Chapter 1: What is the threat of Trump's potential invasion of Greenland?
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In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.
Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
MUSIC
Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
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Chapter 2: How do world leaders react to Trump's Greenland ambitions?
I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we have a five-alarm Pod Save the World fire. Did you see that Trump has threatened to slap a 200% tariff on all French wine?
I know. There goes the Bordeaux. I thought of you. I know.
Wither the Bordeaux.
Could finally make me keep my New Year's resolution to drink less.
Drink more beer?
Yeah.
Drink more bourbon. Speaking of beer, I just got back from London. What a great city. It's fantastic. The pub culture is so fun. Just like sitting outside. It's fucking cold as hell. People are ripping heaters sitting outside. Actually, less smoking than I expected to see in London.
Yeah, it's down a little bit, but the drinking is still robust. Seemed up. So is the calorie count at this pub. Sunday roasts, those are fantastic. Nothing like tucking into like a giant pie of meat.
Oh, yeah. I had a pie with like mashed and something else. Some egg like… deep fried in a ball of meat or something like that. It was really good.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's military threats to Iran?
Although I did get there. I turned on BBC News. I was like, I don't know. Let's see what's on TV. Nigel Farage right in my grill with what's his name? Robert Jenrick who just defected to the reform side. Coming in hot. It was, um, it's like, ugh, that guy. Come on.
Although it was fun watching their press, like, actually kind of, like, take the piss out of them and ask, like, super shitty questions and kind of make fun of them a bit. I was like, where's that, guys? U.S. Press Corps?
There's no, like, Politico playbook, you know, uh, Nigel making things interesting.
Well, there's no like Lindell TV in the room.
Give it a minute. Maybe they'll get a UK correspondent for Lindell TV.
Yeah, I guess there are a bunch of Murdoch rags in the room, but whatever. We got a lot to cover today, Ben. We're going to start with Greenland, which is the dumbest and yet potentially the most consequential international crisis in, I don't know, decades.
Then we're going to talk about why Donald Trump told millions of Iranian protesters that he would rescue them and to go into the streets and to take over the government and then did nothing when thousands of them were massacred. We'll help you guys understand the new Board of Peace. We'll help you fill out your applications if you want to apply.
Just a billion dollars and I think the Common App, they probably accept that. And then we're going to explain some major developments about governance in the future of Syria, why Elon Musk's Grok AI tool has been banned in a number of countries.
And then finally, we are once again going to put our fate in the hands of our producer, Michael, who is going to show us a video that we have not seen and he has seen. And risk cancellation. So that's exciting, as always. It's always the best.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the 'Board of Peace' in international relations?
And then, Ben, you did our interview today. Tell us what we're going to hear.
Yes, I talked to Yusra El-Bagir, who's the Sky News Africa correspondent. Yusra's been on before. She just covered the Ugandan elections, Tommy. And we've had Bobby Wine on, both you and I have talked to him. Basically, we had another not exactly or not even close to free and fair election. The internet was shut down.
Uster describes kind of war zone-like conditions on the ground, military out threatening people, the tallies being – seemingly manipulated. Yusra was there for it also.
She kind of walks through what it was like to be there for that election, what it says about the direction of politics in Africa, like the rest of the world, where the strong men are kind of just not giving an inch and it seems to be working for them. How do younger Ugandans, including the 70% of the country that's under 30, feel about it? What's next for Bobby Wine?
And again, what does this mean for the broader African landscape? So very important to cover a story like that that can get drowned in Greenland. So you should check it out.
Great. I mean, really important story. Also, you know, Bobby Wines, such a brave guy. For those who don't know, I mean, this guy was like a rock star. Yeah. And he decided to dedicate his life to politics. And he's met, he's been beaten. He's been locked up in his own house. I think he just had to escape his own house, right? Because the security forces were coming for him.
And the kind of Don Jr., Museveni, the president's kid, is like online tweeting, like threatening to kill him. I mean, it's pretty dark, but it's important.
Yeah, really important story.
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Chapter 5: How is the ceasefire between the Syrian government and Kurdish forces evolving?
Great reporter, by the way.
She's very good. She has an eye. She dives right into the story. She's like there. She interviewed Miss Evany. She's interviewed Bobby Wine. She was at the vote tally locations. She gets out and gets the story.
Your sister's a total badass, too. Yeah. That's great.
We just sit in a room in LA and talk about it.
So speaking of which, Ben, next week, for those of you who are part of our Friend of the Pod subscriber community, you're going to hear Ben and I answer some questions from the Friends of the Pod Discord. So if you want to hear that or if you want to submit a question, go to crooked.com slash friend to join and become a friend of the pod.
Or if you just want to support Crooked Media, support, you like the show, you like progressive independent media, becoming a subscriber is the single most helpful thing for us because it helps us reduce our dependence on these big tech platforms and connect directly with you. So again, that's crooked.com slash friends.
And of course, you know, we'd love for you to also nurture our dependence on big tech platforms by subscribing to Pod Save the World on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And then Ben, you have a big announcement for us today. Drum roll.
Drum roll, please. Big announcement. That was a drum roll for those not watching on YouTube. But after four years of work, my next book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches, is coming out in May.
May.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Grok's AI face in the global landscape?
I wanted, after writing a book about the rise of authoritarianism – I sense that the answers to that question that's gnawing on all of us, which is like, how the fuck did we get here 250 years into this experiment, lay in the past. And I spent four years looking at how to tell the story of the argument we've been having, essentially.
the argument about what it means to be an American, who gets to decide that. We've been having that argument since our founding. And so I chose 15 speeches. This is not an anthology, though. This is meant to understand the thread of the arguments we've been having back since our founding. J.D. Vance has one answer. We kind of begin the prologue with J.D. Vance's answer. I was just going to joke.
How many Stephen Miller speeches did you choose?
I don't do a J.D. Vance speech, but he says— he made this speech where he said, America is not a nation founded on a creed. Oh, right, yes. The Declaration of Independence is not the right way of thinking about what it means to be American. And he basically gives the blood and soil argument, which is a kind of Christian nationalist argument. We are defined by...
a certain kind of people that founded this country, white Christians, and were defined kind of by our use of power and American exceptionalism, right? And counter to that is obviously the story of multiracial democracy and a nation that protects rights and a nation that is enriched by welcoming people from other parts of the world.
And those two stories, I kind of want to trace the argument between them throughout our history. I begin at the founding. Benjamin Franklin gave this extraordinary speech at the Constitutional Convention that was about compromises. and about how the only way we can start this country is if we agree to disagree about important things.
Well, that worked, but it didn't work because the things that we didn't agree about were things like slavery or who gets to be American or, you know, what is the basis of how power works in this country. And then I kind of follow those threads and there's, Each chapter is not just about a speech.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Yousra Elbagir provide about Uganda's contested election?
It's about the political movement and conditions that could produce that speech. And we have the kind of strain that most of us identify with, like the abolitionist strain, extraordinary people like Mariah Stewart and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, but also then how they interacted with presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and ultimately our former boss, Barack Obama.
That's one side of this argument.
And then you end with Biden's NATO press conference after the debate?
Yeah.
He, I know what you're thinking. He doesn't have a, well, anyway, no PhD there. But on the other side- Pretty hard delivery. I have the Confederate, you know, I've got the white supremacist arguments. I've got, you know, up through some of the kind of xenophobic nature of American populism, up through Ronald Reagan. And unfortunately-
The book ends with Donald Trump, but the story doesn't end with Donald Trump. And that's actually kind of the important part here is that we are living in the latest iteration of a competition that we've had since the beginning.
And Trump makes a lot of sense if you read him in the context of American history, but so does the possibility that if people stand up and make a case and build a movement and persuade people that we can take this in a different direction. And that's part of what I took away from this, Tommy. It's like, Obviously, speeches are kind of the purest form of persuasion.
You stand in front of an audience, you try to convince them of something. We stopped doing that for a lot of reasons. And I get into that technology, social media polarization. But actually, part of what's missing in the movement against Trump is what is our unifying story? What do we think it means to be American?
Like, how do we persuade our fellow citizens that we are going down a very, very dark path? So to me, I really hope people pick up this book. It was fun to write. They're amazing characters, they're amazing stories, they're amazing movements, amazing breadcrumbs that, again, make a lot of sense in terms of today. You look at the past and you're like, oh, that seems familiar.
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Chapter 8: What are the broader implications for democracy in Africa as discussed in this episode?
It's very much about this moment. How do we get here and how do we get out of it? If you can pre-order this book, it is hugely helpful. Get some on the bestseller list. Look, if you're going to buy this book when it comes out, God bless you and I thank you. But it's not just the bestsellers.
It's like that way they're like, oh, we better print some more of these or get these in the bookshops, right? You can help launch this book so that it gets kind of up into the orbit in an attention economy where books have a hard time breaking through. I'm going to be talking about it from time to time. I may even like delve into the Substackverse. Oh, yeah.
to share thoughts on this, but also like other things that I think are going on in the country, things maybe we don't get to talk about in this podcast about where the hell America is going and how we got here. So please keep your eye out.
You can go today and pre-order All We Say on all the platforms where you can support independent bookstores by doing a bookshop or if you're a prime addict, you can do it on Amazon. However you want to get it, please consider picking it up.
Ben's coming for Heather Cox Richardson. Yes. On this episode. Jokes aside, I'm very proud of you. I can't believe that you write books. It seems impossible. This one was hard. To sit down for that long. Four years of my life on this one. And do that much work. Question for you. In 30 years, do you think the next Ben Rhodes will do a book on like the top 15 political TikToks of all time?
Possibly. Is speech writing a lost art? Do you think it's dead soon? The last three are Reagan.
Okay.
Obama-Trump, right? And that was just, that little snapshot alone was fascinating because, like I, you know, spoiler alert, but the Obama speech is a race speech. It's impossible to imagine a politician delivering that speech today. Like a 45-minute speech like brilliant meditation on multiracial democracy. It was covered in depth too.
Yeah, that people watched the whole speech, people read it, engaged. And actually that's part of the problem is like, we don't listen to each other. We don't make long arguments, you know?
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