Latest / Pod Save the World / Keir Starmer’s Last Stand?

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Keir Starmer’s Last Stand? · Pod Save the World

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• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitre.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: I'm Ben Roads.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Then, congrats on your New York Knickerbockers.
• 1:47
  Speaker 4: It's unreal time mission. This is the best that they've
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: played in my entire life. Usually when they're good, it
• 1:53
  Speaker 4: is still agonizing. I don't know what it feels like
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: to have your team just like paste the shit out
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: of everybody. They play just crushed and be fun and
• 2:01
  Speaker 4: cool and and have our fans take over Philadelphia people. Yeah,
• 2:06
  Speaker 4: it was it was uh, you know, it was let's
• 2:10
  Speaker 4: put it this way, like a four game destruction of
• 2:12
  Speaker 4: Philadelphia was more fun than what would have been probably
• 2:15
  Speaker 4: an agonizing Nick Celtics series for six or seven games,
• 2:17
  Speaker 4: So it.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Would have been tough. Ben Stiller out there tweeting away.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: So Bang Twin towers a lot of tweets that you
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: take in a couple of different ways.
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well, you know Stiller's uh, like I said,
• 2:28
  Speaker 4: he's just living my text thread online.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Does he sit on the wood?
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: Does he sit like of course he's sports idea.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: What do you think those costs?
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: I got to go in the wood. Yes, that's for
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: the first time this year.
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: And it's weird because you look kind of look down
• 2:42
  Speaker 4: this row and there's like Spike Lee, Ben Stiller's, you know,
• 2:47
  Speaker 4: Chalame wasn't there that day, Tracy Morgan, and it's it's
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: you know, I actually like our celebrities, Like sometimes that's
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: kind of nauseating, but like Spike Lee, come on, I.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: Mean, Spikes going forever through thick and thin suck mostly
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: And yeah, he absolutely deserves to enjoy this. Chaloney has
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: proven himself to be a real sports fan, seemingly a
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: pretty cool guy.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: I will say that there they have the ex players there,
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: which is cool to see too. I won't name names,
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: but one of them.
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: Walk by me in the The whiff of marijuana was
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: like the one of the most powerful smells I've I got,
• 3:23
  Speaker 4: like a contact hie on the court side.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: But it's good. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: And then Jim Dolan is like using AI facial recognition
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: to kick out any critics.
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: All right, just to give a wreck. You're Pablo Tory
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: to find about Dolan.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Dolan's the owner of the Next and he literally like
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: has his friggin security goons run around the stadium and
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: chase people that chant thinks critical of him.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: He's that petty of a sad little.
• 3:47
  Speaker 4: Monitors people in the bathroom. It's really creepy. That is
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: really kind of Palaeers.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: It's very palatiner esque. Okay, enough about the Next. Congrats,
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: I'm happy for you. We have a great, great show.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Today. We're gonna lead with something new.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: We're gonna talk about recent elections in the UK, which
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: were a disaster for the Labor Party, and it led
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: to widespread calls for Prime Minister Curres Starmer to step
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: aside and allow a leadership election. We'll debate whether that's
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: a good idea or not. Then we're going to walk
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: you through the last disastrous week in the disastrous war
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: with Iran. We got abandoned missions, ben ceasefires, on life support,
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: we had ballooning economic consequences.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: All of it.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Then we watched Israeli Prime Minister bib dent Yahu's interview
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: in sixty minutes so that you don't have to, We're
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: gonna let you know about all the hard hitting questions
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: from the new and improved Barry Weis CBS. We'll preview
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: Trump's trip to China. He's going to use actually I
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: think he's in air right now. He's gonna go meet
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: with Chinese President Chijinping. We'll tell you what both sides
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: one out of the visit, what it means for Roun,
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: what it means for Taiwan. We'll talk a little bit
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: about some jockeying for the future of the Democratic Party
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: on foreign policy, we'll bitch about coverage and Marco Rubio,
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: because that's all we have left we're just whining, little
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: babies cry about stuff. And then we're going to tell
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: you about Cash Betel's recent testimony in the US Senate.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: Then then you did an I talked.
• 5:00
  Speaker 4: To Susie Hansen, who's a really great journalist. He's written
• 5:03
  Speaker 4: for like the New York Times magazine, among other places.
• 5:06
  Speaker 4: She lived in Turkey for ten years and she wrote
• 5:09
  Speaker 4: a book essentially about one neighborhood, but it's really about
• 5:12
  Speaker 4: the transformation of Turkey under type erdigon both inside of
• 5:15
  Speaker 4: Turkey but also this role it's played and welcoming millions
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: of Syrian refugees in the Arab Spring, and you know,
• 5:24
  Speaker 4: the rise of Authorityranism that Aaron's been a part of.
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: So it's both a conversation about Air Dowan and Turkey,
• 5:31
  Speaker 4: but also about understanding what's happened in the world through
• 5:35
  Speaker 4: this place that all.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: The trends converge in.
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: I mean, like, there's not one thing that hasn't happened
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: in the world in the last fifteen years it hasn't
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: run through Turkey. So it's a great conversation, great book.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: People check it out.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: I was thinking about the day that there was that
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: attentive coup We talked about that later, Jets.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah that's what.
• 5:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah, we were just you came in and we were
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: still talking about it after the interview because I have
• 5:56
  Speaker 4: so many questions.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: About thanks rolling down the street and that just disappeared.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: And yeah, Aaron seemed to know about it, but.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: Did he facetiming from his phone on that play? Whole
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: thing was very strange, fucking crazy. Finally, after that, our
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: friends with the pod subscribers will hear Ben and I
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: take some questions from the friend of the pod subscriber
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: community from our discord. If you want to join, go
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• 6:53
  Speaker 1: So all right, Ben, let's talk.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Let's leave with the UK, because we've been doing a
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: round stuff for like two months straight now. There have
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: been some mere political machinations in the UK. Prime Minister
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: Cure Starmer's tenure as prime Minister could be over soon
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: or not, We just don't know yet. The backstory here
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: is last week there were local elections in England and
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. These were not
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: elections to Parliament itself, it was not like directly impacting
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Starmer's standing. But these council elections are seen as bell
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: weathers to assess the political mood in the UK, and
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: the mood is pissed. Voters are pissed. The results were
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: really really bad for the Labor Party. Remember Labor one
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: a historic landslide in twenty twenty four, but in this election,
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: just two years later, Labor lost fourteen hundred council seats.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: So it's just a drubbing and Labor lost votes from
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: both directions. They lost to the Greens on their left,
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: they lost to Reform UK on their right. Now Reform
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: is the right wing xenophobic party run by Nigel Farraj,
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: the cameo star Nigel Frage. So Reform they made big
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: gains in England to Reform also did really well in Wales.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: In Scotland and Wales, the Welsh Nationalist Party won the
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: most seats, but Reform came in second, in Labor in
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: the Tories last ground. This came after Labor was literally
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: the leading party in Wales for one hundred years, over
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: one hundred years. And then in Scotland, the SMP of
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: the Scottish National Party they're going to stay in control
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: of Parliament and Labor had its worst ever result in Scotland.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: It is now tied with Reform. The Greens also did
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: quite well in Scotland. So what does it all mean?
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: I think first, we're seeing the total collapse of the
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: traditional two party system and it's really becoming a five
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: party system. You've got Labor in the Tories cratering, the
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: lib Dems are doing better, the Greens, Reform UK they're
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: gaining ground. And then in Scotland and Wales you also
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: have like nationalists local parties. Second, you have voters just
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: furious about the cost of living in a bunch of
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: economic issues and labor has not made their lives better.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: They're getting punished for it.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: And there's lots of reports that labor campaigners were on
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: the doors and they were talking to voters and the
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: voters are like, we hate Cure Starmer, hate, like visceral
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: hate for that man, which is interesting. So that gets
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: us the question of whether Starmer will step aside or
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: be deposed. On Monday, he gave it a defiant speech,
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: taking responsibility for the loss but rejecting calls to resign.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: Let's listen to a bit of that.
• 9:16
  Speaker 5: The election results last week were tough, very tough. We
• 9:23
  Speaker 5: lost some brilliant labor representatives. That hurts, and it should hurt.
• 9:32
  Speaker 5: I get it, I feel it, and I take responsibility.
• 9:38
  Speaker 5: We are not just facing dangerous times, but dangerous opponents,
• 9:45
  Speaker 5: very dangerous opponents. This hurts not just because labor has
• 9:51
  Speaker 5: done badly, but because if we don't get this right,
• 9:56
  Speaker 5: our country will go down a very dark.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: It seems like he's not feeling emotions but.
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: To say yeah, yeah.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So a Tuesday, he also had the cabinet meeting. He
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: was again defined.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: He told his team he's not going anywhere, but it's
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: not entirely up to him. There are reports that more
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: than ninety Labor MPs wants Starmard to step aside. That
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: includes four ministers in his government. But crucially, Ben, no
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: alternative candidate has gotten the support of eighty one sitting
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: Labor MPs, which is what you need to formally challenge
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Starmer and trigger a leadership election. So Ben, I'll pause
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: there your thoughts on these results, and then after that,
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: do you want to make the case that it's time
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: for cure Starmer to step aside? And I'll make the
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Starmer should staycase. Yeah, straw Man, just for fun.
• 10:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, And I could probably argue it both ways,
• 10:43
  Speaker 4: but I would definitely tilt in the direction I'm going
• 10:46
  Speaker 4: to argue. For Look, the problem here is that Labor
• 10:51
  Speaker 4: won this massive majority in large part because the Tories
• 10:55
  Speaker 4: had self immolated, as we covered meticulously.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: On this podcast for a decid.
• 11:00
  Speaker 4: Over the course of a decade with Brexit and Liz
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: Trust and all the chaos. Boris Johnson having COVID parties
• 11:06
  Speaker 4: all the rest of it. And so they get this
• 11:08
  Speaker 4: huge mandate and have done fuck all with it. I mean, like,
• 11:15
  Speaker 4: what was their program? What is James Starmers?
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: They got jobs for Jeffrey Epstein friends.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, what is cures? Starmer's.
• 11:21
  Speaker 4: Well, this is part of the problem is that their
• 11:23
  Speaker 4: their theory. Starmer's theory of the case was I got
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: to purge Jeremy corbyin the left wing, previous leader of
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: Labor and all of his supporters and move this party
• 11:32
  Speaker 4: to the center to make it an acceptable alternative to
• 11:35
  Speaker 4: the toys and win.
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: And that worked.
• 11:37
  Speaker 4: But the problem is they had no program for when
• 11:40
  Speaker 4: they won. And this is a country that has an
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: identity crisis after Brexit, This is a country that is
• 11:44
  Speaker 4: desperately need of growth. This is a country that has xenophobic,
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: rising far right politics, but desperately needs immigrants to sustain
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: their care economy and their NHS. So there's a lot
• 11:57
  Speaker 4: of work to be done. And he's not offering any
• 11:59
  Speaker 4: vision or any big ideas about what the UK is
• 12:03
  Speaker 4: or what their economic future is. And that's showing up
• 12:08
  Speaker 4: in the polls. You know, and I know some of
• 12:11
  Speaker 4: these you know, one of my someone. I know, Payman
• 12:14
  Speaker 4: Asad actually won by thirty votes, but you know that
• 12:17
  Speaker 4: thirty votes it's tough, you know. And here I'll pivot
• 12:20
  Speaker 4: to the case against Starmar. I know what he said,
• 12:23
  Speaker 4: which is that we can't be as chaok as the
• 12:25
  Speaker 4: Tories and change of leaders, you know, in the merryground.
• 12:28
  Speaker 4: We let me have five years to have my full mandate.
• 12:31
  Speaker 4: The problem with that is he has not shown any
• 12:37
  Speaker 4: other gear. You know, you know when you see a politician.
• 12:40
  Speaker 4: I mean, first of all, does he get it? No,
• 12:43
  Speaker 4: he looks like he's reading talking points he was told
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: to say, I feel it.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: He did tend speech perhaps where they said show passion.
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: And he just can't really show motion or passion. He's
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: like a well meaning perhaps guy, but like he doesn't.
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: But then beyond that, he hasn't shown that he has
• 13:01
  Speaker 4: any new vision or any new program. It's all political
• 13:05
  Speaker 4: positioning and tactic. Should I tack a little bit more
• 13:08
  Speaker 4: to the right, as they've done on immigration, which doesn't
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: make sense because if you're anti immigrant, you'll.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: Just vote for reform. Should I tack to the left?
• 13:16
  Speaker 4: And look, the Green Party's done a lot to differentiate
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: itself and actually stand on principle. That's why they're winning voters.
• 13:23
  Speaker 4: I just don't think he knows what he wants to
• 13:26
  Speaker 4: do as Prime minister other than state prime minister. And
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: there's a kind of you know, there's a kind of
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: younger Joe Biden vibe here too. I just want to
• 13:33
  Speaker 4: stick around and.
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: Look, he's the guy that did August Yeah, well too,
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: to be fair, but.
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: He's not wrong about reform UK being scary. I mean,
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: this is a xenophobic far right party led by Nigel Farahs,
• 13:48
  Speaker 4: who should be a punchline, not a prime minister. But
• 13:52
  Speaker 4: precisely because of that threat. I just don't see him
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: rehabilitating labor to be able to compete with Nigel Pharah
• 14:00
  Speaker 4: and so and look, there's the biggest problem is there's
• 14:03
  Speaker 4: not an alternative. Part of the problem is not alternative.
• 14:06
  Speaker 4: The biggest alternative is Andy Burnham, right, who's a very
• 14:09
  Speaker 4: popular mayor, but who would have to come into the
• 14:12
  Speaker 4: Parliament to become Prime minister. He was blocked from coming
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: into parliament by Cure Starmer and his allies, and so
• 14:19
  Speaker 4: they prevented there from being alternatives again echoes of the
• 14:23
  Speaker 4: Democratic Party. We've done primaries and so I just don't.
• 14:28
  Speaker 4: I just don't know that Cure Starmer has showed us
• 14:31
  Speaker 4: that he can govern any differently than he already has.
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: And we see what the results are of how he governs.
• 14:37
  Speaker 4: And I just therefore think that and look, take some
• 14:41
  Speaker 4: time if you're not ready today to find an alternative,
• 14:44
  Speaker 4: you know, figure out a timeline to find one. But
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: they're running three years from now under the next election
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: of Cure Starmer. I just think that's a recipe for disaster.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: So let me let me straw man the case for
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Wi Starmar's should stay, because I actually think it's then
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: we'll talk about our own personal views. I have a
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: fairly strong view, but it is it's complicated. So it's
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: the case for why Starmer should stay is like you know,
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: like I said at the top, like this was not
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: a landslide for reform or total wipeout for labor. It
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: was the political system really fracturing into this new reality
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: of multi party not just a two party system. And
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: I think we do adjust our expectations accordingly. Yes, here
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: Starmer is unpopular. His polling is terrible. There's all these
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: reports about, you know, visceral hatred of him on the doorsteps.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: But every single leader.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: In Europe is unpopular right now. Right in April, Yugov
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: did a big tracking poll here. Starmer's forty four points underwater,
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: French president a Minimum Crown is forty nine points underwater,
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz is fifty two points underwater. Even
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: leaders I think that you and I think of as
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: more deft politically or at least more interesting or struggling,
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: like Georgia Maloney is negative twenty two her approval. Pedro
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Sanchez is twenty one points underwater. So everyone's getting fucked.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: People are pissed everywhere. And then again, like getting rid
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: of Starmer is the easy part, figuring out who comes
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: next is much harder. Have you heard of West Streeting,
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham?
• 16:14
  Speaker 6: Me?
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Neither, And those are the leading candidates to replace this guy, right,
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: And like if Wes Streeting wants to run, he needs
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: to man up and do it. No one, No one's
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: manned up yet. And so to your point, Ben, like
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: about Starmar and his what do you want to do
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: with the job, I don't get the sense from anybody
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: really what they want to do within labor, Like it's
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: not about who comes next, is about what comes next?
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Like and what are you going to do with the mandate,
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: and like no one's laying out in an alternative vision.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: I know that's complicated when you're still in government, but
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: no one's done it yet. And then in that speech
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: we didn't play all of it, but like Starmer did
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: try to lay out a bit of a path forward.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: He has like more direct intervention in the economy. He
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: talks about like nationalizing steel plants, more partnership with the
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: you takes a more head on fight with Nigel Farrage.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: He blames the Iran War for a lot of his troubles,
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: speaking of which, you know, the one thing this will
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: do is it will mean that Starmar helps Nigel Farrage
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: deliver on his big election promise. Let's watch a clippus
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: of Sparrage ranting away after the election already happened about
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: the results.
• 17:18
  Speaker 7: We thought this election campaign on a big national slogan.
• 17:23
  Speaker 5: You might remember it.
• 17:24
  Speaker 8: It said vote reform and and I'll tell you what.
• 17:30
  Speaker 7: He'll be gone in the middle of the summer.
• 17:32
  Speaker 8: The most unpatriotic, worst, least prepared prime minister we've ever
• 17:37
  Speaker 8: seen in this country.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: And we will have seen the back of him.
• 17:41
  Speaker 8: We are directly taking votes from patriotic old labor in
• 17:46
  Speaker 8: areas that frankly they've been pretty much able to take
• 17:49
  Speaker 8: for granted since the end of World War One.
• 17:52
  Speaker 7: It all goes to show. But maybe the course of
• 17:54
  Speaker 7: the last two years, since we made that breakthrough in
• 17:57
  Speaker 7: the general election, we have professionalized pH See, we've done
• 18:02
  Speaker 7: it at a very very rapid rate.
• 18:04
  Speaker 9: Is what's call with your friend Donald Trump.
• 18:06
  Speaker 5: So maybe end this war in Iran. That would help prices.
• 18:09
  Speaker 7: Hide at the war in the rounds very close to
• 18:11
  Speaker 7: a Rovin Heroin is just not my thing.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: There's a way better backdrop for them.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: Also, I love the guys who have the big like broaches,
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: like there's one like a ribbon and like.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: A horse jumping competition.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: But anyway, so if Starmer goes, he you know, delivers
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: for forage. And I think that there's no way this
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: ends with this just a leadership election. There will be
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: intense pressure to call for an early general election that'll
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: come at the worst time possible for labor. It'll rattle
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: the bond markets, it'll create a permanent economic cost. And
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: so I think, you know, the only path forward deliver
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: on the mandate voters gave Starmer fight it out. Also
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: very awkward that the King's speech. I think it's the
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: day this episode comes out this Wednesday, and that's where
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: the Prime Minister lays out his legislative agenda. So it's
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: kind of a crazy time to make a change. But
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: that's the case.
• 18:59
  Speaker 4: First arm, yeah, I get the case being that part
• 19:04
  Speaker 4: of what like, we made fun of the Tories for
• 19:07
  Speaker 4: you know, musical chairs prime ministers, and that's suboptimal. First
• 19:12
  Speaker 4: of all, Nagel Farage, it's like a walking talking pack
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: of marble reds, you know.
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: At that voice is so funny.
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: But I think that they're not easy answers to these problems.
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: I'd say a couple of things though.
• 19:27
  Speaker 4: First of all, yes, all those people are underwater, but
• 19:30
  Speaker 4: you notice who's less underwater. Pedro Sanchez and Georgia Maloney
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: wildly different politically right, us on the right, Santra's on
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: the left. But they believe things like squishy centrism that
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: Macrone and Starmer embody literally and Mertzy is a little
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: bit more to the right. But like is not what
• 19:52
  Speaker 4: anyone's looking for. They want to know that we are
• 19:55
  Speaker 4: dealing in this country but also in the UK like
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: existential problem, you know, like the economy doesn't work anymore,
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: capitalism doesn't work anymore, the world doesn't work anymore. And
• 20:04
  Speaker 4: this idea that you're just going to tinker and a
• 20:06
  Speaker 4: little bit of a social program here and a little
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: bit of a tough on immigrant rhetoric here, and you know,
• 20:12
  Speaker 4: a tiny bit of money for the NHS a national
• 20:14
  Speaker 4: health service like that. That approach, that's that star merism.
• 20:18
  Speaker 4: It's just not what people want.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's also creating problems that there's not like
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: a clear faction that wants to get rid of them.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: It's not like the left of the labor parties all
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: like get rid of Starmar. It's just like everyone kind
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: of it's just not that into them.
• 20:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah, because nobody really knows what you know, what he
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: is and what he stands for. And you know, I
• 20:36
  Speaker 4: don't I'd have to go deeper on what the big
• 20:38
  Speaker 4: what big ideas they could have?
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: What is an actual.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Here's one Brexit was bad, but that's a second.
• 20:44
  Speaker 4: So you read my mind, It's like why not just say,
• 20:47
  Speaker 4: you know what, like this economy has been totally fucked,
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: just like this predictable would be by brexit. We have
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: lost our place in the world stage because we're kind
• 20:55
  Speaker 4: of an orphan now getting beat up by Donald Trump.
• 20:58
  Speaker 4: Like we should go back into EU, right, Like that's
• 21:00
  Speaker 4: gold be better for our geopolitics and our economy. It'll
• 21:04
  Speaker 4: be good for growth because we have more markets, like
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: something on that scale.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: The speech.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: The speech hints at more, more with Europe, more something
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: like it, like hints it getting back, he hints it
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: undoing Brexit. But then his team was briefing, no, no, no, no,
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: we didn't really mean that. He just wants more partnership
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: with Europe or something like that.
• 21:20
  Speaker 4: It's like hide, pick aside and show people that you
• 21:24
  Speaker 4: believe in something and you know what, God forbid, maybe
• 21:26
  Speaker 4: you lose, but at least you tried to do something
• 21:29
  Speaker 4: you cared about, you know. And I think that that's
• 21:32
  Speaker 4: what's missing. And now you know, Angela and Rayner would
• 21:34
  Speaker 4: have normally been the left wing candidate. She remember had
• 21:37
  Speaker 4: these tax issues and scandaled mortgage scandals that here like
• 21:41
  Speaker 4: you know nothing and.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Also like nothing compared to Nigel Faraj.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: I mean it just came out that he took like
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: five million dollars from some crypto billionaire for some reason.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: He says it was for security, but like there's no
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: like the meat. The British media treats him kind of
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: like a fun person to book on shows and be
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: a talking head, not like a serious.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: The guy prime minister.
• 22:00
  Speaker 10: Minister.
• 22:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean Zach Polanski, the late the Green Party
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: you know, has made real inroads because there's a kind
• 22:07
  Speaker 4: of a mumdani dust that you know they have over there,
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: But it's because like people actually know what the Greens
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: believe in, you know, and actually on the centrism side,
• 22:16
  Speaker 4: well then you have the lib Dems like Labor's just.
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: Kind of homeless now, like it what is it? You know?
• 22:23
  Speaker 4: And I think Starmer is not the one. He doesn't
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: seem to be and you could prove me wrong. He
• 22:28
  Speaker 4: doesn't seem to have the answer.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: To that question.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Zach Polanski really screwed up recently and didn't seem to
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: take seriously enough some very serious incidents of anti Semitism
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: that have happened in the UK. So I don't know
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: what that means for his future. Like I'm with you,
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: Like he's Jewish, so I know that's the weird part
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: about all this, I mean the Starmer's speech. I watched
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: the whole thing and then he did a little press conference.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: It was just it seemed it seems so weak, Like
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: it was like someone was like, try to, you know,
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: turn him up twenty percent. He kept hit this refrain,
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: re kept being like and that's the Labor way, or
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: like that's the labor choice. So it just it just
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: it didn't work. He also, you know, he started to
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: blame Iran for a lot of the UK's problems. I
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: think that's well, it's probably accurate. Yeah, yeah, it's useful,
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: but I don't know. I like, I think I think
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: no one thinks that Kure Starmer is going to be
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: leading the Labor Party into the next election. And the
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: question is just like when do.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: You get rid of them?
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that to me is the question.
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: Maybe take your time if you grab a.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: Labor Liz trust. But the clock is ticking.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: They gotta start a process.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: They can't do what Biden did with Harris and just
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: the Democratic Party did and just seem to anoint someone.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: They need a process. I don't know how long that
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: is going to have to take, but they're going to
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: have to have one to your Biden point.
• 23:44
  Speaker 10: Uh.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: I know this is unfair and silly and look an
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: American thing. But I think Starmer said something about this
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: being a fight for the soul of the country, and
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: I was like, oh, just screamed Biden.
• 23:53
  Speaker 10: Yeah.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: Look, I think he's a dead man walking politically. I
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: think he was the right guy to get them through
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: that election. He was not the right guy for this moment,
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: just because once you have a negative fifty approval rating,
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: I don't know how you fix that. Whoever comes next
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: is probably fucked as well. Yea'll like staunch the bleeding,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we beat Medicare.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: The scary thing is there's all these trends we're watching
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: of the rise of the far right in the UK,
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: in France, in Germany, and we have the French presidential
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: election coming up in twenty twenty seven. The Germans have
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: a bunch of elections coming out you can see, like
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: AfD governors and parts of Germany. It's just like the
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: future for the far right in Europe is bright.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, which is dark for us. Yeah.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: It's never a good mixed far right politics and Europe.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: No, not good.
• 24:44
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• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, So the.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: War in Iran living all over all of this remains
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: a little mess, and depending on who you ask Ben,
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: the war with Iran could be over or not.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Here's a little super cut that tells the story.
• 27:20
  Speaker 11: Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of
• 27:23
  Speaker 11: that operation.
• 27:25
  Speaker 4: Is it accurate to say you think the combat operations
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: are over and done?
• 27:29
  Speaker 9: But that I said they are if they are defeated,
• 27:34
  Speaker 9: But that doesn't mean they're done.
• 27:36
  Speaker 6: Is the war with Iran over? And if it isn't
• 27:38
  Speaker 6: Who will decide when it is.
• 27:41
  Speaker 10: I think it accomplished a great deal, but it's not
• 27:43
  Speaker 10: over because there's still nuclear material.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: So clear as day.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: That was Marco Rubio, Trump, and then Israeli Prime mister Beauty.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: Then Yahoo for those of you lucky enough to not
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: just automatically recognize their voices. So let's to walk you
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: guys through the last week in the disaster that it was,
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: and then we'll talk about it. So first Trump and
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: bounced Project Freedom. That was this like pr bullshit plan
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: to guide ships through the Strait of Hormus. That mission
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: lasted I think about thirty six hours until Trump pulled
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: the plug on it. NBC News later reported that the
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Saudis and the Kuwaitis were surprised by the plan.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: They were mad about it, and they.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: Pressured the US to pull the plug because they thought
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: I could unravel the ceasefire in peace talks. Then we
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: had a bunch of breaking news and sirens from reporters
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: quoting senior White House officials saying the US and Iran
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: were very close to making a deal that of course
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: was bullshit. There's still no deal, and according to the
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Financial Times, the two sides were very far apart.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: Trump's demands were a twenty year.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Moratorium on Iran's nuclear and Richmond program, transferring the stockpile
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: of uranium enriched to close the sixty percent enriched stockpile
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: that the so called dust out of the country, and
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: then dismantling their three main nuclear sites. And the Iranian response,
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: I think loosely translates to get fucked. It was and
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: the war and all fronts have Iranian management of the
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: Strait of Hormuves going forward word suspension of sanctions. And
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: then they actually gave a little ground on their enriched
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: uranium stockpile. They said they chip half of it out,
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: but like to loote the rest. But they gave Trump
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: a little something. Here's how President Trump took their response.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Let's watch for the time.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: Being, the ceasefire remains in place.
• 29:17
  Speaker 9: It's unbelievably weak. I would say I would call it
• 29:22
  Speaker 9: the weakest right now after reading a piece of garbage.
• 29:27
  Speaker 9: I didn't even finish reading it. They said, I'm gonna
• 29:30
  Speaker 9: waste my time reading it. I would say it's one
• 29:32
  Speaker 9: of the weakest. Right now. It's on life support. They
• 29:36
  Speaker 9: understand these are all medical people, doctor os life support
• 29:40
  Speaker 9: is not a good thing.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: You're back prognostic.
• 29:42
  Speaker 9: I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support,
• 29:47
  Speaker 9: where the doctor walks in and says, sir, your loved
• 29:51
  Speaker 9: one has approximately a one percent chance of living free to.
• 29:56
  Speaker 12: Allow the removal all their Well, they did.
• 30:00
  Speaker 9: It two days ago.
• 30:01
  Speaker 10: They didn't.
• 30:02
  Speaker 9: Okay, they did two days ago. They said you're going
• 30:06
  Speaker 9: to have to take it. We were going to go
• 30:08
  Speaker 9: with them, but they changed your mind because they didn't
• 30:10
  Speaker 9: put it in the paper. So when they sent us
• 30:13
  Speaker 9: this document that we waited four days for, they should
• 30:15
  Speaker 9: have taken ten minutes to do. It's looking very simple.
• 30:19
  Speaker 9: We get that they guarantee no nuclear weapons for a
• 30:23
  Speaker 9: very long period of time, and.
• 30:25
  Speaker 7: A couple of other minded things.
• 30:26
  Speaker 9: But they just can't get there. They think that, well,
• 30:28
  Speaker 9: I'll get tired of this, I'll get bored, or I'll
• 30:30
  Speaker 9: have some pressure. But there's no pressure. There's no pressure
• 30:33
  Speaker 9: at all.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: I love that, like this, sir, construct for a story
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: that he's totally making up. Support Now and now is
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: how the doctor talks about you, and like the er
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: would there.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: And sure, some random people have to stand there the
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: whole time.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: There's one lady Ben who literally someone told her to smile,
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: as she did this the whole time.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: See, anyway, things are going good, things are going great.
• 30:56
  Speaker 4: First of all, I'm just going to keep coming back
• 30:58
  Speaker 4: to this as we have to because our media doesn't
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: do it enough. This is why we have to support
• 31:02
  Speaker 4: independent progressive media.
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: They'll say things.
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: Like, well, they're already defeated at what like soccer, Like
• 31:09
  Speaker 4: the regime is in place, they have all the nuclear material,
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: they control the straight ofform moves, like they're not defeated.
• 31:14
  Speaker 4: Like let's just like not even let him just keep
• 31:17
  Speaker 4: saying something that isn't true because he wants to repeat
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: it until it becomes true. The fact that the Iranians
• 31:23
  Speaker 4: aren't even offering the JCPOA the Iran Nuclear Deal terms
• 31:28
  Speaker 4: shows you that they believe that they have all this leverage,
• 31:31
  Speaker 4: like they control the straight ofform moves they've got.
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: And he when the way he talks about I can
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: wait here all day.
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: Person outside who's paying fucking seven dollars a gallon for gas, right,
• 31:42
  Speaker 4: Tell that to the people in the UK who have shortages,
• 31:45
  Speaker 4: to the people in South Korea who have shortages, or
• 31:47
  Speaker 4: people in Bangladesh who you know have to ration energy,
• 31:51
  Speaker 4: like everybody is suffering, and Donald Trump's just sitting there
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: on his fat ass being like, oh, I got all
• 31:57
  Speaker 4: the time in the world.
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: Well, and then he acts like.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: She's asked about his red line for the negotiations. He's like,
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: I don't We're gonna think about it on the flight
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: to China.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: And here's here's the thing.
• 32:06
  Speaker 4: Like I've often again, they will they will be willing
• 32:11
  Speaker 4: to ship that stockpile out because they know that's not
• 32:14
  Speaker 4: their nuclear program. That's just the product of the nuclear program.
• 32:16
  Speaker 4: And so I just don't get why these you know,
• 32:19
  Speaker 4: he needs in the war, he needs to show he
• 32:21
  Speaker 4: got something. I just don't get why he doesn't make
• 32:23
  Speaker 4: a deal where it's like they're going to open the
• 32:25
  Speaker 4: straighter horn moves and they're gonna ship out their stockpile
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: and they're going to get some sanctions belief in a
• 32:29
  Speaker 4: bunch of money, because that's how this thing ends. And
• 32:32
  Speaker 4: otherwise it's like a frozen conflict. But it's a frozen
• 32:36
  Speaker 4: conflict where the straight upform moves is closed, you know,
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: and the global economy will collapse within a matter of months.
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: If that's the case.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: The cost is Unbelievableeble the Pentagon says the direct cost is.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Twenty nine billion dollars. Double that right like it.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: It's they asked for two hundred billions, So I don't
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: know what.
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: The real number is. Way more. Oil prices are still
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: are way up, so JP Morgan said.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: It's analysts think that the oil prices will remain over
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: one hundred dollars a barrel through this year.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: That's bad.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: A Brown University study found that as of last week,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: American consumers had paid an extra thirty five billion dollars
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: in gas and diesel costs and so war began, that's
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: about two hundred and sixty eight dollars per household. Jet
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: fuel prices reup seventy percent, fertilizer prices are up thirty percent.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: By the way, US in California, man we get especially screwed.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: These were more dependent on Middle Easter n oil than
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: other states. And then the Financial Times was looking at
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: the total cost of the war and they found that
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: a reasonable estimate based on the FED Zone models, is
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: that the war's going to cost the economy two hundred
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: billion dollars and a loss of a million jobs in
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: the US for like a bunch of factors including interest
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: rates and the FEDS like monthly gauge of global supply
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: chain pressures is now at the highest level since the pandemic.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: So like everything the economy is like filling like a
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: balloon and something is going to pop very soon. He's like,
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: I'm on board.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: I don't care, that's the thing.
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: And because everybody can feel right, So there's already this
• 34:01
  Speaker 4: discordance between you know, the quote unquote markets and the
• 34:05
  Speaker 4: lived reality of everybody that has to pay for anything
• 34:07
  Speaker 4: on earth and the shortages that are coming. And I
• 34:11
  Speaker 4: guess he thinks that when they bubble burst, he'll just
• 34:14
  Speaker 4: blame Barack Obama or Joe Biden or something. But like
• 34:18
  Speaker 4: this is one where everybody knows that things were one
• 34:21
  Speaker 4: way and then this war happened, and there another way.
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: And I think it's going to take.
• 34:28
  Speaker 4: The rest of the world, you know, hi jimping in
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: the next couple days, all these Europeans, they're going to
• 34:33
  Speaker 4: have to go to Trump and be like, look, man,
• 34:36
  Speaker 4: and the Iranians for that matter, and just be like,
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: just take the minimal ast deal you can agree to.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: Trump.
• 34:43
  Speaker 4: His his willingness to spin anything should allow him to
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: just get the hell out of this thing. I mean,
• 34:50
  Speaker 4: just he's going to say he defeated them. Anyway, his
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: morons who watched Fox all day and listen to like
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: Mark Levin will swallow that. Seventy percent in the country
• 35:01
  Speaker 4: will think this is a mistake. They already think it's
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: a mistake.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: Look again, and the right wingers, the FDD think tanks
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: and stuff like, they'll hate it, but eventually they'll shut
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: up like the Hugh Hewitts, you know, floppers and propagandas like.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: They will hate this deal. They're saying as a munch,
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: But yes, I think that's where he's gonna end up.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: And also been there's been all these reports about the
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: way the war is kind of metastasizing and spreading across
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: the Middle East. So the Wall Street Journal reported that
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: the United Arab Emirates UAE had been carrying out military
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: strikes on Iran directly. They were a direct combatant in
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: the war. They hit a refinery back in April, for example.
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: They had been targeted by you know, twenty eight hundred
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: missiles and drones from Iran, so it was response to that,
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: but still we didn't know that. There was also a
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: Reuters report today that Saudi Arabia carried out a bunch
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: of secret air strikes during the war too, so again
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: this wasn't just the US and Israel. It was a
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: bunch of countries bombing Iran. And then the journal had
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: this wild story about how Israel built a base in
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: the middle of the Iraqi desert to support the military
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: operation in Iran, and then I think it was like
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: search and rescue and some sort of air force logistics.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: Then the story says at one point, the Iraqi military
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: tried to investigate what was going on there because I'm like,
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: you know, she heard her tipped them off to it,
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: and the idea fired on them a couple of times
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: and killed two Iraqi soldiers, and like just nobody.
• 36:16
  Speaker 4: Said, what is their basis for being there? It's not
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: their territory, czy. Like, I think that's even beyond Mike
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: Huckaby's definition of Israel, which ends somewhere around the Euphrates.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: And some Kansas.
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, But I mean, look, first of all,
• 36:30
  Speaker 4: on the regional side, we just again we have no
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: idea the damage that's been done to our basis, to
• 36:35
  Speaker 4: our facilities, to these golf countries. We you know, people
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: still can't like post pictures of Dubai. The Amiradis are
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: the biggest losers or I don't know, there are a
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: lot of losers, but they're one of the biggest losers
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: in this war. First, they threw all their chips in
• 36:52
  Speaker 4: with the Abram Accords with Israel, with this idea that
• 36:55
  Speaker 4: were to form a united front and stand up to
• 36:57
  Speaker 4: the Iranians. And here they are. They just got you know,
• 37:00
  Speaker 4: showered with drones and their Dubai model got wrecked. And
• 37:05
  Speaker 4: you know they're they're they're carrying out airstrikes and look
• 37:08
  Speaker 4: if you're feeling sorry for them, they fund the RSF
• 37:12
  Speaker 4: and Sudan. That is like committing war crimes on a
• 37:15
  Speaker 4: regular basis. But all this is going to I'm very
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: interested to see how the backstory of all these things
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: comes out, in addition to the damage assessments. One thing
• 37:26
  Speaker 4: in particular, that base in Iraq clearly seemed tied and
• 37:30
  Speaker 4: it was reported to the Kurds right to the idea
• 37:32
  Speaker 4: that the Israelis wanted to use the Iranian and Iraqi
• 37:36
  Speaker 4: Curds to be a ground force to do things inside
• 37:39
  Speaker 4: of Iran. I think what probably happened there is, you know,
• 37:44
  Speaker 4: the Kurds have partnered with Israel in the past. Some
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: Curds not all cards, and they were probably waiting to see, like, okay,
• 37:52
  Speaker 4: can Iron take this punch. We killed the Supreme leader
• 37:55
  Speaker 4: and drop all these bombs and the regime lo and
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: Behold is not only still state, they're capable of closing
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: straight afoard moves, and it seems like the Kurds are like, thanks,
• 38:04
  Speaker 4: but no thanks, We're not like going to war against
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: the regime. I think the Curtish play was if the
• 38:09
  Speaker 4: regime collapses, you know, maybe we'll or the regime is
• 38:12
  Speaker 4: like literally on its last legs, maybe we'll get involved here.
• 38:15
  Speaker 4: But it should be pointed out that failed, like the
• 38:19
  Speaker 4: Israeli pitch, as reported the New York Times in the
• 38:21
  Speaker 4: situation room, was the Curds are going to rise up.
• 38:24
  Speaker 4: There's gonna be all these ground forces on our side.
• 38:27
  Speaker 4: Res of Paul Lavi, the son of the show, is
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: gonna come in. None of those things happened, and we
• 38:31
  Speaker 4: never hold bebing In now accountable, not just for the
• 38:34
  Speaker 4: fact that he convinced Trump to do this stupid fucking thing,
• 38:39
  Speaker 4: but that his analysis he was either lying or he
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: was completely wrong. That the regime would fall, that the
• 38:45
  Speaker 4: Kurds would rise up, that the Ranings would rise up,
• 38:47
  Speaker 4: that Reza Paulavi was somehow in credible leader of iron.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: Do you see Trump like directly bitching about the Kurds.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: He was like, we gave them weapons and they just
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: stole them and they didn't do it. He was complaining
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: about it. That's covered action and.
• 38:58
  Speaker 4: It sits bullet first of all, like it's such both
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: the Kurts have done so much. You know, they were
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: the ground forced against ISIS for the United States and
• 39:07
  Speaker 4: the obomb years and under Trump, you know, they were
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: on our side in the Iraq war. Like this idea
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: that they're obligated to be our fight our war, to
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: fight all of our wars, and they never get what
• 39:17
  Speaker 4: they want, which is a state. And for reasons that
• 39:20
  Speaker 4: I can understand given the complexity of that. But why
• 39:22
  Speaker 4: would they fucking fight our war?
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: It's crazy.
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: And also him just like crying about a clear like
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: COVID action program in of lot this press race.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Funny also that the New York Times.
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: Just posted a piece it's a new like leaked assessment
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: of the impact of the war in Iran.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: Most alarming to some senior officials.
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: Is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to thirty
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: of the thirty three missile sites it maintains along the
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: trade of war moves.
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: But Pete Hexa told me that they were destroyed.
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: Which could threaten America and so came oil tankers. Iran
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: still fields about seventy percent of its mobile launchers across
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: the country and has retained roughly seventy percent of its
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: pre war missile stockpile.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: That is bad news.
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: So they got a lot a lot of kit left
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: to fire at us in a lot of ways to
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: do it. Also been do you see that DoD wants
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: to apparently rename their n war operations Sledgehammer if it restarts,
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: and they're thinking that that means they get to restart
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: the sixty day war powers clock, so they can just
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: do another end ground around Congress by giving it a
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: new name.
• 40:21
  Speaker 4: Well that's what little Marco's doing when he's like epic
• 40:24
  Speaker 4: fury is over. I mean they think that a war
• 40:26
  Speaker 4: is like the name that you give to something and
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: not the state of hostilities that you have in the country.
• 40:31
  Speaker 4: I mean, I would argue that we've been at war
• 40:34
  Speaker 4: the Ron since at least these still called.
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: Twelve Day War nineteen forty seven. Well was the Tom
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: Cotton timeline.
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: Oh that was crazy seventy nine.
• 40:43
  Speaker 4: But I mean remember the twelve Day War, Like this
• 40:46
  Speaker 4: has all been one war. Yeah, I mean that's the point.
• 40:49
  Speaker 4: These guys count on our attention spans being so destroyed
• 40:53
  Speaker 4: by social media and technology that we like forget that
• 40:56
  Speaker 4: we're still in a war or something. Because as a
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: new name, what do we children, I.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: Mean, it's just rebranding.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: It's like it's like restaurants that close down and reopen
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: in the same spot in La every six months.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: This is a new name.
• 41:06
  Speaker 4: My favorite taka place in Venice, Teddy's Real Tacos. It
• 41:12
  Speaker 4: suddenly suddenly it was different, different name, and I was terrified.
• 41:15
  Speaker 4: But the menu's exactly the same, kind of like the
• 41:17
  Speaker 4: ron works that the tacos are.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: Good, same same spot. All right.
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: You mentioned that Yahoo trump the IRGC. They're not the
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: only arsonists in this conflict. We also have bebing in Yaho.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: He was on CBS's sixty Minutes over the weekend.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: As Net.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: Yahoo watchers know Net and Yahoo avoids speaking with Israeli
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: journalists because they are actually knowledgeable about all of his
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: failings and failures and ask him about them, and so
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: he instead launders his message through the US media, who
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: tend to be softer than a you know, baby skin
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: and easily manipulated by him. And unfortunately, the new and
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: improved sixty minutes under Berry Weiss's leadership was no exception.
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: I want to play one example to just annoyed the
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: shit out of me, Ben, and then we'll talk about
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: some more substance of stuff. So this is CBS's Major Garrett,
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: who by the way, is a nice guy.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: He's a good reporter.
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: Not knocking him as a human, but this was not
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: his finest hour or finest interview, I don't think, and
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: it sounds like Weiss steered the interview to him as
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: opposed to Leslie saw it probably would have been a
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: little rougher.
• 42:18
  Speaker 4: But by the way, Major, as you know, is capable
• 42:20
  Speaker 4: of asking tough questions. So that tells you a lot
• 42:23
  Speaker 4: about Barry Weis's leadership to give Major even further pass,
• 42:26
  Speaker 4: although I would prefer people didn't go along with Garry
• 42:28
  Speaker 4: Weiss like I've seen Major Garrett do tough interview the RST.
• 42:32
  Speaker 4: So this is probably a direction from Hon.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very weird. So here's a question.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: Here's part of a question he asked about Israeli intelligence
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: that I thought was instructive.
• 42:41
  Speaker 6: Mister Prime Minister. The capabilities of Israeli intelligence was in
• 42:45
  Speaker 6: Iran allowed you to pinpoint the location of supreme leader
• 42:48
  Speaker 6: and others. That is a kind of granular intelligence that
• 42:53
  Speaker 6: is borderline miraculous in the modern world. Why wasn't it
• 42:57
  Speaker 6: sufficient to also foment a revolution?
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: So Ben his office, it was on his house, like
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: he was working above ground, the home office in his
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: own house. So that would like be a miraculous intelligence
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: to bomb the White House to kill Trump or or
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: drone you know, the gold gym in Venice to take
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: out RFK Junior.
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: The heavy breathing was good, mister Prime Minister. The granularity
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: of that intelligence, this is so remarked.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: It's like bombing the poodle rum.
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: It's you're not watching like fucking Munich.
• 43:30
  Speaker 4: Here we're talking about a guy, an eighty six year
• 43:32
  Speaker 4: old man who's killed in his house. It's crazy and
• 43:35
  Speaker 4: look like like this is a bigger deal. I mean
• 43:39
  Speaker 4: then I know that it gets online attention, but I mean,
• 43:43
  Speaker 4: you know that doesn't count for anything.
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: These days.
• 43:44
  Speaker 4: I mean, this is sixty minutes, this is CBS News,
• 43:48
  Speaker 4: This is like literally like the catalog of American journalism, right,
• 43:52
  Speaker 4: And it gets purchased by David Allison, who's kind of
• 43:58
  Speaker 4: qualification for running anything is that his father's Larry Elson,
• 44:01
  Speaker 4: and he went to like usc film school and wants
• 44:04
  Speaker 4: to play with the movies and they're super pro Israel
• 44:08
  Speaker 4: and super pro Trump. And so he hands the keys
• 44:11
  Speaker 4: of sixty minutes and CBS News to Barry Weiss, whose
• 44:14
  Speaker 4: only qualification is running a blog where she tells rich
• 44:18
  Speaker 4: billionaires that they're wonderful, Israel's wonderful and Dei is bad.
• 44:24
  Speaker 4: And essentially the fields you get when you watch Bill
• 44:28
  Speaker 4: Maher are all right, and we're going to bring those
• 44:30
  Speaker 4: feelings over to CBS News. And then you have the
• 44:34
  Speaker 4: prime minister of a country that literally convinced the President
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: of United States to do the dumbest thing since the
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: Iraq War and launching an attack on a country. None
• 44:44
  Speaker 4: of the things that Nanyaw said we're going to happen happened.
• 44:47
  Speaker 4: We're in an economic catastrophe, Major Garrett and CBS News.
• 44:51
  Speaker 4: His own viewers are like not being able to afford
• 44:54
  Speaker 4: their gas and he's sitting on there like blowing smoke
• 44:58
  Speaker 4: up Bebie's butt out.
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: How wonderful and granular. The intelligence is what is going
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: on here?
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: This is your job.
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: This is putin level propaganda.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: I mean.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: Also, CBS didn't ask about Netya's responsibility for October seventh
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: until an hour and seven minutes into the conversation. It
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: feels like that'd be something to be friends enter, and
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: then he just brushed it off. There was lots of
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: talk about Hamas violating the seasfire and Gaza. There was
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: none no conversation about or questions about Israel violating the
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: seasfire as far as I could tell you. And Netanyah
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: who vomiting out the same talking points about all the
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: ways the idf avoids civilian casualties and text people and
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: it's like all the same shit we heard two years
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: ago and then we watched like seventy thousand people get
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: slaughtered and it's just demonstrably false.
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: And just he didn't get he didn't get pushed on
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: any of it.
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: And also you know, like Trump sued CBS right for
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: editing out sixteen minutes interview like a Kamala Harris answer
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: CBS cut from the broadcast version net yah who's saying,
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: we'll play this clip in a minute. He was asked
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: about social media, and you know, NDB blames social media
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: for all of Israel's woes, and he said basically says
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: like we're not going to fight the battle on social media.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: But that got cut out, and I wonder why.
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: They also cut Netnyahu's saying that Americans turning against Israel
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: also hate America. Again, like why it seems like those
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: are things that are relevant for American viewers, and so
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: like the whole thing, You're right, it's frustrating because the debate,
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: like the Berry Weiss's bad Twitter debate, is like kind
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: of boring and reductive and like I'm not interested in it,
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: but like I do think, like when there's a product
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: like this that shows the fruits of that labor, it's
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: worth kind of like highlighting the point the harm it
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: did to us as viewers we're trying to get information.
• 46:42
  Speaker 4: It's much bigger than just the kind of Berry Wi's discourse,
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: because it's about the fact that the premium brand in
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: American journalism sixty minutes like when it comes to Israel,
• 46:54
  Speaker 4: it's like it makes our tea look like a hard
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: hitting news source.
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: You know, they there it is.
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: And the problem with it is it's not like there's
• 47:05
  Speaker 4: a significant market for this. Like the problem, I mean
• 47:09
  Speaker 4: to be specific and complaint here is they constantly come
• 47:14
  Speaker 4: back to this idea that that social media is bad
• 47:17
  Speaker 4: and that's why people are turning against Israel. No, it's
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: what people are seeing on social media. Right, there's another story.
• 47:23
  Speaker 4: Nick Christoff had a powerful story in the Times about
• 47:27
  Speaker 4: the sexual assault of policing and prison and all these
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: people are on you know, this is outrageous. How could
• 47:32
  Speaker 4: the Times print this as if the problem is the
• 47:35
  Speaker 4: story and not the underlying conduct that the story's about.
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: Well, there's a question about the veracity of some of
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: the sourcing, but still, like, there's a lot of well
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: documented evidence of rape and sexual assault of Palacidians and
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: Israeli president. This is not the first this is not
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: the first coverage of this. Look, this is I've been
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: to this rodeo.
• 47:55
  Speaker 4: What you have is, let's say there's one hundred instance
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: and this is not that story, but just the hypothetical.
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: Let's say there a hundre instance is a sexual assault,
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: and ninety seven of them are true, but they find
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: the three that have some holes in the story and
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: they're like, this whole thing is libel.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: Or you know, or that you know, they go after,
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: you know, sort of one of the victims who you know, does.
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: His cousin is in Hamas or something?
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: You know?
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, but this this major Garrett thing if
• 48:19
  Speaker 4: Americans want to know. I had this long conversation with
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: John Stewart today I did his podcast and we had
• 48:25
  Speaker 4: a pretty interesting conversation about why do we keep doing
• 48:28
  Speaker 4: these dumb things?
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: And we talked about all the reasons. But one of
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: the reasons why is.
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: That we don't have a media that tells us the truth,
• 48:33
  Speaker 4: you know, like like it. So it makes it so
• 48:36
  Speaker 4: much easier to give weapons to Israel or to.
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: Go to war in Iran.
• 48:41
  Speaker 4: If we don't have media that will like sixty minutes viewers,
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: those should be some of the more important people in
• 48:47
  Speaker 4: the country that can't be told the truth about what's happening.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: Yep, for the work.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: For the record, I think that Hamas raped and sexually
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: assaulted victims on October seventh, and that Palestinians are being
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: raped and sexually assault that in Israeli prisons, and both
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: are true, and I wish there was less attacking of
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: reporters for talking about these things and more concerned.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: Like you said, about the under lying issue.
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: Two more clips we want to play from this, So
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: the first is Netanyahu's saying, basically, it's time for Israel
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: to wean itself off of US military support.
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Let's watch that.
• 49:18
  Speaker 10: I want to draw down to zero the American financial support,
• 49:23
  Speaker 10: the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.
• 49:27
  Speaker 10: We've come of age. We have a blooming economy after
• 49:31
  Speaker 10: three years of war. You know, our currency is the
• 49:34
  Speaker 10: strongest it's ever been in the last fifty years, maybe more.
• 49:37
  Speaker 10: We have a lot of talent here which we share
• 49:39
  Speaker 10: with our American friends, and we're going to share it
• 49:41
  Speaker 10: with our ourb prints too.
• 49:43
  Speaker 6: And I.
• 49:45
  Speaker 10: Think that it's time that we weaned ourselves from the
• 49:48
  Speaker 10: remaining military support and go from aid to partnership.
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: And then let's listen to the clip of him blaming
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: Israel's image problems at social media and talk about both
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: of them.
• 50:00
  Speaker 10: The proportion of civilian casualties non combatants to combatants is
• 50:05
  Speaker 10: one of the lowest in the history of modern urban warfare.
• 50:08
  Speaker 10: So Israel has given a bum rap. I'll tell you
• 50:10
  Speaker 10: what happened. We have several countries that basically manipulated social
• 50:15
  Speaker 10: media with the bot farms, with fake addresses to break
• 50:22
  Speaker 10: the American sympathy to Israel, to break the American Israeli
• 50:25
  Speaker 10: alliance because they think it's in their interests and they
• 50:29
  Speaker 10: do it in a clever way.
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: So that on the military support part, like I mean,
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: first of all, I just I'll believe it when I
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: see it, you know. And also he cites like the
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: three point eight billion dollar a year stat that's just
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: the beginning of the support that US provides Israel. Like
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: there's always supplemental funding requests, emergency iron dome transfers, etc.
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: Then there's the direct support when the US is like
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: literally shooting down you know, missiles.
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: How much did we just spend on that?
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: So again, like I just don't believe, like Ben Shapiro
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: has been saying this kind of thing too, Like I
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: just don't believe it, Like I'd like to see it happen,
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: I just don't believe it's gonna happen. And then the
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: social media stuff though, this is like it's delusional and worrisome.
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: On a couple of different levels.
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: Like the suggestion is always that those of us who
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: are worried about civilian casualties or the Palestinian people, especially
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: in Gaza, were just stupid rubes getting manipulated by algorithms
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: who are not couldn't possibly just be like, sincerely horrified
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: by day after day of these like horrifying images of
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: like children suffering in Gaza. Right, these so there are
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: like there's an eighth front in the war on fucking
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: social media. Now, Like, first of all, Israel is famously
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: active on social media.
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm on the receiving end of it.
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there was reports that they're paying influencers like seven
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: thousand dollars to post positive stuff about Israel. Like, what
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: does this mean? It's kind of ominous. I don't think
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: social media is a war.
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: Well, first of all, on the military stuff.
• 51:51
  Speaker 4: I mean, what that tells you is he knows he's
• 51:53
  Speaker 4: losing the political argument in the United States. But importantly
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: that ship has saled. They're not going to get fur
• 52:01
  Speaker 4: their financing. Now, what they do is a couple are
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: a couple of questions remain one that you highlighted, which
• 52:05
  Speaker 4: is whenever they're in a war, which is seemingly all
• 52:08
  Speaker 4: the time, they're these supplemental requests that APAC pushes hard.
• 52:11
  Speaker 4: And so it's not in the ten year memory understanding
• 52:14
  Speaker 4: where it's like they get a set amount every year.
• 52:16
  Speaker 4: They've gotten way more than that, and you know, quote
• 52:19
  Speaker 4: unquote emergency situations. But beyond that, the debate has shifted
• 52:23
  Speaker 4: so much that last week or maybe two weeks ago,
• 52:27
  Speaker 4: forty Democratic senators voted against arms sales to Israel. This
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: is the next front. The financing thing is over, I think,
• 52:35
  Speaker 4: and that he's just acknowledging that you've got forty Democrats,
• 52:40
  Speaker 4: including everyone who might run for president, voting against even
• 52:43
  Speaker 4: selling them weapons, which I think is the right position.
• 52:46
  Speaker 4: And just to highlight one of those systems it was
• 52:48
  Speaker 4: being sold to the Israelies was.
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: Bulldozers armed armor.
• 52:52
  Speaker 4: What do you need armored bulldozers for? You need armored
• 52:54
  Speaker 4: bulldozers to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon or to demolish whatever
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: remaining structure exists in God's Like, that's that's where this
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: is moving. And people should be aware that they're gonna
• 53:05
  Speaker 4: want to say, Okay, fine, we don't need the financing.
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: They're still gonna want to be able to buy all
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: the weapons.
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: The partnership is some real weasel language, like what does
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: that mean exactly?
• 53:13
  Speaker 4: It means we sell them whatever they want. And the
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: thing is, if they're committing war crimes as they have,
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: we shouldn't be selling them anything. You shouldn't be providing weapons,
• 53:20
  Speaker 4: either financed by the American taxpayer or sold full stop.
• 53:24
  Speaker 4: The social media thing is is rich and ominous. It's
• 53:29
  Speaker 4: rich because these relies have done exactly what he says
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: for a long time. They've got troll farms, they've got
• 53:33
  Speaker 4: paid influencers. They're not new to this game. They're they're
• 53:36
  Speaker 4: not just these you know people that we just use
• 53:39
  Speaker 4: social media to like post government statements. And there's some
• 53:41
  Speaker 4: other governments I'm sure he's talking about, like Katar or something.
• 53:44
  Speaker 4: They always you know, hype this.
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: I mean this. If you have an Instagram account, you know.
• 53:51
  Speaker 4: That, like most of the content you get related to
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: Gaza is not like state sponsored. You can see that
• 53:58
  Speaker 4: them all away. It's like somebody, you know, like reposting
• 54:01
  Speaker 4: a video. And by the way, you don't even need
• 54:04
  Speaker 4: to aggregate whether this or that video is accurate. You
• 54:08
  Speaker 4: can look at just a picture of Gaza and it's
• 54:11
  Speaker 4: destroyed flat right, it's completely flattened. Now going forward, I
• 54:15
  Speaker 4: think what is kind of worrisome. It ties into the
• 54:18
  Speaker 4: conversation we just had about Barry Wise because lo and behold,
• 54:22
  Speaker 4: Larry Elson has also bought TikTok. Right, and so I'm
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: I'm less worried about Sure they can pay all the
• 54:29
  Speaker 4: influencers they want.
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: It doesn't really make a difference. Just look at Ben
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: Shapiro's audience.
• 54:34
  Speaker 4: The problem is if they start to leverage their friends
• 54:37
  Speaker 4: who bought TikTok or you know, seems pretty committed to
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: his version of free speech, which is, you know, kind
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: of assessible, but and start manipulating the algorithm, start shadow
• 54:50
  Speaker 4: banding accounts, start censoring content.
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: That's I think where this is going. And that's pretty scary.
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just that is the scary stuff. Positive the
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• 57:50
  Speaker 2: so let's talk about China sweek of censoring. Trump's on
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: his wib China for his big summit meeting. He was
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: supposed to go to Beijing in late March. The trip
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: got delayed because Trump wanted to wrap up the whole
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: war with Iran thing. So glad we got that all handled.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: He arrives in Beijing Wednesday night. There's a welcome ceremony.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: Thursday morning, there's a one on one on the she.
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: There's a tour of the Temple of Heaven, which is
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: like amazing temple complex dates back to the Ming dynasty.
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: I think it was built in like fourteen twenty. Then
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: he attends a state banquet Thursday evening. Then he has
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: tea in lunch with She again on Friday, and then
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: he goes home. It's a lot of meetings, So let's
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: just speculate on what they want out of this trip.
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: Ben So for Trump, first and foremost, he wants to
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: feel like the biggest boy on the biggest stage and
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: special and the pomp and circumstance. Then I think he
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: wants a trade deal or something he can sell back
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: home as having some sort of economic benefit. Third, I'm
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: sure he would enjoy some help reopening the straight or
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: her moves or getting Iran to chill out. We could
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: talk about what that might entail. And then fourth, I
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: think we should just always assume that there's a big
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: fat corruption bucket sitting there that will learn about down
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: the road someday, whether it's Crypto.
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: Or Don Junior invested in Chinese.
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: Chinese drones, Chinese robox company, the CEOs Don Jr. For
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: she Uh Shei Japaning. I would imagine he wants to
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: get rid of US tariffs on stuff. He wants to
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: show the world that he can manipulate Trump and that
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: he is actually as strong, if not the you know,
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: stronger party. I bet he'll try to ring some concessions
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: out of Trump on Taiwan. Uh, maybe try to get
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: rid of some restrictions on ai chips.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: Who knows.
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: So, Trump on this trip is going to be flanked
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: by a bunch of American CEOs. Elon Musk will be there,
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: Tim Cook will be there. Remember when they almost briefed
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: Elon Musk on the secret China warpoint.
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a good idea, great idea.
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: Here's Trump talking about the China trip from Monday in
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: the Oval Office as great gentleman.
• 59:42
  Speaker 9: I find him to be an amazing an amazing man.
• 59:47
  Speaker 9: And when I say that, the presso says, oh, that's
• 59:49
  Speaker 9: terrible that he called them. He runs one point four
• 59:52
  Speaker 9: big people with a pretty iron fist. He's he loves
• 59:58
  Speaker 9: his country. I can tell you that President she I
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 9: look forward to being there, and if he felt anything
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 9: would we wouldn't be doing it.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: But a lot of good things can happen.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 9: Now we'll be talking about I mean, he'll bring up Taiwan.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 9: I think more than I would have a great relationship
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 9: with the President she We're doing a lot of business,
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 9: but it's smart business. We used to be taking advantage
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 9: of for years with our previous presidents, and now we're
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 9: doing great with China. We make a lot of money
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 9: with China. I have a great relationship with the presidency,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 9: and I think you can see that with the fact
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 9: that in hermus they get a big percentage forty percent.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 12: Of their oil from hormones.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 9: There's been no ships coming in, no nasty ships coming
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 9: in that we end up in skirmishes with. There's been.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 9: He'd like to see it get done he doesn't want
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 9: to see I'll tell you what. Look, I respect him
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 9: a lot and hopefully he respects me. He didn't respect
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 9: our previous government. That I contell you.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: All those clips are from a sand Win and rolling
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 2: out with moms dot Gov women.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 4: There watching it's up there with the door dash lady.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 4: He started to yelling out of that trans athletes like.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: Do you like transports? Like I'm just here for the tip.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: I mean, this is completely insane.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: What do you think?
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 10: What do you think?
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 2: What's the it's on the jennif for the meeting, Like
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: what's the best case do you think in terms of
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: an accomplishment and deliverable.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 4: Don Junior gets a robotics guy him for here's what
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: I would So, first of all, there's a problem, which
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 4: is normally these are huge summits. They usually happened like
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 4: every two years. You spend two or three days. You know,
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 4: we use this, for instance in the Obama to come
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 4: up with a bilateral agreement on reducing carbon emissions.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 3: It became the Paris Agreement, you know, like we worked
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: on that for a year.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 4: So, first of all, the fact that there's a war
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 4: in Iran and horror moves is still closed for business,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 4: means that they're going to spend a big chunk of
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 4: time just talking about that. And Trump is probably gonna
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 4: be asking the Chinese to pressure the Iranians to open
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 4: the street and make a deal. Chinese is gonna be
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 4: pressuring us to, you know, just wrap this thing up.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: I was talking to a ron expert friend of both
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: of ours who suspects that the Taiwan conversation, well, the
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: China the Iron conversation, will be like, mister President, how
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: do you expect me to help you with Iranians and
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: to not sell my good friends and Iran weapons when
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: you're selling weapons to Taiwan and giving them all this help.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, wink wink.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: Chinese figures very.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 4: Good at what about is them? And by the way,
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 4: we get to do what you did to Irn and Taiwan.
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 4: I think, and yeah, Trump may want you know, I
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 4: think for him a win is like you know, they
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 4: agree to buy a bunch of soybeans or something, right,
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 4: you know, like he can just say for sure he
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 4: loves these deals where it's like the Chinese said they're
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 4: gonna spend X amount of money on American products that
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 4: by the way, they're probably gonna buy anyway or something,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 4: you know, and the Chinese will extracts and consents about it.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: Everybody's done.
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 4: I mean, I mean, if you add up the money
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 4: people claim that they're going to spend in these photo
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 4: ops Trump, it's like trillions of dollars of it's here.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 4: I would here's what I would be doing on Taiwan.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: What you want to do is you want to create
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 4: like some diplomatic track that just kind of puts this
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 4: thing on a back burner and like slow rolls it.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 4: You know, I don't think Trump is deft enough to
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 4: do that. The Chinese will say, don't sell them arms,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 4: will say don't conduct military exercises, and most likely it's
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 4: just going to be what it is.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: Well, interestingly, there's been some big headlines announcements of arm
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: sales to Taiwan, but I didn't realize that there those have.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: Been very slow in getting delivered.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: There's like a twenty billion dollar backlog on the delivery
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: of US arms to Taiwan. So that's kind of the
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: rub there if you're.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well, and what's notable about that is that the
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 4: Congress votes for these things, and then the executive branch
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 4: has to deliver them, and they're probably slow rolling them
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 4: to create positive atmospherics as she In terms of what
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: I think they should be doing, I'm not sure they're
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 4: going to do. Is they should be talking about artificial
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 4: intelligence because we are the two AI superpowers. We have
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: all these frontier companies like Anthropic and Open AI and Microsoft, Google,
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 4: et cetera.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: They have.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 4: Their own AI models that like and here we should
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 4: say this is actually kind of a I don't want
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 4: to say failure of the BID administration, but there's this
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 4: idea that we're going to put all these restrictions in
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 4: place and export controls and sanctions and whatever. The Chinese
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 4: figured out how to build the technology anyway.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was slow that we didn't stop them.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and so whether who's ahead, you know, someone might
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 4: be head by six months. It almost doesn't matter because
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 4: Chinese have AI.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 3: We have AI.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 4: In normal times, we would be sitting down and saying,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 4: let's negotiate some norms and some guardrails around this new
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 4: technology before it's fully deployed out in the world. We
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 4: want to make sure that nuclear weapons and command and
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 4: control systems have human beings in the loop. We want
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 4: to make sure that job displacement is cushioned by testing models.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 4: We have huge cybersecurity you you saw this incident with Mythos,
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: the next generation of anthropics, a model that when they
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 4: shared it with some of their customers was like nobody
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: was ready to deal with this. It could literally launch
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 4: a cyber attack and shut down, you know, the power
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: grid of the country.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 13: You know.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: Do you see the Time story about how AI bots
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: were telling these scientists how to make biological weapons.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 4: Exactly biological you know, here's the recipe for biological weapons,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 4: here's you know, another pandemic strain, right, and so what
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: should be happening is we should be getting off this
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 4: idea that there's some like AI race, like foot race,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 4: and whoever wins gets the technology.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: No, everybody's going to get this technology.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 4: We should be putting strict guard rails, starting with nuclear,
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 4: biological and chemical weapons, dealing with job displacement, dealing with
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 4: cybersecurity risks. The Chinese aren't going to want to negotiate
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 4: around this information or information operations. But that's part of this.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 4: I just don't think Trump's going to do that. If anything,
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 4: He's gone the other direction. If Biden was building export controls,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 4: Trump is for whatever reason, probably some corrupt reason is
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 4: the kids. So Jensen Wong and Video can sell we've
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 4: semiconductors of the Chinese, so the Chinese would love that.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 4: I'm sure what the Chinese's gonna do is buy a
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 4: bunch of chips, you know. So I'd love to see
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 4: how Ais dealt with out of this thing.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: It's just the idea of Trump sitting down for tea
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: and like the Forbidden City with Chijen Pang and having
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: like a deep substantive conversation about AI.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: So it's so impossible to imagine.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah, test models and said guardrails. It's just not how
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 4: Trump thinks. But it's what they I mean, it's what
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 4: you should be talking about.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: For sure, no doubt, no doubt. Or human rights, remember
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: that climate change. Yeah, it's a few things.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: Okay, we got a couple more things, so we'll get
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 2: to those now. We'll obviously next week we'll talk about
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: how the trip actually went to the set we know.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: But first we're gonna be petty for a second because
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: there was an article in the Atlantic last week with
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 2: the headline, is Marco Rubio the happiest.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: Cabinet member that we wanted to discuss here.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: So this was almost entirely based off this one press
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: briefing Rubio did at the White House. It was like
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: his only appearance of the White House briefing room since
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: so warn Iran started. Here are some excerpts from that briefing.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 11: I mean, the top people in that government are to
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 11: say the least you know, they're insane in the brain.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 11: I wish I knew your name.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: I apologize.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: Can you put name tags on?
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 9: Can I ask you Spanish?
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 10: Yeah?
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 12: You can answer Spanish.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 11: I have to translate for them what you asked me
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 11: to go to tells me don I said, damn, come,
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 11: you don't have black ye blue on it?
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: I'm colored black, but I know blue and black right there?
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 11: Yes, ma'am, no, no, you the first one I called on.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 3: This is chaos.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 10: Guys.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 3: I wish I had like a dice go ahead, yeah no, no, no, no, no, no,
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 3: no right there, because I'm going to Italy.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 11: Way, I thought, I'm okay, he's Italian.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: I know him.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 11: He used to cover Capitol Hills Secretary.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 2: Many people want to know, what is your DJ name?
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: My DJ name?
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 13: Your DJ name?
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: You're not ready for my DJ.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 11: They are facing real catastrophic destruct to their economy, generational
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 11: destruction to their economy, generational destruction to the wealth of
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 11: their country imposed on themselves by the actions that they're taking.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 11: They should check themselves before they wreck themselves in the
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 11: direction that they're going.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: What a cool cat.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: There's also this video of Rubio like stepping into the
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: DJ booth in mar A Lago. Trump's fucking caddy turned
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: deputy Chief of Staff, Dance Cabino posted that, and then
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: this whole conversation kind of folds into this broader debate
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: of will it be Rubio or will it be jd
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: Vance who takes like kind of the mantle of MAGA
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: and becomes Republican nominee in twenty twenty eight. So this
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: is petty media criticism, Ben, but I did just want
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: to ask reporters, like, what are we doing here, guys? Yeah, because,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: first of all, Rubio, I don't know if he's happy
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 2: or not. I don't wish him any personal unhappiness, but like,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 2: he should not be happy about how his job is
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: going if he's doing a briefing when the US is
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: stuck in a catastrophic war with Iran, and just like
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: regarding that press briefing itself, Rubio was rolling out Project Freedom,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: that straight o'hormus escort that we just talked about, which
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: Trump unwound like a day later. So that is that
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: is humiliating. Any other any other senior foreign policy official
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 2: would be judged according like that would be seen as
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 2: a humiliating moment in defeat for them, possibly a like
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: career ending thing. And on top of that, like the
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 2: last time Rubio did a press conference, it was when
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: he was on Capitol Hill that one day and he
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: basically ran up to the sticks and was like the
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: Jews made us do it, and it ran away and
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: he hid in a fucking up in a cave for
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: a month, and so I was like, what.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: Is this article?
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 4: My daughter, I remember she did a yso soccer and
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 4: I think she was, you know, six or seven. And
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 4: at the end of the year it was really nice.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 4: Even though the team didn't win a single game. It
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 4: was kind of a bad News Bearers kind of team.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: They all got trophies, nice participsion trophies. Literally, the eagerness
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 4: with which most of the Washington press corps is intent
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 4: on giving Mark Rubio a participation trophy is so embarrassing.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 4: I mean to just build on what you said. The
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 4: man is Secretary of State and national Security advisor for
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 4: a country that just lost it mounted one of the
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 4: dumbest wars in recorded human history. He announced an operation
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 4: that lasted twenty four hours. Let's just dig into his responsibilities.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 4: One of the reasons that that operation shut down is
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 4: because the Saudis hadn't been notified about it and we
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 4: wanted to use their Who would do that normally the
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 4: Secretary of State, right, I mean, he is failing utterly
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 4: at his job. The National Security divisor is supposed to
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 4: be coordinating policymaking, so it's smart. Did anyone ask Mark
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 4: Rubio why they didn't know that the Runnings would close
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 4: the straight up Hoore moves because it's his job as
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 4: now security advisor to wargame how the war is gonna go,
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 4: and they clearly do not know anything about Iran or
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: the straight Orfoar moves did not consult allies, which is
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 4: also his responsibility. So like he is directly responsible, more
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 4: even than Pete Hegseth for the catastrophic failure of this
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 4: policy and the fact that the whole world is suffering
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 4: because of it, and they're all sitting there like having
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 4: a grand old time chuckling about what he says. Second
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 4: these Sure he doesn't do the like doctor Seuss rhyme,
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 4: weird pete hegseth voice.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: But this checked yourself.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: It's not cool? Is here? Is he more charming than
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: Jade Vance?
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: Sure, but like talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: I mean that's not cool.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 4: Check yourself, Like I cannot believe the extent in this
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 4: foreshadows of cash hotel segment to which we are run,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 4: our country's run and apparently significant selest for media by
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 4: people that just could not get anyone to sit next
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 4: to them at lunch in high school, you know.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 3: And now like years later.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 4: He's like check yourself before you wreck yourself like that,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 4: that's like what is going on here?
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: And like, look, Rubio is like seen as politically ascendant
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: within the Republican Party, like Sarah long Well from the
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: Bulwark talks about his name's coming up in her focus
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 2: groups all the time. Now there's this meme of like
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 2: Marco Rubio on the couch in the getting every job.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 2: Apparently that's like genuinely helping him because he's seen his competent,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: but again it's like you know.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: The land the you know, the one eyed man.
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: Is king in the land of the blind kind of
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 2: situation where it's like, yeah, he's the most competent of
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: a bunch of morol.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 3: But what is what is his accompl Here's what huge.
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: Drives me nuts then, as well as seen this is
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: the one accomplishment. But again that that is not a finished story.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 4: Even if you just like accept the premise, the premise
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 4: being that he's capable of standing in a podium and
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 4: being reasonably articulate for an extended period of time, which
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 4: by the way, should be like the bar for like
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 4: the deputy press secretary, not the exact future president or
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 4: the secretary of state. Even if that's some bar he clears.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 4: Judge him on his results, like what what is he?
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: Like this one?
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 4: Our politics? I mean just today's media Christen Day, Like
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 4: don't the results matter? Like just the optics, just the
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 4: fact that this guy manages it now like vomit on
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 4: himself or its like or appear to be on.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: A politically Trump's approval ratings in the toilet.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thirty seven, what are we doing here?
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 4: What's building this guy up for for for for nothing,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 4: like for for for being responsible for this policy.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: It is enraging spade a losers in high school. Ben uh.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: FBI director Trash Battel Oh, sorry Cash, betel Uh. He's
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: up on Capitol Hill this morning on Tuesday. As our
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 2: listeners know, Cash has gotten a little bit of unwonted
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 2: attention lately because he's because he's drinking, drinking. He was
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: guzzling beers on camera at the Olympics. The Atlantic report
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: that is boozing is a source of concern within the bureau,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: and the Cash was once so drunk that a security
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: detail couldn't wake him up and considered calling a swat
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: team to get the equipment used like bust on the door.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 2: Then he sued the Atlantic in this reporter in particular,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: and apparently the FBI might be investigating her. And then
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: she drops another banger on his head, and we learned
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 2: that Cash has created and distributes his own signature bourbon bottles,
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: not really beaten the drunk wrap. There go logo on it,
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 2: there's an eagle talent, his name on it. It's all very
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: cute and.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 3: As a dollar sign for Cash.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's his name. Cash just like the dollars.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so presumably you would think that, given all this contacts,
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: Cash would want to delivery calm, sober performance in front
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: of the Senate to silence his critics.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: Let's see how it went.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 11: There have been no occasions when your security detail had
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 11: difficulty waking or locating you.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 7: Is that right?
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 3: No, if it's a total force, I don't even know
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 3: where you get this stuff.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 5: But it doesn't make it credible because you say.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 12: So, I'm not saying it, Director Patel.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: It's been written and documented.
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 3: You are literally saying it.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 6: No, I'm saying that these are reports direct unlike unlike reports.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 11: The only person that was slinging Margarita is in now
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 11: Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gang banging
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 11: rapist was you?
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 13: You know?
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: The only person that ran.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 6: Up a direct dollar bar tab in Washington.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: DC is lobby was Okay, Yeah, that was with Senator
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: Chris van Holland. So that exchange on the way a
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 2: while long, Christ.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 3: Van Allen didn't strike me as some guys like really.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: A big boozer.
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, is this not a credible attack?
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: Well, for like, yeah, I have no idea about the
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: bar type thing. But like the remember the kill mar
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: a breakup, Ben Holland went down to.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 3: Evidence.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so Van Holland went to El Salvador to meet
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 2: with Kilmar Rego Garcia. They had a conversation at the embassy.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: Daibukele's goons put these drinks in front of them to
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: stage a photo op that made it look like they
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: were drinking together. It was just like it was completely
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: propaganda bullshit. Of course, cash Hotel's repeating that the second,
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 2: as you noted, kill Mar Abreo Garcia is absolutely not
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: a convicted gang banger rapist.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: And for a lot, director purjured himself.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 3: It's crazy himself and down.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: And then finally Buddy like button the top button. He
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: looked like a groomsman who'd been at a wedding since
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 2: you know, the bar opened at five.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 3: He looks like he tied one on last night. He's
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: got like a bottle.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: On his slouching forward.
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like I know they all think that this is
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 2: what Trump wants, which is like fight back, throw a punch.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 3: Had that worked for Pam BONDI did that look good
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 3: to you?
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 4: I mean, first of all, we just have to remember
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 4: that the FBI director is supposed to be a non
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 4: partisan official.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 3: So it's just insane that anybody.
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and he's supposedly like a yeah, civil servant essentially,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 4: and and so the and like I get that the
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 4: audience have won, but this makes him look ridiculous. Like
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 4: if his problem is he looks ridiculous to the point
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 4: that the whole country is making fun of him, and
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 4: he's like becoming a thing on Saturday Alive. Like he's
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 4: just just keeps dumping AMMO out for everyone else to
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 4: use because he looks I'm completely absurd. And and actually
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 4: he's just drawing attention to that Atlantic report, like you know,
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 4: it's not even good communications. Like the smart thing is
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 4: to be like, no, that report is not true and
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 4: just that's it. But by like throwing a little tantrum,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 4: it's like going to drive some more people to that
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 4: article and be like ahha, Cash, you like had to
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 4: get woken up in the morning because he's so hammered.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 4: I mean, like, boy, this guy I can't decide. There's
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 4: the content creator in me wants Cash around, but like
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 4: the American is a little concerned about that. That's the
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 4: person running the Federal Bureerau of Investigation. Yeah, and By
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 4: the way, I'm a little bit obviously concerned about the
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 4: fact that nobody's mining the store and there's actually criminals
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 4: and terrorists and all the sorts of people that the
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 4: FBI supposed to be dealing with. But that mentality the
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 4: way he talked to Van Holland, the FBI has vast
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 4: investigative powers. Yeah, it did not suggest someone who might
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 4: not abuse those powers to like, how does he know
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 4: about the bar tab I don't.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: Know, Like I think someone that seems that paranoid.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's all these reports, right, remember the other
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 2: report and that it was in The Atlantic that he.
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: Got logged out of his computer and he freaked out
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: and thought he.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 3: Was he was polygraphing everyone'st.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 2: He seems like a dangerous, paranoid, like kind of wounded
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: animal who knows he's not up for the job, who
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: would do exactly what you're saying there, like kind of
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: use the enormous power of the FBI to go after critics.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: I like, yes, whoever comes next will be terrible, but
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: I think it would be good for the world to
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 2: get that asshole out of there.
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think it would. We'll miss him. I
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 3: guess we can cover.
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll go back to podcasting him.
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 3: And Bongino continue that Batman and Robbin.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it'd be great. Yeah.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 2: Okay, that's it for our boy. Cash drinks on us
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: next time you're in La.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 4: Pre order my book. It's out two weeks from today.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 4: Order and I'm actually going to be doing my virtual
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 4: book launch event next Monday, so I'll throw that link
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 4: on my social change.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: There we go, but also stick around for Ben's interview
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 2: with Susie Hansen about Prime Minister Erdwan life in Turkey.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: Lots of big important geopolitical issues, so don't miss that.
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• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: this episode.
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  Speaker 4: Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by my friend
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: Susie Hansen, who's a journalist who lived in Istanbul for
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 4: over a decade. She's written for the New York Times magazine.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 4: Her first book, which I also recommend, Notes on a
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 4: Foreign Country, was a finalist for.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 3: A Pulitzer prize.
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 4: Her new book, which everybody needs to buy if you
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 4: like politics, geopolitics, literary journalism, great writing, amazing personalities. It's
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 4: called From Life Itself, Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 4: the Age of Erdigon.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 3: Susie, thanks so much for joining us.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 12: Thank you so much for having me Ben Okay, So.
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 4: This really is, you know, a unique book because you
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 4: started and you are reading the story of a neighborhood
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 4: in Istanbul. Then you realize you're reading about the city
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 4: of Istanbul. Then you realize you're reading about Turkey. Then
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 4: you realized you reading about Aragon, and then you realize
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 4: and this is all within the first probably you know,
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 4: forty pages that you're reading a book about everything that's
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: happened to the world.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 4: And so I want to begin by asking where you
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 4: begin the book, which is you describe how the forces
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 4: that we've all become familiar with now, the kind of
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 4: cocktail of nationalism, au ouritarianism, corruption, chaos, How those things
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 4: that we feel as Americans arrived in Turkey. First, and
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 4: in particular in this neighborhood that you profile, you write
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 4: the dissolution of nations and borders and peoples, and seemingly
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 4: civilization itself was transforming how many of us felt about
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 4: our individual lives in our future, that sense that we
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 4: are we're in history here and not the good kind.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 4: Can you describe how these forces became manifest in Turkey
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 4: and in this neighborhood first, and it's really around twenty
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 4: fifteen or Arab spring to twenty fifteen that you begin,
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 4: And why did you choose to write about those forces
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 4: through this neighborhood?
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 13: So it was twenty fifteen I had been witnessing. I
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 13: moved to Turkey in two thousand and seven, so I'd
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 13: been there for seven or eight years, and then I
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 13: was there as all of these Syrian refugees were fleeing
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 13: the Syrian Civil War into Turkey. And you know, I'm
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 13: sure you're aware of this. This was a kind of
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 13: laissez faire refugee management situation where Erdowan was just allowing
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 13: people to come in, millions of people, and they sort
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 13: of had to figure out their lives on their own.
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 13: I mean, they had to find they had to rent
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 13: a place, they had to put their kids in school,
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 13: all of that. So no one really had any idea
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 13: how everyone was making this work, and there were at
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 13: that point twenty fifteen five hundred thousand Syrians in Istanbul.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 12: And one evening I.
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 13: Went to a friend's for dinner and they said, you know,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 13: after dinner, you have to take a walk down the
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 13: main street of Carganrouk. All of the shops have become Syrian.
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 13: And that was I knew enough about Carganrook to know
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 13: why that was surprising. Carganoruk was a nationalist neighborhood. It
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 13: was famous for them for mafia, for thieves, it was
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 13: famous for this right wing party that Mayhepe, and so
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 13: I knew that they were not going to be welcoming
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 13: to Arabs, and I saw the opportunity to tell this
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 13: larger story through how these people were getting along, because
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 13: when I started talking to them, they started talking about
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 13: how the presence of the Arabs was challenging their Turkish
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 13: national identity. And then as I was there for the
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 13: next few years, all of these major events were happening.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 13: So you had the Syrian Civil War, obviously, you had
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 13: Isis had appeared in Turkey and they were flying into
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 13: Istanbul and then switching to aeroplanes and going down to
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 13: the southern border. You had a new war with the PKK,
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 13: the Kurdish militant group, and you had Airdowan steadily becoming
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 13: more repressive, and I suddenly recognized, Okay, maybe I can
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 13: see all of these events through these characters, but understand
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 13: how they're seeing it from the street level, not from
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 13: the headlines, and not from the point of view of
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 13: the West.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 4: So you shift back and forth between some of these
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 4: incredible characters as you find in this neighborhood and Adorn himself,
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 4: who's a huge character in your book, And I want
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 4: to focus a bit on him, because I'd never read
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 4: a book that I learned as much about him from.
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 4: He's a fascinating character, and where one place I wanted
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 4: to start, I did not fully understand this. You write
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 4: about his kind of dual love of Islam and capitalism,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 4: you know, and we in the West think of him
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 4: as an Islamist, but you know, you write about how
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 4: much he embraced capitalism and kind of you know, development,
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 4: real estate development, for lack of a better way of
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 4: putting it, in kind of the corruption the playbook we've
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 4: seen right where you're building things, but you're skimming money
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 4: off the top and all the.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 3: Rest of it.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 4: It also got me thinking that as much as we
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 4: don't associate Islamists with capitalism, I mean, in our country,
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 4: the religious zealots, the Christian evangelicals are similarly pullish on
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 4: capitalism and deregulation. And explain where this ideology of Erdor
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 4: came from, and how would you describe this melding of
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 4: Islamist politics and kind of uber twenty first century capitalism.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 13: I mean, this goes deep into Turkish Islamists history. It
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 13: goes way back to the first Islamist parties and movements
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 13: in the nineteen sixties and seventies. But I think you
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 13: have to put it in the context of you know,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 13: Turkey's founding party was Auto Turk's party and the only way,
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 13: and they had shunned religious people to some degree. They
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 13: had forced religious brotherhoods to go underground. They had wanted
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 13: Turkey to be a western looking, secularist country, and so
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 13: the people of the countryside and the religious people were
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 13: very much shut out from the halls of power right
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 13: and so there were a number of old families that
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 13: got a lot of the contracts from the government and
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 13: were rebuilding Turkey after World War One and World War two,
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 13: but the religious people were shut out of this, and
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 13: so slowly, slowly over time they did see business and
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 13: starting their own businesses as a way to build their
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 13: own power in the country because they were shut out
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 13: of the state and shut out of most of the
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 13: business activities. Airdowan was the mentee of a man named
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 13: Metin Arabican, who also saw the union of Islam and
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 13: capitalism as a way of restoring Turkish pride, because these
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 13: were people who were very nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 13: and for this more grandiose sense of Turkey than what
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 13: the Turkish Republic became. Aridwan learned from him, but also
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 13: I think it was sort of deep in his blood
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 13: in the sense that he came to power as the
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 13: mayor of Istanbul, and Istambul was a wreck at that time.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 13: It was very poor, people were suffering, and what he
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 13: recognized he could do, even though most of the secular
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 13: slites did not want him to be in office, was
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 13: he could actually improve the lives of the people, which
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 13: seems like an obvious thing for a politician to do,
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 13: but it's a little bit shades of mom Dannie there.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 13: But he saw that, oh, I can clean up the
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 13: garbage of the city. I can improve, the water supply,
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 13: I can improve. But he needed to obviously to ally
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 13: with business groups and other businessmen in order to make
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 13: a lot of these things happen. And so I think
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 13: it happened naturally. But I think a really crucial thing
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 13: here also is when he finally becomes Prime Minister, he
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 13: feels still threatened by the secular state, by the military
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 13: and the judiciary, who very much wanted to get rid
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 13: of him. They put him in jail in the nineteen nineties,
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 13: and so he quickly had to build up his crony class,
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 13: his businessman class, and that was the way he saw
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 13: that he could solidify his power in the country.
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 4: So one of the things that listeners to the show
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 4: hopefully know is that, you know, over the years, I've
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 4: kind of really had to reprogram myself around or away
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 4: from some of the assumptions that are kind of baked
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 4: into American farm policy or into kind of the commentary
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 4: class about the world. And you go right at some
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 4: of those assumptions about Erdigon, and I want to go
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 4: through a couple of them. The first one is, I
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 4: remember when we came into office in two thousand and nine,
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 4: and we went to you know, Ankara in Istanbul in
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 4: two thousand and nine. You know, from that period kind
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 4: of through the Arab Spring, the trendy thing was Erdon
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 4: is a mediator between Islam and the West.
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 3: He's a potential.
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 4: Bridge because he has cred with these Islamist you know,
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 4: Muslim brotherhood guys and places like Egypt, and yet he's
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 4: modern and capitalist who wants to join the European Union.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 4: I kind of now see how like orientalists that was,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 4: you know, just kind of well, he's a Muslim and
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 4: so therefore he you know, he can be a bridge.
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 4: Yet at the same time he's clearly an intermediary in
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 4: other ways. This is a guy that can navigate between
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 4: the US and Russia, between Europe and the Arab world,
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 4: between you know, the bricks countries in NATO. Why is it,
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 4: you know, I mean, Turkey historically has always been this
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 4: kind of bridge country between Islam and the West and
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 4: the rest of it.
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 3: So there's some of that history.
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 4: But what is it about him that has allowed him
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 4: to play this kind of mediator role? Or this guy
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 4: that can kind of live in one block for a
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 4: few months and then shift to another one.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 13: I mean, I think in the beginning, first of all,
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 13: that was how they were marketing themselves to the world right.
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 13: And it was not only Aridwan, but it was also
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 13: this other Islamic brotherhood, that Gulen movement, which was already
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 13: very international. This is this global Islamic movement that was
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 13: in the United States. Knew lots of people on the Hill,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 13: had schools in every country, and so these two allied together.
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 13: And I think again, you know, their fundamental fear was
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 13: about the Turkish state, right, so they want to create
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 13: a sense of them as big on the global stage
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 13: in order to fortify their own power and counter some
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 13: of the national forces that were against them. I mean,
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 13: it's amazing because because he came to power in the
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 13: two thousands, it's like, really globalization is firing on all cylinders,
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 13: and he becomes this kind of globally minded leader.
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 12: And so I think he was.
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 13: Very different from other Turkish leaders who were much more
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 13: inward looking and much more almost defensive. And so I
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 13: don't think it was all incorrect. But now what he
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 13: has managed to do is something even more extraordinary, because
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 13: over these twenty years, what we have seen him do
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 13: is extend himself in Libya, in Syria and Azerbaijan, but
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 13: also to stand up on the world stage with his
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 13: rhetoric and say, no, you know, we take care of
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 13: our own country. We are regional leaders, We own our
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 13: own Syrian refugee crisis. We are not going to let
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 13: the NGOs in and tell us what to do. He
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 13: has over time steadily made this into you know, his
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 13: position in the world. But with those refugees, if you remember,
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 13: he was essentially able to say to Europe in the West,
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 13: you can no longer tell me what to do. You
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 13: cannot criticize me in terms of human rights and everything else.
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 13: He's putting leaders like Selahat and Demeritash, the pro Kurdish
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 13: leader in jail, on all of these he's repressing thousands
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 13: of people after the twenty sixteen military coup, But he
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 13: had four million Syrian refugees, and it gave him a
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 13: card to play with the Europeans so as to say,
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 13: you know, I can just let them into Europe anytime
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 13: I want, and look at us. We are actually taking
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 13: care of these people and you can't deal with them.
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 13: I mean, in all of these different ways, he was
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 13: able to assert himself it's unprecedented. And now he's Yes,
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 13: he advertises himself, I'm the middle man for everybody. Hey, Ukraine,
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 13: Hey Russia, Hey you know Israel. I mean, he's always
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 13: projecting this sense that you need him that all of
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 13: the but I think in some ways they do simply
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 13: because of Turkey's geography.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 12: I mean, look, Europe.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 13: Is now speaking to him in these very kind terms
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 13: because they might need him against Russia, you know. I mean,
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 13: so he somehow manages to bounce back and reposition himself.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah, no, you, And I mean, among many good things
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 4: about it, there are all these what ifs of history
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 4: that I found myself asking, one of which was, you know,
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 4: there was still this idea that they're going to join
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 4: the European Union, which seems impossible now in twenty nine,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 4: twenty ten. And you rightly point out that Sarkozi is
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 4: the one who you know, truly tube that, although I
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 4: think probably other Europeans supported that.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 3: That's a great what if? What if? You know they're
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 3: in the EU?
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 4: One other DC thing that you you kind of take
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 4: a mat is, you know, and I've been guilty of this,
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 4: which is it? You know, he gets put in the
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 4: creep club. You know, it's you when you're rattling off
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 4: the list of autocrats who got elected through democracy and
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 4: then dismantled it. You know, it's usually you're like saying,
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 4: putin Mody Erdowan orbon Bolsonaro de terte, Netanyahu, now Trump.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 3: You kind of push back against that.
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 4: And I was really curious to kind of pursue that
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 4: with you, because on the one hand, you know, the
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 4: way you describe it, you know, really meticulously.
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 3: You know, I see a familiar playbook.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 4: You know, you kind of enriched people through corruption, and
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 4: you build these power blocks, and you slowly change the
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 4: judiciary and then you you know, you're you're starting to
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 4: intimate the media and make it pro government and and
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 4: and then lo and behold, you know, we're changing the constitution.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 4: And you know aird On is you know, going to
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 4: be president after being prime minister or whatever, and you
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 4: kind of push back against him being the same or
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 4: kind of in a group with those guys, and they're
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 4: all guys. I think I get why in the sense
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 4: that Turkey has such an eccentric political system.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 3: But but but how would you.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 4: Position him relative to the the autocrats who've kind of
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 4: defined our age?
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 13: Well, it just never when they when he was lumped
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 13: in that category, it just never rang true to me,
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 13: and I thought it was a little bit lazy. I
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 13: think now from the point of view of twenty twenty six,
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 13: I'm seeing more and more of these similarities with the
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 13: United States. So when I wrote the book, i finished
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 13: it in twenty twenty five, I never would have compared
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 13: the US and Turkey. But now since twenty twenty five
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 13: and twenty twenty six, it actually this current time period
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 13: echoes the book a lot, Like there's a whole chapter
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 13: about a university and in the oppression of universities. But
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 13: I think that a few things are different. Number one,
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 13: you know, he wasn't we weren't really referring to him
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 13: as a populist in the beginning. I think it's the
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 13: first ten years that is different about that are different
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 13: about Turkey that you want to look at. He was
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 13: not just preying on people's sense of victimhood or grievances
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 13: the way that say Donald Trump does. The people who
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 13: he appealed to actually had legitimate grievances. They were actually
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 13: left behind, They were not folded into the system properly.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 13: They were people who felt that they had been looked
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 13: down upon and left behind in terms of the economy
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 13: and education and many other things. And so I think
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 13: and then the second part is he actually did improve
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 13: the lives of people there. This wasn't this isn't a
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 13: superficial you know, ruler. This is someone who actually everyone
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 13: can talk about when he got the natural gas you know,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 13: people's natural gas accounts hooked up to the internet, or
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 13: when he made water supply easier or better, when he
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 13: improved the electricity, all of these services, when he improved
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 13: the healthcare, when he you know, and then of course
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 13: just what he did for people's self esteem, which was
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 13: all very real. So it was because of this genuine
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 13: popularity that that's the basis for why he has sustained
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 13: a lot of his role today. I think it's more
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 13: interesting to consider again, as you said, yes, the EU,
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 13: what would have happened, but also all of these other
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 13: regional and global events that were going on and how
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 13: they affected some of these regimes he had. Okay, the
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 13: Seriance Civil War played a huge role in radicalizing Aradwan.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 12: I think that's worth looking at.
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 13: But I think at the end, which I'm sure you remember,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 13: I do think we have to consider how for a
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 13: regime in the Middle East, how the war on terror
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 13: also just that environment led to this increasing radicalization. It's
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 13: not to let him off the hook because we can
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 13: talk about the second ten years. Very happy to do that,
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 13: but I think that it is just worthwhile to consider
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 13: that there are other reasons why the world is going
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 13: in this direction.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well, let's talk about the second ten years, and
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 4: you know, maybe can I bring in a little bit
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 4: of my history here It might be interesting.
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 3: So and you write in part one we kind of work.
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 4: Up to twenty fifteen and Aragon's consolidated power, the Syerian
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 4: refugees are there, like these changes are in motion.
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 3: Then you have this coup where.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 4: I still don't you know, people think when you're in
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 4: the US government, in rolling mind, you know what happened.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 4: I have no idea what happened. I know that something
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 4: fundamental shifted in Aragon. And you obviously get in this
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 4: in the book. I will tell you my experience, which
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 4: is he used to be a fascinating guy to meet
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 4: with because he would actually debate Obama and they liked
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 4: each other, and they they'd go back and forth, and
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 4: he was nimble flexible, even he might change his mind
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 4: on something. In the meeting after that coup. You know,
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 4: Obama only overlapped for what like a year. Every meeting
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 4: he would literally show up with files about Gulan. This
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 4: is the Islamist that he fell out with, who he
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 4: blamed for the coup and demand his extradition, and and
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 4: just didn't want to hear about anything else. Didn't want
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 4: to talk about anything else. He kind of started presenting
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 4: like putin you.
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 3: Know, like I.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 4: Believe what I believe. Some of it may be choose
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 4: some maybe conspiracy theory. And that was my experience of him.
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 4: I mean, I mean, you write about this transformation in him,
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 4: I mean, what was your impression at the time that
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 4: you obviously reflect on about what happened? You know, there
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 4: something happened. There was some attempt to you know, bomb
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 4: the parliament. And yet I also know Turks who think
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 4: like that was all false flag, you know, or you know,
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 4: you hear a million different things, but something clearly did happen.
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 4: How did he change because of this event that also,
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 4: by the way, coincided with the year that Brexit and
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 4: Trump happened.
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 3: So the world is taking a pretty dark turn.
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 13: I think he genuinely felt threatened, and then I think
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 13: that he made use of a glorious opportunity which echoed
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 13: you know what happened after many military coups and Turkish history,
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 13: which is that they sort of remake everything, they put
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 13: people in jail, they start all over. But it was
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 13: much worse with what he did. But I think that,
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 13: you know, if you look at the number of threats
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 13: that in his mind he was he was facing, it
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 13: was this war with the Gulen movement. Most people do
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 13: believe the Gulen movement was involved in that military coup.
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 13: I think that it's very they suspect that, yes, he
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 13: might have known about it earlier, he let it happen,
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 13: then he knew he could take advantage of it. But
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 13: that war between Erawan and the gu Len movement was
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 13: absolutely real, and it was a lot of people in
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 13: the country really resent the Gulen movement. So, I mean,
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 13: there have been tons of things written about it. It's
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 13: just very difficult to understand and I think get weird. Yeah,
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 13: it's a very weird, fascinating movement.
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 3: Trust me.
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 13: I tried to sell lots of magazine stories about this
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 13: many many years ago, and it was hard because people
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 13: couldn't really get their their head around it by but
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 13: by now it's quite well known what they were about.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 13: But I think also, you know, he saw Mohammed Morsey
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 13: in Egypt deposed in twenty thirteen, and he believed that
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 13: it was possible or Turks believed it was possible that
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 13: the Americans were involved in that as well. And this
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 13: is a Muslim brotherhood guy. You know, you have a
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 13: belief in Turkey on the left, on the right, basically
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 13: across the board that the Americans have always been involved
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 13: in military coups in Turkey or played some sort of role.
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 13: So I think that just speaks to a broad fear.
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 13: And then I think there were also in two thousand
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 13: and thirteen the Guessie Park protests, which you know, might
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 13: not seem that threatening from the outside, you know, you think, oh,
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 13: he's a big guy, he's a strong man. Whatever, he
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 13: can just deploy the military and put them all down.
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 13: It was deeply threatening to him.
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, this was like people occupying this green space. It
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 4: was going to be demolished. It was the last from
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 4: remaining green space.
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 3: Just so people know.
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 4: And and it grew two thousands, thousands of people upset
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 4: with what had been happening in Istanbul in the country.
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 4: I see that and I guess I'm just to pull
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 4: it up to today and then I want to get
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 4: to the neighborhood with one more question. How do you
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 4: know you look at eric On today and look, you know,
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 4: he's still a key player and almost an indispensable man
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 4: on the world stage. He in Syria, Akmad al Shara,
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 4: a guy he backed, is now you know, in charge
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 4: of that country instead of bisharh al Sad. At the
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 4: same time, you know, Israel's making noises about attacking Turkey
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 4: next after Iran.
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 3: We'll see if that happens. Given what happened Ron.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 4: You know, he's you know, barely skates through elections, but
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 4: he does. The Kurdish issue is you know, up and down,
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 4: like there's a piece deal with the PKK, but there's
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 4: still these concerns about the Kurds in Syria having autonomy,
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 4: although ahmadels Shara is trying to put an end to that.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 4: The question I guess I wanted to ask is is
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 4: this a man who is realizing what he wants to
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 4: do in power? Is he have a strategy that he's
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 4: implementing in Turkey and in the region, or is this
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 4: a man that is just a survivors had to react
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 4: to a million things in an opportunistic way, and some
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 4: of them work and others don't. How much do you
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 4: think he's building something and has this kind of idea
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 4: of what Turkey is and should be in the region,
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 4: versus he's just a very canny political survivor.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 13: I think they had a vision for Turkey in the region,
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 13: and as what if you say middle power, I don't
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 13: think they like that term, But as a regional power.
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 13: I think they've had a vision for a long time.
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 13: I think they've building up their defense industry. I think
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 13: they've obviously, as I said, extending themselves throughout the region.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 13: I think they also did that for business interests. I
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 13: think they did that as a way to just shore
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 13: up their power, and I think it works in the
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 13: sense that I think some people in Turkey probably can
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 13: imagine who would come after them at this point, because
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 13: he has successfully taken over basically all of the institutions
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 13: of the country. He has repressed about forty percent of
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 13: the population, and at this point he's now taken to
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 13: meddling in elections. But I think in terms of the
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 13: bouncing back and being a sort of canny, flexible domestic leader.
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 13: I think he's just reacting to events at home, and
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 13: he's happy to shift. He was a liberal looking leader
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 13: in the beginning. Then he became allied with a right
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 13: wing party around twenty fifteen, and so you know, he
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 13: was looking at a Kurdish opening in his first eight
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 13: years of power, and he was he turned against it.
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 13: Wherever he saw the mood of the country or you know,
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 13: his own political fortunes shifting, he would shift also, and
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 13: he'll do it again. I mean, he has now put
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 13: the country just in a terrible, terrible economic situation, and
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 13: that is the trap. I don't see the way out
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 13: of that. I mean, I was just in Turkey in March.
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 13: The people in my book who loved him for all
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 13: of these years suddenly are shattered, people, including one of
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 13: my characters, whusan Their self esteem, their sense of self
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 13: and also their belief in Turkey's great future and their
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 13: children's future is now gone.
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 12: And I think that that is.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 13: A very very new for him, and I think it's
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 13: I don't think he has a way out of it.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 13: So I think it will be interesting to see to
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 13: see where we go. I think the question that you
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 13: have and I have is what about the opposition?
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 12: What happened?
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 13: Yeah, And at this point, what exactly can they even
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 13: do given how much he's repressing them.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 4: Well, the last thing we would ask you is the neighbor
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 4: itself is fascinating. And one of the things I love
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 4: about your writing and your journalism is that you don't
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 4: exclude people. I know, we just spent a long time
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 4: talking about arewon, but we see what it's like for
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 4: people to live through all these changes. And the question
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 4: we ask you is I love this role of mutar
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 4: so people understand this is kind of like you're It's
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 4: not just like you're the kind of mayor of the neighborhood.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 4: You literally people come to you with every problem, like
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 4: from you know, I don't want my daughter to marry
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 4: this person to you know, where can.
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 3: I get this document?
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 4: And it's a very old feeling for but it's a
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 4: form of democracy in a way. It's just people constantly
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 4: trying to solve these problems and survive. I hesitate to
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 4: say resilient because I know a lot of people who
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 4: hate being called resilient because it makes it seem like
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 4: it's not hard. But with all this change, like you
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 4: just see these people working it out, you know, and
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 4: sometimes they're helping each other. Sometimes they're resent the you know,
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 4: New Syrians or what have you. But it is human
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 4: beings just in a somewhat democratic way, just keeping this
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 4: neighborhood moving. And the question I wanted to ask you
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 4: is we just talked about the you know, the decline
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 4: of democracy in some ways under it on which is undeniable.
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 4: I've changed how I think about democracy. There's no such
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 4: thing as this is a democracy, and this isn't like
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 4: where everything's a spectrum, you know, like America right now
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 4: is very not democratic in tons of ways and kind
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 4: of democratic in others.
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 3: Right, But did you learn something.
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 4: About democracy itself by just focusing in on this local
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 4: neighborhood and now human beings experienced democracy?
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 3: You know that human beings that may.
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 4: Not have a stake and you know how Air Dowon's
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 4: policy is going in Syria will be on the refugee
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 4: So maybe that's not the right one, but like, how
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 4: did that local viewpoint of democracy changed how you think
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 4: about the concept itself.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 13: Well, this was why I found this neighborhood interesting because
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 13: they were a bit on the margins. No one in
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 13: my neighborhood was a member of the media that was
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 13: being oppressed, or of the academics, or the Kurds, or
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 13: maybe the judiciary. The judges who were all being fired
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 13: or transferred. These people were a little bit on the margins,
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 13: and many of them supported eared one. About seventy five
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 13: percent of the neighborhood did, and then there was a
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 13: twenty five percent that did not, But they weren't their
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 13: lives were not directly affected. And what I think was
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 13: the benefit of failing to finish my book in a
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 13: normal amount of time was that I got to go
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 13: there for ten years and I got to see how
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 13: all of these people changed and evolved over those years.
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 13: And what I found fascinating and I think would be
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 13: fascinating to Americans as well, is that you might disparage
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 13: some of these people who vote for the Autocrat, but
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 13: what you're not really prepared for is how they are
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 13: actually processing what's happening to them and the moment when
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 13: it strikes them that their lives have changed.
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 12: And it does.
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 13: And I think the chapter in the book that is
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 13: somewhat hopeful, although it was, you know, a while ago,
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 13: now is twenty nineteen. Because what happened in my neighborhood
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 13: was that it was the Istanbul mayoral election. There was
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 13: AKP was running their candidate they had run Estambul for
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 13: twenty five years, and then there was the opposition candidate,
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 13: akram Imamlu, and he won and it was the first
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 13: time AKP had been defeated in a very important election
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 13: in the Istambul mayoral election. And then the AKP tried
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 13: to claim that there were election irregularities and they called
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 13: a second election, and everyone in my neighborhood, even his supporters,
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 13: were so insulted, you know, they said, what does he
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 13: think we're stupid? Does he not realize does he not
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 13: think that we realize what he's doing? And it was
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 13: a very kind of macho reaction in some respects, and
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 13: they started saying, you know, we're going to teach him
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 13: a lesson. We're just going to teach him a lesson
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 13: this time. And then the neighborhood actually voted for the
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 13: opposition party, which they had not voted for for maybe
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 13: in all of their lives, just to show Aratawan that
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 13: they were not going to lose their voice. And an
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 13: interesting thing about Turkey is that it has always had
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 13: free elections and this is the one thing everybody has had,
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 13: and they love to vote there. I mean, it's really
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 13: a great pleasure to witness election day in Turkey. And
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 13: so they they fought back in that. In that instance,
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 13: Imamlu became mayor. Of course, Imo Molu is in jail now,
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 13: in jail, now he's in jail. But I think that
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 13: when we think about people's psychologies in the age of authoritarianism,
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 13: I think, you know, the verdicts that we don't really
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 13: know what's happening, how people are feeling, and what exactly
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 13: they are going to react to. And you're right, in
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 13: a neighborhood like that, in an old Ottoman in these
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 13: neighborhoods in Istamble, they still work together to figure things out.
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 13: They're out in the street, they're talking to each other
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 13: face to face. I mean this was also what was
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 13: appealing to me because I was.
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 12: Online all the time.
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 13: Yeah, and they're still talking to They're still passing on
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 13: information in this face to face way, which I think
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 13: is a lesson for all of us as well.
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 12: So you know, I do I do have hope for Turkey.
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 12: I just I simply do.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 13: It's it's I think also one thing to consider about
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 13: characters like Eradiwan and and this is really an open question.
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 13: You know, he loves elections too, so he has put his.
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 12: Main rival in jail.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 13: This was also an unprecedented move. But will he return
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 13: the country to some sort of of real elections. I
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 13: think that's that's still a possibility.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well let's you know, let's hope.
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 4: So I mean, you you convey, like you say, this
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 4: country has been through everything you can imagine, and yet Istanbul,
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 4: there are all kinds of people are there, you know,
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 4: and they regenerate, you know, Roma, Armenian, Greek, Syrian, you know, in.
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 3: Addition of Turks.
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 4: All these other people are going to pass through, and
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 4: some have been expelled and then some have common and
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 4: yet it all kind of keeps is what I love
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 4: about cities like it just keeps regenerating and becoming something
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 4: that is similar and different.
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 13: Yeah, And I think that if you look at what
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 13: Eratawan was brilliant out at the beginning, is that he
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 13: took that creative chaos and he created a new political
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 13: movement out of it. I mean it was by going
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 13: into these neighborhoods. That's the whole reason. Also that I
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 13: told the story the books through a neighborhood. But the
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 13: question is, can the opposition now look at the world
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 13: as it is and and the city as it is,
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 13: and actually and actually say, Okay, what is the political
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 13: movement that needs to be created created?
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 10: Now?
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 3: Well, look, the book is from life itself.
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 4: It's just so rich with character, detail, history, politics, So
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 4: people should check it out.
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 3: Susi Hanson, thanks so much for joining us.
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 12: Thank you. Ben was really great talking to.
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: Thanks again to Susie Hanson for doing the show, and
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 2: we'll talk to you next week. Pozza of the World
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith and Nisha Bonnercy. Our team includes
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 2: Matt de Grot, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Kanter, Kenny Moffatt, David Toles,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 2: and Ryan Young. Her staff is proudly unionized with the
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 2: Writers Guild of America East