Pod Save the World

Trump lays the groundwork for a massive Iran escalation, Netanyahu plays the weapons-of-mass-destruction card, and North Korean hackers pull off the largest heist in history.

Tommy and Ben read the tea leaves on whether Trump will ramp up the war in Iran after the midterms, taking into account Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to re-escalate, the “insane” war plans being drawn up, and Tucker Carlson’s warnings of a nuclear apocalypse. They also take a look at the post-election landscape in Israel, including aspiring prime minister Gadi Eisenkot’s uphill, politically thorny battle to form a government, Netanyahu’s attempts to delegitimize the election results, and Trump’s surprise announcement on halting military aid to Israel. Then: how North Korea’s massive crypto heist is a sign of things to come, Trump’s push for Russia to sell gas to Europe via pipelines in Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s sweeping purge of Chinese elites, and Trump’s weird nonchalance about China’s alleged spying on NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

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Lula pulls off a shocking comeback in Brazil, a leaderless student movement topples Serbia’s autocrat, and Israeli voters go to the polls for the first time since the October 7th attacks.

Tommy and Ben break down Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s stunning runoff victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, including a 10-million-person WhatsApp army and 3 million new second-round voters, and look ahead to what a final Lula term will mean for the Brazilian left, the Amazon, and foreign policy. Then an even more extraordinary story from Serbia, where the end of President Aleksandar Vučić’’s 12-year grip on power proves that a protest movement can force change. Israeli voters just finished casting ballots in record numbers, and the guys explain the process ahead, the stakes, and why Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly tried to provoke Iran into striking Israel in the final days of the campaign. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado returns from exile, and it might have something to do with the midterm elections in the US. And the UAE nominates a Palestinian diplomat to be the next UN Secretary-General, which sounds like good news until you look at the UAE’s human rights record. At the end of the show, Ben talks to Pedro Telles, a program director at D-Hub, about the view from the ground in São, Brazil, and the tactics Lula’s campaign used that progressive campaigns around the world can learn from.

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Trump rigs the war in Russia’s favor, France descends into chaos, and we witness another episode of the Trump administration soap opera drama, As the World Burns.

Tommy and Ben walk through Trump and Zelensky’s most recent war of words, the devastating consequences of the US holding back interceptor missile shipments and satellite access, and the ridiculous possibility of a summit to conclude the war with China, Russia, and the US...but not Ukraine. French protests get bigger and more lawless as frustrations with spending on education and the high cost of living get co-opted by violent looters, and French politicians point fingers at the left. An OpenAI employee gets caught allegedly spying for Saudi Arabia. Exclusive polling from the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project shows that voters in swing states are tougher on Israel than Washington seems to think. And in this week’s latest example of infighting and corruption within the Trump administration, Alina Habba and Richard Grenell battle over a story involving millions of dollars, a Turkish billionaire, and the Kennedy Center. At the end of the show, Ben speaks to independent journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who describes the brutal attack he witnessed on an American photographer in the West Bank, and how violent gangs of Israeli settlers no longer hold back on either journalists or diplomats.

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Trump cuts a diesel deal with Putin, the Houthis hit Saudi Arabia’s main airport, and Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns after demanding ice at 4am in Mykonos.

Tommy and Ben dig into Trump’s announcement of a diesel fuel deal and “energy ceasefire” with Russia that caught Ukraine and the Europeans completely off guard, and will pump $4 billion into Vladimir Putin’s war machine. The Houthis launch a deadly strike on Saudi Arabia’s international airport in Riyadh that leads the CEOs of major oil companies to cancel their trips to “Davos in the Desert”. Ship attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have nearly doubled in the past two weeks, Iran is reportedly reading war stories to kindergartners and training civilians to fire anti-aircraft missiles, and the guys explain why none of this looks like a country preparing to make a deal. In India, the Cockroach movement is back in the streets after 130 million names were purged from the voter rolls. New reporting exposes details about Erik Prince’s mercenaries conducting drone strikes in Congo and collecting mining taxes. And finally, Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns as ambassador to Greece after a State Department investigation, a $100,000 Amex bill, and an incident involving a 4am demand for ice while drunk in Mykonos. At the end of the show, Tommy speaks to Dr. Lesley Anne Warner, a visiting scholar with the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to get more context on why the current fighting in Ethiopia and conflicts in Sudan and Yemen could all spill over into each other.

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Tommy and Ben dig into Brazil's election results, where right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro surged past expectations and is now favored to win the October 25th runoff. In Europe, Spain's Pedro Sanchez calls a snap election over a housing crisis after a dramatic eviction sparks demonstrations, and student protests have spread to more than 40 French cities over a lack of funding and poor conditions at schools. Quebec separatists win provincial elections with eyes on an independence vote in the future. Germany's former intelligence chief is arrested for passing state secrets to foreign governments — a wild story that involves a steakhouse heiress, a custody dispute, and a kidnapping in Denmark. Reports of a pneumonic plague death at a research institute that have Russian officials saying one thing and local governors saying another are terrifying because no one knows who to trust. Then the Iran war: US B-1 bombers are suddenly pulled out of a UK airbase, 10,000 more troops are headed to the Middle East, and Trump suggests (jokingly?) that Iran should bomb Los Angeles and San Diego. And finally, a report from the Wall Street Journal raises new questions about Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s health.

At the end of the show Ben speaks to Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who details his time imprisoned in Russia in his new book, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian American Story.

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The Trump/Xi summit produces two pandas and not much else, violence in Ethiopia could have massive regional consequences, and Manchester City is found guilty of nearly a decade of cheating.

Tommy and Ben close the loop on Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington and how Trump walked away with only vague commitments. On Iran, Trump is reportedly planning to resume bombing after the midterms, and a workaround in the Strait of Hormuz is getting oil flowing again, but it may make Trump less likely to cut a deal. A potential plot at a UK base used by US bombers to strike Iran ends with five British men arrested. The guys do a deep dive into Ethiopia, where a peace deal from 2022 is unraveling and the risk of a conflict that could merge with the wars in Sudan and Somalia is very real. Manchester City is found guilty on 115 charges of breaking Premier League financial rules for nearly a decade — and the story highlights the complications of state-owned entities with unlimited money buying their way into sports. OpenAI pauses its latest model because it kept lying, and a previous model hacked an Australian healthcare website. And finally, we take a tour of Trump's ambassador corps: Charles Kushner ignoring France's foreign ministry, Kimberly Guilfoyle steering contracts to her boyfriend's clients in Greece, and the US ambassador to Belgium picking a fight over circumcision. At the end of the show, Tommy speaks to Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the dangerous on-the-ground reality in Haiti and how the Trump administration is making it worse.

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Xi Jinping comes to Washington, the UN struggles for relevancy, and the Russian parliamentary elections turn out exactly as expected.

Tommy and Ben break down Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to Washington since 2015, including Trump’s personal airport greeting, and what leverage China has on everything from AI to rare earths to Iran. 

Then a new list of disturbing AI headlines: a Bloomberg investigation on how AI-assisted targeting contributed to the US strike on an Iranian elementary school, a CNN report on how AI nearly triggered a war with China, and the Israeli election is being flooded with AI-generated slop. It's also UN General Assembly week in New York, where Trump met with Zohran Mamdani, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and threatened Iran. 

The Houthis keep expanding their military campaign in Yemen, attacking Riyadh and Saudi oil facilities, and Trump can't seem to decide whether to help the Saudis or not. Russian parliamentary elections are setting Vladimir Putin’s party up for its largest majority ever. 

The far-right AfD wins again in two more German regional elections, and Ben and Tommy give some thoughts on Trump’s arch and the Pentagon’s height and weight requirements. At the end of the show Ben speaks to Maher Bitar, executive director of National Security Action, about new polling that reveals why foreign policy is on the ballot in the midterms.

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The Houthis seize control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Trump rolls a grenade into Northern Ireland's politics, and a Russian oligarch funds Don Jr.'s wedding.

Tommy and Ben break down some of the most alarming expansions of the Iran war: Houthi rebels have captured roughly 80 miles of Yemen's Red Sea coastline, Iranian-backed militants have blown up a Saudi pipeline in Iraq, and Iran's targeting has improved thanks to Chinese satellite imagery. 

An exclusive first look at a new Eurasia Group poll finds the Iran war's approval sitting at 34% nationally, with disapproval among independents jumping 13 points. Then Trump visits his Irish golf course on the taxpayer's dime and casually upends decades of US policy on Northern Ireland in an impromptu press conference. This week also brings multiple stories of brazen grift: ProPublica reports that a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for portions of Don Jr.'s Bahamas wedding, and The New Yorker does a deep dive on how much Jared Kushner’s diplomacy is colored by his personal financial motives. 

And finally, a Russian drone strikes a Ukrainian train station minutes after trains carrying the national security advisors of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy passed through. At the end of the show, Tommy speaks to Hamza Chaudhry from the Future of Life Institute about the crazy last week in AI, how to judge tech leaders’ calls for a slowdown in development, and what to expect from Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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The far right gets a huge win in Germany, Serbia celebrates a war criminal, and Nigel Farage gets caught on camera breaking the law.

Tommy and Ben dig into the ultra-right-wing AfD party's historic results in a regional election, what drove it, what it would mean if they actually form a coalition government, and what it says about the state of European politics more broadly. Trump’s dumb and dumber team of negotiators (Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff) return from a busy weekend traveling to Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin, and their first trip to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky on a train they named the “Peace Express.”

 In Serbia, convicted genocide architect Ratko Mladić is given a funeral fit for a national hero, which doesn’t bode well for the country’s pathway into the EU. The UK's new Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announces a sweeping shift in British policy toward Israeli settlements, and a bombshell Haaretz investigation reveals that Netanyahu received a direct warning from the UAE about a major Hamas attack ten days before October 7th.

There are nothing but bad updates in the fallout from the war with Iran, including tit-for-tat strikes, mass polygraph tests at the Pentagon, and the dangerous escalation of the Saudi-Houthi conflict. And finally, a Channel 4 investigation catches Nigel Farage on camera conspiring to illegally solicit foreign donations.

At the end of the show, Ben speaks to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 about what we have and haven’t learned 25 years after the 9/11 attacks.

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The war with Iran reaches six months, Trump’s Pentagon cuts a corrupt oil deal with Venezuela, and Russia makes an (unwelcome) surprise appearance at a G20 meeting.

Tommy and Ben mark six months of the war with Iran, including the death toll, damage to the global economy, and reports that Trump may implement a "mow the grass" forever war strategy. Pete Hegseth is clearly losing the confidence of military leaders as the Secretary of the Army resigns and the Washington Post reports that top military commanders are pushing back on his management of the war. 

Then Trump announces that the US government is taking a 35% stake in a Venezuelan oil company. The guys walk through why the deal wouldn’t benefit either average Americans or Venezuelans, why it’s doomed to fail, and how the corrupt business partner Alejandro Betancourt is a perfect symbol of Trump’s smash-and-grab foreign policy. Also discussed: the US hosts a G20 finance meeting in North Carolina and invites Russia, Israel’s National Security Minister posts a sickening AI video, what we know about the catastrophic glacial collapse in Nepal that killed more than 900 people, Iceland’s vote against restarting EU membership talks, and a crazy story out of South Korea about government corruption and a cult-like church. 

Then Tommy speaks with David Eby, Premier of British Columbia, about Trump’s trade war against the Canadians and his “cringe” name change for Lake Ontario.

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