Pod Save the World - Pope Warns of AI Apocalypse

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Tommy and Ben dig into a week of an “almost” deal, a sweeping AI warning, and a terrifying Ebola outbreak.First up, the Iran deal that was supposedly days away somehow produced new US airstrikes instead, and the guys break down why the path to a permanent ceasefire remains littered with obstacles from Netanyahu wanting to escalate in Lebanon, to Trump suggesting Iran join the Abraham Accords. Then they bid a fond farewell to Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned as Director of National Intelligence under circumstances that depend entirely on who you ask. Pope Leo XIV dropped a 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence that urges leaders to grapple with the impacts it will have on war, democracy, and the future of humanity. Trump’s Taiwan sellout is now official, with the administration quietly pausing a $14 billion arms sale just in case they need the munitions to fight Iran. The guys also give a sobering update on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a man raises awareness for prostate cancer and bullying in schools by putting his manhood on the line. And finally, Tommy sits down with Ben about his brand-new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches, out now.Buy Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches  and subscribe to his Substack here.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast, episode title, and episode date.

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Don't miss one of their biggest discounts all year. Just head to ridge.com slash PSTW and you're all set. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. America's 250th birthday calls for a history is sprawling and contradictory as the country itself. The history of the United States and 100 objects produced by BBC Studios and 99% Invisible tells this story one object at a time. told over 100 episodes, join host Roman Mars as he reveals the fascinating stories behind a collection of often overlooked objects,

each of which sheds light on key moments in American history. From a gold coin founded a shipwreck that triggered financial panic to a tiny screw that kick-started an industrial empire, every week one object will open the door into an extraordinary, often shocking story about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. New episodes of a history of the United States and 100 objects are released every Tuesday. find it in 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Pod Save the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes.

And Ben happens to be in New York when the Knicks going to the NBA finals. Congratulations, buddy. I got here yesterday because I did my book launch here today, and I was able to watch the Knicks win in New York City. The buzz was palpable. Did you rip down like a street light or anything? I considered it. I considered some looting,

but I think, you know, we had to win the championship before we can properly tear things up. So we'll see. One trash can through a Starbucks window, maybe. Yeah. There were some dudes like, there were some great footage of dudes like, you know, standing on top of subway stations. And, you know, I think it got real last night in a few neighborhoods. But we still got one more series to go. Yeah, well, I'm happy for you.

Ben, did you see that President Trump today was scheduled to go to Walter Reed for his third in-person visit for like a medical and dental evaluation? I think this year or since inauguration last year. Do you ever feel like there's a massive cover-up of his health problems that like no one ever really talks about? I will just say that for eight years, I don't think I ever went to a doctor that wasn't the White House medical unit on the campus. Right.

I mean, you can get procedures done. You can get prescriptions. You can get checkups like you don't have to go to Walter Reed for like routine medical care. It's like some sort of specialized equipment. Yeah. Dr. Ronnie was right. scripts from anywhere, but you need some sort of like, you know, if there's a big thing or a big

problem, you're going to watch a read. It's all just very weird. It is weird. And every now and then, you wonder whether some of the more resistancy people are onto something here. I don't think we need to give them any credit for shit in this case. It's just like, you know, the third time the guy goes, you're like, interesting. But I digress here. We've got a lot to cover today. Congratulations on your book. We're going to talk about that at the end of the show. But first, we're going to start with trying to explain where the hell the U.S. and Iran are, when it comes to a possible peace deal or ceasefire extension or something after this weekend of furious social media diplomacy from Donald Trump. There were like announcements and background

briefings that the deal was almost done. Then there were walkbacks of those announcements. And then we woke up today to airstrikes. So all of it's very confusing. Maybe it was all just an excuse to skip Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. We don't know. Maybe it's a both and there, Ben, you know? Quite plausible, actually, quite plausible. I mean, consider the lengths you would go to to to skip Don Jr.'sville. Almost anything. Yeah, I might start a war with Iran to skip done Junior's wedding.

They were going to bid farewell to the now former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know if she's resigned yet, but she put her letter out. We'll reflect on her time as the nation's top spy. Then we're going to walk through Pope Leo's

treatise on artificial intelligence. Very interesting document. Very long, interesting document. I will update you on U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, this growing Ebola outbreak in central and eastern Africa. And then our guest today, like I said, is Ben. We're going to talk about his new book.

all we say, the battle for American identity, a history in 15 speeches. It is available right now, right, Ben, you can go right now to any store or buy your book. You can walk out of your house after this podcast and buy it. You can order it. It's great. I desperately want people to buy it because I worked on for four years. And you are the audience, world those for everything I do. And today, Wednesday, the day this podcast comes out, I'll be at Politics and Pros in D.C. I'll be in Miami at Books and Books on Friday night and Coral Gables. And I will be in Nashville at Parnassus Books on Monday night. And I'll be at the Cleveland Public Library on Tuesday night.

So if you're in any of those places, come check it out. Go see, Ben, if you're there, also pause the podcast right now, buy a book. We're going to also, at the end of the episode, focus on two chapters in the book. There's two major speeches, foreign policy speeches, one by FDR, one by Reagan. So we'll talk about those. we'll talk about the art of speeches and leaders moving people or a nation through their words in this day and age. But either way, congrats on this sucker coming out, Ben. And I'm excited to read your book on AI Lego remakes in their role in history in about a decade from now.

That's the next one. That's where it's going. Things are moving fast. Also, thank you all for listening to POTSafe the World. Please subscribe or follow to POTSave the World, wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube. It helps us grow the show. It helps us reach more people. Ben, I think that our growth on YouTube is 90% responsible for the demise of the Daily Wire.

I have no evidence for that claim. But I think correlation is causation. Isn't that the thing they always say? Yes. I mean, we're clearly part of it. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy than Ben Shapiro and just seeing his audience implode. Lovely young man. Another casualty of the Iran war, by the way.

Yeah, by the way. If you want more cricket media, consider becoming a paid subscriber in our friend of the pod community. It's just $9.99 a month. You get ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, Pod Save America. You had Dan Pfeiffer doing deep dives on polling data and much, much more. So go to crooked.com slash friends for more information. All right, let's start with Iran because it was a very confusing weekend. Ben and I were both at John Levitt's wedding every other couple hours. I was like, we're going to have to do a goddamn bonus episode from fucking Santa Barbara. This is a pain in the ass. But no, nothing has been accomplished. So Trump spent the weekend like teasing some sort of announcement

that would create like a memorandum of understanding for a ceasefire or a ceasefire extension that would begin a process to permanently end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hamoos. But again, like I said, we woke up Tuesday morning to reports of U.S. air strikes in southern Iran that Sentcom described as self-defense strikes on Iranian boats laying mines, so it's perfectly incoherent. On Saturday, Trump said the deal will be announced shortly in that the, quote, final aspects were being negotiated. Then on Monday, Ben, he said he was in no rush to get a deal. but if you did, it would either be great and meaningful or there would be no deal. So like, I guys just all over the place. I think trying to walk through all of the back and forth is a

waste of everybody's time and just confusing. But the gist of what this deal is supposedly might entail is an end to the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets. The Iranians apparently want 24 billion. Then Iran would open the Strait of Hamuz. The U.S. would end its blockade on the Strait of Hamuz. U.S. troops would withdraw from the immediate vicinity of Iran, and then the two sides would have 30 to 60 days to negotiate some sort of agreement on the nuclear issue. So they'd be kicking the can down the road on all the really hard stuff. Now, the optimistic case on why this gets done is Trump is desperate for a deal. He knows that high gas prices are basically killing his presidency and all the Gulf countries

are begging him to get a deal done, right? So that's optimistic reason. The list of reason to be pessimistic is a little longer. Ben, tell me if I'm missing anything. First of all, all just again on the nuclear front, there has been so much disagreement over what happens with Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile. Trump does seem to be softening there. He tweeted something, I think on Monday or Tuesday, about maybe the HEU getting destroyed in place under IAEA safeguards in Iran. That would be a big shift for him. The Israelis have been intensifying and not winding down the war with Hezbollah and Lebanon. Israel hit more than 70 targets over the last few days. And Netanyahu said, we're not removing our foot from the pedal. On the contrary,

I said no, press on the pedal even more. Then I think we all assume that Iran will want to charge some sort of toll or fee on ships going forward, and that's going to be a problem for a lot of parties here. Trump decided to randomly complicate everything by announcing that he's requiring or, he said, I'm mandatorily requesting that all countries sign the Abraham Accords, whatever that means, because why not upend fraud negotiations with that 11th hour ask that no one had? There's no mention in what's been discussed about caps on Iranian ballistic. Remember, we were all told that if they got enough ballistic missiles, they could then just proliferate nuclear material without anyone stopping them.

And then finally, Ben, we're seeing all the warmongers and the hawks attack what has been floated, the FD folks, the right-wing senators, Lindsay Graham's of the world. All the idiots that push Trump into war in the first place are now mad at him for trying to end it. So sorry for the long wind up there. What are you seeing in terms of, you know, the odds of success at this point? And what are the key kind of pros and cons in favor of this getting done that you're kind of evaluating if you try to figure out what's going on? I think, first of all, we've seen a repeat of something we've talked about before, which is they probably do get close to some kind of understanding, but there's still outstanding

questions. And I'll get to what those might be in a minute. But then Trump goes out on true social, and he spikes the football in the end zone when he's still on like the 25-yard line. and he does it by spinning the best possible deal, you know. And then the IRGC says, well, wait a second, you know, we didn't agree to that. And they kind of yank back the negotiators. And then there's an effort to scramble and put things together.

That's also connected to the fact that Trump is desperate to get some win, some credible accomplishment that will not justify or come close to the objectives he set for the war at the beginning, but that feels different than he fought an entire war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars in pulverized U.S. standing in the global economy to get something that looks kind of like Iran nuclear deal light. And so that's why he then introduces things like, oh, the pro-Israel people are mad at me. I'll just demand that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan join the Abraham Accords, you know? Apparently he did this on a conference call and all those leaders were like, what? What are you talking about? What the fuck? You know, they're

They're not going to do that. That's not going to happen. And so he keeps, he cannot come to terms with the fact that the only way to end this war is quite clear, which is you give Iran a significant amount of revenue up front and lift the blockade in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz. And then you have a separate negotiation in which you get JCPOA light. You know, they ship the HEU out. There's some inspections and some promises from the Iranians to not enrich uranium for some period of time. Again, JCPOA light, and, by the way, the Iranians get another tranche of revenue at that point, either from sanctions, relief, and or they're going to toll the strait going forward. I think that probably the hang-up in the negotiations, put aside

the kind of performative disruption of Trump, is the sequencing of this. Trump probably does not want to be seen to be giving the Iranians money up front to open up the straight. He probably wants them to open the straight first. But the Iranians are sitting there and thinking, well, why would we do that? We have all the leverage. And so I think there are probably sequencing questions that are the actual substantive hang up in the negotiation. But look, this is what a deal will be because Trump doesn't have, to use his phrase, really any cards. I mean, Tommy, I was even thinking today, like, let's say they do this, where the Iranians get some money, they open up the straight, the blockade is lifted. and then we're negotiating the terms of a nuclear side of the agreement that expires in 60 days,

which takes you to, I don't know, Labor Day before a midterm election campaign? Do the Iranians really think he's going to start bombing them again in September? He's walked himself into a dead end, and he's not going to get out without being humiliated. And that's it. The choices perpetuate the war, escalate the war, or accept the humiliating reality that you lost the war, and the best you're going to get out of it is JCPUA Iran deal light. But before we go forward on this conversation, did you and I even talk about the fact that the New York Times reported that the Israelis and the U.S. wanted to install former

President Mahmoud Ahmad Ahmadinejad as president of Iran? But the Israelis bombed his fucking house and, like, nearly killed. It's the craziest story, craziest plan I have ever heard. Like, this guy is an awful person. Like, in 2009, you know, Remember we were talking about, you know, Trump coming to the rescue of the Iranian protesters? This is a guy who crushed a protest movement when he stole an election in 2009, who used to talk about eradicating Israel. He was like a horrible bloodthirsty nationalist.

And they wanted to install this dude as president of Iran. What on earth is happening? Yeah, that was one of the weirdest stories I've read. There have been two crazy Israeli plans that we've read about in the New York Times, including from Ronan Bergman, who is, I think, byline on both. Yeah, and Israeli. Yeah, very sourced guy. The first is in that situation room meeting where Netanyahu sold Trump on the war, the plan was apparently that Reza Pahlavi, the Shah's kid, was going to, you know, parachute in and run Iran, which is insane that a guy in Northern Virginia who hasn't been in Iran

since about the time I was born is going to take the country over. And then the second is this idea that Ahmadinejad was going to be sprung from house arrest by targeted. air strikes on like his front door. His guards or something. Some IRGC goons who were hanging out. And then somehow miraculously take over the country. Look, either this is the dumbest. I mean, either the Israelis are dumber about Iranian politics than anyone

could have ever imagined. Or these are kind of weird disinformation things where, you know, they're trying to actually ice Ahmadinejad. inside of Iran by putting this out. Either way, it's just bizarre. I mean, can you explain, Tommy, like, what is the sequence of events that would take Ahmadinejad from house arrest to running the country via Israeli airspace? Right. Where does he like rustle up an army on the way to like downtown from his house or something? None of it makes any sense. So yeah, look, I mean, that, that just speaks to the absolutely embarrassing, ridiculous planning and the things that were sold, the ideas that were sold to

Trump and the Trump administration to get them into this war. And also just the wish casting span that you were talking about from over the weekend, Ben, was by a guy named Frank Luntz. For folks who don't know who he is, he's like a famous kind of like focus group, polling research guy in the Republican Party. He tweeted, and I still don't know if this is a bit or not. Insider reporting from an unnamed White House official says the Iran deal is 95% done. The remaining five percent of negotiations are focused on Iran opening the street of Hormuz and turning over all nuclear materials. Like, yeah. The whole whole thing. hard stuff. He was, quote, tweeting Scott Jennings, who's the asshole who yells at 21-year-olds and

curses at them on CNN, who remember early on in the war said, he quoted, he said that a, quote, senior Trump administration official telling me that credible intel indicated that Ron planned preemptive missile strikes against U.S. military targets in the region and against civilian targets as well. So he was trying to sell us on the idea that the war was a preventative one to be that the U.S. was going to get attacked by Iran, which was a total lie. Look, either way, if this it's done, like they're getting energy flowing will take months and months. There will be like a bunch, there are a couple hundred ships that flow out of the Cerrado Hormuz right away because those people are desperate to leave. But like ships will have to start coming back in to pick up more oil.

And those are tankers that are onto other jobs now. They could be halfway across the world. They might still be concerned about the increased political risk that the war restarting. So they're going to think twice about, you know, just running right back to, uh, to the UAE. or wherever, they're picking up oil and gas. It's going to take time to get oil and gas. Infrastructure flowing again, and energy to, like, actually transit to where it needs to go. So this is not over in terms of the energy crunch. And then the big, like the hardest part to me, Ben, is still the Lebanon piece. I mean, Israeli forces on Tuesday were reportedly moving deeper into Lebanon. And they're already holding up to six point miles of territory into Lebanon.

And then Hezbollah is also just continually targeting the idea of with drone. So everyone's still referring to that a ceasefire. It's just not. They're just killing each other on a daily basis. Netanyahu has an election coming up, probably in September or October. The wars in Iran and Lebanon are not seen as completed or successful in any way yet. So he's going to have some real political problems if this thing ends and it looks like a loss for him. But he also has real political problems if he pisses off Trump in any way. So it just, anyway, there's so much churn over the weekend, but it just still feel like the whole thing is completely unsettled and probably trending towards the war just kind of bumping along for a while. But who knows? It certainly feels that way. And look,

hopefully they pull something out of a hat. But to do that, they'll have to, I think, concede to, you know, some of these surrounding terms about getting money up front, etc. The Netanyahu point is really, really important because this is absolutely humiliating to him. All the reporting is that he's panicked, furious, whatever adjective you want to use about it. You can tell he is because all of his buddies in the United States are the ones that are posting stuff about how terrible this deal is, right? So it's not a, you know, shock that FDD types and Lindsay Graham and all the people the Netanyahu talks to are raising the alarm bells. And the problem for Netanyahu is he cannot run for re-election without some war going on, you know, because that's how he sells himself. I'm this tough guy.

and none of the objectives are met, by the way. Hizbel is still in Lebanon. The Iranian regime is still in place. Iran nuclear program is still in place. And so the scary thing is that if Trump does do some deal and the Iran war is over and he tells Bibi under no circumstances are you allowed to bomb Iran, we won't defend you if you do that. Well, then Lebanon and or Gaza or the West Bank heat up. So watch that space because if there is an Iran deal of some sort, I worry that actually that's bad

for either Lebanon or Gaza for that matter, where there's some reporting that Netanyahu may want the Gaza Peace Board to find that Hamas has violated that ceasefire because they haven't disarmed, never mind that Israel has violated it hundreds, if not thousands of times. And I will say that the phrase fragile ceasefire is doing a lot of work in Lebanon. I don't know how one party you can say they're putting their foot to the gas and doing dozens of airstrikes, and it's not a ceasefire. And that makes it harder for Iran to concede things that Trump wants. Yeah.

I mean, for what it's worth, like, in my view, the best case outcome for the world is just this war ending as soon as humanly possible. And I understand why people are out there like criticizing Trump for accomplishing none of his goals. I will be too. But I don't think a lot of those goals are accomplishable at this point. And I think I would just rather not see people in Southeast Asia. starve to death or have their economy shut down because they can't get oil or gas. I mean,

that has to be a part of the calculus going into what you want here as the outcome. Yeah, I've seen a couple of Democrats, like, take this bait of like they're now going to sound tough and hawkish. And no, I want the war to end. And, you know, the minimalist thing where the Iranians get a bunch of money and they open the straight and then they got a bunch more money and they ship the H-EU out. That's good. You can welcome that as a good outcome for the world relative to where we are now, while still being able to make a case that the war was catastrophically and historically stupid and set us way back. I mean, two things can be true, that the best possible outcome right now is just getting out of this thing. No need to kind of

put on your 2002 tough guy, Democratic, you know, talking points head. Like, you should be able to make the case without it. Yeah, that's where I am, too. Well, keep watching. this one and update, you guys, if anything changes. This show is sponsored by strawberry. Dot me. If you're thinking about switching jobs, ask yourself these questions. Am I growing or just repeating the same experience

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comforted knowing that unqualified weirdos were serving in senior national security positions because, as we said at the top, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced her resignation last week. The stated reason in her letter is very sad and very personal to her. Telsie said her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Obviously, that is awful. We wish her the best. We wish her husband the best. However, Trump's staff and Trump's allies were eager to brief the press that they, in fact, fired her, and that's why she was leaving. One source told Reuters that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House. Back in April, there were sources telling Reuters that Gabbard could get pushed out in a broader cabinet

shakeup. And a White House official told Reuters and a bunch of other outlets that Trump had expressed displeasure with Gabbard and had been asking around about potential replacements. But let's set that aside the reasons for her departure. We wanted to celebrate Tulsi's career and tenure in the DNI role in her own voice. Let's watch this little montage of some of her greatest hits. As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers. I was at Fulton County, sir.

at the request of the president and to work with the FBI to observe this action that had long been awaited. President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a year's long coup to try to undermine President Trump's presidency. The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Kamani has not authorized the nuclear weapons program. that he suspended in 2003. Tulsa Gamer testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon. I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to happen.

Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president. So it's up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust. Beautifully done. Beautiful montage there. For those listening and not watching YouTube, please again, subscribe to POTSafe the World on YouTube.

So the montage starts and ends with this bizarre video that Tulsi released out of nowhere about the threat of nuclear annihilation that apparently pissed Trump off and no one knew what she was talking about. then it was followed by Tulsi testifying about a little election interference here here in the states. It was her accusing Obama of treason, or they hit the Obama did treason button at the height of the Epstein stuff, followed by Trump humiliating Tulsi over speaking the truth about Iran's intelligence. And then Tulsi subsequently covering up for Trump's lies about the threat from Iran. And then finally, it ended with his image of a tweet Tulsi sent of herself doing yoga on the beach with the caption. My heart is filled with gratitude. Aloha in peace. Hashtag 2026, prayer emoji. She sent that as she was being cut out of the planning process around the Venezuela operation. So wonderful stuff there. Ben, it is very hard for me to decide what part of her tenure is most impressive. Was it hitting the

Obama did treason button at the heart of the Epstein files fiasco? Was it firing officials who produced intelligence products she didn't like? Or was it generally just Tulsi building her career around opposing regime change wars in the Middle East and then helping Trump start and spin one. Did you have a favorite moment or part of her uvra? Quite a legacy. But I do think actually the last one is the most important one because why is Tulsi Gabbard in that job in the first place? You know, one because she endorsed Trump and maybe she brought, I don't know, some number of votes his way in close election. But I think more fundamentally, Tulsi was put at D&I and Joe Kent was put at NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center.

Those are kind of, together with the CIA, the two most kind of high-profile intelligence community officials. And that was the signal from Trump to MAGA to kind of the Tucker Carlson wing of the party. Hey, look, I know you don't trust these I see people. Well, I'm putting your people, you know, Tulsi and Tulsie and Tullsey. Joe Kent in charge of these agencies is a signal that I'm going to make good on my promises. And like almost immediately, he turns around. I mean, honestly, my favorite moment, Tommy, is the whiplash between her saying Iran wasn't close to a nuclear weapon, then being forced to walk that back, then being forced to say that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated,

and then having to go along and justify a war to destroy the nuclear program that had already been obliterated a year before. So she completely sold herself out, sold her principles out for a whiplash of misinformation and to justify whatever it is that Trump either did or said he accomplished. And look, I think what's consequential about it, though, is that this move from Trump away from MAGA, core MAGA, anti-interventionist MAGA, is now cemented. I mean, they're dunking on her on the way at the door. But without Tulsi, without Joe Kent, who's left over there? It's Marco Rubio, noted neocon. It's Pete Hexeth who likes to do Dr. Seuss rhymes about bombing other countries. You know, it's John Ratcliffe who's going down to Cuba trying to, you know, force a regime change. Like that, there's no MAGA people left, you know? Yeah, she also fired people who, um,

released assessments about Venezuela that contradicted the Trump administration's political claims that the government of Venezuela was controlling Trenda Aragua. So she really covered herself in glory. She also reportedly thinks that she can use the DNI platform to run for president someday in the future. So good luck with that, I guess. You are kind of like failed and ineffectual and then ultimately seemsing sounds like you were pushed out. But I don't know, whatever. But to your point about the who's left, I mean, the principal deputy director of national intelligence is a person named Aaron Lucas. He will serve as the acting director. He's a former CIA guy who served on the MSC during Trump's first term, but also I think was

chief of staff to Rick Rinell, who was the sentient Twitter troll who served in a bunch of positions before getting fired from the Kennedy Center. So things are going great. Well, I mean, yeah, there is a serious point here, too, which is that job is actually not a policymaking job. It's supposed to be about managing the intelligence community effectively. Can you imagine what a complete and utter fucking mess the intelligence community is? Because I can promise you there's no way that Tulsi Gabbard or Rick Grinnell's former chief of staff

have been doing anything but driving people out who provided assessments that they didn't like and probably alienating, you know, career operatives who are out trying to run networks that are, you know, being put at risk by this kind of reckless foreign policy. So it will take us a long time to figure out the state of the actual intelligence community. Never mind, by the way, Tulsi to further in furtherance of Trump's conspiracy theories, crapping all over the Russia investigation, which was not, no matter what they say, something that came out of Barack Obama's head. It was something that emerged from within the intelligence community itself because

they saw intelligence about what Russia was doing. So she's probably done significant harm just to the functionality of the intelligence. in this community while not achieving any of her policy objectives, including, by the way, I should say, not even the kind of participation in the conspiracy theory stuff, right? Like, to much fanfare, I mean, maybe I'm tempting fate here, but to much fanfare, she launched that, you know, height of the Epstein panic inquiry into Obama. We haven't really heard much about that. Yeah, it hasn't really heard from since.

I mean, Trump did post the same AI image of someone who doesn't look like me in an orange jumpsuit the other day. But, I mean, we're literally reprising the same truth. social AI slop. And, you know, that Fulton County thing, where she went down to, you know, get the ballots from 2020 to, I guess, find out whether Hugo Chavez, who was dead, you know, manipulated them. I mean, where did that go? So not a lot of competence emanating from Tulsa. Yeah, those have not delivered yet. Let's hope, knock on wood, that remains the case. But, you know, the big thing that she sort of pledged to be, her whole existence is built around avoiding

terrible regime change wars in the Middle East. And here we are. So great work, Tulsi. Shifting gears again. So there's a new spicy AI take that just dropped that we wanted to talk about. But this was not like your typical kind of Adderall-fueled AI-generated slop from your high school acquaintance on LinkedIn about using Claude for his side hustle. We are talking about Pope Leo's 42,300 word encyclical on artificial intelligence. So a papal encyclical is a formal letter written by the Pope about some major issue. Pope Leo's treatise, it's fascinating. It covered the morality and ethics of AI, its use in war, its impact on democracy in the labor market, and really like AI's impact on humanity itself.

Here's just a little bit of what Pope Leo had to say, and then we'll talk about some more elements. Let's watch. Artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death. Let's not fear artificial intelligence, but constantly. keep the question of the human in play. The person bears within him or herself a freedom, an interiority, and the vocation to love and worship that no machine can replace or block.

Every person is unique and irreplaceable, a free and intelligent subject with a conscience capable of seeking God, serving one another and caring for our common home. I therefore invite all members of the church and of the human family. Let us learn to listen to one another, face the present challenges with courage, and cooperate in building a more human and fraternal society. God, so funny to hear a pope speaking in like slightly Chicago accented perfect English. You know, and it's like not over it yet. So again, this is a huge document, 42,000 plus words, covered a lot of stuff, but just a few things that jumped out of me, Ben. I'd love to hear what you heard about it. I mean, first of all, it was just, it was so rare and interesting.

to hear someone talk about artificial intelligence from a truly global perspective and only about its impact on humanity. There's almost always some element of economic competition from the companies or like nationalism and competition from political leaders. Like we got to beat China. We got to do this. There was none of that here. It was just about like the impact on us as humans. And that was frankly nice. One of the key phrases he used was he talked about the need to disarm AI, but it was an expansive definition of disarming. So he, he, wrote, disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This

entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger data sets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance to disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. Very important idea there. He was adamant that artificial intelligence is not alive or human. He said, so-called artificial intelligence. intelligence do not undergo experiences. They do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good or evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations or bear responsibility for consequences. He was pushing hard for moral standards for AI saying, we cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines

without also having the courage to insist on further condition the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. And then again, when it comes to war, he wrote, no algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict. Indeed, it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat, prediction, and thus reducing victims to data. And he seems to argue that the use of AI in war is even greater atrocity than standard war.

So one of the founders of Anthropic, Chris Ola also spoke. The timing of all, this was interesting. This was released on the 13th anniversary of Pope Leo the 13th encyclical about the industrial revolution. More recently, it comes after Anthropics fight with a pedagon about the use of its technology and war. And then there was all these reports like a week or two ago that the Trump administration was going to release an AI executive order that might have started to regulate the industry a little bit. but apparently David Sacks and a bunch of industry douchebags got it spiked because of concerns about, you know, the economic race. So Ben, huge document, super interesting stuff. What'd you make of what you read? Yeah, I know. I actually spent a lot of time with this. I think it's very important

and it's also very appropriate that we're talking about it on this podcast because AI is going to be globally transformative and put aside. the opportunities of, you know, industrial efficiency and robotics and, you know, a chatbot who can do your PowerPoint presentation and all the rest of it. The risks are extraordinary. And Pope Leo goes through some of them to include, obviously, the societal impacts of job dislocation, the kind of societal and psychological impacts on children. Some of these security risks, he highlighted the risk of militarized AI. And he spoke about something that was in that anthropic fight with the Pentagon that need to have human beings in the loop on the use of any lethal weaponry. So in other words,

AI is not making decisions about killing people. You know, you can add to that from a national security perspective, the risks of AI generating recipes for biological weapons and new pandemics or being somehow involved in nuclear command and control. So there are all these risks. And the reason I found this so interesting, Tommy, is that in normal times, right, as recently as 15 years ago, this would have been a subject of massive global convening. You probably would have had summits taking place with world leaders. You probably would have had the United Nations taking some role in the formulation of, if not treaties, at least the development of standards. you probably would have had some effort to standardize AI safety regulations across the globe.

The kinds of things, for instance, that Rishi Sunak actually is the only person who had like an AI safety summit towards the end of his tenure. But the kinds of things that were being discussed that were being discussed in the latest Anthropic model. You know, governments testing AI models before they were released and testing them on some agreed upon set of standards for what you're looking out for. Instead, you're the opposite. You're the United States. Like, J.D. Vance running around the world, like, lecturing anyone that tried to slow down the advancements of the technology. It's like we're just completely, we're just arsonous in this whole conversation.

That's right. And so what I found so refreshing about what the Pope did, once again, a good Pope we've got here, is he's kind of speaking, obviously for the church, which is going to be interacting with this, with their parishes. But he's also kind of speaking for everybody, because I think people everywhere are like, what the fuck is going on? this is moving way too fast. It feels really risky. We're not asking for this. And he's one of the few people in the absence of an international community, in the absence of leaders' meeting,

in the absence of the United Nations playing a functional role, who is left who can step into this gap and fill this void and speak with some kind of moral authority and institutional authority as the leader of the Vatican. And so I thought it was very interesting to see how much this broke through, it speaks to the desire I think people feel for moral and global leadership on this issue. Yeah. And how much people just don't trust the technology companies who are obviously like, I feel like, I don't know, I feel this backlash brewing within myself, Ben, which is like so many of the same people that did grave damage to our society, to young people, to our economy through social media and consolidation of technology power around, you know, advertising are now running it back

and in charge of artificial intelligence with even fewer safeguards. And it's like, why are we letting this happen? It's nice to hear the Pope come out and talk about all of this in such a holistic way. I think, yeah, what's really notable is, look, Anthropic played a role in this. Anthropic is coming out with kind of their hands up and saying, please, please regulate us. You know, like, we know how to build this technology. We need somebody else to control it because if not, it's going to be raised to the bottom. And if you look at Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, you know, these kinds of guys that built other

platforms like you said that had caused huge destruction in the world, mainly advertising models and social media that fuel polarization, those are not the people that you want self-regulating. That's who J.D. Vance wants in charge because J.D. Vance is backed by Peter Thiel and, you know, Mark Andreessen and people like that who are just pouring money into AI and want it to be totally unregulated. But I think what you're seeing, the AI populism is here. And whoever steps into fill the void and offering ideas for both regulation and constraints and guardrails and also just frankly, a conversation about what the hell is going on, there's going to be a huge appetite for that. And so the Pope's done it, message to any Democrat who's thinking of running for president, like get to where the Pope is on this stuff. Yeah, exactly. And credit to the anthropic founder who was there, the Chrysola, for saying, you know, the conversation about AI has got to go beyond just kind of like computer coders and technology experts. It has to include religious leaders, civil societies, scholars, governments. It's just so frustrating to have that fall on deaf ears, at least here in the United States and just see, you know, all these companies are American for the most part. And our country is just the least helpful of all of them. So good. More of this from the Pope.

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There's no safe like Simpliceave. Ben, last week we dug into Trump's visit with China. And, you know, frankly, at the time, said we hoped that, like, AI and coordination and safeguards would be part of that conversation. But all signs coming out of it was it's kind of just a dud of a meeting, except for that the White House was preparing to sell out Taiwan or at least signaling that. Specifically, Trump was making comments to the press about using Taiwan arms sales as a negotiating chip. That was a quote. the sellout is now official. So last Thursday, Trump's acting secretary of the Navy told the U.S. Senate that the U.S. had paused a recent $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan to make sure that, quote,

we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury, which we have plenty. We're just making sure we have everything, but then the foreign military sales will continue when the administration deems necessary. So it's funny to watch these guys get stuck in their own kind of lies, right? Because he's saying, we're not running short of these critical munitions because of the war with Iran, but we need to pause the arms sales to Taiwan in case we are. But we'll be fine. We'll get back to it, right? So they're just like tied up and knots. Either way, it sounds like this, $14 billion sale is paused. We don't know exactly what's in it. Reuters said it includes air defense interceptor missiles and other kind of like big ticket items that Taiwan needs. But that pause comes on top of a nearly

$30 billion backlog of U.S. weapons deliveries to Taiwan. So, Ben, I mean, as we discussed, the U.S. got pretty much nothing out of this Trump visit. Like there was some ag sales. There was a Boeing airplane announcement that was pretty underwhelming. But it seems like Xi Jinping got a huge concession of Trump when it comes to Taiwan. And then you're seeing a lot of people point out that they're going to meet three more times this year. She has been invited to Washington, I think, in September. Then there's an APEC meeting.

And there's a G20 meeting. And the question I think is like, what happens if she uses all of those meetings to signal to Trump that, hey, it would be a really good idea. for you to delay or pause or get rid of the arm sales and not piss me off before we get together. What do you think that means if there's just this constant pushing out of these arm sales for Taiwan security? First of all, what's extraordinary about this is he's describing it as a negotiating chip, but he's not getting anything in return. So he's basically negotiating away U.S. commitment to Taiwan in exchange for having nice photo ops with Xi Jinping. And to people who are skeptical of

arms sales, as we often are on this podcast, bear in mind that this is actually under the Taiwan Relations Act, which dates back to the time when the United States formally established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, China, and deregognized, you know, Taiwan, they passed a law that said that the United States will commit to helping Taiwan defend itself. And so it was up front with China and Taiwan. Part of what we're going to do to kind of maintain peace across the Taiwan Strait is make sure that Taiwan can sufficiently defend itself against an invasion. Nobody on earth thinks Taiwan is going to use those weapons to attack China.

It's purely for their defense as a means of preventing a war, right? The more Taiwan has got a capable and competent armed forces, the less likely it is that China invades them. So if that gets taken away, if Xi Jinping was able over the course of the year to essentially invalidate the Taiwan Relations Act and the United States is just, you know, holding those weapons systems, but also Trump is signaling, I don't really care about this. I'm willing to trade this away for, I don't know, some Boeing planes and some ag deals. It leads to a very dangerous last two years of the Trump administration, during which Shishishishish, Jinping might think to himself, well, look, not only do the Taiwanese not have defense capabilities

that were promised them, but Trump is clearly not interested in defending them in any way. So this is my window, 2027 and 2028, to do something. And that something could be everything from an invasion of Taiwan to like a blockade of Taiwan, which is another scenario, where they're just squeezing and squeezing and trying to force them to capitulate. That's clearly the play that China's running. and it's not clear what Trump is trying to get in exchange for this huge gift to the Chinese. Yeah, that's the part I'm really struggling with because, like, there's just no, nothing has even been floating, floated of what we might get in return.

And yet at the same time, Trump is just kind of like casually upending decades of diplomacy with Taiwan. I mean, we played, I think we played last week the clip of Trump not only threatening that David Sanger, the New York Times reporter and accusing him of committing. treason, but also Sanger was like, hey, you said, you know, that you negotiated over arm sales with Taiwan, Rishi Jinping, but, you know, as part of like the kind of six assurances that the U.S. made to Taiwan in 1982, that's not supposed to be a part of it. And in Trump's response was like, oh, what am I supposed to give a shit about some document from 1982? And it's like, yeah, you know, like that, those six assurances were kind of like the foundation of the modern U.S.-Taiwan relationship and a lot of that has been codified, you know, into diplomatic agreements in Congress

and the Taiwan Relations Act. So it's like, but he's just kind of upends the table and seemingly either doesn't know or doesn't care what he's doing. And those agreements and that law, the Taiwan Relations Act and all those agreements are designed again to prevent the war because it's meant to make the war seem costly enough to China that they won't do it. If you, stack up the Iran war, the illegal war that we launched in Iran, the Ukraine war, well, she's sitting there in Beijing and thinking nobody else is following any rules and these guys are rug pulling Taiwan and maybe this is the moment to make a move. And Trump doesn't seem to be in the slightest bit considering that likelihood. Yeah, it's bonkers. Also, there was a report in the financial

times that apparently one of the most heated part of the Xi Trump meeting was she talking about Japan remilitarizing. I don't know if you caught this Ben. So it's just sort of interesting if that's going to be another flashpoint soon or suggests it might be. That may be the next one up, you know, but the reality is I think Japan's going to rearm no matter what. Could you describe what Trump's vision of this very volatile region where you have Japan, Taiwan, North and South Korea and China all in close proximity? No. Right?

The goal there is to keep a lid on that. And I think Trump doesn't understand that by walking away from all of America's commitments, by pulling military hardware out of South Korea and clearly not giving a shit about the South Koreans, he's making them vulnerable to North Korean aggression in the same way that he's doing that to Taiwan and then potentially Japan next. I see why Xi Jinping's doing it. Get America out of my neighborhood. and I want freedom of action.

It doesn't mean he's going to invade Japan necessarily, but it does mean that he wants to be the dominant military power there, which could lead to military action, certainly in Taiwan. Yeah, and then it just, them constantly bullying random other countries in the region about islands and, you know, access to fishery, South China Sea. Yeah, exactly. It's nothing good. All right, Ben, so this next story is one we hoped we didn't have to cover,

but this Ebola outbreak and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda has really gotten big and out of control, and it does feel like it's important to update everyone on it. So the World Health Organization has now classified the outbreak as a, quote, public health emergency of international concern. That's a notch below a pandemic in their UN alert system. And the International Rescue Committee said on Tuesday that the outbreak could become the deadliest outbreak on record without urgent international action.

So far, there's been more than 900 suspected cases and 222 deaths. There's a few factors making this outbreak worse than normal. The first is that it was just caught pretty late. so the response is likely weeks behind the spread of the virus at best. Second, there's no vaccine or effective treatment for this particular strain of Ebola. That's usually a critical tool of sort of putting a ring around an outbreak and stopping the spread and protecting, you know, frontline healthcare workers. Third, these cases are mostly in eastern Congo, which is an active conflict zone where there's very limited health infrastructure. Wait, wait, wait.

I thought he ended that war. Oh, yeah, we did end that war. You're right. My bad. I take that all back. millions of people have definitely not been displaced there. And then fourth, you know, you have these healthcare workers who are trying to battle the virus itself, but they're also dealing with traditional customs.

Like, for example, there's a tradition in the region of like touching the corpse one last time at a funeral. And that is just the worst possible thing you could do to spread the disease. Then there's also local distrust of foreigners and healthcare workers who are often blamed for the virus and attacked by individuals. even though they're trying to treat them. And then fifth, we have Trump and Elon Musk dismantling USAID and just destroying, you know, global health response infrastructure and preparedness and Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization. So there's less coordination and communication.

So great work all around gang. Who could have seen this coming, everybody? The U.S. has already restricted travel to the U.S. from people who have been to the affected areas. There's increased screening at airports. So the risk of an Ebola outbreak coming to the U.S. and spreading in the U.S. is still quite low. But it's very likely to get worse in Congo, in Uganda, and to spread to other countries in the region like South Sudan, where it's probably spread already. So, Ben, you were around in the Obama administration in 2014 when there was another very serious, scary Ebola outbreak. Any lessons from that time worth sharing and kind of like things you're watching here?

Yeah. I mean, that was one of the scariest times I was in government because we looked at projections, where if the Ebola outbreak wasn't contained, essentially the cases of Ebola went straight up like a hockey stick spreading around the world because these are countries that do not have public health infrastructure. So in addition to the kind of cultural norms you're talking about, they just don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. Now, here's how we dealt with at the time, and that speaks to the problems now. Because those West African countries at the time did not have that public health infrastructure. The United States worked through the World Health Organization

to build literal public health infrastructure in the affected countries. It used, we used USAID in conjunction with the United States military to help facilitate the construction of logistics hubs, hospitals, mobile health units to transport health care workers from around the world to the effective region to get other countries through the WHO to contribute everything from health care workers to money to equipment. I think you see where I'm going with this, Tommy. The World Health Organization is the vehicle through which the international community responds to an outbreak like this, and the United States is no longer in the World Health Organization.

USAID was the funding mechanism to provide public health assistance to countries that need to build public health infrastructure, USAID does not exist anymore. The diplomacy required to galvanize collective action from all these different countries, both in terms of surging resources to Africa, but also in terms of kind of coordinating, how are we dealing with flights, how are we dealing with quarantine policies? That requires very careful diplomacy at a time when the United States doesn't even have an ambassador in, I think, over 100 countries. So, I mean, this is not us gratuitously, look swerving to knock Trump. I mean, this is literally a perfect storm of the precise capabilities are needed to contain and deal with an Ebola outbreak have actually been systematically

dismantled by Trump intentionally. And we're kind of just going to have to hope that, I don't know, other countries are able to deal with this because I don't really see any credible blueprint for how the Trump administration is going to do it. I mean, there's no permanent CDC head. There's no permanent director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Bobby Kennedy is a clown, and he's running around Dr. Oz's porch, like catching snakes with his hands and filming it for TikTok. Like this is, yeah, we have a bunch of idiots running public health infrastructure in the country. Is that what that was? I saw that. And I was like, why is he picking up a snake?

What is he? What do you do and do it? And things like biting him. And he's like, look, look, Cheryl. Look what I did. It's a disaster. All right. We're going to do one more dumb thing. And then we're going to talk about Ben's book. So, Ben, we wanted to play. a clip that you have not seen yet. You have no forewarning about this. And then we want you to try and guess what is happening and why. All right? You game? I'm ready. So we're going to roll the clip and you tell us what's happening and why. Oh my God. It's going to go out again. Any thoughts? You're wild discussed. What is happening is a woman seems to be pulling a car walking backwards while being on fire?

That's a gentleman named John Stevenson. He's from West Yorkshire, England. He's pulling a Renaultz-Cleo R.S. car with his penis. And then someone lights him on fire. I didn't see that twist. Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, Ben, this is how this gentleman decided he would, quote, raise awareness

about prostate cancer and bullying in schools. So we slotted this into the pod, save the world, run down because it happened in England, I guess. Where does Michael find these? The New York Post is actually the answer on this one. What does that have to do with bullying in schools? And how are those linked? Can I just recommend that there are alternative ways of generating awareness? That would be my take.

It don't involve being lit on fire or using that particular part of your body to pull a car. Yeah, he said, I pulled a car with my testicles before and I pulled a car on fire, so I thought, why not combine both? But this time, I'll do it with my penis. I won't lie, did hurt quite a bit. But my mind was focused on being on fire. Actually, here's actually what he had to say about the experience when he was asked about it by TMZ. I don't plan on having any more kids, guys. And it's just hanging about. So I thought I put it to work. I thought I put it to work. Well, maybe there, look, I will say, Labor is looking for a new prime minister. Are we aware of this man's politics? Because he's clearly willing to engage in the attention economy in a way that the current labor leadership doesn't seem to be. He's putting it on the line. Yeah, no, that's more of a lib-dem move pulling a car with your flaming dick.

Anyway, we thought that would be fun. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear my conversation with Ben about his new book in some incredibly important foreign policy speeches in history and the artist speech writing generally. So stick around for that. Potta of the world is brought to you by Haya. We're only beginning to understand the impact ultra-processed foods have on our health and especially the health of our kids.

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speech on TikTok or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. So I don't think where you, how you think about the speech, the presidential speech as part of the communications toolbox these days. And whether you think like, you know, a great future president, a John Ossoff for president could kind of like bring this speech back. Yeah. So first of all, what I do. did in kind of curating 15 speeches, I wanted to tell the entire story of American history

through speeches. And I particularly wanted to focus on speeches that dealt with the matter of American identity. What is American? Who is an American? How do we decide that question? Because that's essentially the kind of core of the argument that we're having now and that we've been having throughout our history. Speeches are this venue precisely because the United States is not just like a particular territory. We were 13 states, for instance, at the beginning, right? We're not a particular ethnic group. We are a country that is committed to a set of ideas.

So speeches have been this venue where we work out who we are and we work at our differences and we tell stories about what it means to be American and what we stand for in the world. And so each of the speeches, starting with Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention, deal with this question of who are we? And I dealt with both sides or all sides of that argument.

I think the thing I found that was really interesting, Tommy, that you know, you learn things that you didn't expect to learn. How much technology changed how people engage in that? So in Ben Franklin's day, the audience was in the room, but you knew that the speech was going to be reprinted into a newspaper. So you wrote these kind of carefully worded arguments. You get to like Frederick Douglass's time. Douglas is hit in the road. He's delivering the same speech hundreds of times going town. to town as a performer and a celebrity, frankly. But that's how a lot of reform movements,

and I deal a lot with each chapter is not just about a speech. It's about the life of the person who gave it and the movement that led into that speech. That's how movements got built for things like abolition and women's rights. And that existed through Reagan, right? Because he was giving speeches to like every GE plant in the country for a while. He's like a paid flag for them. That's, there's an American tradition of that, right? And that's how presidential candidates, you know, hit the stump. Then you get radio and you get FDR and you get the kind of plain spoken explanation of things. You get TV and you get spectacle, right, charisma, Kennedy and King standing there and delivering a message that everybody can see. Now, to get to where

we are today and your question, with internet and social media, we've been so chopped into algorithmically divided tribes that all we see are like bits and pieces of clips that are designed to kind of either reinforce our views or trigger us to kind of hate the other side. And Trump has been the perfect politician for that medium, right? He'll give a one-hour rally speech, but he doesn't give it for the full hour except for the audience in the room. He knows that clips are going to travel around the internet. I actually believe, though, I truly believe this, that a lot of Democrats, like from Gavin Newsom on down, you know, are trying to mimic elements of Trump's communication, clap back on social media, or they're making pithy social media videos. That's great. I think

people should do those things. But actually, the counter-programming that's needed, and one of the reasons I think people feel like, hey, what do the Democrats actually stand for, is since Obama, and Reagan did this very well, too, we haven't had a politician provide an alternative story to Trump's, like about the big questions, not just about like, you know, ACA subsidies or even the war on, but about like, where is this country going? Because it feels like it's gone off track. And how can I make you believe that we can get to someplace better. I think we're starting to see like our guy John Ossoff, who was in our Tulsi clip. He's beginning to do this.

But I truly believe that the counter-programming to the Trump era is actually to stand up and tell a story to Americans that can resonate. And as you know if I'm doing communications, if you get that story right, that's like the trunk of the tree. And then all of your interviews, all your social media videos, all those other things, your podcast appearances, you know, come on Pods, the World Presidential candidates, they kind of, they go out from that speech.

Right, right. In the same way that Obama would have a stump speech, and then, you know, you're repeating bits and pieces of that when you go out and communicate. Yeah, you need to have a big picture and a vision and usually has to be optimistic. You're right. I mean, too many Democrats are focused on just shitting on Trump,

which, hey, all for that, that's what we do, but you have to have an alternative. We do it, yeah. Yeah. One of the speeches you highlight in the book is FDR's Four Freedom's State of the Union address where he's making the case for a vision. It's against American isolationism. It's advocating to do more to help our allies against Hitler and fascism. In that speech, he talks about the four freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom

of worshiped, freedom from want and freedom from fear. These were like big, you know, radical ideas. Yes. And they created this moral argument for helping fight the Nazis. Can you describe the genesis of the speech and the impact that it had on American public opinion in that critical year before Pearl Harbor attacked and were finally fully pulled into the war. I thought this was such like a fun chapter to research and write. And it's a deeply world-o chapter because I'm going to set the scene for you, Tommy. It is the spring of 1940. FDR has not decided whether or not he's going to seek re-election to the presidency. In fact, he's indicated that he's not. He's told some of his associates he's not going to run. Nobody's run for a third term before. And he's giving a press conference at Hyde Park

which is going to be his presidential library. So this guy is already thinking past his presidency. And he's literally giving a tour to the assembled press. And he's showing them, you know, his book collection, his memorabilia collection. And here's, you know, where you're going to be able to come and visit these things. And he has said, though, that the one thing that would make him run is if the war compels him to run. And at that point, you know, the Nazis are just beginning to march across Europe. The Japanese are beginning to march across China.

And someone asks him, hey, what's your national defense strike? strategy. And you'll like this because you've been in press conference prep. You know, he gives a kind of wrote answer. And then at the end, he says, you know, the fascists stand for all these horrible things. And he says, I think, you know, we stand for four freedoms. And he lists four freedoms. And it's freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from fear, and freedom of information. And then a reporter says, what about freedom from one? He says, that's good, five freedoms, right? And then we don't really hear much about that. He decides to run for re-election. He has a hard-fought campaign for him. He wins. And like shit is going south fast. Like the Nazis

have conquered France, the Japanese haven't conquered Pearl Harbor yet, but the democracies aren't looking good. And so he has to give a speech to Congress in which he makes the case for the Lenleys program. That's basically writing a blank check to the British. to stay in the war. And that actually became a blank check to the Soviets, too. He's facing a very determined isolationist movement that has literally tied his hands. Congress had refused to allow him to provide that assistance. They had legislated and mandated that Britain had to take ships all the way over the United States, load the ships with weapons, pay for their weapons, and go back. They didn't have the money, and they didn't have the ability to do that. So this is high-stakes stuff, Tommy.

he gives a great speech about what's wrong with isolationism in the America First Movement, so a lot of echoes of today that you would find interesting. Then he kind of makes the case for his policy. But the night before the speech, he had gathered his speechwriters in the Oval Office, and he said, I have an idea for an ending. I want to go back to those four freedoms. And he kind of dictates out this ending. And freedom of information gets collapsed with freedom of speech.

So that's how you get forward. And what I find so interesting about this time, Tommy is that he intuitively understood as a politician, I'm about to ask people to do really hard fucking shit. Like, not only have to pay for all this arsenal democracy, but we're probably going to be in this war, people are going to have to fight for it. And it's not enough for me to just give people, you know, a good policy program. I have to give them a sense of meaning. What is this all about? And he basically makes the purpose of America at home in the world, these four freedoms. And that becomes something that people could take into the trenches with them.

That becomes something that was in Norman Rockwell paintings and postage stamps. People got it that this was who we are. This is what we stand for. Hitler stands for that. We stand for this. And it also informed became the basis of the entire post-war international order. The four freedoms are embedded in the UN charter. So you want to talk about consequential. He not only, he kind of spoke America into a new purpose that became the purpose of the post-war order. It just shows you what a politician of that caliber can do with words. Yeah, the meme everyone always posts of the one guy standing up kind of looking out, giving a speech, is a Rockwell Four Freedom's poster that has repurposed today to annoy people on X. So yeah, enduring. You also did a chapter on Reagan's

famous evil empire speech. This was a speech of 1983 that is like mostly red meat for a bunch of right-wing evangelical, conservative Christians about domestic stuff, abortion, prairie and schools. And then it concludes with this final third about communism, the threat from communism, and it uncorks this big attack on, you know, so-called appeasement of communism. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Reagan's decision to kind of jam all that together into this one speech. But also, there's a section of the speech that is just genuinely insane to me that I couldn't get over. It's Reagan telling the story where he claims that some prominent, man in the entertainment industry was talking about communism and said, quote, I love my little

girls more than anything else, but I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God than having them grow up under communism and have them one day no longer believing in God. That's the end of the quote. As a father of two, as a human being, a normal person, I found that sickening and psychotic and also probably didn't happen because Reagan's a congenital liar. But the audience applauded both times in the story that he was recounting and also in that Hall where Reagan was speaking. What the hell? So I actually have a very clear explanation for this, Tommy. And I was surprised by what that speech actually was, because I had only heard about it as the evil empire speech. But actually, again, it was a speech about American identity. And again,

I tell the story of Reagan's whole life in his political journey and the coalition he built. And what Reagan built was the version of the Republican Party that melded together Christian evangelicals, national security hawks and small government free market people. And that speech is in miniature, in one container, his whole coalition, because he's giving that speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. It's a constituent event. The first two-thirds of that speech is just red meat served up to that audience. He talks about the need to abolish abortion. He talks about the need to prosecute, you know, people that provide reproductive health care to girls without the consent of their parents, all these kinds of things that actually became, you know, unfortunately

because of Donald Trump, the law of the land, or at least in some states. But then, so what he does very deftly, actually, is he pivots out of this religiosity. And by the way, he also condemns not just godless communism, but the godless bureaucracy. in the United States government, right? That's the small government stuff, right? We don't want these secular bureaucrats making decisions for us. You know, you should be making it. So that when he gets the Soviet Union, that's his frame. We are a Christian nation that believes in God and a set of Christian values. They believe not in God, but in man. So the reason they're an evil empire is because they're not Christian like we are in the way that we are. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

It's a red meat speech that ties together the whole Reaganite project of Christian conservatism and national security hawkishness and small government. That's an identity for this country that Reagan kind of spoke into a coalition. What I found more positive about Reagan that's interesting is if you follow the story out of the speech, Reagan actually had a pragmatic streak. Mikhail Gorbachev comes along. He's like, well, I can deal with this guy and I don't want to have a nuclear war. and he became a dove.

And you should see the freakouts of Republicans were having as he was negotiating arms control agreements with Gorbachev. He goes to Moscow in 1988 and is asked, do you still believe in the evil empire? And he says, no, I don't think it's an evil empire. That was just something I said at that time. So his actual strength as a leader was being able to walk away from that.

I think the dangerous thing that I took out of that, though, is that idea of a godless enemy that is evil after the Cold War, some of those right-wing evangelicals just turned their fire on guys like us. Yeah. The secular technocrats, right? But, I mean, I learned so much from taking that journey. Yeah, it's a fascinating story. I mean, I guess my takeaway to wrap this up a little bit was after reading both of those speeches,

I mean, it's two presidents coming from totally different political parties and ideological perspectives. But reading both of their speeches kind of left me feeling ashamed when I thought about the words and the policies they were espousing and their commitments to fighting fascism and promoting freedom as imperfect as those efforts could be. What I now think about how Donald Trump is just hanging Ukraine out to dry and we're watching, you know, Russia pound Kiev with, you know, intermediate range ballistic missiles that could be fitted with a nuclear warhead if Putin so chose. And like, obviously, like, all these issues are more complicated than Reagan made them out to be right. It wasn't good versus evil or black versus white. But FDR and Reagan spoke about a commitment to values. And it's like that is just gone. It just doesn't, it's not a thing.

That's right. I had the same feeling because even Reagan, like, I don't, you know, agree with a lot of his approaches and politics. But I did appreciate that there was a values proposition to foreign policy that that we wanted to stand for a set of things in opposition to a totalitarian system. And FDR certainly spoke to me. When Trump talks about Iran, he talks about the nuclear dust or he talks about, you know, the Strait of Hormuz. We've just drained the values proposition out of everything we do. And I think that's one reason, again, why Americans feel so demoralized and disoriented because what is this all about? because it just without any values proposition, it's just about pure power and pure transactionalism.

And in Trump's case, like personal power and transactionalism. Yeah, and just stealing resources. I mean, we're going to run, taking the oil, we're picking who the leaders are. It'll be total surrender. Give us your dust. Give us everything. We can do whatever we want. But yeah, I mean, at least, I don't know, at least that signal he was trying to send

to the world about our ability to just be a global bully is not working out. maybe it'll rain him in a bit. Yeah, but I think, again, it means that things are ripened for someone to come along. And not in, I want to be clear, like, you know, Joe Biden would do the pap, like, you know, he would mouth the words about indispensable nation or, but it wasn't like, it didn't hang together as a story, you know. I mean, look, I appreciate, I'm glad Joe Biden brought some values-based rhetoric to things. But for Freedoms is a coherent and potent.

story about what you can stand for in the world. And we need a new story. It's not as simple as Democrats standing up again and saying, America is the indispensable nation. We stand for freedom. Like, take the Pope. The Pope is telling a story in that encyclical about being a human being, you know, in the 21st century with artificial intelligence. It's that kind of story, right? It's one that meets people where they are now. It's not just kind of replaying the hits. The speeches that move things forward, like evil empire, that was new for freedoms. That was, new. Like, we need a new story that people can tell in this country and around the world. Yeah, I can't just be nostalgia and looking back and, you know, we were great once.

And let's get back to that. It's got to be something new and bigger. Yeah. The book, again, all we say, the battle for American identity, a history and 15 speeches by Ben Rhodes out today. Buy a copy. Buy a copy for your friends. Buy a copy for your enemies. Just buy all the copies. Bulk buy them. Congratulations. It's a great book. Excited for you to get this thing in the world. Potsie of the World is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethkoe, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.