Values in Foreign Policy Today

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With Whoop, you can focus on living better for longer, understand your sleep, optimize your training, and build habits that support your well-being. Whoop gives you personalized insights into your sleep, your recovery, your strain, and the patterns that may influence how you feel. With more clarity and consistency, you can create routines that support you throughout the year. Add more life to every moment. Discover Woop at Woop.com . Welcome back to Pod Save the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Uh and Ben happens to be in New York when the Knicks go into the NBA Finals. Congratulations, buddy. I got here yesterday, uh 'cause I did my book launch here today and I was able to watch the Knicks win in New York City. Uh the buzz was palpable. Did you rip down like a street light or anything? Uh I considered it. Um I considered some uh looting, but I I 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 was some great footage of dudes like, you know, standing on top of subway stations and you know, uh I think it got real last night in a few neighborhoods, but uh we still got one more series to go. Yeah, well, I'm I'm happy for you. Um Ben, did you see that uh 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 theres 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 ev you know, you can get procedures done, you can get prescriptions, you can get checku ps like y you don't have to go to Walter Reed for like routine medical care. It's like it's some sort of specialized equipment. Yeah. Dr. Rani was writing scripts from anywhere, but you need some sort of like, you know Yeah. If there's a big thing or a big problem, you're going to Walter Reed. 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. 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, hmm, interesting. Uh but I digress here. We've got a lot to cover today. Uh congratulations on your book. We're gonna talk about that at the end of the show. Um, but first we're gonna start with trying to explain where the hell the US and Iran are when it comes to a possible peace deal or ceasefire extension or something after this weekend of furious m uh 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 uh all of it's very confusing. Maybe it was all just a excuse to skip Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. Uh 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 skip Don Jr.'s wedding. Almost anything. Yeah, I might start a war with the Ron to skip Don Jr.'s wedding. Uh then we' bre gonnaid farewell to the now former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know if she put her letter out. Uh we'll reflect on her time as the nation's top spy. Uh 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 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 Fifteen Speeches. It is available right now, right, Ben? You can go right now to any store buy your book. You can walk out of your house after this podcast and buy it. You can order it. It's uh great. I desperately want people to buy it because I worked on for four years and you are the audience, Wildos, for everything I do. And today, uh Wednesday, the day this podcast comes out, I'll be at Politics and Pros in DC. I'll be in Miami at Books and Books on Friday night in 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 uh pause the podcast right now, buy a book. We're gonna also at the end of the uh episode focus on two chapters in the book. There's two major speeches, foreign policy speeches, one by FDR, one by Reagan. Um, so we'll talk about those. We'll talk about the art uh of speeches and leaders moving people or a nation through their words in this day and age. Um, but either way, congrats on this sucker coming up and and I'm excited to read your book on AI Lego uh remakes and their role in US history in about a decade from now. That's the next one. Yeah, that's where it's going. Things are moving fast. Uh also thank you all for listening to Pot Day of the World. Please subscribe or follow to Pod Save the World wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Uh it helps us grow the show. It helps us reach more people. Ben, I think that our growth on YouTube is ninety percent 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? Uh yes. I mean we're clearly part of it. Um 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. Uh if you want more crooked media, consider becoming a paid subscriber uh in our friend of the pod community. It's just nine ninety-nine a month. You get ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, pod save America. Yeah, 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. Uh Ben and I were both at John Levitt's wedding every other couple hours. I was like, ah, we're gonna 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 uh 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 Humuz. But again, like I said, we woke up Tuesday morning to reports of US.. airstrikes in southern Iran that CENTCOM described as self-defense strikes on Iranian boats laying mines. So it's just perfectly incoherent. were being negotiated. Then on Monday, Ben he said he was in no rush to get a deal. But if he did, it would either be great and meaningful or there would be no deal. So like the guy's 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. Um, 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. Uh, then Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz, the US would end its blockade on the Strait of Hammuz. 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 in 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. Um 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. Um, the Israelis have been intensifying and not winding down the war uh 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 the. On contrary, I said no press on the pedal even more. Um, 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 or he said I'm mandatorily requesting that all countries sign the Abraham Accords, whatever that means, because why not upend fraught negotiations with that 11th hour ask that no one had. Um, 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. Uh and then finally, then, you know, we're seeing all the warmongers and the hawks attack what has been floated, the FDD folks, the right-wing senators, Lindsey Graham's 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. Um 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? Do you try Aaron Powell 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 we didn't agree to that, and they kind of yank back the negotiators, uh, and then there's an effort to scramble and put things toget her. 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 US standing in the global economy to get something that looks kinda like Iran nuclear deal light. And so that's why he then introduces things like, oh, the pro Israel people are mad at me. Uh I'll just demand that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan join the Abraham Accords, you know? And 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 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 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 destru ption 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 strait. He he probably wants them to open the strait 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: look, let's say they do this, where the Iranians get some money, they open up the strait, the blockade is lifted, and then we're negotiating uh the terms of a nuclear side of the agreement that expires in sixty 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. Um he just he's walked himself into a dead end, uh, and he's not gonna get out without being humiliated. And that's it. The choice is 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 the Israelis and the US wanted to install former president Mahmoud Akbutzinichad as president of Iran, but the Israelis bombed his fucking house and like nearly killed the guy. It's the craziest story craziest plan I have ever heard like this guy is an awful person like in 2009 you know so 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 two thousand nine, 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 that was one of the weirder stories I've read. There have been two crazy Israeli plans that we've read about in the New York Times. Um including from Ronan Bergman, who is I think byline on both, who's like the best sourced reporter. Very sourced. 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 Iran, 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. Um and then the second is this idea that Ahmedinejad was going to be sprung from house arrest by targeted airstrikes on like his front door. Some IRGC goons 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 and and 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. I I either way, it's just bizarre. I mean can can you explain Tommy like what is the sequence of events that would take Ahmadinejad from house arrest to running the country via Israeli airstream? 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 uh that just speaks to the absolutely embarrassing, ridiculous planning uh and the things that were sold, the ideas that were sold to the Trump and the Trump administration to 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, Ben, was by a guy named Frank Lunz. 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. Uh insider reporting from an unnamed White House official says the Iran deal is ninety-five percent 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 hard stuff. Um 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 uh he quoted, he said that a quote, senior Trump administration official s 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 because the U.S. was going to get attacked by Iran, which was 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 of, there are a couple hundred ships that flow out of the Strait of Hormuz right away because those people are desperate to leave. But um 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 uh to the UAE or wherever they're picking up uh oil and gas. It's gonna 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. Um, 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 in into Lebanon. And then Hezbollah is also just continually targeting the IDF with drones. So everyone's still referring to that as a ceasefi They're just killing each other on a daily basis. Um Netanyahu has an election coming up uh uh probably in September or October. Yes uh 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 feels 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, I uh 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 around 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 uh that FDD types and Lindsey Graham and all the people the Netanyahu talks to uh are 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. Hezbollah 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 uh if Trump does do some deal, uh and the Iran war' overs and he tells BB uh 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, um I worry that actually that's bad for either Leban or Gaza for that matter, where there's some reporting that Nanyao 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 and I will say that the the phrase fragile ceasefire is doing a lot of work in Lebanon . I I 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 uh that Trump wants. Yeah. I mean for, what it's worth, like the 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. Uh, but I don't think a lot of those goals are accomplishable at this point. And I think I would just rather not see uh people in Southeast Asia starve to death or have their economies shut down because they can't get oil or gas. I mean that that has to be a part of the calculus going into what you want here as the outcome. Yeah. I've seen a couple Democrats like take this bait of like they're now gonna sound tough and hawkish. And no, y I want the war to end. Uh and and you know, if the minimalist thing where the Iranians get a bunch of money and they open the straight and then they get a bunch more money and they ship the HEU out, that's good. You 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 that the best possible outcome, right now is just getting out of this thing. Um no need to kind of put on your 2002 tough guy Democratic, you know, talking points head. Uh like you should be able to make the case without it. Yeah. That's uh that's where I am too. Uh we'll keep watching this one and 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? Do I feel energized by my work? Am I constantly drained and counting the hours until it's over? One more hour. I'm ready to rock. Do I know what my next career move should be or am I just hoping something better shows up? 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That's selectquote.com slash world . In different news. So it's a it's a sad day for anybody who felt comforted knowing that um unqualified weirdos were serving in senior national security positions because as we said at the top, director of national Inelligentce, Tulsi Gabbard anno,unced her resignation last week. The stated reason in her letter is very sad and very personal to her. Uh 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. Uh, one source told Reuters that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House back in April. There were sources telling Reuters that Gabbard uh could get pushed out in a broader cabinet shakeup. Uh and a White House official told uh 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 DI role in her own voice. Let's watch this little 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, uh, at the request of the president, and to work with the FBI to obser ve this action uh that had long been awaited. President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created uh to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a years 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 Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to heaven. 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 on YouTube, please again sub,scribe to Pod Saves World on YouTube. So the mon tage starts and ends with this bizarre video that Tulsi released out of nowhere about the threat of nuclear 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. Remember, 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 her of herself doing yoga on the beach with the caption, My heart is filled with gratitude, aloha and peace. Uh 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. 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 uh fiasco? Was it firing officials who produced intelligence products she didn't like? Or was it generally just Tingulsi build her career around opposing regime change wars uh in the Middle East and then helping Trump start and spin one? Did you have a favorite moment or or part of her oeuvre? Quite a legacy. U h 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? Uh you know, one because she endorsed Trump and maybe she brought, I don't know, some number of votes his way in uh 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 IC people. Well, I'm putting your people, you know, Tulsi and Joe Kent in charge of these agencies as a signal that I'm gonna 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 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 is now cemented. I mean, they're dunking on her on the way out 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 uh 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, and she also fired people who um released assessments about Venezuela that uh contradicted the Trump administration's political claims that the government of Venezuela was cruel controlling Trend Aragua. So she really covered herself in glory. Um, she also reportedly thinks that she can use the DNI platform to run for president someday in the future. So uh good luck with that, I guess. You are kind of like failed and ineffectual, and then ultimately um seeming sounds like you were pushed out, but I I don't know, whatever. But to your point about the the who's 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 Rennell, um, who was the sentient Twitter troll who served in a bunch of positions before getting fired from the Kennedy Center. So um things are going great. Well, I mean, yeah there, is a serious point here too, which is that job is actually not a policy making 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 uh Tulsi Gabbard or Rick Rennell's former chief of staff uh have been doing anything but driving people out who provided assessments that they didn't like and probably alienating uh 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. Um so it'll 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 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 uh she's probably done significant harm just to the functionality of the intelligence community while never 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 may,be I'm tem pting fate here, but to much fanfare, she launched that you know height of the Epstein panic uh inquiry into Obama. We haven't really heard much about that. Yeah, hasn't really heard from since. I mean, uh 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 true social AI slop. Um and you know, that Fulton County thing where she went down to, you know, get the ballots from twenty twenty 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 uh emanating from Telson. 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 um avoiding terrible regime change wars in the Middle East. And here we are. So great work, Tulsi. Uh shifting gears again. So uh 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 uh high school acquaintance on LinkedIn about using Claude for his side hustle. We are talking about Pope Leo 's forty-two thousand three hundred-word encyclical on artificial intelligence. So a papal encyclical is a formal letter written by the Pope about some major issue. Um Pope Leo's treatise, uh, it's fascinating. It 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. Um, here's just a little bit of what Pope Leo had to say. Artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and the first time. 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 a 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 to Still so funny to hear a Pope speaking in like sh slightly Chicago accented English. You know, I'm just like not over again. So again, this is a huge document, forty-two thousand plus words, covered a lot of stuff, but just a few things that jumped out at 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 gotta beat China, we gotta 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 uh idea there. Um, he was adamant that artificial intelligence is not alive or human. He said uh so-called artificial intelligence do not undergo experiences, they do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, um, 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. Um 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 um uh the use of AI in war is even greater atrocity than standard war. So the 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 XIII 's encyclical about the industrial revolution. Uh, more recently comes after Anthropics' 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 going to release an AI executive order that might have started to uh regulate the industry a little bit, but apparently David Sachs um 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 um what you read? Yeah, I know I I actually spent a lot of time with this. Uh I I think it it it's 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 uh put aside the opportunities of you know industrial efficiency and robotics and you know a chat bot who can do your PowerPoint presentation and all the rest of it. The risks are extraordinary. And Poplio 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. Um, and he he spoke about something that was in that enthropic fight with the Pentagon, the 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, um, 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 uh regul ations 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 were being discussed and 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. 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, uh 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 uh 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 . Um, 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 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? And it's nice to hear the Pope come out and like 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. The 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. Um, because if not, it's gonna be a race to the bottom. And if you look at Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, you know, th these kinds of guys that built other platforms like you said that have caused huge destruction in the world, um mainly ad advertising models and 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 Thiel and, you know, Mark and Driessen and people like that, uh, who are just pouring money into AI and want it to be totally unregulated. But I I I think what you're seeing, there is a the AI populism is here. Um and and whoever steps in to 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 gonna 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 yeah, credit to the anthropic founder who was there, the the Chrisola, 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 um from the Pope. 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Right now our listeners will get fifty percent off the new system when you sign up for professional monitoring and your first month is free by visiting SimplySafe.com slash crooked world. That's half off. It's simply safe.com slash crooked world. There's no safe like simply safe . Ben, last week we dug into Trump's visit with China. And our, you know, frankly, at the time said we hoped that like AI and coordination and safeguards would be part of that conversation. But um all signs coming out of it, it was it's kind of just a dud of a meeting, except for that the White House was preparing to sell out uh Taiwan or, at least signaling that. Specifically, Trump was making comments to the press about using uh Taiwan arm sales as a negotiating chip. That was a quote. Um the sellout uh is now official. So last Thursday, Trump's acting Seretcary of the Navy told the U.S. Senate that the U.S. had paused a recent uh $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan to make sure that, quote, uh, 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 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, um, it sounds like this fourteen billion dollar sale is paused. We don't know exactly what's in it. Uh 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 ag sales, there was a Boeing airplane announcement that was pretty underwhelming. Um, but it seems like Xi Jinping uh 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 gonna meet three more times this year. Um, she has been invited to uh Washington, I think, in September. Then there's an APEC meeting, then 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? Like, what do you think that means if there's just this like 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 retur.ns Right. So so he's basically negotiating away the US commitment to Taiwan in exchange for having nice photo ops with Xi Jinping. Um and to people who are skeptical of arms sales as we often are on this uh podcast, bear in mind that this is actually under the Taiwan Relations Act, which you know dates back to the time when the United States formally established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, China, and derecognized Taiwan. Um that they passed a law that said that the United States will commit to helping Taiwan defend itself. And so it was upfront 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. Um 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 were promised them , but Trump is clearly not interested in defending them in any way. So this is my window, twenty twenty seven and twenty twenty eight, 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 that's the part I'm really struggling with because like w there's just no nothing has even been floating floated that of what we might get in return. And yet at the same time, Trump is just kind of like cas ually upending decades of diplomacy with Taiwan. I mean we played, I think we played last week the clip of Trump not only threatening uh the David Sanger of 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 arms sales with Taiwan with Xi Jinping, but you know, as part of like the kind of six assurances that the US 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 that, those six assurances were kind of like the foundation of the modern US Taiwan relationship. And a lot of that has been codif ied, you know, into diplomatic agreements and 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 and those agreements and and that law, the Taiwan Relations Act and all those agreements are designed again to to prevent the war because it's meant to make the war seem costly enough to China that they won't do it. Um 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 to make a move. That and Trump doesn't seem to be in the slightest bit consider ing that likelihood. Yeah, it's um bonkers. Also there was a report in the Financial Times that apparently one of the most heated part of the She 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 um gonna be another flashpoint soon or or suggests it might be. That may be the next one up, you know. But the reality is I think Japan's gonna re-arm no matter what. Could you describe what Trump's vision of this i uh very volatile region uh 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. Um 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 gonna 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's just them constantly bullying random other countries in the region about islands and you know access to fisheries. South Tennessee. Yeah, it's actually nothing good. Um all right, Ben. So the this next story is one we'd hoped we didn't have to cover. Uh, but this Ebola outbreak in 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 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. Uh 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. Uh I take that all back. Uh millions, millions of people have definitely not been displaced there. And then fourth, you know, you have these healthcare workers who are trying to buy 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 uh 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 just 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. Um the US has already restricted travel to the U.S. from people who have been to the affected areas. Uh there's increased screening at airports. So the risk of an Ebola outbreak coming to the US and spreading in the US is still quite low. But it's very likely to get worse in Congo , in Uganda, uh, and to spread to other countries in the region like South Sudan, where it's probably spread already. So Ben, you were around um in the Obama administration in twenty fourteen when there was another very serious uh 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 uh we looked at projections where if the uh Ebola outbreak wasn't contained , essentially the cases of Ebola went straight up like a hockey stick, spreading around the world. Um, 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. 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 healthcare workers from around the world to the affected 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 a hundred 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 gonna have to hope that I don't know, other countries uh are able to deal with this uh because I don't really see any credible blueprint for how the Trump administration is gonna do it. I mean there's no permanent CDC head, there's no permanent director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseas es. Um, 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 U..S Is that what that was? I saw that. And I was like, why is I why is he picking up a snake? What is he what like what are you doing, dude? And things like biting him, and he's like, look, look, Cheryl, look what I did. It's a disaster. All right, we're gonna do one more uh dumb thing and then we're gonna talk about Ben's book. So, Ben , we wanted to play you a clip uh that you have not seen yet. You have no uh 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 gonna roll the clip and you tell us what's happening and why. Oh my god. It's gonna go out again. Any thoug hts? Uh your wildest guys. 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 Renault's Clio RS car with his penis. And then someone lights him on. 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 theld Wor Rundown because it happened in England, I guess . Um Where does Michael find these ? 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 rec ommend that there are alternative ways of generating awareness? Aaron Powell 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. Uh 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 it's just hanging about. So I thought I'd put it to work. Well maybe there I look well I will say um Labor is looking for a new prime minister. Yeah we aware of this man's politics because he's clearly willing to engage in the attention economy in a way that you know, current Labour leadership doesn't seem to be. Putting it on the line. Yeah, no, that's more of a libdem move, pulling a a a a a car with your flaming dick. Anyway, uh we thought that would be fun. Uh 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 uh foreign policy speeches in history and the artist speechwriting generally. So stick around for that. 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Go to H I Yah L T H dot com slash world and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults . With Whoop, you can focus on living better for longer, understand your sleep, optimize your training, and build habits that support your well-being. Whoop gives you personalized insights into your sleep, your recovery, your strain, and the patterns that may influence how you feel. With more clarity and consistency, you can create routines that support you throughout the year. Add more life to every moment. Discover Woop at Woop.com We wanted to talk about your new book: All We Say The Battle for American Identity, A History in Fifteen Speeches. Again, it is out today as we're recording this Tuesday, May 26th. So go pick one up uh before they're sold out. Get them while you can. Yes. So Ben, the the book is focused on great speeches in American history. You got examples from Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, uh Frederick Douglass, FDR, Dolores Huerta, Reagan, Obama, Trump. Sometimes it can feel like in twenty twenty-six 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, right? He just vomits whatever comes to his mind. Like he 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 think 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 a great future president, a John Ossov for president, could kind of like bring this speech back? Yeah. So first of all, what I did in kind of curating the 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. Um, speeches are this venue precisely because the United States is not just like a particular territory. We were thirteen states for for instance at the beginning, right? We're not a particular ethnic group. Uh we are a country that is committed to a set of ideas. So speeches have been this venue where we work out who we we are and work out 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? Um, and 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 gonna be reprinted in a newspaper. Right. So you wrote these kind of carefully worded arguments. You get to like Frederick Douglass's time. Douglas 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 through Reagan, right? Because he was giving speeches to like every G E plant in the country for a while. He's like a paid flag for them. Aaron Powell That's yeah, 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 this kind of plain spoken explanation of things. You get TV and you get spectacle, right? Charisma, can Kennedy and King standing there and delivering a message that everybody can see. Now, to get to where we are today in 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. Right. Um and Trump has been the perfect politician for that medium, right? His 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 I think people should do those things. But actually the counterprogramming that's needed, and one of the reasons I think people feel like, hey, what do the Democrats actually stand for? Is since Obama, um, and Reagan did this very well too. Uh we haven't had a politician provide an alternative story to Trump's, like what w about the big questions, not just about like, you know, ACA sub sidies or even the war to run, 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 Osof uh who was in our Tulsi Club, he's beginning to do this. But I I I truly believe that the counterprogramming 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 things, your podcast appearances, you know, come on podsday 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 you're repeating bits and pieces of that uh 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 um FDR's for freedoms state of the union address, where he's making the case uh for a vision. It's against American isolationism. It's advocating to do more to help our allies against Hitler and fascism. Um 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. Um and they created this moral argument for helping fight the Nazis. Um 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. Uh and it's a deeply world chapter because um 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 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's 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. Um, 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 m march across Europe. The Japanese are beginning to march across uh China. And uh someone asks him, hey, what's your what's your national defense strateg y? And 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 uh four freedoms. And he lists four freedoms, and it's freedom of religion, freedom of speech, um, 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 uh have conquered France, uh, the Japanese haven't conquered Pearl Harbor yet, but 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 Len Lee's 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 to the United States, load the ships with weapons. 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 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 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 he literally like you want to talk about consequential. He not only he kind of spoke America into a new purpose that became the purpose of the postwar order. It just shows you what a politician of that caliber can do with words. Yeah. posts of the one guy standing up kind of looking out giving a speech is uh it's a rockwell for freedoms poster that is repurposed today to annoy people on X. So yeah, enduring. Um you also did a chapter on Reagan's famous uh evil empire speech. This was a speech from nineteen eighty three that is like mostly red meat for a bunch of right-wing evangelical conservative Christians about domestic stuff, abortion, pray in schools. Um, 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. Um 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. Uh that's the end of the quote. Um 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 uh the audience applauded at both times in the story that he was recounting and also in that hall where Reagan was speaking. Uh what the hell? So I actually have a very clear explanation for this, Tommy. Uh and I was surprised uh by what that speech actually was, because I had only heard about it as the Velampire speech. But actually, again, it was a speech about American identity. And again, I tell the story of Reagan's whole life and 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 uh provide uh reproductive health care to girls without the consent of their parents, all these kinds of things. It actually became, you know, unfortunately, because of Donald Trump, uh the law of the land, um, uh, or at least in some states. Um 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 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 I I uh the you should see the freakouts that 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. You know, so 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 tur n their fire on guys like us, you know, the the uh the secular uh you know technocrats, right? Um but I mean I I I learned so much from taking that journey. Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating story. I mean, I guess my 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. Um, but reading both of their speeches kind of left me feeling ashamed when I thought about the words uh and the policies they were espousing and their commitments to fighting fascism and promoting freedom, as imperfect as those efforts could be, when 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 the all these issues are more complicated than poop than Reagan made them out to be, right? It wasn't good versus evil or black versus white. Um, but FDR and Reagan spoke about a commitment to values, and it's like that is just gone. It just doesn't is not a thing. That that's right. I had the same feeling. Because even Reagan, like I don't, you know, agree with a lot of his approaches in politics, but um I 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. Uh there we've just drained the values proposition out of everything we do. Um and and I think that's one reason, again, why Americans feel so demoralized and disoriented, because what is this all about? It cause it just without any values proposition, it's just about pure power and pure transaction