Sudan, a lot of others are trying to broker talks, find some sort of resolution. How are you feeling about the odds of this thing getting resolved? peacefully given what we've seen over the last week. I don't feel very good about it. And, you know, I came back a couple times in this issue came up to the Saudis and the

Emirates and the Egyptians who have a lot of sway with the Sudanese military. And we talked last week about the Abraham Accords and how it kind of plays into this idea that the pathway to stability is through these kind of military regimes. You know, you either have the royal families in the Gulf or the military government. in places like Egypt and Sudan. And the reason I was saying that is because I'd seen the movie before in Egypt, you know? Yep. And here, you know, what's even more like remarkable in a way is that in Egypt you had a Muslim

Brotherhood led government. Here you weren't even through the transition. It was like this kind of collection of people got together and were like, well, you know, we're just more comfortable with the military government there. And obviously the military, the Sudanese military itself was the primary actor here, but you have that Israeli official kind of saying the quiet part out loud. And I think we just have to reckon with this that like, like do the why would the world not take the lesson from us when we're, you know, when we're so close to all these governments that are involved in the region and in the Abraham Accords? and then they, you see quotes like that and you see the actions of these governments and, you know, where's the U.S. on democracy? Yeah, it feels like history is doomed to repeat itself, right?

I mean, we backed all these autocrats and in Iraq and, you know, Egypt and countless other places that led to these popular uprisings, which led to instability. I mean, it's a cycle. And there's always some reason, right? You know, terrorism, security, stability. Oil. Abraham Accords. Like, there's always some issue other than democracy. that justifies kind of, if not, because we're not supporting this.

I'm not suggesting we are, but these governments that we're close to are, you know, and I'm glad to see that we're talking to the Amarides and the Egyptians about this. I think that the only thing that will make a difference is if people keep protesting, you know, and if there's just a sense that this is just not going to sit with the public there, that's hard. It's a lot to ask of people, you know, fatigue and people have lives and people have, basic needs and there's the risk of a crackdown. But really, it's these internal pressures, they don't just disappear because you have a coup. And my hope is that the combination of

U.S. diplomacy and other countries and public pressure from within kind of at least keeps some embers burning for democracy that can then hopefully lead to something like what the transition was supposed to be. Yeah, fingers crossed. Let's stay in the horn of Africa for a bit and do a quick update on the Civil War in Ethiopia. So it's been hard to get reports out of Ethiopia generally because of all the media blackouts and everything else. But there's been some reporting this week that the Tigray People's Liberation Front or TPLF and another insurgent group said that they had captured back significant territory from the government. Remember those are the two groups fighting. The Ethiopian government has been

attacking the northern Tigray region in the TPLF that's up there. On Sunday, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, posted a message on his Facebook page calling on people to, quote, destroy and bury the terrorist TPLF. So that was chilling. He also accused them of executing 100 young people in one of those captured towns that we were talking about earlier. And then just before we started taping, there were new reports that the Ethiopian government has declared a state of emergency and called on citizens to pick up arms and prepare to defend the capital. So very scary stuff, hard to know exactly what's going on. You know, the latter part I was just reading about the call to pick up arms was in a New York

Times report like dateline out of Kenya. So I'm not sure how close they are to the action. So we're going to try to keep making sense of this. But also, how the hell does Facebook allow the prime minister to post destroy and bury the terrorist TPLF? Like, how is that not a violation of their terms? That's good question, Tommy. Yeah.

And that's not in the metaverse. That's here in the fucking earth, you know? That's here in the fucking universe. I mean, one thing that people need to, you know, keep in mind, too, that the TPLF, you know, if you're looking at the newspaper and you just see the kind of little box of the map and then this little region up there, these are the guys that, like, used to run the country, you know? So, like, I always kind of wondered, like, maybe they'll win this war, you know? And because it's not just like this is he's trying to crush some small province and settle some small dispute. These are the people that they know what they're doing here. And it looks like the momentum is with them.

Now, if they end up overrunning Otis, the capital of Ethiopia, and there's bloodletting, I don't know what the future of Ethiopia looks like. I mean, it's just civil war, like mass atrocities in both directions, protracted, like famine. I mean, this is an utter catastrophe if it continues like this. And really the only solution to avert that is some kind of diplomatic ceasefire negotiation. Like nobody's going to, quote, unquote, win this, you know, or even if they do win, that victory is going to be followed by bloodletting and international isolation and humanitarian crisis. So we're looking at this now, it looks like the momentum is with the TPLF, but that doesn't change the fundamental. equation that absent this getting into some negotiation, like it's just going to get worse for the

people there. Yeah. I feel like every day we talk about this, it's just going to get worse. And there's got to be some real pressure on the Ethiopian government in particular to get a ceasefire. And Biden did some of the things you talked about, getting rid of those trade preferences. And, you know, so they're trying. I think it's just going to take a lot of countries, not just the U.S., like just, you know, everybody kind of coming in and saying, you know, this has got to stop. Yes, agreed. talk about the prison at Guantanamo Bay for a minute because last week, an eight-member jury in the military commission trial made up of officers in the U.S. military, her testimony from a guy named

Majid Khan, who he grew up in the suburbs of Maryland before becoming an al-Qaeda courier. These are facts. In 2012, Khan pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, including delivering $50,000 from al-Qaeda to an extremist group in Southeast Asia, and that money was then used to fund the bombing of a hotel in Indonesia. The hearing was to determine Khan's sentence. But what made it remarkable is that this was the first time an individual who had been tortured by the U.S. government at CIA Black Sites had testified publicly. Khan spoke for two hours about being waterboarded and about the sexual and psychological abuse and torture he endured in U.S. custody. At one point, he said, quote, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured. And he just started making stuff up to try to stop this torture from happening.

So it's a good reminder that torture does not work. So on Sunday, this jury issued its sentence. Now, the lowest possible sentence they could issue given the framework provided to them was 26 years. But then seven of the eight jurors sent along a letter calling the torture a stain on the moral fiber of America and a source of shame for the U.S. government. It was sort of a clemency letter. So you can thank the Bush administration, Ben, for these programs existing in the first place. Thank President Obama for banning them in 2009. But this is the first kind of like public reckoning we've really seen in the court in a long time.

Con has kind of deal with prosecutors that should end his sentence in 2025 at the latest. But I think the broader question is if and whether this clemency letter and the decision overall might impact future military commission cases for Gitmo detainees. So pretty big news. It is. And man, this is like just awful stuff to read. Horrifying. Horrifying. And we've seen very.

versions of this, right, in news stories in some of the accounts of get-mo detainees who've been, you know, repatriated to other countries and then they're interviewed. And it's always worse than like you even imagined. And I think that, look, number one, the excesses of those early years of the war and terror are astonishingly horrific and like a horrible chapter in our history. These were literally authorized tactics, you know. And part of, and that leads to the question of, you know, I often wonder, like, could we or should we have done more in the Obama years to hold people to count, to be more transparent about this? You know, the legal argument that ultimately Obama was persuaded by is if, if like the leadership of the Bush administration literally signed off on these tactics, prosecuting the people who carried them out, like in the prison cells,

was, you know, a difficult precedent to set because you're holding people accountable for the orders they were following, which is obviously always a complicated thing. But when you read this, the sadism and excess of it makes you question that decision again. Truly sadism.

And I do think, look, it's shameful that we've kind of moved on. Gimaud's still open. What the hell is it doing there? Like, you know, everybody got to dunk on Obama for not being able to close it because Congress tied his hands and then Trump obviously wasn't going to do it. How long are we going to keep this prison where we tortured all these people and it's a symbol for all this to the rest of the world open? We may have moved on as most Americans, but like, I tell you, the rest of the world, like, made some serious decisions about what kind of superpower America was based on these things. And we've not reckoned with it.

And so I think that one of the things that's going to have to happen at some point and it probably won't. But is some kind of like, almost like truth commission? Like there has to be a public accounting of what happened. You know, in part as an accountability measure, but in part to make sure it never happens again, you know? I mean, I just, what are we doing to learn from this? We're just looking away from it. I mean, that's my impression. Yeah, and just wrapping these, you know, Gitmo detainees, guilty or not in this sort of like Kafka-esque, you know, bureaucratic nightmare where they can't even have a trial for decades.

This was 20 years ago. I mean, like not, you know, this is, we just passed a 9-11 anniversary 20 years. I mean, how long, how, like, this is insane. Like, like, these people have been in this legal morass. It just shows you how much we lost our way there, you know. And it shows you, again, like Bush, like Trump rightly, you know, tracks a lot of tension. Like, the Bush years, especially that first Bush, term. Yeah, pretty bad. Not a high point. I mean, he hangs out Ellen and Jerry Jones's box and that's

great. But like this guy, you know, let's not figure what happened. Speaking of people who lost their way, let's shame some people who visited Saudi Arabia. So that's fun. Every year, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund hosts this big conference. It's called Davos in the Desert. That's what the cool kids say. Davos in the Desert. It attracts lots of politicians. Boy, that sounds like, yeah. That's terrible. Politicians and CEOs who desperately want Saudi investment dollars show up to this thing, and they genuflect before a sadist. In 2018, Davos in the Desert came only 20 days after the Saudi government executed a U.S.-based journalist named Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

You've heard us talk about that many times. That horrific murder of a journalist caused many but not all of the big name. Participants in the Davos in the Desert conference that year to drop out. Big shots at J.P. Morgan, Soft Bank, Goldman Sachs, Uber, Ford, leaders at the IMF World Bank, other governments, they all canceled. This year's Davos in the Desert was last week. And an excellent NPR reporter named David Gora tweeted out a thread of all the morally bankrupt business vampires who came crawling back to suckle at the Saudi spigot. So here's a few names that are worth knowing. This guy, Ray Dalio, a big investor, CEOs of BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman

The insufferably named Lady Lynn Forrester Dorothschild was back. This is a person who took it upon herself to defend capitalism after the financial crisis. And she goes to the Saudi government. The U.S. government sent the Deputy Secretary of Commerce. That's like, I don't know. Frankly, that's kind of insulting to the Saudi. So, like, that's fine. The former Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin showed up.

He gave a speech. Remember Steve Mnuchin's raising a big investment fund with mostly Gulf money. CEO of Carnival Cruises was there. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was there. Journalists from CNN, foreign policy, and Euro News, moderated panels. I don't know how you could talk into that. Check out David's full Twitter thread if you want to see all the names. Then anyone you want to single out in name and shame.

I just want to quickly point out, these are mostly billionaires. You know, these are people who, if they never got another dollar from the Saudi government, would still be on private jets and houses in the Hamptons and etc. I'm not that I would excuse it if they were poor, but I think does speak to you how utterly depraved you have to be to show up at this thing. I mean, how much is enough for these people? Like, to your point about them already being billionaires,

like, you know, like this is so much the problem in the world today, is it like if you are always going to choose, like, profit over any other value, you whatsoever, they're always going to be Maham bin Salman's who chop up journalists and invade their neighbors and cause humanitarian crises and kidnap prime ministers of other this guy's rap sheet. We never even mentioned that one. He kidnapped the prime minister's left. This guy's rap sheet is so long.

And these guys go over there and suck up to him. And, you know, shame on these people. Like they're also the kind of people that probably sit at their book parties in the Upper East side and of New York. in D.C. and lament the challenges to democracy. You are the problem. Like, you are the reason there's a problem with democracy. If there weren't people that went over and grovel before autocrats who chop up journalists, maybe things would be looking a little better for democracy. Because guess who else is over there? All the Trump people, the people, the very same people that,

you know, you say, well, you know, gosh, this is such a problem that we need to save democracy in America. Well, guess where, like, what happened to that crew? They're all, like, becoming billionaires themselves over there at the same conference at the Davos in the desert is not as if the first Davos wasn't bad enough and you're sucking up to a sociopath yeah lady lynn forster de rostra was a huge bill and hillary clinton supporter was so pissed that the uh clinton lost to Obama in the primary that she switched over to support mccain and then other republicans but like again this during the really cost us a lot of votes after the financial crisis the lady delin do davos after the financial crisis She decided that Occupy Wall Street was like really awful and that she needed to defend capitalism.

One way you could defend capitalism is not by trying to get money from homicidal maniacs. Like show the world that there's a line, that capitalism can be okay with some sort of framework and boundaries. But when you're like groveling to Mohamed bin Salman, you know, Occupy Wall Street seems pretty reasonable. Well, the other thing that these people like to talk about is like how capitalism allows people to come up from the bootstraps and and fosters competition. What, what, where in that equation does a sociopath with a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund? What, is that fair competition? Yeah. Because he happens to have some dirt.

What, put straps. Yeah, like with oil in it, that, that allows him to put on. I mean, I just, this should get more attention. And because like, these are the kinds of things that, like, we're sitting in this country, debating, you know, the school curriculum in Loudoun County. this is what's actually happening in the world. Like, this is the story of how people are getting screwed and why democracy is in recession,

and why, by the way, a lot of people feel grievances against the elite and the establishment. And yet, like, this is not what we're talking about, you know? It's just the worst. Yeah. The worst. And by the way, because if Democrats were smart, right, like, you would be going after.

Of course. Mnukin. Like, what would Republicans be doing if the roles were reversed? And you could point to the fact that like all these senior Republican types are going over there and bootlicking the Saudis to line their pockets for their corrupt funds. The reason Democrats can't do it is because too many of our own donors and people go to the same shit and do the same stuff. So, you know, you don't hear word one about it. Nope. Nope.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to run an ad about Steve Mnukin like sitting over there? Sorry, you're looking. It would be nice. I go on. I'll stop. I hear you. I hear you. Okay.

So here's another issue that's annoying. A report issued by the Director of National Intelligence says about the lab leak theory in COVID-19 origin says we still don't know conclusively whether COVID came from natural animal to human transmission or some sort of leak from a lab. So thanks for that one. Multi-billion dollar intelligence agencies. Yeah. It's good stuff. I mean, you know, sometimes they don't have the answer. Sometimes it's just like we should know, you know.

Something tells me on the outline. It's not the last issue where that might be. No. Okay. Here's another mystery that no one seems to be able to solve Ben, Havana syndrome. So Havana syndrome. We talked about it before on the show. It's this mysterious, sometimes debilitating ailment that was first reported in Cuba back

in 2016, 2017. Today, there have been over 200 reported cases among American government officials and places around the world, including Washington, D.C. There are also been people in foreign governments who've said they had symptoms. Some in the U.S. government, especially the intelligence community, have settled on a theory that Havana syndrome is a result of an attack of some sort, most likely by the Russians. Congress passed a law to provide compensation to the victims of Havana syndrome. But there are also many people

who don't believe that there is one thing causing Havana syndrome, and they believe that it is certainly not an attack or certainly not proven to be an attack. So we've talked about, you know, this issue before, but we wanted to outline the skeptical case because there have been some, you know, really hard pushback, especially on Twitter, very caustic in some cases, to recent reporting about Havana syndrome. The thing is worth airing. So scientists in particular have pushed back on the idea that a sonic weapon or a microwave weapon could create the kind of brain injuries that we're talking about or that it could somehow

like penetrate the brain and injure someone without harming surrounding tissue. Some scientists believe the most likely explanation is what's called a mass psychogenic illness, which is when people get sick because they think they were exposed to something. You know, these same scientists point out the fact that there was this sound that was initially thought to be a sonic weapon attack. That turned out to be really loud type of cricket. Now, that doesn't mean like the victims aren't suffering real symptoms, but it just means the causes a mix of factors.

One neurologist quoted in this one times piece referred to the illness as being like depression or a migraine, they happen in that gray area where the mind and the brain intersect. So, Ben, the New Republic had a good piece about why I think it's important to pump the brakes a bit here. Trump's former defense secretary called Havana syndrome an act of war. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is working on sanctions. The Trump administration pulled everybody out of Cuba years ago, just blaming the Cubans for what happened.

No one, I think, thinks that's the case now. Marco Rubio accused skeptics of being influence agents paid by foreign government. So, again, obviously, I don't know what happened. I don't want to, like, upset any victims or doubt their suffering. But I do think this admonition to everybody to say, hey, stop saying this some sort of Russian attack or else there's going to be a response is probably well taken. Well, Dr. Rubio begs to differ. Dr. Rubio thinks I'm a noted neurologist, you know. Yeah, look, I think it's right to balance this with skepticism in the sense that clearly, you know, you know, I'm a noted neurologist.

Yeah. I think it's right to balance this with skepticism in the sense that clearly. there are some people that that were injured, right? Like, you know, then there's a larger, larger pool of people that may not have been, right? And there's two things that I would just highlight from the skepticism case, positing that I do think something happened to some people and that the Russians are the most likely culprit. But one is I write about this in after the fall, my book, I learned of this for the first time when I was in Cuba in July of 2017. I saw a friend from the embassy.

He's like, yeah, these weird things are happening. And then, like a few days later, I got violently ill. I had, I was sick to my stomach. I had like ferocious headache. Think of your food poisoning and hangover all rolled into one and it lasted like two days. And it was probably food poisoning, right? But there was like this part of me that was kind of like, well, I'm staying in a government hotel and the Russians don't like me. and and I could in my worst moments lying there sweating this out talk myself into like,

hey, did something just happen to me, you know? And that's not to impugn people. It's just that when you hear that there's bad things happening to people and who are serving in diplomatic posts and that these are the symptoms like headaches and, you know, vertigo type symptoms, you get those symptoms and you might think that's that, right? So that's one thing that bears in mind. The worst part of getting sick is when you don't know what it is, you're freaking out. Your web-M-Ding and everything says you have cancer AIDS and you're terrified.

Yeah. And you're in a place like Cuba where, like, you can get food poisoning or, you know, and this has happened, obviously, in a lot of places around the world. I think the second thing that's right to tap the brakes is, like, the Russia, this is the same thing that happened in all the Russia stuff, the Russia investigation stuff, is that there's a core of, like, very true concerns that doesn't mean that we have to, like, hang every ornament on the tree. and say it's Russia and you know like let's establish what we know and and try to work out from there what to do about it you you can feel like what's so interesting about Rubio is that the same guy who was using this to like close our embassy in in Havana a few years ago is now like using this as part of his anti-Russia politics that that doesn't seem like someone who's being informed by like the science of this no he's pathologically stupid yeah well they're set to

it's a problem yeah yeah so you know look I think you're notice I don't want to anyone listening who may have suffered from this or know someone who like to feel like we're doubting them. We are not. No, we're not. We're not. But I do think if the U.S. government is going to respond, it should be based on real hard evidence.

It doesn't sound like anyone thinks we're there. Yeah. Ben, a few quicker things to sort of close out the show. This might be the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. And I barely understand it. It's so stupid. The Federal Election Commission has ruled that foreign donors can finance U.S. referendum campaigns. So current law says foreign nationals can't donate to U.S. candidates or political.

action committees. Make sense to me. These idiots the FEC now seem to think it's fine if some foreign corporation or some foreign billionaire finances like a ballot initiative in California, I think. Here's an example of why it could be problematic. Axios mentioned this example. In Maine, there's a Canadian power company that is paying to promote a ballot initiative to get, I think, the state to pay for more power lines. That seems like a huge conflict of interest that should not be allowed. They tried to pass a bill to prevent that from happening. The governor of veto did. The good news is that states can ban these kinds of donations, but like, what the hell? This is insane. How is this happening? Yeah, I don't know how this happening. And like this reinforces,

this is not like, you know, we had 15 years ago, like publicly financed elections in this country, right? Remember McCain-Feing? Yeah, yeah. And then Citizens United gets rid of that. And I think one of the underappreciated problems in our democracy is like all. the sets of money flooding in politics, dark money flooding in politics, and foreign money flood. Remember when Obama stood up in the State of the Union and said there's going to be foreign funding for elections and in like Scalia's like, no, there won't. That's a lie or something. And it's like, and here we are like 10 years later talking about like foreign corporations could finance self-interested referenda in American states. That is insane. The FEC should not approve this.

They should replace the FEC commissioners who did. Like we need to turn the tide on. Just across the board, this kind of lack of regard for who's financing elections and campaigns and politics in this country. Run the most jingoistic campaign against us you possibly can. Accused Democrats of accepting donations from, I don't know, name some boogeyman country. But yeah, we should ban this. Yeah. How is possible? Yeah, this is crazy.

Another one. Last week we talked about Boston Celtic Center and former guests on the show, Anas Cantor, his criticism of the Chinese government for its policy in Tibet and for the genocide against the Uyghurs. that advocacy online did not go over well in Beijing. Streams of Celtics games are now blocked in all of China. Well, Ennis tripled down over the weekends, tweeting, the genocidal Chinese government and the insecure tyrant behind it, all Xi Jinping must not be allowed to host the upcoming Winter Olympics say no to Beijing 2022. So this is a great story about Ennis just being like a full-throated advocate for human rights

and a ballsy one at that. But also, this is, we're going to hear a lot more. This is coming. Beijing 2022 boycott is coming. Is he getting minutes? I don't know. Because you're the cell. Like I, because I haven't watched.

Yeah. Like, he was kind of not getting minutes and I was curious about that. But like he clearly is just, you know, there's a good joy in his trolling on this that, that, that, that, that, that, you know, it doesn't feel like. I mean, he's saying things often that everybody knows to be true, that, but. that certain people never say, right? And so he's kind of testing the limits of free speech, really. But I think you're right to home in on this one point, which is it like, this Olympics question is not going away.

Not going to. And it's very reasonable. And I don't see how the momentum doesn't build towards a boycott. You know, like it's hard to see given a lot of the, given the reality of what's happening to the Uyghurs and giving people standing up. expressing their views like this, it's going to be a hard case to make against the boycott absent China taking some corrective action, which there's about a 0% chance that they will. So I think this is going to be with us.

Yeah, I think it's going with us too. I went to ESPN to see how Ennis is doing in terms of minutes. It looks like averaging two points a game, maybe getting like five minutes. He's getting a run. Yeah, you're going to run. The real upside here was there was a video that just live played with Ennis Cantor. and another teammate teaching Taco Fall how to swim. Taco Fall, for listeners who don't know, is, I think, 7-7.

So it's very funny. That's good. That's good. Watching them swim in the pool. Anyway, enough basketball from us. Ben, the Bravo series, the Real Housewives, is coming to Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. I wonder if the cast will include Princess Latifah al-Makhtum, the Emir of Dubai's

daughter. She was the one who tried to escape from Dubai in 2018 and then was kidnapped. by some like commando unit when she was on a boat and forcibly returned to the country. Or maybe it will include some domestic workers who are trafficked to the UAE and now are treated as slave labor. I'm guessing there won't be any gay cast members since homosexuality is illegal and consensual sodomy can get you 10 years in prison in the UAE. Also, you can't drink alcohol. So what the fuck are they going to do?

What is Bravo thinking? I mean, you're not going to have the rosé's. subplots here. Real Housewives Shin-Jang. Yeah, I mean, what you've seen in the past is like a lot of money spent by the Emirates to almost subsidize some of this stuff. Like, in full disclosure, I'm an MSNBC contributor, but CNN, there were some stories recently about like they have a partnership with the Emirates to kind of promote the expo that they're hosting. But in some of this is CNN just as a journalistic partner for the expo, that's fine, right? But then there's like all these stories and packages about come visit the Emirates because it has it.

Or did you see the thing online of like the tour of that hotel suite that is like the like in, I think it's in Dubai. It's like gold leaf. Yeah, gold leaf everything. So they're selling this kind of luxury brand. Yes. Yes. That is like, you know, what's kind of sad about it to be fair to the Emirates is like it's kind of an American. Look, it's like, look how rich and successful these people are and how pristine their lives are.

Just don't pay attention to all this stuff happening over here, you know. Awful. But I hope, I'm so glad you did what you did because it's like every time you see Dubai, Abu Dhabi, just remember all those other things you just talked about. Built on slave labor. Yeah. Gay people can't live. They'll get thrown in jail. Critics of the government are hounded.

There have been foreign, like, Ph.D. students in prison because they didn't like. the research they were doing. So it has like the appearance of this kind of modern, almost progressive society and then underneath the hood, it's not exactly what's happening. Bad idea, Bravo. Ben, did you notice that Facebook changed its name last week to meta? I noticed. Catch this. Great rollout. Very successful rollout. I watched a chunk of that event. You planned a few rollout, Sami. Do you ever have one that clung to like quite like that? It landed. Yeah, it was lots of, it was hours of just like painfully awkward hand-talking. Here's a funny story. So the BBC reported on the fact that meta sounds like the Hebrew word for dead.

So Twitter users in Israel have been having a lot of fun with that. There we go. I mean, like, that's, I mean, I, I did. It's too good. You know what we may have figured out? What? It may be hell. Oh, that's good.

Like hell may actually be Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse. Oh, yeah. Like if you're bad and you do bad things in life and you die, you're just stuck. may just float into some room with Mark Zuckerberg's apparition talking to you about how cool his new gadgets. It's like poltergeist. Yeah, yeah. He's going to the TV. That's actually, like, that's too real.

So this BBC story mentioned some past translation errors by companies. Here's a few favorites. When KFC went to China in the 1980s, their motto, finger-licking good was translated into Mandarin as, eat your fingers off. That was going. Rolls-Royce had to change the name of a car called the Silver Mist. because in Germany, the name translated to silver excrement, like that one. Nokia's Lumiaphone was a misfire in Spain because it translated to prostitute in some dialects. And the Honda Fitta had to change its name because it translated to a vulgar name for vagina in Swedish.

So corporate branding, it's getting dicey. Here I thought our pronunciations are bad. You can do a lot worse. You could do a lot worse. Last topic before we get to Kevin Rudd. the Biden administration delayed, can we get some spooky sort of war of the world's sound underneath this, please, thank you. The Biden administration delayed the public release of thousands of documents that pertained to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So Biden's team cited delays in the declassification review process that were caused by the pandemic.

Trump also delayed the release of these documents back in 2017. understandably, Ben, this has gotten a lot of people wondering about whether there's government cover up. Big chunks of the country already don't believe that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman. It's not likely that there's a smoking gun file about to be released that says, hey, the CIA did it or whatever. But I do think scholars think there could be information about, you know, the government's efforts to stop organized crime or the CIA's failed covert actions in Cuba, trying to assassinate Castro, or whether Lee Harvey Oswald had ties to, you know, CIA-backed, exiled groups. You got any theories on what might be in here or whether it's reasonable to say that all these years later, there could be some information that could actually be harmful of national security? This seems absurd to me. It seems totally

absurd to me. And people always ask me, like, did you, like, figure out when you're in government, like, you know, the two things people always ask about, like, Area 51 in the Kennedy assassination. And the moon landing. And unfortunately, like, I had no... Mostly Emily Fabrow. Yeah. I should have gone over and read the files. But, look, the amount of time that's passed, it's insane to claim, you know, this is 60 years ago in a totally different context of a Cold War.

All the people involved are dead. Like, I have no possible reason I can think of. There's clearly some shit that went down in Mexico. Like, I'm not, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but just like, who... who he was associating with and and a lot of theories were just they were embarrassed that they didn't you know roll up this guy given everybody he was associating with i will tell you i used to like have these crazy things with the cubans when i was negotiating with the cubans particularly at the beginning because they would always assert as if it was a fact well look well we know that you know

uh that lehar v oswald was working with these cuban exile groups and that's you know and and so it was always weird because they they they you got a guy i was like yeah i was like you want to give me some information here. There's a paper on this? But, you know, I, I, the serious point I make is that, like, not releasing this information, like, conspiracy theories are very destructive. I mean, like, today. Dude, totally.

There are a bunch of fucking lunatics in Dallas, like, waiting for JFK Jr. Literally. To turn up at the spot of his father's assassination. Hundreds of people. Now, that's because those people are insane and Facebook locks them in kind of strange echo chambers of conspiracy theory. but it's also kind of tied to this, like, you know, paranoid mind that was fueled by the lack of transparency around the JFK. So the point is that the national security people of which, you know, I used to be one, make these arguments about the cost of the revelations of certain sources, methods, tactics, even if they're in the past.

There is a cost to not being transparent. The cost is insane distrust of government and conspiracy theory. Yeah. And just release everything already. Like just put it all out. No redactions. Like what are we doing here? This is insane.

Yeah, we are giving, look, we can make fun of the Q&A. Who are we protecting? Who are we protecting? We're giving them fodder. And you know what? Like Google CoinTel Pro. There's a lot of reasons to mistrust the government to think that we've been lied to. Do you think that there have been cover ups?

I mean, you know, like the U.S. government's done a lot of terrible things over time. And the only way to deal with it is some sort of disclosure, transparency, reconciliation. I mean, look, I will take them at their word that they need to do this declassification review, that that COVID slowed it down. I do not take them. I don't believe for a second that the CIA has real sources and methods concerns besides being worried about feeling embarrassed. What are this statute of limitations on like, I mean, it just, it boggles a mind to think that something in 1963 is still a sense of national space. And like all the people who live through this trust. will never see the truth.

Yeah. Because they're all going to be dead by the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. It's absurd. I also always think about living in that period of time. Like 63.

JFK is assassinated. And then 68, you have King and Bobby Kennedy. I mean, I can imagine. I would never. If I'd live through that, I would never, like. The lies about Vietnam. No wonder we'd ever like Ronald Reagan. Like everybody else is just like, fuck this.

Yeah. This place is in nightmare. Give you that happy talk actor guy. He'll tell me it's going to be okay. Or just say sat it out. I mean, it's just, it's insane to me that that happened. And, um, and eerie that it happened. And like, yeah, people are right to ask a lot of questions about it.

Release the documents. Just release the documents. Like, we're just giving Alex Jones like 700 more shows. Yeah, like two more Oliver Stone movies and maybe we'll figure it out, you know. Okay, well, I think we solved that one. See, I did it. Uh, when we come back, we will have our interview with former prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd.

We're going to talk climate. We're going to talk about China, these scary reports that a big Chinese real estate developer could go under and that could impact the global economy. So stick around for all of that. We are thrilled to welcome back to POTS of the World, the former Prime Minister of Australia. Kevin Rudd to the show. Thank you so much for doing it. Great to see it. Good to be.

Looking forward to our conversation. So, Prime Minister, I know our producers promised you that we'd spend the bulk of this interview talking about whether or not. Scott Morrison pooped his pants out of McDonald's in New South Wales back in 1997. But I was hoping to start by asking you about climate change and the summit that's happening right now because I believe that's important as well. You have been to one of these big summits. Most of our listeners have not. Can you help them understand what happens behind the scenes and what you hope will come out

of COP 26, the event that's happening this week? Yeah. Well, thank you to your producers. They are texting you. you're like, what are you talking about? We regard all matters concerned in McDonald's in Australia as a national security matter. And we're not able to comment further. But if you've got some time after, I've got some great stories.

Okay, good. Look, yeah, I've been to a few conferences of the parties over the years as head of government. In fact, I began at Bali, which is way back in the Mesolithic period, a couple of years before Copenhagen. And these were the days of the Bush administration, when frankly, United States is in the same sort of recalcitrant modes that then went into under the Trump residency. And so my first insight in terms of how you unlock momentum at these conferences

is steeped in Bali. And then, of course, what I observed and experienced in Copenhagen after that. I think it's around two or three things. When people listening to this podcast are trying to make sense of Glasgow, you can look at all the, as it were, the public excitement of the external protest movements in and around a conference of the parties, tens of thousands of people, each legitimately trying to make their point about what needs to be done to save the planet. That's important.

It places some pressure on the negotiating process. It's a good thing. But it's not where the actual action is. The second thing to focus on is what actually happens on the conference floor, which is what most people see happening on their screens, which is the formal declaration of national positions. That's underway at the moment. President Biden's spoken.

The Australian Prime Minister Morrison has spoken and said nothing. And of course, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has done the same. It's useful to actually get a clear idea what the formal positions are. But then the third element is, as you all know, and this is the critical one, is what happens in the green room, what happens in the negotiating room,

among the principal countries. And certainly, having been in Copenhagen, when President Obama arrived, and I've been urging him privately to get on a plan and get to Copenhagen, was to unlock what was then, frankly, a locked process amongst the principal negotiating states.

So it's really the dynamics of what happens in that smaller group, which unlocks the momentum or non-momentum for the rest of the conference. And now we want to get to Australia's pledge, but hearing you say that, are you concerned as a China watcher? And you and I have talked a lot about China and climate change over the last year or two, that Xi Jinping isn't there? Because obviously it was the U.S. and China making an agreement heading into Paris

that kind of unlocked the Paris Agreement. How big a deal is it that he's not there? and what do you attribute that to as a China Watcher? Look, I don't overstate the importance of these non-physical attendance. There's a reason for that, because it's a Marxist-Leninist system who are absolutely paranoid about the physical health of their leaders. Therefore, when the Chinese would look at the normal COVID security arrangements in Glasgow, they're likely to freak out using Chinese polypureos.

standards of how you look after the leadership. I think that would have been the dominant consideration. Secondly, their principal negotiator, Shia Genoa, and many of us know of them, here for more than a decade since we crossed swords on many occasions back in Copenhagen and have become good friends. Shea has been around long enough in the system to know exactly what his negotiating parameters are, and he would have had direct exchange with Chinese leadership before leaving about how far he could go. So I don't have a problem with that score. What I do have a problem with,

though, Ben, is frankly the desultory nature of the Chinese NDC. That's the nationally determined contribution, which frankly doesn't move the dial much. It's simply an aggregation of what China has said so far it's already doing. It's not a reflection of new levels of ambition through until 2030. That's what has me more concerned. What about the Australian And so we've covered this, our friends over at a Rational Fear podcast in Australia. We helped them promote their billboards with creative images of kangaroos with their tails on fire. Burning kangaroos, yeah. I guess that helped persuade Scott Morrison to go.

But then his commitment left a lot to be desired. Where do you see Australia in the equation right now as whether or not they're playing as constructive roles they should? Well, Morrison and the Conservatives here have been dragged kicking and screaming into a minimalist rhetorical commitment to carbon neutrality by 2050. And I think there's a reason why that's occurred, getting your billboards up in Times Square and the rest of it, frankly, it all plays back into the domestic marketplace here. And a whole bunch of, shall we say, socially progressive but financially conservative members of Morrison's political party, that affects them, particularly in inner city areas right across Australia. But the second big one, Ben, is this. Murdoch, who has viciously campaigned against any form of climate action against my government, regarded it as a core plank. to vote us out of office back into 2013. Murdoch, literally a month ago,

has his own Damascus road conversion, so-called, whereby, on the front of his papers in this country, at least, they are now also in support of carbon neutrality by 2050. That was to give Morris and political cover to move to that position, but on the reality of a roadmap to get to 2050 or a serious and robust commitment for 2030 from Australia, we see very little action. So I do fear both at the Conservatives level and certainly the Murdoch level, it's one giant exercise in greenwashing.

I also saw that Morrison's a conservative party is starting to push for voter ID laws in Australia. My questions are two part one. I read that and instantly felt anxious that America might. be exporting another terrible product to Australia. I'm wondering if the Genesis, if they might be linked. And two, what you think the impact might be on the Australian electorate, how this might, you know, change voter patterns, et cetera. Yeah, it's a big one here. I mean, I'm a deep fan of the United States, and there are certain things that seriously freak me out as a friend of America as well that you guys get up to. And the voter suppression laws, as I would describe them, are part of that.

I think we need to understand that the Australian Conservatives, the Republican Party in the United States and the British Conservatives at a staff level work really closely, including their key political and ideological operatives. So these things are shocked around among them in terms of how you ultimately succeed in getting away with what I think is the general political project, which is how do we convince, 50% of the country to vote for a set of politicians and policies, which again, to damage the interests of working people, working Americans, working Australians, working Brits. And they will use any device known demand, including this one. It's currently before the Australian House of Representatives in the Senate. We have an election due in the first five months of next year. So it's going to be make or break literally in the next couple of weeks.

And it really does sit in the balance of the moment with one or two votes in the Senate in terms of whether this thing is going to get passed or not. So I wanted to also get your expertise on China on a different matter that we haven't taken up here because we wanted to have the right voice to unpack it a little bit. And I saw your writing about Evergrand. And I just, you know, for the layman listener here, given your vantage point again, looking at China, working obviously leading Asia society policy, how big a deal is this? How worried should people be? How should someone who doesn't quite understand

what's happening, but has seen some headlines about this? How are they to make sense of it? Yeah, it's a really important question, Ben. There's two elements we should look at. One, what's Xi Jinping doing to the private sector, period? And secondly, what about systemic financial risk with very large real estate and financial conglomerates, getting themselves into all sorts of default territory. On the first one, Xi Jinping really since 2017, has been progressively moving the centre of gravity and Chinese domestic economic policy towards the left, that is, away from the market, back towards the party's state, across a whole range of policy measures, whether it's Communist Party committees and private firms, the ideological

mission of state-owned enterprises or the new crackdown on Chinese billionaires. So there's a whole, as it were, new ideological push towards the left, which I think has profound consequences in terms of long-term private sector confidence in China, given that the private sector represents 60% of Chinese GDP, most of China's innovation, most of its tax growth, practically all of its employment growth. So this ideological experiment, which is gaining momentum in China, the question I have analytically is how much will it take off the top of China's normal economic growth rates? So my gut tells me that this is going to start to cost in terms of real growth levels

of the Chinese economy. At the second level, which is systemic financial risk, most Chinese leaders wake up each morning and have what I've described as their Lehman's moment frisson. That is, look at what happened in the United States in 2008, when Lehman's went down the gurgle, and then it brought the US financial system to its knees. And frankly, the rest of us around the world and spent years, including President Obama, myself in office, trying to hold the whole show together, not just in terms of financial markets, but the real economy. The Chinese have learned from that. So when you see Evergrand, which has got $300 billion in liabilities, which is not small,

then the bottom line is it's the Chinese are not going to allow it to default. They're going to not allow it to go bankrupt. I think you're going to have an orderly dispersal of its assets to various other entities within the Chinese property and financial system. so that the, as it were, the foundations of the overall financial system are not undermined. But at the same time, this continued correction against debt levels in the Chinese property sector will also create new headwinds against China's overall growth levels, given that a huge slice of Chinese GDP growth comes out of the property sector as well.

Scary. Yeah. I mean, one last thing for me is just, so we've talked. climate, we talked China, we talked right-wing politics. So those are all things that the world is contending with. Looking at Glasgow, looking at the U.S.-China relationship where it is, China has its own preoccupations, what is your optimism level, let's just take the climate issue in particular, the capacity of the U.S. and China and other countries to do what's necessary in the coming years here.

Look, I'm always a glass half full guy, although I began to question whether the glass had finally cracked during the Trump. That's true. And just being pulverized into little silicon chips or something. But the bottom line is I'm probably about 55% on the positive side of ledger. Why do I say that? A, Biden's in office. UNF, Triple C hasn't been killed. The multilateral process continues.

We can continue to bend the arc of history towards a better climate outcome. And the fact that the United States has announced its position for 2050 and 2030, which was unthinkable under a Trump administration, this is pretty important. Obviously, President Biden's run into all this, let me use the technical term,

congressional crap, in trying to get this thing, his package of $1.7 trillion through, which would be a massive injection to renewable energy industry in your country. That's a disappointment. But, you know, as Bismarck said, of politics, like making German sausages never a process to be observed closely. And something will come out of this. I think the second one on the China front is the Chinese

will act and continue to act increasingly decisively, as I read carefully the elements of the 14th five-year plan produced in March this year. And it's not because they love you or they love me or anybody else. They figured out through their own national scientific consensus that unless they do this themselves, they're going to fundamentally undermine their own economic and environmental future and their aspirations to become a global great power by mid-century. The final thing I've I'd really like to see come out of it, Ben, is this. One of the great achievements of Obama and the team in that period of 2014-15 was the establishment of the US-China Climate Working Group.

Sounds like a piece of techno-talk, but the bottom line is it became a piece of essential machinery in the US-China climate collaborative arrangements, which produced a whole lot of sector-specific work between the two countries and the two systems, which creates the, as it were, the nuts and bolts of bringing down greenhouse gas emissions further, whether it's the energy sector, it's the transportation sector, whether it's on methane, whether it's on reforestation or deforestation. This sectoral work, if we can breathe a new bunch of oxygen into the lungs of it, in that reconstituted working group, that will be a good outcome coming out of Glasgow as well.

Well, we'll all hope for that. Prime Minister Red, thank you so much for joining the show. Everyone should check out your books, the PM years, the Case for Courage. Both are excellent. And we've talked about them before on the show. So go back to the back episodes. That catalog is great. We whack the Murdox a bunch, too.

It's fun. Anyway, thank you so much. Case for Courage wax the Murdox. I've got a new one coming out early next year, which is called the avoidable war. There we go. China States. So that'll be out in about April.

So that's why my head's, his turn white, completely, as I've been writing in the last six months. Excellent. Well, let's hope we avoid that war. Yeah.

I don't know to do that one. All right. Thanks, guys. How we going? Thanks to Prime Minister Rudd for joining the show. Ben, I made the mistake of looking at Twitter. Oh, no.

Yeah, glance. Right before the outro. And it seems like people are freaking out. So that sucks. I will say that creedids lost by how many points in 2009? Like it was double digits, I think, or close to it. And Barack Obama was handled to re-elected, although that was when we didn't quite have this total sociopath running the Republican Party

preparing to run from president again. But, yeah, it would not be great. You know, we usually lose these off-year Virginia races. You know, right now it's 50. percent in 55 44 yonken that's not good you know my concern is about 2022 less than great using a house i you know my concern is also that um you know yonken it feels like in in to connect it to the world though issues you know like the the guy who is running as the leader of a base of people that are like kind of far right nationalist,

but throws on a fleece and is a businessman? He tuned to the right frequency. It's a dangerous. Yeah, it's kind of dangerous, right? Like they may have hacked something here that like, it's not my hot take. It's just kind of like. That's my hot anxiety. Yeah, it's hot anxiety.

Yeah, me too. Me too. Is that this is like a model that can be replicated in congressional races and in other countries too frankly where what we've seen in the past is like if you have like the completely objectional you know nutcase you know that's one thing but you know sometimes you get the guy in the fleece yeah sometimes you get the guy in the fleece who by the way worked at the freaking carlal group probably they probably had like a sponsored tent at davos oh absolutely you know probably given out like the old fash you know they probably merch little bone sauce carlyle merch out

over there oh god remember when the carlough group was like the the boogie man of the democrats Yeah. Why was that? Yeah. Our like super awesome new producer, Haley Muse is like looking at me like... Wrap it up. How old are you guys? Like the car... Tommy, remember in 2003 when the Carlisle group was like...

MTV played videos. MTV to play. All right. That's all we got. Thanks again, Mr. Rudd. And we'll see you next week when, you know, maybe every Democrat will be pooping their pants like Scott Morrison and McDonald's. Or there'll be some wonderful

Steve Cornacky comeback. Yeah, rabbit out of a hat. Yeah, we'll say helpful. We'll say helpful. By the time this drops. Yeah, I'm having a drink tonight. Yeah, I'm having a drink either way. Okay. See it.

Potsave the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes

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