Trump Flirts With Nuclear Annihilation

Speaker 1 Podse of the World is brought to you by Simply Safe. If you could actually stop someone from breaking into your home before they got inside, why wouldn't you want to?

Speaker 1 Traditional be welcoming and invite them in. You want to throw a nice burglar, like the Louvre guys or something.
They're classy. Traditional security systems respond after someone breaks in.

Speaker 1 Simply Safe is different because it can stop crimes before they happen with its active guard outdoor protection.

Speaker 1 High-tech cameras detect threats while they are still outside your home and alert real security agents. This is a game changer.
The agents take action while the intruder is still outside.

Speaker 1 They confront the intruder, letting them know they're being watched on camera, and even sounding a loud siren and triggering a spotlight if needed, and triggering the burglars.

Speaker 1 This is how you stop crime before it starts. Other systems have cameras that let you talk to intruders, but they require you to see the alert yourself.

Speaker 1 SimplySafe's monitoring agents have your back and talk to intruders even if they aren't there. Plus, with SimplySafe, there's no long-term contracts or hidden fees.
You can cancel anytime.

Speaker 1 They've been named best home security systems by U.S. News and World Report for five years running.
And they have a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try and see the difference for yourself.

Speaker 1 As you guys know, John Lovett sent up a Simply Safe system himself. He did it right out of the box.
It worked incredibly well, kept John safe, kept Pundit safe, kept everybody safe.

Speaker 1 You can turn it on and off from your phone. It's very funny that we've been just congratulating Lovett for a second.
I'm so proud of him.

Speaker 1 I've been a do-it-yourself security system for seven years running now. He's our special boy.
Don't miss out on Simply Safe's biggest sale of the year. 60% off.

Speaker 1 Right now, our listeners can save 60% off on a SimplySafe home security system at simply safe.com slash crooked world. That's simply safe.com slash crooked world.
There's no safe like simply safe.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 2 I'm Ben Rhodes.

Speaker 1 Ben, the vaccine finally got Dick Cheney. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm just kidding. He died of natural causes.

Speaker 2 As far as I mean, he hung on for a long time, given that he had like 17 heart procedures.

Speaker 1 84 years old, five

Speaker 1 heart attacks. Yeah.
And a chain smoker.

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 2 also a lot of...

Speaker 2 A lot of being eaten from within by your deeds in the world.

Speaker 1 By your mistakes. Remember when he had his pacemaker removed or swapped out because there were words you could hack it?

Speaker 1 It was like a plot line from Homeland or something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they watched a little too much TV.

Speaker 1 Yes, I'm guessing that's not how the Al-Qaeda guys are going to get you.

Speaker 1 Look, we don't like Dick Cheney. We don't like his political views.

Speaker 1 I give him credit for being one of the bigger name Republicans to come out and say he was voting for Kamala Harris and not for Donald Trump. He stepped over the lowest bar possible.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't believe it. Santered over it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 To me, that was a little bit

Speaker 2 emblematic of the ultimate too late, too little too late category. Oh, yeah.
Because essentially, these guys like Cheney,

Speaker 2 they became never Trumpers at the end, but his dishonesty.

Speaker 2 But the thing is, he plowed the ground for Trump, right? His rampant dishonesty and kind of bad faith approach to politics and, you know,

Speaker 2 win at all costs, blow through norms, you know, expand the power of the presidency. Like, he

Speaker 2 kind of helped create this monster and then he saw it and he's like, oh, I don't like that. And,

Speaker 2 you know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's clearly the lowest bar, but he didn't exactly soar over it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I'm guessing that Cheney didn't like Trump because, one, Trump was mean to his daughter, and two, you know, he opposes all things that neocons stand for, at least pretended to.

Speaker 1 Pretended to, yeah.

Speaker 2 Which shows you there's no constituency for Dick Cheney.

Speaker 1 Like zero, like negative.

Speaker 1 So I got my coffee and my water today because it's going to be a long night with election returns.

Speaker 1 So Cheney is primarily known as Bush's VP, but he had a long list of jobs and some political lowlights and highlights. Here's a few, Ben.
Chief of staff for Gerald Ford. I think that was during

Speaker 1 his wet era when he was drinking a lot.

Speaker 1 I had an uncle who was a journalist who said Dick Cheney was like a pretty good time at that point.

Speaker 2 The Joe Biden of the Republican Party, Gerald Ford.

Speaker 1 Yeah, except drunk.

Speaker 1 He was a member of the House for 10 years representing Wyoming, Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, CEO of Halliburton from 95 to 2000.
Sweet gig, if you can get it.

Speaker 1 Cheney led the VP selection process for George W. Bush and then ultimately selected himself, which you got to kind of tick the head for.

Speaker 2 I know, but to the younger listeners, that was a great moment in politics that you missed.

Speaker 1 It was crazy. It's like, wait, wait.
Wait, you picked you? Yeah.

Speaker 1 In 2006, Cheney shot his friend Harry Wittingson in the face while on a hunting trip, and they tried to cover it up. That's the best part.

Speaker 1 Didn't they then give the story to like the local newspaper where the hunting trip was in Texas?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was,

Speaker 2 this made for like weeks of daily show episodes. It was glorious.

Speaker 1 That was like I remember where I was moment. I was in this apartment with my then-girlfriend.
Anyway, so we don't love Dick Cheney.

Speaker 1 The one thing about him is he was unrepentant for some of the problems he caused. Here's a clip that will highlight that for you all.

Speaker 3 I say President Obama. You say...

Speaker 4 I say a president whose policies are doing lasting damage to the United States of America.

Speaker 3 The Iran nuclear deal.

Speaker 4 Terrible deal. It definitely ought to be rejected rejected by the Congress.

Speaker 3 Should Guantanamo stay open? Yes.

Speaker 5 Any regrets about going into Iraq?

Speaker 1 No, it was the right thing to do then. I believed it then, and I believe it now.

Speaker 6 No apologies.

Speaker 1 No apologies. I believe that was 14 years after the invasion.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Pretty remarkable.

Speaker 1 Yeah, anyway.

Speaker 2 So I guess the world looks pretty good from whatever farm in Wyoming he was on.

Speaker 2 Very interesting.

Speaker 2 Somehow, the lasting damage of policies comment was directed at Obama and not in the mirror.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not the Iraq War.

Speaker 1 Iraq War. Been in a typically classy move, Trump has not yet put out a statement of any kind about Dick Cheney.

Speaker 2 Now there's Obama as of this recording, which I Heavy D gets one, but

Speaker 2 I kind of admire if we can stick to that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sure, why not?

Speaker 2 Well, because there's something performative about this.

Speaker 2 I'm not trying to be a jerk or something, but it's like I don't like Dick Cheney.

Speaker 2 And I don't, you know, I get why his friends want to say nice things about him, but I don't know why we all have to pretend like he was a selfless public servant who tried to advance the democracy.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't think that's what he did this is the giant white space that like people refuse to just acknowledge is possible to you as a public figure say nothing is available

Speaker 1 you don't have to you can just say nothing yes you want to glorify these people like the whole charlie kirk thing it's like or you can just you could just say nothing bite your tongue yeah or just wait a few weeks yeah like i don't know anyway uh we got a great show for you guys today we're not going to talk anymore about dick cheney so kind of dealt with it done yeah uh we're going to cover uh we're going to explain why president trump started threatening to invade nigeria that's a thing that happened You'll be shocked to learn that he doesn't even have the best handle on the facts.

Speaker 1 We'll also update you on the latest from Sudan, where a rebel group called the RSF captured the last city under Sudanese government control in the Darfur region and is committing atrocities at such a massive scale that you can reportedly see the carnage from space.

Speaker 1 Truly horrifying story. We'll explain why Trump's plan to resume testing nuclear weapons is like maybe his dumbest idea ever been.
Yes. It's like top five, right? It's concerning.

Speaker 1 Okay, we'll get to it. We'll explain why FBI Director Cash Patel is very mad online and he's not at all defensive.
And if you say that, he might sue you.

Speaker 1 We'll talk about the controversy over detainee abuse that is rocking Israel, but not for the reasons that you might expect or prefer to expect.

Speaker 1 The two big elections in the Netherlands and Ireland that might give you a little hope. We'll explain why America's refugee policy is now just overtly racist.
Not a complicated story.

Speaker 1 And then finally, Prince Andrew gets slapped in the face again. Good show today.
Good show today. And then, Ben, you did our interview.

Speaker 2 I did. I talked to Santa Marin, the former prime minister of Finland, who has a new book out, Hope in Action.
It's a memoir of her time as prime minister.

Speaker 2 We talked about her view of Russia and the invasion of Ukraine. She obviously brought Finland into NATO.
We talked about that decision.

Speaker 2 Bring that up to date. You know, how does she looking at the situation with Zelensky and looking at the war now?

Speaker 2 Talk about battling far-right politics. But also, like, really interestingly, you know, she writes about,

Speaker 2 I actually told her before the interview that we once had an episode titled,

Speaker 2 Let Santa Marin Dance.

Speaker 1 And she liked that.

Speaker 2 She liked that.

Speaker 2 But she went through all these faux scandals that she writes about that basically had to do with her being a woman with a life, you know, under 40,

Speaker 2 including the famous picture of her dancing that got some people all bent out of shape. But we talked about like, does that disincentivize normal people from going into politics?

Speaker 2 Does that disentivize women from going into politics? What is it about our culture that we particularly put young women through those kinds of quote-unquote scandals?

Speaker 2 So that was like a really interesting conversation because I actually, Tommy, I worry about this a lot. Like how many normal people look at politics and are like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Nope. No, thank you.

Speaker 2 And so the way she was treated definitely

Speaker 2 trends in the wrong direction, but obviously she wants people to get involved. So check it out.

Speaker 1 It's an especially acute problem for

Speaker 1 progressive women. Yeah.
Just progressives generally. I mean, Donald Trump was videotaped dancing with Jeffrey Epstein at a party at Mar-a-Lago, and everyone just seemed to memory hold.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Here we are.

Speaker 1 Anyway, stick around for that great interview.

Speaker 1 Also, for those of you who are subscribers and members of our Friends of the Pod community, you get a bonus QA that comes from the Pod Save the World Discord.

Speaker 1 If you want to join and be a part of that Discord, go to crooked.com/slash friends. All right, Ben.
Let's talk about Nigeria. First time we've heard that.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that we'd start here.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Nor did I.
So Donald Trump is suddenly very, very worried about events in Nigeria.

Speaker 1 On Friday, he named Nigeria a country of particular concern, which is a designation given to countries that, according to the State Department, have engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.

Speaker 1 Then on Saturday, Trump posted the following on Truth Social: Quote: If the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and we may very well go into that now-disgraced country, guns a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.

Speaker 1 Okay. And then here's here's a clip of Trump talking about Nigeria on Air Force One from Sunday.

Speaker 1 That part of the world, very bad. They're killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers.
We're not going to allow that to happen. He envisages

Speaker 2 a lot of things.

Speaker 2 I envisage many things.

Speaker 1 So, what the hell happened that prompted this, you ask? Well, it turns out, according to NBC News, that Trump saw a report about Nigeria on Fox News. Of course.
Great way to make policies.

Speaker 1 Great way to go to war. So I have not seen that segment yet.
I'm positive.

Speaker 2 You don't need to see it. Yeah, we know what it looks like.

Speaker 1 You know what it looks like. So there's this belief among evangelicals that there's been this wave of anti-Christian violence in Nigeria to the point of it being a genocide.

Speaker 1 I'm sure it was about that. And so that led to these social media posts from Trump and then this massive scramble within the government to like catch up to whatever he was talking about.

Speaker 1 I saw one report, Ben, that said staffers at AFRICOM got like an emergency call to come back to the office, and they were just scrambling to figure out military options to respond to a genocide against Christians that's not actually happening.

Speaker 1 So that's great. So to be clear, though, like there's a lot of violence in Nigeria.

Speaker 1 In the northeastern part of Nigeria, there's a terrorist group called Boko Haram that has launched brutal attacks on civilians, including on churches and mosques.

Speaker 1 Don't confuse them with Woko Haram, which did wage war on Twitter in the 2018, 2019 period in a pretty brutal fashion.

Speaker 1 But so that region, northeastern Nigeria, it's predominantly Muslim, and the majority of Boko Haram's victims are thus Muslims because they live in that community.

Speaker 1 Don't take my word for it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So last month, Masad Balus, who is Tiffany Trump's father-in-law, said the following.
People of all religions and of all tribes are dying.

Speaker 1 We even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than Christians.

Speaker 1 That this is not specifically targeted at one group or another. Again, Trump's advisor.

Speaker 1 In central Nigeria, there's clashes between these Muslim and nomadic cattle herders and mostly Christian farmers, but that fighting is over scarce land and water resources, not like jihadist ideology.

Speaker 1 But this idea that there's a genocide against Christians is big among Republicans in Congress. It's big from Ted Cruz, talks about it a lot.

Speaker 1 And then the reaction in Nigeria to all of this has just been like confusion, I think.

Speaker 1 Understandably so. Yeah, the president of Nigeria, Bola Tanubu, he's a Muslim guy, but he's married to a Christian woman who's a minister.
So the idea that he's

Speaker 1 fomenting a sectarian warfare

Speaker 1 feels off.

Speaker 1 The truth is, it's really hard to combat terrorist groups, especially in a country like Nigeria that is huge, has lots of ungoverned spaces,

Speaker 1 among other problems. So, Ben,

Speaker 1 all you can kind of do is laugh at something this crazy, but can you just imagine how freaked out like your average Nigerian was?

Speaker 1 Like, one day you wake up, the president of the United States is threatening to invade you. And also, like, the country's half Muslims, half Christian.

Speaker 1 There are sectarian tensions, and this is just going to pour gas on them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's so many things that are crazy about this.

Speaker 2 I mean, you put your finger on one that really does matter because it's easy to chuckle at, but it's so obvious that he will occasionally just see some segment on Fox or OAN, or he'll like have a conversation with some visiting MAGA influencer.

Speaker 2 And then, like, all of a sudden, we're on like the cusp of war, or we're tariffing this country, or he's like demanding the arrest of some foreign leader. Um, that is fucking weird.

Speaker 2 And as he gets older, you know, another thing that we're beginning to, I think, have to talk about a little more, like this impulse control problem could get worse, you know?

Speaker 2 And there's nobody around him there to say, you know, in Trump parlance, sir, maybe we can put that one in the drafts folder, you know? Right. Because Nigeria is the largest country in Africa.

Speaker 2 Like he's, he's, he's literally threatening.

Speaker 2 He's literally threatening to invade a massive country that does not have this problem. Like Boko Haram has been around for a long time.
They're an awful group.

Speaker 2 They kill indiscriminate of religion. Like, as you said, they've killed majority Muslims.
There's literally no possible constructive U.S. military engagement that I could imagine whatsoever.
Like,

Speaker 2 so this is kind of either a completely

Speaker 2 bizarre and disastrous threat if it actually leads to some action, or it's just kind of a bizarre thing to do to just kind of threaten to go to war with the largest country in Africa.

Speaker 2 And with a lot of racialized language, too, you know, like we bad things happening in that part of the world. And, you know, so now disgraced country.
Nothing, yeah, nothing.

Speaker 2 Well, and actually, like, to be serious about it, you know, if you want to look at the geopolitics of this, like, Nigeria is a massively important country, right? We talk about competition with China.

Speaker 2 Like, well, what a great way to just signal that, like, get as far away from the Americans as possible. Like, sign up to every belt road initiative you can, Nigerians, because we are not reliable.

Speaker 2 Like, these things actually matter in the real world.

Speaker 1 There's going to be 400 million people in Nigeria by 2050. They're having explosive population growth.

Speaker 2 Like, this is a huge, important country.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And, and he's just now, this will be the thing that they, you know, know about Trump.

Speaker 2 And, and, just one more point on this, because we beat this drum a lot, but this is the man who promised to end forever wars, you know, and we, you know, the same time that he's like on the verge of regime change war in Venezuela and blowing up boats, he's threatening to invade, you know, guns ablazing Nigeria, like does not feel like very ending of the forever war-ish to me.

Speaker 1 No, no, it does not.

Speaker 1 Um, and also part of what makes the concern about a fake genocide against Christians in Nigeria so galling in this moment is that there's an actual genocidal massacre happening as we speak in Sudan that I don't think I've seen them comment on.

Speaker 2 No, and actually, I'm glad you say that because one of the things that really bugged me about this is like the clear prioritization of Christians, you know.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 genocides against other religions are fine.

Speaker 2 It just feels like, and we'll get to this with the refugees too, like, we care about white people and Christians and maybe sometimes Jews if they're Israelis, and we like everybody else is a second-class global citizen, right?

Speaker 2 That's fucking dark.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is really dark, and it is like codified into policy now. Yeah, and so let's talk more about Sudan.
So, last week we talked about the fall of this city

Speaker 1 of El-Fasher in Sudan's Darfur region.

Speaker 1 They had been under siege for 18 months, and then finally troops aligned with the Sudanese government just abandoned the city and they allowed it to be taken by a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces or RSF.

Speaker 1 So civilians in El Fasher were already in the midst of a famine. They were eating animal feed to survive.
But the violence since the RSF has taken over has been like

Speaker 1 Rwanda genocide levels of horrific. The humanitarian research lab at Yale, they were looking at El Fasher via satellite imagery.

Speaker 1 They said they have seen a quote explosion of objects that are the size and shape of dead bodies on the ground and that there is discoloration around those clusters of bodies from all the blood.

Speaker 1 In other words, you can see the bloodstains from the massacres from space. We also have RSF soldiers posting videos of themselves executing civilians and then bragging about it.

Speaker 1 Men and boys are being separated from women and being summarily executed. The women are being abducted.

Speaker 1 The World Health Organization said that the RSF executed basically everyone they could find at the last remaining working hospital in El Fasher, something like 500 people just executed.

Speaker 1 And then, maybe most chillingly, Ben. So, when El Fasher fell, there were believed to be about 260,000 people left in the city.

Speaker 1 But according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, less than 6,000 people have made it to the nearest refugee camp.

Speaker 1 And those that did had to survive like a 40-mile, multi-day journey. And when they got there, they had stories about torture and beatings and witnessing executions as El Fasher fell.

Speaker 1 And it just really makes you wonder: like, what is where are the rest of those people?

Speaker 1 Save the Children sent us this clip from a staffer in Sudan who has been in touch with folks on the ground in Darfur. Her name is Odette Nanatambara.
Here it is.

Speaker 7 Our teams responding in Tawila tell us that many of the families and children

Speaker 7 coming through Tawila are arriving with nothing.

Speaker 7 Recent stats from MSF show that out of the 70 children under five screened for malnutrition, 100% of those were found to be malnourished.

Speaker 7 Now, these results are deeply worrying considering that many children as well are witnessing killings,

Speaker 7 lost their family members, or were separated from their loved ones.

Speaker 7 Some now are living alone or with a

Speaker 7 host family who themselves are struggling to cope.

Speaker 1 So, you know, ethnic violence is driving a lot of these atrocities. The RSF is predominantly Arab.

Speaker 1 The Yale Lab said the RSF, quote, appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnically cleansing of indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, as we noticed last week,

Speaker 1 the world has ignored this civil war pretty much for years.

Speaker 1 Tragically, back in 2005, evangelical Christians were a huge part of the Save Darfur coalition that drew attention to that last genocide.

Speaker 1 Now, I guess they're focused on Nigeria or just they don't care anymore.

Speaker 1 As discussed, the United States has completely failed to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates to stop funneling arms to the RSF. In fact,

Speaker 1 the UAE has increased those shipments over the last few months, and now USAID no longer exists to help people who escape.

Speaker 1 So I guess the question is, like, what the hell should the international community do now?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 the core way to think about what's happening in Sudan is this is the absence of any international order or system. Right.

Speaker 2 Because normally, there actually is like a pretty clear playbook about how you'd approach this.

Speaker 2 Now, remember, this all had roots in the fact that there was like a popular uprising that ousted a war criminal president of Sudan, and that was supposed to create some transition to democracy.

Speaker 2 Now, what inevitably happened is the regional powers did not want to see a transition to democracy. Some of them backed the Sudanese military, and some of them, like the UAE, backed this RSF force.

Speaker 2 But in a normal system, the international community would come in and say, okay, wait a second, like stop arming people in this proxy war. UAE, you know, if we, the U.S.

Speaker 2 are not going to sell you any more weapons so long as you do that, like exert a little bit of leverage there.

Speaker 2 You have some kind of UN, you know, Security Council resolution aimed at kind of promoting like a process for a ceasefire. You have,

Speaker 2 you know, international diplomats who go in and negotiate that. And then you'd have mechanisms of international assistance like USCID working with others to like surge resources people on the ground.

Speaker 2 None of those things exist now. Like there's no political will to put pressure on countries like the UAE that are funding the arms.

Speaker 2 There's not really the apparatus, the UN Security Council, that can, you know, mount some initiative and set up a diplomatic process to get to a ceasefire.

Speaker 2 There's far less international assistance that can surge in. So, what we're doing is we're seeing this is what it's like to not have an international system that works.

Speaker 2 These are the kinds of things that can happen. And all people seem to be able to do about it is comment on how people aren't commenting on it enough.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.
And I do think talking about this stuff matters because the UAE keeps denying that they're funneling arms to the RSF. Nobody does.
It's like well documented.

Speaker 1 There's a UN panel of experts report. There's tons of press reporting.
Like there's a base in Chad that the UAE was using.

Speaker 1 Countries have found all kinds of weapons from the UK or from China that we know were sold to the UAE and thus they must have given them to the RSF.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the RSF forces, so the UAE has this relationship with this guy, Hameti, who is the leader of the RSF that dates back a decade because they use RSF guys to fight in Yemen, which is pretty fucking bleak.

Speaker 1 The UAE was trying to build a port, as we discussed last week, in Sudan and trying to build a relationship there to sort of extend their power.

Speaker 1 And they have this strange relationship with Sudan where all the Sudanese gold comes to the UAE. Save these economic interests.

Speaker 1 But my God, I mean, you would think that like... A little bit of naming and shaming like this would go a long way, but so far, they're just, they're still in this denial phase.

Speaker 2 It doesn't seem to matter as much as as it did to name and shame because we're in this kind of post-rules world.

Speaker 2 And yeah, part of the other concerning thing underneath the surface here is like gold is suddenly much more valuable, right?

Speaker 2 Which makes sense at a time when the world looks like it's falling apart, people turn to gold.

Speaker 2 The problem with that is as gold gets more valuable, we see this kind of return to this resource plunder kind of foreign policy from some people. And look, the U.S.
has been one of them in the past.

Speaker 2 And I do worry that in addition to showing what happens when there's no functioning international system, we're kind of seeing the beginnings of what could be some pretty bloody efforts.

Speaker 2 I mean, we've already seen in the DRC

Speaker 2 similar kind of resource wars.

Speaker 2 You know, that has the potential to

Speaker 2 reoccur in some places.

Speaker 1 That's really dark. I mean, so just to give folks a little bit of...
sense of what people are trying to do about it.

Speaker 1 So Chris Van Hollen and Sarah Jacobs, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Congresswoman Jacobs, they introduced a bill to halt U.S. weapons exports to the UAE until they stop supporting the RSF.

Speaker 1 That's not going to go anywhere under Trump, but like good on them. It's the right approach, yeah.
Senator Jim Risch, Republican, wants to designate the RSF a terrorist group.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's the right approach, but it would cause them some real problems.

Speaker 2 And better than like inventing fictional terrorist groups to blow boats out of the water in the Caribbean.

Speaker 1 That's a good point. And also, if Sudan gets partitioned, then basically the RSF controls the West and the Sudanese militia calls the East.
I mean, that could create a new context.

Speaker 1 There were talks that were held by another group called the Quad. It was the U.S., the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 That didn't do much much because, again, a lot of those countries treat Sudan like a proxy

Speaker 1 for their battles. One thing we did want to just highlight quickly, Ben.

Speaker 1 Both of us saw this particularly ghoulish article in the Jewish Insider

Speaker 1 that accused mostly progressives calling out the atrocities by the RSF. It accused them of selective Sudan outrage.

Speaker 1 Again, like,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 it's like so ridiculous. I don't even know where to be in.
Like, so

Speaker 1 the point of the article article is basically like, what about the Sudanese government? Why aren't you calling them out to? They have Muslim Brotherhood kind of influences or something.

Speaker 1 And I just found it so galling because I guarantee you, like, there's no fans of the Sudanese government out there, the Sudanese military.

Speaker 1 But for years, the kind of whataboutism you would always hear from people defending the war in Gaza was that liberals were hypocrites because they're not talking about the atrocities in Sudan.

Speaker 1 And now Jewish Insider is attacking critics of the militia group that's conducting a genocide. And again, like like the RSF is, both sides are bad, but they're particularly evil.

Speaker 1 Like they grew out of the Janjaweed militias that conducted the last genocide.

Speaker 1 And the difference now is instead of being on horseback, they have like brand new military equipment from the UAE that they're using to slaughter people.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And if your whole argument is constantly whataboutism, like that's a tell that you don't really want to defend things on facts.
And look, the paradigm here, it's not subtle.

Speaker 2 It's like for a long time, the whataboutism was, oh, progressives, like, why do you care about Gaza and you don't care about Sudan?

Speaker 2 Which is a way of avoiding the facts of Gaza and to say, well, there are even more people being killed here. Never mind the fact that people cared about Gaza because it was U.S.

Speaker 2 weapons doing the killing. And then now, all of a sudden, people start talking a lot about

Speaker 2 Sudan and they're talking about the RSF. But, you know, the UAE is an Abraham Accords country.
It's like a country that

Speaker 2 has been the most stalwart supporter of Israel in the Arab world. And so now we're going to defend them.
It just,

Speaker 2 you know what? Like

Speaker 2 what the RSF is doing is like grotesque atrocities. It's supported by the UAE.
That's why people are talking about it, you know.

Speaker 2 Frankly, it looked like the conflict in Sudan, as terrible as it had been,

Speaker 2 was nearing an end and the Sudanese military was winning. Again, not because they're all good guys, but like I'd rather the conflict come to an end.

Speaker 2 And frankly, it probably makes sense that the corrupt military of the country is a more legitimate actor than like a rogue militia that that did some like fighting in Yemen.

Speaker 2 So it's not saying they're good. It's just saying that it makes kind of sense that the RSF is not going to be governing Sudan.

Speaker 2 So this kind of this stuff drives me nuts because it just shows you how everything becomes a proxy for some other thing that is about selective outrage and whataboutism.

Speaker 2 And no, it is not wrong to single out the RSF and the UE for scrutiny in this context.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And those who have a problem with that are literally defending the indefensible.
So

Speaker 1 okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 So the other big question kind of out there in the ether right now, Ben, about the Trump administration's foreign policy is whether the United States is about to start testing nuclear weapons again.

Speaker 1 Yes. This started, of course, because of a truth social post.

Speaker 1 So last week, Trump posted the following: quote, because of other countries' testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis.

Speaker 1 That process will begin immediately. Don't tell them that the Department of Energy don't manage the nuclear stock weapons.
Small detail. Details, details.
It's only nukes.

Speaker 1 So So this statement was seemingly in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who last week announced that Russia had tested an underwater nuclear drone that can create a tsunami and take out a coastal city, so he says, as well as a nuclear-powered cruise missile that flew for over 15 hours.

Speaker 1 But critically, both of those cases involve Russia testing the delivery system for a nuclear weapon, not the nuclear weapon itself. It's a nuclear detonation.

Speaker 1 And that distinction is a really big deal because the U.S. hasn't tested a nuclear weapon since 1992.

Speaker 1 In 1996, we signed, along with many other countries, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT. Before that treaty, the world's nuclear powers carried out over 2,000 nuclear tests.

Speaker 1 But since the CTBT, there have only been 10 total nuclear tests, two by India, two by Pakistan, and then six by Trump's buddies over in North Korea.

Speaker 1 So this is a good thing for a lot of reasons to state the obvious. Like militarily, the status quo benefits the United States because the U.S.

Speaker 1 conducted a little over half of the 2,000 nuclear tests, which means we have more data about nuclear detonations than any other country.

Speaker 1 And we can use that information to create computer models to test our nuclear arsenal with computers. The Russians are next with about 700 tests.
China has only done 45 tests.

Speaker 1 So if the world starts testing nukes again, it would really, really, really benefit China, which is in the middle of a massive buildup of its nuclear arsenal.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure would love nothing more than more data to refine those nukes as they go.

Speaker 1 It's also, I mean, again, to state the obvious, was really bad to fill the atmosphere with nuclear radiation all the time.

Speaker 1 But judging then by this exchange Trump had with 60 Minutes as Nora O'Donnell, it's not clear that he understands the distinction or really the issue at all. Let's watch.

Speaker 8 Less than an hour before your meeting with President Xi, you posted on social media that you instructed the, quote, Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons immediately.

Speaker 8 What did you mean?

Speaker 4 Well, we have more nuclear weapons than any other country. I think we should do something about denuclearization.
And I did actually discuss that with both President Putin and President Xi.

Speaker 4 We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 150 times.

Speaker 4 Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons, and China will have a lot. They have some.
They have quite a bit.

Speaker 8 So why do we need to test our nuclear weapons?

Speaker 4 Well, because you have to see how they work. You know, you do have to.
And the reason I'm saying testing is because Russia announced that they were going to be doing a test.

Speaker 4 If you notice, North Korea is testing constantly. Other countries are testing.
We're the only country that doesn't test, and I don't want to be the only country that doesn't test.

Speaker 8 Are you saying that after more than 30 years the United States is going to start detonating nuclear weapons for us?

Speaker 4 I'm saying that we're going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.

Speaker 8 But the only country that's testing nuclear weapons is North Korea.

Speaker 1 China and Russia are not.

Speaker 4 No, no, Russia is testing nuclear weapons.

Speaker 8 My understanding is that.

Speaker 4 And China's testing them too. You just don't know about it.

Speaker 8 That would be certainly very newsworthy.

Speaker 1 My understanding is what Russia did recently was test essentially the uh delivery systems for nuclear weapons essentially missiles which we can do that but what not with nuclear weapons russia's testing and china's testing but they don't talk about it that's wrong uh okay so trump's team kind of scrambled to clean this up the energy secretary and the head of the u.s strategic command both seemed to walk the statements back but you never know with trump ben lot i have lots of thoughts on why this is so dumb but uh please go off

Speaker 1 well

Speaker 2 first of all if there were there were tests of nuclear weapons right like secret tests, we would know about it. Like you can't hide.

Speaker 1 Pretty easy to think about.

Speaker 2 You cannot hide the detonation of a nuclear device. So just in case anybody was wondering, there wasn't some big reveal there about the Chinese.

Speaker 2 We would be able to tell if someone detonated a nuclear device.

Speaker 2 This is completely.

Speaker 1 That's like a collection priority number

Speaker 1 1A. Yeah,

Speaker 2 you can see that kind of thing. There's satellites, right?

Speaker 2 Now, this would be terrible.

Speaker 2 Look, CTBT has been one of the most effective international treaties in the post-World War II era.

Speaker 2 Frankly, we tried to get it ratified in the Senate in the Obama years and didn't go anywhere because Republicans wouldn't ratify the treaty, but we basically act as if we're in line with the treaty.

Speaker 2 But the reason why is like, it doesn't take a genius. Like, if you start breaking again the norm of nuclear testing, A, that's potentially environmentally catastrophic.

Speaker 2 But also, you're just kind of loosening the norms on nukes in ways that then other countries start testing. Believe me, if the U.S.

Speaker 2 starts testing nuclear weapons, the Chinese and Russians will do that. We're back at like peak Cold War.
Other countries that are like nuclear curious

Speaker 2 might start saying

Speaker 2 we got to start testing, or if we don't have nuclear weapons, we have to get them.

Speaker 2 But the thing that really worries me about this, Tommy, is that, look, we've done on this podcast, like World War Watch, it's concerning. There's already a big war in Europe.

Speaker 2 There's been a big war in the Middle East. Now we've got like the fascistic president in this country.

Speaker 2 You look out at this collection of goons in the world, and it's Trump and it's G, and it's Putin and it's Modi and whoever is holding the button on the Pakistani nuclear stockpile.

Speaker 2 And we know we're going to go through some like bumpy times here. We know this.
There's not going to be a soft landing out of this period in history.

Speaker 2 The thing that we can't survive is if this suddenly gets linked up, all this conflict and ego and nationalism and narcissism and old men and toxicity, if all that becomes a nuclear question,

Speaker 2 like we're fucked.

Speaker 2 Like anything else, we can survive an economic collapse.

Speaker 2 The AI like shuts down the power grid or like there's you know creative

Speaker 2 east wing yeah we can even survive the east wing being knocked down we can even survive dick cheney passing away right um but this is just the one thing that needs to stay off limits like i for sure please just keep this one on the other side of the of the lock and key here because you start bringing back nuclear weapons with this current crowd that's running this collection of countries uh and it just you're just suddenly starting to play like much higher stakes yeah and like it's, you can't overstate how much this doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 Just like militarily, like the weapons Putin tested weren't new and they're not game changers in any way.

Speaker 1 Like apparently even Russian researchers are skeptical that this like tsunami underwater drone thing will work.

Speaker 1 And like even if it did, a tsunami drone is not more threatening to our security than a Russian nuclear sub with 16 ballistic missiles that each carry a half a dozen warheads.

Speaker 1 That's a little more of a threat to us. And And this, in the nuclear cruise missile, apparently the U.S.
was testing nuclear cruise missile technology in the 1960s.

Speaker 1 And we were like, ah, you know what? We don't need this because we have ICBMs. And what those do is they go into space and they come back down at mock time.
Really fast.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they're really hard to take out because they have multiple warheads and decoys and shit.

Speaker 1 And so like neither of these weapons changes the strategic calculus of mutually assured destruction that is behind our theory.

Speaker 2 But part of what is concerning about this,

Speaker 2 to take it seriously, is the reason Putin is designing all these new delivery systems is because he has this paranoia about U.S. missile defense, right?

Speaker 2 And so he's tried to figure out these different ways, like underwater missiles and tsunamis and all the rest of it. This is kind of Putin's kind of mad response to U.S.
missile defense.

Speaker 2 By the way, U.S. missile defense is also pretty fucking crazy.

Speaker 1 And kind of bullshit.

Speaker 2 Because it's bullshit. We know it doesn't work anywhere near 100% of the time.
Or like 50%. You and I actually were chatting about House of Dynamite, this new Netflix movie,

Speaker 2 in which the U.S. missile defense misses an incoming nuclear weapon, and they basically say, well, it's 50-50 chance.
And actually, the Department of War put out a statement being like, it is 100%.

Speaker 2 And that's bullshit, right?

Speaker 2 But if people start trying to figure out how to win nuclear wars, right? Whether it's Putin developing new delivery systems or the U.S.

Speaker 2 building a golden dome, member Trump is going to build, like, that scares the shit out of me because mutually assured, as long as there are nuclear weapons, like the only fallback against them being used is mutually assured destruction.

Speaker 1 if these guys start competing and testing things to try to figure out how to like beat the other guys defenses what are you suggesting you're suggesting the nuclear war could be fought and that should be off the table or could be won yeah i mean that's the scary thing right like project 2025 those guys want to go back to kind of like the scariest cold war days when we are trying to win a race to produce the most nukes what is it with these guys it's nuts man and again i was talking about to this to an expert last week because i called around to be like like am i missing something here um nope this person said that a nuclear cruise missile, like the one that the Russians allegedly tested, would be much easier to intercept, again, than an ICBM going Mach 20.

Speaker 1 We have cruise missile defenses.

Speaker 1 In part, because, like you said, like we have this missile defense system that, like, I feel like the success rate was like 60% in the most possible favorable conditions, favorable conditions possible,

Speaker 1 which doesn't like, but again, 50%, 60%, that doesn't do much for you when we're talking about like nuclear annihilation, like 100%.

Speaker 1 So anyway, like, this makes, this is crazy. Revving testing back up would take years.
It would cost billions. People in Nevada would lose their minds because we're not going to be able to do this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're the fucking going to test this.

Speaker 1 This is all nuts. And it's such bad politics.
I just can't believe he, but he's like, he's such an arrogant prick.

Speaker 1 Like he knows he's screwed up, but he's like not willing to back down to Nora O'Donnell there in the face of like incontrovertible facts.

Speaker 2 Well, and he even says things when he tries to sound like the normal rational person, like, you know, it's crazy that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 150 times.

Speaker 2 It somehow seems more unsettling just having him say those words out loud because you know he's the person who literally has the sole authority to launch American nuclear weapons, you know, like it's just all up to this guy, you know.

Speaker 2 I mean, it should make people think about why we don't consider that a little bit more when we vote.

Speaker 2 You know, Trump doesn't seem the kind of character that would have gotten in the Cold War when a nuclear war seemed like it's something that could actually happen.

Speaker 2 Um, so, like, maybe this will sober people up. I mean, look, we've talked about him threatening to invade Nigeria, start nuclear weapons testing.

Speaker 2 Like, this is like at a certain point, his again, his aging and his impulse control, and his sycophantic circle.

Speaker 2 Who is saying no to this guy?

Speaker 2 And that should be, you know, on nuclear weapons testing or going invading Nigeria, like there should be people there, like bring back the Committee to Save America or whatever there was, like, just who will actually say no to this guy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Jim Mattis.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 Normally, Trump's comments on nuclear weapons are referring to it as the other N-word at rallies because that gets a little titter out of people. So that's all cool.

Speaker 1 This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As seasons change and days grow darker sooner, it can be a tough time for many.
I feel this one.

Speaker 1 This November, BetterHelp is encouraging everyone to reach out, check in on friends, reconnect with loved ones, and remind the people in your life that you're there.

Speaker 1 Just as it can take a little courage to send that message or grab coffee with someone you haven't seen in a while, reaching out for therapy can feel difficult too, but it's worth it.

Speaker 1 And it almost always leaves people wondering, why didn't I do this sooner? Hey, Tommy. I'm here.
Thank you so much, John. BetterHelp therapists work according.
Did you get a new job at BetterHelp?

Speaker 1 They work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals.

Speaker 1 A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences in their 12 plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time.

Speaker 1 If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations.

Speaker 1 With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally.

Speaker 1 And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This month, don't wait to reach out.

Speaker 1 Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step.

Speaker 1 Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash crooked world. That's betterhelph-e-l-p.com/slash crooked world.

Speaker 5 Take the next next 30 seconds to invest in yourself with Vanguard.

Speaker 1 Breathe in.

Speaker 5 Center your mind. Recognize the power you have to direct your financial future.
Feel the freedom that comes with reaching your goals and building a life you love.

Speaker 5 Vanguard brings you this meditation because we invest where it matters most in you. Visit vanguard.com/slash investinginyou to learn more.
All investing is subject to risk.

Speaker 1 Okay, so nuclear annihilation, it's a bit heavy. So let's lighten things up for a bit and talk about our buddy Cash Patel.

Speaker 2 One of those yes men.

Speaker 1 One of those yes men, one of our favorite yes men. So, Ben, you guys probably know Ben and I are not the biggest fans of FBI director Cash Patel.

Speaker 1 He is absolutely unequivocally not qualified to do the job. He clearly got the job because he wrote a book that had a literal enemies list.

Speaker 1 And then he's shown that he's willing to go after the people Trump hates.

Speaker 2 And a book where Trump is like a wizard, right? Or something like that. Yeah, there's a wizard book, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a wizard or something. It's the worst.
Anyway, so this week, Cash has been big mad after getting his ass kicked up and down social media.

Speaker 1 So at issue is Cash's use of the FBI's government jet.

Speaker 1 Now, to be fair, Cash Patel, the FBI director, is required by law to use government aircraft when you travel because you have to have access to like secure comms equipment at all times.

Speaker 1 But there is no law requiring that the FBI director fly to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at some low-rent, real American freestyle wrestling event at Penn State, nor does the law require that you give her a ride home to the city of Nashville where you don't actually live, which is what he did.

Speaker 1 It also does not require you to post photos of all this stuff on fucking social media, you stupid goober.

Speaker 1 So the story blew up when a former FBI agent who was turned into this right-wing influencer type tweeted about Cash's trip. But again, it wasn't some state secret.

Speaker 1 Like you can track the FBI director's flight schedule using online tracking services. And again, Cash reposted photos of himself with his girlfriend at the event.

Speaker 1 So you didn't have to be like an FBI agent to figure this out.

Speaker 1 However, that did not stop Cash Patel from flipping out and blaming others for his stupidity. Bloomberg News reported that Patel forced out an official overseeing aviation operations at the FBI.

Speaker 1 And he posted this Bill Ackman-length tweet about it.

Speaker 1 it all declaring that he will not be distracted by quote uninformed internet anarchists what And he pretended that people were going after his girlfriend, not him, and was like trying to act like how beyond the pale that was.

Speaker 1 So this is verbatim, Ben. The disgusting, baseless attacks against Alexis, that's his girlfriend, a true patriot, and the woman I'm proud to call my partner in life are beyond pathetic.

Speaker 1 She is a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in 10 lifetimes.

Speaker 1 I'll never forget in your wedding vows when you were like, Anna's a true patriot.

Speaker 2 10 lifetimes.

Speaker 1 A true patriot.

Speaker 2 Isn't this woman like 26 years old too or something yeah she's very young

Speaker 2 that may be the wrong age no

Speaker 1 i think she's 26 also very important to note here that she is absolutely not a country music sensation

Speaker 1 this clip will explain why

Speaker 1 okay so uh finally Ben, what makes this whole mess just too perfect is this clip from 2023 of Cash Patel offering his thoughts on former FBI director Christopher Wray's use of government planes.

Speaker 1 Let's watch. I'm not saying take all their funding.
I'm not the defund everything guy. I'm just saying Chris Ray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation.
Maybe we ground that plane.

Speaker 1 15,000 every time it takes off.

Speaker 1 Minimum. Maybe we ground that plane, Ben.

Speaker 2 There is a podcast clip for for everything, isn't there, Tommy?

Speaker 1 It's remarkable.

Speaker 2 I mean, look,

Speaker 2 the one thing I'd add is this guy also seems to spend like a tremendous amount of time online. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 He's so tricky. And part of his constant tough guy defense is like, I'm so busy catching bad guys that I don't have time to worry about you fucking trolls.

Speaker 2 But all he's doing is clearly sitting on his fucking phone at the FBI headquarters between private jet rides to see his girlfriend, shitty country singer who's only getting gigs because she's dating the FBI.

Speaker 1 That's bad guys and baddies.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, like if this isn't a grift, I don't know what is. I don't know if you're right.
I mean, this guy's just living a fucking fantasy camp of FBI director. You know,

Speaker 2 he's training and like, you know, Quantico with the agents and posting

Speaker 2 social media pics of him looking like a tough guy. He's like, you know, gonna see his, you know, Charlie Kirk and Balhalla and some weird, the cryptic things.

Speaker 1 That's really under discussed. I'll see you in Balhalla, brother.

Speaker 1 What? What is it?

Speaker 2 We're just living through this act. And guess what? Here's the thing I would say: there are real-life criminals that Cash Patel is not catching.
Like his boss.

Speaker 2 When he's on the private jet ride to like the Penn State wrestling match that he's going to attend, like there's white-collar criminals, there's crypto scammers, there's money launderers, there's international terrorist organizations, there are these narco-traffickers that they're always telling us about.

Speaker 1 Is cash on the case, or is he just dunking on like some Midas touch bot bot that triggered him online you know this is the best part ben it's not it's not like the lefties that are getting him so mad he is getting killed by like infowars I watched this long segment of this dude just going so hard at cash but I we couldn't clip it because he uses the F slur over and over again.

Speaker 1 It's like crazy. But it's like the far right is going nuts on Patel and this, which is why he's getting so mad.
Because look at that podcast clip.

Speaker 2 He pissed on their legs about the Epstein files, about ending corruption at the FBI, about all these things. And like, you know, now

Speaker 2 he's clearly not delivering the goods for those guys.

Speaker 1 No, and by the way, now Cash Patel has made it to the services like FlightAware can no longer track his flight. So he took his G5 and went home.

Speaker 2 G5 went dark, you know.

Speaker 1 I'm sure we'll find you another way, you moron. Yeah,

Speaker 2 because we'll see you at the fucking wrestling match that you flew to.

Speaker 1 Glad you're having a good time, Cash. Enjoy the plane.

Speaker 2 Well, and you can't, I mean, one more thing about this, too, because this is like

Speaker 2 a lot of the snowflakes in the Trump administration are like this. You can't like simultaneously be this like hyper public person.
You know, you're in a position of Senate-confirmed responsibility.

Speaker 2 You're online all the time. You're like showing up at events and then want total privacy.

Speaker 1 And your girlfriend's a MAGA influence. Yeah.
Like, she's not some private, like,

Speaker 1 she's like trying to be a country star. She tweets all day about MAGA shit.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not going after her, but like, don't act like this person is not out there, too. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, she's just trying to take her country country back, Tommy.

Speaker 1 Yep. She wants her country back.
Okay, that was cathartic. Okay, back to some really bleak shit.
So this story comes out of Israel.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, last summer, listeners probably remember this horrific story of the abuse of a Palestinian prisoner at the Siday Timan Military Detention Center that just exploded into the media.

Speaker 1 So the details of the abuse are like truly awful. This guy was brutally clubbed and kicked and beaten for about 15 full minutes.
He was shocked with a taser.

Speaker 1 And his resulting injuries were life-threatening and required surgery, including a severe injury to his rectum after being raped with a foreign object.

Speaker 1 Like, that's what these monsters did to him in the span of 15 minutes.

Speaker 1 And the injuries were so bad that this guy needed to get medical treatment outside of this detention facility, which got it on the radar screen of Israeli military police that they launched an investigation.

Speaker 1 So, after this investigation was launched, five Israeli reservists were charged with assault. And in response to those charges, there was this like massive right-wing backlash and freak out.

Speaker 1 Like, the worst right-wing political leaders were stoking this and protesters even stormed the detention facility, I think two detention facilities to try to like stop the prosecution.

Speaker 1 Right-wing leaders were calling like the IDF lawyers were saying they were on the side of Hamas. You know, it's just sort of like the worst politics.

Speaker 1 So fast forward about a month later, a video of the assault was leaked to Channel 12 News in Israel. And you can see in the video, like this, this detainee gets taken aside.

Speaker 1 He's surrounded by soldiers. They hold up ride shields to block what they're doing from view.

Speaker 1 And then 15 minutes later, they literally drag this man back to the other detainees and he can't even walk. It's like awful.
So fast forward to last week,

Speaker 1 on Friday, the IDF military advocate general, Major General Yifat Tomariel Shalmi, she resigned, taking responsibility for leaking the video.

Speaker 1 And then on Sunday, she was arrested, but only after this like strange period of time where she kind of disappeared on the beach. Do you see all this? Like they found her car on the beach.

Speaker 1 No one could hear from her. There was a weird cryptic note.
And everyone seems to think, like, people thought she might have killed herself.

Speaker 1 At a minimum, she seems to have tossed her cell phone into the ocean. So I'm not sure that's going to work, by the way.
Usually those things are backed up in the video. Yeah, this is a cloud.

Speaker 2 It's such a thing.

Speaker 1 Tough. Anyway, now she's being prosecuted both for leaking the video, but also for lying about it.

Speaker 1 So just stepping back, it's important to note that the reaction to all of this in Israel is primarily anger about the leak itself. Yeah.
Not the underlying activities.

Speaker 1 So the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, accused Tomer Yaril Shalmi of spreading blood libel in Bibi Netanyahu, said the leak, quote, caused enormous reputational damage to Israel, to the IDF, and to our soldiers.

Speaker 1 He didn't say the soldiers' actions caused the damage to the reputation. He said the leak did.

Speaker 1 Katz also said the next person in that role must, quote, not initiate or take part in blood libels that will defame IDF soldiers, harm their honor, and expose them to persecution throughout the world.

Speaker 1 So I guess they just get a pass if they do stuff like this in the future.

Speaker 1 It's also important to note that this detention facility was notorious for detainee abuses, and human rights groups accuse Tomury Olashami of turning a blind eye to those abuses over the course of the war until this one incident finally kind of became public.

Speaker 1 And also, Ben, just like as we're

Speaker 1 talking about cover-ups, the Washington Post reported that the State Department's inspector general said the IDF has committed so many potential violations of U.S.

Speaker 1 human rights law in Gaza that it will take multiple years to review them all, assuming they even try.

Speaker 1 So, just an incredibly dark story about, you know, kind of like the lingering worst abuses of the war in Gaza.

Speaker 2 There's just something deeply sick about a government and society where the crime is leaking the evidence of the criminal activity and not the absolute brutal dehumanization of somebody in your custody.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 we see this pattern time and again, too, that

Speaker 2 there's this effort to kind of obfuscate any examination of facts. You know, it's either we don't like you wonder why there's still no international journalists allowed into Gaza, right?

Speaker 2 How many, how many weeks ago was the quote-unquote ceasefire? And they still won't even let people in just to see the aftermath of the destruction of Gaza.

Speaker 2 This kind of any information leaking out of this prison system gets like brutally suppressed.

Speaker 2 The next thing that happens when people talk about this is they'll probably say, like, what about Sudan?

Speaker 1 You know, anything, right?

Speaker 2 To just get the conversation off of this and it does kind of speak to something that has always been a talking point that drove me insane in the Biden years right I mean Trump doesn't even bother with it anymore but used to hear all the time from the Biden State Department when some horrible thing would happen and would leak out well Israel must do an investigation

Speaker 2 they're not going to investigate misconduct by the IDF in fact they're going to punish the people that reveal the misconduct by the IDF or whistleblowers, right?

Speaker 2 I just don't know how much more evidence people need.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like, I was trying to think about Abu Ghraib and some of the incidents of like detainee abuse or

Speaker 1 abuse of POWs in the U.S. And like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's not, it hasn't been this bad. Like, I don't remember a right-wing faction like storming the courthouse or storming Fort Bragg.

Speaker 1 But clearly, like, I think a lot of militaries, like,

Speaker 1 you know, circle the wagons like this and protect their people at all costs. And it's a real dark stain.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what was bad about ours and Abu Ghraib and some of the the others is that we tend to just kind of punish the low-level guys and actually, in some cases, women in Abu Ghraib, but nobody else up the chain

Speaker 2 has to be responsible for creating the environment. But yeah, this feels like a systemic effort to create a culture of complete impunity for whatever people do in prisons or in warfare.

Speaker 2 And that's a recipe for consistent war crimes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And just so folks know, I mean, this detainee was released back into Gaza without providing testimony.

Speaker 1 And the individual is described by the Times of Israel as basically like a Hamas police officer. He was not like Yahya Sinwar.

Speaker 2 He wasn't like paragliding on October 7th.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which like, again, wouldn't make it okay. Yeah, it wouldn't make it okay.
It sort of like shows you how random and seemingly widespread this violence was.

Speaker 1 And it seems like the military advocate general and a couple of her colleagues are in serious legal jeopardy because not just because they leaked this video, but because as soon as the video was leaked, there were all these calls to do a leak investigation.

Speaker 1 And then her office office was tasked with doing it. So they basically faked a leak investigation and pretended they couldn't find the culprit because it was them.

Speaker 1 And they swear it's some like sworn affidavit. So they lied, they obstructed justice.
Like it's a huge mess and people are going to be in some serious trouble. Wow.

Speaker 2 You should run a tight shop like Pete Hagseth with them.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's right. That's right.
Just signal it out. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do, this is your last chance to get tickets at CrookedCon in D.C.

Speaker 1 There's only about 50 tickets left.

Speaker 1 CrookedCon is the event we're doing where other angry, hopeful, and otherwise exhausted people people can get together and talk about the better future we're all fighting for.

Speaker 1 Our guests include Jen Saki, you know her, Ben Rhodes, Tim Miller, Mark Elias, Governor Andy Bashir, Senator Brian Schatz, a lot of great folks.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to name them all because then they get mad at you. You just can't only listen to them.
Too many great ones. Too many great ones.

Speaker 1 If you can't make it, you can listen in and watch the content after on our YouTube channels and on our podcast feeds and on crookedcon.com.

Speaker 1 We're going to share the foreign policy panel we do on this feed. So enjoy that.
Also,

Speaker 1 follow our socials if you want content throughout the day. Make sure to go to crookedcon.com to get tickets before they sell out for real.

Speaker 1 This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success.

Speaker 1 Squarespace provides all the necessary tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand, and facilitate payments, making it the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes.

Speaker 1 Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place.

Speaker 1 From consultations to events and experiences, showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business.

Speaker 1 With Squarespace's collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business.

Speaker 1 Squarespace makes it easy to showcase your expertise and engage clients with video content on your website.

Speaker 1 upload and organize your videos, create stunning video libraries, and even monetize your content by adding a paywall. perfect for online courses, exclusive tutorials, and premium workshops.

Speaker 1 Squarespace domains make it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair, all-inclusive price, no hidden fees or add-ons required.

Speaker 1 Head to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/slash world to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Speaker 1 That's squarespace.com/slash/world.

Speaker 9 At Eiseneramper, we are creative problem solvers that take a 360-degree approach focusing on you. We're an award-winning firm with decades of experience providing accounting and advisory services.

Speaker 1 Eisner Amper, let's get you ready.

Speaker 1 Okay, so two quick updates on elections abroad that might provide you guys with some hope, some rare good news for fans of democracy and progressive politics.

Speaker 1 So let's start in Ireland, where Catherine Connolly just won a landslide election to become Ireland's next president.

Speaker 1 This is a a largely ceremonial role, but she does have to sign every bill before it becomes a law or refer to the Supreme Court to assess its constitutionality. So there is some power there.

Speaker 1 It was also a weird election. One of the top candidates decided not to run for health reasons.
Another pulled out like 19 days before the election itself because of a corruption scandal.

Speaker 1 But the result was a clear FU to the establishment. And Connolly's unabashedly lefty views on issues like Gaza have drawn comparisons to Bernie Sanders.
And then over in the Netherlands.

Speaker 2 Oh, don't forget our buddy Conor McGregor, McGregor, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 1 he thought about running for a while, but he pulled out, right? He pulled out, yeah, yeah. What an idiot.
Why do you want to run for president?

Speaker 1 Be the Taoiseach, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Or clean up that cocaine problem. Okay, and then in the Netherlands, there was a 38-year-old centrist named Rob Yetten, who was part of the D6X party.

Speaker 1 He beat out a far-right-wing populist named Hirt Wilders and his party for freedom. This was a very, very close race.
It was basically decided by people, Dutch folks living abroad.

Speaker 1 But Dutch political analysts say that Yetin's optimistic, forward-looking message ultimately was more appealing to voters than Wilder's nativism and racism and Islamophobia.

Speaker 1 And he is on track to be the youngest and first openly gay prime minister in Dutch history.

Speaker 1 The government formation process is a total mess because there's like a million parties and it'll take them a while to sort it all out.

Speaker 1 But hopefully this race can help others figure out a path to defeat these far-right, right-wing populists. Ben, any big takeaways from these races from you?

Speaker 2 I think the Ireland one is interesting only insofar as like Ireland, despite despite its relatively small size, has kind of begun, I mean, you saw this most acutely on Gaza, but

Speaker 2 they've become a bit more of a spotlighted country speaking out on other things around the world.

Speaker 2 And they have this kind of weird credibility as like a European country that was colonized for hundreds of years and as people that are just pretty fucking awesome, if you know Irish people, and as people that are, you know, a little neutral, like they're like that big NATO, you know, country.

Speaker 2 So that's interesting. Is it Ireland continues to be this kind of voice for the underdog in geopolitics, and she'll do that? I think the Netherlands thing is really hopeful.

Speaker 2 Like, Geert Wilders has kind of been driving the train of Dutch politics recently.

Speaker 1 Informed his party in 2006, the Party for Freedom. He's been around forever.

Speaker 2 He's been around forever, and he kind of broke through, like Frearage is breaking through in the UK now in the last election. And

Speaker 2 it does kind of feel like something is stirring out there a bit with like younger, more unabashed parties that are less afraid of taking on the far right. They're not tentative.

Speaker 2 They're not like the Democrats in this country, like checking 900 focus groups before they

Speaker 2 go on a podcast.

Speaker 2 I mean, hopefully, when we record, you know, we're recording this on Tuesday. Hopefully, tomorrow morning, like, we'll have had Zoran Mamdani win here.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we obviously want to win the governor's races in

Speaker 2 New Jersey and Virginia. But it does kind of feel like,

Speaker 2 you know, maybe, I mean, the Dutch thing is a little too early to tell here, but like, is the far-right the establishment now? And is there, I keep wondering, is there a younger,

Speaker 2 like if parties, if these center-left parties and left parties can just get fucking younger and less afraid of themselves, can we run? With less baggage. Yeah, with less baggage.

Speaker 2 Can we just run as like authentic people who are outsiders and fighting against the far-right establishment?

Speaker 2 That is the message hopefully you could take away from all three elections, Ireland, the Netherlands, and assuming it goes well,

Speaker 2 the Mamdani one in particular.

Speaker 1 If Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in the UK can take on like 13 years' worth of baggage in like a year or 10 months,

Speaker 1 certainly some of these far-right parties can own some of the events happening around the world.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And the fact that you don't really have solutions.

Speaker 2 That guy, Geert Wilders, has just been blaming immigrants for everything for 20 years.

Speaker 2 He's no new ideas.

Speaker 1 And that was kind of the message against him. Like, look, we could talk about actually fixing the economy or you can blame Muslim people.
Like, what's going to work?

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, Unfortunately, though, Ben, we do still have a right-wing populist in charge of our country. Shit.

Speaker 1 Along those lines, Trump has announced that he has decided to limit the number of refugees that will be admitted to the U.S.

Speaker 1 over the next year to 7,500 people, only 7,500 people, and that white South Africans known as Afrikaners who are French and Dutch descendants are going to get priority.

Speaker 1 7,500 is the lowest allotment of refugees in our nation's history. It's literally half of what Trump took in or the limit Trump set in the first term.
Biden set his target at 125,000 refugees.

Speaker 1 Of course, Trump also ignored a law that required him to consult with Congress on these matters. I'm sure Speaker Johnson is drafting a very harsh letter as we speak.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, it's just like the policy is just, it's so overtly racist and despicable. It's not surprising.

Speaker 1 You know, Trump paused refugee admissions back in January, so all these people are in limbo in the vetting process.

Speaker 1 He's been pushing to get white South Africans to come to the United States for a long time ever since he saw some Tucker Carlson

Speaker 1 segment on white genocide of South African farmers in like 2019.

Speaker 1 But it is still disgusting. And just, it also, it's kind of like,

Speaker 1 it really jumps out to me that there is not more outrage or clear condemnation of what is just like unequivocally a racist policy.

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's useful in that it just reminds you of how at core, if you peel back all the layers of Trumpism, there is just like a core of racism that is fundamental to the whole project.

Speaker 2 It's baked in, it's not secondary, right?

Speaker 2 This is the berther president. This is like the Stephen Miller boss, right?

Speaker 2 Like this is actually their worldview manifested and saying we're not going to take anybody but white South Africans, literally the people who did apartheid and we're worried about them out of everybody in the world.

Speaker 2 The other thing that bothers me about this is it's a moral abomination to slam the door on refugees. It's also going to make it harder.

Speaker 2 It's going to incentivize other countries to stop taking refugees. It's going to leave all these people in this limbo.

Speaker 2 It's going to kind of break the international system that requires countries to take refugees in. I know that like you can look at polls and refugees, support for refugees, polls, like low.

Speaker 2 But in part, it's because nobody's been willing to defend these programs for like 10 years. Because actually, if you also look at polls, people tend to like the refugees in their communities.

Speaker 2 There are these hugely successful groups. The Vietnamese here in California California are a good example of people that have built extraordinary communities in this country who are refugees.

Speaker 2 But also importantly, Tommy, if your concern is, and this is an argument I've not heard people make, if your concern about immigration or the border, right, is this kind of sense it's out of control.

Speaker 2 Like there are all these people, tens of thousands of people are crossing the border. We didn't know who they were.
We didn't know where they were going.

Speaker 2 There is actually no more orderly process for admitting people in the United States than the refugees.

Speaker 1 Like they're vetting associates.

Speaker 2 They are vetted like crazy. They have to wait in line, like talk about coming through the front door, like you're applying for these slots.

Speaker 2 And so actually, if we ever could get back to a discussion about an actual legal immigration system that worked, that had a very secure border, that did not just let people to cross the border with no process,

Speaker 2 a key part of that, actually, I think...

Speaker 2 should be like a big refugee program because that's how you could get like an orderly process to admit a certain number of people who've been vetted and all the rest of it.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of a dumb thing to take aim at like the most rigorous part of the immigration system.

Speaker 1 It's just

Speaker 2 I know that's not what they just don't want any black and brown people here and they want more white people here. So I'm not expecting them to do this, but someday I hope we can get back to that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it would be nice. And you're right.
You got to make a case. Okay, Ben, our final story allows us to say one last fuck you to the worst Duke since David, Prince Andrew.

Speaker 1 Last week,

Speaker 1 the palace announced that it has, quote, initiated a formal process to remove the style titles and honors of Prince Andrew, a punishment the New York Times calls unheard of in the annals of our buddy Mark Land.

Speaker 2 I really enjoyed writing this one.

Speaker 1 He sure did.

Speaker 1 Great reporter. A couple weeks ago, we talked about how Prince Andrew was giving up his Duke of York title, but King Charles went even further, and now Andrew will be losing his prince title to.

Speaker 1 I didn't even know that was possible. I thought if you were like the son of a queen here, whatever.
He will now be known as only Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Speaker 1 Maybe he can do like a cool thing, like the former prince, you know, the other one, the symbol.

Speaker 1 And Andrew will also get the boot from the Royal Lodge, the 30-room mansion he's been crashing in with his ex-wife.

Speaker 1 He will now have to slum it at Sandringham Estate, a 20,000-acre property north of London owned by the royal family.

Speaker 1 So the controversy is mostly about Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced pedophile and New York financier who once said he was Donald Trump's closest friend.

Speaker 1 One of Epstein's victims, a woman named Virginia Juffrey, published a memoir recently that includes details about being trafficked to Prince Andrew.

Speaker 1 Disgustingly, she writes that Andrew told her that his daughters were, quote, just a little younger than you on the evening of their first sexual encounter. She was 17.

Speaker 1 Andrew has previously said he has no recollection of meeting Jufre, but he settled a lawsuit with her that included like a $10 million payout. So, like, good luck squaring that circle.

Speaker 1 Andrew's demise, it really started in 2019 when he did an interview with the BBC about all this that was an unmitigated disaster.

Speaker 1 A guy named Charlie Proctor, the editor of the Royal Central website, like one of the Royal Watcher journalists, described it on Twitter as, quote, a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion, level bad.

Speaker 1 It's a pretty bad interview. It's a pretty bad interview.
We did the prep for that one. I don't know.
Andrew also lied about when he cut ties,

Speaker 1 the magic of Andrew. Andrew also lied when he, that's a joke just for you and like two people, when he cut ties with Epstein.

Speaker 1 So like Prince Andrew said, he'd cut ties with Epstein. Then all these emails came out that showed him emailing with Epstein like a year later.
So he's just full of shit.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, my favorite part of the coverage of all this is that the stories seem to note that Andrew will no longer be attending royal family Christmas celebrations.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's like a special, specific thing.

Speaker 2 Massive dunk on the guy.

Speaker 1 But I don't know. Like you were saying, like, this is the definition, I think, of

Speaker 1 too little, too late. I guess better late than never.

Speaker 2 No, it's better late than never. I mean, look,

Speaker 2 I read these world watcher that I am. I like dissected the coverage of this, including I was reading like the British press, and a few things jumped out to me.

Speaker 2 Like, number one, the palace was all over these stories. So, like, details like this, like, he's not even going to be invited to the fucking fucking Christmas party.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, you could just tell that, like, King Charles authorized, like, a shivving of his brother. He was dumb.
Like, like, it was scorched earth in the media.

Speaker 2 Like, every detail of every single thing that's being taken away from this guy was stressed.

Speaker 1 Because apparently, the queen liked Andrew, right? Like, he was referred to as like her favorite story.

Speaker 2 You got a sense that after the queen died, like, the gloves came off a little bit.

Speaker 2 It's just been, you know, one battle after another for Andrew since then.

Speaker 2 So, that was good. The other thing is, like, to your point, actually, I was reading about this, usually you would take an act of parliament to remove the prince title.

Speaker 2 King Charles, man, not one for norms. We got another norm buster over here.
But he's kind of flexing his muscles here a little bit.

Speaker 1 So that confused me because like when we talked about this last week, we repeated that line because it was reported that it would take an act of parliament. Did he just say, no, it's not?

Speaker 2 I'm the king?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I read the spin, and it was basically like, I didn't want the parliament to waste a minute on this motherfucker. Oh, that was basically the line.
Solid. So I'm just doing this.

Speaker 2 I'm just just pulling the plug.

Speaker 2 So that struck me too. It also struck me that, like, the core unit that remains, right, of Charles and William, that's basically it.
And you could add like Kate to that.

Speaker 2 Camilla is like a little questionable, right? These people have been through some crazy shit. They had like Diana and the divorce and Charles with the tampon and all that.

Speaker 2 Then Diana's death and the aftermath of that and how badly that was handled.

Speaker 2 Then Harry like flying the coop, you know, like then the the crazy book from harry about like fist fights with his brother in despair like this this this these two

Speaker 2 charles and william must get in a room and be like we are like literally the last piece of this institution that and and you know i'm not saying they're emerging clean from all this i'm just saying that like this has been a lot of shit you know yeah and they just decide to unload on andrew well they did but rightly so and i will say this in their defense like Heyude Barack, also in that book, like I don't see a lot of defrocking of that.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, absolutely.

Speaker 2 That's great.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump buddies with Epstein. He's sitting pretty in the White House.
So I'll say one thing for the Brits. Like, they're taking out the trash with Epstein.
Remember they.

Speaker 1 And they fired Peter Minton. Peter Mandelson?

Speaker 2 They fired Peter Mandelson. Who weirdly emailed Epstein that he would never be treated like this in the UK? Well, maybe Peter Mandelson was wrong because

Speaker 2 they're dealing with their Epstein mess.

Speaker 1 God, it's good. Get him out of there.
What a dickhead. What do you think?

Speaker 2 What does he do alone in the whatever the rooms he's in now?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Kind of weird.
There's big questions about what he does for money too.

Speaker 1 He's unemployable.

Speaker 2 Because I remember Fergie from when I was a kid, his ex-wife, but like it's kind of weird that he was shacking up with his ex-wife in the city.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess he's got a 30-room house. You can divide that pretty easily.

Speaker 2 She got the boot, too. They made it clear in the spin that she's not getting anything.
No allowance from the king or nothing.

Speaker 1 No corgis. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I read that Andrew has leeched about 14 million public dollars over the past four decades. So pretty good game if you can get it.
I guess I don't know what he'll do now.

Speaker 1 Again, I said this was mostly about Epstein because I think it is, but also it recently came out that Prince Andrew had been meeting with this Chinese spy, basically,

Speaker 1 affiliated with the Chinese government and sort of compromised the family that way. So he's just a disaster.
Like, I can only imagine what this dude does behind closed doors.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he'll just have to summer with Alan Derschwitz and Martha Vineyard and get into fights with

Speaker 2 the Epstein alumni

Speaker 2 reunions.

Speaker 1 Epstein alum reunion. That's so funny.
Maybe we could do it on the island. Yeah.
And we could just kind of lock them there after they're done.

Speaker 2 Happy space.

Speaker 1 It's like you guys live here now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I met Princess Beatrice, which was a very, very, very nice person.

Speaker 1 Which one is she?

Speaker 2 The daughter of Andrew. And you know, so I feel bad for like the two, but they're still royals.

Speaker 1 They get to keep their titles.

Speaker 1 Yeah, good luck with that, dad. Okay, we are going to take a quick break.
When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with former Prime Minister Sonomarin. So stick around for that.

Speaker 1 Potse of the World is brought to you by American Giant. Talk about a piece of clothing you wore into the ground.

Speaker 1 I had a New England Patriots kind of throwback logo t-shirt that I think I bought when I was in LA for Ben Rhodes' wedding

Speaker 1 20 years ago. Like

Speaker 1 legitimate. We're coming up on it.

Speaker 1 I threw it out two days ago. Actually, no, I didn't even throw it out.
I gave it to Hannah because she was like, I'll wear that.

Speaker 1 You've had that a long time. It's super comfy.
And, you know, when you love a piece of clothing and when it's durable, it means something.

Speaker 1 American Giants' clothes work harder and are wearable for years to come, ensuring you get layers you can count on for seasons to come.

Speaker 1 Their greatest hoodie ever made is made of the highest quality materials that are cut and sewn right here in the United States. So you're investing right back into your local supply chain.

Speaker 1 As the seasons shift and get cooler, stock your closet with durable layers that are built to last from American Giant. I love my American Giant stuff.
I have have sweatpants, a sweatshirt.

Speaker 1 I got a ton of stuff. I lost count.
How's your American Giant gear these days? I have a good sweatshirt and I could use some more of their t-shirts though. They got some good t-shirts.

Speaker 1 Lix has reminded me to go check it out.

Speaker 1 They have a wide range of looks from the greatest hoodie ever made to everyday pieces designed for everyday life, from fleece to knit in all seasonal colors for versatile daily wear.

Speaker 1 Their men's crew neck is made in Los Angeles and easy to layer on top of tees or under a heavy coat.

Speaker 1 Choosing American Giant means taking a stand for hardworking people, local communities, and quality clothes.

Speaker 1 Through American ingenuity and innovation, they're going against the current and doing better. They believe small changes add up to something big, a new kind of conscious buying.

Speaker 1 Get 20% off your first order when you use the promo code WORLD at American-Giant.com. That's 20% off when you use the promo code WORLD at American-Giant.com.

Speaker 9 At Eisner Amper, we are creative problem solvers that take a 360-degree approach focusing on you. We're an award-winning firm with decades of experience providing accounting and advisory services.

Speaker 1 Eisner Emperor let's get you ready.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'm very pleased to welcome Sana Marin to the show. She served as Prime Minister of Finland from 2019 to 2023.
So COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

Speaker 2 Finland joining NATO, like lots of things happened, lots of things to talk about. And her new book is entitled Hope in Action, a memoir about the courage to lead.
It is out this week.

Speaker 2 I encourage everybody to pick it up. It's an extraordinary story about an extraordinary time.
Prime Minister, welcome to the show.

Speaker 6 Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
So

Speaker 2 I want to get into all the geopolitics

Speaker 2 with Russia, with

Speaker 2 the democracy versus authoritarianism issues that you dealt with.

Speaker 2 But I have to say, one of the reasons why people should read the book is it's also just an incredible window into what it's like for a person at a relatively young age.

Speaker 2 You were 34 years old when you became prime minister, to go through the kind of strangeness of

Speaker 2 ascending to the heights of politics, to be dealing with double standards that women leaders have to face. And

Speaker 2 I wanted to start by asking you about this line that really jumped out to me.

Speaker 2 Our political systems struggle to acknowledge that politicians are also human.

Speaker 2 And you obviously had, and listeners to the show, remember

Speaker 2 we followed the story about you dancing.

Speaker 2 But what I was struck by in reading this is

Speaker 2 you were clearly balancing wanting to still be human,

Speaker 2 be a mom, be a friend,

Speaker 2 with the responsibilities of politics. And I guess the question I wanted to ask you to start is just, do you feel like that's getting harder

Speaker 2 because of either social media, because of polarization?

Speaker 2 How concerned are you that maybe normal people might not want to go into politics because it looks so strange from the outside in?

Speaker 6 Well, first of all, I have to say that politicians are just human beings. They are people.

Speaker 6 And I have had the privilege to work with a lot of politicians, of course, in the European Council, with my colleagues in Europe, but also otherwise.

Speaker 6 And when I have worked with these people, I can say that they are just generally normal human beings. but we are not viewed, politicians did this way.

Speaker 6 And of course, social media platforms and also the news cycle that is always spitting up and chasing for polarizing stories because they sell more and negative news actually sells better than positive news.

Speaker 6 This all comes to the situation where politicians are quite scrutinized, they're constantly watched, people have cameras with their phones everywhere, so of course politicians are under a lot of pressure and especially the younger generation and women and people from minority groups that are scrutinized otherwise as well are acknowledging this fact and they are wondering that is this a platform where they can run, where they can participate, where they can actually take action.

Speaker 6 And that's real pity because we need people from all genders, different backgrounds, different age groups to participate in our democratic systems or otherwise our democracies will fall and collapse.

Speaker 6 So of course I worry about the fact that we are not always witnessing politicians as humans with all of their sides.

Speaker 6 I think we should more welcome people to join and participate and not drive them away with these unrealistic expectations or perspectives.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I want to ask one more question about this because I actually work with

Speaker 2 the Obama Foundation has networks of young people, many of whom are in politics. And

Speaker 2 in Europe in particular, one of the things I've noticed,

Speaker 2 and I've talked to, we talked to Jacinda Ardern about this,

Speaker 2 but that young women in politics in particular have to deal with a lot of stuff online.

Speaker 2 And some of it can be kind of scary, right?

Speaker 2 Do you think that there are ways to provide kind of support?

Speaker 2 Are there extra steps that can be taken to just kind of ease that burden on people?

Speaker 2 Or do you have tips for people about how to manage what it's like

Speaker 2 if you're starting out, you're getting elected to parliament, you're getting elected to city government, and this is all new to you?

Speaker 2 What would you say, particularly to a young female politician, about how to deal with

Speaker 2 the strangeness of these times?

Speaker 6 Well, even though I'm quite young and I became the prime minister with only 34 years old, so I was young then and I'm still relatively young compared to many politicians, but still when I started in politics 20 years ago, when I was 20, I didn't have to deal with the social media that young people have to deal with today or everybody has to deal with today.

Speaker 6 So even though it was never easy, I think it was much more easier earlier when we didn't have to face that hostile and violent environment where people have to live nowadays.

Speaker 6 And especially, as I said before, young people, women, people from different minority groups, different ethnic groups, they have to face a lot of hostility coming to their homes from different platforms.

Speaker 6 And this is scary.

Speaker 6 And I think how we should deal with this is not actually putting this on the burden of individuals, but actually we should look at this as a societal problem and a societal issue and acknowledge this as a violence against people, like any kind of violence is.

Speaker 6 So we need legislation changes, we need protective measures, social media platforms should take more action to combat these phenomenons and we shouldn't let people to deal with this alone because it is too much burden for any individual to deal with this kind of hostility that is out there and of course me and also the other leaders that were in our government.

Speaker 6 We were a coalition government led by five parties, actually

Speaker 6 five women, four of us were under 40 years old, so we know exactly how it is to meet that kind of hate speech and usually also very sexualized hate speech and violence that is usually targeted against women.

Speaker 6 So of course it is scary for individuals. It is

Speaker 6 an environment where where nobody feels protected and safe if we don't take that responsibility as communities, as societies, as a group, and not put this on the burden of individuals.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I just think it's so important because you want people to go into politics. And if people, if there's a barrier to entry, we're just not going to have as good people in it.

Speaker 2 Moving us

Speaker 2 into

Speaker 2 some of the geopolitics a little bit, but I wanted to ask kind of one more question about this. Because

Speaker 2 I was struck in reading your, you know, you have this kind of extraordinary story of dealing with the Russian invasion in particular.

Speaker 2 And then you have this chapter on all these kind of fake scandals.

Speaker 2 It reminded me of when I was working for Barack Obama in the White House, and I think he got scrutiny, obviously he's a man, but as a black man, he got extra scrutiny.

Speaker 2 And so there's a famous scandal where he wore a tan suit.

Speaker 2 And what people...

Speaker 6 I remember that actually. And I was always wondering, what on earth is this scandal about tan suit? I just didn't get it.
As a Finnish citizen, I didn't know what it was about.

Speaker 2 Well, as an American citizen, I don't get it, but I don't get a lot of things about our politics. But what I remembered about that day is we were dealing with the height of the ISIS crisis, right?

Speaker 2 And I remember the strangeness of he simultaneously dealing with the rise of ISIS and the need to put together this global coalition against ISIS and responding to this Tan Suit scandal.

Speaker 2 And in your book, this comes across, like you were, I think you were at the Munich Security Conference, right, when that story broke. what was it like just juggling?

Speaker 2 Like, on the one hand, you have this incredibly weighty issues that you're dealing with that are like existential for Finland, and on the other hand, you're dealing with this kind of nonsense.

Speaker 2 I mean, how was that experience of juggling? Because you write about it well in the book, but I, for people who are trying to bring to the book, tell us a little bit about what that was like.

Speaker 6 Well, of course, every politician that works on a high level meets some kind of scandals or some kind of media scrutiny.

Speaker 6 It varies on the person, but I also wanted to include these scandals of mine to the book to show

Speaker 6 people what kind of scandals I personally have to deal with and what those scandals might

Speaker 6 tell us about our societies. So I put it in one chapter and my scandals has

Speaker 6 maybe interesting tone to it because it's not actually

Speaker 6 political scandals, nothing to do with corruption, nothing to do with misuse of power or public money or anything such sorts.

Speaker 6 My scandals are named the Blazer scandal where I showed too much skin on a cover shoot. Here nothing actually showed but that was one scandal.

Speaker 6 Then there was the breakfast scandal and a phone scandal where I didn't have two work phones with me on a night out but actually only one the one that I usually used.

Speaker 6 And then there was the famous dancing scandal. So all of my scandals are in a context of moral side or

Speaker 6 watching me. Am I

Speaker 6 performing correctly as a person?

Speaker 6 And I think that those scandals

Speaker 6 also tell something about our societies and how we treat women.

Speaker 6 And I think the reason why so many related and wanted to support is actually that many women are viewed in their everyday lives similarly.

Speaker 6 And we are not viewing and watching women that they are full persons, that they have the right and that they are entitled to have 100% of their lives.

Speaker 6 At the same time, they can be leaders and professionals and very powerful and very tough.

Speaker 6 And at the same time, they can also be mothers and daughters and friends to their friends and to their closed ones. And they can have that funny, quirky side at their free time.

Speaker 6 And still, they can be extremely professional and good at their jobs. And I think that it is important to understand that this is a structural issue.

Speaker 6 And one example is that I don't think that ever any man has been asked, how can you lead your company or country or whatever when you have a small child at home?

Speaker 6 Or how can you be at work today to be professional when just yesterday you went to a football game, drank a beer with your friends? How is that possible? How does that work? But women are

Speaker 6 met in these circumstances many times and they are viewed, I think, very narrowly.

Speaker 6 And I think it's also important to say to women out there that you're entitled, you have the right to be fully yourselves and you can be many things at the same time. And that doesn't

Speaker 6 lower your value at all as individuals and as professionals.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, look, you clearly did manage the job part very well. I want to ask about Russia.

Speaker 2 One of the things I thought was really interesting is you kind of bring in the unique history that Finland has had with Russia.

Speaker 2 You obviously have the longest land border with Russia of any NATO country now.

Speaker 2 And you also had this experience in the Cold War of kind of being

Speaker 2 in a different category where you had to kind of almost self-censor about the Soviet Union. And you write about how all that informed your decision to bring Finland into NATO.

Speaker 2 And I just want to ask you a bit about what was your reaction to the Russian invasion and how did Finland's unique history and its long border kind of inform that decision to pull your country out of neutrality and into NATO membership?

Speaker 6 Well, we had a long

Speaker 6 history and policy to be military non-aligned. And there were, of course, historical reasons behind this.
But actually, the same reasons were also behind our decision of joining NATO.

Speaker 6 The most important thing for Finnish citizens has been always

Speaker 6 to stay independent,

Speaker 6 stay secure and safe as a country, to have the right to decide by ourselves.

Speaker 6 And up till that point when Russia attacked Ukraine with full-scale invasion 2023, the war started already 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea, but in 2022

Speaker 6 when Russia went to Ukraine with full force, the reason and the logic behind Finland joining NATO and applying NATO membership then was the exact same.

Speaker 6 We saw that not only in the history books, but actually today, we have that kind of aggressive neighbor that starts full-scale invasion of war in Europe today.

Speaker 6 So we were seeking security, we were seeking to be more safe. And at that moment it became real that only way to secure ourselves were to apply NATO membership.

Speaker 6 But the logic and reasoning was exactly the same behind that, to make sure that Finland and Finnish citizens are safe. And that was the way to handle that at that point.

Speaker 2 And I want to ask a couple more questions about this because it's obviously been such a strange couple of years with the transition here to President Trump.

Speaker 2 But I want to ask first about President Zelensky. I think you write pretty powerfully about going there relatively early in the war,

Speaker 2 you know, shortly after the Bucha massacre, meeting with President Zelensky, kind of sensing the weight that was on his shoulders.

Speaker 2 You're younger,

Speaker 2 so is he,

Speaker 2 you're a neighbor, and I've always felt like he had particularly close relationships with you know, the Baltic countries, Finland, countries that similarly knew what it was like to be, you know, sharing a border with Russia.

Speaker 2 What did you learn about President Zelensky as a leader? And how do you

Speaker 2 it seems like the burden on him has only gotten higher right as he's had to manage Donald Trump you know dressing him down in the Oval Office

Speaker 2 you know manage these questions of peace negotiations and trying to get US support

Speaker 6 how do you explain to people the kind of as someone who's sat with him what's the weight on his shoulders and and what what how do you how would you describe for people how he's managed that well I would only say that President Zelensky is extremely tough and talented leader that has gone gone through so much like his whole nation has first COVID-19 that everybody met and that was a big global crisis that we had to deal with and face.

Speaker 6 And just as after that, when things were going easier, the full-scale invasion towards Ukraine. that was a burden for any leader and he has handled it, I think, very, very talented.

Speaker 6 And Ukraine is still in this situation.

Speaker 6 And Finland, like Nordic countries, Baltic countries, Poland, countries with that closeness to the Russian border can really feel their pain and that's why we have shown support like the rest of Europe and like US has but we can really

Speaker 6 feel the pain of the people because we also have and shared that kind of history.

Speaker 6 Finnish citizens they have the collective memory of our wars with Soviet Union and the pain and the hardship of lost lives, land.

Speaker 6 We had to accommodate huge amounts of Finnish citizens after the wars because we lost so much land.

Speaker 6 And then we had the very difficult history also with Russia when we always had to watch what our aggressive eastern neighbor is doing, how it might affect us.

Speaker 6 So we know exactly how hard the situation is. And now we have to show true solidarity to Ukraine because that is the only way also to keep the whole of Europe safe.

Speaker 6 Ukraine is the only country in Europe has

Speaker 6 experience of the modern warfare and there's so much we need to learn from Ukraine because Russia will be there, it will stay there and it will have that kind of aggressive

Speaker 6 attitude against Europe also in the future.

Speaker 6 So we have to learn from this war and the only way to learn is to look what Ukraine has endured and how they have coped and they have really shown so much skill like President Zelensky personally has also

Speaker 6 during this war, that unfortunately still lasts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you've been pretty outspoken about the need to provide more support.

Speaker 2 And, you know, recently we saw some additional sanctions on Russian oil companies,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 we still have not seen the provision of additional advanced weapons to Ukraine.

Speaker 2 You know, there was this question about whether to provide longer-range rockets that the U.S. has still not done.

Speaker 2 You've also said in your book that the Europeans must strengthen their military forces and capabilities quickly now, especially given that the U.S. is taking a bit of a step back.

Speaker 2 I mean, what more would you like to see now in terms of support for Ukraine? And are there times when you were in office even when you felt like the U.S. could have been doing more?

Speaker 2 What's been missing in terms of the support that the Ukrainians need?

Speaker 6 Well, I think that we all could have done more and we should have done more.

Speaker 6 The little we get and the slower we give it to Ukraine, the little we give and the slower that we are giving it to Ukraine, the longer this war will continue.

Speaker 6 So of course we all should do more and we could do more. If we look at the percentage,

Speaker 6 how little actually European countries and countries in general are using money to support Ukraine, the amount isn't something that is huge. We could do so much more.

Speaker 6 And what Ukraine needs now, they need

Speaker 6 decisive decisions on the financial,

Speaker 6 supporting their financial situation, especially using the frozen assets of Russia to support Ukraine. And there are ways.

Speaker 6 And I'm really sad that the European Council couldn't do the decision in its last meeting. I only hope that they will reach this decision in their December's meeting.

Speaker 6 So using the frozen assets in a way that Ukraine could lend money to use that as a collateral.

Speaker 6 That would be one concrete example how to support Ukraine financially, because they need money to continue in their defending themselves. They need military equipment and they need it fast.

Speaker 6 And also there, of course, we as Europe could do more, but also US, because US is the greatest military force that we have in the globe. So of course we need US US to help.

Speaker 6 And then, the sanctions. We need more heavier sanctions, and we need to make sure that the sanctions cannot be circled.

Speaker 6 Because there is a big problem also with the circulation of the sanctions, and this isn't any new news.

Speaker 6 We have known this for a long time, but now it is time to take real action and not only discuss about these problems that we have witnessed for a long time.

Speaker 6 So, of course, there are so many things that we could do,

Speaker 6 and also Europe needs to face the fact that we cannot rely that the US will always come to our aid. We have to be able to take care of ourselves and keep European citizens safe.

Speaker 6 And I think that if there is something that I truly

Speaker 6 also agree with the current administration and the message that has been sent to Europe is that Europe needs to take care of itself. We need to boost our military capabilities.

Speaker 6 We need to make sure that we can defend ourselves and that we can also this way be better partners in NATO. So we have to also take responsibility.

Speaker 6 Finland has always taken responsibility in its own security and when others didn't always invest in their

Speaker 6 defense systems, Finland did and we maintained our military capabilities,

Speaker 6 making sure that there is still mandatory military service.

Speaker 6 We invested heavily throughout the decades with our own capabilities because we knew what kind of neighbor we have and we couldn't rely that somebody else will take care of our problems.

Speaker 6 We have to take care of our own problems when we meet them and of course work together with others and that's why we joined NATO.

Speaker 6 We wanted to make sure that we are not alone and we can also support others because we as democratic countries are on the right side and on the same side.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and

Speaker 2 another thing I want to ask you about is obviously the conflict with Russia in its own way is part of this larger conflict about the direction of politics.

Speaker 2 I would kind of count Russia as a far-right nationalist system, albeit a unique one, because it's very expansionist.

Speaker 2 You were governing as a social democrat at a time when

Speaker 2 you're also engaging far-right leaders. You had to deal with Viktor Orban.

Speaker 2 And we see across Europe and France and Germany, but also in Finland, you write about not going into a coalition with a far-right party there.

Speaker 2 It feels like everybody's aware of this danger from the rise rise of far-right politics.

Speaker 2 In Europe, it presents unique challenges too, because it makes it harder for Europeans to act collectively if there are these far-right parties that want to kind of spoil things in Brussels.

Speaker 2 What's your advice, essentially, about what social democrats can do to both better prevail against far-right parties inside their countries, but also kind of beat back this global tide of far-right politics?

Speaker 6 Well, I see that there's actually two wars going on in the world, if we would want to use this kind of wording.

Speaker 6 There is the challenging of the rules-based international order.

Speaker 6 Authoritarian leaders, authoritarian countries, are actually questioning and challenging the whole international rules-based order that we built after the Second World War together, try to build some kind of rules that everybody obeys so that not only the strong and powerful rule with force.

Speaker 6 And this is being challenged.

Speaker 6 So, we need as a democratic country to understand that there is this wider battle of values going on, and the war in Ukraine or conflicts elsewhere are only part of this story.

Speaker 6 And then there is also war within our democracies. There are more and more actors within our democracies and also outside forces like Russia influencing in our democratic system and in our elections.

Speaker 6 And this is something that we have have seen in Europe more and more, that there are actually Russian money, Russian influence, Russian misinformation used in our democratic elections, trying to push those pro-Russian forces into power and gain that kind of far-right extremist way of thinking and get those

Speaker 6 actors and parties to governing.

Speaker 6 So we are living in a very difficult moment and I know that many citizens watching, for example, nowadays election discussion debates are quite confused because we don't anymore see the platforms where we can even share

Speaker 6 the facts. It's very polarized and there is so much misinformation and also

Speaker 6 so polarizing and aggressive takes

Speaker 6 on things. that many middle ground voters and people that are just normal people are wondering what is going on.
And I think this is a challenge where social democrats or liberals or

Speaker 6 moderate forces should really focus on and bring back to the facts and value

Speaker 6 real information and try to have some kind of middle ground

Speaker 6 rational discussion about that things that really worries about people. And many times where also the far right wins, the people's worries are genuine.
They are real. It's about housing,

Speaker 6 prices of everyday living, high inflation, energy costs. Can they support themselves, their families?

Speaker 6 What is the situation with their education systems or social welfare or social health care or different kinds of services?

Speaker 6 These are normal everyday problems that we need to tackle and face and not dismiss the people's worries that they have, but give real solutions and not give the so-called solutions that the far right many times has, like blaming the immigrants or blaming somebody else coming from outside.

Speaker 6 That doesn't help anybody, but we really need to tackle with the people's everyday worries and take those seriously.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, one last question I wanted to ask you, which is,

Speaker 2 you know, you were 34 when you were prime minister, so you were historically young in that job. You're historically young to be a former prime minister.
You had a successful term. I mean,

Speaker 2 your party didn't stay in government, but you increased the vote share. So it wasn't like a necessarily negative verdict on you.

Speaker 2 So now

Speaker 2 you're younger than I am, that's for sure. And you're

Speaker 2 working, I know, at the Tony Blair Institute on some of these issues like Ukraine and Moldova.

Speaker 2 But what might we expect

Speaker 2 from you in the future?

Speaker 2 Is Finnish politics over or European politics or some other international role? Like, how are you thinking about your next chapter? Are you just kind of taking it one step at a time here?

Speaker 6 Well, even though I have

Speaker 6 would say resigned the parliament quite early on, I'm now turning 40.

Speaker 6 So I'm still quite young when we compare to many politicians, but I've been in politics for 20 years. Like I said before.
Right now I'm not seeking any position in politics.

Speaker 6 I'm really happy that I can work the ways that I do now. So I work with Tony Blur in his Institute for Global Change.

Speaker 6 We work approximately 40 countries globally, helping governments and leaders with their strategy, with their policy, and also the delivery of the things that they want to do in their countries.

Speaker 6 And now I have been writing my book, Hope in Action, intensively for one and a half years, and finally it's here. So I'm very excited also to meet the people and discuss about

Speaker 6 also the hope that is there, so we can all make our

Speaker 6 part in making the world better. And I'm still working on the same matters, human rights, climate, gender equality, rule-based international order and geopolitics.

Speaker 6 And I still have passion for these issues. But right now I don't have the passion to have that kind of political position.

Speaker 6 But maybe in the future I would never say never. Now I'm also focusing just being my mom because I have a seven-year-old daughter and it's so nice to spend time with her more.

Speaker 6 That I didn't have the time when I was prime minister, so I'm also focusing on the little things in life and enjoying that.

Speaker 2 Well, that's good. I have an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old daughter, and that is full-time and fun.

Speaker 2 Well, look, everybody should check out Hope in Action. It's funny, actually, I mentioned the Obama Foundation earlier.

Speaker 2 The framework that the foundation uses with leaders is called Hope to Action.

Speaker 2 So, you actually skipped right to Hope in Action. So,

Speaker 2 that's what we want to see. Um, more hope in action.
Uh, but the book is extraordinary, it, it, it's, you, it, it takes you inside your kind of personal story.

Speaker 2 Um, it takes people inside like these huge events like COVID and the invasion of Ukraine. Um, so everybody should check it out.

Speaker 2 Uh, Ruben, want to wish you the best with the book and uh, appreciate uh, spending this time with you.

Speaker 6 Well, thank you so much for having me, it was my pleasure.

Speaker 1 Thanks again to Sonoma Rin for joining the show. Talk to you guys next week.
Oh, see you at CrookedCon, Ben. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. You know, I'm very excited about CrookedCon.

Speaker 1 That'll be very fun. We'll also have some bonus content from CrookedCon for you guys, so look for that in your feed.

Speaker 2 Get a taste of the vibe.

Speaker 1 Potse of the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski.
Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes.

Speaker 1 The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our audio engineer.
Audio support by Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Speaker 1 Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

Speaker 1 Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics.

Speaker 1 If you want to listen to Pod Save the World ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events.

Speaker 1 Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more. And if, like us, you're opinionated, leave us a review.

Speaker 1 Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America East.

Speaker 9 At Eisener Amper, we are creative problem solvers that take a 360-degree approach focusing on you.

Speaker 9 We're an award-winning firm with decades of experience providing accounting and advisory services.

Speaker 1 Eisner Amper, let's get you ready.

Speaker 1 A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated and it just feels so good.

Speaker 1 Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car,

Speaker 1 suddenly it seems quite practical. The all-new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats, it only feels extravagant.