Keir Starmer’s Last Stand?

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I'm Tommy Geetor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben congrats on your New York maker bockers. It's unreal timing. Commission to glow. This is the best that they've played in my entire life. Every when they're good, it is still agonizing. I don't know what it feels like to have your team just like paste the shit out of everybody they play. Just crush the switch. Just crush and be fun and cool and have our fans take over Philadelphia. Young zing monga people. Yeah. It was, you know, it was, let's put it this way like a four game destruction of Philadelphia was more fun than what would have been probably an agonizing Nick Celtic series for six or seven games. It would have been tough. I've been still out there tweeting away. So bang. Twin towers. Yeah. A lot of tweets that you'd take in a couple different ways. Yeah. Well, you know, stillers. Like I said, he's just living my text read online. Does he sit on the wood? Is he sitting like a corset? He's a corset. Yeah. What do you think those cost? I got to go. You on the wood? Yes. That's for the first time this year. And it's weird because you look kind of look down this row. And there's like Spike Lee and stillers, you know, Shalamay wasn't there that day. And Tim Morgan. And it's, you know, I, I, I actually like our celebrities like sometimes that's kind of nauseating, but like Spike Lee, come on, I mean, Spike's been going forever through thick and thin. He's a fan. Yeah. He's a fan mostly. Yeah. Yeah. He's absolutely deserves to enjoy this. Shalamay has proven himself to be a real sports fan, seeming like a pretty cool guy. I will say that they're, they have the ex-players there, which is cool to see too. I won't name names, but one of them walked by me in the, the whiff of marijuana. It was like the one most powerful smells. I got like a contact tie on the court side, but it's good. That's good. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah. And then Jim Dolan is like using AI facial recognition to kick out any critics. All right. Just to give a rack here, Pablo Torrey did a fine, great piece about Dolan. Dolan's the owner of the next and he literally like has his friggin security goons run around the stadium and chase people that chant things critical of him. He's that petty of a, Salamay. Monitor's people in the bathroom. It's really creepy. That is. Really? Kind of, Palantiris. Right. That's very Palantirisque. Okay. Enough about the next. Congrats. I'm happy for you. Thank you. We have a great, great show today. We're going to lead with something new. We're going to talk about the recent elections in the UK, which were a disaster for the Labour Party. And it led to widespread calls for Prime Minister Kirstarmer to step aside and allow leadership election. That will debate whether that's a good idea or not. Then we're going to walk you through the last disastrous week in the disastrous war with Iran. And missions been cease fires on life support. We had ballooning economic consequences all of it. Then we watched Israeli Prime Minister BB Dantia, who's interviewed in 60 minutes so that you don't have to. We're going to let you know about all the hard-hitting questions from the new and improved Barry, YCBS. Well, pretty few Trump's trip to China is going to use actually, I think he's in air right now. He's going to go meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and we'll tell you what both sides want out of the visit. What it means for Iran? What it means for Taiwan? We'll talk a little bit about some jockeying for the future of the Democratic Party. Unformed policy. We'll bitch about coverage in Marco Rubio because that's all we have left. We're just whining little babies. Cry about stuff. And then we're going to tell you about Cash Patel's recent testimony in the U.S. Senate that then you did an interview. I talked to Susie Hansen, who's a really great journalist who's written for like the New York Times magazine among other places. She lived in Turkey for 10 years and she wrote a book essentially about one neighborhood but it's really about the transformation of Turkey under type Erdogan. Both inside of Turkey but also this role it's played in welcoming millions of Syrian refugees in the Arab Spring and the rise of authoritarianism that Erdogan has been a part of. So it's both a conversation about Erdogan and Turkey but also about understanding what's happened in the world through this place that all the trends converge in. I mean, like there's not one thing that hasn't happened in the world in the last 15 years it hasn't run through Turkey so it's a great conversation, great book, be sure to check it out. I always think about the day that there was that attempted coup. We talked about that too. Fighter jets. Yeah. Well, I know. Yeah, we were just, you came in and we were still talking about it after the interview because I have so many questions about it. Thanks rolling down the street and then just disappeared. And yet Erdogan seemed to know about it but did he? It's like face timing from his phone on the plane. Yeah, yeah. The whole thing was very strange. Fucking crazy. Finally, after that, our friends of the pod subscribers will hear Ben and I take some questions from the friend of the pod subscriber community from our discord. If you want to join, go to crooked.com/friends, get ad free episodes of this show, ad free episodes of PodSafe America, you get bonus episodes of PodSafe America, you get polling deep dives from Dan Pfeiffer and you can get discounted tickets to CrookedCon, our second annual jamboree of politics, fun, hot takes, cold takes, light drinking, heavy petting, there's all of it. So crooked.com/friends if you want to go and by the way, subscribing is the number one thing you could do to help us grow as a progressive independent media company. And if that's a bridge too far for you, at least just subscribe to PodSafe the world on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Right through the show, review the show, it really helps us grow and we will appreciate it. So all right, Ben, let's talk about, let's leave with the UK because we've been doing around stuff for like two months straight now. There've been some major political machinations in the UK. Prime Minister Kirstarmer's 10-year-old Prime Minister could be over soon or not. We just don't know yet. The backstory here is that last week there were local elections in England and elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. These were not election to parliament itself. It was not like directly impacting Starmer standing, but these council elections are seen as bellweathers to assess the political mood in the UK and the mood is pissed. Photos are pissed. The results were really, really bad for the Labour Party. Remember, Labour won an historic landslide in 2024, but in this election just two years later, Labour lost 1,400 council seats, so it's just a drumming. And Labour lost votes from both directions. They lost to the Greens on their left. They lost to Reform UK on their right. Reform is the right wing xenophobic party run by Nigel Farage, the cameo star, Nigel Farage. So they made big gains in England. Reform also did really well in Wales and Scotland. In Wales, the Welsh Nationalist Party won the most seats, but reform came in second. And Labour and the Tories lost ground. This came after Labour was literally the leading party in Wales for 100 years, over 100 years. And then in Scotland, the S&P of the Scottish National Party, they're going to stay in control of parliament. And Labour had its worst ever result in Scotland. It is now tied with reform. The Greens also did quite well in Scotland. So what does it all mean? I think first we're seeing the total collapse of the traditional two-party system. Yeah. And it's really becoming a five-party system. I mean, you've got Labour and the Tories cratering. The Lib Dems are doing better. The Greens reform UK, they're getting ground. And then in Scotland and Wales, you also have like Nationalist local parties. Second, you have voters just furious about the cost of living and a bunch of economic issues and Labour has not made their lives better, they're getting punished for it. And there's lots of reports that Labour campaigners were on the doors and they were talking to voters and the voters were like, we hate Keir Starmer, like visceral hate for that man. Which is interesting. So that gets us to the question of whether Starmer will step aside or be deposed. On Monday, he gave a defiant speech taking responsibility for the loss, but rejecting calls to resign. Let's listen to a bit of that. The election results last week were tough, very tough. We lost some brilliant Labour representatives. That hurts and it should hurt. I get it, I feel it and I take responsibility. We are not just facing dangerous times, but dangerous opponents, very dangerous opponents. This hurts, not just because Labour has done badly, but because if we don't get this right, our country will go down, a very dark It seems like he's not feeling emotions, but performing. - I was gonna say, yeah. - So on Tuesday, he also had the cabinet meeting, he was again defined, he told his team, he's not going anywhere, but it's not entirely up to him. There are reports that more than 90 labor MPs want Starmer to step aside. That includes four ministers in his government. But crucially, Ben, no alternative candidate has gotten the support of 81 sitting labor MPs, which is what you need to formally challenge Starmer and trick her leadership election. So Ben, I'll pause there. Your thoughts on these results, and then after that, do you want to make the case that it's time for your Starmer to step aside and I'll make the Starmer should stay case? - Yeah. - It's draw man, just for fun. - Yeah, yeah, and I could probably argue it both ways, but I would definitely tilt them in the direction I'm gonna argue for. Look, the problem here is that labor won this massive majority in large part because the Tories had self-immolated as we covered meticulously on this podcast. - Over a decade. - Over the course of a decade with Brexit and Liz Truss and all the chaos, Boris Johnson having COVID parties all the rest of it. And so they get this huge mandate and have done fuck all with it. I mean, like what was their program? Like what is key Starmers? - They got jobs for Jeffrey Epstein, friends. - Yeah, well what is key Starmers? Well, this is part of the problem is that their theory, Starmer's theory of the case was I got a purged Jeremy Corbyn, the left wing, previously leader of labor and all of his supporters and moved this party to the center to make it an acceptable turn of to the Tories and win. And that worked. But the problem is they had no program for when they won. And this is a country that has an identity crisis after Brexit. This is a country that is desperately need of growth. This is a country that has xenophobic rising far-right politics, but desperately needs immigrants to sustain their care economy and their NHS. So there's a lot of work to be done and he's not offering any vision or any big ideas about what the UK is or what their economic future is. And that's showing up in the polls. And I know some of these, one of my, someone I know, Paymana Asad actually won by 30 votes, but that 30 votes, it's tough. And here I'll pivot to the case against Starmer. I know what he said, which is that we can't be as chaotic as the Tories and change leaders in the merry ground. Let me have five years to have my full mandate. The problem with that is he has not shown any other gear. You know, when you see a politician, I mean, first of all, does he get it? No, he looks like he's reading talking points. He was told to say I feel it. He did. He tends to be perhaps where they said show passion. And he just can't really show much in her passion. That is fair. He's like a well-meaning, perhaps guy, but like he doesn't. But then beyond that, he hasn't shown that he has any new vision or any new program. It's all political positioning intact. You know, should I tack a little bit more to the right as they've done on immigration, which doesn't make sense, because if you're anti-immigrant, you'll just vote for reform. Should I tack to the left? And look, the green party's done a lot to differentiate itself and actually stand on principle. That's why they're winning voters. I just don't think he knows what he wants to do as prime minister of a state prime minister. And there's a kind of, hey, you know, there's a kind of younger Joe Biden vibe here too. I just want to stick around and look. He's the guy that did August. Yeah, boy, it's true, to be fair. But he's not wrong about reform UK being scary. I mean, this is a xenophobic far-right party led by Nigel Farage, who should be a punchline, not a prime minister. But precisely because of that threat, I just don't see him rehabilitating labor to be able to compete with Nigel Farage. And so, and look, the biggest problem is there's not an alternative. Part of the problem is not an alternative. The biggest alternative is Andy Burnham, right? Who's a very popular mayor, but who would have to come into the parliament to become prime minister. He was blocked from coming into parliament by Kierstharmer and his allies. And so, they prevented there from being alternatives. Again, echoes of the Democratic Party. We've done primaries. And so, I just don't know that Kierstharmer has showed us that he can govern any differently than he already has. And we see what the results are of how he governs. And I just therefore think that, and look, take some time. If you're not ready today to find an alternative, figure out a timeline to find one. But if they're running two, three years now into the next election with Kierstharmer, I just think that's a recipe for disaster. So let me strom in the case for why Starmer should stay. 'Cause I actually think it's-- Then we'll talk about our own personal views. I have a fairly strong view, but it's complicated. So the case for why Starmer should stay is-- Like I said at the top, this was not a landslide for reform or a total wipeout for labor. It was the political system really fracturing into this new reality of multi-party, not just a two-party system. I think we do adjust our expectations accordingly. Yes, Kierstharmer is unpopular. His polling is terrible. There's all these reports about visceral hatred of him on the doorsteps. But every single leader in Europe is unpopular right now. Right, in April, you gov did a big tracking poll. Kierstharmer is 44 points underwater. French president and Emil Macron is 49 points underwater. German chancellor Friedrich Merz is 52 points underwater. Even leaders, I think that you and I think of as more deaf politically or at least more interesting or struggling. Like Georgia Maloney is negative 22, her approval. Pedro Sanchez is 21 points underwater. So everyone's getting fucked. People are pissed everywhere. And then again, getting rid of Starmer is the easy part. Figuring out who comes next is much harder. Have you heard of West Streeting, Angela Rainer, or Andy Burnham, me neither. And those are the leading candidates to replace the sky, right? And like if West Streeting wants to run, he needs to man up and do it. No one's manned up yet. And so to your point Ben, like about Starmer and his, what do you want to do with the job? I don't get the sense from anybody really what they want to do within labor. Like it's not about who comes next is about what comes next. Like what are you going to do with the mandate? And like no one's laying out an alternative vision. I know that's complicated when you're still in government. But no one's done it yet. And then in that speech, we didn't play all of it. But like Starmer did try to lay out a bit of a path forward. He has like more direct intervention in the economy. He talks about like nationalizing steel plants, more partnership with the EU. He takes a more head on fight with Nigel Farage. He blames the Iran War for a lot of his troubles. Speaking of which, you know, the one thing this will do is it will mean that Starmer helps Nigel Farage deliver on his big election promise. Let's watch a clip of Farage ranting away after the election already happened about the results. We thought this election campaign on a big national slogan. You might remember it. It said, vote reform and-- Yes, summer house. And I tell you what, he'll be gone for the middle of the summer. The most unpatriotic, worst, least prepared prime minister we've ever seen in this country. And we will have seen the back of him. We are directly taking votes from patriotic old labor in areas that, frankly, they've been pretty much able to take for granted since the end of World War I. It all goes to show that over the course of the last two years since we made that breakthrough in the general election, we have professionalised the policy. We've done it at a very, very rapid rate. Is it possible to have a phone call with your friend Donald Trump to maybe end this war in Iran? That would help prices over here. I think the war in Iran is very close to it. I've been heroin's just not my thing. [LAUGHTER] There's a way better backdrop for them. Also, I love the guys who have the big broaches, like this one, like a ribbon, like a horse jumping competition. But anyway, so if Starmer goes, he delivers for Farage. And I think that there's no way this ends with just a leadership election. There will be intense pressure to call for an early general election. That'll come up at the worst time possible for labor. It'll rattle the bond markets, so create a permanent economic cost. And so I think the only path forward, deliver on the mandate voters gave Starmer, fight it out. Also, very awkward that the King's speech-- I think it's the day this episode comes out, this Wednesday. And that's where the Prime Minister lays out his legislative agenda. So it's kind of a crazy time to make a change. But that's the case for Starmer. Yeah. I get the case being that part of what, like, we made fun of the Tories for musical chairs, Prime Ministers. And that's suboptimal. First of all, not until Farage, it's like a walking, talking pack of marble reds. You know, that voice is so funny. But I think that they're not easy answers to these problems. I'd say a couple of things. First of all, yes, all those people are under water. But you notice who's less under water. Pedro Sanchez and George Imeloni. Wildly different politically, right? Far from these on the right. Sanchez is on the left. But they believe things, like squishy centrism, that Macron and Starmer embody literally. And Mertz is a little bit more to the right. But like, is not what anyone's looking for. They want to know that we are dealing in this country, but also in the UK, like, existential [BLANK_AUDIO] You know, like the economy doesn't work anymore. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. The world doesn't work anymore. And this idea that you're just gonna tinker and a little bit of a social program here and a little bit of a tough on immigrant rhetoric here and tiny bit of money for the NHS and National Health Service. Like that approach, that's the starmerism. It's just not what people want. - Yeah, and it's also creating problems in it. There's not like a clear faction that wants to get rid of them. It's not like the left of the labor parties all like get rid of starmer. It's just like everyone kind of, it's just not that into one. - Yeah, 'cause nobody really knows what he is and what he stands for. And you know, I'd have to go deeper on what big ideas they could have, what is an actual-- - Here's one. Brexit was bad. - Well, that's what it's about to say. - So you read my mind. It's like, why not just say, you know what? Like this economy has been totally fucked just like this predictable would be by Brexit. We have lost our place in the world stage 'cause we're kind of an orphan now getting beat up by Donald Trump, like we should go back into the EU. Like that's gonna be better for our geopolitics and our economy. It'll be good for growth 'cause we'll have more markets. Like something on that scale. - The speech hints at more, more with Europe, more something. Like hints at getting back, hints at undoing Brexit but then his team was briefing, no, no, no, no. We didn't really mean that. He just wants more partnership with Europe or something like that. It's like, pick a side. - Pick a side and show people that you believe in something and you know what, God forbid, maybe you lose. But at least you tried to do something you cared about, you know? And I think that's what's missing. And you know, Angela Rainer would have normally been the left wing candidate. She'd member out of these tax issues and mortgage scandals that hear like, you know, nothing. - And also like nothing compared to Nigel Farage. I mean, it just came out that he took like $5 million from some crypto billionaire for some reason. He says it was for security, but like there's no, like the British media treats him kind of like a fun person to book on shows and be a talking head and not like a serious candidate. - The guy who couldn't prime minister. - Yeah. I mean, Zach Polanski, the Green Party, you know, has made real inroads because there's a kind of a Mumbani dust that, you know, they have over there. But it's because like people actually know what the Greens believe in, you know? And actually on the centrist side, well, then you have the Lib Dems. Like labor is just kind of homeless now. Like it, what is it? You know, and I think Starmer is not the one, he doesn't seem to be and he could prove me wrong. He doesn't seem to have the answer to that question. - Yeah, I think Zach Polanski really screwed up recently and didn't seem to take seriously enough some very serious incidents of anti-Semitism that have happened in the UK. So I don't know what that means for his future. Like I'm with you, like he's Jewish though. - I know, that's a weird part about all this. I mean, the Starmer speech, I watched the whole thing then then he did a little press conference. It was just, it seemed, it seemed so weak. Like it was like someone was like, try to, you know, turn him up 20%. He kept, he had this refrain where he kept being like, and that's the labor way or like that's the labor choice. So it just, it just, it didn't work. He also, you know, he started to blame Iran for a lot of the UK's problems. I think that's, well, it's probably accurate - Yeah, yeah, that's their LNG, yeah. - It's useful, but I don't know. Like I think, I think no one thinks that Kier Starmer is gonna be leading the labor party into the next election. And the question is just like, when do you get rid of them? - Yeah, that to me is the question. - Can we maybe take your time if she? - I can't. - Make a choice, don't grab a labor list trust, but the clock is ticking. - They gotta start a process. They can't do what Biden did with Harris and just the Democratic Party did and just seem to just to annoy someone. They need a process. I don't know how long that is gonna have to take, but they're gonna have to have one. To your Biden point, I know this is unfair and silly and like an American thing, but I think Starmer said something about this being a fight for the soul of the country. And I was like, oh, just screened Biden. Yeah, look, I think he's a dead man walking politically. I think he was the right guy to get them through that election and he was not the right guy for this moment just because once you have a negative 50 approval rating, I don't know how you fix that. Whoever comes next is probably fucked as well with like staunchly bleeding. I don't know. - Yeah, we beat Medicare. - We beat Medicare. But the scary thing is all these trends were watching of the rise of the far right in the UK, in France, in Germany, and we have the French presidential election coming up in 2027. The Germans have a bunch of elections coming up. You could see like AFD governors in parts of Germany. It's just like the future for the far right in Europe is bright, which is dark for us. - Yeah, it's never a good mix. Far right politics in Europe. - No, not good. (upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. 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And depending on who you ask Ben, the war with Iran could be over or not. Here's a little super cut that tells the story. Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation. Was it accurate to say you think the combat operations are over and done? But they're making-- No, I didn't say that. They are defeated, but that doesn't mean they're done. Is the war with the Ron over? And if it isn't, who will decide when it is? I think it accomplished a great deal, but it's not over, because there's still nuclear material. So clear as day. That was Marco Rubio, Trump. And then this really primates to be done. Yahoo, for those of you lucky enough to not just automatically recognize their voices. So let's try to walk you guys through the last week in the disaster that it was, and then we'll talk about it. So first, Trump announced Project Freedom. That was this PR bullshit plan to guide ships through the straight-of-hormouse. That mission lasted. I think about 36 hours until Trump pulled a plug on it. NBC News later reported that the Saudis and the Kuwaitis were surprised by the plan. They were mad about it, and they pressured the US to pull the plug, because they thought it could unravel the ceasefire and peace talks. Then we had a bunch of breaking news and sirens from reporters quoting senior White House officials saying the US and Iran were very close to making a deal. That, of course, was bullshit. There's still no deal. And according to the financial times, the two sides were very far apart. Trump's demands were a 20-year moratorium on Iran's nuclear enrichment program, transferring the stockpile of uranium enriched to close to the 60% enriched stockpile that the so-called dust out of the country, and then dismantling their three main nuclear sites. And the Iranian response, I think loosely, translates to get fucked. It was, and the war in all fronts, have Iranian management of the straight-of-hormouse going forward, suspension of sanctions. And then they actually gave a little ground on their enriched uranium stockpile. They said they'd ship half of it out for, like, to loot the rest. But they gave Trump a little something. Here's how President Trump took their response. Let's watch. For the time being, the ceasefire remains in place. It's unbelievably weak, I would say. I would call it the weakest right now. You have to read it in a piece of garbage, they said. I didn't even finish reading it. They said, I'm going to waste my time reading it. I would say it's one of the weakest right now. It's one of life support. They understand these are all medical people. And Dr. Oz, life support is not a good thing. You're the back part, not the-- I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support where the doctor walks in and says, sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living. Read to allow the removal of all their enriched uranium. Yeah. two days ago. They did two days ago. They said you're going to have to take it. We were going to go with them, but they changed them up because they didn't put it in the paper. So when they sent us this document that we waited four days for, that should have taken ten minutes to do. It looked very simple. We get that. They guarantee no nuclear weapons for a very long period of time. And a couple of other minor things, but they just can't get that. They think that, well, I'll get tired of this. So I'll get bored. I'll have some pressure. But there's no pressure. There's no pressure at all. I love that. Like this sir construct for a story that he's totally making up support. Now, and now is how the doctor talks to you and like the ER would do mom's side. Sir, some random people have to stand there the whole time. There's one lady Ben, who literally, she was someone told her to smile and she did this the whole time. Anyway, things are going good. Things are going great. First of all, I'm just going to keep coming back. This is we have to because our media doesn't do it enough. This is why we have to support independent progressive media. Thank you sir. The same things like, well, they're already defeated. At what? Like soccer? Like the regime is in place. They have all the nuclear material. They control the straight-up form rules. Like, they're not defeated. Like, let's just, like, not even let him just keep saying something that isn't true because he wants to repeat it until it becomes true. The fact that the Iranians aren't even offering the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal terms, shows you that they believe that they have all this leverage. Like, they control the straight-up form moves. They've got, and he, when the way he talks about, I can wait you're all day. I'm not bored. I won't get bored. I'm not bored at all. Person outside who's paying fucking $7 a gallon for gas, right? Tell that to the people in the UK who have shortages or the people in South Korea who have shortages or people in Bangladesh who, you know, have to ration energy. Like, everybody is suffering. And Donald Trump is sitting there on his fat ass being like, oh, I got all the time in the world. Well, well, and then he acts like, he's asked about his red line for negotiations. He's like, I don't know. We're going to think about it on the flight to China. Yeah. And he's, he's a thing. Like, I, I've often, again, they will, they will be willing to ship that stock pile out because they know that's not their nuclear program. That's just the product of the nuclear program. And so I just don't get why these, you know, he needs in the war. He needs to show he got something. I just don't get why he doesn't make a deal where it's like they got to open the straighter hormones and they're going to ship out their stock pile and they're going to get some sanctions relief and a bunch of money because that's how this thing ends. And otherwise, it's like a frozen conflict, but it's a frozen conflict where the straighter hormones close, you know, and the global economy will collapse within a matter of months. If that's case, the cost is unbelievable, unbelievable. The Pentagon says the direct cost is $29 billion. That's bullshit. Double that, right? Like, it's, it's, they asked for 200 billion. So the real numbers way more. Oil prices are still are way up. So JP Morgan said it's analysts think that the oil prices will remain over $100 a barrel through this year. That's bad. A Brown University study found that as of last week, American consumers had paid an extra $35 billion in gas and diesel costs. And so we're began. That's about $268 per household. Jet fuel prices are up 70 percent. Fertilizer prices are up 30 percent. By the way, us in California, then we get especially screwed. Yes. These were more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than other states. And then the financial times was looking at the total costs of the war. And they found that a reasonable estimate based on the Fed's own models is that the war is going to cost the economy $200 billion in a loss of a million jobs in the U.S. for like a bunch of factors, including interest rates. And the Fed's like monthly gauge of global supply chain pressures is now at the highest level since the pandemic. So like everything that the economy is like feeling like a balloon and something is going to pop very soon. And he's like, I'm not bored. I don't care. That's the thing. And because everybody can feel it. Right. So there's already this discordance between, you know, the quote unquote markets and the lived reality of everybody that has to pay for anything on earth and the shortages that are coming. And I guess he thinks that when the bubble burst, he'll just blame Rocco Biden or Joe Biden or something. But like this is one where everybody knows that things were one way. And then this war happened. And there are another way. And I think it's going to take the rest of the world, you know, Xi Jinping in the next couple days, all these Europeans, they're going to have to go to Trump and be like, look man, and the Iranians for that matter and just be like, just take the minimal as a deal you can agree to. Trump, his, his willingness to spin anything should allow him to just get the hell out of this thing. I mean, just he's going to say he defeated them anyway. His, right. His morons who watch Fox all day and listen to like Mark Levin will swallow that 70% of the country will think this is a mistake. They already think it's a mistake. And look at it. And the right wingers, the FDD think tanks and stuff like they'll hate it, but eventually they'll shut up like the Hugh Hewitt's professional floppers and propaganda. Like they will hate this deal. They're saying as much. But yes, I think that's where he's going to end up. And also been there's been all these reports about the way the war is kind of metastasizing and spreading across the Middle East. So the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates, UAE, had been carrying out military strikes on Iran directly. They were a direct combatant in the war. They hit a refinery back in April, for example. They had been targeted by, you know, 2,800 vessels and drones from Iran. So it was response to that. But still, we didn't know that. There was also a Reuters report today that Saudi Arabia carried out a bunch of secret air strikes during the war too. So again, this wasn't just the U.S. and Israel. It was a bunch of countries bombing Iran. And then the journal had this wild story about how Israel built a base in the middle of the Iraqi desert to support the military operation in Iran. And then, I think it was like search and rescue and some sort of air force logistics. And the story says at one point, the Iraqi military tried to investigate what was going on there. Because I'm like, you know, she perter, tipped them off to it. And the idea fired on them a couple times and killed two Iraqi soldiers and like just nobody said what is their basis for being there? It's not their territory. Like, I think that's even beyond Mike Huckabee's definition of Israel, which in somewhere around the Euphrates in Kansas. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, look, first of all, on the regional side, we just, again, we have no idea the damage it's been done to our bases, to our facilities, to these Gulf countries. We, you know, people still can't like post pictures of Dubai. The Emirates are the biggest losers, or I don't know, there are a lot of losers, but they're one of the biggest losers in this war. First, they threw all their chips in with the Abraham Accords, with Israel, with this idea that we're going to, you know, form a United Front and stand up to the Iranians. And here they are. They just got, you know, showered with drones. And their Dubai model got wrecked. And, you know, they're carrying out airstrikes and look, if you're feeling sorry for them, they fund the RSF in Sudan that is like committing war crimes on a regular basis. But all this is going to, I'm very interested to see how the backstory of all these things comes out, in addition to the damage assessments. One thing in particular, that base in Iraq clearly seemed tied and it was reported to the Kurds, right, to the idea that the Israelis wanted to use the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds to be a ground force to do things inside of Iran. I think what probably happened there is, you know, the Kurds have partnered with Israel in the past, some Kurds, not all Kurds. And they were probably waiting to see like, okay, Ken Iran, take this punch. We killed a Supreme Leader and dropped all these bombs and their regime lo and behold is not always still standing there, capable of closing straight-of-form moves. And it seems like the Kurds are like, thanks, but no, thanks. We're not like going to war against the regime. I think the Kurdish play was if the regime collapses, you know, maybe will, or the regime is like literally on its last legs, maybe we'll get involved here. But it should be pointed out that failed. Like the Israeli pitch as reported in New York Times in the situation room was, the Kurds are going to rise up. There's going to be all these ground forces on our side. It rests a polavi, the sun, the shazen coming. None of those things happened. And we never hold beeping in y'all accountable. Not just for the fact that he convinced Trump to do this stupid fucking thing, but that his analysis, he was either lying or he was completely wrong, but the regime would fall that the Kurds would rise up, that the Iranians would rise up, that Resapolavi was somehow a credible leader of Iran. Do you see Trump like directly bitching about the Kurds? He was like, we gave them weapons and they just stole them and they didn't do it. He was complaining about it. Well, that's a covert action program. And it sits bolt, first of all, like, it sits bolt, the Kurds have done so much, you know, they were the ground forced against ISIS for the United States in the Obama years and under Trump. You know, they were on our side in the Iraq war. Like this idea that they're obligated to be our war, to fight all of our wars. And they never get what they want, which is a state. Right. And for reasons that I can understand given the complexity of that, but why would they fucking fight our war? It's crazy. And also him just like crying about a clear, like, covert action program in a lot of press race, funny. Also, the New York Times just posted a piece. It's a new, like, leak assessment of the impact of the war in Iran. Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites that maintains along this trade of war moves. I bet Pete Hexat told me that they were destroyed, which could threaten Americans or just oil tankers. Iran still feels about 70% of its mobile launchers across the country and it has retained roughly 70% of its pre-war missiles. stockpile. That is bad news. So they got a lot, a lot of kit left to fire at us and a lot of ways to do it. Also Ben, do you see that DOD wants to apparently rename their Ron War operations sledgehammer if it restarts? And they're thinking that that means they get to restart the 60 day war powers clocks. They can just do another end run around Congress by giving in their new name. Well, that's what Little Marco is doing when he's like, "Epic Fury's over." I mean, they think that a war is like the name that you give to something and not the state of hostilities that you have in the country. I mean, I would argue that we've been at war with the Ron since at least the so-called 12-day war. 1947. Well, what was the Tom Cotton timeline? Oh, well, that was crazy. 79. But I mean, remember the 12-day war? Like, this has all been one war. I mean, that's the point. These guys count on our attention spans being so destroyed by social media and technology that we forget that we're still in a war or something. Because that's a new name. What do we, children? It's just rebranding. Yeah. It's like a restaurant that closed down and reopened in the same spot in LA every six months. It's just a new name. My favorite talk of place in Venice, Teddy's, where I was. It suddenly was different, different name. And I was terrified, but the menus exactly the same. Kind of like the Ron War except the talkers are good. Same, same spot. Are you imagine that Yahoo, Trump, the IRGC, they're not the only arsonists in this conflict. We also have BBN Yahoo. He was on CBS 60 minutes over the weekend. As Netanyahu watchers know, Netanyahu avoids speaking with Israeli journalists, because they are actually knowledgeable about all of his failings and failures and ask him about them. And so he instead launders his message through the US media who tend to be softer than a, you know, baby skin and easily manipulated by him. And unfortunately, the new and improved 60 minutes under Barry Weiss's leadership was no exception. I want to play one example. There's no way this shit out in me, Ben. Then we'll talk about some more substantive stuff. So this is CBS's major Garrett, who by the way is a nice guy. He's a good reporter, not knocking him as a human, but this was not as finest hour or finest interview. I don't think. And it sounds like Weiss steered the interview to him, as opposed to Leslie Saul, who probably would have been a little rougher. But by the way, major, as you know, is capable of asking tough questions. So that tells you a lot about Barry Weiss's leadership, right? I to give major even further pass, although I would prefer people didn't go on with Barry Weiss. Like, I've seen major Garrett do tough interviews. So this is probably a direction from online. Yeah, that's very weird. So here's a question. He's part of a question he asked about Israeli intelligence that I thought was instructive. Mr. Prime Minister, the capabilities of Israeli intelligence within Iran allowed you to pinpoint the location of supreme leader and others. That is a kind of granular intelligence that is borderline miraculous in the modern world. Why wasn't it sufficient to also foment a revolution? So Ben, he was in his office, the air strike because he was in his fucking office. It was on his house. Like, like, he was working above ground, the home office, sorry, on his own house. So that would like be a mere miraculous intelligence to bomb the White House to kill Trump or or drone, you know, the golds gym in Venice to take out RFK junior. The heavy breathing was going to Mr. Prime Minister, the granular intelligence. This is so remarkable. It's like bombing the Poodle Room, it cash battalion. You're not watching like fucking munic here. It's crazy. We're talking about a guy in 86-throwed man who was killed in his house. It's crazy. And look, I like, like, this is a bigger deal. I mean, then I know that it gets online attention, but I mean, it, you know, that doesn't count for anything these days. I mean, this is 60 minutes. This is CBS news. This is like literally like the catalog of American journalism, right? And it gets purchased by David Ellison, whose kind of qualification for running anything is it is father's Larry Ellison and you went to like USC film school and wants to play with the movies. And they're super pro-Israel and super pro-Trump. And so he hands the keys of 60 minutes and CBS news to Barry Weiss, whose only qualification is running a blog where she tells rich billionaires that they're wonderful, Israel's wonderful, and DEI's bad. And essentially the, the, the feels you get when you watch Bill Mar are all right. And we're going to bring those feelings over to CBS news. And then you have the Prime Minister of a country that literally convinced the President of the United States to do the dumbest thing since the Iraq war and launching an attack on a country. None of the things that Netanyahu said were going to happen happened. We're in an economic catastrophe. Major Garrett and CBS news is own viewers are like not being able to afford their gas. And he's sitting on there like blowing smoke up BB's butt about how wonderful and granular the intelligence is. What is going on here? This is your job. This is Putin level propaganda. I mean also CBS didn't ask about Netanyahu's responsibility for October 7th until an hour and seven minutes into the conversation. It feels like that would be something to be front and center. And then he just brushed it off. There was lots of talk about Hamas violating the ceasefire and Gaza. There was none, no conversation about our questions about Israel violating the ceasefire as far as I could tell. You had Netanyahu vomiting out the same talking points about all the ways the IDF avoids civilian casualties and text people. It's like all the same shit we heard two years ago and then we watch like 70,000 people get slaughtered and it's just demonstrably false. And it just he didn't get he didn't get pushed on any of it. And also you know like Trump sued CBS right for editing out a 60 minutes interview like a Kamala Harris answer CBS cut from the broadcast version. Netanyahu was saying we'll play this clip in a minute. He was asked about social media and you know in VB blames social media for all of Israel's woes. And he said basically says like we're not going to fight the battle on social media. But that got cut out. And I wonder why they also cut Netanyahu saying that Americans turning against Israel also hate America again like why it seems like those are things that are relevant for American viewers. And so I like the whole thing you're right. It it it's frustrating because the debate like the Barry Wises bad Twitter debate is like kind of boring and reductive and like I'm not interested in it. But like I do think like when there's a a products like this that shows the fruits of that labor. It's worth kind of like highlighting the harm it did to us as viewers. We're trying to get information. It's much bigger than just the kind of Barry Wises discourse because it's about the fact that the premium brand and American journalism 60 minutes like when it comes to Israel. It's like it makes RT look like a heart-hitting news source. You know. They they they're it is in the problem with it is that it's not like there's a significant market for this like the problem. I mean to be specific in complaint here is they constantly come back to this idea that that social media is bad and that's why people are turning against Israel. No, it's what people are seeing on social media. Right. There's another story. Nick Kristoff had a powerful story in the time about the sexual assault of Palestinian prisons and all these people are on you know this is outrageous. How could the times print this as if the problem is the story and not the underlying conduct that the story is about. Well, there's a question about the veracity of some of the sourcing but still like there's a lot of well-documented evidence of rape and sexual assault of Palestinian and Israeli persons. But it's not the first it's not the first coverage of this. I like this is I've been to this radio. What you have is let's say there's a hundred instances and I'm this is not that story but I'm just a hypothetical. Let's say there are hundred instances of sexual assault and 97 of them are true but you they find the three that have some holes in the story and you're like this whole thing is is a libel. Or you know that or that you know they go after you know sort of one of the victims who you know doesn't have his cousin is in Hamas or something. Yeah. I mean but this this major guaranteeing if Americans want to know I had this long conversation with John Stewart today at his podcast and we had pretty interesting conversation about why do we keep doing these dumb things and we talked about all the reasons but one of the reasons why is that we don't have a media that tells us the truth you know like it like it makes it so much easier to give weapons to Israel or to go to war in Iran. If we don't have media that will like 60 minutes viewers those should should be some of the more informed people in the country that can't be told the truth about what's happening. Yep. For the work for the record I think that Hamas raped and sexually assaulted victims on October 7th and that Palestinians are being raped and sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons and both are true and I wish there was like less attacking of reporters for talking about these things and more concerned like you said about the underlying issue. Two more clips we want to play from this so the first is Netanyahu saying basically it's time for Israel to wean itself off of U.S. military support let's watch that. I want to draw down to zero the American financial support the financial component of the military corporation that we have we've come of age we have a bullying economy after three years of war you know our currency is the strongest it's ever been in the last 50 years maybe more we have a lot of talent here which we share with our American friends and we're going to share it with our Arab friends too and I I think that it's time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support and go from aid to partnership. And then let's listen to the clip of him blaming Israel's image problems that social media and then talk about both them. the proportion of civilian casualties, non-combatants to combatants, is one of the lowest in the history of modern urban warfare. So Israel has given a bum rap. We'll tell you what happened. We have several countries that basically manipulated social media with the bot farms, with fake addresses, to break the American sympathy to Israel, to break the American Israeli alliance, because they think it's in their interests. And they do it in a clever way. So that on the military support part, I mean, first of all, I'll just believe it when I see it. You know, and also he sites like the $3.8 billion a year stat. That's just the beginning of the support that U.S. provides Israel. Like there's always supplemental funding requests, emergency ion dome transfers, etc. Then there's the direct support when the U.S. is like literally shooting down, you know, missiles and drones. How much do we just spend on that? Right, so again, like I just don't believe. Like Ben Shapiro has been saying this kind of thing too. Like I just don't believe it. Like I'd like to see it happen. I just don't believe it's going to happen. And then the social media stuff though, this is like it's delusional and worrisome on a couple different levels. Like the suggestion is always that those of us who are worried about civilian casualties or the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza, were just stupid groups getting manipulated by algorithms who were not, couldn't possibly just be like, sincerely horrified by day after day of these like horrifying images of like children suffering in Gaza, right? These others like, there's an eighth front in the war on fucking social media now. Like first of all, Israel is famously active on social media. Oh yeah, I've been on the receiving end of it. Oh yeah, there's reports that they're paying influencers like $7,000 to post positive stuff about Israel. Like what does this mean? It's kind of ominous. I don't think social media is a war. Well, first of all, on the military stuff, I mean, what that tells you is he knows he's losing the political argument in the United States. But importantly, that ship is sailed. They're not going to get further financing. Now, what they do is, there are a couple of questions remain. One that you highlighted, which is whenever they're in a war which is seemingly all the time, they're the supplemental requests that APAC pushes hard. And so it's not in the 10-year member understanding where it's like they get a set amount every year. They've gotten way more than that in, you know, quote-unquote emergency situations. But beyond that, the debate has shifted so much that, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, 40 Democratic senators voted against arms sales to Israel. This is the next front. The financing thing is over, I think, and that he's just acknowledging that. You've got 40 Democrats, including everyone who might run for president, voting against even selling them weapons, which I think is the right position. And just to highlight one of those systems that was being sold to the Israelis, was bulldozers. Armored bulldozers. What do you need, armor bulldozers for? You need armor bulldozers to ethnically cleanse Southern Lebanon or to demolish whatever remaining structure exists in Gaza. Like, that's where this is moving. And people should be aware that they're going to want to say, "Okay, fine, we don't need the financing. "They're still going to want to be able to buy all the weapons." The partnership is some real, we's a link. What does that mean exactly? It means we sell them whatever they want. And the thing is if they're committing war crimes as they have, we shouldn't be selling them anything. You shouldn't be providing weapons either financed by the American taxpayer or sold full stop. The social media thing is rich and ominous. It's rich because the Israelis have done exactly what he says for a long time. They've got troll farms, they've got paid influencers. They're not new to this game. They're not just these people that we just use social media to post government statements. And there's some other governments. I'm sure he's talking about Qatar or something. They always hype this. I mean, if you have an Instagram account, you know that most of the content you get related to Gaza is not like state sponsored. You can see that in a mile away. It's like somebody you know reposing a video. And by the way, you don't even need to aggregate whether this or that video is accurate. You can look at just a picture of Gaza. And it's destroyed. It's just flat. It's completely flattened. Now, going forward, I think what is kind of worrisome it ties into the conversation we just had about various ways. Because lo and behold, Larry Elson has also bought TikTok, right? And so that's where the fight's going on. I'm unless worried about sure they can pay all the influencers they want. It doesn't really make a difference. Just look at Ben Shapiro's audience. The problem is if they start to leverage their friends who bought TikTok or, you know, Elon Musk. And that's what Elon seems pretty committed to his version of free speech, which is kind of a cesspool. But and start manipulating the algorithm, start shadow banning accounts, start censoring content. That's, I think, where this is going. And that's pretty scary. Yeah, that's, that is the scary stuff. [MUSIC] Positive world is brought to you by Sundays. Is your dog's food created to maximize your dog's quality of life or to extend the food's shelf life? Think about it. And while you do, let me tell you about Sundays. Sundays was founded by a veterinarian and mom, Dr. Torrey Waxman, the tired of seeing so-called premium dog food full of fillers and synthetics. So she designed Sundays. Air dried real food made in a human grade kitchen using the same ingredients and care you'd use to cook for yourself and your family. Every bite of Sundays is clean and made from real meat, fruits and veggies, no kibble. That means no weird ingredients you can't pronounce and no fillers. 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The trip got delayed because Trump wanted to wrap up the whole war with a wrong thing. So glad we got that all handled. He arrives in Beijing Wednesday night. There's a welcome ceremony Thursday morning. There's a one-on-one on the she. There's a tour of the Temple of Heaven, which is just like amazing temple complex. It dates back to the Ming Dynasty. I think it was built in like 1420. Then he attends a state banquet Thursday evening. Then he has tea and lunch with she again on Friday. And then he goes home. It's a lot of meetings. So let's just speculate on what they want out of this trip. So for Trump, first and foremost, he wants to feel like the biggest boy on the biggest stage and special in the pop and circumstance. Then I think he wants to trade deal or something. He can sell back home as having some sort of economic benefit. Third, I'm sure he would enjoy some help reopening the straight-of-home news or getting a run to chill out. We could talk about what that might entail. And then fourth, I think we should just always assume that there's a big fat corruption bucket sitting there that we'll learn about down the road someday when it's crypto or you know. Don Junior's so many investment in Chinese robots. Yeah, Chinese drones. Yeah, Chinese robots companies. You see, you know, Don Junior, for Xi, Xi Jinping, I would imagine he wants to get rid of U.S. tariffs on stuff. He wants to show the world that he can manipulate Trump and that he is actually as strong if not the, you know, stronger party. I bet he'll try to ring some concessions at Trump on Taiwan. Maybe try to get rid of some restrictions on AI chips. Who knows? So Trump on this trip is going to be flanked by a bunch of American CEOs. Elon Musk will be there. Tim Cook will be there. Remember when they almost briefed Elon Musk on the secret China war point? Yeah, yeah. It was a good idea, a great idea. Yeah, here's where I'm talking about the China trip from Monday in the Oval Office. He's a great gentleman. I find him to be an amazing, an amazing man. And when I say that, the press always says, "Oh, that's terrible." They called him, he runs 1.4 billion people with a pretty iron fist. He's, uh, he loves his country. I can tell you that President Xi, I look forward to being there, and if he felt anything, we wouldn't be doing it. But a lot of good things happen. Now we'll be talking about, I mean, you'll bring up Taiwan, I think more than I would. I have a great relationship with President Xi. We're doing a lot of business, but it's smart business. We used to be taking advantage of for years with our previous presidents, and now we're doing great with China. We make a lot of money with China. And I think you can see that with the fact that in hormones, they get a big percentage, 40% of their oil from hormones. There's been no ships coming in, no nasty ships coming in that we end up in skirmishes with. There's been, he'd like to see it get done. He doesn't want to see. I'll tell you what, look, I respect him a lot, and hopefully he respects me. He didn't respect our previous government, that I can tell you. All those clips are from an old man rolling out of moms.gov, these four women are watching it. It's up there with the door, the door dash lady started yelling out of that trans athletes for sure. She's like, do you like transports? She's like, I'm just here for the tip. I mean, this is completely insane. What do you think? What's the, oh, it's on the agenda for the meeting. Like, what's the best case, you think, in terms of an accomplishment? It's deliverable. Don, junior gets a robotics. Yeah. There's a delivery for him. Well, here's what I would, so, first of all, there's a problem, which is normally, these are huge summits. They usually happen like every two years, you spend through three days. We use this, for instance, in the Obama to come up with a bilateral agreement on reducing carbon emissions that became the Paris agreement, you know, like, we worked on that for a year. So, first of all, the fact that there's a war in Iran and horror movies is still closed for business means that they're going to spend a big chunk of time. Just talking about that. And Trump is probably going to be asking the Chinese to pressure the Iranians to open the straight and make a deal. Chinese are going to be pressureing us to, you know, just wrap this thing up. I was talking to a Iran expert friend of both of ours who suspects that the Taiwan conversation, well, the China, the Iran conversation will be like, Mr. President, how do you expect me to help you with the Iranians and to not sell my good friends and Iran weapons when you're selling weapons to Taiwan in giving them all this help. The Chinese are very good at what about us, and by the way, we get to do what you did to Iran and Taiwan. I think, and yet, Trump may want, you know, I think for him, a win is like, you know, they agree to buy a bunch of soybeans or something, right? You know, like, you can just say, for sure, he loves these deals where it's like the Chinese said they're going to spend X amount of money on American products that, by the way, they're probably going to buy anyway or something, you know, and the Chinese will extract some consensus. Or there's a lie about it. You know, as everybody's done, I mean, I mean, if you add up the money, people claim that they're going to spend in these photo ops Trump, it's like trillions of dollars and none of it's here. I would use what I would be doing on Taiwan. What you want to do is you want to create, like, some diplomatic track that just kind of puts this thing on a back burner and like, slow rules it, you know, I don't think Trump is deaf enough to do that. The Chinese will say, don't sell the arms. People say, don't conduct military exercises, and most likely it's just going to be what it is. Interestingly, there's been some big headlines, announcements of arms sales to Taiwan, but I didn't realize that there are those have been very slow in getting to deliver. There's like a $20 billion backlog on the delivery of US arms to Taiwan. So that's kind of the rub there if you're talking about that. Is it the Congress votes for these things? And then the executive branch has to deliver them and they're probably slow rolling them to create positive atmosphere because she, in terms of what I think they should be doing, I'm not sure they're going to do, is they should be talking about artificial intelligence. Because we are the two AI superpowers. We have all these frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft Google, etc. They have their own AI models that, and here we should say this is actually kind of a failure of the Biden administration. But there was this idea that we were going to put all these restrictions in place and export controls and sanctions and whatever. The Chinese figured out how to build the technology anyway. Yeah, we slow that we didn't stop them. Yeah, and so whether who's ahead, you know, someone might be ahead by six months, it almost doesn't matter because Chinese have AI, we have AI. And normal times, we would be sitting down and saying, let's negotiate some norms and some guardrails around this new technology before it's fully deployed out in the world. We want to make sure that nuclear weapons and command and control systems have human beings in the loop. We want to make sure that job displacement is cushioned by testing models. We have huge cyber security, you saw this incident with Mythos, the next generation of Anthropics AI model that when they shared with some of their customers, was like, nobody was ready to deal with this. It could literally launch a cyber attack and shut down, you know, the power grid of the country. Do you see the time story about how AI bots were telling these scientists how to make biological weapons? Exactly. You know, here's the recipe for biologic weapons. Here's another pandemic strain, right? And so what should be happening is we should be getting off this idea that there's some like AI race, like foot race, and whoever wins gets the technology. No, everybody's going to get this technology. We should be putting strict guardrails starting with nuclear biological and chemical weapons, dealing with job displacement, dealing with cyber security risks. The Chinese aren't going to want to negotiate around just information or information operations, but that's part of this. I just don't think Trump's going to do that. If anything, he's gone the other direction, Biden was building export controls. Trump is for whatever reason, probably some corrupt reason is greasing the skid, so Jensen Wong and video can sell them in semiconductors of the Chinese. So the Chinese would love that. I'm sure what the Chinese wouldn't do is buy a bunch of chips, you know, so I'd love to see how AI is dealt with out of this thing. It's just the idea of Trump sitting down for tea in like the forbidden city with Xi Jinping and having a good deep substantive conversation about AI, so yeah, it's so impossible to imagine. Yeah. We need to test models and set guardrails. It's just not how Trump thinks, but it's what they, I mean, it's what you should be talking about. For sure. No doubt, no doubt. Or human rights, remember that? Climate change. Yeah, a few things. Okay, we got a couple more things, so we'll get to those now. Well, obviously next week we'll talk about how the trip actually went to the set we know. But first we're going to be petty for a second because there was an article in the Atlantic last week with the headline, is Marco Rubio the happiest cabinet member that we wanted to discuss here? So this was almost entirely based off this one press briefing Rubio did at the White House. It was like his only appearance at the White House briefing room since the war in Iran started. Here are some excerpts from that briefing. I mean, the top people in that government are to say the least, you know, they're insane in the brain. I wish I knew your name. I think I should have apologized. Can you put name tags on? Can I ask you in Spanish? Sure. Yeah, you can answer in Spanish. But they'll have to translate for them when you ask them. (speaking Spanish) You don't have black yet blue on it, I'm color blind, but I know blue and black. Right there. Yes, ma'am. No, no, the first one I called on. Thank you, Mr. Kiri. Thank you. This is chaos, guys. I wish I had like a dice. Go ahead. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, right there. Because I'm going to Italy. Where are Talia? I'm going to send you this. Okay. He's Italian. I know him. I know him. He used to cover Capitol Hill. You're a DJ name. My DJ name? You're a DJ name. You're not ready for my DJ name. They are facing real catastrophic destruction to their economy, generational destruction to their economy, generational destruction to the wealth of their country and posed on themselves by the by the actions that they're taking. They should check themselves before they wreck themselves in the direction that they're going. What a cool cat. There was also this video of Rubio like stepping into the DJ booth in Mar-a-Lago. I'm fucking caddy turned deputy chief of staff, Dan Scabino posted that. And then this whole conversation kind of folds into this broader debate of will it be Rubio or will it be JD Vance who takes like kind of the mantle of Baga and becomes Republican nominee in 2028. So this is petty media criticism then, but I did just want to ask reporters like what are we doing here guys? Because first of all, Rubio, I don't know if he's happy or not. I don't wish him any personal unhappiness, but like he should not be happy about how his job is going if he's doing a briefing when the U.S. is stuck in a catastrophic war with Iran. And just like regarding that press briefing itself, Rubio was rolling out project freedom. That straight-o-hormue was escort mission that we just talked about, which Trump unwinds like a day later. So that is humiliating. Any other senior foreign policy official would be judged according like that would be seen as a humiliating moment and defeat for them, possibly a like career ending thing. And on top of that, like the last time Rubio did a press conference, it was when he was on Capitol Hill that one day and he basically ran up to the sticks and was like, the Jews made us do it and ran away and he hid in a fucking cave for a month. And so I was like, what is this article? My daughter, I remember she did AYSO soccer and I think she was, you know, six or seven. And at the end of the year, it was really nice even though the team didn't win a single game. It was kind of a bad news bearer's kind of team. They all got trophies, you know, participation trophies, literally. Bye! eagerness with which most of the Washington Press Corps is intent on giving Marco Rubio participation trophy is so embarrassing. I mean, let's just to just build on what you said. The man is Secretary of State and National Security Advisor for a country that just lost and mounted one of the dumbest wars in recorded human history. He announced an operation that lasted 24 hours. Let's just dig into his responsibilities. One of the reasons that that operation shut down is because the Saudis hadn't been notified about it. We wanted to use their. Who would do that normally? The Secretary of State, right? I mean, he's failing utterly at his job. The National Security Advisor is supposed to be coordinating policymaking so it's smart. Did anyone ask Marco Rubio why they didn't know that the Iranians were closed to straight reform moves? It's his job as National Security Advisor to war game how the war is going to go. They clearly didn't know anything about Iran or the straight-of-form moves, did not consult allies, which is also his responsibility. He is directly responsible, more even than Pete Hegg's death, for the catastrophic failure of this policy and the fact that the whole world is suffering because of it. They're all sitting there having a grand old time chuckling about what he says. Sure, he doesn't do the Dr. Seuss rhyme, weird Pete Hegg's death voice, but this checked yourself very roughly. It's just lame. It's not cool. Is he more charming than JD Vance? Sure, but talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations as George Boyce wants to. That's not cool. Check yourself. I cannot believe the extent in this foreshadowing as a cash potential segment to which we are to run a country's run and apparently a significant slice for media by people that just could not get anyone to sit next to them at lunch in high school. And now, years later, he's like, check yourself before you wreck yourself. Look, Rubio is seen as politically ascendant within the Republican Party. Sarah Longwell from the Bullwark talks about how his name is coming up in her focus groups all the time now. There's this meme of Mark Rubio on the couch in the Oval Office getting every job. Apparently, that's genuinely helping him because he's seen as competent. But again, it's like the one-eyed man is king and the land of the blind kind of situation where it's like, yeah, he's the most competent, a bunch of morons. But what is his, like, here's what drives me nuts. Then as well, I've seen this as one accomplishment, again, that is not a finished story. Yeah. Even if you just like accept the premise, the premise being that he's capable of standing at a podium and being reasonably articulate for an extended period of time, which by the way should be like the bar for like the deputy press secretary, not the future president or the secretary of state, even if that's some bar he clears, judge him on his results. Like what is he, like this way, our politics, I mean, just today's media criticism day. Like, don't the results matter? Like just the optics, just the fact that this guy manages to not like vomit on himself or appear to be on. You truly politically Trump's approval ratings in the toilet. Yeah. So what are we doing here? What's crazy? Building this guy up for nothing, like for being responsible for this policy. It is enraging. Speed of losers in high school, Ben, FBI director, trash Patel, sorry, cash Patel. He's up on Capitol Hill this morning on Tuesday. As our listeners know, cash has gotten a little bit of unwanted attention lately because he drank it. He was guzzling beers on camera at the Olympics. The Atlantic reported that his boozing is a source of concern within the bureau and the cash was once so drunk that his security detail couldn't wake him up and considered calling a SWAT team to get the equipment used, like bust on the door. Then he sued the Atlantic and this reporter in particular. And apparently the FBI might be investigating her and then she drops another banger on his head and we learned that cash has created and distributes his own signature bourbon bottles. I really beat in the drunk rap there. Go logo on it. There's the Eagle talons. His name on it. It's all very cute. And as a dollar sign for cash. Cash. Yeah. Because that's his name. Cash. Just like the dollars. Presumably you would think that given all this context, cash would want to deliver a calm sober performance at front of the Senate to silence his critics. Let's see how it went. There have been no occasions when your security detail had difficulty waking or locating you. Is that right? Nope. It's a total force. I don't even know where you get this stuff. But it doesn't make it credible because you say so. I'm not saying it. Director Patel, it's been written and documented. You are literally saying it. No, I'm saying that these are reports, director Patel, unlike unlike I will say reports. The only person that was sling in Margaritas and now Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gang banging rapist was you. You know, the only person that ran up a director $1,000 bar tab in Washington, DC, the lobby just to make you. Well, you. Okay. Yeah. That was with Senator Chris Van Hollen. So that exchange actually goes on. The fun way like a while longer. Chris Van Hollen doesn't strike me as some guys like really a big boozer. Yeah. Is this not an incredible attack? Well, for like, I, yeah, I have no idea about the bar tab thing, but like the, remember, the Kilmar of Braco, Van Hollen went down to El Salvador or to meet with evidence. Yeah. So Van Hollen went to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar of Braco Garcia. They, they had a conversation at the embassy. Diabocalies goons put these drinks in front of them to stage a photo op that made it look like they were drinking together. It was just like, it was completely propaganda bullshit. Of course, cash potential is repeating that. Second, as you noted, Kilmar of Braco Garcia is absolutely. He's not a convicted gang banger rapist. And for the FBI director to say that, purge, purge it himself. It's crazy. Purge it himself. And then finally, buddy, like, but, but in the top button, he, he looked like a groom's man who'd been at a wedding since, you know, the bar opened at five. He, he looks like he tied one on last night. He's got like a bottle on his fucking table. Slouching floor. Yeah. Like, I know they all think that this is what Trump wants, which is like, fight back, throw a punch. Have that worked for Pam Bondy. Did that look good? It looks great to me. I mean, first of all, we just have to remember that the FBI director is supposed to be a nonpartisan official. Yeah. So it's just insane that anybody would be professional. Yeah. And he's supposed to be like a, yeah, civil servant, essentially. And so the, and like, I get the audience of one, but, but this makes him look ridiculous. Like, if his problem is he looks ridiculous to the point that the whole country is making fun of him and he's like becoming a thing on Saturday live, like, he's just, just keeps dumping ammo out for everyone else to use because he looks completely absurd and, and, and actually, he's just drawing attention to that Atlantic report. Like, you know, it's not even good communications, like, no, the smart thing is we like, no, that report is not true. And just that's it. Right. But by like throwing a little tantrum, it's like going to drive some more people to that article and be like, ha, ha, ha, cash, like, I had to get woken up at the morning because it's so hammered. I mean, like, boy, this guy, I can't decide. Is the content creator in me once cash around? But like the American is a little concerned about that that's a person running that federal beer investigation. Yeah. And by the way, I'm a little bit, obviously concerned about the fact that nobody's minding the store and there's actually criminals and terrorists and all the sorts of people that the FBI is supposed to be dealing with. But that mentality, the way you talk to Van Halen, the FBI has vast investigative powers. Yeah. It did not suggest someone who might not abuse those powers to like, how does he know about the bar tab? I don't know. Like, I think someone that seems that paranoid, I mean, there's always reports, right? Remember the other report in the, it wasn't the Atlantic that he had logged out of his computer and he freaked out and thought he was fired. And he's polygraphing everybody on his detail. He seems like a dangerous paranoid, like kind of wounded animal who knows he's not up for the job. Who would do exactly what you're saying? They're like going to be used, the enormous power of the FBI to go after critics. Like, yes, whoever comes next will be terrible, but I think it would be good for the world to get that asshole out of there. Yeah. I think it would. We'll miss him. I guess we can cover. I'm sure we'll go back to podcasting. I mean, Bongino can team up again. Just that man in Robin. Yeah, be great. Yeah. Okay. That's it for our boy Cash drinks on us next time you're in L.A. Pre-order my book. It's out two weeks from today. Pre-order. Yeah. And I'm actually going to be doing my virtual book launch event next Monday. So I'll throw that link on my social chat. Pause. There we go. Check around for Ben's interview with Susie Hansen about Prime Minister Erdogan, Life in Turkey. Lots of big, important, geopolitical issues. So don't miss that. Potsy of the world is brought to you by Remi. Sure, we've all had those times in our lives and you wake up and you're like, "Why is my jaw hurt?" What am I teeth hurt? It's because you've been clenching and grinding from stress and it screws up your sleep and it makes you feel. I don't know. I'm not sleeping. All the time. It was happening to me a lot. It was actually a real problem. I'd wake up with headaches and jaw pain until I got Remi. This was years ago, by the way, long before they were ever a sponsor. And that's why I trust Remi to protect my teeth with their custom nightgards, which have been helping out over like 350,000 Americans. 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(laughing) - That's really it. - That's my experience as a guy's like, I'll torture you for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, and then charge you a couple grand. So that your mouth can be just normal. - Yeah, so yeah, to get you back to like normal. - Oh, Remy, they send you this thing. You roll together some of this putty stuff. You're putting your mouth, takes five minutes. You send it off, and they send you your mouth guard. And it's way cheaper, and it works just as well. It is really so much better than going to a dentist to try to get a night guard. Protect your teeth with Remy by using the code World to get 50% off your new night guard. That's 50% off. Go to shoprem.com/world with the code World. Again, that shoprem.com/world with the code World. Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode. (upbeat music) - Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by my friend, Suzy Hanson, who is a journalist who lived in Istanbul for over a decade. She's written for the New York Times magazine. Her first book, which I also recommend, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Her new book, which everybody needs to buy, if you like politics, geopolitics, literary journalism, great writing, amazing personalities, it's called From Life itself, Turkey, Istanbul, and a neighborhood in the age of Erdogan. Suzy, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Ben. - Okay, so this really is a unique book because you started and you are reading the story of a neighborhood in Istanbul. Then you realize you're reading about the city of Istanbul. Then you realize you're reading about Turkey. Then you realize you're reading about Erdogan. And then you realize, and this is all within the first probably, you know, 40 pages, that you're reading a book about, everything that's happened into the world, you know? And so I want to begin by asking where you begin the book, which is you describe how the forces that we've all become familiar with now, the kind of cocktail of nationalism, authoritarianism, corruption, chaos, how those things that we feel as Americans arrived in Turkey, first, and in particular in this neighborhood that you profile, you write the dissolution of nations and borders and peoples and seemingly civilization itself was transforming how many of us felt about our individual lives in our future. That sense that we are in history here, and not the good kind. Can you describe how these forces became manifest in Turkey and in this neighborhood first, and it's really around 2015 or Arab Spring to 2015 that you begin and why did you choose to write about those forces through this neighborhood? - So it was 2015, I had been witnessing, I moved to Turkey in 2007. So I'd been there for seven or eight years, and then I was there as all of these Syrian refugees were fleeing the Syrian civil war into Turkey. And you know, I'm sure you're aware of this, this was a kind of laissez-faire refugee management situation where Erdogan was just allowing people to come in, millions of people, and they sort of had to figure out their lives on their own. I mean, they had to find, they had to rent a place, they had to put their kids in school, all of that. So no one really had any idea how everyone was making this work, and there were at that point, 2015, 500,000 Syrians in Istanbul. And one evening, I went to a friend's for dinner and they said, you know, after dinner, you have to take a walk down the main street of Cargum Rook, all of the shops have become Syrian. And that was, I knew enough about Cargum Rook to know why that was surprising. Cargum Rook was a nationalist neighborhood. It was famous for them, for Mafia, for thieves. It was famous for this right-wing party that may have pay. And so I knew that they were not going to be welcoming to Arabs. And I saw the opportunity to tell this larger story through how these people were getting along, because when I started talking to them, they started talking about how the presence of the Arabs was challenging their Turkish national identity. And then as I was there for the next few years, all of these major events were happening. So you had the Syrian Civil War. Obviously, you had ISIS had appeared in Turkey, and they were flying into Istanbul, and then just switching to airplanes and going down to the southern border. You had a new war with the PKK, the Kurdish militant group. And you had Erdogan steadily becoming more repressive. And I suddenly recognized, OK, maybe I can see all of these events through these characters. But understand how they're seeing it from the street level, not from the headlines, and not from the point of view of the West. So you shift back and forth between some of these incredible characters you find in this neighborhood, and Erdogan himself, who's a huge character in your book. And I want to focus a bit on him, because I'd never read a book that I learned as much about him from. He's a fascinating character. And one place I wanted to start, I did not fully understand this. You write about his kind of dual love of Islam and capitalism. And we, in the West, think of him as an Islamist. But you write about how much he embraced capitalism and development, real estate development, for a way of putting it in the corruption, the playbook we've seen, where you're building things, but you're skimming money off the top and all the rest of it. It also got me thinking that as much as we don't associate Islamists with capitalism-- I mean, in our country, the religious zealots, the Christian evangelicals, are similarly bullish on capitalism and deregulation. And explain where this ideology of Erdogan's came from. And how would you describe this melding of Islamist politics and kind of uber 21st century capitalism? I mean, this goes deep into Turkish Islamist history. It goes way back to the first Islamist parties and movements in the 1960s and '70s. But I think you have to put it in the context of Turkey's founding party was Autotorx party. And the only way-- and they had shunned religious people to some degree. They had forced religious brotherhoods to go underground. They had wanted Turkey to be a Western-looking secularist country. And so the people of the countryside and the religious people were very much shut out from the halls of power. And so there were a number of old families that got a lot of the contracts from the government and were rebuilding Turkey after World War I and World War II. But the religious people were shut out of this. And so slowly, slowly over time, they did see business and starting their own businesses as a way to build their own power in the country because they were shut out of the state and shut out of most of the business activities. Erdogan was the mentee of a man named Nehmetin Erdogan, who also saw the union of Islam and capitalism as a way of restoring Turkish pride. Because these were people who were very nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire and for this more grandiose sense of Turkey than what the Turkish Republic became. Erdogan learned from him. But also, I think it was sort of deep in his blood in the sense that he came to power as the mayor of Istanbul. And Istanbul was a wreck at that time. It was very poor people. We're suffering. And what he recognized he could do, even though most of the secularists elites did not want him to be in office, was he could actually improve the lives of the people, which seems like an obvious thing for a politician to do. But it's a little bit shades of Mamdani there. But he saw that, oh, I can clean up the garbage of the city. I can improve the water supply. I can improve. But he needed to obviously to ally with business groups and other businessmen in order to make a lot of these things happen. And so I think it happened naturally. But I think a really crucial thing here also is when he finally becomes prime minister, he feels still threatened by the secular state, by the military judiciary, who very much wanted to get rid of him. They put him in jail in the 1990s. And so he quickly had to build up his crony class, his businessman class. And that was the way he saw that he could solidify his power in the country. So one of the things that it listens to show, hopefully, knows is that over the years I've kind of really had to reprogram myself around or away from some of the assumptions that are kind of baked into American farm policy or baked into kind of the commentary class about the world. And you go right at some of those assumptions about Erdogan. And I want to go through a couple of them. The first one is I remember when we came into office in 2009. And we went to Ankara and Istanbul in 2009. From that period kind of through the Arab Spring, the trendy thing was Erdogan is a mediator between Islam and the West. He's a potential bridge because he has creed with these Islamist Muslim Brotherhood guys and places like Egypt. And yet he's modern and capitalist and wants to join the European Union. I kind of now see how Orientalist that was just kind of-- well, he's Muslim. And so therefore he can be a bridge. Yet at the same time, he's clearly an intermediary in other ways. This is a guy that can navigate between the US and Russia, between Europe and the Arab world. between the BRICS countries in NATO. Why is it, I mean, Turkey, historically, has always been this kind of bridge country between Islam and the West and the rest of it. So there's some of that history. But what is it about him that has allowed him to play this kind of mediator role or this guy that can kind of live in one block for a few months and then shift to another one? - I mean, I think in the beginning, first of all, that was how they were marketing themselves to the world, right? And it was not only Erdogan, but it was also this other Islamic brotherhood, the Gulen movement, which was already very international. This is this global Islamic movement that was in the United States, knew lots of people on the hill, had schools in every country. And so these two allied together. And I think, again, their fundamental fear was about the Turkish state, right? So they want to create a sense of them as big on the global stage in order to fortify their own power and counter some of the national forces that were against them. I mean, it's amazing because he came to power in the 2000s. It's like really globalization is firing on all cylinders. And he becomes this kind of globally minded leader. And so I think he was very different from other Turkish leaders who were much more inward looking and much more almost defensive. And so I don't think it was all incorrect. But now what he has managed to do is something even more extraordinary because over these 20 years, what we have seen him do is extend himself in Libya, in Syria, and Azerbaijan. But also to stand up on the world stage with his rhetoric and say, no, we take care of our own country, we are regional leaders. We own our own Syrian refugee crisis. We are not going to let the NGOs in and tell us what to do. He has over time steadily made this into his position in the world, but with those refugees, if you remember, he was essentially able to say to Europe in the West, you can no longer tell me what to do. You cannot criticize me in terms of human rights and everything else. He's putting leaders like Selahat and Demeratash, the pro-Kurdish leader in jail, and all of these, he's repressing thousands of people after the 2016 military coup, but he had four million Syrian refugees. And it gave him a card to play with the Europeans. So as to say, I can just let them into Europe anytime I want and look at us, we are actually taking care of these people and you can't deal with them. I mean, in all of these different ways he was able to assert himself, it's unprecedented. And now he's, yeah, see, advertises himself. I'm the middle man for everybody. Hey, Ukraine, hey, Russia, hey, you know, Israel, I mean, he's always projecting this sense that you need him that all of the, but I think in some ways, they do simply because of Turkey's geography. I mean, look, Europe is now speaking to him in these very kind terms because they might need him against Russia, you know, I mean, so he somehow manages to bounce back and reposition himself always. Yeah, I mean, among many good things, but there are all these what-ifs of history that I found myself asking, one of which was, you know, there was still this idea that they're going to join the European Union, which seems impossible now in 2009, 2010, and you rightly point out that Sarkozy is the one who, you know, truly tube that, although I think probably other Europeans supported that, that's a great what-if, what-if, you know, they're in the EU. One other D.C. thing that you kind of take aim at is, and I've been guilty of this, which is that, you know, he gets put in the creep club, you know, it's, you're rattling off the list of autocrats who got elected through democracy and then dismantled it, you know, it's usually you're like saying, Putin, Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Netanyahu, now Trump, you kind of push back against that. And I was really curious to kind of pursue that with you, because on the one hand, you know, the way you describe it, you know, really meticulously, you know, I see a familiar playbook, you know, you kind of enrich people through corruption and you build these power blocks and you slowly change judiciary and then you, you know, you're starting to intimidate the media and make it pro-government and then lo and behold, you know, we're changing the constitution and, you know, Erdogan is, you know, going to be president after being prime minister or whatever. And you kind of push back against him being the same or kind of in a group with those guys and they're all guys. I think I get why in the sense that Turkey has such an eccentric political system, but how would you position him relative to the autocrats who've kind of defined our age? Well, it just never, when they, when he was lumped in in that category, it just never rang true to me and I thought it was a little bit lazy. I think now from the point of view of 2026, I'm seeing more and more of these similarities with the United States. So when I wrote the book, I finished it in 2025. I never would have compared the US and Turkey, but now since 2025 and 2026, it actually, this current time period echoes the book a lot. Like there's a whole chapter about a university and the impression of universities. But I think that a few things are different. Number one, you know, he wasn't, we weren't really referring to him as a populist in the beginning. I think that's the first 10 years that is different about, that are different about Turkey that you want to look at. He was not just praying on people's sense of, of victimhood or grievances the way that say Donald Trump does. The people who he appealed to actually had legitimate grievances, they were actually left behind. They were not folded into the system properly. They were people who felt that they had been looked down upon and left behind in terms of the economy and education and many other things. And so I think, and then the second part is he actually did improve the lives of people. This wasn't, this isn't a superficial ruler. This is someone who actually everyone can talk about when he got the natural gas, you know, people's natural gas accounts hooked up to the internet or when he made water supply, easier or better, when he improved the electricity, all of these services, when he improved the healthcare, when he, you know, and then of course, just what he did for people's self-esteem, which was all very real. So it was because of this genuine popularity that that's the basis for why he has sustained a lot of his role today. I think it's more interesting to consider, again, as you said, yes, the EU, what would have happened, but also all of these other regional and global events that were going on and how they affected some of these regimes. He had, okay, the Syrian Civil War played a huge role in radicalizing Erdogan. I think that's worth looking at, but I think at the end, which I'm sure you remember, I do think we have to consider how, for a regime in the Middle East, how the war on terror also, no, yeah. Just that environment led to this increasing radicalization. It's not to let him off the hook because we can talk about the second 10 years, very happy to do that, but I think that it is just worthwhile to consider that there are other reasons why the world is going in this direction. - Yeah, well, let's talk about the second 10 years. And maybe can I bring in a little bit of my history here? It might be interesting. - Yeah, sure. - So, and you write in part one, we're going to work up to 2015 and Erdogan's consolidated power, the Syrian refugees are there, like these changes are in motion. Then you have this coup where I still don't, you know, people think when you're in the US government in a role like mine, you know what happened. I have no idea what happened. I know that something fundamental shifted in Erdogan and you obviously get it in this in the book. I will tell you my experience, which is he used to be a fascinating guy to meet with 'cause he would actually debate Obama and they liked each other and they'd go back and forth and he was nimble, flexible even. He might change his mind on something in the meeting. After that coup, Obama only overlapped for like a year. Every meeting, he would literally show up with files about Gulen. This is the Islamist that he fell out with who he blamed for the coup and demand his extradition and just didn't want to hear about anything else, didn't want to talk about anything else. He kind of started presenting like Putin, you know, like I believe what I believe, some of it may be true, some maybe conspiracy theory and that was my experience of him. I mean, you write about this transformation in him. I mean, what was your impression at the time that you obviously reflect on about what happened? You know, there was something happen. There was some attempt to bomb the parliament and yet I also know Turks who think like that was all false flag. You know, you hear a million different things but something clearly did happen. How did he change because of this event that also, by the way, coincided with the year that Brexit and Trump happened, so the world is taking a pretty dark turn? I think he genuinely felt threatened and then I think that he made use of a glorious opportunity which echoed, you know, what happened after many military coups in Turkish history which is that they sort of remake everything. They put people in jail, they start all over, but it was much worse with what he did. But I think that, you know, if you look at the number of threats that in his mind he was facing, it was this war with the Gulen movement. Most people do believe the Gulen movement was involved in that military coup. I think that it's very, they suspect that yes, he might have known about it earlier, he let it happen, then he knew. he could take advantage of it, but that war between Erdogan and the Gulen movement was absolutely real. And it was, there are a lot of people in the country really resent the Gulen movement. So, I mean, there have been tons of things written about it. It's just very difficult to understand, and I think it's a weird, very weird, fascinating movement. Trust me, I tried to sell lots of magazine stories about this many, many years ago, and it was hard because people couldn't really get their, their head around it. But by now, it's quite well known what, what they were about. But I think also, you know, he saw Muhammad Morsi in Egypt, opposed in 2013, and he believed that it was possible, or Turks believed it was possible that the Americans were involved in that as well. And this is a Muslim Brotherhood guy. You know, you have a belief in Turkey on the left, on the right, basically across the board, that the Americans have always been involved in military coups in Turkey or played some sort of role. So I think that just speaks to a broad fear. And then I think there were also in 2013, the Gezi Park protests, which, you know, might not seem that threatening from the outside, you know, you think, oh, he's a big guy, he's a strong man, whatever, he can just deploy the military and put them all down. It was deeply threatening to him. Yeah, this was like people occupying this green space. It was going to be demolished, it was the last remaining green space, just so people know, and it grew to thousands, thousands of people upset with what had been happening in Istanbul and the country. I see that, and I guess just to pull it up to today and then I want to get to the neighborhood with one more question. How do you look at Erdogan today and look, you know, he's still a key player and almost an indispensable man on the world stage. He, in Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharah, a guy he backed is now, you know, in charge of that country instead of Bashar al-Sad. At the same time, you know, Israel's making noises about attacking Turkey next after Iran. We'll see if that happens, give him what happened in Iran. You know, he's, you know, barely skates through elections, but he does. The Kurdish issue is, you know, up and down, like there's a peace deal with the PKK, but there's still these concerns about the Kurds in Syria having autonomy, although Ahmed Al-Sharah is trying to put an end to that. I mean, the question I guess wanted to ask is, is this a man who is realizing what he wants to do in power? Is he have a strategy that he's implementing in Turkey and in the region, or is this a man that is just a survivor, has had to react to a million things in an opportunistic way and some of them work and others don't? How much do you think he's building something and has this kind of idea of what Turkey is and should be in the region versus he's just a very cany political survivor? No, I think they had a vision for Turkey in the region. And as, what if you say, middle power? I don't think they like that term, but as a regional power, I think they've had a vision for a long time. I think they've been building up their defense industry. I think they've obviously, as I said, extending themselves throughout the region. I think they also did that for business interests. I think they did that as a way to just shore up their power. And I think it works in the sense that I think some people in Turkey probably can't imagine who would come after them at this point because he has successfully taken over basically all of the institutions of the country. He has repressed about 40% of the population and at this point he's now taken to meddling in elections. But I think in terms of the bouncing back and being a sort of cany, flexible, domestic leader, I think he's just reacting to events at home and he's happy to shift. He was a liberal looking leader in the beginning. Then he became allied with a right-wing party around 2015. So he was looking at a Kurdish opening in his first eight years of power and then he turned against wherever he saw the mood of the country or his own political fortunes shifting. He would shift also and he'll do it again. He has now put the country just in a terrible, terrible economic situation and that is the trap. I don't see the way out of that. I was just in Turkey and in March, the people in my book who loved him for all of these years suddenly are shattered people, including one of my characters who's saying. Their self-esteem, their sense of self and also their belief in Turkey's great future and their children's future is now gone. And I think that that is a very, very new for him and I think it's, I don't think he has a way out of it. So I think it will be interesting to see where we go. I think the question that you have and I have is what about the opposition? What happened? Yeah, yeah. And at this point, what exactly can they even do, given how much he's repressing them? Well, the last thing I want to ask you is the neighbor itself is fascinating and one of the things I love about your writing and your journalism is that you don't exclude people. I spent a long time talking about everyone, but we see what it's like for people to live through all these changes. And the question I want to ask you is, I love this role of Mutar. So people understand this is kind of like your, it's not just like you're the kind of mayor of the neighborhood. You literally, people come to you with every problem like from, you know, I don't want my daughter to marry this person to, you know, where can I get this document? And it's a very old feeling for, but it's a form of democracy in a way. It's just people constantly trying to solve these problems and survive. I hesitate to say resilient because I know a lot of people who hate being called resilient because it makes it seem like it's not hard. But with all this change, like you just see these people working it out, you know, and sometimes they're helping each other sometimes they resent the, you know, new Syrians or what have you. But it is human beings just in a somewhat democratic way. Just keep in this neighborhood moving. And the question I want to ask you is, we just talked about the, you know, the decline of democracy in some ways under one, which is undeniable. I change how I think about democracy. There's no such thing as this is a democracy and this isn't like where everything's a spectrum. Like America right now is very not democratic in tons of ways and kind of democratic in others, right? But did you learn something about democracy itself by just focusing in on this local neighborhood and how human beings experience democracy, you know, that human beings that may not have a stake in, you know, how Erdogan's policies going in Syria will be on the refugees. So maybe that's not the right one. Like how did that local view point of democracy changed how you think about the concept itself? Well, this was why I found this neighborhood interesting because they were a bit on the margins. No one in my neighborhood was a member of the media that was being oppressed or of the academics or the Kurds or maybe the judiciary, the judges who were all being fired or transferred. These people were a little bit on the margins and many of them supported Erdogan about 75% of the neighborhood did and then there was 25% that did not, but their lives were not directly affected. And what I think was the benefit of failing to finish my book in a normal amount of time was that I got to go there for 10 years and I got to see how all of these people changed and evolved over those years. And what I found fascinating and I think would be fascinating to Americans as well is that you might disparage some of these people who vote for the autocrat, but what you're not really prepared for is how they are actually processing what's happening to them and the moment when it strikes them that their lives have changed. And it does. And I think the chapter in the book that is somewhat hopeful, although it was, you know, a while ago now is 2019 because what happened in my neighborhood was that it was the the Istanbul mayoral election. There was AKP was running their candidate. They had run a stumble for 25 years and then there was the opposition candidate Ekrem Imamolu. And he won. And it was the first time AKP had been defeated in a very important election in the Istanbul mayoral election. And then the AKP tried to claim that there were election irregularities and they called a second election. And everyone in my neighborhood, even his supporters, were so insulted. You know, they said, what does he think we're stupid? Does he not realize? Does he not think that we realize what he's doing? And it was a very funny kind of macho reaction in some respects. And they started saying, you know, we're going to teach him a lesson. We're just going to teach him a lesson this time. And then the neighborhood actually voted for the opposition party, which they had not voted for for maybe in all of their lives, just to show Erdogan that they were not going to lose their voice. And an interesting thing about Turkey is that it has always had free elections. And this is the one thing everybody has had and they love to vote there. I mean, it's really a great pleasure to witness election day in Turkey. And so they fought back in that instance, Imamolo became mayor. Of course, Imamolo is in jail now. Now he's in jail. But I think that when we think about people's psychologies in the age of authoritarianism, I think the verdict is that we don't really know what's happening, how people are feeling and what exactly they are going to react to. And you're right in a neighborhood like that. old ottoman in these neighborhoods in a stumble, they still work together to figure things out. They're out in the street. They're talking to each other face to face. I mean, this was also what was appealing to me because I was online all the time. And they're still talking to, they're still passing on information in this face to face way, which I think is a lesson for all of us as well. So, you know, I do have hope for Turkey. I just, I simply do. I think also one thing to consider about characters like Erdogan and this is really an open question. You know, he loves elections too. So he has put his main rival in jail. This was also an unprecedented move. But will he return the country to some sort of of real elections? I think that's still a possibility. Yeah. Well, let's, you know, let's hope so. And you convey, like you say, this country has been through everything you can imagine. And yet, Istanbul, there are all kinds of people are there, you know. And they regenerate. You know, Rome, Armenian, Greek, Syrian, you know, indigenous Turks, all these other people have kind of passed through and some have been expelled and then some have gone and yet it all kind of keeps, is what I love about cities. Like it just keeps regenerating and becoming something that is similar and different, you know. Yeah. And I think that if you look at what Erdogan was brilliant at the beginning is that he took that creative chaos and he created a new political movement out of it. I mean, it was by going into these neighborhoods. That's the whole reason also that I told the store, the books through a neighborhood. But the question is, can the opposition now look at the world as it is? And, and, and the city as it is. And actually, and actually say, okay, what is the political movement that needs to be created, created now? Well, look, the book is from life itself. It's just so rich with character, detail, history, politics. So people should check it out. Susie Hansen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Ben. It was really great talking to you. Thanks again to Susie Hansen for doing the show and we'll talk to you next week. Let's say the world is a crooked media production, our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonerjee. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Heffko, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the writer's guild of America East. [BLANK_AUDIO]