Expertise Matters
I’ve mentioned podcasts frequently in these essays, and I’m going to talk about another one today. This is the Wednesday, October 25, 2023 episode of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the World, and I recommend it to you. I listened to this podcast on my walk Wednesday morning. It is about 90 minutes long and is chock-full of good information. Here’s the link to the YouTube version of the podcast:
I like to listen to these podcasts about international affairs because these individuals are smart and experienced.
Ben Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting in the Obama White House until he left that position during Obama’s second term. He was a key advisor to the President during the 2011 Arab Spring and the 2012 Israel-Gaza conflict. He was instrumental in the conversations that led to Obama reestablishing the United States’ diplomatic relations with Duba at the end of 2014. His memoir of his years in the Obama administration, The World as It Is, was published in 2018.
Tommy Vietor is a veteran of the first Obama Senate campaign in 2004 and then worked for Obama in the Senate. During Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, he was Iowa Press Secretary. In the Obama administration, he served as Assistant White House Press Secretary and then as National Security Spokesman and Special Assistant to the President.
They combine a deep understanding of world affairs with a casual and sometimes light-hearted manner that makes their podcast enjoyable. But they are dead serious in their concern over the current course of world events, and seek to explain events and encourage listeners to pass along the insights provided in the podcast.
Wednesday’s episode featured 10 minutes on Gaza, 10 more minutes on Biden’s visit to Israel, and another 20 minutes on violence in the West Bank. They then spent eight minutes on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s message about the trauma of political violence and becoming a refugee, based on her own experience of living for four years in a refugee camp in Somalia before coming the United States. No matter what you think about Rep. Omar’s politics, the pain she reveals as she talks about this experience is moving.
After that, they make a five-minute swerve to the Australian Billionaire to whom TFG revealed nuclear secrets over dinner at Mar-A-Lago, South American elections, Iceland’s imminent gender equality strike, and Ukraine War Updates before devoting 20 minutes to an interview with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and thus is in a position to receive classified briefing about what’s going on in all the world’s trouble spots. Rhodes and Vietor had a deep and insightful conversation with the Senator.
The world is vast and complicated, and it seems impossible to understand everything that is going on. Podcasts like this one help.