Pod Save the World

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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You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.