Trump & Saudi Arabia: A Tale of Corruption

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Built points have been ranked the most valuable point currency by the points guy. And they just announced built cash, a way to unlock even more value from built partners. It's simple. Paying rent is better with built, earn rewards, and finally get something back for being a renter. Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbuilt.com/world. That's j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t.com/world. Make sure you use our URL so they know we sent you. Hello, and welcome. This is the Michelle Hussein show. I'm Michelle Hussein. I speak with people like Elon Musk. I think I've done enough. And Shonda Rines. That's so cute. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me. Listen and subscribe to the Michelle Hussein show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcast. You certainly ask interesting questions. Welcome back to Potsay the World. I'm Tommy Vittor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I heard some music over the weekend that made me think of you. And I just wanted to play you a little clip. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] That was, of course, Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro delivering a message, I think, to the Venezuelan people to Trump, and to John Lennon fans everywhere. Yeah, not exactly the most prominent cover of Imagine that we heard, or the-- The Gal Gadot version. Yeah, exactly. But hey, if you're facing down the USS Gerald Ford and 10% of the US Naval assets, I guess you reach for inspiration where you can get it. Yeah, whatever you can do. Yeah, we're not going to go in deep on Venezuela today because in part, because that story's kind of in a holding pattern, I mean, there's this, as you just mentioned, the massive buildup of naval assets in the Caribbean. But then on Sunday, Trump said his administration might be having some talks with Maduro. It's not clear if it's him directly or someone or maybe Rick or Nell is back, who knows. We'll see. But also, Trump, our peace president, also said he was open to launching military strikes on Mexico. So-- You don't need an aircraft carrier to blow up speedboats in the Caribbean. No, sure. So we'll see what that's for. Or 15,000 US servicemen were just sitting in the region. Maybe we'll get a twist. Maybe we'll invade Chile or something. I mean, it could be like spinning one of those wheels like on kids' board games. Yeah, one of the Falklands, that's two. Trump likes the '80s. Maybe we'll give him back to Argentina now that Mila is our guide down there. Maybe we'll still get a curious armor and give the Falklands, Maldives, whatever, yeah. There is a violent chain he chooses. There wasn't a weird thing I saw on Twitter, forget which good journalist retweeted this, I apologize. So the estate department says they intend to designate a group called Cartel De Los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization led by Maduro. That goes into effect on November 24th. I guess the question is whether that then becomes the justification for a strike on Venezuela proper? Certainly feels quite possible. But they've yet to tell us what their objectives are. Oscar is anybody. Is it a regime change? Is it the trillion dollars of oil underneath the ground? Is it something else that we're missing here? Do you see the-- Doesn't seem to be drug traffic. Do you see the report in the journal that said that fentanyl might count as a chemical weapon? Now it's part of the justification, potentially. Yeah, but we're not invading China. Right. We're the fentanyl. Right. Or Mexico. Or Mexico. Anyway. That we know of. So that's a story we're not covering. But boy, keep an eye on that one. So all right, we got a great show for you guys today, though. I thought you were going to play some patriots theme song or something. No. But that game was a while ago and no surprise to the judges. The Thursday night game, yeah. Honestly, I didn't even watch it. I had plans at night. You don't have to watch your team play the Jets because you already know the outcome. I was also getting texts from you being like this offense is an abomination. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that. That's all I needed to know. Yeah, tough game. We got a great show, though. We're going to start. We're going to cover Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman's visit to Washington this week. We'll tell you what the Saudis want, what the US wants, what Trump wants. And if any of it benefits us, the citizens of this country, we're also going to tell you about a very Swiss tale about US government corruption. What we learned from a bunch of recent reports and profiles of FBI director, Kash Patel, our best friend, we'll talk about the ways the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has gone international and has impacted foreign governments. There's a scarier report about AI and the future of hacking that we really should talk about more, but our government does nothing about it. And then we're going to explain why the former Prime Minister of Bangladesh just got the death penalty. We'll talk about a corruption scandal that is engulfed President Zelensky in the Ukrainian government. And then what a new documentary tells us about Adolf Hitler's junk, his package. Yes, this is BB. This is why you come to Pots of the World. So we can curate these things for you. That's exactly right. And then you did our interviews today. What are folks going to hear? It's about a different documentary. So a tool guanday who was the assistant USAID administrator for global health, but it's also just a leading public intellectual writer, thinker. He's produced a new documentary for The New Yorker called Ravenous Choice, and he also wrote an article about it in a recent issue that focuses on the impact of USAID's dismantle meant through the story of like one woman and like a terrible choice she has to make around nutrition for her child. But more broadly, we talk about what the impact has been of USAID being dismantled, how it's not like a light switch that you can turn back on because of the complex distribution networks and strategies of USAID, what the impact has been on a human level, what it will be going forward, they need to kind of bear witness, which is what this documentary does. But also like how it's changing or not changing perceptions of the US around the world and what we can do about it. So we need to stay on top of this story and bear witness in a tools as good a person to talk to as anybody. Yeah, he really is. I read The New Yorker story of not seeing the documentary yet. I think it's pretty short though. It's like 20 to 22 minutes. 22 minutes, yeah, so it's definitely worth your time. Worth everybody's time. I'll definitely watch that. Every time I see, I saw Elon Musk getting a fight with someone on Twitter the other day, who thought it was gross that his new Elon's new pay package could make him a trillionaire. And he was lashing out and being defensive. And every time I see that, I get mad all over again at the harm he did to millions of people. Yeah, and the complete lack of any self refluxion that is a kind of a decision, yes, or a kind of a word. Yes, also finally, the end of the show, our friends of the pod subscribers will hear Ben and I answer some questions from the pod save the world discord community. So join up if you want to hear that. Or if you want to fire some questions at us. We love to hear from you. We also did a whole subscription show called Inside 2025 where we told stories basically about being drunk on foreign trips. Yeah, Inside 2025 did not focus that much on 2025, but there were some good stories along the way. It was us revisiting back in the day. Yes. So big story this week is the Muhammad bin Salman's kind of quasi state visit in Washington. So it's a side crown prince of Muhammad bin Salman or MBS for short. It's technically not a state visit because MBS's dad is the head of state, but Trump is rolling out the red carpet. There's a black tie dinner. By the way, when's the last time you saw that guy? Yeah, Salman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's he doing? Just sitting there? Not much, yeah, yeah. Surprise. Well, there's some health issues there. Yeah, big time. I'm just fries MBS hasn't, you know, grabbed a very expensive pillow. Yeah, he doesn't need to. He gets cheered in the studio here. Okay, so Trump, there's lots of meetings. There's the red carpet. There's all this stuff. So MBS is his first visit to Washington since 2018. Listeners from back then might remember that that was the 2018 visit was like literally three weeks long. MBS, he went to DC. He saw Trump. He got coffee with Mayor Bloomberg in New York. He went to Boston and hung out at MIT with some robots. He went to Silicon Valley and saw the tech CEOs like Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and the Google guys. And he was fed it in Hollywood. Yeah, it came here. Just hanging out with everybody. A lot of celebrities produced everybody. I'll want his money. And MBS got all kinds of gauzy media coverage for being this great reformer. And then a few months later, MBS approved the brutal execution of a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. And it all went crashing down for a couple of months. Yeah. Now he's fully back. Thanks to business leaders who want Saudi money, President Biden who wanted Saudi oil and the Trump goons who want corrupt crypto and real estate deals as far as I can tell. So according to the various news reports, Ben, the MBS wish list for this visit is the following. You want some sort of NATO-like security guarantee. It's probably going to have to be via an executive order of some sort. Like the one Trump gave to Qatar, because Congress is unlikely to approve anything without the Saudis normalizing relations with Israel. But I guess we'll see. He wants support that's a priority of all the things you could ask. Yeah, I'm not sure why will she get into that so he wants Support and technology for a Saudi civilian nuclear power program what could go wrong there The Saudis wanted advanced semiconductor chips to power their artificial intelligence industry and kind of Match what the UAE got basically and then Reuters reported that MBS plans to personally appeal to Trump to intervene to stop the war in Sudan Which is objectively a good thing But we should note that the Saudis have been back in the Sudanese military While the Emirates have been back in the RSF militia force. So this is also a bit of a proxy battle So Ben, it's not clear to me what US interests are gonna be advanced Trump and Biden like they used to want the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel But the Saudis say that's off the table if these really won't support a two-state solution which And BB reiterated last night on Monday night He said he doesn't believe in two-state solutions. So you'd think that would be off the table Then there's the corruption piece the times at a great story on this the detailed how The Trump Organization is in talks to lend its name to these massive projects in Saudi Arabia Including something a 63 billion dollar gig up project. They're calling it in the town of Jurya That's in addition to like Trump Tower the Trump Plaza private members only clubs in Jeddah other projects in Riyadh Saudi golf events the two billion the what the Jared Kushner so Ben Let's just you know, you sort of preview this like to let's pretend this visit is on the level for a minute How is it in the US interest? Do you think to give the Saudis a security guarantee or anything on their wish list besides ending the war in Sudan? Okay, so if I want to make the argument It's a geopolitical argument and the argument is essentially that the Saudis are sitting on top of you know trillion plus dollars If you have a lot of money to spend To throw it issues at a time when there's not a lot of You know we're in a cash poor world and these guys have like the biggest checkbook to take out and you know, I think in the Biden years there was a sense that We don't want them to fall into the orbit of China that essentially is what you always heard if they take their money and they start doing oral transactions and the R&B The Chinese currency will undermine the dollar or if they start buying Chinese weapons instead of ours like that will you heard our defense industry All these things the problem with that is First of all, it's not very simple for the Saudis to just kind of flip a switch and become like a Chinese You know satellite or something. I mean there there are militaries all been built by the United States like It's not as the people that are all using that argument Kind of overstate how much we need to court the Saudis and give them to kind of keep them engaged with us and Europeans and others like They're doing just fine as it is, you know So I I think everything he's asking for is kind of extra, you know like we don't need to give them a defense pact It's not in our interest to like have to go to war to defend Saudi Arabia at some point in the future, you know We don't need to give them a Nuclear program, which is something that they're also asking for that seems crazy Because they could flip a switch and turn that into a nuclear weapon if there's a sufficient amount of infrastructure in Saudi Arabia The AI you know the argument you get there is the same one as well They might buy Chinese chips if they don't buy American chips and that kind of thing but at the same time that cuts both ways too Because if all these chips go to Saudi Arabia without any kind of Restrictions in the same way that f 35s might be going to it seems like they're going to Saudi Arabia Well, they actually do have relationships with China and that stuff could go out the back door too So in a bizarre way if we're like pouring chips in the Saudi Arabia to beat China at the AI race So they actually may help China in the AI. So all these things are a little bit more complicated than they would be presented and none of them particularly the you know large investments in the Trump business interests Have anything to do with like what is on the mind of most Americans. That's for sure I think it makes total sense to give a civilian nuclear energy program to the country with the second largest proven Crude oil reserves in the world. Yeah, it's just an obvious thing. They're in desperate need of energy. Obviously, you would do. Yeah, so Ben and I were Our jaws were on the floor as we watched President Trump in MBS in the Oval Office earlier today This is Trump Taking a question from an ABC News reporter named Mary Bruce. He's very smart. Actually, we worked with her back in the day She asked about Jamal Khashoggi 9/11 and Trump's corrupt dealings with foreign governments. Let's watch Including the EU orchestrated to brutal murder of a journalist 9/11 families are furious. He is who you with who you with and the same team is the who you with? I'm the ABC news sir. You with who? ABC is fake news. ABC fake is one of the worst of the business, but I'll add a cheap way. Thank you I have nothing to do with a family business. I have left and when I I've devoted a hundred percent of my energy what my family does is fly They do business all over. They've done very little with Saudi Arabia actually because I'm sure they could do a lot And anything they've done has been very good. That's what we've done. We built our tremendous business for a long time You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial a lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about whether you like him or didn't like him Things happen, but he knew nothing about it And would you believe it that you don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that? I was just asking Mr. President along with you answer, you know, I prepared for both, you know, the families of My and I delivered in America, but you know, we have to focus in reality reality Based on ZI documents and based on what documents that some of the led them to use Saudi people and that event for one main purpose Is to destroy this relation to destroy the American Saudi creation. That's the purpose of my television About the jurors. It's really the painful to hear It's painful and so you can mistake and you're doing our best that this is those happen again So in Trump's mind Jamal Khashoggi the journalist was controversial He has nothing to do with his family businesses even though we watched him at the piece of it in Trump's shake Tell the president of Indonesia to call Don and Eric about a deal presumably some sort of like You know golf resort in Bali What did you make of that answer about been lot in trying to use Saudis to divide the US government and why how did they make you feel that MBS's Answer was more reasonable than Trump's. Yeah, there's so much happening there I do think that this is one for the time capsule big time because you are taking both the corruption and the Autocracy and kind of fusing them in one presentation from Donald Trump and the idea that he has nothing to do with his family businesses Because he's not necessarily running day-to-day operations or not the Bagman flying to the golf to pick up the check for the investments in the Trump Properties is complete another bullshit. There's no reason that these governments be pouring money into the Trump properties Because of the business acumen of Eric Trump, you know They're doing it purely because of the access it gets them to Donald Trump the preferential treatment that they think it's going to get them from Donald Trump And they have decent reason to believe that given the fact that we know for instance that Lauren Behold where Liberty Financial gets a two billion dollar investment from the Emirates Surely before Donald Trump shows up and announces that there are no restrictions on AI trips and things that plug in the Emirates, right? So this does not take Inspector Klusso to figure out that there's a lot of corruption going on here And Trump's efforts to obfuscate that are kind of absolute bullshit like people can see what's happening before their own eyes then on the Jamal Khashoggi thing what's Really depressing about this visit is you know that was a bit of a watershed moment in 2018 where It was such a shocking and glaring crime to murder and dismember A Washington Post journalist and US resident who was a human rights activist who criticized MBS You know that that even got the attention as you said for a few months of you know American business leaders were going to show up I remember talking to some foreign leaders in diplomats who said there was a real moment there Where actually embassies in trouble like inside the Saudi royal family did he go too far And Trump is the one who wrapped his arms around MES at that time and kind of brought him in from the cold now fast forward He's all the way in from the cold like this is MBS's world and we just live in it People like to talk about how Trump wants to be like Putin I don't think that's exactly the right analogy. He wants to be like MBS He wants to sit on top of a trillion dollars. He wants to mix politics and business He wants to be able to silence maybe not by dismembering them But he certainly as he made clear in that clip once to be able silence journalists who he finds to be A pain in the ass and look you're right MBS seemed like more reasonable MBS the person that aren't telling somebody it says Supervised the chopping up of a journalist seemed more reasonable and less offended by not even a tough question An obvious question that would be asked then Donald Trump You know who like we can't you know get comfortable with the fact that he just Really said a journalist who was killed for doing his job was like a difficult guy. Yeah people didn't like first of all It's not true. I don't I don't remember like some course of people that were like Jamal Kishoggi's an asshole He was viewed as a guy who deeply loved Saudi Arabia, but was concerned about like the treatment of civilians by the monarchy Yeah, yeah, and the silencing of descent and the kind of culture personality around MBS so Yeah, I mean and the 9/11 stuff is just you know, they don't want the conversation to be about What Bin Laden's ties might have been to Saudi intelligence or what Saudi money? I mean, I'll tell you a story like I went on The Axviles now defunct podcast by-- Is it defunct? Oh, it ran its course. But great podcast in 2016. And Ax asked me about this study relationship. And I said something about them financing Wahabi Madrasas. And essentially, frankly, in Cornish with the US, was supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. They were spreading this pretty strict and form of Islam. And that that was part of the incubator for what became the al-Qaeda in the Taliban. And we went to Saudi Arabia after that. And I was told by John Kerry and Rod Malay, who is at the time, like, you-- MBS is really mad about this and everything you gave to Dave Daxroud. And it's the first time I realized it-- I was like a podcast, so I didn't know. And we listened to podcasts. Yeah, MBS, buddy. Yeah, you've got better things to watch and listen to, pal. But so their very point is that they are very sensitive about this issue. And they redirect it to-- is he wrong? And he's not wrong. Like, I'm sure Ben Laden wanted to break up the US Saudi relationship. But that's not the question the families are-- the families are not questioning that. They're questioning, like, do we know the full facts about whether there was any Saudi government context? Yeah, certainly Ben Laden was pissed about US troops in Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf and in those foreign policy generally, but you're right, that wasn't the question at all. By the way, crooked media is Matt Berg, spoke with Jamal Khashoggi's fiancee at the time when he was murdered. We're going to drop that in here in post, just so folks can hear her perspective on all this. I got very strange feeling. It just all came up. And it digging more in my vein, in my wound, because I feel there is a focus for his visit for some deals and this, and Jamal being forgotten. He did take a responsibility in 60 minutes interview in 2019. But nothing happened behind the aftersists. And since, OK, he took a responsibility, but there is no real justice comes through. I do feel great in sense. There is some development to go and go on in Saudi Arabia, which is Jamal wish to have it. And I feel this have to align with another-- something is missing-- with all of this development and all of this advance. It has also to maintain the human right side as well, and democratic side as well, and the real justice. It has to be aligned together. There is something missing now, which is the real justice transparent and democratic and the equal right. So I just have to flesh out this corruption piece. I mean, a lot of it is through a company called Dar Global, which is based in Dubai, but as close links to the Saudi government. And Dar Global seems to have helped Trump just license his name to all these Gulf countries' properties, like Saudi, Qatar, Oman, the UAE. Their offices in the US are based in Trump Tower. Again, this is a lot of this is from a great New York time story. Also, I don't know if you saw this been the financial times had a report this week about how the Trump Organization is collaborating with the Saudis to build a luxury resort in the Maldives. But the twist is it includes some dumb bullshit about the blockchain technology. How you can own a fractal share of this 80-villa property that, by the way, was announced the day before MBS's visit. It's very, very, very subtle corruption there. And then I just noticed that Senator Warren and Senator Jack Reed asked DOJ in the Treasury Department to investigate world liberty financial, the Trump family's crypto company that you just mentioned because of transactions with North Korean hackers, Russian hackers, and even Iran. So I'm sure Pam Bondi will get on that one really, really fast. But this watchdog group called accountable.us estimates that roughly $11.6 billion or 73% of Trump's net worth is tied to his cryptocurrency ventures. And so we can see this stuff happening with the Saudis when it comes to real estate. We still don't know what, if any, participation they have on the crypto side. No, and it's all just like a scam. And you can't even get your mind around the depths of the corruption. And the reason they migrate to cryptos, it's like the easiest place to be corrupt. Because the money's dark, and it's hard to have a paper trail. Stuff can disappear quite literally. And you can get away with anything. Because there's no real oversight anymore, not that there ever was like that robust oversight, but at least there were investigations in the pre-Trump years. But I think the other thing you have to kind of keep your eye on in this relationship is we started by talking about really big, conswential things. Like, are they going to get a bunch of F-35 aircraft? Are they going to get a defense, you know, guarantee? Potato, yeah. Are they going to get a potentially a civil nuclear program? They're making really minimal investments to get that, right? If you have a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, throwing $10 billion a year, $10 billion a year, and again, I don't know the amounts, because we don't really know, but at real-state properties, it don't really matter. Or into crypto ventures, it will never lead to anything. That's literally beyond a rounding error for these guys. Yeah, and MBS knows how to play the press release game. Right, this is first meeting with Trump. He said he was going to spend, I think, invest $600 billion in the US. I wouldn't hold your breath for that to come through. You know, they're kind of running out of money and not running out of money. They're spending more than they should be on boondoggles, like the Neon project. We just talked last week, yeah. So I don't know. But Ben, just a quick aside. So last week we covered Syrian President Amid Al-Sharah's White House visit. After we recorded that, this unbelievable clip popped up that we just, we had to play for the listeners. Please watch. - Ms. Men's. - Ms. Frager, should I hold his hand? - Yeah, this is it, this book. - You don't know. - It's acting? - It's the best. - Frager, come here. - I'm thankful to you. - I have more here, sir. - Thank you, Mr. President. - Okay. So what we'll do is just take that, you know, put it in. And then the other one is, you know what? - I don't know, I don't know if you want it. - I don't know if you want it or why. - I don't know, but you guys said never know. - So we don't know why that was set to music. I don't know if there was a little string quartet in the room or if it just got edited that way. - I mean, I think it came out of it. - That sounded like a hotel lobby or anything. - I think it came out of Sharra's side. Like someone in the delegation was watching her, but I don't know. So Trump was happening there for listeners who were not watching on Potsaythoral YouTube and please subscribe to Potsaythoral on YouTube. We got some great stuff for you guys. A lot of funny visuals. And it's free. So Trump is spraying Sharra with Victory 47. His $250 Trump Cologne, which according to the website is quote, "For men who lead with strength, confidence, and purpose." He also offered, "I'll Sharra, the counterpart, Victory 47 perfume," which quote, "captures confidence, beauty, and unstoppable determination for Sharra's wife or wives." Trump helpfully asked him to clarify how many wives he had, which, you know, made me laugh. It was a weird fucking question. - You can see it, yeah. - It was real weird. Whoever's filming it laughed through real weird. - Maybe Trump's getting a little, you know, Sharia Curious there, I don't know. But I have to say like, it was objectively funny thing to watch. It also, I know this is like such a tired cliche. But like, this guy was in like a US prison in Iraq. Then he was like fighting in northern Syria for years. He's got like a bounty on his head. And suddenly the president of the United States is spraying Cologne on him in the Oval Office. Like it's crazy. Just like a one of seven billion life that this guy has. Like the movie rights alone. I don't know who play Al Sharra in the movie, but like, that would be quite the biopic. But the wives question there. Like does that land poorly? Like is that, I mean. 'Cause Cologne's like something he, you know, he has one of these kind of like orientalists, you know, views of like if I was a Muslim guy with a beard, maybe I'd have like nine wives and maybe that'd be cool or something, you know. - Yeah. - There's a little bit of a wish fulfillment in that question. - Yes, you're right. I mean, although, you know, I don't know that the bounds of marriage really keep Trump from-- - Yeah, from explorations. Yeah, that's true, that's true. - But yeah, I couldn't tell if Al Sharra just kind of laughed 'cause the situation was weird. I never know about like translation and what he understands. - What a weird thing for the translator, too, by the way. I mean, you know, you suddenly, this is like the conversation. - Yeah, you're like floppin' through your mind like concubine and concubine. 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We wanted to talk about Switzerland for a minute in an incredible story about corruption. So back in August, Trump reportedly had this disastrous phone call with the president of Switzerland, Karen Kelly-Sitter. I think we covered it at the time, Ben, I think Trump was mad about the trade deficit. So the Keller Center didn't grovel enough. After the call, Trump jacks up tariffs and that led her to calling this emergency cabinet meeting to figure out how to fix the problem as an actual crisis for the Swiss. So fast forward to earlier this month, the Swiss, they dispatched this group of Swiss business leaders and billionaires to meet with Trump. That crew brings with them a $130,000 gold bar, paging Bob Nendez, engraved with a 45 and a 47 on it, and a gold Rolex desk clock. Now technically this bribe was paid to the Trump presidential library, not Trump himself. Big wink. Yeah. I'm sure that that would be an exhibit. Either way it worked. Now tariffs are down to 15%. So again, I'm like tempted to laugh at just the brazenness of printing 45, 47 on a gold bar and offering it up as tribute, but when you add it all up, we're the ones getting fucked here. I don't know what the US should be demanding from the Swiss and a bilateral trade deal, but it's probably not a gold bar for a deal leader. I was in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago, as in Geneva and Baron, beautiful. Geneva is beautiful. Yeah, both beautiful places. And the tariff thing was all I'm being talking about, 39% tariff and everybody's like, this was very reasonable. So they're like asking me, you know, why this number, why with 39%, don't they? You know, that we are, you know, net importer of services from your country, like you just add this trade deficit thing up and people like yelling at me about, you know. Well, sir, Kevin has it tariff the island full of sheep and like the sub-sivex, oh no. So they were taking it very literally, but clearly they arrived at a different kind of strategy. And to your point, I mean, this is the classest form of corruption. This is like medieval shit where there's like a king of like with a bigger army that you have to show up literally with like a gold brick. I mean, they probably just had to like go into some castle and dust off the playbook from like the 15th century. Yeah. Like how do you, how do you deal with like a bad tariff duty? Because there's nothing subtle about a couple of gold bars and a gold Rolex clock. And there's certainly nothing in that for US taxpayers. And again, I desperately want people to bookmark this. All of the people that like to St. Louis Trump or like to, you know, I've had some of my speaking engagements people be like, well, isn't it time that we had an economic strategy to stand up for manufacturing in this country? If this was truly some theory of the case about reversing the inequities of globalization through the use of tariffs. It wouldn't be relinquishing tariffs on Switzerland in exchange for gold bars, you know. This is not a strategy for anything other than enriching an empowering Trump. Yeah. So it's a dusting off the playbook for like the Burgundy and Wars from the 1470s. Oh, good reference. Yeah. Thank you. I could go quickly. Yeah. It's insane. It's so insulting. It makes us look like just the most. Oh, yeah. Too big dictators, but anyway. All right, Ben. So switching gears here. In the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of really interesting reporting on FBI Director Cash Patel, who, according to one report in the Minnesota Star Tribune, is referred to as, quote, "A giant douche canoe by a top aide to Stephen Miller." So point for Stephen Miller here. But let's take through some of the things we learned about director canoe from these articles. It was the Wall Street Journal, did a great one in New York or at a long piece the other day. And we'll kind of learn about some of the many controversies that are swirling around Cash Patel and the FBI right now. So the first is Cash Patel's use of the FBI's private jets. We've discussed this on previous episodes. Back in the day, Cash viciously attacked the FBI director, Christopher Ray, for using the FBI's planes for personal travel. Now Cash does the same thing all the time. He flies to Nashville to visit his 26 year old, quote unquote, "country music sensation" girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, Cash even flew to Pennsylvania to see her sing the National Anthem at a low rent wrestling event. And then according to the Wall Street Journal, after the wrestling event, Cash flew Wilkins home to Nashville, and then he continued on to a place called, "I shit you not." The boondoggle ranch in Texas, it is owned by a big Republican donor named Bubba. It is stocked. It stopped. This is fiction, right? You're wondering if Trump spent some one-on-one time with Bubba? Yeah, yeah. Person-reasoned reports. The ranch, the boondoggle ranch, is stocked with exotic animals that you can murder via the comfort of your customized hummer. So there's that Patel is reportedly asked an FBI SWAT team from Nashville to provide security for his girlfriend, which is just like nuts and unprecedented, though we should know. She is like a maggot influencer type. She shitposts a lot, and she has been baselessly as far as we know, accused of being a Masad agent by various right-wingers. The evidence is basically she's hot and Cash Patel is ugly. And she works at Prager U, or she used to work at Prager U. Yeah, which is-- There's some Israeli-- Pretenduous connections. Yeah, yeah. The Masad or whatever. I'm just saying, I'm just relaying. Yeah, no, you're just-- I don't get sued here, because she's suing everybody. She's also suing a bunch of right-wing influencers. She's suing a bunch of maggot influencers. One for like five million. Yeah. It's a lot of money. Okay, it's going to open him up to discovery, too. It seems like a bad idea. Yeah, it seems like a bad idea. Okay. So there's also a public interest group called Public Citizen that has accused Cash Patel of illegally failing to disclose his work for the government of Qatar and for failing register as a foreign agent. Public Citizen also claims that DOJ changed the way it enforces the rules around foreign agent registration to prevent Cash from ever having to disclose what he did. Also, according to New Yorker, almost a quarter of the FBI's more than 13,000 agents have been assigned to work on the apprehension of undocumented immigrants. We have talked a lot on the show about the kind of opportunity cost of reorienting all these agencies to do stupid shit. That quantifies it better than anything I've seen. There's also the board pedestrian stuff about Cash being just kind of bad at his job when he's tweeting out and accurate information about ongoing investigations or pushing out competent agents who are just perceived to be liberal in some way or apparently the deputy director Dan Bongino didn't have to get polygraph like everybody else does. So out of weird stuff. So Ben, let's just pause there. Like we've talked about the flight stuff. I just want to harp on it for one second because I do think it speaks to a mentality within this organization. These Cash's defenders will say, "Look, by law, he has to fly on an FBI plane because he needs the secure comms." But like what makes me so mad about this is when you sign up to be a top national security official, I would say implicitly, but really explicitly agreeing to make that job your entire life through the duration of the time you have it. You know what I mean? Like CIA director, FBI director, national security advisor, like Homeland Security advisor. Those people are not going to fucking ranches for the weekend to hunt big game. Like we worked John Brennan when he was Obama's counterterrorism advisor and Homeland Security advisor at the White House before he went over to the CIA. John had his knee replaced and then showed up for work the next day. It might have been a hit. I can't remember. It was one of the two, but it was fucking weird, yeah. Yeah. He was at work the next day with a big cut and a brand new knee. Hopefully a little percussive or something. No, John, probably not. Probably not. Probably just fucking just whiten up like that. So like you got cash hotels flying to the ranches for the weekend. He's going to hockey games with Wayne Gretzky, he's flying to UFC events. Like that's not the job. You sit in the fucking skiff and you try to stop bad guys. That's your whole life. Yeah. Until you quit. Yeah. You know, the plane is not intended to like support the lifestyle of a maggot influencer, which is essentially what he's living with these kind of random weekends. There are also other resources too. Do you see that she's getting now like security from like FBI, like swat teams, swat teams literally? And he keeps redirecting it even when he was attacked mainly by mega people as well as like a few libs like us who are not really mad at the right wing though. But he took Umbridge by saying what a great American patriot his girlfriend was like, people are not attacking your girlfriend, bro. Like people are attacking you for being corrupt and incompetent and a little fucking weird. Okay. And, and so he's just redirect, you know, the security for her and all this stuff. But the reality about a guy like cash tell that I find interesting is it's gonna do a lot of damage in the short term. I mean, you mentioned that one story, the times did a big deep dive on the DHS gaps that are being left by this focus and immigration enforcement that included areas like child protection and cracking down on child sex trafficking and pornography. Like another thing that they just seem to be going pretty light on over the FBI these days. But the reality is in addition to being kind of this, you know, I mean, he's not even like one of these guys. It's like going to go back to being a rich guy. Like cash pretails future is as like a post maggot influence. He's actually got some problems like cash is like taking on some water here because he's going to have to go back to like podcasting and YouTuber and, you know, I don't know how long the girlfriend's going to stick around when he doesn't have the private plane anymore. So he's kind of hanging on by a thread here. But the thing that bothers me whenever these kind of stories come up is, and we can tie together the MBS thing into this all, do you ever feel timey like we are now like citizens of universe that is a fantasy camp for the worst fucking people in the world? The biggest loser. Yeah. So like cash pretails like living fantasy camp, right? He's got his like 26 year old girlfriend. He's flying down to the boondoggle ranch. He's going to UFC fights. MBS is coming here and saying like you got a trillion dollars and you walk away there with me once, you know, Eric Trump's vacuuming, I'm up billions of dollars in like crypto investments. And what are we doing here? You know, we're just literally like extras in the movie of their fantasy camp. I'm getting a little tired of it. It sucks. And then like the damage is being done. I mean, Cash Mattel was angry and embarrassed by reporting about his use of the FBI jet. So we like, in a fit of peak, fired a guy who was like in charge of the aviation program, that dude was also in charge of hostage rescues in child abduction cases. Like, okay, I'd rather keep that guy around. I mean, to your point about him returning to be a podcaster, the, I think it was the New Yorker story noted that his podcast back in the day was produced by the epic times, the fallen gong. He's a Chinese thing. There was a former senior White House official from like Trump 1.0 who was asked about Cash Mattel in New Yorker and they said Cash was seen as lazy and had no significant achievements during his time. And then just on your fantasy camp point, I just, it is worth noting that he's just a fucking dork. - Yeah. - He's a huge dork and a loser. - Yeah, I guess that's how I feel better about it is 'cause I don't even know that that guy knows how to have like a great time at the Boondock Orange, you know? Like he's just such a weird, he looks so uncomfortable in his skin. - Yes. - And that's actually like what we have going on these guys is like some of them like Steve Miller literally look like they're being eaten from within by an organism of like hatred. Some of them like Cash Mattel just look like deeply uncomfortable. - They know they're not. - They're just standing there like their arms rigid and like weird looks on their face, right? And then some like Trump or just like whatever the fuck like I just can't believe I get to do this every day, right? But I will say and you know, we don't do this that much anymore because we're 10 years into this Trump decade. But man, the people that like to lecture us on like law enforcement and like the sanctity of law enforcement, you know? And you must honor the police. It is so fucking disrespectful to law enforcement in this country to have this guy running it, you know? - He's a client. - And then this, just advice to Democrats who are being called soft on crime, like you might point out that like putting Cash Mattel in charge of the FBI to fly a jet around to see his girlfriend perform it like wrestling matches is not exactly a tough on crime. - Put a photo of him in your wallet and bust it at anyone time someone yells at you to back the blue. Yeah, also to my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now brother, we have the watch and I'll see you in Valhalla. That's what he said. - I'm still trying to make good sense of that one. - That is almost try hard, try hard, should have ever heard of my life. You're not a Viking, sir. Also, he gives out these challenge points. It's designed to look like the Marvel character called the Punisher. We're gonna throw it up on the screen for again for the YouTube viewers. It's hard to overstate how lame and ugly it is. Again, go to YouTube if you wanna see it, but it's like the shape of a skull. There's three guns on it for some reason. There's the number nine, 'cause he's the ninth FBI director. There's Cash's signature. There's the FBI seal. Like a lot of time when it's a planning something this lame. - Yeah, he is the kid that tripped your art kid. Like he, you know, he was that freshman in college at like, you know, did too many keg stands in 30 minutes and had to have his stomach pumped 'cause he was just trying to like, trying so hard to be like the cool, you know what, it's okay to just be yourself, you know? - Yeah, for just two seconds. - You're probably a little bit closer to being yourself when you wrote the children's book about the wizard named Donald, you know. But this Punisher, you know, country music boyfriend, it's just, it's not very convincing. - She's not that into you, dude. Okay, so back in the day, Cash Patel, you used to talk a lot about the Epstein files and pledged to release them now as part of the cover up. So we're not going to get into Trump's kind of crazy stonewalling of the release of the Epstein files because that is once again dominating the domestic political debate in the US. And by the way, it's like, I was listening to the BBC this morning and I was like, "The line's so great there, too, everywhere." But there have also been some really, there's been some interesting coverage of Epstein's ties with foreign governments that we want to just quickly touch on. A lot of this comes from the roughly 20,000 Epstein documents released by the House Oversight Committee, but then drop site news has been mining another, I think, kind of hacked archive of A-Hood Baroque's emails, maybe your other Epstein-related files. So the one, the couple of things that jumped out of us. First of all, Epstein tried to pitch himself as a Trump expert to the Russians. He told the then Prime Minister of Norway to tell Putin that Sergey Lavrov should give him a call to talk about Trump. This was leading up to the infamous Helsinki summit. Epstein claimed to have spoken to Vitaly Cherkin, the former Russian and UN ambassador. So that's interesting and notable. And then there's just been a ton of reporting on Epstein's ties to Israeli government officials. So we've talked about his relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister A-Hood Baroque, who stated Epstein's House a bunch of times there's a ton of traffic between the two of those financial relationships. A-Hood Baroque is also allegedly the, quote unquote, prime minister named in Virginia Jew phrase book, Virginia Jew phrase, one of the Epstein's victims. And she says A-Hood Baroque raped her. She died by suicide earlier this year. And then drops that news. They've done a bunch of fascinating reports off of both the congressional emails and then another tranche released by this hacking group that looked at Epstein's relationship with another senior Israeli intelligence official who lived at Epstein's house in Manhattan on and off from 2013 to 2016. That's weird. - You haven't had former Israeli - Yeah, missod. - Thousands of officials live at your house for three years. - And there's also like lots of weird kind of clearly coded worded emails that leaked out, being like return the headphones. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Return the airport. - The ego flies at 1230, yeah. - Weird shit, man. And then they looked at drops that news day. They looked at the role Epstein played in brokering security deals between Israel and Mongolia and then Israel and Cote de Bois. - As one does. - Oh yeah, yes one does. And then Epstein's attempt to set up a back channel between the Israelis and the Russians over Syria. So these reports are worth your time. They're long, they're complicated. We're not gonna take into all of it. But A-Hood Baroque clearly seems to have lied about his business relationship with Epstein. And clearly, anybody who has thought that Epstein had ties with the Israeli intelligence community that had not been disclosed, sure seem vindicated. In fact, one might argue that A-Hood Baroque at Epstein were kind of international arms and spyware dealers. - Yeah, this A-Hood Baroque relationship seems even closer than like any of the other Epstein relationships had been discussed, right? - Besides maybe Larry Summers. - Look at her dating advice, Jesus Christ. - Yeah, but look, the thing about the Epstein values is it's sad as shit, but you're also, are you truly that surprised by the people that seem to turn up in these files? I don't know. - A few of them. - Yeah. Well, okay, yeah, I guess there are a few. But it's serious about this. Like, you know, we've talked a lot about the royal formerly known as Andrew or Prince Andrew. But he seemed to kind of parachute in and out and stuff. Like A-Hood Baroque was like tight with this guy for years, staying at his place, like emailing with him, his associates are there. This is a guy that was not just a prime minister, again, was a defense minister of the country for years when we were there. And this has not gotten a lot of scrutiny. And by the way, the allegations against him are worse than we've heard about almost anybody else. - Like that he's sadistic. - It's like sadistic rape stuff, right? I mean, not even just ambiguous, you know, like assault claims. So the first point is that this is clearly like a tight nexus with A-Hood Baroque that like, again, like it's not a conspiracy theory. These are emails we're reading, you know? And in Israel as the United States, unlike the UK, there doesn't seem to be this, you know, the mark of shame only falls on people who have the capacity to be shamed. So Larry Summers feels it seems like he has a capacity to be shamed. He came out, gave a very like sad seeming statement that doesn't make it better. But it's just interesting that like, you don't hear much from Baroque, you hear nothing obviously from Trump of the denials. And then the secondary question about the, look, this Israel question is, it's not just kind of fringe stuff here. I mean, this guy was literally doing foreign policy type stuff with the Israeli government. Like that is clear from the emails. The Israeli government like makes use of all kinds of relationships around the world. They like to brag about their connections in all kinds of countries. And they're, you know, massage capacity to kind of run influence operations. So yeah, I mean, as this more information comes out, it is a legitimate line of inquiry to want to know more about that. Yeah, and shout out to the drop site news for being some of the only ones covering it. There has been a strange lack of quote unquote mainstream media coverage. I mean, I don't know if that's because these documents are allegedly hacked. But I mean, even drop site was like, they're alleged to have ties with like the Iranian government. So we don't know how all this got out there. But there's sort of like ethical questions or challenges verifying some of the documents. I don't know, but it is the lack of coverage is surprising. And look, the thing I'd say is, is yes, like people don't want to kind of jump all the way to the worst kinds of conspiracy theories that exist in the world, which are like, you know, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or what we have to recognize though is there's something in between saying like there's nothing to see here. So we won't even look and then saying like your Kenis Owens and like this entire thing was a creation of the Israeli government, right? There's some, there's a huge gray space in between those two things. And it's pretty obvious that Epstein was somewhere in that gray space. Right. And so is Ehud Burak. And it's, and so is Ehud Burak. And so is this random dude that lived with Epstein. Yeah. And so is the question of why Jeffrey Epstein is involved. Trust me, if you're in New York, like, you know, wealth investor, finance year slash child trafficker on the side, I don't know why you're brokering a coat of war security agreement for the Israeli government. Right, presumably. The normal thing that you do when you're like managing money for rich people. Yes, really weird. So many of these Israeli government could just call someone over there and stuff. You mentioned Prince Andrew, the Prince formerly known as Prince Andrew. I guess he, we've covered, you know, his scandals. We've covered the king recently stripping him of various titles and kicking him out of one palatial manner and into another, basically. But Andrew was always denied having net Virginia due friends. there's an infamous picture of them together touching each other in an intimate way. Not an intimate. Well, it's kind of a couple different ways. It's gross. He said that it was doctored. Well, in this latest launch of emails that was released, there's a message from Jeffrey Epstein to his former publicist saying yes, Andrew met Virginia G. Frey and they took a photo together. So no surprise, Prince Andrew was a fucking liar. That guy's not only a liar, he's like a terrible liar terrible. He's like frantically lying while like resigning things. I mean, he doesn't give off. I'm innocent vibes. No, let's just say that. No, he does not. Mr. Mr. Monbaton, now I think, right? Right. Yeah. Here's a new name. Yeah. Well, it's got to be weird to get a new name. That's the luck. 60s or whatever. 70s. Old creep. We're going to take a quick break, but before we do, I want you to let you know that the holidays are here. Ben. Happy holidays. I guess we're having those this year. Now is the perfect time. If you're looking to get something, go to the crooked store and snag gifts for your favorite activists and friends of the pot. We've everything from conversation starting stocking stuffers to cozy sweatshirts that you'll be wearing all winter. Maybe we should make like a pod say the world like chew toy. Yeah. Dogs. Yeah. Yeah. But don't I have conversation starters? It's a brain storm. The last thing to purchase to ensure you get your order by Christmas is December 11th for domestic consumption in December 7th for international shipping. So order soon, go to crooked.com/store to shop this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays can be a blast, but also can be challenging for people too. It's important to look for help if you're struggling. This November, BetterHelp is encouraging everyone to reach out, checking on friends, reconnect with loved ones and remind people in your life that you're there. And if you could use a little extra support this season, BetterHelp is there for you. BetterHelp Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 or more years of experience in industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from our tailored wrecks. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 at a 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This month, don't wait to reach out whether you're checking it on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself. BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com/CricketWorld. Alright Ben, we're going to turn to this fascinating report about the Chinese government using AI to automate most of its hacking operations. We wanted to dig into it. So this was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then in Thropic, which is a big AI company whose tools were used by these Chinese hackers put out a report confirming all of it and what they'd learned. So there was a hack that happened back in September. Some Chinese hackers used in Thropic's Clawed AI tool to automate 80 to 90% of their attack. And they could do things faster than any human being possibly could. And they were able to basically start these hacks and then only sporadically intervene. Only have human decision making and a couple key decision points. Should we continue? Should we stop? Things like that. The specifics of this hack were pretty limited. Like in Thropic's had they detected about 30 targets. The hacking the execution wasn't perfect. So like the AI hallucinated some log in and password stuff and messed up a few times. But going forward, if other hackers or their you know, state-back entities are able to get around safeguards that are put in place by AI companies like Anthropic and then use those tools as publicly available tools to hack other targets. Like the volume of hacking that happens in the world could just go up like exponentially. And so that is a scary prospect. And like the defensive side never keeps up with the offensive operations. And so crooked media is Matt Berg actually caught up with Senator Chris Murphy on Tuesday to talk about this issue in a total failure by Washington to regulate AI systems. And he had sort of an interesting observation about the way industry is trying to avoid regulation. Let's listen. There's a lot of power in the AI lobby. The industry uses China as a red herring, right? They tell us that well, if you regulate us at all, even lightly China will gain an advantage and ultimately control the global AI industry. That argument is a red herring. In fact, China would delight if the United States put no regulation, no restriction, no protection, on our AI systems and the AI destroyed American society and civilization. But for it, destroyed Chinese society and civilization, China is actually being fairly thoughtful about the way that it rolls out AI. It is not going to use its citizenry as guinea pigs to test different versions of dangerous AI. They have more guardrails imposed by their federal government than we have on AI. So there is no worry that we are going to hurt ourselves by smart, sensible regulation of AI. In fact, it's probably the only way to protect ourselves. So we're saying it's not just China that's using these AI models. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google also spotted Russian hackers using an AI model to make customized malware. But Ben, I mean, this is a massive problem. It's one of those problems that only government can solve. And we're just like the White House is just the huge story that just doesn't break through because there's so many dimensions to it. When you think about what's worrying about AI, you could think about security threats like could the AI be used to create like a biological pathogen, like a new pandemic? You worry about these offensive cyber attacks that will come back to you. You worry about disinformation campaigns like deep fakes that are incredibly credible that you can radicalize people or like cause a crisis. And then you just think about like job displacement. Do you think about AI companionship issues and teenagers committing suicide and I think it's so big that people are like, I don't know what to do about this. But the reality here is that we might look back on this time and Trump is like a secondary story. Like there's a world in which, you know, I've thought about this like 20 years from now, like Trump was the analog to like what was really happening, which was that like we were just like giving over society to like artificial intelligence. And just to take the anthropic example here, this is already here, right? And you don't have to be a computer genius to realize that AI can both do things faster and potentially better particularly in this kind of space, right? I mean, studies have already shown it's better, things like coding, it's better at programming makes sense because it's, you know, artificial intelligence. But it can also repeat things like at a volume that we can't even get our minds around. Like instead of one cyber attack, there could be a million, right? Yeah, it's like a volume game, right? Yeah, it's like password fishing and stuff. And a lot of cyber defense is a volume game, it's like you're a goalie and you're trying to keep out all these shots and all of a sudden like the shots went up million X. And I think these AI agent cyber attacks people have to realize is this is like the dial up modem version that the the fucking, you know, Chinese we're using from anthropic three years from now when we've reached AGI artificial gender of intelligence and super computer and smarter than human beings. This stuff, if you're just like in North Korea and you're like crash the power grid and Los Angeles, you know, like this stuff is going to happen. Right. And the idea that we're putting no guardrails on it to connect it back to Saudi Arabia, if you want to know why it's kind of weird to just let them buy as many chips as they want, build as many data centers and have as many large language models, it's this. It's like what might MBS want to do with AI in four years, you know, whether, I mean, just let your mind run, you know, with that for a little bit. Yeah, adding like a successful quantum super computer that can break any encryption. Yes. And we are in real trouble. And that's why what you should want. And I actually don't even like this paradigm of like racing the Chinese because the Chinese are going to get it. Like that there's no world in which the Chinese don't have the same technology. And so what we normal times, we be negotiating with the Chinese like a whole new global regime of regulations, right? Not just national ones, but international regulations for this stuff, but it's just not happening. Yeah, like obviously I don't love the Chinese. I don't trust them. What I hate about this setup is it's like the same handful of assholes that ruin society through social media are now in charge of this stuff. It's like we're we're giving Sam Altman the keys to the kingdom here. And people don't even I don't even think people are Zuckerberg and people are not excited about it. You know, like social media, like people were, you know, they liked it, right? I don't most people I know are kind of like, fuck, this thing seems like it sucks, you know? And like Sam Altman's doing these like weird interviews and he's like not convincing, you know, it just it like I think the frankly we need to help these people not destroy society. Like they they should want regulation, you know, because frankly in the absence of regulation, it's more likely something really bad happens. It causes like the people to to really react, you know? Yeah, I'm sure Elon Musk will be on it. I'll be really thoughtful and that's the thing you're counting on like, you know, it's tough when you're counting on like Elon to self-regulate. I remember the point of this when he was like seen as like the one, the canary and the coal mine telling the truth about AI and like sounding the alarm and now he's just racing to try to beat everybody too. It's just yeah. Grappacious capitalist with a weird, you know, at times Nazi. Yeah, and the goal of Elon is not to have GROCK ENTER YOUR WEIRD queries on X about like, you know, did this person really like, you know, shoot their dog or something? I mean, it's, it's this next level. It's domination. It's AGI, and it's also displacing like as many workers as humanly possible at Tesla factories with robots. Yeah. Just like is already happening in Amazon. Great future we got here. All right, we're going to make a big swarf here, Ben, and talk about Bangladesh. I'm like we've talked about Bangladesh. I should probably talk about last summer. Oh, we did. Yeah, in detail. Yeah, so last summer, there was a huge protest movement and then a violent crackdown on these student protestors that killed at least 1,400 people. So the protests kicked off when the Supreme Court of Bangladesh reinstated a rule that set aside 30% of civil service jobs for the descendants of fighters in the Bangladesh liberation war against Pakistan back in 1971. Before that war, Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan, and then there was this, this, this, uh, liberation war. But like so many of these protests we've covered on the show, the kind of quota ruling was the tipping point that got people into the streets where they expressed longstanding anger about corruption, lack of economic opportunity, and a broken political system, and increasingly authoritarian political system. So the prime minister at the time, uh, Sheikh Asina, uh, called the protesters traitors, and then she authorized the military to shoot them on site for breaking whatever rule. Um, so fast forward to Monday, the Bangladeshi International Crimes Tribunal, uh, court in Bangladesh sent into Asina to death for authorizing these extra-digital killings, and her case was kind of open and shut because they have leaked audio where she specifically authorized the use of deadly force. You probably don't want to do that on an open line next time, uh, autocrat. So, um, uh, Asina was found guilty, but she's currently, uh, in India and refuses to return. So she was tried in absentia, and it's not clear what happened next. Um, Bangladesh has been ruled by a caretaker government since she went into exile. That government has demanded that the Indian government return Asina, but a bunch of political analysts don't think it's likely, um, it's tough politics for the Indian government to return someone who's going to be killed, but also like she had closed ties with them over the years. A lot of people think the Indian government was propping her up over the years, so we will see, I guess. So Bangladesh has elections coming up in February. Asina's party has been banned from participating. Then, I don't know, how do you see this set of protests that kind of folding into the broader set of Gen Z protests we've been covering so much lately? Well, I think this one was kind of an instigator, right? It was like one of the first ones, and it succeeded to a point that ousted her, and she would have been kind of a increasingly autocratic figure. It would have been a dominant figure in their politics for decades. Um, and, you know, got this transitional government under Muhammad Yunus, who is this kind of unifying figure in the country. I think one of the challenges that I see with this, though, is look, I'm not, she was a bad leader, bad person. Um, number one, I'm not a big fan of like the death penalty, like in general, like it just, I'm not either. I am justice, but like, you know, put her in prison for life, you know, um, I just think like there's something kind of primal about, um, the death penalty being like kind of the objective, right? But it ties to the second point, which is again, that there should be accountability, right? And all these places, I'm not saying there shouldn't be, but you also really want the focus to be on like, "Hey, what are we building next, you know?" So you want to make sure that like vengeance doesn't overcome, um, the, the opportunity of trying to do what is often harder, which is building an alternative political system in society. Uh, and so you want to me, and I'm not suggesting that's unhappening Bangladesh, but, you know, you want to see that anger channels constructively, um, in addition to being directed at accountability. Yeah. Uh, speaking of anger and how it'll get channeled, the corruption, let's talk about Ukraine. So there's been, uh, a major corruption scandal that's come out of the last few days that has ensnared members of, uh, President Zelensky's inner circle. Um, listeners might remember how back in July, Zelensky was like roundly criticized for trying to weaken anti-corruption agencies in Ukraine. He backed down after there were these major protests and pushed back from the international community, but people are not wondering, you know, what did he know at the time and why was that happening? So the economist has an excellent report on what happened. Here's some details from it. So there was this 15-month-long investigation by these anti-corruption bodies in Ukraine. They uncovered a scheme to steal at least $100 million from Ukraine's, uh, state nuclear power company. It was uncovered by all these secret recordings. They were bugging like offices and apartments and rooms. And the details are incredible. Like these guys found a golden toilet bowl in an apartment that belongs to a guy named Timor Mindich, who is a close friend and former business partner in the partner of Zelensky's uh, Mindich left the country right before he was arrested. So clearly he was tipped off somehow, which raises a whole other set of questions. Um, this again is verbatim from the economist, quote, at one point in the transcripts, one of the accused complains about back pain from lugging heavy bags of cash around Kiev. It's tough. That's how much they were stealing. There's another individual, uh, recorded saying it would be a waste of money investing to protect parts of Ukraine's electricity grid near its nuclear power plants. And then right before this story broke, the Russians hit those electrical substations with drones and blew them up. And so the conspirators seemed to have figured out they were getting busted sometime in July. They started harassing the various members of the corruption anti-corruption bodies. Again, that is when Zelensky's office and political party started trying to take control of the anti-corruption agencies independence, which is very bad timing. Like, I've not seen an explanation for that. That's seen the explanation for that. I've also not seen like a non-political actor say that Zelensky was being on the scheme or even aware of it. But there's a lot of questions being asked here because his current energy and justice ministers are among the alleged conspirators, along with a former deputy prime minister, and a lot of the money seems to have been stolen and taken over to Russia. There are also, I think, some evidence that this broader scheme started before the Zelensky administration came to be. Zelensky is called on two of the ministers to resign. He's announced sanctions on Minditch, who escaped the country. And this is really bad. It already has enraged Ukrainians who can barely heat or light their homes. And then they're reading about a hundred million dollars being pilfered. And these guys scoffing at the idea of protecting energy infrastructure from Russian drones. It's also going to infuriate Ukraine's international supporters to like why the fuck would I get these guys money if it's going to get psyched off like that. How much damage do you think is done? And like, what are the odds you think that Zelensky can fix it? I mean, I think it is a lot of damage because, look, Ukraine has always had a lot of corruption. A lot of the systems that were built there in the post-COVID years. And frankly, something probably go back to the Soviet years. We're kind of these everybody gets to take something off the top. And you grease something by paying off a politician. But you know, Zelensky actually came to office as there's going to be any corruption reformer type candidate, right? This outsider. And I think what the reminder is, look, you're right. There's no evidence or nobody's said that Zelensky was personally involved in this. Frankly, he's said and done the right things since this kind of came to light, at least recently. At the same time, though, it's a warning that just because you might like Zelensky and the way he's led the country, that doesn't mean that underneath him, there couldn't be huge fucking problems, you know, that he might not know about, right? But the warning sign is this. Ukraine has drifted a bit to being like not a one-party state, but like, you know, Zelensky and his party kind of bit dominating things. And when that happens, that's when this kind of should happen. Even if the leader might be okay, if there's a sense of impunity and there's a sense that there's not like guardrails, like, you know, you get bad apples in any party and this kind of should happen. And it's especially dangerous for Ukraine because number one, it could endanger that support, you know, who wants to be, you know, supporting a country to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from Europe and the United States and then learn that some guys are like lugging that around in bags that we're hurting their backs, literally. And also, like, you don't want to become, you know, the victory that Ukraine could win, we know is not like reclaiming every ounce of territory and like vanquishing Russia in the battlefield, the victory is that they can emerge as a democratic society, which is how this all started, that could be a member of the European Union. Well, none of those things can happen if you're corrupt either. You should not enjoy the EU. So they have an extra responsibility to get this in order and to not get lazy and frankly to take democracy seriously because ultimately that's the prize that they have to win here. Yeah, it's a very big deal. I think the sort of, I think the economist story on this reported that the next part of the government that they're going to look at the anti-corruption body is going to look at is the defense industry. Yeah. And, you know, there's some sense that like, as long as he's better let that happen. Yeah. And even if it sort of leads to him losing some top allies again, because it's sort of a question of between cutting off a limb or letting the entire body get sick. Yeah, exactly. Let's see what he chooses. Good morning. So I think I stole that from the economist or someone quoted in it. Two more things forwarded on so we're going to get to the Benz interview. So we just want to keep highlighting what's happening in Sudan. So we've covered the Civil War there. It's been raging since 2023 and more recently there has been the capture of the city of El Fasher by this group called the RSF, the militia force that is backed by the UAE and that is fighting the Sudanese military as part of the Civil War. They are just accused of unspeakable atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. So we reach back out to our friends at the Norwegian Refugee Council who are working in a city called Tawila helping people who escaped El Fasher get services. So this is a clip from Noah Taylor who's the head of operations for NRC Sudan. When I arrived here again a few days ago, what struck me was I crested this hill driving into the town and what was burgeoning as a small makeshift camp back in June has now exploded into this. sprawling, mega-city of a settlement with multiple sections and a new rival still pouring in daily. I spent time with some families who had recently arrived including a man who was reunited with his wife who'd been separated from for nine months. He walked on foot with the crutches from Elfasha with the wound in his leg who had taken him 18 days to travel some 60 kilometers from Elfasha to Tuwila dodging checkpoints, moving at night, moving in small groups to try to avoid those who would seek to extort him, those who'd seek to accuse him of being a soldier or intelligence, or to reunite. And unfortunately this this story is one of the happy ones. The ones that aren't are the people who've sitting and look out towards Elfasha daily waiting for any son that their loved ones could possibly still be making that journey. I've worked in displacement camps and sites like this my entire career and I've never seen anything like this before. So you know they're the Mark of Ribio called the Emirati Foreign Minister last week. Hopefully Sudan was on the agenda but we don't know that's the case. We also saw that you know we talked earlier about how Mohammed bin Salman apparently came to the Oval Office today with a request that Trump helped and the war in Sudan. So maybe Trump will take that seriously but mostly it seems like they just don't care. Yeah the only thing I'd say it's interesting is that MBS. Mohammed Zayed is the leader of the UAE. MBS and MBC used to be super tight and they seemed to have kind of drifted apart, shall we say, and this is one of the reasons why. But yeah as we talked about absent some pressure on the Emirates and and and others who are kind of financing this stuff like it's gonna be really hard to stop. Yeah final sorry Ben so we're gonna try to put the put the dick in dictator or measure at least. Channel four news over in the UK they produced a documentary called Hitler's DNA Blueprint of a dictator. They analyzed a swatch of bloody fabric from the couch Hitler killed himself on and they confirmed the blood was his and they proceeded to start testing his DNA for like everything possible. A couple of conclusions. One, Hitler did not have Jewish ancestry despite longstanding rumors that he may have. Two, Hitler most likely had something called Kalman syndrome which is a rare genetic disorder that can mess with sexual development during puberty. Kalman syndrome can lead to undescended testicles and in 10% of the case a micro penis. This tracks with an exam from a stint in Landsberg prison where doctors noted an undescended right testicle. So interesting and one can only hope that those scientists who cloned Tom Brady's dog stay the fuck away from that swatch of fabric. So what you're saying is he had one undroped testicle on a micro penis. Sounds like that could have been a case. I mean it would you know I mean look famously you know Hitler made sure that they really burned his body thoroughly right and the thought was that you didn't want to get like you know. Paraded through the streets like this. But well maybe it was this. I mean maybe tiny bridge. It's a very tiny little coffin. Tiny little secret that he was carrying around his whole life. I also love by the way Channel 4 during this and the Brits have been dunking and as they should. They've been dunking on Hitler. Like I love that they're still dunking on the guy. Nobody deserves it more. Biggest creep in human history. We should have stories about his micro penis on a regular basis. It is remarkable documentary. I don't know how you pull something like a lot of patients too like to just get on that. What was the pitch meeting here like I wonder if we test his blood whether we can find out. Yeah I think it took a long ass time and I think you know there was the Guardian had a good right up on it. It was like they tried to get a sample of blood from some modern descendant of Hitler and it's like they understandably weren't particularly. That publicity is a kid no shit but anyway I've not seen this documentary I think it's out now so maybe I'll go to watch. Okay we're gonna take a quick break but when we come back you're gonna hear Ben's conversation with a tool go on day about the impact of USAID getting doged by Elon Musk and Donald Trump and a bunch of other assholes so stick around for that. Pazet the world is brought to you by Quince. Cold Morning's holiday plans. This is when I just want my wardrobe to be simple. Stuff that looks sharp feels good and things I would actually wear. For me that's Quince and the bonus Quince pieces make great gifts too. The season's lineup is simple but smart and easy with Quince. $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like an everyday luxury and wool coat that are equal parts stylish and durable. 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I'm very pleased to be joined by a tool to one day who is a renowned surgeon and public health leader from January 2022 to January 2025. He was also the administrator for Global Health at USAID. You may have read a tool's work in the New Yorker. He currently actually has a new documentary film out from the New Yorker that is meant to highlight the dire circumstances left behind by the destruction of USAID. It's called Ravenous Choice. It's short it is incredibly powerful and it really drives home in one story the impact that so many people are feeling. So a tool thanks for joining me and thanks for making the film. I'm so glad to be here. So let's just start with kind of the big picture of what's happened because you know there's a lot of attention for two weeks when you had 25 year olds going through and firing people and and then of course it's the Trump era so the camera kind of moves on to other things and people kind of memory hole what's happened but obviously the impacts of USAID's closure are being felt intensely around the world and there's some estimates that show that as many 600,000 people have already died this year because of the shutdown including two thirds of whom are children. Those are staggering numbers but you're kind of warning that that could just be the beginning. Just put put people a little bit inside the scale of what's happening. Yeah so let me just start where you started right that the even I was leading Global Health at USAID when I departed at 11.59 on January 20th at an auguration a few hours later the President Trump signed the executive order saying that all foreign assistance needed to come to a halt. By that weekend half of the Global Health staff was being let go because they were contractors and their contracts came to an end. You had all leader letters going out ceasing all spending of US dollars. He had medicines on the shelf that could not be distributed food on the shelf not given to starving children. It was evident within those first few days that hundreds of thousands of lives would be on the line just in the first year alone but there was zero curiosity zero interest in how to mitigate that suffering and instead what was a pause turned into a complete shutdown of USAID so the staff were purged the 83% of the programs were terminated. The institution was dismantled and what remaining programs there were were transferred to the State Department and the and the funds were impounded. Now that meant everything from Global Surveillance for Bird Flu that was being done in 49 countries was shut down HIV meds halted. There are programs that are running so things aren't at zero. The estimates that have been made have taken a fairly conservative view. The reason I went to the field and wanted to see it on the ground and brought a film team with me that followed me as I went was because we're not going to have the actual numbers immediately. The mortality estimates will for 2025 will be released in 2027. The data monitoring that would tell you, well here's what services are working or aren't working. That set of funding was stopped by the administration. They also fired the inspectors general who would be doing audits and heading into the field and seeing what happened and so the result is you don't see what is happening and then you know the The deaths don't occur like they do in a war with everybody in one location. You go from a 3% to a 4% death rate for children, and that's a one-third increase in deaths, but they're scattered, and just walking around, you don't see what's happening. So, following individual stories is how you begin to unpack it, so we can begin to know what's happening now, and you can see why. Yeah, so sometimes people are overwhelmed by statistics, and a single story can drive home what's happening in a more relatable, recognizable way. And so with Revenous Choice, you tell the story of a mother from South Sudan, who's in Refugee Camp, and Kenya, who has to make a terrifying choice about how to deal with the sounds. Listen, I give it away. Yeah, well, yeah. But I wanted to ask you, you could have picked so many stories, why this one and why does it uniquely capture, maybe not uniquely, but why this one and why does it capture what so many people are facing around the world because of the U.S. ID closure? Yeah, so a couple of reasons. I've been, went into the field fairly early, and have pulled together a team that includes people who are embedded, you know, people from Kenya, a Kenya journalist, a refugee who's helping support the film team and do filming on an ongoing way, all of those things. And everywhere you're seeing these terrible cases, you know, we met a family who lost their 18-year-old daughter to pregnancy, lost her life because the monitoring that was there for her pre-eclampsia was taken away and she ended up having a seizure and dying, right? A story after story that you could tell. I was in primary health care centers. I was in Nairobi, advanced HIV facility, and everywhere you could see what's happening. I was particularly concerned about malnutrition, however, and it's partly because Ravenna tells a story that most people don't know about, that you just think malnutrition is like we just need to get people food and that's the problem. 20 years ago, a child with severe acute malnutrition would come to a hospital and they'd have a 20% chance of death at that point. And we learned how to move the care and the detection into the community. You have community health workers simply going and measuring the heightened weight of children once a month and having some basic recipe for saying if this child is not gaining their weight or actually losing, here is now a therapeutic food specially formulated to recover this child. Invented and manufactured in the US, it's a sometimes called plumpy nut, a peanut paste that can rescue children and they got to 85% of the children with severe acute malnutrition and treat them in the home and then the complications would come to the hospital instead of waiting for people to come in. The result was dropping the death rate in Kenya to under 1%. That has been responsible for a big part of the reduction by half in child deaths that occurred during the last two decades. So I wanted to see what is the state of that system. I had worked on making that system work and what Ravenna shows as she tries to navigate the system with a sick child who's also got starvation that that system every part of it is broken, the community health workers who do those measurements, two thirds are laid off. The food aid that can support people is down to only 40% of calories for the day which meant just a single meal available to children and as well as adults. And then their treatments in the facility were pulled away. So we've found the way to make it so severe malnutrition you don't have to die. And then we pulled that treatment away. Yeah, and I want to ask a question about the system because I think it's really important for people to realize that this is not even just a dollar question. Some people may hear this and think, "Well, why can't someone else pick up the tab for these things?" First of all, that's not happening. We've actually seen the European Union cut their own development budgets too. But even if it were somehow possible to find some other money, I think it people don't understand. It's not just a sense that what USAID was like some dollars flowing out, it's, or even just some medicines or some peanut paste, it's who's paying the community health workers, how does that supply chain managed? I was trying to explain on the podcast the other day that it's in a place like Sudan, it's how do you get the things there? And there's logistics points and there's contracts with people who can move certain things around. So if you remove USAID, talk a little bit about the system that is being removed on things like health and food support and not just the kind of, now there's less money being spent on it. That's such a great core point you're making. One way we save lives is, yes, putting medicines on the shelf and putting food, distribution out, and putting out the funds to organizations like the World Food Program and UNICEF and so on to do some of those things. And that's important to rescue lives in the moment. But the biggest, most efficient part of the investment is the investment that identifies and helps patch holes that are making it so instead of 70% of people on HIV or with TB or with malnutrition getting what they need because stocks are out of supply or there's a part of the system that's broken here and there. We were coming in and helping provide technical assistance that could identify, here is where the gaps are, we sometimes provide capital to close the gap and then hand over the system. You know, it might be fuel for motorcycle riders making sure laboratory tests get to the places where they are, they can be run and it can happen in under 24 hours where it makes the difference instead of losing the time. And that expertise, you know, most USAID staff were in the field. They were in the countries where they worked, they worked with their partners and that might be, you know, might be in Ukraine we had 40 people, for example. You can't make the whole country run in 40 people. They had networks of civil society, of doctors and nurses, of people in the health ministry that could do the execution and together you would partner around, hey, here's how you get the pharmacies back open again. You know, when you're in Kenya, here is how you get vaccination rates that are at 60 percent to 90 percent and that's what saves hundreds of thousands of lives and ultimately millions. So just, you know, the last 20 years, the latest estimate is that USAID work saved 92 million lives and those were the biggest parts of making that happen. It was ways that we kept scaling improvements in the system and accelerating making those things happen. So the obvious priority area of concern and what's happening is the lives that are being lost or the lives that are not being made whole because of the absence of this assistance. I mean, there's research that suggests that this could, you know, end up costing tens of millions up to 22 million lives. But I also want to ask about, there was a secondary aspect to USAID, which was, you know, it was founded by John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. In part, just so if I could put it, you know, crudely, people liked us more, you know, we're battling for hearts and minds against the Soviet Union and we're showing up as the good guys trying to help countries solve problems and develop and deal with challenges. What is your sense? Because if doing USAID well can be helpful in that regard, ripping it away from people is not helpful and they don't watch Fox News in Kenya and they don't, you know, have a steady diet of propaganda being fed to them about how great the president is. What is your sense of the impression that this is made on the people you've met with in Kenya and other places in the field or people you talk to? How would you describe to Americans the impact this is having on the way that people around the world look at us? So a couple of things. One, let me start with what inspired Kennedy was the Marshall Plan. Here was America coming out of a war. We were the victors and instead of raping and pillaging the resources of the societies that we just defeated. As so often happens in war, we did the crazy thing of investing in Germany, in Japan, in Italy and other countries where we, whom we had just defeated and that ended up producing much more prosperity for the United States as well as those countries gave us peace and stability for going on a century. And so it had enormous value and self-interest for us as well as benefit to humanity. And that is what has played out again and again in the USAID story. There is a dark side to the USAID story. There have been periods and we're in one of them where the criticism is that soft power stuff is just soft-headed. It doesn't do any good cooperation and work with partners to solve big humanitarian problems. What's in it for the US? We should be putting our objectives, our political and our military objectives first. And the humanitarian mission should be secondary to that. And we did that in Vietnam. We did it in Iraq. We did it in Afghanistan. And every time you gave it in the hands of contractors who ignored what wanted to solve all the problems in one year or two years had no long-term plan, no engagement with the country to solve together these problems. And the result was they were political failures. They were militarily a failure on top of being a humanitarian loss of life. And you're seeing that again now. So we're not a reliable partner as the way the other countries see us now. They see China as being more open and predictable in certain ways. I'd say there's, you know, a mix of three different reactions that I hear. One group of people are just wistful. They remember when the US was an important leader. And would rally the world around, we have to stop HIV, we have to stop polio, we have to end famine. And we contributed enormously to make that happen. A second group were like good riddance. You were never a good country. We knew this was the real you the whole time, right? We have given fodder to those folks. And then most people are like, you know, we survive. We survive. We got through, we had COVID. We had Hurricane Freddie in Southern Africa. We have had climate disasters of all kinds everywhere. This is another one. And they suffer. But we will survive. We will find a way through. And, you know, it's a mix of all of those things happening, none of which are ones where anybody says, you know, we see the we see America as a force for good in the world or a force that we want to support rather than resist and fight. Well, obviously, one last question when I ask you is that, you know, the kind of people that will be watching Revenue's Choice or hopefully the people that can be impacted by it and, you know, think more and care more about what's happened USAID. And again, encourage people to check it out from the New Yorker. But, if people are thinking, well, you know, what can we do about this going forward? Obviously, not much for the next couple of years, although I think people should, you know, try to do more to support organizations that are meeting some of these challenges. But, but, you know, the opportunity may come someday where we can build a new development agency, right? Or at least, reintroduce ourselves to the world as caring about these things that people need to survive. What would you tell people about how to think about what we could do differently in the future? Should we be thinking about, like, what would a new development agency look like? Should we be thinking about just different ways that America can show up in the world than not just the way we have in our Trump, but the way we did in Iraq and Afghanistan? What would be your affirmative case for what we can do when we can remedy this? Well, first, I would say, before I get to the affirmative case, we have an administration that denies any of this is happening. So, it's absolutely critical that we bear witness and show the harm. And it is, and that harm, you know, the indifference to global to health abroad and public health abroad is translating into indifference to public health at home. With the same HIV programs being shut down across the country, we abandon all HIV vaccine work. Research, we've, you know, we've decimated significant parts of the public health capacity in the country as well as-- We almost got snapped. Just like we got global and malnutrition assistance, you know? 100%. See, it is the same thing being extended home. So, all that said, I'd say the second thing is, you know, USAID was built over 60 years and was a, you know, on the one hand, it was 10,000 plus people deployed around the world. Those people had networks that reached the millions of people. So, you could make a lot happen. It was our largest non-military force for operations in the world. Rebuilding it is going to be a multi-- it's going to take, you know, decades to really rebuild that. And I do think we have to be building the case for recognizing this is an independent development agency function. It is not something that can sit, you know, we have three pillars of foreign policy, development, defense, and diplomacy. And if you say, look, let the diplomats run the development process. Diplomats work on a month to one or two year kind of objective level. And these objectives are ones that are 20 years in the making. Those are-- that's how we eradicated smallpox. It's how we were able to work around the world to lift a billion people out of extreme poverty and stabilize, you know, turn places like Latin America into largely middle and upper income countries where they used to be, you know, the impoverished of the world. So, we know we can do this, but it doesn't happen if you don't build that independent and longer casting capability. Yeah, no, that's a good-- that's a good point. There's no quick fixes to any of this. Well, again, everybody should check out the documentary Revenous Choice, continue to follow a tool, go on his work in the New Yorker, and pay attention to this issue. We'll keep trying to do that over here too. Thanks so much for joining us. Great thanks. Huge thanks. Thanks again to a tool go on day for, uh, 20 in the show. And we'll see you guys next week. Potsy of the world is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alonam and Kovsky. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vittor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cancer is our audio engineer. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefkoat, Mia Kellman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. 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