Greenland Prepares for Trump Invasion

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Then we have a five alarm podsay The World fire, do you see the Trump is threatened to slap a 200% tariff on all French wine. I know there goes the Bordeaux. I thought of you. I know. It's wither the Bordeaux. Could finally make me keep my nearest resolution to drink less. Drink more beer. Oh yeah. I can drink more beer. Speaking of beer, I just got back from London. What a great city. It's fantastic. The pop culture is so fun. Just like sitting outside, cold as hell. The ripen heaters sitting outside, actually less smoking than I expected to see in London. Yeah, it's down a little bit, but the drinking is still robust, seemed up. So is the calorie count at this pub? Sunday roasts. Those are fantastic. Nothing like tucking into a giant pie of meat. Oh yeah. I had a pie with mashed and something else. There's some egg deep fried in a ball of meat or something like that. It was really good. Although I did get there, I turned on BBC News because I don't know. I see what's on TV, Nigel Farage, right in my grill, with Robert Generick, who just defected to their form side. Coming in hot. It was. That guy. Come on. Although it was fun watching their press, like actually take the piss out of them and ask super shitty questions. It kind of make fun of them a bit. I was like, where's that, guys? US press corps? There's no political playbook. Nigel making things interesting. Well, there's no like Lindell TV in the room. Yeah. I think purely. Give it a minute. Maybe they'll get a UK correspondent for. Yeah. I guess there are a bunch of Murdoch rags in the room but whatever. We got a lot to cover today then. We're going to start with Greenland, which is the dumbest and yet potentially the most consequential international crisis in, I don't know, decades. Then we're going to talk about why Donald Trump told millions of Iranian protesters that he would rescue them and to go into the streets and to take over the government and then did nothing when thousands of them were massacred. We'll help you guys understand the new board of peace. We'll help you fill out your applications if you want to apply, just a billion dollars and I think the common apathy probably accept that. Then we're going to explain to major developments about governance in the future of Syria. White Elon Musk's Groc AI tool has been banded in a number of countries and then finally we are once again going to put our fate in the hands of our producer, Michael, who is going to show us a video that we have not seen and he has seen in risk cancellation. That's exciting as always. It's always the best. We did our interview today. Tell us what we're going to hear. Yes. I talked to Yustra Elbegear, who's the Sky News Africa correspondent. Yustra has been on before. She just covered the Ugandan elections, Tommy. We've had Bobby Wein on both the United Kingdom and talked to him. Basically we had another, not exactly, or named close to a free and fair election. The internet was shut down. Yustra describes war zone-like conditions on the ground, military out, threatening people. The tallies seemingly manipulated. Yustra was there for it also. She walks through what it was like to be there for that election. What it says about the direction of politics in Africa, like the rest of the world, where the strong men are kind of just not giving an inch and it seems to be working for them. How do younger Ugandans, including the 70% of the country, that's under 30, feel about it? What's next for Bobby Wein? Again, what does this mean for the broader African landscape? It's very important to cover a story like that that can get drowned in Greenland, so you should check it out. I mean, really important story. Also, Bobby Wein is such a brave guy for those who don't know. This guy was like a rock star, and he decided to dedicate his life to politics, and he's met, he's been beaten, he's been locked up in his own house. I think he just had to escape his own house, right? Because the security force is just coming for him. And the kind of Don Jr., the president's kid, is like online tweeting, like threatening to kill him. I mean, it's pretty dark, but it's important. Yeah. Really important story. A great reporter, by the way. She's very good. She has an eye, both, she dies right into the story, she's like there, she's interviewed me 70. She's interviewed Bobby Wein, she was at the vote tally locations, she gets out and gets the story. Sisters are a total badass, too. Yeah. That's great. We just sit in a room and play and talk about it. So speaking of which, Ben, next week, for those of you who are part of our friend of the pod, subscribe our community, you're going to hear Ben and I answer some questions from the friends of the pod discord. So if you want to hear that or if you want to submit a question, go to crooked dot com slash friend to join and become a friend of the pod. Or if you just want to support crooked media support, you like the show, you like progressive independent media, becoming a subscriber is this single most helpful thing for us, because it helps us reduce our dependence on these big tech platforms and connect directly with you. So again, that's crooked dot com slash friends. And of course, you know, we'd love for you to also nurture our dependence on big tech platforms by subscribing to part of us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And then Ben, you have a big announcement for us. Today, drum roll, that was a drum roll for those not watching on YouTube, but after four years of work, my next book, all we say, the battle for American identity, history and 15 speeches, is coming out in May, the preorder links are live. You can hit it on bookshop, you hit it on Amazon. But essentially just, you know, for this audience is where I'm announcing it, because these are my people here. I wanted after writing a book about the rise of authoritarianism, I sense that the answer is to that question that's knowing on all of us, which is like, how the fuck do we get here in 20, 50 years into this experiment, lay in the past. And I spent four years looking at how to tell the story of the argument we've been having essentially, the argument about what it means to be an American, who gets to decide that we've been having that argument since our founding. And so I chose 15 speeches as non-anthology, though, this is meant to understand the threat of the arguments we've been having back since our founding. So 80 Vance has one answer, we kind of begin the per-log with JD Vance. I was just going to joke how many Stephen Miller speeches do you choose? I don't do a JD Vance speech, but, you know, he says recently, he made the speech where he said America is not a nation founded on a creed. Oh, right, yes. The Declaration of Independence is not the right way of thinking about what it means to be American, and he basically gives the blood and soil argument as a Christian nationalist argument. We are defined by a certain kind of people that founded this country, white Christians, and we're defined kind of by our use of power in American exceptionalism, right? And counter to that is obviously the story of multiracial democracy and a nation that protects rights and a nation that is enriched by welcoming people from other parts of the world. And those two stories, I kind of want to trace the argument between them throughout our history. I begin at the founding, Benjamin Franklin gave this like extraordinary speech at the Constitutional Convention that was about compromise and about how the only way we can start this country is if we agree to disagree about important things. All that worked, but it didn't work because the things that we didn't agree about were things like slavery or who gets to be American or what is the basis of how power works in this country. And then I kind of follow those threads and there's each chapter is not just about a speech, it's about the political movement and conditions that could produce that speech. And we have the kind of strain that most of us identify with, like the abolitionist strain, ordinary people like Mariah Steward and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, but also then how they interacted with presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and ultimately our former boss, Barack Obama, you know, that's one side of this argument. And then you end with Biden's NATO press conference after the debate? He, I know what you're thinking, he doesn't have a few, well, anyway, no PhD there. But on the other side, I have the Confederate, you know, I've got the white supremacist arguments I've got you know up through some of the kind of xenophobes. nature of American populism up through Ronald Reagan, and unfortunately, the book ends with Donald Trump. But the story doesn't end with Donald Trump. And that's actually kind of the important part here is that we are living in the latest iteration of a competition that we've had since the beginning. And Trump makes a lot of sense if you read him in the context of American history. But so does the possibility that if people stand up and make a case and build a movement and persuade people that we can take this in a different direction? And that's part of what I took away from this time. It's like obviously speeches are kind of the purest form of persuasion. You stand in front of an audience, you try to convince them of something. We stop doing that for a lot of reasons. And I get into that technology, social media polarization. But actually part of what's missing in the movement against Trump is what is our unifying story? What do we think it means to be American? Like how do we persuade our fellow citizens that we are going down a very, very dark path? So to me, I really hope people pick up this book. It was fun to write. They're amazing characters. They're amazing stories. They're amazing movements. Amazing breadcrumbs that again make a lot of sense in terms of today. You like look at the past and you're like, oh, that seems familiar or that. I can draw a direct line from this thing that happened to where we got to today. So I think that this story matters more than ever. It's very, even though it's a history book, it's very much about this moment. How do we get here and how do we get out of it? If you can preorder this book, it is hugely helpful. Get some on this. That's solid list. Look, if you're going to buy this book when it comes out, God bless you and I thank you. But it's not just the best solos. It's like that way. They're like, oh, we better print some more of these or get these bookshops, right? You can help launch this book so that it gets kind of up into the orbit in an attention economy where books have a hard time breaking through. I'm going to be talking about it from time to time. I may even delve into the sub-stack verse to share thoughts on this, but also like other things that I think are going on in the country. Things maybe we don't get to talk about in this podcast about where the hell America's going and how we got here. So please keep your eye out. You can go today in preorder. I'll always say on all the platforms where you can sport and pen bookstores by doing a bookshop or if you're a primatic, you can do the Amazon. However you want to get it, please consider picking it up. Ben's coming for Heather Cox Richardson in this sub-stack. Jokes aside, I'm very proud of you. I can't believe that you write books. It seems impossible. This one was hard to sit down for that long. Four years of my life on this. And do that much work. Question for you. In 30 years, do you think the next Ben Rhodes will do a book on like the top 15 political TikToks of all time? Possibly. I mean, it's been trading a lost art. You think it's dead soon? The last three are Reagan. Okay. Obama Trump. Right. And that was just that little snapshot alone was fascinating because like I, you know, spoiler alert, but the Obama speech is a race speech. It's impossible to imagine a politician delivering that speech today. Like at 45 minute, like brilliant meditation on multi-racial democracy. It was covered in depth too. Yeah, people watched the whole speech, people read it, engaged. And actually that's part of the problem is like we, we don't listen to each other. We don't make long arguments, you know. Not even a little bit. Yeah. That is very exciting. But please buy a copy, buy it early. And if you have like a MAGA uncle, buy him one and then take it to his house, then burn it on his porch. Then you're both happy. Ben gets a sale. What I like to think it's, there's, there's, there needs to be some space for progressive patriotism here, not because we don't see clearly the bad parts of the story. And I have actually a native chief, Senator, chief, gave this extraordinary speech in the early 19th century, that basically like sounded like a, was delivered at a Black Lives Matter protest, right? So, but this is the only country we have. And if we don't win the argument, then it's going to be the worst version of itself, whereas if it's the better version of itself, like it can do a lot of good for people. And we are not doing a lot of winning these days. Yeah. Everyone could brush up a little bit. I think that'd be helpful. It's very exciting. Please pre-order Ben's book. All right. So we're getting dark already. Ben, let's start with Greenland. So when you guys hear this Donald Trump will probably in Davos, he'll probably be screaming at a group of random European leaders. We'll be debating an emergency YouTube. Yeah. He really wants to like steal Greenland from Denmark. So on Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Greenland told his constituents that they needed to start preparing for possible invasion of Greenland, Prime Minister Gents Frederick Nielsen said, quote, "It's not likely there will be a military conflict, but it can't be ruled out." A little ominous. Trump's commentary on the subject was a little less serious and sober. He posted an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag in the ground next to a sign that said Greenland U.S. territory established 2026. He posted a screenshot of a text from French president Emmanuel Macron, where Macron said, "I do not understand what you were doing on Greenland." I don't either. He also posted a screenshot of a psychophantic pathetic text from NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta. He later attacked the UK over an unrelated issue. So this past week and Ben, Trump sent a text to the Prime Minister of Norway that said the following, quote, "Dear Jonas, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, the world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland. Thank you, President DJT. I cut a bunch of even crazier shit because it's just too long." So Ben, this Greenland obsession went from being something that I think a lot of people treated like a joke to genuine crisis that is threatening to destroy NATO in the global order. Trump himself said there was no going back at this point. In past episodes, we explained in more depth why Trump might want Greenland. The quick interity is the melting Arctic is opening up shipping routes. There's mineral deposits, oil and gas. Then there's this big stupid fucking ego and he wants to expand the size of the United States. But this most recent temper tantrum seems to have stemmed from a misunderstanding. So basically, a few European countries recently sent a tiny number of troops to Greenland for military exercises. The financial time said it was one British soldier, two Finns, a few dozen Danish German and French troops, that's all we're talking about. Those countries thought this would show Trump that they were taking his Arctic security concern seriously. He interpreted it as defiance or in a front to him. So he announced tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK until we get control of Greenland. French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to Trump during their speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. Here's a bit of what they said. Carney is first. Macron is second. We knew the story of the international rules base order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. An American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. It's as well a shift towards a world without rules. Where international law is trampled and a food corporation gives way to renounce this competition. Competition from the United States of America through trade agreements that undermine our export interests, demand maximum concession, concessions, and openly aim to weaken and subordinate Europe combined with an endless accumulation of new tariffs that are fundamentally unacceptable, even more so when they are used as a leverage against territorial sovereignty. This is all very serious. For you not much can you do backwards work sunglasses? I think you've got a big guy or something. But it's not that it's the blue why those sunglasses? It's like if Joe Biden took mushrooms and bought a new pair of aviators that happened to be mirror blue. It looks like his AI. Yeah we've got to laugh at something now. It's so fun to laugh at something. Sorry everybody. So then the S&P is down 2% on Tuesday so maybe the business world's taking this more seriously than we are right now. That's like the response from Europe is pretty fecal. It's like a you know stern speech from across the sunglasses. At least Karni's like pretty serious looking. Okay we're going to try to get it together. But if you were a Davos and you were in a strategy session for a bunch of European leaders like what are we telling them to do at this point? So look first of all I think part of what's happening here is the Greenland thing it's it's serious. It's deadly serious. He keeps coming back to it. He clearly means that it's not just a control like he clearly wants to conquer Greenland. We've been through those reasons. But the other thing is it also can't be separated from where we're one year into the Trump administration. He just kidnapped the president of the Venezuelan whatever you think about that guy right. He's just invaded Minneapolis. He's just tried to like arrest the head of the Federal Reserve. This guy is out of control. And to pivot to the leaders here and the people at Davos you know Karni gets up there and he says well you know it looks like the rules based orders ending or it's over. It is fuck the music has stopped. It doesn't exist anymore. Trump's reelection was the end of that. Like these these guys and they're almost all guys have been living through this year We're the. they've basically mimicked all the tactics of all the capitulators and we've talked about this, the law firms, the universities, if we can just kiss his ass hard enough or flatter him hard enough or the British give him like a. - Or a piece in long enough, yeah. - Mark Ruder calls him daddy giving us a spanking and like a text. - Which actually happened, by the way. - That's actually a thing that happened in the world, right? This doesn't work. In fact, like any bully, like the more you give him your lunch money, the more he's gonna come back for something else. And by the way, it's not the fucking Nobel Peace Prize. If they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, like he demand the Eiffel Tower, you know, like if they don't stand up to him and I think they've finally figured this out, if they don't stand up to him, he's going to take Greenland. Like the status quote, we should all just name this, absent something changing. He will try to take Greenland in some fashion, which will shatter NATO and ensure in this era of like imperial conquest and competition, right? - And Greenland might not be, might not be last. I mean, he also put out an AI image that had Canada marked with the US fluke, you know? - Yeah. And why not, we have to take this stuff all seriously and literally to use an early Trumpism. But look, so what could they do? They need, they need to, everybody needs, by the way, to just, we have to push back. This guy is clearly out of control. He's clearly the worst version of himself. If I'm the Europeans, I'm sending actual troops to Greenland, right? Like show that there is a military commitment to defend this territory. I would be ending up the tariffs, right? I would be threatening to essentially invoke the coercion principle in the EU, right? That this is the idea that if you are trying to coerce the EU territorially, which is exactly what he's trying to do, that you're essentially going to rug pull them from European markets, right? - Basically, that would, that could cut off the United States companies, including like service providers, tech companies from the entire half a billion person European market. That is, it's often described as like a bazooka. It's like a massive tool that would send a message. - And they don't have to necessarily use it. But if you start to threaten these things or you start to kind of pull from US investments, by the way, like there would be some economic costs like we saw today. I would much rather, there would be some market disruption than the US through this appeasement strategy, the Europeans, then invades and takes Greenland and breaks NATO. And by the way, if people want to say like, oh, you know, you signed with the European, no, as an American, I don't want to do that. Like, I would like this president to be stopped. Same thing with Republicans in Congress, who would like to go on like Kodel's to Denmark and reassure them, don't reassure them, get to fucking work drafting a resolution. You can't reassure them. You have no power. - Well, try to assert power, right? And Trump may try to know you, but everybody needs to be pushing back because he's made it clear that he's not going to stop. - Yeah. And like, and just the European understanding, this is not popular. Like, there's a CNN poll, 75% of US voters oppose the USA Greenland, Quinnipiac et a poll, 55% oppose as buying Greenland, 90% oppose the United States taking it by force. Also, the guy's lying, right? Like Trump keeps saying, oh, the Chinese are all over the Arctic. No, the former head of NATO said he hasn't seen the Chinese naval ship there and decade. Like, the Russians are there, sure, but destroying NATO is the greatest thing you could do to Putin. - That's much better than, you know, anything else. - Yeah, his oligarchs are laughing. I'm with you on like the anti-coursion tool. There needs to be some sort of massive economic cost. It could be tariffs, it could be the coercion tool, and it's got to be now. And like, I actually, Trump actually does respond to pain. If the market sits 10%, 20%. - And it gets in the bottom markets, essentially. - Yeah, if his donors started calling him, like, that's when they're like, that's when he backs off. Also, Ben, I just, I would quickly want to point out, Trump pretends not to care about the elites and the establishment. He's currently leading the largest ever delegation to Davos in presidential history. No one cares more about the fucking elite opinion than he does. It actually wouldn't matter. - Well, yeah. We should, Bill Clinton went to Davos. George W. Bush never went to Davos. Barack Obama never went to Davos, right? So, this guy runs against elites and he just can't wait to get to Davos. - He's obsessed with them. - Every single one of his cabinet secretary seems to be there. - Give the New York Times a three-hour interview the other week. - Yeah, he's obsessed with these people. - But the core point is, you're not going to charm him or persuade him, right? The charm is these sycophantic texts and praise. I mean, the mark root to thing. We should just spend a minute on this cloud, right? Nathan needs to toss that guy overboard, not that they will. But I will defend your policies on Ukraine, on television, he's saying, like, policies that run directly counter to what NATO wants or the rest of NATO wants. But they've tried that. You need leverage. Not persuasion, not charm. You need to show you've got skin in the game. I would say, one of the reasons that European leaders don't do it is that they feel politically weak. Their approval ratings are in the shitter. - I would say maybe one of the reasons why your approval ratings are in the shitter is because you look weak. - Tough enough. - Tough enough. You might actually get a little bump at home. The recent people are probably going to the AFD in Germany or the national rally in France or Nigel Farage in the UK is because at least they look like, quote, unquote, strong leaders, right? - Yes. - Kira Starmer shows some fucking backbone, man. Like, if you want to face down Nigel Farage, like show that, you will do that by defending British interests and European sovereignty. - The new Japanese Prime Minister, Takiichi Senai, just called a snap election because her approval rating is at like 70%. In part, because she just picked a giant fight with the Chinese that she can't win militarily. You're right. There is some value to strength. Just one last thing on this NATO point. Trump did this absolutely insanely. It was nearly two hours, 100 minutes or something like that. Press conference today. It was rambling. It was low energy. He was asked if he was committed to staying in NATO. This is his answer as of Tuesday, January 20th. - Mr. President, are you committed to keeping the US in NATO? - I've had such a good relationship. I've made it so much better, so much stronger. It's so good now. NATO is so much stronger now. I don't agree with a lot of the things they've done, but that was done before I got there. I think NATO has been good. Sometimes it's overrated. Sometimes it's not. But we have a strong NATO. When I came here, we had a week NATO. We had a NATO, a 2%, and they weren't paying. We had a nothing NATO. NATO is whether you like it or not. It's only as good as we are. If NATO doesn't have us, NATO is not very strong. It's your point at the top, like, about the music having stopped. He's speaking in the past tense. Yeah. And he's fundamentally wrong, right? The strength of NATO isn't like a percentage. The strength of NATO is the collective defense commitment. And if one NATO member is ready to invade an NX territory or another, that goes at the window. I should say, and this will anticipate your transition to our next topic. I'm also, I'm mad at everybody today because it's been such a crappy couple of weeks. Not you. Not a wonderful team here. But I'm going to take with a media here for a second. Because he says these things, nobody is spending 5%. That is a fiction. They all promise to do it sometime in the future. They're not spending 5% of their GDP on defense. It's not something happening in the real world. He is not end-to-date worse. We've covered that. He's not ended any of them in the last I checked. But he's allowed to believe this cartoon because he has his own state media. But also because the actual media just repeats these fictions. Like, this man has, the emperor has no clothes. And unless collectively, foreign leaders, congressional leaders in this country, media, citizens. And by the way, citizens are doing in place of Minneapolis start to just call complete bullshit on this guy. Like, he's going to drive this entire world off the cliff. Yep. Even on just on this NATO 5% spending thing, even if you believe for a second that they are all really going to spend 5%. The way it breaks down is it's like 3.5% on kind of like core defense spending like guns and shit. And then 1.5% on this nebulous category of like cyber security, your critical infrastructure or civil preparedness. Like, it's a fake thing. It's a fake thing, but he just repeats it over and over and again. It drives me crazy. Okay. That felt good. I'm sorry for laughing so hard at that. Well, you need a little levity. It's a reason to buy there to subscribe to us on YouTube because if you sell the glasses, I think you'd be laughing with that. It was one of those things where like I cracked once and then I made the mistake of looking at you and then you looked and then we just couldn't make eye contact and we had to get it over. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The new year doesn't require a new you, maybe just a less burdened you. Therapy can help you figure out what's weighing you down, what's holding you back and brings an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, motivations and emotions. BetterHelp Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps you identify your needs and your preferences and their 12 years or more of experience in industry leading match at fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored wrecks. 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Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com/world. [MUSIC] Last week when we recorded, it seemed like the United States was on the cusp of bombing Iran again. And that is because Trump said he would quote, "Rescue the Iranian protesters at the Iranian regime started killing them." Trump even urged protesters to quote, "Take over your institutions." And then he said, "Help is on its way." But then the Iranian regime cut off the internet and started mass-occurring innocent people and Trump so far has done absolutely nothing. So we don't know exactly how many people were killed. There is a number of organizations that estimate like in range of several thousand, like 4,000 confirmed deaths. There are other outlets have much higher estimates. I saw one as high as 16,000 people killed. Tens of thousands of 100,000 injured. We just don't know. But look, as listeners know, we were not in favor of Trump going to war with Iran, but what is so awful in this case is that Trump clearly got hundreds if not thousands of additional people killed by promising them protection and then doing nothing to actually help them. And the question is why, so what happened? So there's been a bunch of news reports on the kind of tick-tock backstory of how he came to the place of doing nothing. Some of the big takeaways for me then were first, when Trump promised to rescue these protesters, the United States did not have this sufficient military assets in place. They needed to conduct a large-scale operation against Iran and then, especially if Iran retaliated against the US or Israel in large part, because the US redeployed a bunch of naval assets and aircraft carrier a lot more to the Caribbean, because we decided to invade Venezuela, so that's one. Even worse, Trump tweeted about intervention on January 2nd, but Axio says that the first high-level meeting to actually consider US responses, it was chaired by JD Vance, wasn't until January 9th. And Trump himself wasn't presented options until January 13th. So we waited like 10, 11 days to even see what these options could be after promising them. And by then, the regime had already started the massacre. I imagine they could have just seen his tweet and figured like, let's get this done now before it's too late for his time to respond. Trump was also reportedly convinced by assurances from the Iranian foreign minister that were made to Steve Whitkov, that Iran would not harm more protesters, or not execute protesters. Trump was pressured to hold off unbombing by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that Israel wasn't ready to defend itself from retaliatory strikes. Again, largely because the US didn't have the right hardware in the region. And then Trump was also lobbied not to bomb by leaders in the Gulf in particular the Saudis, because they don't want a new war with Iran. They don't want to destabilize the region. And Gulf monarchs don't really want their people to see a successful protest movement lead to a change in government. So ultimately, Trump decided not to act and spin the decision by saying, well, actually, I prevented 800 Iranians from being executed after Iran threatened to publicly execute a bunch of people. So since Trump made those comments, I think a bunch of Iranian officials are on the record saying they might do the executions anyway. So Ben, I'm just, I'm so, if you do and I both are joking before, we're coming in hot today. I'm so outraged by this. Trump, like, look, Trump, this should go down in history with other infamous moments in US history, where the US told people to rise up and then did nothing and got them killed like in 1991. George H.W. Bush told Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein tens of thousands of them did, then they were massacred and the US just did nothing. In 1956, a bunch of Hungarians took to the street to demand freedom from the Soviet Union. They were encouraged by the US run radio for Europe broadcast networks. But then the Soviets rolled in tanks and the US did nothing and wrote the drill tanks into Budapest that we did nothing to help people being slaughtered. The point is not that the US should have gone to war in these cases. The point is that the president's words matter. And I felt like you and I learned this the hard way during the Syria Red Line conversation and none of those rules are being applied to what Trump just did to the Iranian people given how many people were killed. - Yeah, I mean, look, the Red Line thing in which we live was about chemical weapons use and then when chemical weapons were used, there was not a military strike. And look, we can relive that. I accept the criticism, though, that if you say it's a Red Line that at a minimum, you shouldn't have used that kind of foreshadowing and then not followed through on it. And the reason I make this point and to connect it to everything else today is I do think that Trump is treated differently. This is not a new insight. We have to stop treating him differently. He's the president of the United States of America, whether he's Donald Trump or somebody else. He told people to rise up and he said, help would be on its way. And let's not forget the pageantry of that week. You've got Lindsey Graham flying around Air Force One with make Iran great again hats. You've got like the Shah's son out there. Like he was conveying a ramp up to Iranians and then he did a rug pull on them, right? - Yep. Can I read a Lindsey Graham to you? President Trump is not Obama. Freedom now, free him forever for the long-suffering Iranian people. I believe your nation's nightmare will soon be coming to an end, make Iran great again. So he was part of a chorus of people making these assurances, Lindsey Graham was. - And it is profoundly irresponsible. And look, I don't support military action for all the reasons we talked about, which I don't know you can engineer regime change with bombs and have it end well. But then you shouldn't have encouraged him that way. You should have found other ways to show solidarity, other ways to call out the regime, other ways to mobilize other countries to impose certain consequences or to try to help support Iranian protesters and whatever way you can, whether it's provision of internet or getting their stories out or whatever way. But don't suggest you're gonna go to war and then pull back in the middle of the crackdown. I mean, the absurdity of this thing is this guy lives in a consequence-free world because nobody will ever tell him to his face that what he did was wrong. But like the climb down was so clumsy. He thanked the Iranian regime for not executing their own people. - And it was like one person was gonna get hanged and then they called them were like, and by the way, this terrible regime, but to the point about not capitulating, they did their crackdown in his face. And then they had like someone called Steve Woodcoff, probably Arachi from the foreign ministry who's been around there forever and be like, "Hey, your threat really got to us. "We're not gonna execute these people. "We're not gonna hang them." They killed potentially tens of thousands of people already. And they're not releasing the political prisoners, like, so to your list there, I think all those things mattered. First of all, it bears in mind. We said, a lot of people said, when you move all this military assets to the Caribbean, they're not gonna be- - Yeah, it's an opportunity cost, yeah. - There and you can't, you didn't have a military option. And the Iranians knew he didn't have military options. They knew we weren't postured there. We knew we didn't have a carrier strike group. They knew that we'd be worried about retaliation and we couldn't provide the missile defenses to our bases or to these railways. And so they knew they had a window to crack down because this guy was irresponsible. And then I do think, at the end of the day, he listens to the Gulf Arabs and they saw those threats. They saw where things could be going to region and called them and he's like the combination of, this seems a lot of effort. This seems like it could go wrong. I got the Gulf Arabs telling me I had to do this. All of a sudden, it's not Lindsey Graham in his ear and he's like, he backs off. But this should be attached to him. And look, I'm not asking. I hope it doesn't result in him bombing them in a week 'cause I don't think that's the answer either. We're just making a point here. This should be held against him as like a horrible thing that he did. - Yeah, he can't undo what was done, right? His words got thousands of people killed. So if he bombed tomorrow, it doesn't solve anything. Imagine getting a call from BB Netanyahu and being told not to bomb Iran. Do you think you assume it's one of those prank shows or something? - I mean, at the end of the day, the thing about BB that people have always wondered is like, it's the same way that he built up a mosque. He needs a mosque, absent a mosque. What is the rationale for BB Netanyahu? Like, you know, I'm always torn to see one through regime change or does he always wanna be on the precipice of regime change 'cause he needs an Islamic Republic of Iran because absent that, how can he scare people into supporting him, you know? - I don't know, but he always gets up to the line and tacos. - Yeah. Trump was asked on Tuesday, that same-- - Bacco's, Bacco's, BB always chickened up. - Yeah, Bacco, like that. But Bacco, Trump was asked if military options against Iran are still on the table during the same like ranging press conference on Tuesday. Here's his weird answer. - So with Iran, they were gonna hang 837 people and I let them be known that, and we let them know that if that happens, that will be a very bad day for them. And they decided not to do it. They didn't hang the people. I can't tell you what's gonna happen in the future, but supposedly they've taken that off the table. So we're just gonna have to see what happens with Iran. - Is the military option of the government? - Yeah, I can tell you what's gonna happen in the future. They're gonna hang them behind closed doors in prisons you'll never see. - But it's such bullshit here. I mean, that could do the media, but he sends up there like Castro giving a six hour press conference and asserts to say 837 number. Eight wars, 5%, 837, bullshit. They killed thousands of people. And then the Iranians themselves called you and be like, Hey, we're about to execute these. 137 people, but maybe we won't do it 'cause we're so scared of you. - Yeah. - Like, he got played. - He got played, the Supreme Leader is on TV, calling him a criminal, saying he's responsible for the casualties, their state TV in Iran is airing footage of forced confessions and interrogations. Like these guys were just shooting innocent people in the face with bird shot. That countless people are blinded and just scarred forever. I mean, because of this, you know, look, they were out there on the streets because they were fighting for their own rights, but Trump encouraged countless people. - Yeah. - Okay, speaking of peace, Ben. So let's talk about the latest leak details about Trump's planned board of peace. So we talked about this on Potsay of America yesterday and I just want to warn you in advance that it is both confusing and stupid, so buckle up, but we will get there. So the reason the administration is now talking about the board of peace is because they claim it's time to move from phase one of the Trump Gaza ceasefire to phase two of the Gaza peace plan, which remember it's supposed to be the point where the conflict goes from temporary ceasefire to permanent end to the war, which is just nuts because there is not an actual ceasefire in Gaza. An estimated 450 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes or military activity since October. SF3 is really soldiers. There is no international peacekeeping force. Hamas has not given up its weapons. Israel is still occupying 53% of the Gaza strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are displaced to live in intense tents that can't, you know, withstand the wind or the cold. And do you see Israel is refusing to allow polls for the tents into Gaza because they are claiming it's a dual use product. - And Israel's banned a lot of very credible international human rights aid organizations from operating. - She's then bulldozing Unrah today? - Yeah, well, and even like doctors without borders. So remember part of the ceasefire phase one was all this aid getting in, it is not getting in, right? So none of the things that he said, this is what I get again, the theme of today, the fiction of Donald Trump's presidency that he brought all this stuff is bullshit. There's no peace in Gaza. There's still Palestinians being killed. There's not getting in, Hamas is not demilitarized. None of these things are happening. - It's so frustrating. But so regardless of those facts, the Trump administration announced like all these sort of board of peace entities. So there's four of them. There's the board of peace, we'll get into in a second. But then below that, there's the executive board, which is like the kind of working level for the board of peace. It's like Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, Marco Rubio, Brandon Business Guys. There's this huge, who's who of Dex? - Yeah, they run the day to day. It's also like the currently capitalism piece. Then there's another board called the Gaza executive board, which oversees Gaza Reconstruction. That is the entity that the Israelis hate 'cause there's a Katari and Turkish official on it. And then there's the national committee for the administration of Gaza that is the Palestinian technocrats. They're supposed to govern Gaza day to day. But apparently they're just sitting in a hotel in Cairo. They can't even get into the Gaza strip 'cause it's not safe there. So it's confusing and nothing is really working. But let's focus on the board of peace because that's the most senior entity. So this was proposed back first in September of 2025. It was framed as supporting Gaza Reconstruction. But the charter that was just released this week does not mention Gaza. It is instead, it seems like it's kind of like slapped together this proposal that is designed to replace the United Nations. Though kind of a name only because there's no real legal authority or structure is to actually do anything. It's just like a new thing on paper. The gist though is that Trump is in charge of the whole thing. Like not the president of the United States is in charge. Like Donald Trump is personally in charge. The White House has extended invitations to at least 60 countries to join the board of peace. But Trump gets to pick who is part of the board and all the substructures. He gets to veto decisions made by the board. He serves as the inaugural chairman of the board. But the chairman nominates a successor until he quits or is pushed out by a unanimous vote. And then there's the demand. I guess they just like bearing Trump as the next chairman of the board of peace or something. And then there's a demand that members of the board pay the billion dollar fee if they want to maintain a permanent membership on the board. So there's this slush fund element that Donald Trump would get to control. So far I think like a dozen countries have agreed to join like all the best countries like Belarus and Hungary. The Russians were invited. France said no, then let's just pause there. Like what the fuck do we even, what do you do with this? This is, it's like, it's like nothing, but also a threat to the entire United Nations system. - Well, I mean, actually, just one question, where is this billion dollars going, right? I mean, we keep hearing about it. Like it's the subscription fee that kicks in after the first 90 days or something, right? But this is not an actual institution, right? There's no clear charter and mechanism. So I have a lot of questions about the billion dollars could be going to like, for all I know could be going to like, Trump coin or something, you know? I mean, seriously. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. - They're not, I'd like to see the budget plan here. This is like fundamentally unserious and fundamentally, clearly not about Gaza, right? He wants this kind of superstructure that he controls its kind of parallel international system. This is like a much worse version of the Chinese building, you know, the belt road initiative or something. And no capacity to do anything. But it reminds you of the Venezuelan thing when he's asked, well, who's gonna run Venezuelan? He's like, the guy's behind me and it's like Rubio and Hexas standing there. That's the same guys. Every time there's anything where he's asked who runs something, it's always like Marco Rubio. And, you know, we got Tony Blair membership here 'cause that guy's just so desperate to be in the country club. - What does he think? - Yeah. But I mean, it's not like his reputation is in the best place. - No. - Regarding the Middle East, but like, this is, he should know better than this. This is crazy. - I mean, I know how many Hamilton stands we've out there, but he's got a bit of the Aaron Burr. Like, all I wanna do is be in the room where it happens five to that guy. But I would say that Border Piece doesn't seem like an actual threat to replace the UN 'cause I have very little confidence that we'll do anything. - Yeah. - Prove me wrong. - No, that's probably right. - But I don't know. He clearly thinks it's kind of his roaming band of brothers that parachute in and I guess try to resolve conflicts, but essentially just extract wealth and resources from places. And so, to me, it's just like a, if it actually happened, it's just a modus operandi for corruption and influence pedaling and people kissing his ass and putting band-aids on problems instead of solving them like all the eight wars he claims he solved and none of which are actually over. - I guess the question is though, what if like Trump creates the Border Piece? Everyone just appeases him as always. - No, but yes. - I think along with it. And then Trump sucks away all the funding and resources for the actual UN and just like pushes attention over to this new bullshit. - And that's the danger. - And so, my recommendation is all the way back to the Greenland thing. Nobody should join this thing. If Trump wants to have a meeting, by nobody, I mean, no self-respecting country or far in meter. If Trump wants to have a meeting that's him and Victor Orban and Lukashenko from Belarus and whatever Gulf Arabs like, you know, he can kind of shake down into coming to it. Make him look ridiculous. Like you should not participate in this. This is not a real thing. This is not an answer. The UN is flawed, fine, like maybe we need different institutions. This is not the answer to it, right? This kind of Trump organization, corporate structure, you know, we know, by the way, how good the books were at the Trump organization. So yes, it is a threat to the UN system. It's meant to be kind of a combination. It's like everything with Trump. It's like part threat, part troll of the UN. Then don't go along with it. You don't need to. It's not the answer to Gaza. It's certainly not going to get them to phase two of Gaza. - It's just like, oh, there's so much plate spinning and you're right. It's like Marco Rubio, like doing all of it, like we're going to stand a style again. I just, I mean, I guess, again, the media will refer to the Gaza ceasefire until one of the parties declares the ceasefire is gone or something. But like, you know, there was one day where, you know, I think some Hamas guys shot at IDF troops and there was like 45 massive airstrikes throughout the Gaza Strip. You know, like life is intolerable for the people there. There's no effort to build it back. I mean, it's just, I don't know. But this is, and again, I swear to God, are we getting harmed, you know? - Yes. And I swear to God, this is not about like us. It's about how to deal with Trump. If there was any other president, I'm not even just Barack Obama, like George Bush, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama. If any other US president had gone out and declared there's a ceasefire, and I'm staking my whole presidency on it and oh, by the way, I wanted the Nobel Peace Prize for it. And then there's like a day, like you described where there are 45 airstrikes, people would have been like, there's no ceasefire. There's this thing with Trump where it's like, we all are adjusting to the fiction that he's presenting. And it's time we're one year in, like my plea today is, let's, it's time to stop that. - Yeah, it's getting real bad. - All right, we're gonna take a little break, but Ben, you're not the only one with a new book coming out. Crooked Media's newest book, "Hated by all the right people, Tucker Carlson and the enravelling of the conservative mind is releasing next week, on January 27th, by one of the best journalists in the business, New York Times magazine writer Jason Zangerly, you know Jason, well, like he's written some of my most unbelievable, like legendary profile pieces, ever of people. I interviewed Jason Monday on Potsay of America, if you want to learn more about the book. It's just an incredible look at Tucker Carlson and his trajectory from like establishment media, darling, like one of the best magazine writers, to use a host on CNN, he was a host on MSNBC for a while, then he went to become the highest rated Fox News host ever, to leaving, to becoming whatever he is today. It tracks, you know, who he is, his career, and how, and what it tells you about the media these days, the Mago world, it's not a problem. - Yeah, I'm a, Tucker's a fascinating figure to me. - Fascinating figure. - And do you wonder, does it, tell you, do you wear that like kind of log cabin is in your cities? - We talked about that. Yeah, it's an island in Maine. - Is it? I mean, it's kind of weird rustic background. - He's like isolated, isolated. - Yeah, it feels like that. - And it'll look nowhere now. And like that, I think our Noia's kind of part of the story. - And it's just my question. - It's amazing. Also, Paz de America, we are going to Auckland, New Zealand. We're going to Australia. So the exact visit is Auckland on February 11th. Then we're going to Australia. The Melbourne show is February 13th. Brisbane on the 14th, Sydney on the 16th. Tickets are on sale right now. Cricket.com/events. If you live in Australia, if you live in New Zealand, please come see us. We'd love to see you. Ben, I was recently told that our Auckland show is on the one and only night that Lord is playing in New Zealand. - I love Lord. - She's really good. So that's a tough competitor. But Cricket.com/events, come see us. (upbeat music) - Paz de The World is brought to you by built. It's 2026 and if you're still paying rent without built, it's time for a change. Built is the loyalty program for renters that rewards you for your biggest monthly expense rent. With built, every rent payment earns you points that can be used towards flights, hotels, lifurides, Amazon.com purchases, and much more. And here's something I'm excited about. Starting in February, built members can earn points on mortgage payments for the first time. Soon you'll be able to get rewarded wherever you live at Unlock exclusive benefits with more than 45,000 restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies, and other neighborhood partners. There's some great ways you can redeem your points like fitness classes, you can use them on Amazon, lift rides, they have gift cards, it over 120 brands. There's a ton of different ways you can redeem your built points and make your rent payments work for you. It's simple, paying rent is better with built. And soon owning a home will be better with built too. Earn rewards and get something back wherever you live. Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbuilt.com/world that's j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t.com/world. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the necessary tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand and facilitate payments, making it the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes. 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Whether that means building a website or adding a professional email service, don't wait to claim your name, invest in your dream domain today. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/world to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace.com/world. (upbeat music) All right, so let's turn to some big developments out of Syria that are less related to Trump than most of the stuff. So on Sunday, the Syrian government led by President Amid Al-Sharah announced a quote ceasefire in full integration with the US-backed Kurdish militia forces in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF. So this deal came together after the Syrian government forces made a bunch of territorial breakthroughs in the Northeast part of Syria, which had been controlled by the Kurds. But this deal they announced Sunday, it seemed like it was starting to unravel by Monday. There were reports of fighting in Northeast Syria, including around prisons that hold a lot of ISIS militants that have been guarded by the SDF for years, but under the terms of this new agreement, those prisons would now be controlled by Shara's government. The Trump administration has come out very strongly in support of this integration idea and of the Syrian government. So Trump's special envoy, Tom Barrick, said, quote, the, quote, greatest opportunity for the Kurds in Syria right now lies in the post Assad transition under the new government. He said the US military presence in Syria was justified by the counter-ISIS mission. But now the Shara's government is on board with fighting ISIS. It changes the US relationship with the SDF. The SDF should get folded into the national military. The Kurds sees this opportunity to integrate into the Syrian state. So the Kurds, the SDF, they feel completely hung out to dry here until recently they controlled like a third of Syria. I think they were probably hoping that would be the case in perpetuity. They fought incredibly bravely against ISIS at their request to the United States. I think they were hoping to be rewarded with their own state. But instead, they're being asked to join a government led by a guy who was once a member of an extremist group that tried to kill them. So Ben, I'm curious what you make of this because I can see both perspectives. Of course, the new Syrian government wants to control the entire country and not have an essentially an autonomous military operating within its borders. On the flip side, the Kurds feel like they're owed a lot given what they sacrificed. And they understandably, I think, don't trust the new government. But they have no choice seemingly with the Trump administration going all in on support of Shara. So I don't know, how are you-- what do you think about this? What's a remove? I think you summed it up well. One interesting thing is that the same dynamic happened in Iraq, right? Same thing. You have Kurds in the north of Iraq, who always opposed Saddam Hussein. We're always good friends at the United States. Kind of did everything we asked them from the Gulf War all the way through the invasion of Iraq, and one of their own state. And after the fall of Saddam Hussein, they weren't going to get their own state because the Turks, we were going to invade them and actually did invade the northern Iraq a couple times. And the US didn't want to fracture it. And we're a D.C. ableized region and all these things. And oh, we need a central government. And actually, I wondered a bit, though, whether there are lessons to take from Iraq of some of the things that worked, because essentially, Iraq, which went through hell along the way, kind of did arrive at this weird federal type solution where there is a kind of semi-autonomous Kurdish region with its own government. But they are a part of Iraq. And there are Iraqi security forces that are the predominant security force in Iraq. Again, it's not apples to apples. And it didn't always go smoothly. But I do think to take into account your excellent summary, the best answer would be somewhere in between just swallowing up the Kurds entirely. There's one security forces, one government, that's it. Versus I do agree it'd probably be unsustainable to have a totally certainly independent Kurdistan that would be very hard-planned to land. I don't think the regional powers would go for it. But totally autonomous security forces in government. But if you could negotiate-- the trick here is how do you negotiate a degree of autonomy? So there is a sense that Kurds are relatively self-governing in the territories of control. In Iraq, there's a combination of national security forces, but then kind of a local, almost national guard-ish type forces. That's what you want. That's hard. The Turks may object to this and that. But the diplomacy should be trying to land the plane there. Because the worst case scenario is the Kurds give up all their leverage, and then they end up getting essentially massacred or swallowing up. Yeah, I mean, the swallowing way Tom Barrick is in part so bullish on the Alshara plan, because the Turks, as you mentioned, they don't like the Kurdish forces, because there's separatist groups that are connected and it's very complicated. So this is really important. We'll watch this one going forward. Also, we'll likely have huge bearing on Alshara's treatment of other minority groups within Syria. That's something important to watch. OK, a couple more things from us. So many listeners may have heard of a ketamine adult white nationalist who learned how to code named Elon Musk. Elon bought a company called Twitter. He renamed it X, because he thought that was cool. It features a generative AI chatbot named Grock. Last summer, there was a software update to Grock. It morphed Grock into a full on Nazi Grock, literally, referred to itself as mecca Hitler. Remember those stories? Yeah, there's a days. Yeah. But I guess Elon was not content with that being Grock's worst news cycle. So at the end of December, they announced that Grock would now generate images based on your prompt. And so in the least surprising turn of events ever, people on Twitter started using Grock to undress others, mostly women and at times children or minors, at least. So I'm going to read you a quick graph from the Guardian's coverage of what all happened. This is verbatim. Relatively tame requests by ex-ducers to ultra-photographs to show women and bikinis rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, and to increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis. Then bikinis made a dental floss placed in sexualized positions and made to bend over. So their genitals were visible. By January 8th, as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour, according to an analysis for the Guardian. So good stuff there. So Elon's response at first was kind of laugh about it and make fun of it. Then they limited the feature to only paying users. Because I think we all should agree that $8 a month entitles you to a undressing teenage girls on the internet. And checkmark and undressing. Yeah, it seems like it makes sense. But this is where governments started to step in Indonesia and Malaysia, they blocked GROC all together, regulators in the EU and the UK, and then France, they all launched formal investigations, Japan is threatening legal action, then the Attorney General California, Senate, cease and desist and launch an investigation into XAI. There's some users who are suing, including Ashley St. Clair, who is the mother of one of Elon Musk's many children. But there is a silver lining here, Ben, which is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced the Pentagon will integrate GROC into its network. So quote, very soon we'll have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department, Hegseth said. So what could go wrong, I guess? Yeah, I mean, just to start on that and then go back to the grotesque, the next, if we somehow get to 2029 and there's a Democratic president, there's a lot of bumps along that road. I've always been worried that they're going to, like, basically subcontract out the entire DOD budget to, like, GROC and Palantir. You're going to have to rip out a lot of stuff, because you trust GROC with the US military. That's something to watch. A little bumps along the road for you too, if I'm in Congress and this is something to be paying attention to, this shows how little guardrails, if you can't even put guardrails around this, like you're not going to use your chatbot to essentially, I mean, it's horrible the thing about what people could do with this tool. I also like love the party that brought you Q&A and is like, "Now we're good with this." And it's not hard. I mean, it shouldn't be hard, or even if it is hard, they should have to prevent this from happening. You're right. It's fucking code. You guys are smart enough to do that. Apparently such geniuses, you prevent people from creating naked versions of human beings, like just full stop, right? But I think, again, to continue the theme of leverage today, ban X, ban GROC. I actually don't know why more countries don't ban X. I mean, if I was a European leader, and he's using it to promote white nationalist Nazis in my country, show some leverage to Elon Musk. I mean, there's just this kind of fallacy that there's an inevitability to the worst things. If this man is allowing his AI that he's plowing money into to be used to generate naked images of living children, then fucking shut him down. Yeah. And also, if you watch Elon closely, he's gotten real insane recently. Yeah. But the white nationalism is basically retweeting white genocide memes and saying that it will be real. Yeah. You make a good point about banning it in this sort of pathetic sense of inevitability. Yeah. You put a Europe in lecture them about their like tech laws, but you won't say a word about the Russians banning Twitter. Yeah. And look, look, I mean, I know there'll be free speech things here, but I live in California. I have daughters. I would like the state of California to ban GROC if it doesn't fix this. And I don't think that's a speech issue. Like, what on earth does free speech have to do with the capacity for a technological tool to generate a naked image of a teenage girl? Like, or anyone. Yeah. By the way, there are plenty of free speech car vats around pedophilia and child sex trafficking, right? It's constantly agreed. The one of the things that people agree on here. So yeah, the QAnon party over there, they used to like not like Jeff, Jeffrey Epstein, and you know, like I don't spare me your free speech arguments when it gets to these kinds of images. Really terrible people, paywalling it is just really just like the perfect format for like their entire world view. It's like, well, this horrible thing. It's fine. If I get paid. Finally, Ben, over in Kadees, Spain, I think it's how you say it. We saw an unusual entry in the city's annual contest of carnival groups at an event we should have one. We should have here in Los Angeles, I think. So one group flexed their creative muscles to bring us this incredibly moving tribute to of all people, scientists, Steven Hawking. So again, Ben and I have not seen what this tribute looked like. This is not what I thought. I thought we'd get like a Liz Trust YouTube. We don't know what we're looking for. No. For some reason, we've decided to repeatedly throw caution to the wind and risk cancellation by letting the professional instigators on the pod say the world team make us cold watch videos. So with that throat clearing done, let's watch whatever the hell this is going to be. What the fuck is this? Okay, so what we saw there was a dozen Steven Hawking impersonators doing an impression of him and at the end, they sprayed them in the face with silly string. Why did they spray them with string? What is happening? Maybe the world already ended. Maybe the world ended like ten years ago. And we're all living in the simulation in an AI generated simulation where should like that happens are minimal crones wearing blue sunglasses like why why seem talking to like okay, some more. Why why seem talking because like I mean, he was hyper relevant like 50 years, 30 years ago, but like I even thought about that guy in a while. So there's some more context that I hadn't read yet that I'm now going to share. So this is 12 comedic musical performers. They say their act was to raise awareness for mobility issues in ALS. The lyrics from their song included with my will to live and my wheelchair. I have reached the very top, even the stars Leonard Cohen eat your heart out. Have you seen that? Remember when Sora came out that like AI? I don't know how our team found that. I yeah. What do you watch corners of the internet? Was that on the list? Trust show? Is that how you found it? Like I have a six three. I have a weird scrolling problem myself, but it tends to lead me to like, you know, deep NBA Twitter. Yeah. Well, the Twitter for you tab is just gotten into my real sickle part of my brain. It's like all like clavicular in the Naga influencers like mocking each other and getting it to fight. So that they're dudes outside clubs in Miami and then they all got banned. Did you see the sort of videos that people were making early on when it came out of Stephen Hawking wrestling and like going up the top rope and like taking dudes out? They're really good. Oh, God. Well, I mean, I think I know what was going on there at the end, but I I didn't want to say it with my words. I didn't like the silly string. I didn't like the objects. I didn't like what the silly string was trying to tell me. I didn't like how it made me feel. So this is a, so this is how I. It's for people who are watching. I'm, I'm, I usually save my nicotine laws and it's all after the podcast, so I'm just popping. It's maybe now. Okay. Well, on that note, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview about what's going on in it. You sure? Please. I hope you didn't listen to that. This is not the worst we've ever done. We'll talk about what's happening in Uganda with the opposition candidate Bobby Wein in their elections. What's happening in Sudan? A lot of really important stuff. Yes. Yes. So we had to give you a break. Yes. We had to give you a break. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes. We got to that. So please stick around for that. Pause the world is brought to you by select quote. If you're a new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, they're select quote. For over 40 years, select quote has helped more than two million Americans understand their options and get the coverage they need over $700 billion in coverage and counting as a broker. Their mission is simple to find you the right insurance policy at the best price. 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Even if this is your first time thinking about it, head to selectquote.com and a licensed insurance agent will call you right away with the right policy for your life and your budget. Select quote. They shop, you save. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. With the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at selectquote.com/world, save more than 50% on term life insurance at selectquote.com/world today to get started that's select quote.com/world. U.S. voters abroad have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to vote from abroad.org and click Request My Ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote from abroad.org. Okay, I'd very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World, Yuzra Albegear. She's the Africa correspondent for Sky News and she's just back from Kampala where she was reporting on the Ugandan election in the middle of an internet blackout which could not have been easy. Yuzra, welcome back to the show. No problem. Thanks for having me, Ben. So, we wanted to start by talking about this Ugandan election. On one side, you had the 81-year-old kind of strong man, President Musevani, who's been in power since 1986. On the other hand, you had a 43-year-old opposition leader Bobby Wein. who's actually been on this podcast a couple of times for those who remember once with his wife, Barbie actually, who also ran in 2021. And just to kind of set the scene, you know, this, something of a rematch, Bobby Wein at some risk to himself has kind of stayed largely in Uganda in recent years. The election took place amidst the internet blackout. You described Kampala as feeling like a war zone. Just set the scene, what was the mood in the country leading up to this election? How did people that you interacted with see the vote before it happened? - I mean, there was definitely an electricity and nervousness when we arrived. It could have gone anyway. And I think people were very aware one of what the state was willing to do to prevent any sort of protest action. But also this looming internet shutdown. So we arrived, say, 48 hours before the shutdown. But it had been disputed because the government actually came out and said, no, we're not going to be shutting down the internet. So people then kind of let their guard down. And then the day before voting, the telecom's ministry government agency put out a note to say that they'd be shutting down the internet. So there was just this feeling of suffocation and looming doom. There was definitely a sense of dread. And the people we spoke to, some of them said, they wouldn't vote that there was no point. They knew that it would be, or they felt that it was definitely going to be rigged. And that their vote wouldn't matter and that they didn't want to risk their lives to basically cast a ballot that would go encountered. The shift was on the day that the votes were counted. So we went to a tally center in the center of compiler that was where the votes were counted, not just announced, that's the national tally center, but where actually you could see people declaring the results in different polling stations. And when we arrived, it was very quiet. We were told it was lunchtime. And we were actually like, what are we going to film here? Everyone's having food and drinking coffee. And so we went to one tent where a woman was declaring results. And it had a sense of apprehension, anticipation, people kind of hanging onto every word. And then as soon as two people voiced their opposition to the results that were being declared that they were not matching up with what their agents had told them, were the actual results in those voting stations. It was so crazy to see how quickly kind of the state versus the people manifested in that environment. Immediately there was this deployment of military, of police, backing national resistant movement officials who were crushing any voices of dissent just in that voting tent. And so we went from this really heated brawl in the tally center to the streets where people were burning tires and being hunted down, Ben. Not just cracked, you know, we always say crack down, but they were hunted down. There was such an intense deployment of troops, huge APVs, trucks, just police, military, just descending on the center of Kampala, this huge roundabout where you have to, the kind of roundabout that everyone has to pass through to get anywhere in Kampala. And there was such an intensity to that day that it felt like a war zone. I saw soldiers act in ways that wouldn't even be allowed in the bush, wouldn't even be allowed on the front line. And this zero tolerance approach is what people have been dealing with in Uganda for months. Every time they go out and protest, even just yelling slogans of support for Bobby Wein, saying people power Bobby, immediately they're met with this. It's just like a punch in the gut. Like, don't even try and breathe a word against your own Miss 70. Well, you know, the tally that you mentioned, Miss 71, claiming 72% of the vote, obviously that's disputed by Bobby Wein in the opposition. Miss 70, in his victory speech, called the Opposition Terrace, who were working with foreigners in homosexuals. I guess one place need to start. I mean, that's 72% figure. I mean, is there any sense of legitimacy around it? I mean, I know we can't get any kind of independent tally here. But what is your sense of the likelihood that that number matches any reality? Well, the number is just under 20% more. So you got 58% last time. And now he's got the 72%. The likelihood of that is very slim. I think realistically, there's such voter apathy that I would be very surprised if people were rallying in that way for President Miss 70. But then there is also the fact that a lot of people are seeing the wars happening on the continent. They're seeing the war in the DRC. They're seeing the war in Sudan. And some people do feel like they need a strong man. Like Mosevone to hold it together. Someone with decades of experience who has a hand in all of these wars in a way that is materially beneficial for Uganda. So there are people who are voting for President Miss 70 for those reasons, for the kind of security and stability that you get with a despot, with someone who's just held the country together and monopolized power in a way that things would fall apart without him. Very similar to Ahmed Al-Bashir in Sudan. The reason that the rigging allegations feel like they have some credence is because we witnessed firsthand the fury of the people monitoring every single declaration. And telling us this does not add up to what our agents are telling us on the ground. As speaking to a 23-year-old member of the National Unity Party, Bobby Wine's Party, who was so full of angst that her voice was breaking, like, what are we meant to do? We went out, we voted, we did what we were meant to do. Like, what more can be done for us? What can the international community do? This exasperation that was so genuine, that felt truly genuine, that they followed everything step-by-step and they wanted their ballot to be their bullet, their weapon. And just the despair that comes with that was very real, very palpable. I did speak to the Prime Minister of Uganda as the results were declared. She was there, kind of, representing the state in the National Talley Center. And I asked her, is this a free and free election? She goes, it was. It was very quickly before I finished. So I asked, you know, why are the military and police deployed in the streets? And she said, well, no, the military and the police are deployed because there are agents of chaos and there are people who are rejecting and creating anarchy. And that's always the response. So there's this intense militarization around a process that's meant to be democratic. And then when people are hurt and brutalized by that show of force, they're called criminals. But we were there when opposition party officials were calling the government criminals. So this was not a free and fair election, just by the sheer intensity of the militarization. If we get down to the votes and vote rigging, I think that's going to be quite a process to prove. But the climate was not a climate of democratic. It was not a democratic exercise by any means. It was definitely an authoritarian process of fake legitimacy. So I want to ask about both the government and the opposition. Starting with the government, you actually sat down with President Mousseventy a few days ago. I should add, you know, he's been backed over the years by the United States. I think much to our discredit in a lot of ways. The African union kind of differs to him. And notice they didn't exactly, you know, mount any concerns about the result. But I noticed in the talk with you, he even went out of his way to say that he's not senile. I will tell you, I was in a meeting with him 10 years ago. It was a multilateral meeting about held in Ethiopia, about South Sudan. And in that meeting, he wasn't-- I mean, I don't want to-- I will resist being a doctor. But let's just say he wasn't the sharpest guy at the round table that I was at. He had to kind of be reminded of some of the agenda and stuff. What is your sense of his faculties, what he's trying to do? He has a son, who's kind of the Don Jr. of Uganda, who's constantly making threats online. He's threatened to kill opposition figures. He's threatened to invade Kenya. What is the current state of President Mousseventy and kind of his succession plan has approached politics based on your time with him? So to just talk about maybe lucidity, I found him to be-- quite lucid. I mean, there were the ramblings of someone who is of a certain age but also has so much they want to say and goes off on tangents, homophobic tangents, for example, tribalistic tangents. But what was interesting is that he was up for the fight, he liked that he was being interviewed properly. I actually found that I felt like at some point he enjoyed that it was a bit of a fight that we were, you know, I wasn't agreeing with him that I was challenging him. So I found that interesting that there was still that kind of spirit in him where he wanted to be challenged and not just pander to like everyone around him. In terms of his health, moved, walked very quickly, was very seemed very fit. I was actually quite surprised because you know, he's my father's age on paper. And you know, he seemed very fighting fit, you know, for his age in terms of his movements and how quickly he moved around the gardens. We were in the garden of the state lodge where he lives in the state house compound in the center of Kampala. What succession plan for me was almost like a dead end because as soon as you ask him about succession, he says whoever my party wants. As soon as I asked him about him, how long he wants to rule, he said whatever my party wants, whatever the people want. So he kind of sticks to that line that he had as a rebel leader, which is it's about the people because I did challenge him on that because we, I met him 40 years on from the Bush War victory that brought him into power. And what people kind of forget is that he had two unelected terms before the 1996 election. So he's actually seeking his, he's now going into his ninth term after seven election wins. And so I was really curious to see what changed for him in terms of his mentality because there are so many quotes on record of him saying that the problem with Africa is not the people. It's the leaders who want to hold on to power. You know, he has all these kind of like he just has these gems about democracy and people power and you think it's real. So I wanted to find out what the contradiction was and his constant rebuttal was the people have elected me. They want me. And so it did kind of bring some insight or it kind of helped me understand that this whole process is about that for him potentially that he sees this process as a legitimization of this continued reign so that he can somehow feel like the things that he believed in when he was younger and the things that he espoused when he was younger still hold true because he never, he never really shifted on that. He never said, no, well, things change. He said, no, the people have elected me because I'm here and I have the knowledge and I have the experience and you should be so lucky essentially. The people of Uganda are lucky that he's still around to share the experience that he has. And I do feel like there's this paternalism that he has, that McGarby had, that a lot of, you know, liberation leaders turned despots have where it's I'm the one who could hold it together because I'm the one who knows what it took to have this, to create this, to build this for you all. So his line about the intern, Kagame, ANC. Yeah. Yeah. At large. But it's the, and that kind of showed in the line of we built the internet because that's it. We built this country so we can switch it off and we can shut it down when we want. And I kind of knew going into it that that was potentially the mentality. And so it was really interesting to see the ways that it kind of manifested in the micro, whether it was the internet or it was, you know, he spoke to me about Sudan and his time, you know, talking to Bashir and Turaabi about the issues in Sudan. And one of the things that was interesting is that he said to me, you know, we spend a lot of time telling Ahmad al-Bashir that you should be looking at interest, not identity. And the irony is is that Musevani has created many districts based on ethnicity and tribe and in Uganda. He's multiplied districts. And so I actually believe that he's done both. It's identity and interest, but ultimately self-interest. So speaking to him, there's an interest in his son being his successor. There's an interesting kind of keeping everything within the family and keeping everything kind of held within the national resistance movement. But there's also something really, you know, watching NRM celebrate in the election hall and the in the tally center when they won the election was this feeling that it doesn't really have any meaning anymore. You know, these winds, there's just an entitlement to it that they're just holding on to rather than actually recovering anything. And I'll just go to one thing when the ANC lost their majority in the 2024 election. I remember interviewing an MK vet who was the Minister of Defense in that in that administration before the government of national unity. And I said to her, how do you feel that the ANC has lost their majority? How do you feel that you've lost? She was like, where are the ones who created this democracy? Where are the ones who gave people the right to vote? And she was very angry. And so it just really comes down to that as we built it, we hold on to it. And we can destroy anything to do that. That raises the question there whether that's how people see it. You know, which gets to the opposition and also just the people of Uganda, you know, Bobby Wein is 43. You know, he kind of comes out of, you know, the arts there, a musician who went into politics, generated a lot of excitement, showed a lot of personal courage by staying in the country when he kind of could have chosen the path of exile. But as you pointed out, 70% of Uganda is under 30, right? So he may be paternalistic, but it's hard to imagine an 81 year old kind of being in touch with the concerns of the 70% of his people that are young. What is your sense of, you know, is it fatalism that this is just the way things are? Is it anger? Is it is there any hope of changing things through politics so they want the anything out of the international community, which doesn't really exist anymore? What's your sense of that younger population and what's next for this opposition movement that has now tried this with Bobby Wein twice through no fault of his own really just kind of can't can't do things through democratic means? What's the mood? Do you think among younger Ugandans? I think there's a lot of frustration and that's regional, right? It's also in Kenya. It's also in Tanzania. This this regional Gen Z act about what they're kind of left to deal with and the fact that actually they inherent all the issues in these countries and then they don't have any say in how the countries are governed. Because Uganda, I mean, President Micevani spoke about the economic growth and he had those statistics immediately to hand 3.9 billion GDP when he came into power in 1986 and now it's 64 billion. But what he no one ever speaks about is the national debt crisis. They've got around 32 billion dollars in national debt and that's the debt that young people are going to inherit. They also have really bad youth unemployment. I mean, I met a young woman in the voting line in Bobby Wein's stronghold and polling station who said, you know, I graduated and I don't have I can't get a job with my degree. I don't know what to do and her voting for Bobby is kind of a vote. It's not a wasted vote. It's this whole concept that Bobby keeps saying protest vote. You vote out of protest. She said, you know, we know he's going to win but will he actually be announced the winner? I'm voting to ensure that he has one even if that's not the result that shared. So there's it feels like this was an exercise in agency even if that doesn't lead to results, tangible results. And I think, you know, Bobby will continue to call people to protest. I mean, he's just shared that he doesn't he's not going to dispute the results in court because the judiciary is influenced by Micevanie and his administration, but he's calling people to protest. The concern with that is that young people know they're going to get killed. And that's I think that's where Bobby is struggling a bit because I mean, I interviewed him in 2018 and he was an MP and he was full of life and full of of energy and optimism and idealism and we went to the social media tax protest kind of one of the first big protests they organized where people actually came out. It was when the Ugandan government started, you know, we're proposing to to to charge tax for the use of social media. So it's always been a weird internet kind of battleground where the internet is what brings people out in frustration, the lack of internet or the controlling of it. But seeing him, he did seem, I don't want to say defeated, I didn't feel defeat from him, but I felt a sadness, I felt exhaustion really like someone who's been beleaguered and I I did kind of push him on the blood. And the bloodshed, and what protection he's offering, Ugandans, when they kind of go out and support him and face the security apparatus in full force. And he was very adamant, I'm just one Ugandan, it's on the security forces to not shoot. I'm a leader, I show the way, I lead the way, I'm doing that. But there was a holonist to his responses, because I think ultimately he has to go and speak to the families of these kids. And he had spoken to a family just the day before I spoke to him, a man who was 33 killed in the polling station area in Bobby's neighborhood, so someone from his community. And I do think that there is, that is the breaking of the spirit, that Mahoozi, that the state are kind of working on, that they want to just crush the dissent as soon as it happens, so that people decide it's not worth their time. And that Bobby ends up being someone that eventually is blamed for this amount of bloodshed. And I think to some degree it could work, I mean when the vote, when the election results were announced, we drove back. And we saw people gathered around TVs, and we were like, wait, are they watching the election results? Are they waiting for a speech? Watching the Manchester United Man City game, like completely checked out, gathering to watch the results, no protests, everyone back at work. I mean I've been checking in since we've been back for the last kind of two days, and I still haven't heard of protests pick up again. I think there's generally just a sense of, all right, it didn't work, you know, it doesn't mean they won't protest again. And Bobby, continuing to call for protests might change something, but that one day, Ben, where votes were being counted, and the security forces in the military descended, was so aggressive and so brutal, that I do think that they took the kind of air out of it for a little bit. They definitely made it very clear that people would lose their lives if they went out to protest. I honestly felt like we were on the front line, and I've been to a lot of protests in the last few years, around these sort of issues of Gen Z upset and, you know, Ruto must go, I haven't seen anything like this. You know, in Kenya it's very dynamic, it's gunfire, but loads of tear gas and lots of chasing and snatch squads. In Maputo, very trigger happy police officers who just kind of shoot in the air and shoot at people and have rabid dogs, rabid police dogs going for protestors. But this is the first time that I felt that this was a battlefield that could have been in the bush. Well, look, I think that's a very important and powerful picture. And I think you're kind of describing this moment where the balance is really tipped in these kind of strong man direction, Musevani, Kagame and Rwanda, you know, Ruto and Kenya, but we go to get Cameroon. And frankly, we go to Iran. We go to the United States. We go to Russia. This is not just limited Africa, but it does feel like, at some point, something has to give here, you know, like these people are not going to live forever, Gen Z's growing. So it's something to watch how long this dynamic can hold. Well, you really appreciate you coming off such fresh reporting. We'll have to have you back at some point. There's Somali land. There's Sudan. There's so many things happening on the continent that bear attention. But I'm really thankful for you to give us this powerful glimpse into what's happened to Uganda. So thanks for that and for your reporting. Thanks, Ben. Appreciate it. Thanks again to you, Sarah Boogier, for joining the show. I think we'll probably let him do that too soon. Thanks to Minimal Cron for the glasses. So I bet he had, yeah, just had pink eye. He had a minor eye procedure, they said. Oh, procedure. Don't ever, don't come at us and be like, oh, you're being insensitive. I'm sorry. There's a way to not wear those glasses and deal with your minor eye. I was always taught that you got pink eye because someone farted on your pillow. The last time I got it, actually, I think it was because I changed the diaper and you know, yeah, yeah. That was next. That's not good. Anyway. I'm sure next week we'll have, actually, I'm sure I'll see you before that. The odds of us doing some Davos, you know, special are pretty high. Who can resist? Yeah. Anyway, thanks for listening, subscribe for it. Potsy of the world is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alonam and Kovsky. Our producer is Michael Goldspin. Our associate producer is Anisha Banerjee. We get production support from Saul Rubin. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vittor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is engineered, mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor. Audio support by Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis. Thank you to our digital team, Ben Heffkoat, Mia Kellman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. 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