Pod Save the World - Worldo Mailbag!

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

In this special mailbag episode, Tommy and Ben answer listener questions on topics including framing climate change as a national security interest, how both artificial intelligence and migration are going to become headline issues in the years to come, why Democrats are better at foreign policy, Myanmar, their top Pearl Jam albums, career advice for those who want to work in foreign policy, and more. Plus, they offer their takes on the NBA Finals, Taylor Swift, Jared Kushner taking James Patterson's masterclass, and the Saudi golf league.  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 Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben and I are still glowing from our fun interview with Prime Minister Trudeau. We're not really glowing. We're in the same clothes if you're watching this on video, though, because we're recording a mailbag episode. You just busted me because I took off my button-down shirt. Oh, well, I thought I was going to achieve the optical illusion that this is a different day. Yeah, well, I screwed it up for you, buddy. Before we get to the question, just two quick things, Ben. So we get some really exciting news. Our newest podcast, Mother Country Radicals, is out now. It's a 10-episode series hosted by Zane Ayers-Dorn. Finally, Crooked Media gets to tell the story of Bill Ayers that we always wanted to tell on the Obama-Gyipad. You go back to the 1970s when Zaid's parents and

their young friends in the Weather Underground Organization declared war on the United States government explores the progressive reasons and deadly consequences of this incredible time in history with archival footage and firsthand interviews of nearly every living. member of the Weather Underground at the Black Liberation Army. You can listen to the first three episodes of Mother Country Radicals right now, wherever you get your podcast. This show is incredible. Wind of Change caliber.

I can't wait to tune in. You're going to love this. You know, my mom went to college with Kathy Boudin. No way. Bridmar. Yeah, I'm not saying that they were tighter, I think, but yeah. I know. Definitely cross paths.

Yeah, I'm another member. Also, a lot going on in June, but very important this month is Pride Month. This year, Crooked Media's Pride Fund is supporting three incredible organizations. that provide community building, gender affirming, and life-saving resources to the queer and transgender community. Go to crooked.com slash pride fund if you want to donate or just learn more. We're recording a mailbag episode this week because Ben is going to be on the road in Copenhagen. Can I say that?

Yeah, yeah. With what's his face, that guy you're traveling with? The former president Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it'd be quite the feat if Jimmy Carter was still traveling. It's funny that the entire world is coming here for this summit. and I'm leaving with the former, you know.

You zig when they zag, man. I'm like a retired, you know, I guess that means I'm a retired guy. But, you know, we got great questions from you guys. It's honestly, the mailbag episodes on these are always super fun. Yeah, these are good. Great questions. Ben, I would be remiss, though. If we didn't just start by quickly talking about the news that broke this week

that Jared Kushner spent the final months of his time at the White House watching a masterclass, I believe, by James Patterson about how to write a book, way to close out strong, and that Ari Fleischer, former apologists for the Bush administration and the Iraq War, is now fronting a press event for the new Saudi government-funded Gulf League. I will say that this can be categorized as mailbag because I got more than one either tweets or Instagram messages saying, you guys got to talk about the Saudi Golf League, Kina. Saudi Golf League. The rumor is that Tiger Woods was offered one billion dollars or something just short of a billion dollars to do this and he turned it down. Yeah. And Phil Mickelson got

150 million. That's the rumor for Phil. All right, Flesher probably did for 150 bucks. What a piece of shit. Yeah. But it's just a terrible person. It goes from flacking for the Iraq war in the aftermath of 9-11 to flocking for the Saudi Golf League. I'll tell you there's like a serious point to be made about this though, which is that like this golf league is in miniature like the problem. Sports Washington. Because it's basically like. like they are testing a proposition that America and Americans can just be bought, you know. And there are enough people proving them right, like Phil Mickelson. Ari Fleischer.

Ari Fleischer, you know, even like MAGA adjacent Trump endorsing Jack Nicholas, so I saw, said no. You know, so like there's people said no, Tiger, like you mentioned. But come on. I mean, can't people just watch golf without, I mean, and also the fact that it's golf, like, the bone saw invitation. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Come on, guys. You know, I tweeted this at Ari.

He blocks me, but hopefully he listens to the show. But I do think he should do his annual 9-11 tweet storm from the home of one of the 15 Saudi hijackers. Yeah, I saw that. That was well done. It was well done. Thanks. Every now and then, you know, Twitter can still be a unique art form. I mean, of course, of course we both like Twitter when it allows us to be just viciously mean to some enemy.

Well, mainly to Jared Kushner and Ari. Flusher. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's get some substance, Ben. Dan from Australia on Twitter S, given B.B.'s information campaign on the original Iran deal, as well as his pressure on Trump, do you believe we would have a different outcome if the Israeli government had changed earlier? Fascinating what-if question. It really is. I mean, I think that it's quite possible that we would, you know, because I lived on the other side of that information campaign. It extended to be...

Some of it paid. Yeah, yeah. And some of it extended to people like spying on me and stuff, right? But the reality is that like Bibi took his kind of anti-Iran deal politics and he injected them so aggressively into American politics. You know, people won't recall necessarily, but he came to the United States at the invitation of the Republican Party to address Congress against the Iran deal. before it even happened.

And I think what that did is it made the Iran deal like almost like an identity politics issue in American politics. So like, you know, Obamacare, the Iran deal, it kind of got wrapped into that toxic ball of grievance in us versus them politics. And that meant that a guy like Trump, who like doesn't have like a well evolved view of nuclear nonproliferation agreements.

No. you know, just demagogue the hell out of it in his campaign. And then with BB's continued backing in the first couple of years of his presidency, overruled all of his advisors in pulling out of the deal, which he didn't even really need to do. Like, you know, it wasn't like huge political utility in that, but it was just kind of, it was such a, it went from being kind of a second tier right-wing grievance to a first tier because of BB. And I think if you had even like this current government that voices opposition to the agreement, but kind of doesn't really do that much to act on it, I think it might have been different.

I do think that if there's what the person who is most responsible for killing the Iran deal, other than, I guess, Donald Trump, is definitely Bibi Nanyahu. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating hypothetical. I do find incredibly annoying when I read all these former Israeli generals, Mossad guys, national security officials, coming out. five years later and not all the profiles encourage yeah I'd be like hey we were wrong the Iran deal was good yeah but they knew that at the time I know I knew that at time I'll tell you the the the most interesting thing which is it like when when when you would sit down with

them because the US has these 10 year MOUs memorandums of understanding about the security systems we provided to Israel like after the Iran deal they were like pleased to not have to consider like the likelihood of a potential war or over a nuclear program with Iran. And so their working level security people were always in a different place than Beebe, which made this such kind of a toxic, performative issue. Yeah, I mean, like you said,

I think BB's lobbying mattered to Trump, but for purely political reasons. I don't think Trump knows or cares about policy. You wanna do the opposite of whatever Obama did, and that made whatever made his base happy. And so my bigger point on this is the people that know better and oppose the JCPOA should live in shame. I also think like tepid Democrats in the press who kind of like wouldn't really fully support it.

She should really think about the situation we're in now and whether they want to have the guts to be for diplomacy in the future. The tepid Democrats were tepid in part because of BB being so vocal in American politics. Let's just be honest about that. And, you know, you can you can tie it to other issues too, like that, not, you know, whether you're a Republican who knows better about democracy or. or a Democrat knew he's better about taking a principled stand on something like people hanging back is why we're in this mess, not just on Iran, but on a lot of things. Nick on Twitter asks, I feel like Pakistan was the most discussed foreign policy topic at the start of the 2010s, and we never hear about it anymore. Has the situation there over the last decade gotten better or did our attention shift away to other areas of the world? But I actually had a similar thought about this other day.

I think maybe because we were talking about the changeover in administrations. The problem has not gone away. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. There's terrorist groups running around the country. They are constantly teetering on becoming a theocratic government. They still view India as a mortal enemy. I mean, I think what obviously has changed is the war in Afghanistan is now over. The threat from extremist groups has metastasized.

And we're not just talking about al-Qaeda and the Fata. We're talking about ISIS everywhere. But, yeah, I mean, like, Pakistan's in some real trouble. You know, they're dealing with the impact of climate change. There's a polio outbreak that I was reading about just now. There's a fragile new prime minister and a recently ousted former prime minister who's like blaming America for getting pushed out. So the extremism problem hasn't gone away. Yeah.

The nuke's problem hasn't gone away. Yeah. Do you think this is Nick Shapiro on Twitter? I don't know. A friend of the pod. Oh, big question. I'll ask him. But it's a great question because when you and I came into government,

like, Pakistan was like top of the list. Do you remember that in the Jefferson Jackson dinner in Iowa in 2007, like this is the key political event in the Iowa caucus? Joe Biden gave a really long speech. And this is like you're supposed to distill your message in one speech. And it was principally about Pakistan. And it was about like how Pakistan is the most dangerous place in the world. was true, right?

Like the mixture of terrorism and nuclear weapons, you know what I'm talking about it. What was the framing of it? It was like what he would have done on 9-11 or something? It was what would have Joe Biden done after 9-11 and a lot of third person. But I digress. I mean, the point is that what's interesting about this

is that none of those underlying dynamics, right? The presence of terrorist organizations, like a military intelligence, kind of deep state, for lack of a way of putting it, that undermines democracy. support for the Taliban, right? Those problems didn't get solved, right? And they didn't necessarily improve that much. I think what happened is in the earlier Obama years, we made a run at that and kind of got nowhere. No way. Right. And so what ended up happening is the principal interest to

the United States, like there's the thing that kind of enters into like first tier, you can't mess this up, you have to spend time on this, was that al-Qaeda safe haven in Pakistan. and particularly between kind of 2009 and 2012 kind of the first Obama term, most of that safe haven haven was taken away. And then Osama bin Laden was killed. And I think in a lot of ways, if you look at American policy after the bin Laden operation, that first tier, like threat to the American homeland pretty much went away. Because remember even early in the bomb years, there were a bunch of terrorist plots that were uncovered. Oh, yeah, real ones. Time Square, car bomb from Pakistan. That went away. And even though the other threats remained, nuclear weapons, lack of democracy,

support for the Taliban, those were like hard to dislodge. And now that doesn't mean it's any better. It just means that it's less in front of American politicians and American public because we're not as indirectly endangered. I think that the shame on all of us, like as with a bunch of other things we've talked about recently, is that, you know, Afghanistan is a manifestation to some extent of Pakistan's support for the Taliban. So in some ways, Pakistan is the dog that caught the car in that, you know, now the Taliban is next door. Yes, absolutely right. Doug on Twitter asks, I assume Doug M. Hoff, the second gentleman. Oh, I like this game, by the way, give people lost names. Have other countries been more successful in framing renewable energies

is the national security interest, sorry, what could the U.S. learn? And do you think it would help the U.S. quicken the transition? Great question. It is a great question. And I'm thinking about this. And there's been a lot of talk over the years and a lot of work have done. You know, the U.S. in the U.S., there have been reports issued by the Pentagon, the intelligence community, some of which we talked about, to make the national security case around climate change. You hear this in Europe and other places.

And yet I couldn't really think of a country that has successfully kind of frame this issue through security. And people should let us know if there's something we're missing in Europe. But I'm not seeing it. The reality is, like, all the things we talk about that have a national security nexus, conflict, migration, political instability, these are all going to grow up exponentially because of climate change, right? and we're going to be living in a world in which national security is shaped by climate change. And so I do think that part of this is, it's often like a messaging challenge, as it's described, like have generals go out and make the case on climate change, reach audiences that don't really care about,

I don't know, environmental issues by talking to them through this prism. That's all true. But I think the other thing that has to happen is governments need to reorient themselves to recognize that this is national security. challenge. And the U.S. government still hasn't done that. So just to give you one example, like John Kerry is a special envoy. It's still kind of like, and that's great, but it's still like there are these people over here who do climate change, and then there are these people over here who do diplomacy and national security. And so I'd like to see both the messaging point that this is framed around security, but also, frankly, the integration of climate change into the kind

of bureaucracies of national security in countries around the world. Yeah, absolutely. And look at the really truly unfortunate in the U.S. that this has gotten. distorted by fossil fuel industry lies and their ability to buy off politicians and now climate change is just fully tied into the culture war issue, right? Like, Republicans think it's funny to like pretend the issue is AOC wanting to eliminate cows so they stop farting. I mean, it's like it's just idiocy. This stuff is going to, like, can you imagine how that's going to age, you know, like what it's going to look like in 10, 20 years?

I mean, I think what it looks like now, but it's just the case that these issues that, it gets at the question of what is national security, because if national security is like kind of the protection of people's lives, guns, climate, pandemics, like these are much more dangerous to us than taking your shoes off at the airport. Taking your shoes off at the airport. You know, so I do think that the Democrats, and I'd welcome Republicans in this too, like framing national security differently, not accepting the frame that national security is just like, you know, stack, rack and stack of arms. Terrorism wars.

Terrorism, support for Israel. Like, you know, like, no, national security is these other things, too. For sure. Noel on Twitter asks, what are your thoughts overall in nuclear power as a clean generation method? Do the risks both real and perceived outweigh the rewards, even with the impending climate crisis on a global scale to developments in fusion technology change anything? Great question.

I am nowhere near smart enough to know what the reality is with fusion technology. I feel like every couple of years, I read that we're on the cusp of something. And then I read that no, we're nowhere close. close. I have no idea. I do think you and I lived through, we know about Chernobyl, but we lived through the Fukushima disaster in Japan, and that showed the enormous downside risk, enormous downside risk of nuclear technology. In the U.S. for a long time, like the climate movement, the environmental movement was anti-nuclear power. Climate change has changed that. You know, the stats are pretty stark. Nuclear power plants generate about

about fifth of the electricity in the U.S. and about half of our carbon-free electricity, nuclear plants in the U.S. are getting shut down because it's actually cheaper to get power from natural gas. So, you know, would I prefer that all our power come from, you know, solar panels and stuff? Absolutely. Do I think that's feasible today? Not even close. So I guess my position would be do not close down existing plants, keep investing in R&D

to figure out how to make them safer and more efficient. But, I mean, I think right now nuclear kind of has to be a part of the answer. Yeah, this is a really interesting question. And again, I welcome, you know, listeners. Tell me why I'm wrong. Tell us why we're wrong. I, when I was in Glasgow, you know, at the climate change summit, I talked to a bunch of people. And one of the things that kept coming up was this. Like, these emissions goals, the speed of transition that is required is kind of like it's hard to see absent some technological breakthrough that, that, that's, that. that just we're not, that hasn't happened that we're not aware of, or like a mass scaling up of the potential of like hydro power or something, nuclear is the only way, it has to be a part of the equation here. And the couple of examples like give, one is Germany, right?

So after Fukushima, Miracle decided to basically shut down Germany's nuclear power plants. That decision is part of what contributed to the building of these. pipelines, they bring in more oil and gas from Russia. So both increasing dependence on fossil fuels, climate issue, and increasing dependence on Russia. And that shows you kind of the danger of walking away from nuclear, at least before you have renewable alternatives to nuclear, right? That's one thing. The other thing is, and this is something I heard about in Glasgow, and not from the French, by the way, the French get a lot of their power from nuclear. And one of the things that is going to be required to allow the developing world to not rely on fossil fuels is to give them quicker and available

sources of energy on a big scale. And nuclear plants are actually like an available option for that because, you know, people know how to build them, you know, people know how to get energy out of them. And that can be done on a timeline that is feasible for this transition. And so again, I'm, there are environmental reasons to be concerned about nuclear power. There's security reasons. Storage of the waste. Yeah, storage of the waste.

You know, there are national security reasons like are there proliferation risks with, you know, relying on nuclear? That said, I'm currently in a place where it's hard for me to see how we don't return to a global reliance to some extent, not like a whole extent. You obviously want those other renewables on nuclear. Chandrew on Twitter asked, how can we take collective global action when at any given point about half the countries have right-leaning governments that do not prioritize climate? The Paris Accords were a decent starting point, but it's the bare minimum we can do. Fair. Fair. And, you know, you heard we talked to Justin Trudeau about this a bit.

I mean, there's kind of a multi-track here approach. Like one is like elections, right? I'm trying to elect people who care about climate change. That should be taken as a given. And that requires, as Justin Trudeau said, like some either persuasion of people who aren't convinced on climate change or designing policies. Like he talked about designing his cap and trade to basically provide like a subsidy to individuals. Well, that certainly makes it more attractive. I think beyond that, though, we have to understand.

And this is a really important thing for the climate movement generally. and this is something else I took away from that Glasgow experience where it kind of so underperform people's expectations. And for a lot of reasons, here, even where you had a government committed to climate change because Joe Manchin isn't, we are probably not going to spend the several hundred billion dollars that was going to be a good down payment on transition. We have to accept that governments just are not going to do enough. You know, we have to keep pushing on that and trying to change that.

That means pressuring businesses, pressuring private sector, pressuring financial institutions. And people, understandably and rightly, I think, roll their eyes at, you know, these climate finance declarations that are made, you know, trillions of dollars in finance for renewables or when companies make these kind of vague promises to be carbon neutral by some year in the future, you know. But that it actually may be that activism needs to be directed at much as, corporations and financial institutions as governments so that we we aren't just sitting back and waiting for governments to do the right thing here you know yeah it's really about moving money into clean energy and out of fossil fuels as fast

as possible and then lastly it's also about individual and consumer choices right like how are you powering your home or you know like how much energy you're using like and and so I think that like there has to be kind of a whole of society approach taken to climate so that you're not putting all your eggs in the government basket, frankly. So what it sounds like you're saying is that you are an investor in the company that the former CEO of WeWork started to put carbon credits on the blockchain. This dude, Adam Newman, raised $70 million, most of it from A16C.

Would you give more money to the WeWork guy, though? Probably not. It's not the first guy. Neither he or Jared Kushner is the guy that I would. That sounds like a nesting doll of scams. Yeah, yeah. Like give a bunch of money to invest. No, I do think there is a real place for private sector investment,

especially in like big swing shit like fusion technology, right? Because I mean a lot of those companies are going to fail. Yeah. Look, look, I would deeply profoundly support government action. And as I said to Justin Trudeau, like the government can accelerate clients. changes in ways that nobody else can because they can change the law and change the regulations. But like even in this country, like we could lose Congress and not have a shot at passing climate legislation for a while. Even if we pass it, we have this kind of right-wing reactionary Supreme

Court that might strike down those laws. Like, we just have to be working every lever we can pull here. And these, I don't, you know, the technology, we're going to be able to solve this with technological breakthroughs is kind of a right-wing non-climate denying talking point. But that doesn't change the fact that like pressing and pushing and pressuring in every direction that you can isn't still something that you have to do to hedge against government in action. Yeah. And also just remember that, you know, I don't want to make anyone feel bad here, but the U.S. historically speaking, is responsible for like one third of the total excess carbon ever released in the atmosphere through the Industrial Revolution. So I think our job here has to just be to lead and create economic incentives that make it easier for other countries to follow and not like make this just. collective action bottleneck where everyone winds. Like, well, if India doesn't do it and China doesn't do it, what's the point of us doing it?

We have to. Yeah, we got to get off that mentality. It's also not binary. It's like progress is progress. Will on Twitter wants to know, what are some of the issues, trends, we, you don't focus on too much for which you think are going to be front page issues in the next three to five years. Ben, do you have time to take an edible? No, man, I wish I did. Okay, well, anyway, just pretend you did.

So here's mine. Okay. artificial intelligence. I've been reading this book about AI. No one knows when it's going to happen. But at some point, 20 years, 50 years, 200 years, we're going to have machines that are smarter than us. And those machines will know how to program themselves

to become even smarter machines, like add infinitum. And we have no idea where that's going to lead. And the movie version of this is always like very, very dark, you know, from Terminator to X Machina. At least we win in Terminator. Spoiler alert. But, you know, like we, ultimately we'll have to code some sort of ethics into these machines into what their goal is and what they want to do.

Or it seems like it's maybe debatable whether we'll be able to code ethics into things that become super intelligent. So fascinating, kind of scared to think about. I'm not thrilled when I think about the current crop of technology big thinkers and the concern they're showing with current technologies about, like, ethics in morality. I'm also worried that humans seem predisposed to use all new things to hurt each other. So, you know. Well, there's a war, you know, there's an aspect to this like the, like, and not just the kind of Terminator, Blade Runner or like the killer robots angle. But AI is going to be normalized in warfare, you know, in ways that reduce the cost of, in human life to launching wars. Do you see the taser drone that some company floated for schools?

Yeah. I mean, just crazy shit is our gap. Yeah. And to build surveillance states like we see in Western China. That's a trend. Yeah, that's a good meta trend. I would say, because we know we talked about climate. Three to five years like is a good timeline for Taiwan to potentially boil.

I think the thing I would spotlight that we talk about, but not as something that is going to get like exponentially more intense is my. migration. Now, like, the current estimate from IOM, the UN migration agency is that there are 281 million international migrants in 2020. Mostly by wars, right? Yeah. But it's wars, it's also just like the population growth in the developing world is so enormous. And there is now technology, right, that allows people to see what life is like in different places, to have, like to be put in touch with human traffickers or smuggling routes. The idea that you're just going to stop migration, which is kind of the default political point

in most advanced democracies, these numbers are going to be multiplying, $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, like as climate change also kicks in, and there's resource scarcity, and some of the most intense resource scarcity is in places like South Asia and places along the equator,

sub-Saharan Africa. I just think that we don't have a system globally to manage migration flows. That system is already broken. And it's not just about finding homes for refugees. It's just about the idea that enormous amounts of human beings are going to be on the move in ways that bring political instability and in ways in which there's just, there's nothing that can absorb that, right? And so when I look out five, ten, twenty years, you're right.

like climate change, the development of new technologies and AI and the questions that that's going to raise, the migration of people. Like, this is the future that we're going to be dealing with. And it's not, you know, these kind of niche national security issues that have dominated our debates the last, you know, North Korea or Iran, like big meta trends are going to be remaking the world around us. Yeah. Ella on Twitter, great name. Love that name. From Northern Ireland, but I live in Madrid. That's cool.

A few months ago, Ted Cruz gave a big speech to Vox members, the Spanish far right party. Are the Dems and the other left-wing parties across the world doing enough to work together, not just Dems, meaning with UK labor, P.S. David Lamie for PM. Ben, this feels like it was written for you. Yeah, yeah. The answer is no. We're not doing enough. I thought this for a while.

We talked about this on the show. I'll try to be concreted. about it in a way in a moment. I will say that like one of the times this really hit me is I went to Spain, I went to Madrid, where Ella is currently living, having selected a different weather environment than the Northern Ireland. Although New Zealand is really beautiful. Belfast, great movie. Belfast, great movie. And I was there like the week after Steve Bannon had visited Spain to kind of bless the new Vox party. Right? And the thing to me,

that I'd say about this is that like there's an asymmetry in terms of how the right coordinates and how the left coordinates. You know, the left, at best, you have conferences, and I'm going to one in Copenhagen this week. It's a democracy conference, right? But like you have conferences, you have parliamentary exchanges. Yeah, you have like the David Lemys of the world meeting with the Chris Murphy's of the world.

And that's great. That's all really important stuff. But there's a couple things missing. Like one is, I think we do, in post on the question, we do need to look more than just kind of Democratic Party, Labor Party. Like, I don't think there's the connectivity with some of the other social democratic parties in Europe or the green parties. Certainly not with, you know, emerging progressive leaders in places like Latin America, like Gabriel Borich, who we talked about with Justin Trudeau. So you need better connectivity among parties globally on the center left to the progressive left. But then really importantly, if you look at what the right does, these are not just people meeting with each other.

They share political strategies. They share political messaging. They literally share media platforms. Oh, yeah. So they have a crooked media, like a global crooked media. Bannon has international interviews all the time. Yeah. But then they're also like, there's like versions of Breitbart in different countries, right?

they they they it by the way they share rich donor types who buy up the media right so if you look at the the inroads for the right in places like central eastern europe you literally have like right-wing people buying up media and turning them into propaganda and organs right in a way that like we feel you know gets our hands dirty right and so i i think that the leap that needs to be taken is not just on the dialogue but on literally the much more active coordination among progresses, people on the center left, in the media space,

in the social media space, in the messaging space, in the ways in which political campaigns are run. One of the better things that happened out of the Obama years where we had a lot of Democratic backsliding, but some of the people that modeled their own politics

on the Obama-08 campaign were Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron And so, like, that was a toolbox. And it made me think, like, we should have created a road show after the O8 campaign to go teach people how to do that. Well, unfortunately, some of our consultants did, and they pick some bad horses from time to time. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes they weren't the right consultants, but we won't name any names.

Everyone knows you were thinking about. Yeah, sometimes they're the right ones, though. But so I just think it has to be, like, the toolkit has to be broadened here. Yeah. And I'd say this, too, like, I would like to see the, you're going to see the, you're going to. the U.S. administration be more willing to dabble in this, right? So, like, Trump, when he was president, had, you know, didn't worry about making. When we were the UK and fucked with them about Brexit. Yeah, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't, it wasn't

bashful of making his preferences known. Like, I think it was difficult because of the war in Ukraine, obviously, but like, you know, the U.S. government, the Biden administration kind of, you know, you didn't hear them put a thumb on the scale in the hungry election. I mean, you have to, Sometimes it can help. Sometimes it can hurt. It can hurt. But I do just think that, like, we have an interest. If we have an interest in democracy succeeding, not in, like, I'm not talking about, like, meddling in elections.

I'm just talking about, like, building solidarity. Totally. Of course, of course, of course. And David Lemmy would make a great prime minister. Great. Yeah. Prime Minister. He's shadow farm minister.

So that's a nice. I just want Boris to go down. I just want Boris to go down. Be nice enough to look at that guy. Glenn on Twitter, I seen Glenn Beck. Glenn Robinson. Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald.

of a glance. What would it take to make people care more about what's happening in Myanmar? It's a great question. Glenn, I would start by saying it would just take a lot of concern people like you. You know, like the Saved R4 movement was an incredibly effective grassroots organization. I mean, there was some money behind it, but it was an amazing like grassroots organization. Coney 2012 was a deeply flawed, deeply, deeply, deeply flawed effort to bring attention to an issue. But like, I just do think those sort of show that citizen activism can go a very very, very long way. I mean, obviously, in the ideal world, you are not doing it, you know, just from your laptop in California. You are like lifting up the stories and voices and opinions

of people in Myanmar or the diaspora. But, I mean, there's some space here for civil society. You know, it's interesting. And I'm glad we got this question. I actually, I was talking to someone from the Myanmar opposition recently in the kind of like a Zoom thing. And, you know, they were saying, like it's obviously continued to be very bad there. The military is not like loosening its grip. But that, you know, the opposition, there have been a substantial number of military defections. The point that she was making is that there's both the ongoing humanitarian and political catastrophe of this coup, but there's also an ongoing resistance that is very broad and deep. And in terms of the question, And, you know, one example is actually the first time that people got American interested in Myanmar when Aung San Suu Kyi was in prison.

You know, Burma was a pretty distant place disconnected from like kind of core American national security interests. But there was this kind of interesting movement that built up around her, but also around rights in Burma generally that included, you know, a lot of civil society organizations, the Burmese diaspora. A lot of, like, there's a, like, faith-based organizations because there's Baptist, there's Baptist ethnic binarities there. And what those people did that was smart is they found champions in Congress, right, who took up this issue. By the way, bizarrely, including Mitch McConnell, but that's a whole separate story. I know.

It is weird. It is that whole history. Because even when something doesn't have broad public attention, if you have, like, tenacious champions in Congress, like that will keep this on the agenda, it will keep sources of funding and oversight of the issue. And so it's about building that kind of broad civil society movement that keeps attention on something that targets Congress to be involved. It doesn't have to be every member,

but just find those champions that mobilizes diaspora populations who care about this. And frankly, like, if there's a national security frame to this, Burma, I would argue, is that the nexus of a lot of things we care about, the democracy versus autocracy piece, China and China's rising influence in the world, you know, natural resources. There are like a lot of intersecting American priorities in Burma. And so I do think that like going back and looking at the playbook used in the 80s and 90s to pressure the Burmese government around Aung San Suu Kyi and political freedoms and treatment

of ethnic minorities is important, but then also maintaining and building connectivity to the Burmese opposition, you know, so that they are, you know, they have lines into Washington and New York and Los Angeles and places that have influenced in this country. That matters to. Free Tibet is another good example. Obviously, it was ultimately they have not achieved their goal. And frankly, it's completely faded from the limelight. But again, like, you know, there were massive concerts in the mid-90s. It was sort of like a cause-seleb, literally. And, you know, one worth studying. This is a hard one, Ben. Jonathan on Twitter, if you could be nominated ambassador to any non-NATO, non-G20 country,

which would it be and why? It's a lot of, the nons here are hard. I'd say Vietnam. I thought you might say that. Yeah. And here's why. Like, it checks all my boxes, right? It's food.

Food. Like, let's face it. That's probably first. Amazing food. Right? Like, just amazing food. Important country, like really, like, in, and it's an important country. country in really interesting ways. It's like right at the nexus of like the China, U.S.

competition right at the heart of this emerging region in Southeast Asia. Great travel options, right? So like if you're in Vietnam, you can hopscotch around Southeast Asia. You know, you can see a part of the world that is fascinating and diverse and compelling with lots of good food. Yeah. Vietnamese people. Super friendly people. In my experience, like some of the very best people, as one of our former presidents would say. But like, the good, super like nice,

charming, compelling, you know, so I like, I'd go with the history. Like, you have to wrestle with this very complicated history, try to overcome it.

There's, there are issues that go with that, like the cleanup of Asian orange and, and there's a lot of stuff happening there. Yeah, that's a really good one. I was thinking, it's less of,

it's more of a safe call, but New Zealand would be incredible. Oh, yeah. Like one of the most beautiful places in the world. I know the language. That helps. I'm far less likely to get shot in a mass shooting because they actually have gun laws. That's actually not a joke.

You can scout out your zombie apocalypse property. Totally. I could probably meet Peter Jackson. There can be that many people there. Amazing political leadership. Yeah. Which isinda. I mean, again, you know, not the most convenient place to travel from.

But if there's another pandemic, like I feel like I'm good. Yeah. Literally on an island. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. That's a good Like that'd be on my top five for sure

This might be the easiest question we've ever gotten From Ben on Twitter I'm not sure if it's you or Ben LaBolt What's your favorite Pearl Jam album? I mean how do you not say 10? I think I'd be a little different than you What do you got? I got verses, I got VS

You like verses better than 10? Yeah Holy shit Yeah That's shocking to me I look I mean we can all Like 10 is obviously a thing that's started at all

but there's a development in, like, depth to the sound and lyrics and verses that I like. The Obama party over the summer that everyone flipped out about for absolutely no reason and for COVID reasons. I found myself in the, like, Porta John with Eddie Vedder after having had several cocktails. And I think I said something to him, like, thank you for making all the music that defined my middle school and high school years. This may be, like, I'm just maybe a little too revealing, but, like, Like when I was, because like versus, like, it came out of like probably like the height of my teen angst, right? I was probably like 16 or something. Mm-hmm.

And like, like elderly women behind the counter. Great son. Great son. I seem to recognize. That low range. Like, like that hit me. Like that hit me very directly in the solar complexes. I hate to sound like old nerds.

But there is like a viral tweet that someone sends me once every six months, which shows like seven albums that all came out in the same basically 44 day period. 91. There was like Pearl Jam 10, Guns and Roos, these your illusions one and two, red hot chili peppers, blood sugar, sex magic, the Metallica black album, Sound Garden, Bad Motifinger, which I didn't really listen to. And then Nirvana, never mind. Like some of the more iconic albums of the decade. I mean, those are some fucking bangers right there. I mean, I do think like, you know, the Chris Cornell stands. I get it.

But like Soundgarden is kind of sneaking on that list. I will say if you, if you collapsed, you use your illusion into one album. I mean, that like just just a monster. Monster. It's also strange, don't cry, November rain. That was also the height of the video, the music video is like an art form. MTV was, I was having a conversation with someone today.

Like, I know this happens all the time constantly throughout history. Things are massively relevant and that get replaced, but it is still hard to explain to people how big of a deal MTV was and now it's just kind of gone. Yeah. And guns and how big a deal of Guns and Roses was. Right. They unfortunately could never follow that up because they, you know, know, like couldn't get along or drugs or whatever. They did have the best album name for the follow-up that took them like 20 years to do

and it wasn't very good, Chinese democracy. Very world album. Yeah. And a great deal. If G&R had actually, here's a what if of history. If G&R had put out an album in like 1992 that was as good as usual illusion called Chinese democracy, would China be a democracy. Great.

Great question. That would have been there, wind of change. Yeah. It's also hard to overstate how different nirvana. sounded compared to almost everything else at the time. It was just like blew your head off. I grew up with the hair bands and like the 80s stuff and like when suddenly like there's Kirk Corbin, it was like a fucking.

Just the man. And 10 came out right then too. So it was like those are the two. Seattle Grunge. Those are the two things. Because what's interesting about that list is that use your illusion is kind of the best and end of the hair rock period. And then like 10 and and smells like teen spirit are obviously the beginning of.

We're officially getting made fun of her for talking about a 19- music too much. Anna wants to know. Advice for young adults wanting to get into foreign policy work after college grad school. This is a hard one because I lucked my way into it. I'm not going to lie to you guys. I got a job with Barack Obama on a 2004 campaign, got interested in the issues, sort of worked for the right person. I was a lot luckier than I was smart. You went more the think tanky. I went to think tank grab, but then like the luck I had was working on a campaign that elected Barack Obama president, you know. And not listening to the people who said, if you don't work for Hillary, you'll be blackballed

in this time. I literally got taken out for like multiple times before I moved out to Chicago with you guys, hey, don't work on that campaign because he's going to lose and you won't get a job and all this. I will say this. And like I have a lot of coffees with, you know, people, younger people on this question. And what I say to them is like there's actually a lot more, number one, don't resume build, right?

So don't be like, well, I have to get this master's degree and in this internship program to then I want to be that. If I tried to do that, I actually never would have ended up in the White House, granted that I had some luck. But two, it's much a bigger field that you have to run with, particularly if you're fresh out of college or grad school, because people tend to think it's like, do I go through a career in government? And that's great.

But there's campaigns, right? campaigns lead to government jobs in ways that allow you to, you know, get to work with the principal, get to know politics and then come in. But then also, they're international NGOs that I think people don't think about enough, you know, like get out in the field. Like you're young, you have flexibility. Go live somewhere else. There's Peace Corps. There's the bigger ones to save the children's and the IRAs, but then they're the smaller ones. Some really interesting, compelling small NGOs around the world doing accountability work or doing development work. So there's like a diversity of ways into this. Yeah, then there's the think tank

group, be like the young person helping to set up conferences or do research for someone who's writing a book. And so what I would advise is take a long look at the biggest possible spectrum, you know, media, like, you know, go work on a documentary production company on something. There's lots of ways into this and take advantage of the flexibility you have in your 20s. to be able to pick up and go live some place else, whether that's a political campaign or another country. And like, look, you know, the traditional paths are, join the military, take the foreign service exam,

or join the intel communities. Pretty damn interesting. And those are all interesting paths, and I encourage them, but also, like, there are broader, there's broader ways of doing this. At Geek-Kenn, I think this one is, when hitting international airports, do you hit the airline lounges or hang out in the general terminal?

Prefer skipping lounges myself. I don't really have, I guess it depends on how long the layover is. Like sometimes, what is it, like 50 bucks to go to like the Delta lounge or something. Like, you know, that's a big, if you're there for eight hours, I would hit the lounge. So here's the thing. I'm actually an airport guy for, like, sometimes they hit the lounge because like if they have like the free wine, you know. Oh, absolutely. And the buffet.

Yeah. But like I actually love airports. And this is probably like a pre-COVID point. but it still holds. Like if you're like a long layover in like a weird Asian airport, like a Singapore or like Japan has some like fastening airport, like I just kind of walk around.

Yeah. I just kind of wander around and I just kind of like people watch. And in Europe they're just malls. And in Europe they've got these kind of weird upscale malls. And then you can always kind of stop and get a beer somewhere. Yeah. And so I actually like like the more foreign the airport is, the more into it I get.

And I do like to just kind of like wander, people watch, buy something weird, like have like the local food, have a beer. Like I actually love, like that's kind of a happy space for me. Yeah, I agree. There's something, I mean, Obama used always sort of this was his one complaint about the presidency. There is something just really fun about wandering in a crowd anonymous, something like cool and freeing about it. In airports, like I feel like I'm stepping out of all the anxieties in my life and I'm just in this kind of. weird transitory place, you know, where I'm like, weirdly not stressed unless I'm trying to make a plane. Yeah, that part sucks. I do like, you know, I also like, I get, I mean, you get this,

I'm sure, too. Like, I like, I like the occasional world, though, like you're walking to some airport and like, some random city and someone's like, hey, world over here. Hey, hey, hey, Jared sucks. I'm like, I agree. Yeah, yeah. One time I left my, I was coming back from a trip in in Europe and I left my laptop on a plane and then I crossed out of the Eurozone into like, and I had to figure out how to get back in and it was a nightmare. So don't do that. is the answer. One time I, back when I was a smoker, I left my passport in one of those like weird. The lounges?

Yeah. And I was in like Singapore. Oof. And I could have been completely fucked. Like, like, completely. Yeah. Yeah. And a very nice person, like gave it to like the very nice person at the, I don't know if I

get arrested for even saying this. No, like, like cane you. Yeah. No, they was just like, wow, like one of big bullets

in life I dodged. So don't do that. Don't do that. Don't take your passport out of your pocket. I'm going to summarize this one for Andrew on Twitter. He's got some Republican friends. What is the 62nd pitch? What's the elevator pitch for why Democrats are better than Republicans on foreign policy?

Well, I want to say we get into fewer wars. Yeah, I was about to say like, think about the ones Obama started in Iraq, and I think I need to caveat that a little more. Well, we didn't start the one in Iraq. No, no, no. I'm saying Libya, you know, Libya.

People, I'm thinking about what people are going to at me. I would, because like, there's a couple ways to go on this. And I didn't workshop this before because it's good to kind of talk it through. Because, like, one way to do is, like, the Republicans got us into war in Iraq. Full stop, right? You know what I mean? And people say, well, Democrats voted for it well, you voted against it too. Now, the five second pitch is like the Iraq war is where Republican foreign policy led us.

And it destroyed the world order. And it led to the rapid diminution of American influence and the denigration of democracy promotion around the world. And here we are. Right. So like that may be the shortest one. I think the longer one is it actually like Republicans have no foreign policy right now. They don't know whether they're hawks who like to get. get into wars or America firsters like Donald Trump, Democrats have a strong, steady, competent,

reliable foreign policy that tries to keep America out of wars while keeping us safe and advocating for democratic values. And if you're a Republican who liked Ronald Reagan and the things he stood for, your party doesn't stand for that anymore. If you're a Democrat who didn't like the Iraq war, like we're the ones trying to prevent the next one. I mean, I actually do think Democrats have much more real estate on farm policy than Republicans. Here's what I'd say. I figured it out while you're talking. 9-11 happened on George W. Bush's watch and then he invaded the wrong country in response. Yeah.

Do you think that's a good policy? Have that it. Yeah. Yeah. But he's right. The elevator pitch point is a good one. And the elevator pitch for us in the Obama, I think we had a good one in 08, which was essentially like Barack Obama opposed this war that never should have been waged. he will authorize or waged yeah yeah Hillary Clinton yeah he will wind down the wars focus on the terrorists that actually attacked us

and restore America's standing and support for democratic values around the world it's good so and that was like a really good tight pitch and you know the world's a little more weirdly more complicated it seemed complicated to them but it's something like that that combines like the critique with like the quick because like if you want to be proud

to be an American if you want to be and this is I would say to kind of patriotic Republicans, if you want to be proud of your country on the world stage and stand for things on the world stage and have an example of setting a Democratic example in this country that is relevant around the world, like the only option is to support Democrats. Like the rest of the world looks at Republicans as a party that's increasingly not trustworthy, not competent, and not supportive of Democratic value. Certainly, nationalists and not focused on the singular threat that the entire planet faces, which is climate change. That too, yeah.

George wants to know, he says there's a lot going on in the world. Can you guys talk about the NBA finals for two minutes before getting into the heavy stuff? This is tough because we're recording this on Wednesday, June 8. It's going to go out a week from today. I don't know what we can say. Yeah, it'll be incredibly dated. But I will say, I mean, this is like my dream series. These two teams are just so fun and young and shoot the lights out when they want to.

and everybody seems to be able to like, I mean, the Celtics turned it on in that game one, fourth quarter in a way you rarely see a team do. And then Steve Kerr drew up some plan coming out of halftime and the Warriors destroyed the Celtics in the third quarter of the second game in a way that's just like, I don't know, nobody else can do what Steph does and what Clay does when he's on. And it's just, it's a blast. Yeah, I guess what I'd say is like this series is like why I love the NBA and I think it's doing the best of any of the major professional sports.

because it has all the things I love about the NBA. It's got high-wadage stars like Steph Curry. It's got really amazing young guys. You know we're going to do huge things like Jason Tatum. It's got kind of weird mixes of different lineups, you know, that these teams can run out. It's got like eccentric personalities like Draymond Green. Marcus Mark is. It's got like politically active like coaches like Steve Kerr.

Yeah. And he made out of. Yeah. Well, and it's got the international component. Show me doing Nigerian politics. Yeah. Yeah. The international component

on both players and coaches. So, like, if you look at this series, it encompasses a lot of why the NBA is, like, of all the leagues, the one that I feel like is in a groove right now. They definitely embraced these guys being themselves and saying what they want to say in a way that I think it's, like,

benefiting the league in the long run. You know, Charlie Kirk can pretend he's turning off sports for rest of his life. Clay Travis, all these guys are going to whine about it, but, like, they're all watching. The whole world's watching. Yeah, I don't think the NBA is, like, suffered because, you know, like some right-wingers like to attack them over.

Someone took a knee in, yeah, yeah, 2017. This is a random one, Ben, from Caesar on Twitter. Ben, for the last World Cup, you told me at your book tour stop in Seattle that Argentina was going to go all the way. Whoa, some accountability from Caesar. Yeah, who are you rooting for this year and who's going to win it all? That's some real accountability because I, you know, I was obviously not right about that. I'm rooting for the country of Qatar.

Oh, yeah. I'm going to, you know, I like the English team. Interesting, okay. The pander choice would have just been to say Ukraine. I don't even know if they're in it. They are. They have to win one more qualifying match to get in, I think. They beat Scotland, and I think they had to beat Wales.

But England's got like, you know, they almost won the Euro. They've got this young team, super-interesting guys. One of these cups are going to break through. Dude, the England's in the U.S. draw. Well, we can both get out of the draw. We can both get out of the draw. It's us, England, Iran, and Euro playoff. That's Ukraine.

Oh, that's cool. So, like, it's probably, uh, Ukraine. So, um, I don't know. But I think, I don't know. I'll, I'll tentatively go to England, but people shouldn't be taken. I'm no man in a blazer here. I know, like, I'm doing this limited series with Roger Bennett later this year. Like, one of the nicest human beings I've ever met.

If you love soccer, you should listen to the men in Blazers podcast. You should also read his book, too, because the guy just like, born and raised in Liverpool, moved to the U.S., like loves America more than any human being, I know. That's like when Republican demigrog immigrants, it's always the immigrants who love this country more than anybody you know. Super patriotic people. The zeal of the converted, right?

But we're going to talk a lot about the institution of FIFA sports washing. Like, in how hard it is. Sportswashing is fascinating. Yeah, well, it's like, I'm sure you feel the same way that I do about the NFL sometimes. Like, I love football. I watch football every Sunday.

I played football in high school. I can't not watch it. But like, there's some real moral qualms with league, the way they make decisions, the way players are treated, the way injuries are not focused on, right? And so I think Roger has similar frustrations and feelings about FIFA, you know, the international body, the decision-making the leaders, the bribes, the corruption. I have to tell you, though, this has actually started to really impact my, and this is not a virtue signal. I swear to God, but the NFL, it's just something uncomfortable. Like, Roger Goodell's seems like a pretty gigantic tool. Horrible guy.

Compared to Adam Silver, though. Yeah, concussion stuff. I'm like a basketball, baseball guy. Look, I love football. I also watch it. So I get it. And, like, soccer, one of the challenges, I love it, but, like, it is hard to unpack the kind of web of international soccer, you know.

It is gross. Yeah. When you really, those guys were just like the most, they were just handing out bags of cash in envelopes. Yeah. It was just brazen. Yeah. Yeah. Lisa on Twitter asked, what's a book maybe you read in high school or college that made you think you wanted to learn more about the world as opposed to the United States?

It's a really hard question. That's a great question. I mean, I'd say as a starting point that like doesn't directly answer the question. But to me, like, I studied abroad. And it was like completely transformed it to me. Because it was like... Where were you? I was in Paris.

So... That's cool. You're just ripping butts on the scent? I was, man. It was good. It was a good time. Writing fiction? But I remember I was there doing like the...

I'm really dating myself. We can get some serious, like... Let me guess. You were worried about Mad Cow? No, it was a Clinton impeachment. And the French thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Oh, really? They're like, what are you talking about?

Like, our president had... like his, you know, mistress at his funeral. But like, I'm not saying I agreed with that because there's a lot of hair on the Clinton impeachment, like Clinton impeachment, you know, Clinton's behavior is not aged well. The point I'm making is it like seeing my country through a radically different perspective. Yeah. That's the thing. It was like, wait a second. I want to understand, like, it was both getting to know a foreign place, but it was also like looking at where I was from, from the perspective of like a foreign lens, you know, that to me was like, oh, this can change how I think about everything, because it can change not just like, oh, I can learn about this

other culture. It's also like I can look at my own culture from another window, you know? Yeah, I had a very similar experience when I studied abroad. I was in Italy, mostly in Florence. We traveled everywhere. That's another good place. I visited some friends. I had that your real pass. Like, the cool, amazing. But, you know, this was like right when the, this was pre-9-11. This was right when the Eurozone was about to be coming to fruition, so it was easy to get around. And also, you know, look, the kind of the version of U.S. history that you and I were taught in school started in 1776. Yeah. And, you know, when you're, I know that's obviously like very fucked up, but when you're in a country like Italy and you're running around and you're seeing, you know, Roman ruins to, you know, Renaissance artists.

I mean, you just like the sweep of these places. Yeah. It just stretches. dream of their talk. It stretches your understanding of things. I think for me on the books front, it was usually novels. I remember taking a lot of classes in like foreign literature in college. And I remember reading 100 years of solitude by Gabriel Marquez. And it was just like, oh, like similarly to studying abroad is like, like these people are just looking at the world in a totally different way.

It's super interesting, you know. God, I wish I remembered more of the things I read in high school and college. Yeah. I don't know that I used my time that well. I was stretching my, you know, brain to remember a book. And then I remember a couple of those classes I took. It was good classes, though. Great classes.

Modern European literature, Terran Studi. Nice. You know, it's funny. Kenyon College is this little bastion of, like, insane liberalism in rural Ohio. But the political science department was like super right-wing, Neo-Con, Leo Straussian. And I didn't really know it at the time. I think they were all probably big Bush supporters and whatnot.

And I'm sure it, like, filtered in. It obviously didn't impact my views. But I took my political science classes at the Baker Institute at Rice. Nice. James A. Baker. Did he teach classes? No, he didn't. But, like, the, you know, and I don't know that the faculty was particularly right wing.

But, like, there was definitely, like, a presence of that Bush Baker. George P. Bush went to college with me. I took a class of them. Really? Yeah. I took Greek tragedy. It's kind of funny. Wait a second.

I never thought of how funny that is. I took Greek tragedy with George B. Bush. That's incredible. It's literally what I did. We read Euripides and stuff. We read Sophocles like, boy, like, that's interesting to think about now. That is the lead of a Mark Leibovic profile if I've ever heard of one. Last question.

Just for kicks. This is from Noel. A lot of Noel's. Favorite Taylor Swift song. Big fan in 1989 red album. So this is a really important question, no all, because I have two daughters who are five and seven. So I listen to like an extraordinary amount of Taylor Swift. I'm friends with Emily Fabros.

They absolutely love Taylor Swift. My personal favorite is Cardigan. Okay. Right? Like that folklore album, it's a great album. I can't tell you how many times they heard. And my kids kind of, you know, like what kids do, they move past it. And I'd be like, hey, let's just throw on folklore here, guys.

And so that's my number one. I will say of the like shake it off is like eternal and my kids love shake it off and they do dances and stuff and it's cute, you know. She is an incredible songwriter. Her work clearly works her ass off because that album was written and produced in the pandemic, I believe. And it's like one of those artists who's smart enough to work with great people. Like I think she has a lot of work with Jack Antenough from Bleachers. Yeah. Not the bleachers, bleachers.

I've been corrected. Oh, and she's got the national. Yeah, the national writing with her. And she's got Bonnie Vair and all these guys, you know, like, she's really, she's super interesting. Yeah. I also just respect artists that embrace collaboration and give credit. And, like, she features them in the documentaries that she does

for, like, Disney Plus or whatever about these shows. The people who pretend that they just, like, hide and grind it out all by themselves are full of shit. That's just not how it works. You know what's funny, which Emily Favro appreciate is it my kids, we had explained to them because they, like, my oldest could read so she reads the songs in them in the car. we had to explain what Taylor's version was. And now they only want to listen. Like, they got mad.

Really? Because then folklore doesn't say Taylor's version. And I'm like, no, no, this is after. So then I had to explain like the before or after. I'm just going to say, Tommy, like, Taylor Swift, if you want to come on a podcast. Anytime. We won't ask about your personal life. Like, we just want to know.

Unless you want us to. What you think about the world. And we had Justin Trudeau on. Yeah, we'll shit on Scooter Braun. Oh, man. And Scooter Libby. Yeah. All the scooters.

We'll try to get the BTS people on the scooters, you know. Yeah. That's all we got for questions. I am going to be off next week. You're going to hear from Ben Sol. It's going to be a solo joint. It's going to be fantastic. I got some cool people lined up at the Skopin-Hagan thing. So, like, we'll hear some good voices. I'm jealous of you getting to spend some time with these folks that we will name later. Yes. It'll be great. They're good folks. I'm sorry to miss all you people who've been here for some of the Americas. But, yeah. Yeah, well, but thanks everybody for the great questions. Thank you again. Jared Kushner for, again, watching a masterclass taught by a fiction writer to help write your memoir. James Patterson.

When you know you're just going to hire a ghostwriter, dude. Well, that's the thing. Does anybody think he's actually writing it? You clown. It's kind of like the anecdote that he probably leaked out because he thought it made him look good and it doesn't. I mean, like, yeah, you have three months. I mean, I like how he's pretending he's solving Middle East piece. But it's like, I don't, you're just pissing away your last days.

You could have helped prevent an insurrection. I mean, that sounds better to me on paper. than the master class. You could have, yeah, there's a lot of things you could have done differently. Literally. Yeah, yeah, it just fed everything. I guess he lined up a $2 billion bribe, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, is it really worth it, though?

We're all going to die in the end. Like, you mean, like, like, we are all going to die in the end, whether we have $2 billion or not, and I'd like to have not, you know, aligned myself with Robin Salman. Or married into a Trump family. Speaking of Greek tragedies. A lot of different choices, yeah. Just, I guess, just a total full on tragedy.

Yeah. Gross. Weird edible stuff. That's what I'm going to do. Anyway, that's all we got. I'll talk to you in two weeks. See you. Pazate the World is a Crooked Media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Mews. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, B.B. Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montuth, who upload our episodes as videos at YouTube.com

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