Pod Save the World - Trump’s Self-incriminating Audio

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Ben and Tommy talk about the fallout from Wagner Group’s aborted mutiny in Russia, the status of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, new audio of Trump knowingly leaking classified information, why supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are harassing a White House reporter, the fallout from Biden calling Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator, a horrific tragedy that killed hundreds of migrants near Greece and right-wing politics, Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu on trial for corruption, violence in the West Bank, and Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez fails a foreign policy pop quiz. Then Tommy talks to Eben Novy-Williams, a sports business reporter at Sportico, about foreign investment in US sports teams and human rights. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, long time, no see. How you doing? It's been a couple days. It feels like a while ago, though. The coup sorted itself out a little bit faster than people thought. Yeah, the coup kind of tapered out quickly, although there's some weird stuff still happening that I think we will get to today. So, you know, folks who don't know what we're talking about, we recorded a special episode on Saturday about this ongoing Wagner insurrection that was happening in Russia. Today we're going to talk about the latest news there. We'll also talk about. about the latest on Ukraine's counteroffensive, this jaw-dropping new audio tape of Trump leaking classified information in the most brazen way possible. We're going to talk about India exporting its attacks on journalists to the United States, whether Chinese President Xi Jinping is a dictator, the sinking of a boat off the coast of Greece that killed hundreds of migrants. News from Israeli

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's corruption trial and presidential candidate Francis Suarez shows his foreign policy chops Ben. And then I just talked with a reporter, name Evan Novi Williams from Sportico. It's a great news outlet that covers business and sports together. They have the scoop about Qatar, their sovereign wealth fund, buying a piece of three DC-based professional sports teams. And great interview, Ben, but I think sports washing is winning the battleman. Yeah, I mean, we have a pretty good track record of being slightly obsessed with both sports washing and the Wagner group over the last couple years in this podcast. So not sure what that says about us, but at least we're close to this zeitgeist.

Yeah, yeah, some sort of nerdy Cassandra vibes going on. Well, two quick things before we get to the news. So pre-sale tickets to our upcoming Pots of America shows are available to the subscription community. Go to crooked.com slash friends if you want to join. And a big thank you again to the subscribers who's sending questions about Russia that we used in the episode we released on Saturday. Great questions. Really helped us produce the show.

Also, do not miss our excellent podcast, Dreamtown, The Story of Adelanto. It's about weed, corruption, money, and the FBI. There's all kinds of crazy twists and turns. The story includes appearances by Mike Tyson and a Russian oligarch band, so right up your alley. Yeah, seriously. Find Dreamtown, The Story of Adelanto, wherever you get your podcast. That'd be a fun video game. Mike Tyson's punch out with oligarchs.

Yeah, that could be like the hangover before. That's right. All right, let's go to Russia because, you know, on Saturday we released this episode. said about the mutiny that was unfolding, this oligarch name, Yevgeny Prigocin seemingly lost his mind, started marching 25,000 heavily armed private militia members towards Moscow. This was the Wagner group. Progogian eventually stood down after taking a call from Alexander Lukashenko,

the president of Belarus, who offered him exile and amnesty for his fighters. On Moscow, Bella Russian state media reported that Progosin had arrived there. He's in Minsk now, I guess. After initially he seemed to flee Moscow for St. Petersburg, Russian President Vladimir Putin came out of hiding. He did two heavily scripted little media events where he denounced the mutiny, called Progogs in a traitor and held a moment of silence for the Russian military pilots killed in the fighting with Wagner forces.

The Wagner guys shot down, I think, a couple helicopters. Pretty intense stuff. Putin also announced that the Russian state had been funding the Wagner group. That is interesting because until very recently, almost everyone involved with Wagner basically denied its existence. progojin used to sue people for reporting on his connections with Wagner, then it seems increasingly likely that this whole ordeal was not about a Russian military airstrike on Wagner forces, but rather the result of progogian feeling squeezed out of power from Putin's inner circle,

in particular by this Russian defense ministry order that by the end of June, all Wagner forces would have to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense pledging allegiance to the Russian military leadership. Putin supported this plan. The plan basically would have stripped away all of Prugosin's power and gave it to his arch enemy, Sergei Shogu, the defense minister. So, Ben, I'm curious why you think Putin came out and made this announcement about Russia paying the Wagner group. And if there's any other development since we talked Saturday that you think jumped out of you or felt particularly relevant. Well, I think what's clear is that there's this effort now to kind of rewrite the narrative of what happened by Putin. And so,

after this deal was announced shortly before our last podcast, there was this kind of 24 hours where there wasn't much information. Everybody was kind of quiet. Everybody was kind of in ducking cover mode. And then over the course of the last 24 hours, we've seen Putin come out with these statements. We've seen Alexander Lukashenko, the person who was kind of in the middle of, I don't know, negotiating this, or at least being the frontman for the deal that was struck between Progoshin and the Russians, gave like a multi-hour press conference about Max said it was eight hours. I don't know if he was kidding or not.

I was like, it looked brutal. It was quite that long, but it had some serious like Sasha Barron Cohen dictator vibes there. But look, I think what, so what can we learn from the narrative that Putin's trying to put out and what do we think happen? I mean, I think what we can learn from the narrative Putin's trying to put out is he's trying to signal, I'm in charge of all this. I was never really in any peril. I've been in charge all along of the Wagner group. I was the guy paying their bills. I was in charge of this plan to kind of absorb them and integrate them into the Ministry of Defense.

Sure, got a little bumpy there for, you know, the mutiny and military rebellion that the whole world saw for 24 to 48 hours, but kind of nothing to see there, nothing to worry about. Progoshin, he's a traitor. He's kind of on the outs. He's in Minsk. And we're just moving forward. And I see, and that's kind of the narrative that, you know, apparently is kind of filtering out through Russian state television. there's a real problem Tommy, I didn't pause on this and you and I were texting about this but you know

as someone had to kind of do cable news too like there's some people zagging after all the kind of hyperventilating about the coup some people are like well maybe this wasn't that bad for Putin and maybe you know look

this doesn't happen in normal countries like nobody nobody's marched on Washington or Beijing or you know any large functioning country for that matter in recent years And so the bottom line is that Putin's been trying to run this model for a long time that we've talked about where he's got the military, but then he's got Wagner guys, and he's got the Kedirov and the Chechens,

and he's got all these different armed fiefdoms that, you know, when there wasn't a full-scale war, that kind of worked for him because he could use Wagner for some things and he could use the military for others. And not the right hand didn't always know what the left hand was doing, but Putin always knew everything. Well, now, like, that model has kind of failed in Ukraine. You know, the Wagner guys were on the front lines, and they were resenting the MOD. The MOD guys probably didn't like the fact that, you know, there's progosion taking shots at them all the time on Telegram. You had these kind of far-right bloggers that kind of started to go in the progosion camp. And it was just kind of some chaos.

And so they're trying to get their arms around this or trying to absorb Wagner. I think the core question here is very quickly, number one, what's the future of progoshion? He's apparently going to get a military base in Belarus. That seems odd that he'd just be hanging out there, like, right across. Yeah, Porter. Let's see if that happens. Number two, do the Wagner guys actually integrate into the Russian military? It seems like the better fighters in Wagner, not the kind of cannon fodder convict guys,

don't really want to do that. They have a chip on their shoulder, too. So do they lose that fighting force? Do they lose some manpower? Any manpower is going to be a blow to them if it's taken off the battlefield. And then to what extent is Putin's prestige been cut down and not sure? not just inside of Russia, but globally. What does this mean for other people in that system?

Oligarchs, generals, corrupt guys who might have their own daydream plan in their head for a military rebellion down the road. Bottom line is, I think, there's some chaos here that Putin's trying to paper over, and this doesn't look great for him. Yeah, I mean, I think it was David Remnick had a great piece in The New Yorker about when Putin first came into politics, he seemed like a normal guy. He kind of spoke like a gangster. He sounded like someone who like came off the streets. And that made him relatable, which was a sharp contrast with these like decrepit, like literally rotting away Soviet leaders. Now it seems like progoshin's more the man of the people. He is literally on the front lines recording these videos.

He's talking more honestly about the war. He's recruiting in prisons even though he was once a convict. He's getting treated like a celebrity, right? Everyone knows who he is. They're cheering for him. And as you said, he's also tight with this. new generation of military bloggers who are key sources of information about the war for many Russians. Meanwhile, Putin's sitting in these same conference rooms with the same handful of advisors.

He rarely leaves. His propagandists on like RT, the state propaganda networks were all cheering for progoshin, like five days ago. Now they have to turn on him. But they also have to explain why he seems to be getting this kind of sweetheart deal and barely being punished. Like, I don't know. Like, to your point, that's a very delicate dance that Putin is doing here.

And I'm not sure it's really achievable. Yeah, it's a good point from the Remnick piece. And if people want to check out some of the background on Putin's rise to power, we have a good episode in another Russia. The podcast I did was John Namsova. It's kind of about the origin story of Putin. And the thing there is, to your point, Putin was criticizing the conduct of the war in Chechnya. You know, the Russians have been bogged down in this province, breakaway province of Chechnya. And Putin was criticizing politicians and he said he was going to go kill all the Chechens

on literally like he was going to kill them on the shitter. Like that's actually something he said. And so he sounded like Prokotion in these telegram videos. And there is something kind of eerie where now Putin's the establishment. He's got the war that's not going well. And now you've got guys like Progotion taking shots, including shots about the fact that the whole war doesn't make any sense, not just the conflict. of the war. And here's the thing. None of us know exactly what it's like to live in a totalitarian

society like Russia, where there's such information control by the state. I have to think when the narratives change, like, continually, that adds up. There's only so much weight you can put on just, you know, one day this guy, it's like 1984, right? We're at war with one country one day, and then the next day they pretend like that never happened. I mean, Progoshin's a hero one day, then he's a mutineer, you know, like this was, he was going to be detained and he was going to be thrown in prison one day, and then the next day he's like in Minsk and hanging out there. Like there are all these shifts in their own narrative that they're telling themselves. And meanwhile, people are just dying by the thousands in Ukraine.

It's only 16 months into the war. It feels like forever because like we're just not accustomed to wars of this scale, but how long can he sustain not just these casualties, but this disqualities, but this disqualities. function in his own system and these kind of changing stories that he tells his own people, I really do think this guy just is, he's lost his fastball. You know, he doesn't look strong, he doesn't look like he's not, this story he's telling isn't entirely believable. There's clearly more to it. If he lets Progosian live, well, then he looks kind of weak because he, you know, usually kills people like that or they have accidents and they fall off balconies. But if he kills

Pergoshin, I don't know, like he's killing the guy who was committed. the forces that took Bachmoud. Like, there's not like a winning play for him here, you know? Yeah, who seems popular. Ben, speaking of narratives, there was a readout I saw of the Lukashenko progoshin call that was according to the director of the National Library of Belarus. Here's the quote, they immediately blurted out such vulgar things that would make any mother cry.

The conversation was hard. And as I was told, masculine. That was an incredible readout. Like a little dose of toxic masculinity when, uh, Progosion and Lucasenker. I guess those are phone calls, not Zoom. Do that be even funnier if they're like, you know, zooming or video-calling each other? Yeah, because Progosion looks like a vampire from a black and white movie.

And Lucas Schengel looks like a B-List oligarch buffoon. Oh, yeah. Terrible mustache and all. We also learned that U.S. intelligence apparently knew at advance that Progoshin was plotting this uprising. They very quickly leaked that out so they weren't accused of an intelligence failure. But it does sound like the U.S. has had the Wagner group kind of wired for a very one. time. We know that thanks to the Discord leaks, but it was interesting to see that out there. And then President Biden at the same time being like this was an internal problem within the Russian system.

However, you're reading these stories about U.S. intelligence knowing about it. Yeah. And I mean, look, some of that is like the Wagner guys, including Bergosian, were saying this stuff on telling him, kind of threatening this. But clearly they must have seen more advanced planning. Like, it seemed like the Wagner guys were like hoarding more advanced weapons and preparing to do this. And moving stuff around. But I don't know. There wasn't much utility in narrating this thing because I don't think anybody, including Procgrisian, knew where was going.

An important question that the U.S. intelligence community, I'm sure, is thinking about is that they've said now that they're going to try to absorb Wagner guys into the Russian military in this fight in Ukraine. What about all these Wagner guys that are hanging out in Syria and the Central African Republic and Mali? You know, they're all, they have a pretty big footprint globally. and I'm genuinely curious whether those people even can't, like, what do they get absorbed to? Did they get absorbed into the Russian military, the FSB?

Then what does that mean for them? I think Putin liked the cutout, right, of having, you know, it's one thing to have a mercenary force in Central African Republic, you know, running mines and the security for the president of that country. What happens if you're saying, well, now these guys are in the Russian military? Does that mean the Russian military is occupying the Central African Republic? So there's a lot of open questions here. about the future of Wagner and this infrastructure that Putin's built.

Who's running the election interference in 2024? You know, like, you know, Wagner usually ran the troll farms and the disinformation campaigns. Or is someone else going to be in charge of, like, attacking Joe Biden, helping Donald Trump in the next time around? So we'll see. Yeah, he's going to need zip recruiter. Before we go, I do think it's important to point out how Fox News is covering all of this. Here's a quick clip.

The White House wanted to give the media something else to cover. And this is the MO. This is exactly the way they do things. In fact, on Friday, I said, wow, what a blockbuster, what's that message. I'm sure there will be an enormous story over the weekend that the White House is going to be pushing to take this story off of the front page. And sure enough, we've got the State Department drumming up all the drama that took place over the weekend in Russia. So I don't know if it's going to break through. The mainstream media has an excuse again not to cover it.

They're covering everything about Russia and the Wagner group. That was Maria Bartaromo, just living in her little conspiratorial world where we just pull the, the wagtory. your group mutiny lever and that's how you distract from i i assume like a hunter biden thing i don't even know what you're talking about that's what that's what like there's so many things are crazy about that including the fact that that could just be living in some russian created conspiracy theory but it's also like i think it's hunter biden's with taxes or something and and to be so insane to as to believe that whatever weird thing that they're obsessed about with like hunter biden and his like plea deal or his laptop uh from several years ago that that somehow that story is more that's more

important than like 25,000 dudes like shooting down Russian military helicopters and taking over cities in Russia and marching on the Kremlin. Like that that's a strange world that they're living in man. That's a broken brain. You know, there's the five, the five milligram edibles, the 10 sentence you can push it up to 20. Like I don't know what she's taking. Like she's going pretty high. Yeah, she's taking the RFK Jr. brand edibles. You're just fucking whacked out brain leaking 5G Wi-Fi. She's doing those heavy MDMA doses, you know. I don't know what the fuck is going on there. Yeah, be careful with those. You don't want to take too many. Before we move on, we should quickly talk about the Ukrainian counteroffensive because it does seem clear now that this

brief insurrection did not change anything in terms of the military situation. Most of the Wagner forces were already off the battlefield before they like half-heartedly stormed Moscow. But, you know, most analysts agree, I think, Ben, by now that's like we're like two weeks in. The counteroffensive has been incredibly challenging. I think it's going a little slower and a little worse than the Ukrainians had hoped. Remember that Ukraine is basically trying to push down from the Zaporizia region to the Sea of Azov, which would cut off supply lines from Russia to Crimea. But the Russians have had a lot of time to prepare, to lay down mines to fortify their defensive positions. And they have air superiority, which makes attacking very, very hard for Ukraine. So difficult fighting. They've also

lost decent truck hardware, apparently, like something like 10% of the Bradley fighting vehicles that we, the U.S. gave them. Those are those like the, like, the mini-tank things that carry around infantry troops. So long story short, things are going a little worse than Ukraine would like. But again, the counteroffensive is just getting started. Mike Kaufman, who's a very smart military analyst who's quoted everywhere on this stuff, pointed out that during last year's Ukrainian offensive, when they made massive breakthroughs and took back like insane amounts of territory, they were also behind schedule at this stage, like roughly two weeks into it. So just way, way too soon to declare it's over.

even if you're the former interim Zenefits CEO and really know your stuff. You mean like the generals running Twitter these days? The Silicon Valley General. Yeah. The PayPal Generals. Kind of like as qualified as being a hot dog vendor in St. Petersburg, though, I guess, without the 30 years of subsequent mercenary and disinformation operations that progressed out.

You're not wrong. But if you look at the, it's a good point. And we should bear in mind that the real breakthroughs, last time happened for them around like September, you know. So we'll see if they can wear down the Russians. I think what is, you know, undeniably the case is that the Russians have kind of defensively fortified their positions. And so the question is, what's going to prevail? Is it going to be the advanced weaponry that has been provided to the Ukrainians and their capacity to kind of figure out a strategy for retaking territory? Or is it going to be the kind of

defensive posture that the Russians have now taken because they've, you know, they don't say it, but they must have given up on trying to take Keeve and are just focused on holding what they've got. And I think we'll see. I think this is something where people should not be drawing major conclusions until the fall. Yeah, agreed. Okay, let's switch to President Trump because we've talked a lot on the show about how he stole classified information, brought out to Mar-a-Lago, and then lied in an obstructive justice when the Department of Justice tried to get the documents back. it seemed clear, Ben, from the indictment that Trump might be in some big trouble. But then last night, CNN published some audio that made me reconsider my opinion on this whole thing.

Let's listen. He said, he wanted to attack Iran and what. He said it was done by the military given to me. I think we can probably, yeah? We'll have to see. Yeah, we'll try to. Declosified. See, his president, I couldn't have de-liscered.

No, I can't, you know, but this is-classified. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. It's so cool. And you probably almost didn't believe me, but now you believe me. No, I believe it. It's incredible, right? No, it's, bring some coax in, please.

That's my favorite part of the video is he's like, bring some coax in, please. I like it when he's like, this is so cool, you know, like his... This is so cool. Seven-year-old showing his, like, Legos to his friend, you know? Who is this idiot, like, goading him on? I don't know. It's either like a complete fucking moron or it's like some genius at drawing him out into crimes, getting him to say, like, I could have declassified it, but I didn't. So it's secret. I shouldn't be doing this. I'm guilty.

We're no lawyers, but like he is screwed. I mean, this is secret. I can't declassify it. It's off the record. That's not going to help you, pal. How do you defend that? And just to kind of add a couple other angles to this, first of all, when he says, like, as president, I could have declassified this. no he couldn't have like there's he actually has like a poor understanding of this like you can't declassify future war plans like that that has never happened in the history of the United States I mean technically could he make an argument that somehow he could do that when he was present like this clearly won't count as an argument now like maybe but like he just doesn't the fact that he was president of the United States for four years and doesn't understand the difference between like some intelligence document and like an active war plan for

a future scenario, that that's just another crazy component of this. Another piece is like his weird obsession with Iran and what I've, like there's a pretty good, we, you played the Brett Bear clip like a week ago where Brett Bear is kind of like, how come you hired all these people who think you're a fucking moron? Like the question I have for Donald Trump too, to add to this is like, how come you hired all these people that desperately want to go to war with Iran and then or, like, shocked that that might have almost happened. Because literally at the end of his administration, he had lunatics over at the defense department. He had Mike Pompeo, like a guy has been, you know, trying to start a war with Iran for a while. He had people all over his

administration who had, you know, taken the bait of, like, leaving the Iran nuclear deal, making a war more likely. Like, everything Donald Trump did his president kept bringing us to the precipice of a war with Iran. And then he's like shocked that the military even has like a plan for that war. Like like it there's such like internal like logic in, in how he approached that whole issue. And to think that he was like somehow outing the military by revealing they had a war plan. The military like spoiler alert has war plans for like everything. Like that's what they do. They turn out contingency plans for all kinds of shit in the Pentagon. Like what does he think they do over there? You know? It's just nonsense. Although he

Someone just sent me, he was asked about it. He went out and I think Fox News Digital asked about it. And this reporter is like, you're not concerned about these audio tapes with your own voice on them? And he's like, my voice sounded fine. What's the problem? What did I say? We had lots of papers stacked up. You can hear them rustling.

I'm a legitimate. Like, he is just flailing. It is complete nonsense. He knows he is screwed. It's crazy. And like, again, just to hit the sensitivity, this everything in that plan would be, like, incredibly sensitive. Like, what do we know about where the Iranian nuclear program is?

What kind of weapons and hardware would we use as a part of an attack plan? What kind of countries would we ask for permissions? I mean, like, this is the most sensitive shit imaginable in the U.S. government. He's just like, I shouldn't be showing this, but here I am. He's just a fucking idiot. You know, yeah. Tweeting it all out. Tweet through a pal.

We love you. What's the defense, though? Like, if you're his lawyer, like, what are you even saying? They're going to delay and try to get it thrown out. And he's just screwed. I don't know. Look, we'll find out. We'll find out.

but it's just incredible. Why don't we take a quick break? When we come back, we'll talk about Prime Minister Modi and press freedom and whether or not Xi Jinping is a dictator. So stick around for that. With Trex, you get the most of everything. The most wood inspired. The most eco-friendly.

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Visit Trex.com today. Last week, President Biden welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House for a state dinner. Modi also addressed a joint session of Congress. India, obviously, is a huge economy. The Biden team wants their support on a bunch of issues, the war in Ukraine, competition with China, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of people, as we talked about Ben, were pissed that Modi was getting the royal treatment when he fans the flames of Hindu nationalism and doesn't seem to be a big fan of freedom of religion or freedom of speech when it comes from his critics. Luckily, for us, the White House Press Corps got to ask Modi a few questions about his record.

Here's what Sabrina Siddiqui from the Wall Street Journal asked Modi. Mr. Prime Minister, India has long pried in itself as the world's largest democracy, but there are many human rights groups who say that your government has discriminated against religious minorities and sought to, its critics. As you stand, you're in the eastern of the White House where so many world leaders have made commitments to protecting democracy. What steps are you and your government willing to take to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech? So Modi's answer, Ben, was just like deny everything and to say Pablam, like democracy is in our DNA, democracy is our spirit, democracy runs in our veins. But what happens next, I think, really shows

his true colors. There has been a relentless campaign of harassment against Sabrina ever since she asked this question, both online and in pro-Mody news outlets. Even official BJP, his party's spokespeople, have jumped in on the act and attacked her. They've attacked her for having a Pakistani mother. They called her a bigot. They tried to claim she's not a regular or real White House reporter, and that was actually a secret plant by the White House to embarrass Modi. So just for the record, that is obviously nonsense. Like Sabrina's a great reporter. She literally accompanied Biden to Ukraine like four months ago was the pool reporter on that major trip. So she's like hardly a new face in the briefing room. But the irony of these idiots doing this in response to a question about Modi's government

going after religious freedom or free speech, it still makes your head spin, Ben. Modi's allies also went after President Obama for talking about the need to respect the rights of Muslims in India. So Ben, the White House condemned this harassment. But like, do you think that his people understand how much worse they make things when they do shit like this? Does it even like compute? It's an interesting thing to watch because I obviously watched the Sabrina piece of this and also the Obama piece. Because Obama said that they need to treat the Muslim minority better. And he also kind of tried to make an argument like from India's perspective, like a big diverse country like this.

It risks instability. It risks, you know, real problems. if you're persecuting a massive minority of like a couple hundred million people, which is how many, you know, it's one of the largest populations of Muslims in any country in the world in India. To me, it makes him look utterly ridiculous because all he has to say is, you know, even if, because first of all, like, it's true. They treat, like, the Muslim minority has been singled out. It has been, you've got, look, we've talked on the show, like his chief political opponent,

who's not Muslim, or who Gandhi, Like they're trying to convict the guy. They've got journalists in prison. The BJP his party and the RSS movement that, like, sustains it as its infrastructure literally goes after Muslims in the streets. They have trumped up charges against all manner of journals. Rana Ayub, who's been on this podcast, like, can't put her head up without some new tax issue being used against her.

Like, this is happening. Journalists are being persecuted. The Muslim minority in that country is dealing with a lot of crap. And this is, you know, Modi's clearly on the top of the superstructure that is doing that. That doesn't mean that Modi is all bad. And like Modi, like people will point out, like he's made some good reforms in the economy. He's an important partner on China. Sure, that's all true.

But when you react like this, all you have to say is we have more work to do, you know. All we have to say is we're not perfect. Nobody is. We have to do more. Give an inch. They won't give an inch. And the fact that they use this kind of drippingly defensive and thin skin tone to say, we are going to come educate you about how perfect everything is in India or shut up because

you know you only ask this question because you're Pakistani confirming the bias that you use against people based on their identity in India like all you're doing is showing the world that you are exactly what Sabrina was indicating in that question or you are exactly dealing with the kind of problems that Obama talked about in his answer and so to me if you want to be if part of the kind of aspiration of Modi and the BJP is to be a world class power, right, to be, you know, taken seriously as you should because you are like running this country over a billion people. You need thicker skin than this. I mean, this is ridiculous. That you're this thin skin, thin skinned about everything. I mean, come on. It gets worse,

by the way. There was a top BJP official, the chief minister of basically a state, tweeted that there were many Hussein Obama in India itself who needed to be taken care of. So again, doubling down on bigotry and essentially threatening to kill Muslims or kill the President of the United States. Yeah. And this is the problem with like rolling out the red carpet without any criticism at all because they think that if they just throw these brushback pieces, they're a racist brushback. We're going to take care of Hussein Obama. Okay, tough guy. Like, why don't you go tweet a few more threats at Muslims? You know, you're such a powerful man. I mean, it just makes them look really small, you know, and it proves the point of all the critics.

Speaking of thin skin leaders, Ben, so we talked last week about Secretary of State Tony Blankens trip to China, his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the hope that this would all lead to more conversations, more communications between the U.S. and China and sort of a general thawing of tensions. That all got a little bit more complicated last week when at a fundraiser, President Biden called President Xi a dictator. The longer Biden quote was, the reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of. spy equipment, is he didn't know it was there. That was the great embarrassment for the dictators when they didn't know what happened. The Chinese responded very angrily. They called it a blatant political provocation, and quote, extremely absurd and irresponsible. Besides creating headaches for Tony Blinken here, he's probably taking a lot of phone calls. How big a deal do you think that comment was? Like, isn't she a dictator? Who doesn't know that? Well, I guess to me, the more

peculiar part of the comment was like him seeming to be reading out like an intelligence assessment you know that yeah like did does he know how does he know that chishimp didn't know was there is that because chishin ping kind of denied to him that uh that he had sent the balloon or is that because he was kind of revealing something like the whole it just felt like he was sharing a little more information than was necessary uh at a fundraiser you know yeah that could have been the part of the pissed off she more than the dictator line yeah and if it's a calculated out of it's a calculated effort to get under his skin. That's one thing. I just, I can't imagine that, like, doing that at a fundraiser was, like, an intentional information operation, you know? It is interesting that over the,

we talked about this once or twice before that Biden has personalized, like, criticism of Xi Jinping a fair amount. You know, I'd rather be me than Xi Jinping or she, he's a dictator. It's kind of funny because in the last campaign, we heard a lot from Biden had spent more time with Xi Jinping than any like person on earth and you know they're such great buddies you know so the the the the romance is definitely faded here um but uh at the end of the day whenever these things come up i i always have to remind myself that the chinese government says worse things about joe biden all the time you know what i mean um the indian government you know is threatening to like kill people with the same names are the last president so so i think we have to cut our leaders a little slack here

like they don't have to go all trump and say absolutely like crazy shit by people, but like, you know, it's, it's kind of the thin skin point again. Like, you know, Chinese Wolf Warrior diplomats, you know, have like imagery of Joe Biden that is no different than like what the Republican Party puts out. And so for him to every now and then pop off a G, I don't know, it's not that big a deal. And whether he's technically addicted or not, like, you know, I guess they'd argue he's the head of the party, whatever. He's an autocrat. Like, it is what it is. Yeah. I mean, like, I'm with you. Listen, The Chinese can decide whether to get offended or not.

Remember when Trump took a call from the president of Taiwan right after he was elected, breaking with 40 years of diplomatic tradition before he talked to Xi Jinping? Like, they got over that. They had a relationship. We'll see, I mean, Secretary Yellen is supposed to go to China in July. Hopefully that happens. And they don't cancel another trip and sort of to protest this. But you're right.

I mean, you know, Biden got asked about this at the press conference by Sabrina, actually. And his response was basically like, I said what I said. And so it seems like, you know, he's not going to walk. doesn't give a shit, you know, yeah. And I think that's smart. And your point about choosing is totally right because they control the media too. They can choose to like have their people know that that happened or not, right? Which kind of proves part of Biden's point, you know, like, you know, it may not be a total dictator like kind of one man, one rule. Like, but you know, there's aspects of that and so what? Like, so deal with it. If you, if you want to have that kind of control of the system,

you're going to get criticized by the president of the United States from time to time. Yeah, absolutely. Really awful story out of the, the Mediterranean bed where a fishing trawler carrying up to 750 migrants and refugees from Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories capsized off the coast of Greece on June 14th. Only about a hundred of the people on the boat were rescued alive, literally on a super yacht called the Mayan queen, just like the most dystopian thing possible. There are questions about whether the Greek Coast Guard inadvertently caused this boat to capsize when they attempted to hook a line on it and tow it. The boat had been traveling from Libya and they were heading to Italy.

This bunch of asylum seekers trying to get to the EU. The trip was a nightmare before this boat sank. People were running out of food and water. I think like six people were already dead before it capsized. President Obama was asked about this during a recent event. Here's a clip of what he said. There is a potential tragedy unfolding with a submarine that is getting, you know, minute to minute coverage all around the world. And it's understandable because obviously we all want and pray that those folks are rescued. But the fact that that's gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank is, that's an untenable situation. Important point, well taken there. Since 2020, there have been a bunch of instances of Greek

patrol boats pushing migrant boats back into the water. So it's sort of a broader question of the Greek response here. Greek public opinion has turned hard against refugees, which undoubtedly been contributed to the success of far right parties in this past week's elections. The ruling center right party got 40% of the vote, but far right parties won about 13% of the vote, including a new party called the Spartans, which is just sort of like a newer version of the Golden Dawn party that was banned in 2020 for being neo-Nazis, literally. So the Spartans now of 13 seats in parliament. At the height of its popularity, Golden Dawn only got 7% of the vote, so that's a scary trajectory. So look, all in all, like a story about this global failure

to manage conflicts and manage refugee flows and how that leads to horrible human consequences and political consequences. I mean, first of all, like, I always rooted for the Athenians over the Spartans, like in my ancient history, like war games. But then, and Obama, it's funny playing that clip because I was like a couple of times, it's such a reminder of the Obama deliberate speaking style where you're like, is the audio going out? And it's like, oh, no, no, he's just speaking very slowly and considering his words. But I was in Greece with him at the time. And you could sense, like, on the one hand, the public there is very anti-immigrant, very anti-refugee, the political party that we've covered a few of these stories recently where they were pushing back boats.

You know, there's a trend of them kind of seeming to not give a shit when these tragedies happen. and maybe pursuing policies that are making them more likely and feeling no accountability for that because if anything, they're kind of rewarded for it, you know? And it seems like, again, the people that didn't go with like the large, fairly resounding win for the Senate of right government, like went even further right. At the same time, like this is an untenable situation. And so you'd like to think that, first of all, there's a real investigation of what happened here. You can't just let 700 people die and not like get to the bottom of how that happened and whether the Greek Coast Guard contributed to it or could have done anything differently. I think, secondly,

Europe has a say here. And Europe has kind of been at at least just kind of winking at this kind of policy because they want to keep migrants out too because their publics are tired of as well. Well, it's not sustainable from a humane standpoint. It's not sustainable given the fact that there's going to continue to be migrants. There needs to be a rethink of this entire approach. what is happening to try to reduce the flows of people coming in, what is happening to try to have more orderly processing. It's not that different, by the way, from what we're dealing with at our border,

you know, with people from Central America. Like, can you have, like, their version of an asylum process that, like, at least reduces? You're never going to end these types of desperate people trying to get across the water, but can you put some process around it that reduces that risk, cut down on the smugglers and traffickers that kind of put people on these vessels that are not prepared to hold that many people like at a minimum as with our own border like they have to be

doing more to avert tragedy while trying to think ahead about how can you manage migration flows in a more humane way yeah speaking of heartless immigration policies there's a new book out by a guy named miles taylor who is a former trump department of homeland security staffer turned sort of like Trump critic. Anonymous, formerly known as anonymous. The anonymous op-ed writer in the New York Times. It talks about how Stephen Miller, who is the Trump advisor best known for family separation and just for being a monster, argued for having a predator drone fire missiles at a ship full of unarmed migrants that was trying to reach the U.S. This reportedly happened during a conversation Stephen Miller had with the commandant of the Coast Guard. It's worth pointing out that

Stephen Miller denies that this happened. The former Coast Guard, Commandant says he doesn't remember the conversation. But it would be far from the only sadistic policy pitch that Stephen Miller had while in government. Remembered that former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, said that Stephen Miller proposed cutting off ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's head, dipping it in pig's blood and parading it around as a warning to other terrorists. So it sounds like a fun meeting, fun guy to hang out with, great coworker. Yeah, given that Stephen Miller seems like the kind of guy who, like, when a kid, like, use magnifying glasses to, like, fry, like, insects, you know, on the sidewalk in front of his house.

If not his siblings. Yeah, this is utterly believable as an anecdote. Like, because he definitely sat around and fantasized cheering meetings in situation room and, like, you know, drone striking immigrants on the border. Like, this definitely happened. And it's a reminder that among many other things, Steve Miller is a psychopath, you know? And, like, you only have to, like, one look at his dead eyes to understand that. No doubt, no doubt. Speaking of psychopaths, Ben, so I've lost count of the number of allegations of fraud and corruption that have been leveled against Israeli Prime Minister Bibianenayahu.

There's three cases being brought against him. One of them is at trial as we speak. And according to a report in Politico, it featured on Monday testimony from a billionaire Hollywood mogul named Arnin Milchan who said that his gift giving to the Netanyahu family became so frequent and routine that they developed code words for the gifts. Cigars were called leaves. Champagne was called roses. And luxury dress shirts were called dwarves. I was following this little code until we got to the shirts.

Milchan said he realized that the nearly $200,000 worth of gifts he'd given the Netanyahu family was excessive when the police opened an investigation. It seems a little late there, buddy. But in exchange, Netanyahu did him favors like contacting former Secretary of State John Kerry for help with a visa. pushing for tax breaks that would have helped Milchan. So then here I think may be the craziest part of this political story, though. Prosecutors demanded that Beebe's wife, Sarah Netanyahu, not make eye contact with Milchan because they were worried she could somehow sway the witness. What is happening here?

Does this woman practice witchcraft? How is eye contact via Zoom, by the way, going to change this guy's testimony? Well, first of all, in the theme of crimes today, you know, BB's like a little. little smarter than Trump because at least he had code words, right? Yeah. But the net effect is the same, you know, like if Trump's thing is like, I am committing a crime, I didn't declassified, it is secret, I should have been showing it to you. Bebe's is like, I should be not taking these gifts from you. That is corrupt. Therefore, we're going to have code words for the gifts. You know, like, it's actually just as like proving of guilt and just as brazen. It's just a little smarter because

at least he had the code words. Like if Trump had had some code words for the classified documents, you know, documents. You'd be in BB's League here. I always wonder about how people get to be billioners, you know, like, who seem to be such complete morons. Because, like, we've already talked about some of the morons that, like, have all the hot takes on the war in Ukraine. And we'll actually probably end on the Uyghurs, where that's one of the all-in-pod's greatest moments in its greatest hits album. But in this case, like, how did this guy succeed so fabulously? And yet he can't withstand the like steely gaze and like wink or like furrowed brow of Serenet Njahou. I can tell you I've been in room as a producer.

He produced a pretty woman, bohemian rhapsody, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So I don't know, Hollywood guy. But yeah, like what is she doing to him with these tractor beam eyes? Yeah, seriously. What are we talking about? Oh, God. Serrna Nia once brought me a martini or once, or at least like she didn't bring it to me, but she certainly like facilitated.

my having a martini while Obama and BB were like fighting on something. I don't know. Maybe I've never been the same ever since. Or maybe actually, you know, maybe it is. Maybe if I ever saw her again, she could like make me do things by just looking at me, you know? Yeah, you just be buying her cigars. She makes us do a drink and the next thing you know, you're like shipping stuff over there. You're getting a case of Camel unfiltered sending them to Israel and you don't know why. We should point out like less funny. Like as this trial is happening, there's been an uptick in violence in the West Bank. Last week, there were these, you know, hundreds of armed Israeli settlers were just rampaging through West Bank towns, burning stuff, beating people up. It's endless

cycle of violence. This time it occurred after two Palestinian terrorists, I think Hamas terrorists, killed four Israelis near a West Bank settlement. The Israeli military has been launching increasingly militarized operations in the West Bank. In one case, they were firing missiles from Apache helicopters. I think there was a drone strike. That might have been the first. first drone strike since 2006. I think it was the first time a helicopter have been deployed in 20 years. So we should mention this because like this cycle of violence is constant. But meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority leadership is gone. They're just non-existent. And the Israeli government is de facto annexing the West Bank more and more every day. And it's just like increasing the

likelihood that something very, very bad is going to happen, especially when the Israeli leadership is desperate like Netanyahu to stay out of jail and to keep together. this right-wing coalition that could maybe, you know, prevent him from seeing prison time. Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, like, it should be pointing out that they're normalizing this kind of brutality. They happen for a very long time. They're normalizing this kind of displacement. But the only other element that's worth noting here that is new is that just like Trump, Trump, it's existential for him that he gets elected president so he doesn't go to prison. Like, BB's in the same boat. And the more that this case may be closing in on him,

the risk of things escalating with the Palestinians or things escalating with him returning to threats to the judicial system, like that, that is very likely to happen if he feels like the wheels of justice are catching up to him and, and Serenaenao can't make the case go away with her eyes. Yeah. Finally, Ben, last story here before the interview. Miami mayor Francis Suarez recently jumped into the Republican presidential primary. You might be asking, who? Fair question. He is a huge crypto booster who created the Miami coin. I think it was supposed to replace taxes maybe by minting coins and selling them. It is now down something like 90s. percent in value. So, oops.

Suarez decided to go on Hugh Hewitt's show to demonstrate his foreign policy chops. Let's hear out of it. Penultimate question, mayor. Will you be talking about the Uighurs in your campaign? The Uighurs? What's a Uighur? Okay, we'll come back to that. You won't be obvious. You got to get smart on that. And then they come back to it again later. Here's the second clip.

The Uighurs. You really need to know about the Uighurs, Mayor. You've got to talk about it every day. I will talk about, I will search Uighurs. I'm a good learner. I'm a fast learner. Suarez today tweeted that of course he knows what the Uyghurs are, but he just didn't catch the pronunciation. For those who don't know,

the Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic minority group in Western China. The Chinese government has thrown more than a million of them in re-education camps where they are often tortured in what has been called a crime against humanity or genocide. The U.S. government actually called a genocide. Ben, did the mayor get your vote? First of all, why is Hughitt, like, the place you go to to, like, demonstrate your foreign policy chops? I don't know.

Like, noted intellect here, like a complete buffoon, Hugh Hewitt. Second, like, I love his, like, comeback was like, oh, I didn't catch the pronunciation when he actually repeated the pronunciation completely accurately. Like, what's a Uighur? Like, he got it right himself and his comeback. Then there was a weird thing that Hugh Hewitt did, too, where he's like, you should be talking about it every day. which was kind of odd too because like nothing about that exchange made any sense on any level whatsoever

but it does go to show the reason it matters is the only claim this guy has for running is that he's Mr. Anti-Communist, right? Like because he's in Miami there he hates the Cuban Communist Party and his whole line has always been like we fight communism here in Florida and so actually like you really should know

about the Uyghurs particularly if your whole campaign is about how terrible communism is because the Uyghurs are the people that are being treated the absolute worst by a communist party in the world. So, you know, a little more homework. But I'm also like not exactly buying stock in that presidential campaign. Maybe he could go run the Bitcoin city that Buckela is building down in El Salvador. It seems like he's more qualification for that, you know. That's a really good idea. He does have experience running a city into the ground with crypto currency. Yeah, Hugh Hewitt is interesting because like he is,

like one of the most frustrating, shameless defenders of everything Trump does. Just like the Lovett calls them like the intellectual Zambonis who just kind of mop up after him. But he also cares about foreign policy and ask questions. He loves to ask about the Uyghurs. He likes to ask about the nuclear triad and how one would maintain that. He likes to ask about Alger Hiss and whether he was a spy for the Soviet Union. So he has these like hobby horses that I'm glad he asks about but are very easy to prepare

for and still doesn't make it. okay to just defend everything Trump did. Because by the way, Trump famously told Xi Jinping that locking up the Uighurs was the right thing to do and to keep going. We know this because John Bolton told everybody that he did it. The classic thing with Hugh and I'm just going to say, so he was like obsessed with me for a while, like towards the end of the Obama administration. And he, for some reason, he used to call me like the metternick of MSNBC or something, which doesn't make any sense. What a great topical reference. Well, it would also kind of make me out to be like smarter

than he was saying I was not like Metternich was a dumb guy and he actually asked me i don't know if i totally tell me to come on and do a show for three hours uh at the end of the bomb administration like when my book came out my publicist call and she's like i think i we have great like thing that'll get great publicity you know he asked you to do his entire show with him i'm like you know what i don't care how many books that would sell like i'd rather do anything than huge he was fucking shit all the whole time but my favorite thing that hugh huid is for all his like intellect i remember Love it went on that show. At the beginning of the Trump administration,

Mike Flynn was being a poor national security advisor, and I guess loved it taking some shots at him. So Hugh Hewitt had him on because he was going to like fillet him. And one of his gotcha things to love it was like, you're friends with Ben Rhodes, and he's so much less qualified than Mike Flynn. Well, look at Mike Flynn, right? Like this is what I mean? Like Hugh Hewitt puts him out to be this, like, serious guy.

Like he's Hugh Hewitt, this great intellect. And meanwhile, the guy that he was boosting and like, you know, trying to dunk on Love It Over is now like a full-blown QAnon sociopath, you know. So like there's, like Hugh Hewitt is like he's several miles wide in terms of the questions, yes, but he's like a half an inch deep. Yeah, I mean, look, he was the former president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, I think, like his library. So, you know, that sort of tells you a lot about his background and values. All right, Ben, that's it for the news section. When we come back, you'll hear my interview with Ebenovie Williams. He's a really

smart sports reporter for Sportico, who broke the story about Qatar's sovereign wealth fund buying a 5% stake in three Washington, D.C., based sports teams. So stick around for that. We're going to talk about sports washing and lots of other great stuff. With Trex, you get the most of everything, the most wood inspired, the most eco-friendly, the most decking and railing designs, the most trusted. Trex, performance engineered for your life outdoors. Visit Trex.com today. With Trex, you get the most of everything, the most wood inspired, the most eco-friendly, the most decking and railing designs, the most trusted. Trex, performance engineered for your life outdoors.

Visit Trex.com today. Joining me today is Eben Novi Williams. He is a sports business reporter for Sportico. Thank you for joining the show. Thanks for having me, Tommy. So we're here to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart, sports washing. I don't even know if we call it that anymore. It's just sort of foreign conglomerates buying teams, basically.

But you guys broke the news that Qatar's sovereign wealth fund is buying a 5% stake in this parent company that owns the Washington Wizards, the Washington Capitals, and the Washington Mystics. It's NBA NHL and WNBA franchises. I believe this is the first time a sovereign wealth fund has bought into an NBA team. And it might be Qatar's first investment period in U.S. pro sports. What do we know about this deal, like how it came to be? And I'm guessing it's not a coincidence that the focus is on Washington, D.C. to start. Yeah, I think the most interesting place to start is just kind of macro level. Sports teams in the U.S. are so expensive. They're getting so expensive right now.

A decade ago, you could have bought an NBA team for a couple hundred million dollars. The most recent one just sold for $4 billion. And when you have assets... Was that the Charlotte Hornets? Why didn't Michael Jordan do a terrible job? Yeah, that was the... I'm talking about the Phoenix Suns. Right. I'm sorry. The horn that's also just sold for multiple billion.

And Jordan 10x's investment despite doing a terrible job. That's how, that's why these assets are so great, right? Because you don't have to do a great job and you get a great exit. And owners are realizing that when you have multi-billion dollar assets, just the pool of people that have the money and the interest in buying those or buying into those get smaller and smaller. So if you're running out of buyers, you have to expand the pool of buyers. And in the past two years, every major U.S. League except the NFL,

has suddenly opened its doors to institutional money. And that's private equity funds primarily so far, but it's also endowments. And as we're talking about here, it's sovereign wealth funds. So all of this is essentially dates back or stems back to this idea that we're just running out of rich guys that can buy teams. And if you want your valuations to keep appreciating, you need more buyers.

And institutional money is the answer to that right now. Oh, my God. You just said endowments. If the Harvard Endowment buys like the Boston Red Sox, I will be more upset than the Saudis. I'll flip over this table. I would not be shocked if at some point, it's funny, we joke about the Harvard one and Boston sports teams as well, just because it makes sense. But it's proven to be a bulletproof investment. It's been 50 years, I think, since a professional U.S. team sold for less than it was bought for.

They really are, at least right now, they have proven to be fantastic investments. Yeah. So the NBA, you mentioned this, the NBA changes. rules last year to allow for the sort of limited foreign investments. They're now going to review the deal. Do you think they'll have any issues? I cannot imagine Tedliances and Monumental and the Wizards getting this far in and not knowing that the NBA was okay with this. So I would be shocked if anything happens in the next few weeks to squash this deal. I think that, again, when you get to to the point of putting ink on paper, I think they have a pretty good idea that the NHL and the NBA are both

going to be going to be fine with this. And look, there's obviously, you know, there's some controversy here where I'm sure we're going to get into it. But the NBA is no stranger to a lot of that controversy over the past few years in terms of its relationships with foreign governments. And I'm sure Ted and everyone at the NBA also was very aware how some people were going to feel about this news. As long as the Amir doesn't flash his gun on an Instagram live twice, it will be okay. Well, I mean, so as you noted, the NBA, they've been forward-leaning when it comes to speaking out on social justice issues, in particular they let players speak their minds at a time when other franchises weren't, or other leagues. I mean, in 2017, the NBA pulled the All-Star

game out of Charlotte after North Carolina passed that bathroom bill that required transgender people to use public restrooms that matched the sex on their birth certificates, not who they were that day. Has there been any pushback on Qatar as an investor, given its laws, criminalizing same-sex relations from any of the leagues? I'm sure there is pushback. When the NBA, you mentioned a year ago, they kind of expanded this institutional money thing to include sovereign wealth. What I always understood from talking to folks at the league was that it was going to be a case-by-case

basis. It didn't mean that anyone, any pool of money, anywhere in the world could just buy into an NBA team just because one owner wanted it to happen. And because of that, honestly, I'm kind of surprised that QIA is the first one to be doing this. There are certainly less controversial sovereign wealth funds out there that. that you imagine probably are interested in owning an NBA team or a piece of one that that might have gone first.

Cutter, I think, around the World Cup, and I know you guys have done a lot around that. There was no shortage of coverage about some of the human rights concerns that happened in the run-up to that event. And Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, it's funny, was asked about this exact topic a few weeks ago when the LivePGA tour commercial merger happened, right? and there's some similarities and some key differences between that huge business story and this one. But one of the things that Adam said, which I thought was interesting, was that he had faith in the media to essentially, when deals like this happened, when news like this happens, to highlight the other parts about maybe some of the less great things about some of these foreign governments and where the money's coming from. So it's certainly something that the NBA has thought about.

And I'm sure there's other NBA owners that are looking at this deal and saying, man, I'm glad the wizards are first. And we can announce a deal of ours in a few months or in a few weeks, even, whatever it looks like. I think the more of these that happen, I think the smaller the outcry is going to be for sure. Yeah. And look, you know, the World Cup was especially egregious because you had all the human rights considerations and the treatment of LGBT people. But then on top of that, Qatar had to build all the infrastructure for the cup. and they do it essentially with slave labor. There are some estimates from the Guardian that some of the 6,000 somewhat people, foreign laborers died in the process.

Obviously, that won't be an issue here if you're just buying a 5% stake in an NHL team. Definitely. And this is a, we should say, it's a passive investment. The NBA, when it set up these rules, was very clear these institutional investors and whether that's private equity or QIA or sovereign wealth funds. They're not allowed to have board seats. They're not allowed to have any actual say in the governance of the teams. many minority partners, and I'm not privy to the actual details of this one, but many minority

partners also don't have full rights if they wanted to sell the stake later on. There's a very good chance that if QIA in five years decided we don't want to be invested in Monumental anymore, it might just go back to Monumental's other shareholders. So these are limited in a lot of different ways. They're limited investments, at least right now. I think the obvious question there is if things keep appreciating in value, at some point do we see institutional investors buying controlling stakes and teams. It's certainly possible. We're not, we're not there right now. But again, in some ways, I think their writing has been on the wall here for a while. And Tommy, it's interesting. There's a lot of ways in which sovereign wealth funds are already, their fingerprints are

all over American sports. They're all over the American economy as a whole, right? But these sovereign wealth funds are investing in the same private equity funds that are buying teams. And they're investing alongside billionaire sports team owners in their other business. And they're in the U.S. equity markets owning pieces of teams like the Knicks and the Rangers and the Braves, which are all publicly traded in various ways. They're investing in sports-adjacent companies like fanatics and CIA, for example. There's so many other ways in which sovereign wealth funds are already doing a lot of financial work in U.S. sports. This is just the closest this proximity we've seen between a sovereign wealth fund and a major team in the NBA or the

NHL. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I mean, some of the coverage of this purchase by the Qataris suggested that this is sort of the first of many deals that are brewing from sovereign wealth funds. Do you think this is a situation where somebody goes first and then there's sort of a flood of foreign cash into these leagues? I think the floodgates are open. Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of this. And just to put in perspective, perspective, the QIA is it's almost $500 billion under management. And to compare that to the wealthiest humans in America, that's essentially exactly the net worth of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos combined, the three richest people in America. So again, when you're looking for richer pools of

capital, it's really on a totally different scale, the size of PIF, the Saudi Arabian Fund that is doing what it's doing in golf, QIA, which is invested here, and there's a number of others. It's just we're talking about a pool of money that doesn't exist in the hands of any human on the planet. Yeah. Don't even get me started on the Norwegians. They're sitting on the kings. They're the king of the roost. Yeah. Well, so look, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm naive. It did seem like for a little while people were worried about sports washing or at least, you know, sort of offended by it in some instances. The PGA was the leader of the charge in terms of criticizing the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and their investment into Live Golf Tour.

That was until they caved and then merged with Live after a year of like basically accusing them of doing 9-11. Do you think like is the era of companies even pretending to care about human rights records of places like Saudi or Qatar? Was that over? It's such a good question. And again, just because the sovereign wealth funds are everywhere already, I think it's, there are people in the NBA and around U.S. sports that feel like this is honestly no different

than the other ways that I was describing. And I think there's an obvious kind of other side to that point, which is, again, this is the most proximate we've seen a sovereign wealth fund and its logo and a U.S. sports team and its logo, right? So there's definitely a way to look at this investment as some kind of new ground that is being broken. I do think, and the NBA obviously had this huge issue with China a few years ago that, as just you know, better than most people became this political. football to mix my sports metaphors that really did affect the league and affect its business overseas. I think that sports team owners are probably realizing that, yeah, there's probably a few years

in here where these deals are going to be controversial, that when the PGA announces it's combining its commercial assets and taking money exclusively from Saudi Arabia, that there are a lot of people that freak out about that. But that the moral authority starts to wane a little bit. I would not be shocked if there are, let's say there's 10 of these deals in the next year. If the kind of outcry about it and the fears of sports washing just kind of incrementally disappear as the, I know this is really cynical, just disappear as each successive deal gets announced. Yeah, I mean, look, to your point about the NFL being kind of the only holdout preventing these kinds of deals from happening, I mean, like, who could afford the Dallas Cowboys? What are they worth now? Like, $10 billion?

This is probably the topic that at Sportico, we talk about the most right now. because the commanders are for sale right now, another DC team. Some of the richest men in the world are involved in the ownership group that's buying the commanders. And they have actually struggled to put together the financing to get that $6 billion deal done. And the NFL, as I mentioned, it's the only league that hasn't done this yet. I think that's just because they haven't had to. And if the NFL was to go through a say, if the Cowboys hit the market right now, you're right, Tommy.

It's a $10 billion asset maybe. Maybe that's a little high. but the amount of people that have 10 billion in cash to get a deal done, there's nobody, really. Maybe Jeff Bezos would be the only one. So I would expect the NFL at some point to change its rules. I just think it's going to take a sale that goes horribly wrong or a process by which there is no billionaire waiting in the wings to get that deal done. I don't think the NFL is certainly I don't think standing on any kind of moral high ground here. I think it is more, yeah, it's just a necessity.

And again, the minute a NFL owner. says, you mean my team is going to stop appreciating in value unless we change the rules to let private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds buy into teams? The minute that happens, I think you see those rules get changed pretty quickly. Yeah. And look, Roger Goodell, the head of the NFL, the commissioner, he lives to serve the owners. And if they can think they can make much more money on the sale of these teams or just inflate the price of their assets, I'm sure they'll do it. Also, Jerry Jones didn't live forever, folks. I mean, these teams are going to move. The NFL, it's such an interesting, one of the most bulletproof

American businesses, I think, out there. But the NFL teams, they trade so infrequently. And they sell so infrequently. NBA, there's a controlling stake sale. It feels like every four or five months almost. The NFL, there's been, I think in the past decade, there's been three teams that have sold. This is an amazing stat, but it always blows my mind. Of the 32 current NFL owners, there are more of them that bought their team, earlier family members, bought their team for $25,000 or less, than bought their team for more than a billion. Oh my God. That's just so many ownership groups that go back to the 30s or go back to the 40s when you could buy teams for $100 or $500 or whatever it is. And then compare that with the NBA where so many of the NBA franchises have traded in the past decade or so. It's just a different animal. And again, the NFL, I think by virtue of having so infrequent a controlling stake sale, they just don't have to confront a lot of these economic realities that, you know, other leagues like the NHL or NBA, just have to confront sooner because they're having so many

different transactions. Yeah, and for every great family or ownership group, like the Rooney family, there are NFL owners who look really rich on paper because they own this thing that's super valuable, but they actually don't have any cash to bring in new players. So these franchises suck for decades. 100%. Yeah, the Roonies, I'm sure you have an experience with the Rooney family as well in Washington. Yeah, they're a great example. There's a number, again, there's a number of teams that have had the same owners for 80 years, right? And you're right, they're not Steve Ballmer buying the clippers. This is just a family that had an asset that suddenly became super valuable.

And again, we're not just talking about, you know, as we talk about these economic forces, we're not just talking about the control stakes. We're also talking about the minority stakes, right? And if the Roonies wanted to take 10% of the Steelers off the table and get someone to invest $500 million or whatever that would cost, probably something right? around there, they might have a hard time selling that, right? That would be, that would be a hard stake to sell because when you're a minority owner, you just don't, you don't have that many rights, right? Tommy, if you wanted to buy 5% of the Red Sox, it's just a really expensive season

ticket when it comes down to it, right? You're not making decisions about players, even though I'm sure you probably want to, you're not voting on board decisions, things like that. It's a passive stake. And if a lot of people don't want to park that much money into something that, even though it may be fun to own, you're just not doing that much with. Yeah, basically you get tickets and the players have to pretend to be nice to you. I bet that's kind of it. And look, if you're one of these owners who've had a team for a long time and you want to hand it down to your kid, the taxes on that, the estate tax is probably a pretty big hit and makes it challenging. Really hard. And depending on who's in the White House, those estate tax rules change a little bit. And we saw with the

turnover a few years ago from President Trump to President Biden, a lot of sports teams trying to figure out what the implication was there, is there shares that I want to give down to my kids now, as opposed to in a year. There's so much different interesting tax machinations. And this is true, obviously, in every business, not just in sports, but owners are definitely thinking about that as well. Let's keep those taxes high people, at least the estate tax. So listen, you know, I worked in D.C. for a long time. I saw the way Gulf countries would dump money into lobbying. They would dump money to think tanks, all kinds of different ways to peddle influence. They would throw parties for people. When I saw that, you know, the first investment was in three DC-based teams, I thought more soft power, more

chance for influence peddling. Is that fair? Or do you think this is more like Ted Leonsis, the owner of the parent company, these three teams, maybe has these long relationships? I'm of two minds here. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first big sovereign wealth investment in U.S. sports happened in D.C. It just can't be. There's so many reasons why a country like Qatar, in addition to, I'm sure, wanting to own a piece of these assets, also like the idea of owning a very high-profile investment in the nation's capital. There's so much there that makes sense. One thing I will say about monumental, Ted has proven year in, year out, he is willing to push the envelope on a lot of these things. I would consider

him to be one of the more progressive sports team owners out there from a business standpoint. he built, I think before a lot of other owners realized this was the future. He built this sports empire, right, where it's not just teams, but he owns Capital One Arena, where the Wizards and the Capitals play. He owns NBC Sports Washington, the media network. He understood that there is a flywheel here. And the way to really build the future sports ownership group was to have these teams and then put media, put real estate, put technology around it, and really help them all grow in

concert. So I do think that Ted, I'm not surprised also that Ted would be the first to do this or would be on the cutting edge of dipping his toe into this new opportunity. So there's kind of two things there. I'm curious for you, Tommy, I imagine, did you go to sporting events a lot when you were working in Washington? The thing that I'm always curious about is I just hear a lot about senators and congressmen and congresswomen and Supreme Court justices that go to nationals games or go to capitals games. And I imagine there's a part of this that is also enticing to QIA also. that you just get some of these exact people in these power roles coming actually through the building that you're investing in as well. Yeah, I didn't go to a lot of games because,

I don't know, I just stuck at work probably. But like there was a huge scandal where there was basically a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff who was buying off members of Congress and senators, et cetera, by essentially having boxes at Redskins games and was doing a lot of business through sports. So I do think there will undoubtedly be sort of a big element of soft power in terms of inviting people who are in these positions.

There are ethics rules that sort of govern the price of a ticket you can accept for free, but that doesn't matter if you're not in government proper or non-elected official necessarily. Yeah, there's so many different reasons why people invest in teams.

Ted Turner bought the Brave so long ago because he needed content for his media empire. And Bruce Ratner was involved in buying the nets because there was a real estate development opportunity next door that he wanted to be a part of. So I think almost every sports investment in some capacity is this is a good asset and I'm going to have fun owning this. And then also this does X or Y for the other parts of my business that is also really invaluable. So I think there's always kind of multiple parts of an investment, certainly one of this

scale. So final question for you, if this were the world's worst video game, the final boss here of sports washing, in my mind, would be the Saudis getting the 2030 World Cup. They're bidding. They've kind of bought off Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time to be one of their spokespeople, even though his home country is a competing bid. Where do you think we stand on that? I mean, FIFA is the most viable sports entity out there. There is no length of which I would expect for international sport and the Olympics and and and FIFA I kind of group together in this way. Nothing would surprise me in that regard. And this could very well be the the end goal here, right?

Yeah. What PIF is doing to invest in the in global, PIF is going to control professional golf or partially control professional golf moving forward if this PGA merger gets done. It's not the only asset that I know PIF is sniffing around in terms of U.S. sports. They're already doing a lot. in fight sports, for example, yeah, there's a good chance that all of this is a coordinated effort to try to make something like the Olympics take off. And the Qatar World Cup, I think,

for as much as, I think, here in the U.S., media-wise, I think maybe people would be surprised. I think if you are, if the goal was to get more Middle Easterners to want to go to Qatar, or more Europeans to want to go to Qatar, I think it was a massive success for the country, for the government, for the host committee, all that. yeah, I think these big 10 pole sporting events, just like the big 10 pole sports teams, if you can invest in them, if you can host them, again, there's so many ancillary business benefits to doing that. And nothing would surprise me with the 2030 Olympics and subsequent World Cups as well. Yeah, I agree with you. I think there was a lot of great coverage in the

lead up to the World Cup about their human rights record and about the treatment of workers. But ultimately, when the game started, that's what people focused on. And everyone always kind of knew that. Evan, thank you so much for doing the show. Where can folks follow you and find your work? Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at Novi underscore Williams. My company is Sportico, S-P-O-R-T-I-C-O. We cover the business of sports. So anything with a big dollar sign, any sponsorships, media deals, team sales, you can get it at Sportico. Excellent. Well, congrats on the big scoop and thanks for doing the show. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks again to Evan Novi Williams for joining the show. Thanks again to Hugh Hewitt for firing fastballs. And I don't know, thanks again to Donald Trump for just giving us tons of really incriminating content.

That is a shocking tape. Thanks to Alexander Lukashenko for, you know, his service. You're right. That press conference, I watched a bunch of it. It really did have a Sasha Baron Cohen, the dictator. Yeah, yeah. Just like completely absurd. These poor guys, these poor generals are trying not to fall asleep on like hour four of his press avail.

We're getting to specific detail. He's like, Vladimir called me at 10-10. I called him back at 10-15. It was just like that in-depth. High porn of that guy's life, man. Yeah, literally, literally. All right, guys, talk to you next week. See ya.

Potsave the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seaglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vesilius are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn,

D.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week and check out the Potsave the World YouTube account. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.