Khmer people

You can see the layers of a city here.

The Khmer monks walking past, the Hoa merchants setting up their stalls, and the Kin families rushing home to avoid the afternoon showers.

While I sat there, I thought about the practicalities of staying here versus moving on.

As many of you know, the bureaucracy of living in Vietnam is not something you can ignore.

Altogether, he's a seven-time Loeb finalist and has picked up honors at the National Press Club, SOPA, and SABEW along the way.

Today's episode takes us into one of the strangest corners of the art world, which is the decades-long industrial-scale looting of ancient Khmer treasures out of Cambodia and the British art dealer at the center of it all, Douglas Latchford, a man who spent 50 years selling the stolen antiquities to the world's biggest museums and private collectors worldwide.

which was all built on forged provenance and a story that pretty much, it seems, nobody even bothered to check.

Or if they did, the incentives were too misaligned to do anything about it.

In the episode today, we follow the story from Latchford's arrival in 1950s Bangkok through to the horror of the Khmer Rouge and the 30-year civil war that followed into the private homes of American billionaires, the boardroom of the Met, and even the Jeffrey Epstein files.

It's the story of... actual value and providence derided artificial scarcity and value money laundering theft broken failed states misaligned incentives greed it's an incredible book it's called the man who stole the gods and here's my conversation with matt campbell how did the story in the first place get onto your radar

So I came to the story virtually the same way I've come to almost every story, which is I just saw headlines float by and I thought it looked interesting.

If you want to look at just sheer volume of accumulation, though, it's a different, it's a different story is the second world war with Nazi looted art, where, you know, the Nazis were among other things, very interested in art and you know, Hitler, Gering, yeah.

Yeah.

In Khmer, we call him Krutmup, which is a witch doctor or a, like a witch.

A witch doctor.

And she does, well, the connotation for the Krutmup is very dark as in like black magic.

But, of course, like any other culture, we have good witches and bad witches.

Right.

Now, I'm not claiming that the Kru Tmop in Cambodia or in Khmer is black magic or bad, but I've seen Cambodian movies.

Right.