Ridge launches a revolutionary five-in-one travel power bank that charges all devices—phones, watches, tablets—via built-in MagSafe, Lightning, and USB-C ports, with wireless charging and an LED battery display. Available in four colors, it offers up to three full phone charges and is promoted with a 90-day risk-free trial and lifetime warranty, especially during a Father’s Day sale. Meanwhile, a deep political and historical analysis explores the volatile U.S.-Iran crisis, marked by conflicting diplomatic statements, airstrikes, and growing tensions in Lebanon and Taiwan. Trump’s recent actions—including pausing a major arms sale to Taiwan and dismissing diplomatic commitments—raise alarm about weakening U.S. strategic alliances and enabling China to push for regional dominance. The episode also highlights Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation from the DNI role amid claims of political pressure, and introduces Pope Leo’s comprehensive encyclical on AI, which stresses human-centered ethics, warns against militarized technology, and calls for global moral leadership in the face of unchecked AI development. The overarching message is that while technological and geopolitical shifts accelerate, ethical vigilance, global cooperation, and democratic accountability are essential to avoid catastrophic outcomes.
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(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome back to Pod Save the World on Tommy Vittor. - I'm Ben Rhodes. - And Ben happens to be in New York when the next corner of the NBA finals. Congratulations, buddy. - I got here yesterday 'cause I did my book launch here today and I was able to watch the next 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 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 standing on top of subway stations and I think I 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? - You ever feel like there's a massive cover-up of his health problems that 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. - It's some sort of specialized equipment. - Dr. Ronnie was writing scripts for many wear, but you need some sort of like, you know, there's a big thing or a big problem, you're gonna want 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 resistency people are on to something here. - Yeah, 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 got a lot to cover today. Congratulations on your book. We're gonna talk about that at the end of the show. But first, we're gonna start with trying to explain where the health of the US and Iran are, what it comes to a possible piece deal or ceasefire extension or something. After this weekend, a 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 a excuse to skip Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. We don't know. Maybe it's a both-and fair-bend, you know? - Quite plausible, actually. Quite plausible. I mean, consider the lengths you would go to to skip Donald Jr.'s wedding. - Almost anything. Yeah, I might start a war with the rhymes. - Right. - Skip Donald Jr.'s wedding. They went a bit farewell to the now former director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know if she's resigned yet or but she put her letter out. We'll reflect on her time as the nation's top spy. Then we're gonna walk through Pope Leo's treatise on artificial intelligence. Very interesting document, very long interesting document. I will update you on US Armed Sales to Taiwan. This growing Ebola outbreak in Central and Eastern Africa. And then our guest today, like I said, is Ben. We're gonna 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 by 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 it 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 prose in DC. I'll be in Miami at books and books on Friday night and Coral Gables. And I will be in Nashville at Parnassas 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 for there. Also, pause the podcast right now by a book. We're gonna 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 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 and their role in your history in about a decade from now. 'Cause, you know. - That's the next one. - Yeah, that's where it's going. - Things are moving fast. Also, thank you all for listening to Potsay the World. Please subscribe or follow the Potsay the World wherever you get your podcasts 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 seeing his audience implode. - Lovely young man. - Another casualty of the Iran War, by the way. - Yeah, by the way. If you want more crooked 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 of Potsay of America. You get Dan Fyfe for doing deep dives on polling data and much, much more. So go to crooked.com/friends for more information. All right, let's start with Iran. 'Cause it was a very confusing weekend. Ben and I were both at John Levit's wedding. Every other couple hours, I was like, "Oh, we 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 world with Iran and reopen the strata who moves. But again, like I said, we woke up Tuesday morning to reports of U.S. airstrikes in southern Iran that sent Com described as self-defense strikes on Iranian boats laying mines, such as perfectly incoherent. On Saturday Trump said the deal will be announced shortly and 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 Lebanon, unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets. The Iranians apparently want 24 billion. Then Iran would open the strata who moves. The U.S. would end its blockade on the strata who moves. 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 reasons to be pessimistic is a little longer. Ben, tell me if I'm missing anything. First of 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 H-E-U 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. Ben, 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. Drop the side of the brain.
and only complicate everything by announcing that he's requiring or he said, I'm mandatory requesting that all countries sign the Abraham Accords, whatever that means, 'cause why not upend fraught negotiations with that 11th hour ask that no one had. There's no mention in what's been discussed about caps on Iranian ballistic missiles. 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 war mongers and the hawks attack, what has been floated, the FDD folks, the right-wing senators, Lindsey Grams of the world, all the idiots that pushed 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 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 and 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 a lot of standing 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 excremble 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 and pulverized US standing in the global economy to get something that looks kind of like around 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? - He did this on a conference call. All those leaders were like, yeah, what? What are you talking about? - What the fuck, you know, they're not gonna do that. That's not gonna 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 straight-of-form moves. 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 gonna toll the straight going forward. I think that probably they 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 they're 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-assotted 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 gonna start bombing them again in September? He just, he's walked himself into a dead end and he's not gonna 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 gonna get out of it is JCPOA 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 these rallies and the U.S. wanted to install former president Makhmoud Ahmed Zinnichad as president of Iran. But the Israelis bombed his fucking house and like, nearly killed there. It's the craziest story, craziest plan I've ever heard. Like this guy is an awful person. Like in 2009, you know, let's talk, 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've 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, who's-- - Yeah, it's like the best source. - Yeah, very source stuff, yeah. - 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 gonna, you know, parachute in and run around. Which is insane that a guy in Northern Virginia who hasn't been in Iran since about the time I was born is gonna take the country over. And then the second is this idea that Okmanina Jod was going to be sprung from house arrest by targeted airstrikes on like his front-- - His cards or something, yeah. - Some IRGC goons were hanging out and then somehow miraculously take over the country look, either this is the dumbest, I mean, either of these Israelis are dumber about Iranian politics and then anyone could have ever imagined. Or these are kind of weird disinformation things where, you know, they're trying to actually ice Okmanina Jod inside of Iran by putting this out. Either way, it's just bizarre. I mean, can you explain to me like, what is the sequence of events that would take Okmanina Jod from house arrest to running the country via Israeli air force? - Right, where does he like rustle up an army on the way to like downtown from his house? - Yeah. - I don't know if it makes any sense. So yeah, I mean, that just speaks to the absolutely embarrassing, ridiculous planning and the things that were sold, the ideas that were sold to Trump in the Trump administration and get them into this war. And also just the wish casting spin that you were talking about from over the weekend. I mean, my favorite tweet from over the weekend then was by a guy named Frank Luntz from 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, I still don't know if this is a bit or not. Inside a reporting from an unnamed White House official says the Iran deal is 95% done. The remaining 5% of negotiations are focused on Iran opening the street of her moves and turning over all nuclear materials. Like yeah, the 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 key quoted, he said that a quote senior Trump administration official telling me that credible intel indicated that Ron planned preemptive missile strikes against US military targets in the region and against civilian targets as well. So he was trying to sell its on the idea that the war was a preventative one to be that the US was going to get attacked by Iran, which is a total lie. Look, either way, if this gets 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 street of her moves right away 'cause those people are desperate to leave. But the like ships will have to start coming back in to pick up more oil. And those are tankers that are on to 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 gonna think twice about, you know, just running right back to the UAE or wherever they're picking up oil and gas. It's gonna take time to get oil and gas. Infrastructure flowing again. An 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 biggest, like the hardest part to me then 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 withdrawn. So everyone's still referring to that as a ceasefire. It's just not. They're just killing each other out of 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 gonna 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 some of these Iranian terms about getting money up front, et cetera. 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 shock that FDD types and Lindsey Graham and all the people that Netanyahu talks to are raising alarm bells. And the problem for Netanyahu is he cannot run for re-election without some war going on.
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, his bowl is still in Lebanon. The Iranian regime is still in place. The Iranian 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 BB and 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 Danielle 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 of 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 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 at the Al-Qaeda. Yeah. I've seen a couple of Democrats like take this bait of like they're now going to send tough and hawkish. And no, I want the word end. And you know, if the minimalist thing where the Iranians get a bunch of money and they open the strait and then they got a bunch more money and they ship the H.E.U. 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. You don't 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. We'll keep watching this one update you guys if anything changes. This show is sponsored by strawberry.me. If you're thinking about switching jobs, ask yourself these questions. Am I growing or just repeating the same experience over and over again? 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Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 percent at selectquote.com/world. Save more than 50 percent on term life insurance at selectquote.com/world. Go today to get started at selectquote.com/world. In different news, so it's a sad day for anybody who felt 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 a resignation last week. The stated reason in her letter is very sad and very personal to her. Tulsi 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 shake-up. In a White House official, told Reuters in 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 war mongers are carelessly fomenting fear intentions 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 I.C. 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. Tulsi Gabbard testified at March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon. I don't care what she said. I think we're very close to them. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a "imident nuclear threat" posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? Senator, the only person who can determine in 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 in YouTube, please again subscribe to Potseh's 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 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 this image of a tweet Tulsi sent of herself doing yoga on the beach with the caption, "My heart is filled with gratitude, a low-hat and peace, #2026, prayer emoji." She sent that as she was being cut out of the planning process around the Venezuela operation. So wonderful stuff there. Then 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 gathered 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 a close election. But I think more fundamentally, Tulsi was put at DNI and Joe Kent was put at NCTC, the National Counter-Chairism Center. Those are kind of together with the CA, the two most high profile intelligence community officials. And that was the signal from Trump to MAGA, to kind of the Tucker Carlson we're going to party. Hey, look, I know you don't trust these IC people while I'm putting your people, you know, Tulsi and 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
or is the 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. It's John Ratcliffe, who's going down to Cuba, trying to force a regime change. Like, there's no Maga people left, you know? Yeah, she also fired people who released assessments about Venezuela that contradicted the Trump administration's political claims that the government of Venezuela was controlling Trende 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 seeming sounds like you are 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, it's a person named Aaron Lucas. He will serve as the acting director. He's a former CIA guy who served on the MSE during Trump's first term, but also, I think, was chief of staff to Rick Renell, 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? 'Cause I can promise you, there's no way that Tulsi Gabbard or Rick Renell's former chief of staff have been doing anything but driving people out who provided assessments that they didn't like. And probably alienating career operatives who are out trying to run networks that are 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 and further ends of Trump's conspiracy theories crapping all over the Russian investigation, which was not, no matter what they say, something that came out of Barack Obama's head, 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 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, too much fanfare, I mean, maybe I'm tempting faith here, but too much fanfare, she launched that, you know, height of the Epstein panic inquiry into Obama. We haven't really heard much about that. - Yeah, I haven't really heard from since. - I mean, Trump did post the same AI image of someone who doesn't look like me in an armed jumpsuit the other day, but, I mean, we're literally reprising the same true social AI slop. And, you know, that Fulton County thing, where she went down to, you know, get the ballots in 2020, to, I guess, find out whether Hugo Chavez, who was dead, you know, manipulated them. I mean, where'd 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 existence is built around avoiding terrible regime change wars in the Middle East. And, here we are. So, great work, Tulsa. Ships and 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, add-or-all-fueled AI-generated slop from your high school acquaintance on LinkedIn about using cloth 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 treatist, it's fascinating. It covered the morality and ethics of AI. It's use in war. It's 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. That'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 challenge of courage, and cooperate in building a more human and fraternal society. - I still so funny to hear a Pope speaking in, like, slightly Chicago accented English on this account over 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. 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 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 for preventing it from dominating humanity. Very important idea there. He was adamant that artificial intelligence is not a alive or human. He said, so-called artificial 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 135th anniversary of Pope Leo the 13th in cyclical about the industrial revolution. More recently it comes after Anthropic's fight with the Pentagon about the use of its technology in war. And then there was all these reports like a week or two ago that the Trump administration was gonna release an AI executive order that might have started to regulate the industry a little bit, but apparently David Sachs and a bunch of industry douchebags got it spiked because of concerns about economic race. So Ben, huge document, super interesting stuff. What'd you make of what you read? - Yeah, no, 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 industrial efficiency and robotics and 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 and 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 we're being discussed and that we're 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 at for. You said you're the opposite. The United States, like JD 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 arsonists in this whole conversation. That's right. And so what I found so refreshing about what the Pope did once again, 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, I mean, 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 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 a holistic way. I think 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. 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. If you look at Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, these kinds of guys that built other platforms, like you said, that have caused huge destruction in the world, mainly advertising models in social media that fuel polarization. Those are not the people that you want self-regulating. That's who JD Vance wants in charge, because JD Vance is backed by Peter Teal and, you know, Mark and Dreson 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 little 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 yeah, Credity Anthropic Founder, who was there, the Chris Ola, 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 society, 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. Pots of the world is brought to you by Helix. Sleep is very, very important. A man I'd like three or four glorious days, whereas getting like seven hours. And last night it was like sub five for no reason, for no reason. I know I hit six. You know, guarantees a bad night's sleep, a bad mattress. You'll get back pain, it'd be sweaty, you can't move around. It's just awful. Helix will get you a great mattress and they make bi mattresses easy. 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There's no drilling required. There's no rating around for a technician to show up. The app-guided installation walks you through the process. You can get your system armed in less than an hour. SimplySafe is backed by 24/7 professional monitoring agents. Dispatch emergency help when you need it. Over 5 million people value and trust SimplySafe for their home security every day. Right now, our listeners will get 50% off a new system when you sign up for a professional monitoring in your first month. It's free by visiting SimplySafe.com/CricketWorld. It's half off. It's SimplySafe.com/CricketWorld. There's no safe, like SimplySafe. Ben, last week we dug into Trump's visit with China. And, you know, frankly, at the time, said we hoped that AI, 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 Armed Sales as a negotiating chip. That was a quote. The sell-out is now official. So, last Thursday, Trump's acting secretary of the Navy told the US Senate that the US had paused a recent $14 billion dollar arm 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 with 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 world with Iran. But we need to pause the arm 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 in 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 US weapons deliveries to Taiwan. So Ben, I mean, as we discussed, the US got pretty much nothing out of this Trump visit. Like there was some egg sales. There was a Boeing airplane announcement that was pretty underwhelming. But it seems like Xi Jinping got a huge concession out 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. Xi has been invited to Washington, I think, in September. Then there's an APAC meeting. Then there's a G20 meeting. And the question I think is like, what happens if Xi 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 arms sales and not piss me off before we get together? Like, what do you think that means if there's just this like constant pushing out of these arms 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. Right. So he's basically negotiating away the US 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 de-recognized Taiwan, they pass 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 like use those weapons to attack China. It's purely for their defense. As a means of preventing a war, right, the more Taiwan is 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 weapon 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 Xi Jinping might think to himself, "Well, look, not only do the Taiwanese not have defense capabilities that will promise 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 is 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 there's just nothing he's even been floating, floated, that 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 the David Sanger, the New York Times reporter, accusing him of committing treason, but also Sanger was like, "Hey, you said that you negotiated over arms sales with Taiwan, with Xi Jinping, but as part of 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 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's usually. " Like 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 legal 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 Xi talking about Japan remilitarizing, I don't know if you caught this, Ben. It's just interesting if that's going to be another flashpoint soon or suggest 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. But 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, 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 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 is 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 it just them constantly bullying random other countries in the region about islands and, you know, access to the fisheries. South China Sea. Yeah. It's nothing good. All right, Ben. So this next story is one we'd 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 U.N. 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. We're 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 US 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. is already restricted travel to the U.S. from people who have been to the affected areas. There's increased screening and 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 it 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. We used USAID in conjunction with the United States military to help facilitate the construction of logistics hubs, hospitals, mobile health units to transport healthcare workers from around the world to the effect of region to get other countries through the WHO to contribute everything from healthcare 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. This is not us gratuitously serving to knock Trump. 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. 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 in public health infrastructure. Is that what that was? I saw that. Why is he picking up a snake? What are you doing? Do it. And things like biting him and he's like, 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. Ben, we wanted to play you 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. What's going to go out again? Any thoughts? Your wildest guess. 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 Reynolds Clio RS car.
with his penis and then someone lights him on fire. - And 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 safe world rundown 'cause it happened in England, I guess. - Where does Michael find this? - I have 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. - 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, it 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 he'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. - Yeah. - We wear this man's politics because he's clearly willing to engage in the attention economy in a way that, you know, current labor leadership doesn't seem to be. - Putting it on the line. Yeah, no, that's more of a lib demo of pulling a car with your flaming dick. Anyway, we thought that would be fun. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, you're gonna hear my conversation with Ben about his new book in some incredibly important foreign policy speeches in history and the artist's speech writing generally. So stick around for that. (upbeat music) Potay, the world is brought to you by Haya. 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Go to hayahealth.com/world and get your kids a full-body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults. - If you missed some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MSNOW on Saturday nights. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific. (gentle music) - All right, Ben and Lou, our standard interview this week. We wanted to talk about your new book. I'll always say the Battle for American Identity, a history in 15 speeches. Again, it is out today as we're recording this Tuesday, May 26th. So go pick one up before they're sold out. Get 'em all you can. - Yes. - So Ben, the book is focused on great speeches in American history. You got examples from Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, FDR, Dolores Huerta, Reagan, Obama, Trump. Sometimes it can feel like in 2026, a speech is an anachronistic communications tool, especially when you have a president like Trump, who can barely get a sentence out sometimes, who puts zero effort into writing his own remarks, writing his vomits, whatever it comes to his mind. They can entertain the audience, but he's not like moving masses per se. But at the same time, it is easier than ever to consume a great speech on YouTube, to share a great speech on TikTok or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. So I just don't like 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 Assoff for president could kind of like, bring the speech back. - Yeah, so first of all, what I 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 to me that 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 gonna be reprinted in a newspaper. So you wrote these kind of carefully worded arguments. You get to Frederick Douglass' time. Douglass is hitting 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? 'Cause he was giving speeches to like every GE plant in the country for a while, he's like a paid flag for them. - There's an American tradition of that, right? And that's how presidential candidates hit the stump. Then you get radio and you get FDR and you get this 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 gonna 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, you're 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 are the Democrats actually stand for? Is Sins 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 to Iran, 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 a, our guy John Assoff, 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 from 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, your podcast appearances, you know, come on pod, say the world presidential candidates, they kind of, they go out from that speech. 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 in a vision and usually has to be optimistic, right? I mean, too many Democrats are focused on just chitting 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 that you highlight in the book is FDR's Four Freedoms, 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 worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. These were like big, you know, radical ideas. - Yes. and they created this moral argument for you.
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 is 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-owned chapter because I'm gonna set the scene for you, Tommy. It is the spring of 1940. FDR has not decided whether or not he's gonna 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 gonna 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's already thinking past his presidency and he's literally giving a tour to the assembled press and he's showing them his book collection, his memorabilia collection and here's where you're gonna be able to come and visit these things. And he has said though that the one thing he would make him run is if the war compels him to run. And at that point, 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 strategy?" And you'll like this 'cause you've been in press conference prep. He gives a kind of wrote answer. And then at the end, he says, the fascist stand for all these horrible things and he says, "I think 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?" And 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 Leninist program. That's basically writing a blank check to the Brits 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 the weapons, and go back. They didn't have the money. 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 isolation is them 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 speech writers 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 four. And what I find so interesting about this, 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 of democracy, but we're probably going to be in this war. People are going 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 posted 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 he, like, you won't 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, given the speech is a Rockwell four freedoms poster that is repurposed today to annoy people on X. So yeah, enduring. (laughing) You also did a chapter on Reagan's famous evil empire speech. This was a speech from 1983 that is like mostly red meat for a bunch of right-wing evangelical conservative Christians about domestic stuff, abortion, prayer and schools. And then it concludes with this final third about communism, the threat from communism, and in a corks 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 this 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. Reagan's a congenital liar. But the audience applauded in 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 'cause I'd only heard about it as the villain pirate 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 builds. 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 and 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 people that provide reproductive health care to girls without the consent of their parents. All these kinds of things that actually became, 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, also condemns not just Godless Communism, but the Godless bureaucracy in the United States government. That's the small government stuff, right? We don't want these secular bureaucrats making decisions just, 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 instead 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 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. Michael 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 is who's 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 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. 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 is 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 look, 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 FER 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 we wanted to stand for a set of things in opposition to a totalitarian system. And FER certainly spoke to me. When Trump talks about Iran, he talks about the nuclear warhead
dust, or he talks about, you know, the state of hormones, 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, take in 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, it's, at least that signal he was trying to send to the world about our ability to just be that global bully is not working out. Maybe it'll rein them in a bit. Yeah, but I think, again, it means that things are ripened for someone to come long. And not in, I want to be clear, like, you know, Joe Biden would do the pap. Like, you know, he would mow 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, but the four 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 sending up again and saying, America's the indispensable nation, we stand for freedom. Like, 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 our 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 nostalgic and looking back and, you know, we were great once. 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 in 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, book by him. Congrats, buddy. It's a great book. Excited for you to watch. I can't just sing in the world. Potsy, the world is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by a loan of Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith and Inisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Heffko, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Her staff is proudly unionized with the writers killed of America East. If you missed some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry. You can now catch up on the week's best moments on MSNOW on Saturday nights. MSNOW is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments in 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Ridge introduces a five-in-one travel power bank with multiple charging ports (MagSafe, Lightning, USB-C, wireless) for all major devices, eliminating the need for multiple cables.
The product offers up to three full phone charges, includes an LED battery status indicator, and is available in olive, base camp orange, matte black, and atomic purple.
Ridge emphasizes durability, offering a 90-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and a lifetime warranty.
A major Father’s Day sale offers up to 40% off at Ridge.com/PSTW.
A podcast series, *The History of the United States and 100 Objects*, explores key moments in American history through overlooked artifacts, hosted by Roman Mars.
Episodes of *Crooked* are available on MSNOW every Saturday, featuring highlights and analysis.
Political discussion centers on the confusion surrounding U.S.-Iran negotiations, including contradictory statements, airstrikes, and accusations of a cover-up.
Iran and Lebanon conflicts remain unresolved, with Israel and Hezbollah continuing hostilities, raising concerns about escalation.
A controversial proposal to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president was reported as a "crazy" Israeli plan, highlighting disinformation and absurd political ideas.
Tulsi Gabbard resigns as Director of National Intelligence due to personal reasons, though Trump’s staff claims she was fired, raising concerns about politicization of intelligence.
Pope Leo’s 42,300-word encyclical on AI emphasizes moral responsibility, warns against militarized AI, and calls for human-centered ethics amid rapid technological advancement.
The U.S. has paused a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan, with Trump citing "negotiating chips" and undermining the Taiwan Relations Act, raising fears of strategic instability.
The episode concludes with a call for global ethical oversight of AI and a warning about the dangers of unchecked military and technological expansion.
Summary:
Ridge launches a revolutionary five-in-one travel power bank that charges all devices—phones, watches, tablets—via built-in MagSafe, Lightning, and USB-C ports, with wireless charging and an LED battery display. Available in four colors, it offers up to three full phone charges and is promoted with a 90-day risk-free trial and lifetime warranty, especially during a Father’s Day sale. -Iran crisis, marked by conflicting diplomatic statements, airstrikes, and growing tensions in Lebanon and Taiwan.
S. strategic alliances and enabling China to push for regional dominance. The episode also highlights Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation from the DNI role amid claims of political pressure, and introduces Pope Leo’s comprehensive encyclical on AI, which stresses human-centered ethics, warns against militarized technology, and calls for global moral leadership in the face of unchecked AI development.
The overarching message is that while technological and geopolitical shifts accelerate, ethical vigilance, global cooperation, and democratic accountability are essential to avoid catastrophic outcomes.
FAQs
Ridge's five-in-one power bank includes MagSafe, USB-C, and Lightning ports, allowing users to charge multiple devices with one unit. It eliminates the need for separate cables and chargers, offering convenience and portability.
It provides up to three full phone charges and features an LED charge status indicator, helping users monitor battery levels. Its compact design and multi-connector setup make it ideal for charging phones, tablets, watches, and other devices on the go.
The Ridge power bank is available in olive, base camp orange, matte black, and the newest color, atomic purple.
Yes, Ridge offers a 90-day risk-free trial, lifetime warranty, and free shipping, ensuring customers can try the product with confidence and return it if unsatisfied.
Ridge is offering up to 40% off during its Father's Day sale, with a special promotion available at Ridge.com/PSTW, making it a great gift option for dads who need reliable charging solutions.
The 42,300-word encyclical emphasizes the moral and ethical implications of AI, warning against militarization, job displacement, and the dehumanization of conflict, calling for global moral leadership in AI development.
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