Can the FBI Survive Trump & Kash Patel?

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Weird week to be in politics slash political media slash to be an American, Ben.

Yeah, it's a bit of an unsettling time to be all of those.

To say the least.

To say the least.

Yes.

It's fun getting a text from all your friends being like, change up your pattern of life.

P-O-L?

P-O-L.

You get that text from that.

I know which friend.

You get the acronym.

Yeah, I know.

It's been really scary.

It's been really weird.

It's awful on every level.

I feel profoundly sad for Charlie Kirk and his family and his friends, and also quite freaked out by this clear crackdown on free speech.

See Donald Trump today threatening John Carl at ABC News, being like, yeah, your hate speech doesn't ought well.

No, John Carl lunch.

Yeah, I

what also feels

ominous about it too is it it feels like there was a

you know they Steve Miller probably had a plan on the shelf for the quote-unquote radical left,

which he defines pretty broadly.

Yeah.

You know,

because his language, I mean, we can talk more about it, but this constant refrain around terrorism, like terrorist network,

is very deliberately chosen because there's like legal authorities that come with that.

There's all kinds of national security levers that the government can pull if you're approaching something not as a law enforcement issue, but as a terrorism issue.

Yep.

They can spy on you.

That is frightening.

They can kill you if you're on a boat coming from Venezuela and presumed to be a drug runner now.

Yeah.

There's a lot of shit.

Freeze your money, all these things.

There's a lot of scary shit happening.

But we've got a great show for you guys today.

We're going to cover the UN Commission's declaration that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, along with the IDF ground offensive that is starting up now in Gaza City.

We'll also cover Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit to Israel and why it was just pathetic.

for so many reasons.

We'll check in on how things went for FBI Director Cash Patel during his Senate hearings Tuesday, how and why Charlie Kirk's assassination has become this global news story, and why it has led to some very dark accusations against the Israeli government.

Then we're going to look at how an ICE raid in Georgia has created an international incident with South Korea.

The latest on the anti-corruption protests in Nepal.

We'll preview Trump's second state visit to the UK and why the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein is riding on Air Force One with him.

As usual, per usual.

And also, the trip also comes with Trump's latest middle finger to Ukraine.

We'll cover why the presidential campaign in Ireland just got a little less terrible.

And then, Ben, you're going to hear my conversation with Tom Fletcher.

He is the Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the UN.

We talked about like all the hottest hotspots on the globe.

We talked about Haiti.

He just went to Sudan.

He's been to Gaza.

We talked about what doing that job, what doing development and assistance is like in the wake of USAID getting destroyed by Elon Musk.

So really smart, interesting guy.

Yeah, I'll just say one thing too, Tommy.

I've heard anecdotally from people in the UN system who like are worldos or listen to the podcast.

We appreciate you.

Your jobs are not easy.

No.

I mean, the UN jobs are hard in the best of times, but when the UN member states are at each other's throats and they're throwing

rocks in the gears of the Security Council, that job is that much harder.

And the fact that these people show up every day and work their ass off to try to make the world a little bit better.

That is hopeful, right?

Yeah, no.

It's funny.

We sort of concluded on this note, which is like, look, I talked to him as part of this larger initiative called the Be Hope Podcast Initiative, which is tied to the 80th UN General Assembly and the final five-year push to meet these big international goals to end poverty, reduce inequality, and tackle climate change.

And I'll be honest, when I first sort of heard about the initiative, I just felt like, would it be inauthentic for me to have this conversation?

Because I feel anything but hope in this moment.

And the last week has certainly added to that.

But at the end, he sort of talked about how, like, look, you know, he walks into his office, he gets the worst briefing in the world every single day.

And then you dust yourself off and you get back up and you keep fighting.

And how,

you know, yes, institutions are flawed, but they're run by people and we're flawed.

So we're going to create flawed things, but all we can do is keep kind of like fighting on, right?

Yeah.

And that's what gives you hope is people going to work and trying to deal with those things in.

terrible circumstances.

You know,

that in and of itself is a hopeful act.

Yeah.

And if people listening who are working at the UN feel like we're down on you guys this time.

No, we see you.

We're ashamed of our own country.

Yeah, yeah.

We see you and we're proud of you and we appreciate you.

Yeah.

Also, thank you to everybody who listened to the YouTube exclusive episode we released on Saturday.

Actually, a ton of people listened.

That was like one of the best.

most viewed things we've ever done.

We talked about the dysfunctional mess that the FBI has become under Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, his deputy of pair of podcasters.

We talked about Brazil's Supreme Court sentencing former President Jari Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison, and then Russia firing drones at the Polish airspace.

So check that out if you want more deeper dives into those subjects.

And also please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube.

As you know, conservative YouTube channels dominate

the network.

That means that people who search for political news get right-wing stuff, just normies looking for information.

When you subscribe to Pod Save the World, you help us get factual information from a progressive point of view into the all-powerful YouTube algorithm.

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Also, for our friends of the pod subscribers, we are going to do a Discord QA at the end.

So stick around for that.

All right, Ben.

So we're going to start with Israel-Gaza.

I'm just going to quickly summarize kind of like the big stories that I felt like were front page today on this issue alone.

Then we can like break off the individual pieces.

So a UN commission investigating the war in Gaza said that Israel is committing genocide.

The IDF has begun this major ground offensive into Gaza City, an area where there was a famine declared a couple weeks ago.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Israel where he announced that he and Trump have basically given up on trying to broker a deal to end the war in Gaza.

And as a parting gift for little Marco, Israeli officials told Axios that Trump and his team have been lying about not knowing about the IDF airstrikes in Doha before they happened.

So good stuff all around.

Does remind me, remember, was the famous Bill Clinton line after he met Netanyahu in 1996.

I think it was.

Who's the superpower?

Yeah.

Who the fuck does he think he is?

Who's the fucking superpower?

Yeah.

Well said by

Bill.

So, okay, let's start with the UN.

20 years ago, that's what's amazing about that.

96.

Yeah.

96.

So let's start with the UN declaration and the Gaza City offensive.

So the UN had previously accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but on Tuesday, a UN commission investigating the war said that Israel's actions constituted genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

And that responsibility, quote, lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with a specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza.

As I mentioned, this comes as the IDF is beginning this major ground assault in Gaza, which is a city where there's half a million people still sheltering.

There's half a million after the IDF says 350,000 Gazans followed their evacuation orders and left before this latest assault started.

But again, like these are people who have been displaced countless times.

Nowhere is really safe.

There's no transportation.

90% of shelter has been destroyed of the buildings.

People are starving.

A couple weeks ago, the IDF said they were going to pause the fighting to allow relief into Gaza City, and now they're doing this ground operation.

So it's terrible.

And it was kicked off by massive airstrikes.

The Israeli officials then said their goal is to take out up to 3,000 Hamas combatants still in Gaza City.

Maybe this is obvious, but it seems worth noting that 3,000 Hamas fighters do not pose an existential threat to Israel in any way, shape, or form.

And that this offensive, though, is likely to lead to countless more civilian casualties and possibly the death of the remaining living Israeli hostages.

So the UN and EU, they condemned the assault.

The UK and Germany did too.

Trump's giving them the green light.

So I'll just pause there.

I mean, Ben, you and I talked this morning.

Like, I feel like I've, I just feel so angry and demoralized that we're like still having this conversation nearly two years after October 7th and that knowing that the United States government, where we pay taxpayer dollars, just wholly backs a genocide.

But this is where we are.

Yeah, I mean, to start with the genocide point, I mean, you now have a UN Commission of Inquiry that did exhaustive work.

These people didn't just show up at work and decide to do this.

They looked into this.

These are serious people,

India, South Africa, Australia, so they come from like a broad geographic space.

I think one of these people

chaired the Rwandan Genocide Tribunals.

These are experts that know what they're talking about.

You've had the preponderance of genocide scholars come out and say that this is genocide, including Israeli genocide scholars.

This is

not something that will ever go away.

I mean, the world, the experts have determined without a shadow of a doubt that war crimes have taken place, but now that genocide is taking place, that's something that sticks

one year, five years, 10 years, 50 years from now, right?

And

people can, you know,

avoid the conversation here or use terminology like there's a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as if, you know, there was an earthquake or something.

But

at a certain point, you cannot look away from the evidence or the experts and the multiple, multiple findings now that have been made around a genocide determination.

When you look at this military operation, this is clearly, I mean, they've been into Gaza City how many times now?

They've bombed the Gaza Strip into rubble.

They've displaced people.

you know, time and again.

This has the purpose of essentially reoccupying and ethnically cleansing

piece by piece the Gaza Strip.

That's not an opinion.

That's what the Israelis themselves have said is the goal of the operation, that these people are supposed to leave ultimately to South Sudan or Libya or something.

Oh, no, that's unfair.

You get an AI token or some shit when you leave.

Yeah,

like a party bar.

Yeah, you get like an AI token, or you get to, you know, I don't know, watch the Riviera.

Maybe a types note from Jared Kushner.

Yeah, exactly.

So

there's not a military rationale that would justify doing this.

I mean, even that 3,000 number,

we know that they have a very liberal definition of who's a Hamas fighter.

That's seen in the kind of indiscriminate use of violence.

Hamas does not, to your point, pose some threat.

That border is fortified,

to say the least, in terms of the border between Gaza and Israel.

So there's not a military utility beyond the broader project of taking control of the Gaza Strip.

And that's contributed to the genocide finding.

You're destroying a people in Gaza.

And I will just say on the Marco Rubio thing,

this guy,

he has this kind of tough talk that he does, but everywhere he goes, he just kind of gets pushed around.

And

Trump seemed to not want this to happen.

This is one of the wars that he said he was going to end, and it's just getting worse and worse and worse.

And on the Qatar thing, this is important because in the kind of geopolitical context, the Gulf states, as we've talked about, are really important.

Trump cares about the Gulf states a lot, particularly the Saudis and the Emiratis.

And Qatar, you know, outfitted him with this plane.

They're really pissed, as we've talked about, about this strike on Doha.

And they had a summit about it.

They see this as like an encroachment, not just on Qatar, but on the GCC, the Gulf States Cooperative Council as well.

And look, on the question of whether Trump knew or not, somebody's lying.

I mean,

there's no scenario in which someone is not lying because you have all these Israelis Israelis saying we told them, and you got Trump saying we didn't know.

So either the U.S.

or Israel in some bizarre way both are lying about this.

Yeah, well, let me sort of give folks more information on that.

So let's just drill down on the role our feckless, weak, pathetic Secretary of State is playing in all of this because Rubio was in Israel this week.

Before this week, Ben, there were all these stories about how Donald Trump was netting it and Yahoo over the Qatar strike.

They're kind of Biden-esque stories.

It was just like the Stern phone.

The Background things about it.

He's really pissed about it.

Joe Biden yelled at Netanyahu and then nothing changed.

And the coverage, though, suggested that Rubio might be carrying with him a tough message for Netanyahu on this trip.

But instead, when Rubio got to Israel, he basically said the U.S.

has given up on brokering a peace deal.

He just sort of started regurgitating the Netanyahu line that Hamas has to be eliminated, that the hostages need to be returned, that Hamas has to lay down their arms and basically surrender.

And everyone involved in this war knows that the only way you're getting those hostages back alive is through a deal, and that Hamas will just never be fully eradicated.

It's not on the table.

And it's not us saying this, it's like every national security expert in Israel saying it.

And then they're saying people are saying there's no military value to continuing the war.

And then, including the IDF, including the IDF.

They don't want to fight this because they're going to have to call up all these reserves and the force is exhausted and they're taking casualties.

And like this ground, this ground combat in Gaza City is like where a lot of people will get killed.

And Rubio also, he did not have any tough words for the Qatar strike.

He just offered like a we're looking forward kind of message.

And again, like a little gift to Rubio on this trip, the story pops up in Axios as he's there that cites seven Israeli officials claiming that Trump is lying about not getting notified in advance of the IDF strike in Qatar.

The White House said they were informed of the airstrikes, like when the missiles were in the air and it was too late.

But the Israelis say that Netanyahu called Trump at 8 a.m.

and the missiles struck at 8.51, which does give you time to wave him off, but Trump didn't.

And here are some lines from the the story where they just are calling Trump a liar.

So this is from an official explaining why Israel went along with Trump's lie.

Quote, on our side, it was decided to help them with that for the sake of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Another, quote, the Americans are putting on a show.

We updated them about the attack, another official said.

Another one said, what they say publicly should be taken with a grain of salt.

A sixth Israeli official said it wasn't the first time the Trump administration, quote, made things up about their conversations with Israel due to political considerations.

So Rubio makes this trip.

He gives Netanyahu everything he wants.

He gets humiliated in front of the world.

And then, as you said, Ben, I mean, these Gulf Arab countries, they are furious about the Doha strike.

Yeah.

And look, I've been in government.

There is a version of what the Trump people are briefing out that can happen.

Nothing as high profile happened when I was there as bombing Qatar, but occasionally they'd take a strike, I don't know, in Syria or in Iraq or something.

and at a kind of working level, they'd tell you when the missiles are in the air or something.

If Netanyahu called Trump, that's materially different.

You know, that's a notification at the top level.

That's a big deal.

And that's somebody calling someone else who can say no, right?

If it's like a

upper, mid-level intelligence or military official calling their counterpart, that counterpart can't be like, turn that off.

But Trump can do that.

And he bragged about doing it with Iran.

Yeah.

Remember?

Yeah.

And so if he didn't do that, if he didn't say don't do this, then he was notified and didn't stop it.

What's also dumb about this is the audience that the Trump people would be concerned about are the Gulf Arabs,

Qatar, but also the Saudis and the Emiratis and Bahrain and Oman.

And they know, you know what I mean?

Like they're talking to the Israelis too.

They're talking to other people.

Like, so the idea that they're going to be fooled by some background comments to American media or something,

no,

the damage has been done here, and you kind of, you can't repair it because what the problem is here is it's and look, I should say,

some people listening might say, well, how come it was okay for Israel to bomb Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, maybe Tunisia, you know, obviously

Palestine,

but not the GCC.

Well, it is just seen as different by the Gulf Arabs because what they see is that Israel's now put them in the crosshairs, that you're not off limits.

You're no different in the Gulf than in Iraq or Syria.

And that means that not only did they hit Qatar, but who knows?

Maybe they'd hit something in Saudi.

I mean, that would be more extreme, obviously.

But that's kind of the message that is sent in the Middle Eastern context that Israel, look, the Gulf Arabs have had a security paradigm for a decade or two where, you know, Iran is the threat and the rogue actor that everybody's worried about.

What you hear in talking to people now, and this is not an overstatement, is that Israel is the rogue actor that we don't know what they're going to do next.

We don't know who they might bomb,

next year, two years, or three years, that they've gotten too out of control here and they're crossing these kind of lines.

And I think Qatar used that terminology.

They crossed this kind of line in the sand.

And that's going to put a strain on the U.S.-Gulf relationship because these people have options.

They have China.

We've seen India go in the direction of China and Russia.

If the Gulf Arabs do that, that's a big fucking deal.

Even if they just hedge a bit more and they still obviously have a military relationship with the United States States or an AI relationship with the United States.

So

this is not without consequence going forward for the interest of the United States.

Well, it's just like it's this constant escalation, right?

I mean, Israel's bombed seven countries in a year, and it's included in Doha and in Tehran and in Lebanon repeatedly and in Syria, even after the fall of Assad.

And it's just sort of like there's no governor on this, and there's no one seemingly pushing back in any way, shape, or form.

I mean, we thought Rubio might in this instance because Trump really likes getting money and free jets from people in Qatar and the UAE and the Gulf, but I guess not.

Well, and it also, you know, is a bit of

yet another indicator that the Abraham Accords wasn't the peace deal.

Yeah, how about that?

Because even though obviously Qatar is not in the Abraham Accords and probably be the last country to join such a thing, the Abraham Accords, you know, clearly, and we've said this a million times, didn't resolve the actual conflict, which is with the Palestinians.

But more importantly, the Abraham Accords is supposed to be this kind of new paradigm for stability in the region.

Where the Emiratis, as a bit of a proxy too, for the Saudis, the Saudis didn't come into it, but I don't think the Emiratis would have done it without the Saudis.

Bahrain is in it.

Now, those Gulf states are like, well, shit, like the Abraham Accords, you know, they're not delivering a new paradigm of stability in this region.

If anything, they've given Israel the comfort to bomb,

you know, all these countries.

And so I'd watch the health of the Abraham Accords going forward, too.

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The other story we've been watching watching closely is the just nest over at the FBI.

So, again, on this YouTube exclusive we did on Saturday that we released on Saturday, we covered all the ways Cash Patel screwed up the search for Charlie Kirk's killer, and we dug deep into a lawsuit that gets out all the dysfunction in the FBI under both Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

If you want more detail, check that out.

And again, please subscribe to Pot Save the World on YouTube.

But so, Cash Patel was up on Capitol Hill today.

He was testifying before the Senate.

This clip of his back and forth with Senator Corey Booker gives you a good sense of how it all went.

Let's listen.

That

rant of false information does not bring this country together.

If you want to work on bringing this country, it's my time, not yours.

My God.

My God.

If you want to talk about fighting this country, it is.

I follow you on your social media posts that tear this country apart to address you.

Oh, you turn around and

try all you're

doing.

It's my time.

For

I said.

You're not head of this committee.

Sir, you don't tell me my time is over.

You know people in New Jersey tell me what my time is.

You can't lecture me.

I'm not going anywhere.

I am not afraid of you.

Mr.

Chairman.

I am not afraid of you.

Okay, so earlier this week, there was a Fox News story that made it sound like the White House and then senior leaders at the DOJ, especially Pam Bondi, were fed up with Cash Patel.

They lost faith in Battelle and Dan Bungino.

We had talked, Ben, on the show before, about how the FBI had named a second deputy director, which is not a thing that happens.

The Fox piece noted how under the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, once that new deputy was in place, he could fill in the director's spot in an acting role 90 days after his appointment if Cash Patel were pushed out.

So it was sort of seen as maybe,

you know,

giving you a sense of where the things were going.

But before you get your hopes up, Axios reported on Tuesday that Cash Patel's job is is safe, that the White House likes him.

We don't know if those reports are right or wrong, Ben, but my guess is performances like the one we just listened to at this hearing only helps Cash Patel.

I mean, I think Corey Booker played right into exactly what Cash Patel wanted there, which was a big fight that goes viral that someone will show to Trump, like Brett Kavanaugh, to show that he's fighting.

Patel also called Adam Schiff a coward and a buffoon, which again is the kind of performative bullshit that Trump loves.

So I think we're probably stuck with this fucking guy, but I don't know.

What did you make of it?

I first just want to say, Tommy, I mean, it's what we all think, and you guys talked a bit about this on PSA, but look,

it is horrific what happened to Charlie Kirk.

It is a horrific thing that his wife and children lost a husband and father.

I feel bad for people that were his friend.

I feel bad for his audience.

I feel bad for anybody who's upset by this.

We're just like generally scared.

I feel rage at the person who did this, both because it's an act of political violence, but also because that person, you know, opened up this Pandora's Pandora's box.

I will say, though, that for these people like Cash Patel, who've done nothing but pour toxins into the politics and societal health of this country for years, to now be trying to use this to say that they're allowed to call us whatever the fuck they want.

They're allowed to say whatever they want about the people they disagree with.

But then if we so much as point out what they're doing, that we are somehow guilty of incitement, is the classic authoritarian playbook.

That is what is happening here.

They're trying to silence speech.

They're trying to make it so you can't even describe accurately what they're doing, you know?

And so it's not only hypocrisy, it's it's dangerous.

Yeah, you're right that there was an audience of one, you know, go up, save your job by picking a fight.

The only thing I'd add to that clip, though, is you hear the Republican chairman, you know, banging the gavel as if Booker is the guy who's out of line.

Look, the FBI.

That's a good job for your institution, man.

That's my, the FBI director, first of all, used to be like a neutral nonpartisan official.

You You wouldn't have any fireworks at FBI hearings.

It wasn't like even a cabinet secretary going up there.

But it used to be that senators had some dignity about their institution not being pushed around and steamrolled.

And you got the FBI director acting as the chair, like, this is my time.

It's not, it is fucking Booker's time.

Like, he has a time allotted.

And look, I don't like it when senators use up all their time giving speeches, but they're senators.

That's what they do.

You're like yelling at a judge, though.

Like, it's not supposed to do it.

It's just, so it's just a window into both the

playbook they're trying to run to silence anybody else and say that any speech against them, even just accurate description of what's happening, is like so-called incitement.

But it's also just yet another sign that this institution that for most of its history privileged its own power above anything else, you know, sometimes to the detriment, is just like, we're not even in like a parliamentary democracy where everybody falls in line.

We are literally in like, you know, Russia where the United Russia policy is like rubber stamping shit in the Duma and like heckling the opposition.

Yeah, big Duma hearing today.

It's also worth noting, Ben.

I mean, we're living in a context where Trump overtly says he wants the FBI and other like organs of the government to be used to investigate his political opponents, especially Adam Schiff.

Yeah.

We're going after him for mortgage fraud.

Who's a senator?

Yeah, so like, you know, like...

That's got to be in their heads in these hearings when they're getting in fights with Cash Patel, the FBI director.

Frankly, it's in my head.

Like when we talk about these people, they would love to go after us.

I don't believe for a second they wouldn't use the FBI to go after critics.

Let's pause in this for a second because it crossed my head in the YouTube too.

Like it's interesting, right?

It's a new thing that you're like, oh, I'm talking about the FBI director.

Yeah.

And it's also just worth noting like on the policy, like NBC News reported that 20% of the FBI's agents have been diverted to work on immigration enforcement.

They point out that there was a Baltimore domestic terrorism squad.

All of them, there's like 10 people, all of them are reassigned to work on immigration enforcement.

And then there's current and FBI officials in the story saying that like agents working on public corruption, fraud, and espionage are just this no longer priorities.

The things you and I have talked about on the show before, but it's like interesting to see it all in black and white like that.

And then, you know, we, I agree, it definitely was, Patel's performance was for an audience of one, but he has also gotten crosswise with the broader MAGA media movement and base because of his performance both with the Jeffrey Epstein stuff and then the early days of the Charlie Kirk manhunt.

Like Christopher Ruffo,

you know, the guy guy who brought critical race theory sort of to the fore, said that he wasn't sure if Patel was up for the job.

But there was one more moment in this hearing that I think will probably not go over well in that same world, which was Cash Patel was asked about Jeffrey Epstein and whether he had trafficked other young women to other individuals.

And he said, there is no credible information, none, that he trafficked young women to other individuals.

So I guess what that means is that Patel doesn't believe that direct testimony from Epstein's victims that they were trafficked to other individuals is credible.

Pretty shocking.

You just can't believe anything this guy says.

I mean, there's just no modicum of

fidelity to any truth.

And having the, you know, head of the FBI, the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, run by someone that you can't.

trust in any way, shape, or form is pretty disconcerting.

I mean, I want to point out one thing, Tommy, like he did this tour to, you know, burnish his reputation where he compared,

he can't take credit for the arrest, really, in the sense that this guy was turned in by his family.

But what he tried to say is like, well, I insisted that they put out the picture of this guy and that that's how we got him because then it's well, and then he compared it to

he compared it to Boston Marathon bombing and Luigi, the guy who shot the healthcare executive.

He's lost both those cases, they put out pictures of the guy.

Like the Luigi picture is how they got him in McDonald's because someone saw the picture and said, oh, that's that's the guy.

I remember being in the fucking situation room when the pictures were out of the two people that were involved in the Boston Marathon bombing the Stew Brothers.

So he's just like, like relentlessly lying.

And on the Epstein stuff, what's scariest about that is like

his fidelity to MAGA doctrine, which is that Epstein is the center of a cabal,

is less important than even just his complete and utter fidelity to Trump.

You know, that he's willing, he's probably going farther than Trump would even want him to do, to just pour cold water on anything having to do with Epstein.

That should scare people too.

Like, and particularly anybody who cares about the trafficking of young girls, which we know happened in this case.

Yeah, it's it's all terrible.

So, obviously, like the Charlie Kirk assassination was the backdrop for Patel being up there.

Um, and the news of Kirk's assassination has dominated all the headlines and the political debate in the U.S.

since.

And it has also just been truly global news in a way that I think was surprising to a lot of people.

I mean, there were statements from heads of state, like the Prime Prime Minister of Italy, the French Foreign Ministry, Kirst Armer over in the UK.

But then there were also lots of statements from far-right leaders and far-right parties that were a lot darker in many instances.

Like the sentiment was closer to what we've seen from Trump, which was blaming the radical left or other kind of like ideological opponents of whomever was giving the statement.

And these were often before the shooter had been identified.

So you had folks like Victor Orban in Hungary, the National Rally Party in France, AFD in Germany, the German populist Senseito Party.

Then there was like right-wing candidates in Latin America.

It was like truly global, Ben.

And then

you had Netanyahu, Israeli National Security Minister Itmar Ben-Genvir, and the Dutch far-right leader Hirt Wilders

was blaming like radical Islamists for Kirk's assassination, again, without offering any evidence about the connection.

And as far as we know, there is none.

So let's talk about the Israel piece of this in a second because that's a weirder, darker piece of it.

But I was wondering, have you been surprised by how big the story has been globally?

Like, if I kind of intellectualize it, it's like, okay,

all U.S.

political issues are now big news, especially in the Trump era.

There was just the truly kind of novel, shocking, horrifying element of the video itself and the way that traveled.

And then

far-right parties, as we've talked about, are just better coordinated on messaging anyway.

And I think every country probably got the sense from Trump that he really wanted to prioritize this.

Thus, they did too, to Curry favor.

But I don't know.

What did you make of it?

Yeah, there are two things that stood out to me.

The first is it felt like,

because some of these

people

probably barely knew if they knew who Charlie Kirk was.

And that's not to diminish Charlie Kirk.

It's just he's an American politician.

You don't know everyone else.

You don't know everybody.

And it felt a bit like either.

in the government statements, either they just felt like, hey, we better do this because we want to be able to show Trump we did it, or maybe even that they were asking for the statements.

Do you think there's a chance the White House is calling around saying like, hey, it'd be good if you put out a statement?

There was reporting to that effect about in this country, like calling around to

footballs and football teams and businesses and stuff,

which again is, I mean, it's,

they care about it.

It's just notable, you know, that essentially

there's this, there's so much focus on it's notable they want to drive a message on this.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they want an amplification of this, right?

Now, the global far-right thing is more interesting in a way because I think that's a couple of things happening there.

One is there is a true solidarity there, right?

And it's not my kind of solidarity.

But, you know, Kirk was an organizer, and there's been a lot of global organizing of the far right.

He hasn't been as involved in that as like Bannon has and some of the CPAC people, but I'm sure he has cross-pollinated with some of these folks.

And so some of them genuinely feel a connection and a solidarity there.

I also think, though, on top of it, there's a global far-right strategy to try to cast the quote-unquote left as the absolute worst version of itself, right?

So like one of the American innovations is, and we've seen this in the Kirk circumstance, you find the worst thing about the, like you find the worst.

Tweet by somebody who may be nobody, maybe like literally just an ordinary person, and you try to make that the whole left.

What was interesting here is you saw the kind of global far right trying to cast the entire global center left as

this act of political violence and then pile on top of that, you know, Islamists and radical left and trying to delegitimize opposition, frankly, to the far right.

And so we should see that as

both solidarity and a strategy.

Yeah, I mean, Saul sent around a tweet this morning that was an image of

Rick Grinnell speaking at CPAC Paraguay.

So it's just like, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of infrastructure.

Was it Grinnell?

I thought that was was just like making fun of the fact that CPAC Paraguay exists, but I bet that was Grinnell.

I think it was him.

I'm looking at a photo.

I know that fits.

We're clearly not in the game here, guys.

These guys are so deeply organized that there's, I mean, no offense to Paraguay, like, but like, that's really like going everywhere.

It's like your first spin-off.

Yeah, I mean, we have not

done a live podcast in Paraguay.

I'm not ruling it out, but yeah, they're more organized.

Yeah, they're better funded too.

Although it makes it easier, yeah.

Yeah, that makes it a lot easier.

So, also, the darker piece of this is within just hours of Charlie Kirk's assassination, there were thousands of tweets blaming Israel or just blaming the Jews.

And to be clear, there is zero evidence to back up those claims.

Frankly, there's every reason to think that it's an insane charge and just like the latest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

But it's worth covering because, first of all, like Netanyahu very aggressively injected himself into the story by doing interviews in the U.S.

in ways that have not gone over very well in the far right.

And also, also because this kind of like right-wing chatter bubbled up to the point where Netanyahu was asked if Israel was behind Kirk's assassination during an interview with Newsmax.

And so the sort of genesis was a lot of these tweets referenced this August tweet from Harrison H.

Smith as an InfoWars host that said, quote, I'm not going to name names, but I was told by someone close to Charlie Kirk that Charlie thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against them, end quote.

And then, like, no surprise, Candace Owens gets involved.

We've talked about Candace on the show before.

She's a far-right podcaster and kind of the cash patele of trans investigations.

You know, she's like really digging into the first lady of France.

And so, you know, Candace said, you know, like, hold my space laser and then did this whole episode on Monday attacking Netanyahu and suggesting he was to blame for Charlie Kirk's death.

And I listened to all of it.

A lot of it was really unhinged.

A lot of it was hard to follow.

But the gist is she seemed to think that

the hedge fund guy, Bill Ackman, staged some sort of intervention with Charlie Kirk in the Hamptons about his views on Israel, that it was tantamount to a threat.

And here's just like a clip from the episode that came out Monday to give you a sense of the madness.

An intervention was staged by Bill Ackman because Charlie's thoughts, Charlie's rational thoughts about Israel were a no-no.

He declined to go to Israel.

for I would, I would describe this as like, you know, re-education camp.

You know, we've seen it.

You made an uh-oh, but we can help you.

You know, we just need you to come out to Auschwitz and take a picture.

Charlie said no to Bibi.

Does all of this mean that Bibi Netanyahu

and that this somehow proves that Israel was involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

No, we have no evidence of that.

You're not going to gaslight us and tell us to shut up or call us anti-Semitic for pointing out the fact that Charlie was having a change of heart about the tactics that Israel was using in America, and that he felt when he had left that meeting that he had effectively been blackmailed.

Okay, so Bill Ackman, who is best known for writing insufferable, op-ed length tweets and then attacking college students for their views on Gaza, posted an insanely long rebuttal and now we're off to the races.

But on top of that, Ben, it wasn't just Candace, Tucker Carlson joined Vice President J.D.

Vance Monday when Vance hosted Charlie Kirk's radio show he guest hosted.

And Tucker took this swipe in Netanyahu as well.

Let's listen.

I don't think it's helpful for people to jump in, particularly foreign heads of state, to say, this is what, you know, he lived for my cause or whatever.

That's disgusting, actually.

Don't do that.

That turns everybody off.

You don't help your own cause by doing that.

And it's also literally untrue.

So he didn't name Netanyahu there, but it was obvious who he was talking about.

So, Ben, my concern, if I were Netanyahu, is like this, the charge, as crazy as it sounds, builds off of months of criticism in kind of mega media about the Iran strikes and also alleged Mossad ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Even Charlie Kirk himself was sort of like making the Epstein case.

He was kind of Epstein curious on that.

Yes.

And then it strikes me like as a genuine political problem for Netanyahu because Netanyahu, as we've discussed, starting about a decade ago, decided to push all his chips in with the Republican Party and give the finger to the Democratic Party.

And now there is this growing section of the MAGA base that is anti-Israel in all these kind of bizarre and unpredictable ways.

Yeah, I mean, there's a crazy piece of this, and then there's like the more consequential piece that you just talked about.

I want to start with a crazy piece, which is, look,

this is a crazy conspiracy theory, and Kenneth Owens can do the, I'm just asking questions saying there's just, we should name, there's not a shred of evidence for this, and it reeks of the kind of conspiracy theory that gets thrown on Jewish people.

What was interesting to me is that

you pointed this out to me early.

You were like, I think there's going to be a problem with this conspiracy theory.

And I didn't know know what it was.

What I found really interesting, Tommy, is I just wanted to understand what these people thought, you know?

So

I found that.

What's that guy's influence?

Info worker.

Yeah, Harrison something.

So I found that and I watched.

I want to say Harrison Butker, but I know that's Harrison something.

I was on X a lot last week because of this assassination.

And so I watched that clip.

And then as happens, then that leads you to like, then I watched some seven-minute segment that Megan Kelly and Charlie Kirk did together where they, you know, were like talking about how it's dangerous to criticize Israel or something.

The algorithm is

so what was interesting, fascinating is just because I'd spent like 30 minutes on a rabbit hole of just trying to understand what the theory was, I'm still like, if I open X, I'm getting mainlined conspiracy theory stuff about Israel killed Charlie Kirk.

The power and speed with which that, and I'm trying to like palette cleanse my algorithm.

I'm like clicking on Nets content.

You know, like I'm not, I'm just, please, this is getting me back into sports and Democrats and whatever.

I've had the same experience.

It's crazy how fast.

And so if I'm getting that, if you're like a

pilled MAGA person who's already like listening to Candace Owens, your whole fucking feed is probably just full of this stuff.

So it's not going away.

And it's just a sign about the power of that algorithm to spread conspiracy theory.

The more consequential point is everybody's focused on the MAGA Civil War on Epstein.

I think just as, if not more interesting, is the MAGA Civil War on foreign policy.

And I don't just say Israel policy, I say foreign policy.

Tucker talked a lot about that.

And Tucker is interesting in this regard.

We've been hard on Tucker on certain things, but he's interesting in the sense that he's pushing this, right?

They were against, the Tucker wing of MAGA was against bombing Iran.

The Tucker wing of MAGA has turned on Israel.

The Tucker wing of MA is kind of more out there on being non-interventionist, you know.

Wouldn't surprise me if they're not crazy about going into Venezuela if that happens.

I was reading something recently that Tucker kind of led the charge to spike Mike Pompeo from getting what was thought to be a Secretary of Defense job, but then he got spiked from any role in Trump 2.0 because he's such a hawk.

So this is super consequential.

Now, just to focus on the Israel part, if Israel loses MAGA and they've already lost the Democratic Party, they're fucked.

I mean, and this is my cautionary note to the triumphalist pro-Israel crat is like, well, look, they took out the Hezbollah guys at the Pagers and then they've dealt all these blows.

But like, if the outcome is three years from now, you're totally isolated.

You've got a genocide hung around your neck for the rest of time.

You've lost the Democratic Party, which is going in the direction of Zohar Mamdani.

And now you've lost MAGA.

Like, that's a very dangerous place for Netanyahu to be leading them.

Charlie Kirk was interesting because he bridged.

those wings.

Like, because I've watched a lot of Charlie Kirk clips in the last week, and you could feel him like, it's not that he was like moving entirely to one side.

It's that he could talk to both sides of this divide uniquely.

But I think this is something to watch going forward.

And Israel is the place where it's playing out most acutely, and it can get ugly with conspiracy theory.

But this is a bigger question about where the Republican Party is going on foreign policy.

It really is.

And look, you know, there's zero evidence.

to back up this claim.

Frankly, I think it would be like politically suicidal for Bibi Netanyahu to kill someone as a top ally.

Like, just think about it for one second.

It was stupid of him to throw himself in the middle of the day.

It's stupid if not about him.

It's stupid for him to jump into the conversation, but also, like, you know,

when you try to patiently explain to someone why Israel would never do this, and this is so crazy, and they'll be like, well, didn't they just bomb seven countries in a year?

And didn't they just blow up a meeting in Doha?

And don't they assassinate

blow up Greta Thurnberg's boat?

Yeah, they bomb the flotilla.

And you're like, well, yeah, but forget about all that, right?

Like, there is, I think the root of the kind of Candace Owens critique is anti-Semitism.

But I think there is the thing we were talking about earlier, which is this like rogue actor country with no guardrails piece of this that is going to feed into conspiracy theories like this.

Yeah, yeah.

It's going to be a bumpy ride here on this stuff

in the maggot movement because those people will go to anti-Semitism.

And that's the worst kind.

It's the far-right anti-Semitism that has done the most damage in history.

You don't need to know that much about history to know that.

Yeah, some real scary shit.

We're going to take a quick break, but before we do, we need your help specifically about 12 minutes of your help.

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All right, Ben.

So one thing we have not covered on this show yet was this huge diplomatic disaster between the U.S.

and South Korea after ICE raided a factory in Georgia and then shackled and deported hundreds of Korean workers.

So on Friday last week, over 300 South Korean nationals plus 14 workers from other countries.

countries were welcomed back into Korea after being detained in an immigration raid at this Georgia plan open, co-owned by Hyundai.

So according to

the South Korean president's office, one of the returnees was actually pregnant while dealing with this whole ideal, which is like a horrible

detail.

But Korean media and politicians across the political spectrum were furious.

They were shocked at what happened.

The South Korean president called the situation bewildering, and the government vowed to conduct a, quote, thorough review to see if the workers' rights had been violated during and after the raid.

And for example, one of the workers said they'd not been read the rights and and that ICE agents had mocked them.

I mean, I'm sure all the cruelty you see on a daily basis from ICE would not, these people would not have escaped that.

Before this plane took off and took these Korean workers home, who, by the way, are essential to building a factory that is supposed to employ lots of Americans, Trump apparently offered to let them stay in the U.S., but only one of them took them up on it, understandably.

And then in a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump, like, I think, seemed to acknowledge what a massive mistake this was.

He wrote wrote that he did not want to, quote, frighten off or disincentivize investment into America by outside countries or companies.

And then also

the South Korean government said that the Deputy Secretary of State expressed deep regret over the incident.

So, Ben,

I think Trump really realizes that like ICE fucked him here and made a huge problem.

And it sounds like the construction of this plant is now going to be delayed by years, maybe, like significantly delayed.

And if you're a Korean business or really a business anywhere around the world, like

why would you want to invest in or work in the U.S.

if you're going to get treated like this?

Yeah,

this is a big story,

not just because of the human element of how horrible it was for these people and not just because of the U.S.-South Korea relationship.

First of all, this is actually not unusual.

It may sound strange to people, but like, yeah, if you, you often have people come like this and build up the factories.

And I mean, this was part of the CHIPS Act, right?

It was like the

Taiwanese coming here and helping us set up factories so we could do this.

So Trump's whole strategy of like trying to shake countries down for investment doesn't work if people are afraid to come here.

I mean it just shows you that ICE is more afraid of not meeting like Stephen Miller's quotas than they are of like you know, causing a major international incident like this.

This is what happens when you create an unaccountable militia in your country, right?

But I heard something else, Tommy, that

I thought was really interesting today.

I was talking to a a friend of mine who works in AI, and they said that the concern now among some AI companies is that there's a massive brain drain of Americans that are like, fuck, I have a very marketable skill, but I don't want to live here.

This place is going dark, you know.

Never mind foreigners that we depend on to work in high-tech industries, right?

Who are afraid of coming here now and the H-1B visas, even if they fix that.

The point is that this, we were only seven months in, and we could create a situation where americans are leaving because they don't want to be you know the frankly a lot of the high-skilled workers are the kind of people that are a little uncomfortable with what trump's doing and then foreigners won't want to invest because they don't want to like send teams in to build factories and foreign you know h-1b visas or foreign students don't want to come here because look at how they've been treated this could have massive consequences for the American economy, particularly in the most important industries, right?

The places where you want foreign investment, the places where you want high-skilled or sometimes foreign workers, too.

So this is not like a side story that's just about how awful this was for South Korea.

That is like really important, but it also is a huge flaw in the entire Trump strategy of trying to, quote unquote, bring back manufacturing.

Yeah, look, we talked a couple episodes ago about how Trump has infuriated the entire Indian government because he's demanding a Nobel Peace Prize for

brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan when, in fact, he didn't really play any role.

And it has caused this huge political problem for Modi in India, which has driven him into the arms of China.

And then the Washington Post reported on Monday that this combination of Trump humiliating Modi and then singling out India for buying Russian oil has led to like real nationalism in India and this younger generation of Indians to really dislike the U.S.

and turn away from the U.S.

And so, like, there has been this distrust that has come up in Indian politics over and over again over the years that, like, ultimately, you can't really trust the U.S.

to be on your side.

And that's once again emerging because Trump was just a dick to Modi.

And to your point about workers, I mean, I think one in four student visas in the U.S.

are Indians.

Yeah.

And we're cracking down on them.

And the problem with this kind of thing, too, is you don't get it back.

You know, I mean, four years of Trump, which is the best case scenario, if like we're able to

hold the line at

term limits,

investment goes elsewhere.

Foreign students start to go elsewhere.

High-skilled workers start to go elsewhere.

Americans start to go elsewhere.

And it's not like one election even fixes that.

It's like people just move on.

And people are moving on from the United States.

And we are very early in this second.

Trump term and

we're already here.

And so this is going to, whether it's tourism, whether it's investment, whether it's foreign students, whether it's a finite number of highly skilled people in industries like AI,

this is going to hurt all Americans in terms of our economic health and growth and vitality.

Meanwhile, the U.S.

is selling all these advanced AI chips all over the place to places like

the UAE.

So that then, if you are, I mean, this is so the UAE can reportedly, there's a great report in the New York Times about this that everyone should read, but apparently it sounds like the U.S.

decided to basically 5X the number of advanced NVIDIA chips we were going to sell to the United Arab Emirates right at the same time that the UAE put like billions of dollars into Trump's crypto company.

So this is exactly the point too, though, but people should read that too, because we talked about that at the time.

The corruption was very clear, but thank God for good investigative journalism.

So it confirms what we know that this was totally corrupt, quote, quote, quote.

That said, though, to connect these dots, the UAE is going to throw a lot of money at this.

The Saudis are going to throw a lot of money at this.

They're going to get the computing power now because the restrictions have been lifted on that.

If you're an American or anybody else who's an AI expert, who's one of the, because there's only like a few thousand people that are really cutting edge, they're going to pay top dollar there.

You're going to go there.

Because would you rather, if you're an Indian engineer, would you rather come work for an American AI company and worry about ICE picking you up or take the generous offer to go to

pay no taxes and live in Dubai on a tower?

Sounds pretty good, right?

Sounds pretty good.

It's a little hot, but you know.

Yeah, it gets a little warm.

Yeah, you don't leave the house anyway.

All right, Ben, a couple more things.

So last week we covered this massive Gen Z-led protest that swept Nepal's government out of power and torts the parliament, torched the Supreme Court, the president's house, and left the country in chaos.

The death toll from the protests reportedly rose to 72 people over the weekend, so it's really bad.

These protests started because of a ban on social media, but they quickly grew to encompass this broader set of grievances about corruption and this despised kind of elite ruling class.

The protests themselves simmered down after Nepal's army, which is quite popular among the general population, stepped in.

And because they're the only institution left, the army met with the protesters to figure out next steps.

Nepal has had 14 governments representing three parties since the monarchy was abolished in 2008.

And the hope among some Nepalese was that the monarchy would return.

But instead of a return to royalty, this Gen Z protest group decided to elect an interim government in the most Gen Z way possible, which is by Discord poll.

So for those of you who aren't familiar, or aren't friends of the pod subscribers, please subscribe, crooked.com slash friends of the pod.

Discord is a chat platform popular with gamers.

On Friday, they dissolved the parliament and they picked a woman named Sushila Karki, this retired first female chief justice of Nepal Supreme Court.

She has a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader.

She's now going to lead this caretaker government until elections in March of next year.

The ambassador of India, China, and the United States were present at this swearing-in.

So, you know, a lot of the other political parties believe this process was unconstitutional.

I'm sure it was.

I'm sure it was.

That it happened on Discord.

And over the weekend, she stressed that her appointment was temporary.

So we'll see.

So, Ben, just, you know, a truly like wild story.

I feel like it's not over.

I mean, my hope is that this actually leads to a new government, a more responsive government, and not another flare up of violence or a military crackdown.

But I guess we'll see.

Yeah, I think

this, I mean, this was a long time coming because the social media ban was because they were using social media to complain about how lavishly corrupt these people were.

We talked about that a bit.

First of all, on the Discord side, I guess handle me with Claire or Sharkulant.

Two of our best Discord questioners were not.

And this is why people should subscribe.

Very good questions and extra segments.

Excellent questions.

I would have voted for one of them.

But that said, look, it just shows how Gen Z.

First of all, they self-identified as Gen Z.

This is not just like external people coming in and saying, we're calling this a Gen Z protest.

They're like, we are Gen Z.

We're the young people.

And this country is totally fucking corrupt.

And we're sick of the same click of people like dividing up the spoils while we're all screwed and it's good to see Gen Z take some agency the Gen Z people also said the people that were more in the leadership roles these protests we did not intend to burn down all these you know government buildings that they actually can suggested that maybe there's some outside agitators that came in which happens sometimes when these protests take place but it's kind of innovative I mean I part of me is like well that's you know they elected the leader on discord what I also found interesting though is that if you don't think that there's kind of contagion to these things right this this woman that is in the caretaker role is very much like in Bangladesh, which is in the same region, Muhammad Yunus stepped in as a caretaker leader of Bangladesh after a similar kind of student-led protest movement ousted that corrupt establishment.

And so, this is kind of like a template now in this region where you've got these young people-driven, social media-driven protests, like you got the removal of the leader, and you've got these kind of interim trusted people.

Like you find the one person who's more technocratic and anti-corruption in the political lead and have them as a bridge let's hope it is a bridge to something that is more durable and it has democratic legitimacy i just have this vibe tommy that this is not the last one you know no definitely it doesn't it's not like an arab spring exactly but there's just a lot of corruption out there right now yeah no i think courage you know begets courageous contagious yeah and i look i i agree with you there's sort of a template i hope the template uh leaves behind the burning shit down part

of people and it's awful There's all these stories about how there's not enough burn wards in Nepal because there's actually a ton of burn victims there.

Because anyway, but yeah,

fascinating story.

We're going to keep watching it.

All right, Ben.

So

our president is heading to the UK.

I think probably as we speak or as of when you guys are listening to this, he's going for his second state visit.

So listeners probably remember that Oval Office meeting with Keir Starmer

when Keir Starmer dramatically handed Trump a letter from King Charles, which he dramatically opened that included an invite.

It was obviously not a subtle way to kind of butter Trump up in the moment, but now all involved have to pay the piper.

And as the BBC noted, like repeat state visits like this are unprecedented in the UK for a non-royal.

And the politics here are tricky because,

as we've discussed, King Charles is clearly a lib.

He cares about like biodiversity and the environment and shit.

He's a worldo.

He's one of us.

Trump is widely hated in the UK, and Starmer's in a tough spot at the moment.

And so, you know, in terms of the itinerary, I I think Buckingham Palace is being renovated or something.

So they're doing most of this outside London at Windsor Palace, which is conveniently far away from.

The Royal Correspondent, Windsor Castle.

Windsor Castle, thank you.

Conveniently far away from the planned protests.

And the visit itself, it's like long on pomp and circumstance.

It's short on substance.

Like there's no number 10 visit, although he will meet with Starmer at Checkers.

But there's no address to Parliament, which Obama did when we were there.

There will be lots of like marching troops and horses.

And I think like carriages and flyovers.

Yeah and I think the idea is to like give Trump more like horses and carriages than Macron got during the French state visit.

But you know things are going to be weird for a bunch of reasons.

The first Ben

is last week Peter Mendelsohn, who is the UK's ambassador to the United States and like a long time kind of like politico, was fired over his association with Jeffrey Epstein.

It's a relationship that was known about for many decades, but it got real awkward after Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book was published.

And in it, Mandelson called Epstein his best pal.

I think he had like 10 pages of material or something.

And then Starmer initially defended.

He's with these guys too, best pal.

Dude,

the whole thing.

It's so gross.

And then Starmer initially was defending Peter Mandelson in parliament, but then Bloomberg published, like, they got a hold of like Jeffrey Epstein's entire Yahoo account or something like that.

And they had all these damning emails between Peter Mandelson and Epstein that demonstrated that not only did they maintain contact after Epstein had been convicted of being a sex offender, he offered his full-throated support.

Here's one quote.

I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened.

I can still barely understand it.

It just could not happen in Britain.

Brutal.

So those emails come out.

Starmer says, no way, you're out.

It fires Peter Mandelson.

And then also, don't forget that Prince Andrew is a close Epstein associate.

So that's kind of been the backdrop of all of this.

And as we talked about, what, like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, like Starmer's in a very bad place politically.

We covered the

last week, the resignation of his deputy prime minister?

Yeah, it was.

Angela was last week.

Boy, it seems like a year ago.

Yeah, it seems like a lifetime ago.

Then they did this whole cabinet reshuffle that made no sense.

Like, if you're going to fire your cabinet, get some new people in there.

Don't just like reshuffle them.

What's the politics of that?

But more broadly, like Labor is losing to Nigel Farage's Reform UK party in the polls.

Farage is close buddies with Trump, so there's every incentive there to like create problems.

There were massive anti-immigrant protests in London over the weekend that kind of add to the feeling that the far right is ascendant in the UK as it is in many other places in Europe.

And those protests were organized by an extremist named Toby Robinson, who was actually to the right of Nigel Farage.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And Elon Musk fucking video conferenced into the thing to like decry the woke mind virus and call for a dissolution of parliament and a new election.

So he's real helpful as always.

26 cops were injured.

I think the protest was like 100,000 people plus.

So it was big.

And there was a smaller counter-protest.

So, Ben, tough week for our buddies in the UK.

Yeah, there's a lot there.

Exporting our problems to?

Oh, my God.

I mean, first of all, the Tommy Robinson thing is truly scary because this was like Unite the Kingdom, I think it was called.

And it really reminded me of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

It was the same kind of vibe.

It felt very white supremacist vibe.

You know, Tommy Robinson, straight up white supremacist.

Soccer hooligan.

And look, it's scary.

Like, I know people in London who are, you know black and brown

like it felt unsafe you know to have the it literally felt like charlottesville i mean you know maybe they aren't carrying torches and chanting uh whatever we will not jews will not replace us was the famous but but this just is not a good sign um

uh but

turning to this state visit this is something so bizarre because it's all predicated on bullshit.

And I should add, if people should, I I have a piece coming out in the New York Times probably like overnight on Wednesday to Thursday about this.

So I won't, you know,

I'll reserve some takes for that.

But I'll just say

everybody knows that Trump is widely disliked, if not loathed, in the UK.

Like his approval rating is like under 20%.

It's like 15% or something.

It's 15%, right?

So

everybody knows that they don't like him.

Yes, they're renovating Buckingham Palace, but also the reason they're not doing shit in London is there'll probably be big protests in London and embarrassing things like big, you know, pictures of Jeffrey Epstein with Trump.

And, and so, you know, convenient to have it out in the countryside.

Windsor's in the countryside, Checkers is in the countryside.

And it's like, we're just gonna, Trump gets what he wants, which is all this protocol, right?

All this footsie, you know, with like the royal family and like the carriage rides and the, you know, Churchill memorabilia or whatever the shit that they're gonna trot out.

But that doesn't mean they actually like him.

So it's something very odd about it.

It's like Keir Starmer needs to do do this because he wants to keep a lower tariff and he wants Trump to not completely sell out Ukraine.

So we're going to act like we like this guy.

The rurals are going to, it's like they're acting basically like an American law firm or something, you know?

Like we're just, we're just going to like, you know, fodder him and or like Texios, more like texios.

Like we're just going to fight this guy and pretend like what's happening is not really happening.

And I, I, I get it, but I also don't know that that's like a durable strategy.

Well, it didn't get you much, right?

Yeah.

Because like the the the delivery, the gift the first time was this state visit.

But what is Trump going to demand during this visit, right?

Like, you can't give him another state visit.

I don't know, man.

I mean, he'll come up with something.

There's always another ask he has, right?

And you know, the tariffs could come back in a year, right?

And I think that my advice to Kier Starmer, as someone who sincerely would like, I mean, he's very much in the position Biden was, like, he will be remembered by whether or not Nigel Farage is the next prime minister, you know?

And just being cautious is

not, doesn't feel like it's enough.

Like there needs to be more vision, more action,

more engagement.

He was very quiet about the far right.

He didn't say much about this rally, probably because he doesn't want to provoke Trump or Elon Musk or something.

Right.

Well, at some point, you got to get in the fight with these guys, you know, because if you just see the terrain,

they're going to fill that space.

I mean,

I think it was, was you tell me, Tommy, like about Alistair and Rory, you know, the rest of his politics, commenting that for a party that that has like four people in parliament, they're just like dominating the discourse in that country.

And part of that's because Kier Strommer is going to get, and labor generally has got to get more in the mix

and not just be on defense.

Right, exactly.

There's just, there's no clear affirmative agenda.

The people don't seem inspired by labor.

Reform UK has four MPs.

Four.

Yeah.

And Farage is able to kind of dominate the headlines and make news whenever he wants.

Tommy Robinson's out there.

Elon Musk, too.

It feels like an awful and very familiar stew.

But please, British people, don't follow us.

Trust me, it's not anywhere you want to be.

It ain't good over here.

Also, to your point about Ukraine, Ben, I mean, it's worth noting that Trump kicked off the week sticking it to Ukraine again because on Saturday, Trump posted this Truth Social note, this letter, where he said, letter to all NATO nations and the world.

So basically, this letter,

it's a social media post, but he calls it a letter.

Trump essentially issued an ultimatum where he said he would issue, quote, major sanctions on Russia if or when NATO did the same and when, quote, all NATO nations stopped buying oil from Russia.

Trump also suggested that NATO put 50 to 100% tariffs on China.

Now, I know NATO doesn't tariff things, right?

He's saying NATO member countries, but again, that's a crazy idea that all these NATO countries are going to put 100% tariff on China.

So, Ben, it's worth noting what a screw-you that is to Starmer and all of Europe in advance of this trip.

And that we're like

a month and a day from the Alaska summit.

And there's no ceasefire.

There's no clarity on what a potential security guarantee for Ukraine could look like.

Russia is now firing drones into Poland and Romania.

And Romania, two NATO countries.

Which suggests that this is maybe not an accident.

Yeah, and Trump's, you know, suggestions,

every once in a while he's asked, like, you're going to do anything about this.

And he's like, oh, in two weeks, we'll figure it out.

Well, like, any suggestion that he might get tough on Putin now has devolved to this Europe has to go first kind of excuse.

Yeah, he's, he, he talks about Ukraine now as a guy who a month ago was saying he was going to solve it in the summit, like this observer or something, like he's a guest on the all-in pod or something.

And, and look, the lesson, and we will come back to this in another pod, but like these European leaders, I'm invested in their, a lot of the things that they want to achieve here, you know?

So I say this this with like rooting for them.

This isn't working.

I mean, yes, you've prevented the absolute worst case of Trump completely cutting off Ukraine and completely embracing Putin, but that weird truth social post,

it's the textbook case of why capitulating to Trump isn't worth it.

He feels like he extracted the 5% defense spending pledge out of NATO.

So they all got together and said they're going to spend 5% defense, which is an absurdity.

No, they won't.

They won't.

We don't spend that.

But now he's like, he likes this idea of like, I can say, do this, Europe, and they do it.

So he's like, well, now you got to put it, you know, stop buying Russian oil.

And by the way, put a hundred percent tariff on China, which would like break a bunch of their economies.

And until you say no to him, he's just going to keep asking more.

And meanwhile, by not saying no to him on anything, you don't look like a strong leader.

The far right is putting themselves forward as strong leaders.

And we need some leadership out of Europe and not just this kind of like carefully managing Trump to avoid worse outcomes.

Like at a certain point, you got to have your own positions.

Yeah, and we're at a pretty bad outcome.

Finally, Ben, pour one out for every coked up asshole who has dreamed of being president because in this case, we're pouring one out, some Irish whiskey, for UFC fighter Connor McGregor, who has announced he will not be running in the Irish presidential election next month.

McGregor blamed the process for getting on the ballot.

He said it was too hard.

You have to get, if you're an Irish presidential hopeful, you need to get endorsements from a set number of members of the Irish parliament or these kind of local authorities.

But it probably did not help that McGregor was polling at about 7%,

that he recently lost a case, a civil case for sexual assault.

He clearly has a drug habit and in 2019 pleaded guilty to assault after he sucker punched a man in his 50s who refused to take a shot of whiskey with him at a bar.

Other than that.

Seems like a great guy.

Great guy.

I will say, if we're looking for bright spots, right,

hope

the Irish people, man, just rise to the occasion on just about everything.

I mean, we'll test whether our friend Michael Neal is listening to this far, but like, they're just across the board.

Like, they've been out there on, you know, Israel-Palestine.

They don't want Connor McGregor around.

Like, they're fun to hang out with.

Like,

I just, this is a great rebuke of Conor McGregor from the people of Ireland.

And just shows that, like,

there's not.

There's just not much there there to a lot of these kind of MAGA type influencers.

If you can say no to them, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think McGregor was kind of just planning to run on anti-immigrants.

Yeah.

And I'm buddies with Trump, right?

Because he was at like, you know, when Trump goes to UFC fights or something.

Yeah, he'll be there.

It's also interesting.

We should dig into this one sometime in the future.

Like the countries that have managed to avoid kind of the far-right populist kind of stew.

Yeah.

There's some interesting examples.

Ireland's definitely one of them.

Yeah.

It is interesting.

Like tell us, Irish people.

We'll dig deeper.

Yeah.

And we may need to come live there.

Yeah, please get me a visa.

All right, we're going to take a quick break.

When you come back, you'll hear my interview with Tom Fletcher about providing humanitarian relief to some of the toughest hotspots in the world.

That includes Haiti, Sudan, Gaza, and much more.

So stick around for that.

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I would like to welcome Tom Fletcher to the show.

He is the United Nations Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

Thank you for joining me today.

And also, do you guys, when you do titles at the UN, do you get paid by the word?

How does this work?

Sorry, that's a bit of a mouthful.

I'm basically the aid chief is the kind of shorter way of doing that.

You know, once my title in my previous job, private secretary for foreign affairs to the prime minister, was mistranslated as the intimate typist for the prime minister's affairs overseas.

And so every in China, and to this day, they still sit me next to the president because they think I write the love letters for the prime minister.

That's that's an incredible story.

Um, okay, well, look, I'm glad we are laughing, and it's been a lot of fun just chatting with you before we started recording because we're having this conversation as uh part of an initiative called Be Hope.

We're going to try to find some hope in the world.

I have to be honest, I'm feeling pretty bleak at the moment.

It's been a weird week in U.S.

politics, a horrible week in U.S.

politics, and a challenging year to say the least.

And also, I want to ask you about some of the hotspots that you have been to, that you've worked to get assistance into.

So, let's start with Haiti.

I believe you recently recently got back from a three-day trip to Haiti.

As listeners know, I mean, Haiti has been plagued by gang violence.

There's a hunger crisis.

There has been severe political instability for years now.

What did you see in Haiti, and what do you think Haiti needs from the international community?

I mean, Haiti is unrelentingly grim.

And I've got the worst set of visas in the world, really.

You know, when you go to U.S.

customs and they say, have you been to the following countries?

I've been to all of them.

In 10 months in the job, I've been to Haiti, I've been to Gaza, Afghanistan, Syria, I was in Myanmar after the earthquake.

So I've been in Darfur.

So I see some pretty rough places and Haiti is really, really grim.

And

the site I went to for displaced people,

squalid.

You can't imagine the conditions that people are living in there.

And everyone is utterly terrified.

You wouldn't choose to live somewhere like that unless you were leaving somewhere really, really bad.

And to get there, they've had to go through the checkpoints, they've been abducted they've been shaken down for money you know the gangs the armed groups are in control of so much of the country but i tell you one i mean one thing that i found really shocking was that you know i visited this center for survivors of sexual violence amazing place where they're doing amazing work to support these incredibly courageous survivors and the women there told me two things one that they're preemptively taking contraception before they go through the checkpoints because they're assuming that they'll get gang raped.

And secondly, they said, we need this center, like we need the pharmacy and the supermarket and, you know, the corner shop.

You know, every area needs a center for survivors of sexual violence because there are so many of us.

So these are brutal conditions.

My God.

Yeah, I think I saw a statement from maybe UNICEF recently about the gangs that said that I think maybe half of the people in these gangs are actually minors, are children who have been co-opted and forced to either fight or be couriers or otherwise participants.

So it's just

the scope of this problem is just enormous.

Yeah.

And that, you know, that's the challenge we face everywhere is that effectively we're seeing these cycles of generational violence and hatred.

You know, this stuff doesn't go away.

without politics, without diplomacy, without humanitarian work.

It sort of sits in the system and then comes back in different ways.

You can say the same thing for Israel Gaza.

You can say the same thing for the violence that we're seeing every day in Darfur.

This will perpetuate itself through cycles unless we can find a way to break that vicious cycle.

Yeah, and why, you know, Eric Prince, the former head of Blackwater, going down to Haiti to sell people some drones is not a moral or just solution to a very serious gang problem.

You've mentioned Sudan a couple times.

Every day, there's just another sort of brutal story or headline.

I mean, there was a landslide that killed over a thousand people.

The New York Times just published this piece about how desperate people people in the Darfur region, in Western Darfur, are now eating animal feed to survive.

Even the Trump State Department has called Sudan the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

What do you think people need to know about what's happening in Sudan?

And again, I mean, what is the international community doing?

What more should it be doing?

Yeah, and I think you can add cholera to that list as well and massive starvation.

So Sudan's the big one.

You know, 30 million people in need.

It's the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world.

It's why I went there in my first week in the job and went into Darfur to see the effort there, to talk to people there.

So we need the politics to get fixed and that will probably need some sort of regional solution, but it certainly needs the engagement of the US and others.

And it's one of the areas where the US is actually pretty engaged in trying to stop that conflict.

We need the funding back.

I mean, Sudan, you know, we're under 20% funded, even with a massively prioritized appeal that we have.

You know, we're on the ground and our guys are incredibly brave.

They'll go anywhere, talk to anyone, do anything to get those convoys moving.

But they're running huge risks.

You know, Sudan is one of those places where we're losing a load of colleagues to the violence.

And it's another place, by the way, where the sexual violence is utterly, utterly terrifying.

And again, you sit down, you meet the survivors of that, and they just tell you the most horrific stories of being passed around by these militias.

And yet they're still somehow carrying on.

And, you know, if you're looking for hope, sometimes you find it in the bleakest places.

One key element is the role the UAE seems to be playing in Sudan.

I mean, there's been a number of investigations into the way the UAE has helped arm the RSF, the rapid support forces, which is one half of the civil war, the other half is the government.

I've read reports that the UAE is providing advanced weapons, ammunition, armored vehicles.

More recently, Sudanese officials accused the UAE of recruiting foreign mercenaries to fight in Sudan, including fighters from Colombia.

And Khartoum even accused the UAE of being complicit in genocide at the ICJ, which is, you know, it's hard to wrap your mind around that sentence.

What role do you think the UAE is playing in perpetuating this conflict?

And can the UN do anything to pressure them to stop?

I spend a lot of time talking to colleagues in the UAE, but also

across the region about how we stop this conflict, because it's not just a Sudanese conflict.

There are these regional dimensions to it.

I'm pretty encouraged, you know, over the weekend that we heard this statement that came from the US, the Saudis and the UAE basically saying that they want humanitarian access.

I want to get these convoys moving and I'm hearing, and obviously this is, I'm pushing for this every day with all of these players, that

we've got to bust through those checkpoints.

But ultimately, we need the conflict to stop.

We need some sort of political process.

And I'm hearing from the UAE, from the Saudis, and the Americans that they're willing to kind of do the work necessary to get that process in place.

What do you think that looks like?

Is it a prioritization issue, right?

Because I knew the envoy trying to solve this civil war during the Biden administration.

And I think, you know, one thing you would hear from that team was, you know, we kind of knew where ⁇ look, we knew that pressure on the UAE was a key part of any peace agreement or any diplomatic solution.

But, you know, on the sort of pecking order of things we need the UAE to do, maybe Sudan wasn't high enough.

Do you have a sense that this is going to be prioritized in the Trump administration?

So I was also in touch with

your colleague from the Biden administration on his way out, actually.

So I had a good chat to him about his sense of how we could get in there and just reframe this problem, kind of meet this challenge.

I think it is high on the list for our conversations with the Saudis, with the Emiratis.

But I think also Sudan, I mean, unlike a lot of places I operate, Sudan at least does get some international attention.

So there'll be a lot of meetings in High Level Week.

UN, our big week, our kind of speed dating, our World Cup next week.

There are a lot of side meetings, a lot of focus on Sudan.

So I think at least it's got that level of attention.

But we need, you know, diplomacy is 799 days of failure, one day of success.

George Mitchell said that about Northern Ireland.

And

it's really discouraging in my job because Most days the team come in here into this room and give me the operational update each morning and it's just doom and gloom and hopelessness and despair and all the numbers going in the wrong direction.

And we just have to keep kind of dusting ourselves off and carrying on, even though

we're overstretched, we're underfunded, massively underfunded, and massively under attack.

You know, last year was the deadliest year ever to be a humanitarian worker.

We're losing colleagues in Sudan, in Gaza, everywhere we're working.

But we just have to keep carrying on because we have no choice.

Yeah.

The other huge challenge is in Gaza, I mean, we've watched for the last two years, the the humanitarian situation has just gotten inexorably worse.

The Israeli government clearly has the capacity to turn on and off

the flow of aid into Gaza whenever it wants.

Things have gotten worse since the UN was sidelined and the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation took over relief efforts, such as they are.

What are you hearing from

the ground?

And what message do you think it says to the world that the United States, under successive administrations, has fully backed this war effort that the United Nations, the United Nations Commission now calls a genocide?

So I was in Gaza in February, and I'm in constant touch with the team on the ground.

And I think of all the places I've visited, Gaza is easily the worst.

And I drove in through the north, having been in Neroz, one of the kibbutz that was hit on October the 7th.

so horrifically by Hamas and where one in four people were killed or taken hostage.

And then you crossed the border and the first thing I said to the guy with me is, you know, why are the dogs so fat?

And he said, because they're eating the corpses.

And we drove through the rubble.

I met a mother who had watched her kid bleed out on the road across from the hospital because he'd been hit by snipers.

And every time the medics came to try and keep him alive, they were also hit by snipers.

And she watched that happen in front of her.

I got into the hospital

and on the wall, you know, one of the medics has written, just tell them we did what we could.

And he was also then killed by a sniper.

So always you're trying to think, can we judge ourselves through that prison?

Will we be able to say that we did what we could?

And to keep trying absolutely everything to get those convoys moving.

In the good days, I mean, to call them good

is not quite right because it was clearly still grim, but during the ceasefire,

back in the first quarter of the year, we were getting in 500, 600 trucks a day.

And so we were able to deal with the famine.

We were able to stop the starvation levels getting so high.

Still not enough, but we were reaching everyone in Gaza.

And as you say,

that's been shut down.

We're getting a trickle in at the moment.

It's a drop in the ocean compared to what we really need.

Now, I'm in constant touch with the American administration.

We're talking to the Israelis all the time, the team on the ground.

Obviously, we talk to member states to try and create the pressure on Israel.

What we need is not complicated.

All All the crossings open, commercial traffic moving, an end to these bureaucratic impediments that mean we have to load and unload and load and unload.

We bring the trucks in and we have to cart all the stuff off the trucks, then wait for other trucks to come.

Often that takes hours.

Then we go, eventually we're cleared to move in the best case scenario, and we're moving down a road which we know the looters will be on.

We get looted by starving, desperate parents trying to feed their kids.

So it's, you know, we're being set up to fail here, and it's immensely frustrating.

It's infuriating because we know the levels of hunger and starvation on the other side.

I draw encouragement from the fact that President Trump's been very clear.

He said we've got to stop the starvation.

He doesn't want to see starving babies.

And so that instruction has clearly gone down through the US system.

And we are in that constant daily engagement about how we could scale up.

And the reality as it was under previous administrations, as you know, is that probably it's only the Americans that can bring that pressure.

And so we have to keep hoping, hoping, hoping that that pressure will come.

Yeah, I know, look, I appreciate it.

And you have a really tough job.

And I appreciate the hopeful tone.

It's just earlier in the show, we talked about how Marco Rubio sort of sounded like he'd given up on brokering a ceasefire deal during his visit earlier in the week.

And a few weeks ago, we were talking about a famine declaration in Gaza City and the need for humanitarian pauses in the fighting to facilitate the bringing in of aid.

And now instead, we're talking about a full-on ground operation into Gaza City by the IDF, which is a city with like half a million people still in it.

So I just, I wonder what you think the impact of this new ground offensive is going to be on this famine declaration in Gaza City, which I assume has not gone away, right?

It hasn't gone away.

It means the famine will spread to other areas.

And it means that, you know, imagine being a family that's been displaced multiple times and has ended up in Gaza City, has had almost two years of this, living under this bombardment,

will have lost family members, will be coping with starvation,

kids just utterly demoralized.

It's unthinkable as a parent trying to imagine how you would carry on

in that situation.

And here again, we'll see more

mass displacement.

We'll see more starvation.

We'll see more more, you know, masses, more civilian deaths.

And none of us know for sure what the numbers are of civilian deaths, but it's already for sure over 50 times the losses on that terrible day on October the 7th.

How much longer is this going to go on?

How much retribution will there be?

Yeah,

you're right.

We don't know.

It is daunting and haunting.

Bigger picture.

So

the first half of the Trump administration was kind of

dominated by Elon Musk and Doge in this destruction of USAID and just sort of the end of U.S.

foreign assistance, except for military assistance to Israel and a few other places.

In the wake of that destruction, how big is the gap when it comes to the global need for assistance versus the funding available and how has that impacted your job?

So the funding gap is absolutely massive.

So back in December, I launched a campaign to saying we needed to reach 300 million people in need.

And for that, we needed over $45 billion.

Now even before the funding cuts it was clear we weren't going to get close to that and so I've now had to issue a hyper-prioritized plan to try to save 114 million lives which will cost 25 to 30 billion and again you know I have to be optimistic and keep pushing for the funding but I can't be all that optimistic that we'll that we'll get anywhere close to that.

So as a result, you've got tens of millions of people that we won't reach.

Now a more positive way to frame that is that over over the decades, the US taxpayer has saved hundreds of millions of lives.

And probably

we became too dependent on that funding.

It was sort of 40, 45% of all the humanitarian funding in the sector.

And so we do need to spread that burden.

It's a fair point.

We do need to get others to step forward and fill that space.

But I desperately, desperately hope that we'll see that US leadership come back.

into the sector.

I can't give up on that leadership because these are big, big numbers.

And I see the brutal choices every day.

You know, I was in Afghanistan and sat there in can-dos with mothers who'd lost their children because they'd had to cycle three hours to give birth down bumpy roads because the clinic had just shut.

You know, I can see that in Haiti with the programs that are being shut down there.

I can see it everywhere we work.

So we are every day making brutal life and death choices because of the scale of the cuts.

And so I desperately hope that we'll see all that scaling back up.

You know, I understand that there are specific places this administration wants to work and doesn't want to work, specific themes that they want to focus on.

And I'm hoping there's a conversation there we can have, an engagement we can have.

And I was in Washington that weekend building that dialogue

because every bit of funding we get is saving huge numbers of lives.

Yeah, and look, just from a purely kind of, like, if I put my Trump filter on my brain, I mean, boy, if he wants, if he's worried about the migration crisis, imagine what a migration crisis from Sudan could look like if the entire country just disintegrates or South Sudan, right?

I mean, the long-term impact of cutting off all of this funding and just leaving these places to fend for themselves means that mass populations are going to leave and they're going to come to the U.S.

or come to Europe or come to, you know, places where there are governments that don't want them.

Completely.

And we used to say, you know, during that kind of holiday from history period, that sort of post-1989 period period when it all seemed that history was moving in one direction, we used to often say, you know, global problems require global solutions.

I think now we have to almost frame that in a slightly more transactional way, which is exactly that, that if you don't deal with these problems at source, then massive levels of migration, massive levels of disease spreading, economic insecurity spreading, physical insecurity and terrorism.

spreading.

So you almost have to, I think, frame it in that slightly more practical, pragmatic, transactional way, because you can't put a tariff on a pandemic.

Right.

Right.

Absolutely not.

Okay.

So we're talking as part of this Be Hope initiative that's tied to the 80th anniversary of the UN General Assembly, the 10th anniversary of these goals that were designed to try to end poverty, reduce inequality, and tackle climate change.

I have so far delivered to the listener the most hopeless conversation possible, interview possible, in part because of where my brain's at these days in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and

term two of Trump, but also

given the topics we were talking about.

So let me just try to give you a carte blanche here.

Is there anything you are seeing that is going particularly well, advances in science or medicine or work that you've been a part of that makes you hopeful or excited about something happening that we can kind of point to?

So I think, I mean, as I'm the only person in the world to have gone to all these places in the last year, from Darfur to Kanduz to Syria, to Mandalay after the earthquake and so on.

I probably have more reason to feel hopeless even than you or anyone else.

And look, I'll be honest, there are days when I do despair that the numbers in need are going up and I despair of all the numbers of people that we're just not reaching because of the funding cuts and so on.

I genuinely draw hope.

from the visits I do from the people I meet on those visits.

You know that that line about always look for the helpers.

Actually, it really rings true for me because you go into these horrific situations and you always find someone there quietly dealing with you know we're not humanitarian front lines it's those local communities that are responding to what's happening to their neighbors who are opening up their houses the person who's escaping an earthquake who are going out like these women i met in haiti last week and just quietly rehabilitating survivors supporting survivors like the the women i met in in Darfur, orphans themselves who are running centers to respond to those orphans, you know who sadly are being uh displaced every day by the conflict so i think you can draw hope from those individuals and look this

this will come this may come across as a bit glib but i actually genuinely draw hope from the values of the un and it's a really unfashionable thing to say now because no one's standing up for institutions and look I know the flaws of this place it's imperfect it can be much much better but you know I go back and I look at the charter and you know it's we the peoples, we're determined to stand up for those who need our support.

We're determined to, having seen two world wars, to try to end conflict.

And I don't believe that that mission has become any less mighty.

I just have to retain hope that there's a movement out there that will still believe in that.

And maybe it doesn't come from governments and states in the way that it did do for most of my working life.

Maybe it's a genuine movement of citizens who will respond with empathy and emotional intelligence and kindness.

I don't believe that kindness has gone away just because of a few election results.

I don't believe the world's less kind.

And I have to keep faith with that.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I'll give you, my version of hope is I do think the pandemic damaged us in ways that we have not begun to understand, let alone calculate.

We're all feeling the impact, but that broadly speaking, politics feels like a giant pendulum to me that swings one way and then often swings back the other way.

And I am hopeful that I look, I know all the arguments about the UN and its flaws and its inefficiencies and yada yada.

But you know what?

You know, institutions are made up of people and people are flawed.

And so that's what you get, right?

The same as the US government, the same as the UK government.

And so I hope that given the radical change we've seen, the damage it's inflicting on the world, the second and third order impacts of that damage, that hopefully people will wake up a bit and understand that we've gone too far and course correct and maybe try to push and swing that pendulum back in a better direction.

Yeah, absolutely.

And look, you know, I wrote this book, The Make a Diplomat, in 2016, having been ambassador in Beirut during the Arab Spring.

And I was way too idealistic.

And I was writing, you know, basically about social media and the way it will change politics and statecraft and diplomacy.

And I was saying, look,

this is going to make us more democratic.

It's going to make the world fairer.

It's going to give more power to individuals.

And that's basically a good thing.

Because my argument was that

the more you democratize these issues of war and peace, the more peaceful we become.

Now,

sat here in 2025, that looks way too idealistic.

I hadn't realized the way that governments and lots of politics would weaponize social media.

But

I'm still on that arc of the moral universe bending in the right direction.

And I'm still on social media being part of that.

I think it kind of comes down to whether you believe in humans.

And I think we have these two major drivers in our DNA,

both Darwinian.

One is to compete for resource, to fight for resource, and other, as strong, and I believe stronger, is to work together and collaborate for resource.

And I think that's the great dividing line of our times.

It's between the coexistors and the wall builders.

And I believe that out there, you know, I think it's a bit like the period after the invention of the printing press, when you just had this kind of cacophony of noise and libel and slander and anger and rage as people used this new tool that was democratizing knowledge to such an extent.

But they used it for all sorts of ways that polarized our society.

And it took time for not just the rules, but also the norms and the values to catch up with that.

And I suppose I hope that will be the case with the internet and social media.

So let's not give up yet.

Yeah, let's not give up yet.

Well, listen, thank you.

Let's end it on that very hopeful note.

Tom, thanks for making time today.

Thanks, Finn.

It's a very, very busy week slash month for you.

And I'm grateful to you for doing the show.

Thanks, Tommy, and keep up the great work.

Cheers.

Thanks again to Tom Fletcher for doing the show.

And we will talk to you guys next week.

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