Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The United Nations

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Jason Pargin explore why The United Nations is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

The United Nations, known for peaceful stuff. Famous for no stuff, not doing anything? Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the United Nations is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm very much not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Hello. And so fitting for this topic, bringing people together, joining perspectives. One of our favorite guests, a fantastic bestselling author, and his paper, of his latest novel just went on sale. The novel is called I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. Get it now in hardcover or paperback.

And please welcome Jason Pargin. Hey, Jason. I assume you cannot hear the Jack Camry and outside of my window that I think the modern microphones are good at filtering it out. But I do want to talk about it because that is such a symbol of where we are as a society because they're out there fixing. I think it's a water main or something. Like some people in the neighborhood don't have water.

But I'm in here trying to podcast, like that they don't care. Thank you. Yeah. Like my concentration's going to be off because they're out there doing whatever. Right, right. Tearing up the pavement, whatever, you know, whatever wasteful government project these people are out there doing and out in the heat. By the way, thank you for figuring out how to rig your microphone into your M. Morton Joe mask, Jason.

The big mask. I don't know how you did it. It's nifty. It's clever. I'm impressed. This is why you need to become your own micro-nation so that you can declare that you're a sovereign nation and that jackhammer noise is an act of intolerable aggression. And if you get like a nuke, you just need one, really. Yeah.

Two is good. It's always good to have two, one in the ground and one in the one in a sub. But, you know. Yeah. How many nukes could it take to knock out a jackhammer, Michael? Ten nukes? Right. Come on.

Speaking of all these sorts of relations, we have a wonderful topic this week. Jason, let's start with you. What is your relationship to or opinion of the United Nations? So I grew up in an evangelical Christian household. This is not a bit. This is real. So as a child, I was often told that the UN was kind of a secret plot to abolish Christianity. True.

and implement a one-world secular religion under a unified one-world government and have assumed that was true up until we started doing prep for this show. So I will be interested to see if our final conclusion is, yes, that is that for people who did not grow up in that ecosystem, they probably think I'm joking or that I grew up on a weird compound. This was very mainstream within that branch of Christianity. Yeah. My grandfather's spouse had all of the left behind books on a shelf and we just kind of didn't talk about it. Oh. Yeah, like that kind of thing. They were really into it. Left behind? Is that like a, is that a, what is that? It's one of the most popular book series ever printed in the history of literature. They've sold like 200 million copies of this. It is fascinating the way cultural bubbles work. It is about a future or near future where the rapture has happened, where God has sucked the Christians off the earth. There's a Nicholas Cage adaptation that we can go watch right now. And then part of the

premise, the setup is that after this happens, all of the world's religions will agree that remain on Earth, will agree to unify under the United Nations, which is easy to imagine. Islam, you know, Scientology, they all just agree. Yeah, we should all just form one. We all agree that where we basically it's the same. It's all the same stuff. Right. And then all of the world governments also agree to unify and disarm because of a charismatic head of the United Nations is secretly the Antichrist. And through the power of his oratory skills, his silver tongue, he convinces, again, as would

happen, all of these nations, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, they all agreed it mutually disarm and join one unified government under the Antichrist. It turns out the devil's greatest trick is world peace. Well, but see, we're going to get sidetracked, but that's the thing is that within evangelical Christianity, if you hear somebody at the United Nations start talking about unity, peace, bringing nations together, they hear that as code that this is the Antichrist trying to lure us into the false sense of security because, this they said is all in the book of Revelation, which is that specifically is not what this episode is about. We could do 250 episodes just about how they have taken that part of the Bible and reinterpreted it in the last, I don't know, a few decades. Anyway, that was my, the United Nations was always tainted for me as a child. And I don't know that people realize how much of the

opposition to the United Nations and how, like Donald Trump and how that, I realize, it's very early in the show to get a Trump mention, but how much of the knee-jerk reaction against anything United Nations related, the refusal to pay the fees is due to this. It's due to the evangelical Christian prophecies and trying to appeal to that sector of the audience. If you've never read Lord of the Rings and then you're like, you know what, let me like dip a toe in and then someone's like, now hang on, there's a lot here you need to understand. There are these, there's like basically a god, but also not really. And there are elves.

And yeah, it gets to be, gets very complicated very quickly. Yeah, there's a mob outside of your home chanting Tom Bombadil's name, and you don't really understand why they're bad at the movies. He's married to the concept of joy, but she's a lady. The big programming note for this topic is, often listeners thank me or us for making SIF not political. And I like mostly agree because we really don't bother with politics unless there's a

fundamental political component to the topic. But then also we talk about the fundamental political component because it would be like weird and sanitized not to. And so this episode will be political because the UN is a political organization. That's just how it's going to work. And you, you have been told that now. You don't get to be mad if you for some reason think that's bad. I'm going to take a centrist approach and say the UN may or may not exist. And I'm not going to come down on either side of that. Teach the controversy. It's one of those situations where I think a lot of people don't know about the politics behind it.

Because if you learned about the UN in school, it seems very, very boring. And it seems like they have a building and they have meetings that don't really go anywhere. And they kind of pass a resolution that doesn't mean anything. And they don't know how the roots of it are fascinating, but they are deeply political. and it's just hard to avoid, it's hard to avoid that. But, yeah, that's part of what is interesting about it, or part of what is secretly interesting about it, as you would say. Secretly very interesting.

Secretly very interesting, yeah. And Katie, was that your basically knowledge of the UN growing up basically? Like, I remember one of the main things I knew about it at all is that there was a club that did model UN in our high school. That's it. Yeah. My entire understanding came from the rescuers, the little mice who save children, because they have a little mouse U.N. Yeah, the Rescue Society. So that's, that was my introduction to it, was that it's, you know, the idea of there's a bunch of nations that go in a building and they sit on spools of thread and have tiny microphones.

And, you know, I was like, okay. And then so when I under, like when I saw the UN, I was like, oh, the UN base there is on these mice. So it's basically the human version of the mice one. Yeah. No, I mean, I think I have always had a neutral, if not positive view towards it. Because it's like, yeah, we should get, we should try to like get along. I think diplomacy's good. I don't like war.

So I've always had like a, I would say, like fairly neutral to positive view of it where it's like, we should be talking. That makes sense. I mean, maybe as an adult, I have more strong opinions on specific issues that come up in the UN, but it still feels a little bit esoteric, right? Like there are definitely resolutions and like, I mean, now I have to like understand both the UN and the EU and. Oh, no. Because the EU has more tangible impacts on my life, but still. Yeah, and the tangible impact thing, a lot of this episode will be about the UN, kind of being the no tangible impact thing, and then a lot of surprising roots and impacts, too. I loved fighting out about this topic because I really knew very little prior, except like the gist of the outrage about it from evangelical Christians. I keep thinking about the villain and left behind being named Nikolai Carpathia. That's the fake name of the Romanian politician who becomes the Antichrist ruling the world.

It's very stupid. If you rearrange the letters, it says, hey there, I'm the Antichrist. Yeah. Our first fascinating thing about the topic has a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, So this is Statsmas. And what has SIF done? A number year over.

And a new couch has begun. And the name was submitted by Keith. And thank you, Keith. There's a new name for this segment every week. Please make them a sillion wagging bay as possible. Submit through the Discord or to siftpod at gmail.com. Alex, you're getting so much better at just various accents. Accented singing.

It's very impressive. I think I was accidentally David Bowie a little bit. bit, but it's supposed to be John Lennon. It's fine. It's fine. It's whatever. Ah, you know. And the, the first number is 1979, the year 1979. That's the year when the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously every country to pass a treaty determining control of the moon. Hmm. And I picked this story, because it's, to me, a very revealing sample of how much or little the United Nations works and whether it is a thing at all. Because, theoretically, every country on Earth agreed that none of them control the moon, and practically, they didn't decide anything, but also influenced the philosophy of how we approach the moon.

I guess it makes sense at that time. We have the space race. People are going up on the moon, putting flags up there, messing up the quotes that they were supposed to say because they're too excited. So, like, you know, sending dogs there Because it could have been something Where like the Russians sent a bunch of dogs up there And then it's like, yeah, it belongs to a bunch of stray Russian dogs And there's nothing we can do about it now. It's too late. The dog meat.

They peed on it. So it's theirs according to dog law. So I mean, before then, owning the moon, it's like whatever you could say that But it doesn't, you can't actually be on the moon. So you can't say what? whatever you like, but it doesn't change your tangible reality. Right. It's just kind of a thing that means nothing. And also, you'd think the UN would be in charge of this, right? Because what country is in charge of the moon? I guess an organization

of all the countries. In December 1979, the UN drafted a treaty called the agreement governing the activities of states on the moon and other celestial bodies. And according to Lapham's quarterly, everyone just calls it the moon treaty. The treaty said no one can declare Sovereignty on the moon. It also said, quote, the exploration and use of the moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, end quote. Apparently most of the language is based on international waters rules. And in 1979, all 152 countries approved this. The other number there is 193 countries are currently in the U.N. along with two observer states of Vatican City and Palestine. And again, not to get off already on how anti-American all of this is, but can you imagine going back in time and saying to Ben Franklin, an international body is going to pass a treaty saying, nobody owns the moon. I think he would say, you've gone mad. You people, of course, no one owns the moon. What are you talking about? The moon is a, the moon is a God made of cheese that smiles upon us. What do you, What do you mean? Yeah, President Franklin's flying car can't even drive there. So how would you, you know?

Then we would have to explain, no, in the future, we went to the moon. We landed on the moon, the moon in the sky. Also discovered, not that great. We haven't been back. It kind of sucks. Yeah, the dirt there is really sharp. So it's not, not fun. Yeah, I'm going to link the recent Apollo 17 episode of SIF, because it's

It seems like we're mostly going back because it's been a while and we're embarrassed. Right. See if something new is there now. I don't know. And this moon treaty, its main impact was absolutely nothing. Because for one thing, between 1979 and this 2025 taping, no humans have set foot on the moon. There have been a few probes from China and from India. That's it.

And more importantly, the moon treaty is one of thousands of UN resolution. that are non-binding. Oh, so like we could just go and take the moon then? There's basically two levels where it's non-binding. Not only in legal and diplomatic terms, is it non-binding. There's also nobody that would ever enforce us breaking this kind of treaty. Right. But the UN General Assembly, where every country gets a vote,

exclusively passes non-binding resolutions, and then just sort of asks the world's governments to think about ratifying them if they want to. And the wild number here is 17 countries, because according to Lapham's quarterly, only 17 countries have proceeded to become party to that moon treaty. And that doesn't include Russia or China or the United States. So who cares? Wait, so what's the difference between like becoming party to it versus agreeing to it? Great question. Yeah.

The basic mechanics of it vary between countries. But in the U.S., it's a situation where the president and two-thirds of the U.S. Senate all need to approve a treaty to make it actually legally forceful. And that's how it works if the U.S. makes any treaty with anybody on its own. But the U.S. has never ratified this treaty. And the one space treaty that the U.S. and Russia and China did do their various mechanisms to actually agree to was a different U.N. resolution called the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. And that treaty only barred the use and testing of nuclear weapons in space without barring other military action and build up in space. Yeah. And so that's all that the powers have actually agreed to in space. So that did start as another just UN draft that doesn't mean anything. But then the president and the Senate agreed to it. Yeah, I mean, still pretty important.

Like when you're saying like only nukes, like, well, I. I would say that's good, because, I mean, have you seen a nuke? They're pretty bad. Yeah. I think there is a lot of scoffing at things where it's like, oh, any of these, like, international things, they just, like, really aren't worth much. But one of the things that I think is incredibly important is, like, you know, agreements of, like, let's at least on paper agree not to, like, kill every living thing on earth.

if we can manage that. We've sort of barely done that and lit a lot of those treaties laps. Yeah, just the controversy. Maybe let's kill all life, you know. Right. Oh, you're right. We should be less political. I should be like sort of like, you know, maybe a nuke would be good for stuff.

But I think this is a good jumping off point, though, because I think the question that a lot of people want to answer is, what does the United Nations actually do? Because the way it makes headlines typically these days is it'll be like every country passed a resolution declaring that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, but only two nations abstain. And people like, okay, well, what would have happened if that had passed? Like, what does that do? Does that end it? Does that, is it just symbolic? Is it just a form of protest?

Is it, that's what we'll get into because you have to understand why. the United Nations was formed and when it was formed and what it was trying to prevent to understand why they would have this whole process of getting together and say, okay, we can't make you do anything, but we can set out a framework where we have all gathered to discuss like what the framework of a treaty would be. We can't make you do it, but it's better than what we were doing prior to 1945 or... Yeah, 1945. The UN's purpose is basically to hold more meetings and do more discussion than would otherwise happen.

And we had two World Wars without it. And the hope is that this has at least indirectly prevented a third, even though there have been a bunch of conflicts all over the world. Like the UN failing to change the world is kind of the best we can do is what we'll get into. It's the upshot of having a UN. Right. Because there's like there's potentially just the benefit of actually talking about stuff and signaling things so that we have a better understanding of what is going on with other countries. But then there's like with Jason's questions like is, are there any enforcement mechanisms right? Yeah. And enforcement gets us into a next number here of five or six main organs. Depending on how you count it, the structure of the United States. nations is five or six organs. It's almost like branches of government, but they're also different functions. So that's why they're called organs. Like, they each do a totally different

thing. The basic components are pretty Byzantine. According to Georgetown University, the first main organ is the General Assembly. The General Assembly is every country gets a vote, and none of what they vote on is binding in any way at all. Right. So that's a lot of where the UN gets this reputation of being kind of pointless and boring. But the second organ is the Security Council. which we'll talk about a whole lot, that is a set of a few permanent members and then a few rotating seats for other countries where their votes are binding for the members of the UN, and also the permanent members get to veto anything. And we'll talk about exactly how that works a little bit later. But basically, every country in the Security Council is in charge,

and every country that's not is just hanging out and drafting ideas. And then the The third organ is the Economic and Social Council, and the number within that is more than 6,000 NGOs. The Economic and Social Council coordinates the work of more than 6,000 non-governmental organizations that do positive things in the world, so everything from the World Health Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization, to UNICEF, the Children's Charity, to UNESCO, the people who mark historical and cultural sites on Earth. If you're thinking of any like UN charity work, the Economic and Social Council monitors that and partners to run it, the other number there is around 70%. About 70% of the UN budget goes into stuff that the Economic and Social Council is doing. So arguably that's the biggest impact of the UN is just a bunch of charity work all over the earth. Right. So like food, vaccines, things like that. Yeah, both rules for it and programs to do it. Right.

this is the stuff that nobody ever talks about or thinks about or worries about but is going on every single day it all of these there are programs like there are heroic people to staff they're doing yeah doing this across the developing world and every single day and it's they do not have much money to work with they are not really praised for it and in the united states we i think if you polled the average person how many actually know that this goes on. But they've saved an ungodly number of lives. Absolutely. And just in terms of improving quality of life for, you can't calculate it. How many children, it's, yeah. Yeah. And there's like so many ways they're doing it. We can't cover it. Like, we could do a weekly podcast about the

UN Economic and Social Council and the latest cool thing they did. It's enormous. Right. And then what's weirdly not enormous is the budget for this. Because, again, they spend about 70% of the money, and that includes some overhead, but that's most of the UN's activities and money. And according to the Pew Research Center, UN members make mandatory contributions to their budget based on the economy's size in each country, and the 2025 UN budget was $3.5 billion U.S. dollars. And the U.S. covered about 22% of that, so less than a billion dollars.

China, about 20 percent, and then Japan's a distant third at less than seven. But either way, if you've ever heard arguments about whether your country should fund the U.N., the U.N. is such a tiny portion of a government budget. It is a lot of money, but at a government scale, it's nothing. No. Well, for perspective, we just sent, casually sent 40 billion to Argentina. Yes. The United States did, yeah. Yeah, without congressional approval, just because Trump kind of, like, likes the guy I have here, Miele, and wanted to send him money because his policies aren't really working very well. So, like, yeah. Yeah, so we just propped up Argentina's economy to help their right-wing authoritarian leader win an election.

Right. And $40 billion, you know, $820 million in U.N. dues would be about 2% of what we're. we just sent Argentina. Yeah. And we are now also withdrawing most of our previous agreements in the U.S. to send that kind of money to the U.N. Yeah, we also, I think, withdrews from the World Health Organization as well. Yeah, and the Human Rights Council, among other groups.

Oh, good. That's a good, that's always a good sign. Yeah. And again, these dollar figures are microscopic. Another way to frame it is that the video game grant theft auto 6 that's coming out next year, it has a budget of just over $1 billion. So the same as what we contribute to world hunger. It's also like the quiet work the UN does in terms of like infrastructure, food, vaccines, cleaning water.

There's a crazy amount of power like one US dollar will have sort of in that context. So it's not that their budget, I'm not saying that their budget is enough, but it's just might seem like, oh, well, this is just an unfillable hole of like, there's no way we could ever fund it enough. And it's like, well, that's actually not true. Like, we could. It would make, it made, it would make a huge difference. Like, 40, if we had sent 40 billion instead of to Argentina to, to the UN, that would have stretched a lot further, probably. Exactly.

Yeah. Philanthropic efforts for somebody like Bill Gates is always emphasizing how cheap things like mosquito nets are. in the grand scheme of things like malaria prevention like these are not expensive things to do in terms of problems so it's shockingly cheap compared to what it costs to do anything in the United States yeah like making GTA 6 yeah it's actually kind of expensive yeah Mosquito necks or GTA 6 it's tough though it's tough to say which one is better for the world it's like a bunch of mosquitoes in a long coat saying GTA 6 did you GTI-6?

And again, the UN, it does kind of have a Byzantine structure. I've only listed three of the organs out of five or six. I should review them, too. So first organ, general assembly, second organ, security council that has the actual power. Third organ, economic and social council doing all of the good works. The fourth organ is something called the secretariat, which is kind of hard to describe. Well, that's the horse. I'm thinking of the racehorse, yeah.

It's the horse. They have a horse. When I was researching, there was one article about building a statue honoring the Secretariat, and I just kept thinking it was a big horse statue. And he's in charge of counting the nays. So the Secretariat, it's both an executive and a lot of, like, data and management. The leader of the UN is called the Secretary General, and they are in practice, selected, by the Security Council.

Technically, the General Assembly is supposed to vote on them, but they've approved all nine Secretary Generals ever, and it seems like they would just get overridden if they tried to argue. The Secretary General basically manages the staff of the UN, and then the staff collects and publishes data. So it's sort of like a powerless president plus a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, is the Secretariat. And what kind of data are they collecting?

Is it on sort of the internal workings of the UN, or is it stuff like, I don't know, say being able to figure out where to put their resources for the other organizational arms of it. It's especially the second thing. It's basically all like climate hunger, just absolutely everything that we hear about from the UN, the secretary it's helping like organize and publish that. Okay. So it's like a, there's kind of a research wing as well.

Yeah, yeah. It's like if a powerless president had their office next to a big accounting firm and research lab. That sounds actually nice. Just a bunch of geeks bothering the president. He doesn't want to have lunch with him. That sounds great. And the fifth organ is the International Court of Justice. A lot of people

just call it the Hague. But it's a judicial body based in a Dutch city called the Hague. All of the rest of the U.N. is mostly based in New York City as well as a building in Geneva, Switzerland. And then there's a sixth vestigial organ that's called the trusteeship council.

which was created when the UN was formed to help manage specific former colonies of imperial powers transitioning to independence. But they finished their last project in 1994 when Palau became independent, the island nation in the Pacific. But there's like no way to, I guess, delete the trusteeship council from the structure. Yeah. So it's just suspended and a confusing element. Now there's just like a squash court there. And then I said the trusteeship counsel is vestigial, but on some level, most of the other organs are inactive or powerless, especially because another number here is 2002. In the year 2002, the United States government, the U.S. government passed a law called the American Service Members Protection Act, which when I'd read about news about it, I thought people were like exaggerating, but they're not.

the public nicknamed it the Hague Invasion Act because it authorizes the U.S. president to use military force to prevent the International Court of Justice from holding any American military members or any American elected officials. It's still on the books. Since 2002, no administration has been able to change that. And so that organ of the U.N. is basically useless if the U.S. can just invade the Netherlands to relieve people. Right. So, yeah, if an American commits a heinous war crime, then we will go invade the Hague. I thought people were like being conspiracy theorists or something, but that's real. It's just a thing. Yeah. That's, yeah.

Okay. Back in this era, 2002, this is at the height of the war on terror. This is at the time I was just listening to like right wing talk radio all day, every day. And this was huge among us. The idea, because again, in our ecosystem that I had grown up with, the UN is supersedes the United States in every way. If the United, if the United Nations wants to come in and take over our government, they can just do that. This is what we were all afraid of is the day that this happens because they're secretly communists. Right. So when they have started to be talk of Americans committing war crimes in the course of the war on terror, there was, you know, people talking about, well, the United Nations should try them before the, hey. And then all of these talk radio hosts are talking about, well, if they tried to abduct one of our generals or a soldier that was caught abusing somebody, then we would go, like we would go in and get them back. We would send the Navy SEALs into. And they had this whole elaborate scenario that they had invented in their minds of we're going to have to go to war with this, you know, the United Nations once they start to imprison. Now, now looking back, knowing how impotent all of this is, it's hilarious, but this was a serious thing.

Like, these people are going to try to abduct our brave soldiers and try them before a bunch of socialists and Muslims or whatever we thought. And so, no, they insisted. And because the stuff that was starting, like, the talk radio sphere would bubble up to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and then it would become law. Exactly. Still on the books. despite the conspiracy theories like there is actually a burden

of proof for the ICC you need to not only prove that the war crimes are happening but for a lot of it it's like you have to prove intent and so it's not necessarily super easy I read the whole ICC

case against Israel to and it is like exhaustive they have to they have to really go through a lot especially for like genocide or ethnic cleansing you have to prove intent i'm not a war crime lawyer so i don't know all of the all of the things but yes it is something that you you would have to prove uh and so it's it is so kind of like wild that the u.s is just like not for us like we're we're fine with people doing

war crimes and we will will literally go to war with the you know the so-called civilized world in order to prevent any of our soldiers or leaders from being held accountable. Yeah, and it really helps to follow the money, too. Not only is it a whole legal kerfuffle for them to try to try anybody, but again, their budget is tiny. Like, they don't have resources to really stop us from doing stuff. Like, I don't think we'd need to send the giant U.S. military. It could be like a small, the movie Oceans 11 type team, could pretty much overwhelm these guys.

Yeah. I saw a story the other day that the Los Angeles Lakers were purchased for $10 billion, which is like three years of U.N. budgets put together. Like you really don't have to be all that rich or powerful to overwhelm the U.N. resource-wise. Right. Yeah. But the idea that they could, well, you know, they passed a resolution. If this thing goes through, you know, it could be illegal to own property. I am just trying to fathom now looking back.

You know, keep in mind, I was a child at the time. I was only like, you know, like 27. sure that that that that looking back that that how powerful I thought this group was and the way it was presented to me I said well this is all of the world united against us the underdogs the United States we of course always are the underdogs you've seen the film red dawn it's basically just a group of high school kids against the whole world which are all communists right and yeah that we have numbers about climate especially and the idea that that's going to end capitalism being one of the biggest things Americans have been tricked about with the

UN because the key date there is October 1992. That is when the United States Senate approved a UN treaty on climate change and the U.S. president signed it because in 1992, the UN organized a huge conference about climate. They generated a treaty called the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change, UNFCCC. That's a long name. But again, all these UN documents, no power over US laws at all. And then the U.S. Senate approved it. George H.W. Bush signed it. And then from then on, you have like U.S. right-wing media claiming the U.N. is trying to control our industries and on capitalism when all of the actual changes are coming from the U.S. government and from a Republican president.

Yeah, it is very appealing to see ourselves as victims of the world because then you don't have to actually tune in too much about, you know, caring about stuff or spending money on stuff outside of the U.S. Because if it's like, well, hey, the world is this big antagonizing force, it helps to insulate us from sort of like, I don't know, thinking. outside of our own problems, which we don't necessarily like to do. Yeah, passing the buck, easy. And that's proceeded to be the situation with every other U.N. document is that it either has no power over the U.S. or tries to do a stunt with the one treaty we ever ratified. Right. Another number here is 1998.

That is when President Bill Clinton of the U.S. signed a new U.N. climate deal called the Kyoto protocol. So then, of course, that made a bunch of news. But he did not submit it to the Senate because senators made clear they would never approve it. And then Clinton's administration made clear to the public that this was a PR gesture with no binding legal force in the United States. And the other wild example people might have heard of is the Paris Agreement on climate change. According to Newsweek, the UN tried to make the Paris Agreement stick by making it, quote, a hybrid of legally binding and non-binding provisions, end quote. And what that means is they tried to frame it as like an update of the 1992 treaty that the U.S.

signs, but there's also new parts, and it really isn't that. And this led to four consecutive presidential administrations either agreeing with that or not agreeing with that. So President Obama signed it and said, I don't need to send it to the Senate because it's the 1992 treaty. and then next President Trump withdrew us, next President Biden put us in, returning President Trump withdrew us, just all on one logic or the other. That's it. That's all that happened. I mean, it's similar to nukes, right? Where it's like people sometimes try to sell it as like we could be just completely independent of the rest of the world. That time is past like that. You can't do that anymore. Right. And the fact that we keep yo-yoing back and forth on like the climate agreements,

it's like how does how does any country trust that if we do like go into like an agreement on something like the next presidency isn't just going to like pull us back out again yeah it seems like the upshot is they just don't trust us like there have been recent European diplomats talking about their security and saying that they can't depend on what some Wisconsin voters do I'm paraphrasing but that's what they said so then they said we need to defend ourselves NATO doesn't work anymore. No, genuinely. Not to get off on a tangent, but for example, Trump is very big on, well, these countries should just defend themselves. Why should we be spending? We, you know, because we have all these agreements that if they are attacked, we will use our military to come

defend them. It's like, well, why should we have to pay to do that? As if this was an act of charity on our part that we offered to, it's like, no, don't worry about it. Don't worry about building your own military. We'll take care of it as if as if this was something. we did out of selflessness, and now we need to stop being so generous with our military. Yeah, we don't benefit from most of the world being allies with us, right? There's not good things about that. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of gains both politically and then also economically in terms of like basically, you know, selling weapons and stuff. So like American military industry benefiting from these agreements. So yeah, like Jason said, it's not charity. It was.

It was to strengthen American hegemony abroad. Yeah. And then, like, Trump was like, abroad, where? But, yeah, there's a reason why every one of these countries is flying the F-35. Yeah. It's, yeah, that we did not give them those planes. And everybody's got the F-35 now. Yeah.

That's a lot of jobs. It's, don't, okay, this is, I'm sorry. I apologize. not even in part of the show. I got off on military spending. Yeah, all this gets into our last number before we get into takeaways. The last number this week is three meetings. It turns out a series of... Too many. Could have been an email. Oh, it was too early for it. If only a series of three meetings in history created the entire United Nations. And that gets us into mega takeaway.

number one. The United Nations is an American creation promoting American power. And then ironically, it terrifies many Americans into thinking the exact opposite. Intriguing. Tell me more. Yeah, the gist of it is the United States is the chief architect of the UN basically leverage the entire world into most of the actual binding components, especially the Security Council. in a way to make just a few other countries totally sovereign over themselves and have more power in the rest of the world.

So it's, if you actually learn anything about the UN, hilarious that especially right-wing Americans are the main people who fear it. Yeah. Because it's only benefited every American life. Yeah. I mean, it's similar to USAID where it's like, why are we just like throwing this money away, like, as if it's all these sort of greedy leaching little country. And it's like, no, we invented it. Yes. And it like is both economically good for our farmers.

And then also we get to like spread our control out over places that become dependent on it. Like we did that. We didn't do it just because we're cool and nice. Like even though it does accomplish good stuff, like we did it because it helped expand our power. Yeah. Yeah. Or we wanted to prop up. a government that we thought might collapse if things got too out of control and maybe there's

like a socialist that wants to take power. And so you send some foreign aid to prop up to keep the instability low. None of this, again, I'm not saying the United States never does anything good. It's just that we rarely do anything truly selfless. There's a strategy to every dollar we send overseas. And we send very little. A lot of it goes to Israel. But again, there are so many tangents. That's what makes us a great episode. There are so many tangents. I mean, literally talking about global politics might bring other top tangents. Stay, stay focus, Jason. We're just talking about the entire globe. Like we could we could do a, the daily you end geist about what the UN is up to every day. There's so much going on. Like, yeah. Yeah.

And yeah, and exactly like you said, Jason, it's never like a totally selfless dollar, really. And if you're a, let's say, America first person, that should be exciting. Like, it's cool. It's cool that we're using money to make ourselves more powerful and safe. But anyway, there's a lot of key sources for this takeaway, including three books, United Nations the first 50 years by Los Angeles Times, foreign correspondent Stanley Meisler, also a book called The Parliament of Man, the past, present and future of the United Nations, by Princeton University Fellow Paul Kennedy. I also touched on a history book that I've read by American historian David Halberstim, titled The Coldest Winter, America and the Korean War.

And then we'll link other journalism and data about the UN, especially from The Guardian, and from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Maybe the simplest version of where did the United Nations come from is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President FDR from 1943 until he died in 1945 really, really wanted to build this. The biggest reasons were really that World War II was going on and the previous League of Nations had lacked United States involvement. And so as early as 1941, before the U.S. was even fighting in World War II, we were just lending and sending supplies to the Allies.

As early as 1941, FDR ordered his Secretary of State to plan future talks. for a better successor to the League of Nations. And if folks don't know, the League of Nations was an attempt to make a peaceful framework for world diplomacy after World War I, and it essentially died when World War II started. It would be hard to find an example of something that failed harder at doing a thing than their attempt to prevent another World War after World War I. But again, this year, you do not understand why the UN exists unless you understand And the boondoggle that led up to World War I and the failure of diplomacy across Europe

and how a couple of meetings could have prevented that war. It's nobody wanted it. The greatest, sorry, the second greatest podcast in history is a show called Hardcore History hosted by a man named Dan Carlin. And he did a series on World War I called Blueprint for Armageddon. like 26 hours long and walks through the absolute chaotic absurdity of diplomatic failures that led to this war that would kill 30 million people. Yeah.

Could have been an email. Could have been an email. Katie, it absolutely could have been an email. Because World War I was not World War II. There was not a Hitler doing this thing. World War I was a bunch of countries who each thought everybody else was out to get them. And so they were all arming with the assumption, if war is going to happen, we want to do it now because the longer we wait, the more they arm, like our advantage is now. They went to

war because they were afraid they were going to go to war. It was literal madness. Right. The fact that there has not been a third World War in the 80 years since World War II, I'm not crediting that to the UN necessarily, but you can't not, you have to give them some credit Because it has not happened again. And a place for people to get together and have pointless meetings, there is value in that and having a place where people can get together and pass a resolution and have and go up and bluster. And that is so much better than what they had just seen happen, which was Armageddon. Yeah, posturing and signaling, even though it sounds like, well, that's just empty because, you know, you could you could be lying or something. It's actually not exactly empty because if you're doing some posturing or signaling at the UN, it's not like your nation's own citizens, like then you go back to your own citizens and be like, I just lied to the UN. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Don't worry about it. They see what people say at the UN. So like if it's something that's really unpopular politically, you know, they're not going to go to the UN and then just kind of like, I mean, I'm not saying that people don't lie at the UN. They absolutely do. But it is a good.

signal of what that nation's posture is, what they can say and have it be accepted by their own citizens, things like that. So it is a signal. It's not always, not always like an honest signal, but it is, you're able to better read situations when people are posturing and giving speeches. And the UN was hoping to do that job better than the League of Nations could. The League Nations could be 100 episodes, but the short version is that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was one of the key people pushing for a League of Nations to exist. And then the U.S. Senate refused to approve the treaty, remove the United States from it, and basically killed it. There are other reasons it fell apart, especially, as Jason said, there were aggressive fascist and Nazi leaders and also just militarists in Japan. So Japan quit the League in 1933. Germany quit basically as soon as Hitler took power. power. The league tried to expel the Soviets in 1940 when the Soviets invaded Finland. But as all that happened, France and Britain were kind of trying to run the whole League of Nations by themselves and also couldn't agree exactly what it was supposed to do. The U.S. destabilized the entire thing by not mediating that French and British thing and also making the league actually stand up to fascism. So then we just needed another war. Right. And so FDR said, with all of this going on, we need to just build a better version of it.

And in order to get the U.S. Senate on board, we'll make it an organization as dominated by the U.S. as possible. That's the way we can do it. Great. Yeah. So the three meetings are extremely dominated by FDR or held in the United States or both. In 1944, FDR organized a meeting at a venue called Dumbarton Oaks, which is an estate in Washington, D.C. Harvard let him borrow it for high-level meetings with the British and the Soviets. And then that big three did the other meetings.

The second meeting was the Yalta Conference, which was a broader World War II diplomatic meeting between the three powers, but they also worked on some UN ideas. And then this ended with a conference in San Francisco. Where many countries showed up, they generated a draft UN charter, but it was really steered by FDR and the two other powers that the U.S. respected the most for this. They brought the British in because of our totally unique alliance and they brought the Soviets in because it was becoming clear at the end of World War II that the Soviets kind of had to be involved for this to matter at all. They were just too powerful. And of course, all of these meetings and all of the headquarters, it's all in the United States for ease of travel for everyone else. Like that's just this, that's just the most

central location for. Yeah. Everyone's always stopping for coffee here. It would be everyone would get way too distracted by how good the coffee is in Europe. The central mechanism of the entire U.N., the one thing that these powers talked about all of the time is something called the Security Council. When you read about it, it feels like they almost added more organs just to make it seem like there was more going on than a small group of powers dictating to the world. They partly borrowed it from the League of Nations, which had a top group called the Council, where, again, the U.S. refused to participate, but a few major powers, Britain, France, Italy, Japan had the power to impose actual economic sanctions from the League of Nations.

And FDR said, let's kind of borrow that and make a security council because small countries are, quote, consumers of security, big powers are, quote, providers of security, big powers should be able to make binding decisions and most importantly cast vetoes. They set up a Security Council where the permanent members can veto any, quote, substantive matter, but not veto any, quote, procedural matter. And so it seemed like they would only use a veto very rarely. And then as soon as the UN got going, the Security Council members vetoed anything they wanted. And there's a wild anecdote where this might be apocryphal, but apparently a diplomat from a small country asked a Soviet representative what the difference is, between procedural and substantive matters for the Security Council. And the Soviet rep said, we will tell you. So, yeah.

Whoops. Yeah. Well, you know, that is just representative, like, this was designed by the powerful countries like the U.S., where it's like they're not going to buy into something that undermines their power. Exactly. And so it explains the entire structure of it and the entire way it has always worked. And there are five countries with that veto, including the U.S., and all chosen by the U.S., because the five permanent members, it's the U.S. And again, they pick the U.K. because it's our closest ally. And they pick the Soviets simply because there's no point doing a

U.N. if it couldn't try to mitigate Cold War stuff and prevent hot wars. And then the other two, members were chosen by FDR's preferences. And if he lived, he probably would have regretted picking a fourth member of China. Because in 1945, there hadn't been a communist revolution yet in China. And FDR specifically picked China because of its size, but also because he hoped to marginalize Japan. China and Japan had bad relations for a lot of reasons. This was entirely a U.S. choice. Both the British and the Soviets opposed it. Because the Soviets ironically thought China would be too allied with the U.S. And then a couple of years later, it went communist and they were happier with it.

And then the U.K. were mostly just racist and also controlled places like Hong Kong. And so they didn't want to treat China as a power because that could undermine all that. Apparently Churchill went around hand-waving Chinese diplomats as, quote, pig tails. Oh, for God's sakes. Which is just like a racist description of some traditional hairstyles in China. Like he, between that and worrying they would lose. Hong Kong, the British, were super opposed to China on the Security Council. They just have no substantive, like, criticism just like, but the Chinese.

Exactly. Like, it's a giant country. It makes sense that it's on the Security Council in an objective way. Again, if the idea is, like, we're trying to prevent war, you want your opponents in the room. Like, that's the whole point. Like, you know what I mean? Yes. That's why the Soviets are on the Security Council.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like the idea of like, ah, dang, like, I know you're not saying this Alex, but if like we had waited and then it's like, oh, we don't want to include China because of the communist revolution. It's like, no, that's why we should include China. Like we need to include people with whom like that there would be conflict, right? Like that is, that seems like entirely the point. And then also to just convince the British to allow the Chinese and the U.S. allowed a fifth member of France. Right. Because Britain felt like France is a real power and they're white and stuff. And so that makes sense to us. And then that is the entire structure of the UN, those five countries running everything. And have you had their croissants?

Because like if you've got France in there and you're having a morning meeting, you know, I can get some croissants in there. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And so, yeah. And so the upshot is there's this incredibly complicated and many organs UN, which is really just five countries sitting at a table. running the world. And that was such a U.S. driven thing that the U.N.'s army fought the Korean war for us on paper. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the Soviets were boycotting the U.N. because the U.N. was not letting newly communist China get the Security Council

position of the previous Chinese government entity. And so then with the Soviets gone, the U.S. was able to make their war protecting South Korea a U.N. operation with U.N. flags and logos and everything. After that, all the Cold War stuff was really just the U.S. doing its own thing because they'd allowed the communists back in. Well, I mean, it's, again, like, this is, like, shows the history of, like, the U.N. being, like, an arm of the U.S., which I guess we kind of, like, just stopped caring about. Yeah, like the Korean War, U.S. military members are in the U.S. military, but it was under a U.N. umbrella.

Right. It was the U.N. versus North Korea. Right. Really the only bump in the U.S. making the U.N. something that represented us and presented us as the moral positive force in the world was the Soviets trying to jostle for power in that veto situation. I didn't know this until researching, but when they were doing those couple of meetings where the few big powers actually drafted the whole thing, the Soviets tried to give themselves

a whole bunch of seats and extra power. The Soviet delegation was led by a future president named Andrei Gromyko, and at the Dumbart & Oaks meeting, toward the very end, he tried to gently slip in a provision that would make the Soviet Union 16 different countries in the UN. Because it is a conglomeration of countries, right? They're talking about like Ukraine, Belarus, whatever, that they should each have. Yeah, exactly. Like on paper it is 16 republics, but it's not republics and it's really one thing.

And so then FDR heard that and said, perfect, the U.S. will be 48 countries in the U.N. Because there are 48 states right now. And we're 48 different things. Wow. And so really the final steps were to arrange it. So the Soviets didn't get to be 16 countries and the U.S. didn't get to be 48. The Soviets did get to have three seats for the USSR and Ukraine and what's now Belarus. But either way, the key thing was the vetoes and the U.S. and the Soviets each got one veto in one spot.

Right. Okay. Well. It's so silly to imagine like each U.S. state being in the U.N. too. I love it. Yeah. Florida gets to veto. Right. In a UN resolution, Florida has abstained. Yeah, and then from its beginning to today and into the future, the UN cannot make the U.S. do anything. It's the opposite.

It's the U.S. drafting treaties that the rest of the world looks bad for breaking, or the U.N. drafting a treaty that the U.S. just ignores. Those are the two things the U.N. ever does. One of the biggest examples might be just letting countries join the U.N. the number there is 2024. In 2024, the U.S. was the lone Security Council veto that killed U.N. membership for Palestine, which could happen later. But like the U.S. could unilaterally just block that. And apparently that's super rare. The most recent previous time that happened before 2024 is 1976, which was the U.S. vetoing letting communist reunified Vietnam in after the Vietnam War. Right. Like, we just tell the U.N. how the world works. That's it. And, yeah, and with the exception of a few attempts by small countries to start a non-aligned movement, the U.N. has basically codified U.S. leadership of the earth and from jump Americans have thought the opposite is happening.

Stanley Meisler's book says that in 1944, initially more than 80 percent of Americans supported the framework from that first Dumbart-Nokes meeting. But then when the Soviets clearly had a veto and a few more theories spread about it, conspiracists immediately freaked out. And there's an amazing thing. 1945, the U.S. Senate is having its hearings for approving the U.N. Charter, which it approves. But so many cooks came out of the woodwork, a witness got to testify at the Senate hearings, and tell the U.S. Senate that the United Nations was a devious plot, hatched by Britain and by Israel to force the world to live under a world government

where Britain's Duke of Windsor would be a world king. And like many conspiracy theories this had an anti-Semitic element, they thought Israel was going to puppet the earth because of Jews. It's a more fun one. I would have to say it, like when I'm ranking anti-Semitism in terms of creativity, the Duke of Windsor being world king is us for. pretty fun. It's a wild swing. And before the UN even existed, people were saying that kind of stuff. Also, folks have heard the past Siff about Bastille Day. We talk about Illuminati

conspiracy theories starting after the French Revolution. Those immediately incorporated the UN. And then, as Jason said at the top of the show, U.S. right-wing evangelical Christians reading the book of Revelation to mean some kind of world government signals demonic and antichrist things has led to persistent fear and hatred of the UN across the United States for all of its existence. Ironically, they will often figure out ways to combine anti-Semitism with support of Israel, which sounds contradictory, but it's because there's this idea that basically Israel will be the locus point of Armageddon of the apocalypse.

so like the like basically stuff a war will set off the rapture and some of the Jews will be saved but most of them are are screwed and then so they donate a bunch of money because they see they see like Israel as the as this like future battlegrounds for the the holy war that will like set off the rapture which is good because they're very sure that they're going to heaven And also part of it is that the Jews will convert to Christianity when Christ returns. That's what I was taught. This is the subject of bitter, bitter debate within evangelical Christianity. What they all agree on is that Israel needs to exist because in the Bible, all of the world's nations send an army to try to attack Israel, and then God intervenes and wins the war on Israel's behalf. But also, it's no question you must accept Christ to get into heaven.

So then once Israel wins that war, will all of the Jews go to hell or will they convert to Christianity? And there was recently a pastor named John Hagee came out and he said, well, I think that the Jews don't have to convert because Christ technically was not the Messiah of the end. He was shouted down. It was set off a vicious firestorm of controversy that this is a heresy, that no, they will have to convert. this whole thing. I've heard many sermons about this, but what matters is that Israel must exist because that prophecy for it to be fulfilled, there must be an Israel. As for what happens to the people living there, not that's something we can figure out later. What matters? Yeah. Yeah, the special effects people will do it in post. So like, you know, it'll be whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Again, as someone who did not grow up with any religion, this is sort of of it's as if like you're hearing about like someone's super into Star Trek or super into the Lord of the Rings like explain some like argument over canon except it actually people are dying because of it. Yeah. And this topic is truly stiff because most people never think about it and then a few people are terrified of it in a way that makes no sense. Like it's either on your mind for incorrect reasons or never on your mind. Right. And. And, And yeah, and that also means that consistently across the decades in opinion polls, most people in the world are supportive of the UN, and actually a majority of Americans lately are, but there's a persistent and right-wing terror of it. Also, recent polls in Israel have found a huge drop in public support for the UN.

And also the new lore and new canon keeps coming in October 2025. October 2025, the U.S. tech oligarch Peter Thiel gave a lecture. series in San Francisco to a public audience where he invoked the United Nations as one of a group of international ecological and humanitarian forces that are laying groundwork for the biblical antichrist. And he outlined his, it's hard to even call them theories because he's confident. Right. But just like beliefs about how global control will be seized by people like the child, Greta Thunberg. Yeah, if you haven't been paying attention to Peter Thiel recently, he has gotten more crazy, which is to say he is linking Greta Turnburg to the Antichrist.

Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Honestly, like, if I was Greta, I'd be like, that's actually pretty sick. It's a big gut. Yeah. That's quite a, yeah. But, you know, it is pretty wild. This is one of the world's most wealthy people.

and he's like ranting and raving about the UN and environmentalism being the Antichrist. And AI could be God. He's not sure yet. He's thinking on that one. Oh, it's very open of him. He's considering it. Yeah, and all this fear is about an organization that in real life, the United States might be about to kill off.

Because according to the Pew Research Center, the UN has been extremely short on money ever since the start of the first Trump administration because the United States only funds a little less than a quarter of the budget, but that's a lot if we pull all of it. And since 2019, the United Nations has had to dip into emergency funding reserves five separate times. In 2024, they had to withdraw $607 million of emergency funds to basically try to offset specifically the U.S. cutting funding. We've slashed a bunch of of promised funds in 2025 and are trying to just end that completely by 2026. As of this taping, it's plausible the United Nations will shrink or cease to exist within this presidential administration

and a bunch of Americans think the UN is lording over us. Right. It's such a disconnect. I mean, to be fair, Alex, we do need that money to help feed people here at home. Also, by the way, we're not going to feed people here at home. No, no, no, no. Whoa, whoa, Argentina, maybe. Argentina, look, they really need it. Not our poor people. Yeah. That's why I was so interested in doing this episode because when the headlines with

when Peter Thiel said that stuff at the time of this recording, it's just a few weeks ago, it made headlines everywhere because like, oh, this guy has schizophrenia. Like he's talking about the Antichrist and the UN and environmentalism. And it's like, oh, he's having a breakdown. It's like, no. This is the sound of my childhood. I know exactly what he's talking about. This is, no, this is all tried and true.

He's talking to an audience that knows exactly what he's saying. This is, they have read books about it. They've read articles about it. They've listened to podcasts about it. They've watched YouTube videos about it. They grew up hearing sermons about it. The fact that so many people outside that bubble think that this sounds like word salad is fascinating to me. Because like, no, he's just fallen into this ecosystem of belief that's always been there.

Yeah. And they always just incorporate the new thing. So when the Soviet Union was around, that was the Antichrist. When it fell, then the environmentalist pushing against global warming, they were the Antichrist. Because see, they're secretly trying to take over everything and tell us how to live our lives. So now AI is here. So like, okay, well, now we need to figure out how AI can be incorporated in. As the world changes, it never goes away. They just keep updating the lore, like you said. If people just want a fiction to worry about and the UN from jump has provided it. Like if they got into One Piece, I think that might improve things. Like if someone turns Peter Thiel onto One Piece and be like, okay, yeah, but like you actually do need to spend like a lot of time to watch all of it because there are so many episodes, it might help. Sure, yeah. Warhammer, anything. Yeah, yeah, sure. Warhammer.

Yes, absolutely. Oh, Jesus. God, can you imagine that, like, honestly, like nerds, like nerds rise up, like someone get Peter Thiel hooked on to something like Warhammer One Piece. Yeah. Yeah. Paint a figurine. Get a happy. Sure.

Folks, that's a ton of numbers, a mega takeaway, so much. And we're going to take a quick break and then return with a few more modern takeaways about the UN. and the sort of puppet government of the United States that we worry about. We're back, and we're back with two further takeaways for the main episode. Takeaway number two. One of the United Nations' first goals was a failed battle against global disinformation. It's amazing to learn. learned that they were kind of trying to fight the thing that makes people afraid of them.

One of the chief goals immediately of UN delegates and countries was to defeat what they called false news. Interesting. They were really on the ball with this and they just couldn't achieve it. Did it? Oh, it didn't work? Weird. And specifically because of two countries, two countries basically prevented them from doing it.

All right. I got some guesses. I think Djibouti, probably. In New Zealand, because, like, they love it when people think hoppets actually live there. I do. I feel like most American knowledge of Djibouti is former Model U.N. club members who saw it on the list. They were like, yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it's cool.

I got to learn about Djibouti. And key sources here are two historians, Dr. Roland Burke, Associate Professor in History at La Trobe University in Australia. He wrote an essay for The Guardian. And then Dr. Heidi J.S. Tauric, history professor and research chair at the University of British Columbia, wrote a journal article about this. The U.N., it was not designed to totally replicate the League of Nations, but both groups fought very hard to try to defeat disinformation and try to defeat false propagandistic news from getting around. And not just because that's nice. Heidi Tauric's nickname for the goal is Peace Through Truth. The most optimistic version is that,

if the whole world has good and rational journalism, less wars or no wars, right? Like, people will read a story that says, oh, people are kind of the same everywhere, and why would we have a war? Right. Makes a certain sort of sense. Yeah. And like even the more practical baseline hope was that if journalism's less sensationalistic, there will be just more time for diplomats to talk, you know?

And especially in the 1920s, when they built the League of Nations, they remembered recent events like the Spanish-American War in 1898, basically U.S. newspapers on their own convinced the United States to invade Spanish colonies into oceans. Right. A lot of it was just that one guy, right? What's his name? Hearst. Yeah. Hurst with the castle and the pee bottles. Yeah. Confusing him with Howard Hughes, but there may have been some pee bottles involved there too. Hearst definitely had a castle. The pee bottles might have been Howard Hughes. Yeah. And one of our key sources this week is the book

Everyone Poops, and I think you'll find. If Peter Teal doesn't have a few of his own piss bottles, like, you know what? I'll eat my own hat. This is fascinating, though, because it is, people will hear this and say, well, yeah, I'm hearing the same thing about misinformation now in the Internet age.

But keep in mind, the revolution of electronic media and radio and everything back then was just as disruptive and in fact the number of people who could have access to and read a newspaper worldwide. Like the concept of instant press, it's a daily press

and stuff like that. That was spreading so fast and them wanting to rein this in as a force for war and trying to figure out that, yeah, like a more free but actually real press would be something that would stop that. That is absolutely true, makes perfect

sense. Again, the moment you tell an American, the United Nations wants to control what news you read, we will be ready to bomb them flat. We will go and bomb our own building in New York to stop it. Yeah, that's a lot of why the League of Nations could not achieve this goal. Again, the United States nerfed the league from jump by not participating. And then it was also just slow to get going because it was very novel as a thing. And it took them until 1931. The League of Nations passed a resolution against false news, mostly driven by watching fascism rise in Italy and Nazism rise in Germany and be driven by new mass media,

like radio and newsreels and plentiful newspapers. And then that proposal morphed into more and more League of Nations resolutions. In 1936, they agreed to a ban on propagandistic radio, even though there's obvious free speech risks there. And they just kept fleshing that out until World War II started, and it was clear they didn't have any impact. So then when the UN forums, their leadership immediately tackles the issue they call freedom of information. And that means both truthful information and access to it, because it seemed like countries like the Soviet Union were preventing the public from learning things. everywhere i think something that's important for americans to understand it's like not everyone has the same idea about sort of freedom of speech as the u.s like in the u.s we have we see that as

like that is the ultimate sort of like moral goal but in europe i think because they had such a more intimate experience with the rise of fascism it's like sure yeah we want freedom of speech when we can do it but not for nazis so it's uh because like in the u. you can be a Nazi. It's not illegal, whereas in Europe a lot of like Nazi activity is illegal. On this issue, I actually do think it is pretty complicated. So I'm not like saying one is necessarily better than the other. But yeah. And that divide helped kill the UN's project for this, even though an American helped lead it. Because one of the leading Americans at the early UN was the recently widowed, recent first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who I hopeful

know is famous as like a key American in the whole history of the UN. New President Harry Truman made her a delegate. Yeah. Eleanor Roosevelt led the push for a UN resolution and treaty against false information. She called accurate information, quote, the one absolute necessity for human rights to exist on Earth. And then many other countries delegates agreed. Canadian delegates pointed to Hitler as what happens when information is not free and accurate. And as soon as 1948, the fledgling UN was drafting a proposal for an international treaty to protect the validity and truth of information and, like, massive actual economic sanctions for nations without free presses. And you've never heard of the UN acting on any of those ideas because

two members killed it off. The first was Soviet Russia. As soon as the drafting started happening, the Soviets said, hey, what about our model where the government is in charge of a lot of information. That's kind of better. Right. And then, you know, in a timeline where China remains non-communist, if that had happened, maybe the rest of the UN could have forced the Soviets to play along. But the other country opposing this plan was the United States. And as soon as the UN started drafting that in 1948, around that same time, I'm U.S. authorities were building a giant right-wing media ecosystem that's with us to this day. And they demonize the UN as attacking the American First Amendment and American sovereignty.

Right. Yeah. And I mean, like, we've had this issue both internationally and inside America since then, right? Which is how do you both have freedom of speech and expression, but also stop allowing forces to exploit that in order to just like do lies and manipulation to people that is where it's as if everyone gets the freedom of an equal platform. So then you'll have certain well-funded voices getting much larger platforms and being able to spread disinformation. How do we manage that? Like our solution has been just like whoever's got more power, more capital determines what

voices get heard, which is, you know, potentially a problem. Like just recently we had YouTube ban a bunch of videos from pro-Palestine groups that were documenting potential war crimes in Israel because of threats from the Trump administration. So it's like the idea that like, oh, well, yeah, we just, we were paying like by not doing this like checks on misinformation, we're just paying the cost of free speech. It's like, yeah, except when we, you know, it's not, it's not as clear. cut as that, I think, in the U.S. Also, just in the last week, at the time we're recording this, there's a wave of

AI-generated videos on TikTok and Reels and elsewhere, where it's like an AI-generated black family talking about, they've cut off our food stamps. Now we can't, I want to go party and do drugs and not have to work anymore. The exact same script. Yeah. So when you talk about freedom of speech, it's like, okay, they didn't have freedom of the press in Nazi Germany. That was not the problem they had. There was not there was too much freedom of the press.

If you have citizens who said they literally didn't know about the concentration camps, it's like, okay, well, if you had actual journalists, then you would have known because the whole point is that that story would not have been allowed to have been told. So in theory, the idea is supposed to be that more speech always fixed. things like more truth get the information don't let a government suppress the terrible things they're doing but the moment you can generate an entirely fake threat from a group or an entirely fake whatever family that's like the perfect villain in your scenario and now they could just spew that out to a hundred million people in an instant what do you do mankind has never figured this out that in the mass media era is not long it's not been around for very we've never, as a culture, we've never figured this out. But the idea of what they had seen at the

time in terms of the United Nations is they had seen what a tool in wars this became, of manufacturing consent and what a tool in genocides it became, where you can convince a population that a genocide is, in some cases, make them think it's self-defense. Like this group, they're secretly, you know, get them before they get us. They are working behind the scenes to replace us, you know, and that's how it always works. And you just have to plant the right information. It's like, well, okay, it's freedom to say anything, but you now have a coordinated, very expensive campaign to try to make people terrified of this group that if we don't stop them, quote unquote, stop them, they're going to, they're going to get us later down

the road. Yeah, AI has been used to try to reassure Israeli citizens that there's no hunger going on. in Gaza. They made AI videos of there being like plenty of food and people laughing and, you know, things looking pretty good. And like, yeah, so it's happening. The same stuff just with different tools now. Yeah. And like you said, there's been no solution to this in the mass media era of human history. And this might be the biggest what if of the UN's history is that they almost became a force with teeth to try to fight the big. basic problem of fake information. They even basically coined the name fake news. They called it false news. And it's amazing to know that about them because the main thing people know about

the UN's information now is the much, much more passive role they settled for, which is to just publish as much data as possible and hope people care. And even then, modern authoritarians can't stand that, especially Russia and the United States have become very upset with UN data and stuff like climate change, and according to Trump administration, Ambassador Mike Walts, we're going to pursue a, quote, a la carte approach to any UN funding because the mere data that it wants to put out is not stuff the U.S. wants to spend money on. That's good. Being able to cherry pick data is always good, as they say.

That's what scientists say. Scientists are like, cherry picking is good, actually. Cherries are delicious. There's just a bunch of ellipsies between every word. Like, cherry-picking is. Good. And all that said, our last takeaway is some more heroic stuff to me, because takeaway number three, the most important roots of the UN might not be the League of Nations.

They might be the International Red Cross and a global standard for male. my grandma was part of the Red Cross Oh what did she do She went to Australia during World War II Amazing Yeah and she did red cross stuff I don't think she was ever like I think it was more like

You know tending to kind of like things In like not super crisis type things But she did almost get on a plane like she was set to fly out and some girl wanted to switch with her just for like scheduling reasons and she's like sure yeah I'll switch and that plane went down the one that she didn't get on so you know almost almost no me just uh geez you know just like yeah yeah no it's crazy it's like and my my grandpa was just like telling me this story really

casually just like, yeah, you know, your grandma, you know, we might not have ever met because of this. It's like, Jesus Christ, grandpa, that is heavy for a 12 year old. The older generation will just drop news, yeah. Yeah. Like, one time my grandparents just brought up the family's pet alligator in the 40s. Like, yeah, sure. Oh, yeah, we had, yeah, we had an alligator. Like, what? They just had that. Or the family friend that got torn apart in a Thresher accident and they just mentioned it. Like, well, now this would have been before Tommy got torn up in the threshing machine. It's like, what?

And again, you realize what a horror show the past was. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, he was almost your grandfather. Anyway, moving on. What? What?

Hang on. What? That's going to be us someday because it's going to be like, yeah, world shut down for about three and a half, four years. the pandemic. We sprayed our groceries with bleach. Oh, 20209? Ice put me in a box that year. Anyway, I just never, no run-up. Yeah. Anyway, this last takeaway, like, the League of Nations is important as a forer of the United Nations, and it's the one everybody sort of brings up. In particular, Paul Kennedy's

book, he brings up an amazing idea that the even more astonishing innovation was the International Red Cross and then also a global standard for mail, which were really the two first times the Earth worked together on something, especially something humanitarian and positive, which is really the main thing the UN does now. Like most of the actual impacts, as we said, are these many NGOs under the Economic and Social Council helping people worldwide. It is a counterpoint to the idea that we would only ever unite in the face of aliens. We did also unite to like send stuff to each other and do mail. Basically, yeah.

Again, Keystores here, Paul Kennedy's book. It's called The Parliament of Man. It's amazing. One extraordinary idea is that we thought of a world government way before we set up a League of Nations or a UN. Before he'd taken power in Russia, Vladimir Lenin proposed a government called the United States of Europe, where Europe would have a cooperative and world peace government. He also wanted it to be socialist and communist, but that was his thing.

That was his hobby. Yeah, like he just said that about everything. And then endless philosophers did that earlier, especially Emmanuel Kant. Emmanuel Kant theorized a global government agreement for what he named Perpetual Peace. And he published and spread that idea widely way back in 1795. It's just been an idea that's kind of easy to think of is to make a world government. it, the hard part is building any actual organizations at all that the world cooperates on. That's the real challenge.

And you don't even have the mail set up yet. So how do you like write to each other about it? Partly. Yeah, partly. Yeah. And Paul Kennedy says the truly groundbreaking event was the founding in 1864, the year 1864, the founding of the International Red Cross, which is also called the Red Crescent and in mostly Muslim countries. And sort of like the League of Nations, it came out of horrible war stuff because the League of Nations followed World War I. In 1859, there was a massive bloody battle in what's now Italy at a place called Sulpharino.

Hey, we have a piazza Solferino. It's really nice. They do an ice skating rink in the winner. Anyways, what were you saying about horribly bloody battle? It might be named after it. Because a Swiss humanitarian named Henry Do Not wrote a brief book called, a memory of Sulfarino. His two goals were to describe the carnage to everyone to make them more anti-war and to pitch an idea. He said, what if there was an international organization of medics and doctors who all of the countries agreed to allow to heal people after terrible battles? Right. Now this explains why there's a statue of a guy on a horse and the horse

does look terrified. Okay, I understand now. Yeah, it was it was like a Key battle before unification, yeah. Yeah. Ice skating rink, though. And amazingly, do not's book in 1862 got so much interest from so many people that as soon as 1864, there was a giant meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, that created a completely revolutionary organization called the Red Cross, where medics and doctors from all countries join it, and every country agrees to let them come in and help people without making some kind of claim that it's an invading. army or whatever. Completely novel in world history and in human philosophy. It is a war crime to pretend to be the Red Cross. Nice. Yeah, it's called perfidy. You do not want to ever use that as a trick because you don't want the Red Cross to ever be shot at or kill, like, because people

suspect they're trying to infiltrate or do something. So it's, there is like an agreement that like, no, like, these, these, uh, these ones are cool. Like, we have to, you know, allow for an international group of edicts. And to the point that the most egregious invasions and war horrors, even in those cases, they often will not shoot at the Red Cross. Like, they will still agree to let the Red Cross in. And if they do fire on one of the vehicles, they will like defensively say, well, it was an accident. We didn't know. It's, it's a, it is a, it's the kind of, Utopian miracle, you would not think. We totally take it for granted that the Red Cross is a thing.

But no, it is miraculous. And also their logo is a big plus. Yeah. Yeah. Again, like, and when you, when you realize how novel it was, like the entire UN almost seems like a knockoff. Like, oh, yeah, sure, you want to do Red Cross type stuff? Okay, fine.

Whatever. Yeah. Because it's like a plus symbol in Matt. No, no, it's, it's a huge. Yeah, I got it. It is a huge plus. I apologize. And then like the one other novel idea was to make any of the world systems compatible, right?

Like any way anything is organized at all compatibility. The world just carried on without that being available at all until relatively recently. If folks have heard the past SIF about the dollar sign, we talk about world currency basically depending on just one country's money being considered valuable by everybody else was Spanish silver dollars for a lot of history, U.S. dollars recently. Yeah. And the first ever change to that total fragmentation of all world systems was postal services. In 1874, Switzerland had just created a Red Cross the decade before.

They hosted more conferences in 1874, resulting in an organization called the Universal Postal Union. and before they did that and made a treaty that countries voluntarily adopted, there weren't unified standards for international mail. Every letter or package depended on the treaties and agreements that individual countries made with each other. Your mail could get refused in a country that was just physically between the origin of the destination, and then it just never gets there, or it gets lost, or there's sudden weird fees in the country in the middle.

So this universal postal union was completely. revolutionary, and it's so in keeping with the later mission of the UN that it is now a component of the UN. It's fully just part of the UN now. Those two ideas, like the humanitarian Red Cross and the making systems work, universal postal union, that's really where the UN comes from. The League of Nations was just another idea and represents a lot of what doesn't work about the UN. Right, which is so impressive when you consider how many different weird plugs there are like different, like the U.S. plug that kind of looks like a surprised face. Like we've got.

Funniest plug. Yeah, some weird rounded prongs here, which is going to be different from like the U.K.'s It's a mess. So it's good we agreed on how to send mail. Yeah, that had never happened in any functional way until 1874. Yeah. Great job. It's wild to take for granted.

You can just send a letter to just about anywhere. Yeah. And like the very last thing is the even model UN is kind of a derivative idea because it turns out that in 1923, Harvard students met to pretend to be delegates to the League of Nations and a mock league of nations. So like even model UN is a knockoff of something else. And I love the parts of the UN that are knockoffs of these other good things. It's really wonderful that that's scaled up and expanded. that's that's very uh and i'm sure they were very smug about it too uh the harvard or the u s yeah yeah well all of them i was talking about harvard students i guess everybody yeah yeah i guess my main takeaway from all this is that when i grew up watching star trek and they had like the federation of all the planets and then each planet had there's there's not like a million cling on government. There's just the one. Yeah. That starts to feel implausible now. How even if there was a UN resolution to ask us to stop using plastic straws that we would probably

withdraw from the UN just over that, the idea of all the planets of the galaxy getting, becoming a federation, it does feel a long way off. And just each planet got its own act together beforehand. like the federation could approach just the planet right that's because that's always the idea yeah you're always talking to the planet you've got like one representative's like now we're all united in this in this of course as we all of us vulcans are uh yeah i don't know that may have been optimistic that's all i'm saying yeah i mean there's a lot of optimism in that series like the the idea that riker is some kind of sex demon that like is universally appealing to every single humanoid culture.

Nothing against the actor. He's a very attractive man. But to be like, yeah, this guy, he does it for everyone. Literally every culture in the universe. And if the UN disagrees, I'm defunding it, frankly. Yeah. He's so handsome. She's Jonathan Frakes.

We're in the, like, if you don't all consider Jonathan Frakes to be the peak of aesthetic beauty. then we're withdrawing. And we're getting into it out of our chairs about it the way he does. Yeah. Yeah. That's the main episode for this week. And I want to say another thank you to Jason Pargin for making the time and being a guest on the show. As I say, every time he's on the show, Jason's a full-time novelist.

He hopes that people will bother to check out his books if he makes the time to be fun and interesting and hang out. on shows like this. His latest novel is a standalone story. It's called I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. Also, it just went on sale in paperback. So if that's your preference, that's out there now. Check it out. It's brilliant and incisive while also being funny and thrilling and moving in a

breakneck pace at the same time. I feel like that's very hard to pull off, and he did. It's wonderful. And hey, you're in the outro of this episode. It's got fun features for you, such as Help Remembering This episode. with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, the United Nations is an American creation

promoting American power, even though it terrifies many Americans into thinking the opposite. Takeaway number two, one of the United Nations's first and biggest goals was a failed battle against disinformation. It lost that battle to the Soviet Union and the United States.

Takeaway number three, the most important and exciting roots of the United Nations are not the League of Nations. They're the International Red Cross and a global standard for mail. Beyond that, we had a ton of numbers in this, in particular about how the United Nations tried to rule the moon, how the United Nations handles climate change, the entire structure of weird and mostly vestigial organs that make up the organization, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now

if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show. Every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the proposal to build the United Nations headquarters in South Dakota. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows.

It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include two astonishing books about the UN, United Nations the first 50 years, is by Los Angeles Times Foreign Correspondent, Stanley Meisler. The Parliament of Man, the past, present, and future of the United Nations is by Princeton University Fellow, Paul Kennedy. I also leaned on the coldest winter, America, and the Korean War, by American historian David Halberstim,

for especially information about the United Nations fielding an army and a hot war. And then there's an enormous amount of digital resources and journalism this week, in particular from National Public Radio, from the Pew Research Center, from the Guardian. Also, an academic journal called Median und Zeit, and an article for them by Heidi J.S. Tuorik, history professor and research chair at the University of British Columbia.

That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others.

Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Jason taped this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'atsu-Jaha peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord,

where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 33. That's about the topic of toothpaste. Fun fact there, there was a long-running false theory in many cultures around the world that when we have tooth problems, it is because invisible tiny worms are, working their way through our tooth from the inside.

So I recommend that episode. Our guest Jason Pargin does a lot of podcasting in particular on the show Big Feets, which is a production of 1,900 hotdog.com. He and Robert Brockway and Sean Baby cover the wild television show Mountain Monsters and it's Expanding Universe. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Boo.

Udoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network Of artists' owned shows Supported directly by you