Pope Warns of AI Apocalypse  🔗 **Source:** [Pope Warns of AI Apocalypse](https://share.snipd.com/episode/8a438c45-b697-439c-99da-6ad49c73bd11) ## Highlights - **Sequencing Is The Real Hangup In The Iran Talks** - Trump’s rumored Iran deal likely hinges on sequencing: Iran wants money up front to open the Strait of Hormuz while Trump wants proof first. - Ben Rhodes warns that sequencing deadlock plus Trump’s performative announcements collapses negotiations and risks humiliation or escalation. Transcript: Tommy Vietor After this weekend of furious social media diplomacy from Donald Trump, there were like announcements and background briefings that the deal was almost done. Then there were walkbacks of those announcements. And then we woke up today to airstrikes. So all of it's very confusing. Maybe it was all just a excuse to skip Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. We don't know. Maybe it's a both and there, Ben, you know? Ben Rhodes Quite plausible, actually. Quite plausible. I mean, consider the lengths you would go to to skip Don Jr.'s wedding. Almost anything. Tommy Vietor Yeah, I might start a war with Iran to skip Dunn Jr.'s wedding. Then we're going to bid farewell to the now former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know if she's resigned yet, but she put her letter out. We'll reflect on her time as the nation's top spy. Then we're going to walk through Pope Leo's treatise on artificial intelligence. Very interesting document, very long, interesting document. We'll update you on U.S. Arms sales to Taiwan, this growing Ebola outbreak in Central and Eastern Africa. And then our guest today, like I said, is Ben. We're going to talk about his new book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches. It is available right now. Right, Ben? You can go right now to any store, buy your book. Ben Rhodes 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, Worldos, 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 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. Tommy Vietor Go see Ben if you're there. Also, pause the podcast right now, buy a book. We're going to also, at the end of the episode, focus on two chapters in the book. There's two major speeches, foreign policy speeches, one by FDR, one by Reagan. So we'll talk about those. We'll talk about the art of speeches and leaders moving people or a nation through their words in this day and age. But either way, congrats on this sucker coming out, Ben. And I'm excited to read your book on AI Lego remakes and their role in history in about a decade from now. Ben Rhodes Cause you know, that's the next one. Yeah. Tommy Vietor That's where it's going. Things are moving fast. Also, thank you all for listening to pod save the world. Please subscribe or follow to pod save 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? Ben Rhodes Yes. I mean, we're clearly part of it. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy than Ben Shapiro and just seeing his audience implode. Lovely young man. Another casualty of the Iran war, by the way. Tommy Vietor 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, Pod Save America. You get Dan Pfeiffer 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 because it was a very confusing weekend. Ben and I were both at John Lovett's wedding. Every other couple hours, I was like, 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 war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. 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. 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 he did, it would either be great and meaningful or there would be no deal. So like, I got it just all over the place. I think trying to walk through all of the back and forth is a waste of everybody's time and just confusing. But the gist of what this deal is supposedly might entail is an end to the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets. The Iranians apparently want 24 billion. Then Iran would open the Strait of Hamuz. The US would end its blockade on the Strait of Hamuz. US 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 HEU getting destroyed in place under IAEA safeguards in Iran. That would be a big shift for him. The Israelis have been intensifying and not winding down the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel hit more than 70 targets over the last few days. And Netanyahu said, we're not removing our foot from the pedal. On the contrary, I said, no, press on the pedal even more. Then I think we all assume that Iran will want to charge some sort of toll or fee on ships going forward. And that's going to be a problem for a lot of parties here. Trump decided to randomly complicate everything by announcing that he's requiring or he said, I'm mandatorily requesting that all countries sign the Abraham Accords, whatever That means, because why not upend 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 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 windup there. What are you seeing in terms of the odds of success at this point? And what are the key pros and cons in favor of this getting done that you're evaluating if you try to figure out what's going on? Ben Rhodes 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 i... ([Time 0:05:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef2800d8-6861-453c-9d3c-64b31a95d14f)) - **Bizarre Regime Change Plans Reveal Poor Strategy** - Netanyahu and Israeli sources reportedly floated extreme regime-change plans, including installing Ahmadinejad or Reza Pahlavi. - Ben Rhodes calls these plans bizarre and suggests either terrible planning or purposeful disinformation inside Israeli policymaking. Transcript: Ben Rhodes Yeah, 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, including from Ronan Bergman, who is, I think, byline on both, who's an Israeli- Yeah, he's like the Best sourced reporter. Yeah, very sourced guy. Israel 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 going to parachute in and run Iran, which Is insane that a guy in northern Virginia who hasn't been in Iran since about the time I was born is going to take the country over. And then the second is this idea that Ahmadinejad was going to be sprung from house arrest by targeted airstrikes on his front door. His guards or something. Some IRGC goons were hanging out, then somehow miraculously take over the country. Look, either this is the dumbest. I mean, either the Israelis are dumber about Iranian politics than anyone could have ever imagined, or these are kind of weird disinformation things where, you know, they're trying To actually ice Ahmadinejad inside of Iran by putting this out. Either way, it's just bizarre. I mean, can you explain to me, like, what is the sequence of events that would take Ahmadinejad from house arrest to running the country via Israeli airstream? ([Time 0:15:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6263e806-41eb-49a3-ad27-7de71bfbd469)) - **Tulsi Gabbard's Tumultuous DNI Exit** - Tulsi Gabbard resigned as Director of National Intelligence amid conflicting accounts: personal family health vs. being forced out. - Rhodes and Tommy play a montage of her tenure showing contradictions between anti-war posture and aligning with Trump actions. Transcript: Tommy Vietor 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 shakeup. And a White House official told Reuters and a bunch of other outlets that Trump had expressed displeasure with Gabbard and had been asking around about potential replacements. But let's set that aside, the reasons for her departure. We wanted to celebrate Tulsi's career and tenure in the DNI role in her own voice. Let's watch this little montage of some of her greatest hits. As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers. I was at Fulton County, sir, at the request of the president and to work with the FBI to observe this action that had long been awaited. Speaker 3 President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created 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. Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon. I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having it. Tommy Vietor 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. Speaker 3 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. Tommy Vietor Beautifully done. Beautiful montage there. For those listening and not watching on YouTube, please again, subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube. So the montage starts and ends with this bizarre video that Tulsi released out of nowhere about the threat of nuclear annihilation that apparently pissed Trump off and no one knew what She was talking about. Then it was followed by Tulsi testifying about a little election interference here 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, aloha and peace. Hashtag 2026 prayer emoji. She sent that as she was being cut out of the planning process around the Venezuela operation. So wonderful stuff there. Ben, it is very hard for me to decide what part of her tenure is most impressive. Was it hitting the Obama did treason button at the heart of the Epstein files fiasco? Was it firing officials who produced intelligence products she didn't like? Or was it generally just Tulsi building her career around opposing regime change wars in the Middle East and then helping Trump start and spin one. Did you have a favorite moment or part of her oeuvre? Ben Rhodes Quite a legacy. But I do think actually the last one is the most important one because why is Tulsi Gabbard in that job in the first place? You know, one, because she endorsed Trump and maybe she brought, I don't know, some number of votes his way in a close election. But I think more fundamentally, Tulsi was put at DNI 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 going to make good on my promises. And like almost immediately, he turns around. I mean, honestly, my favorite moment, Tommy, is the whiplash between her saying Iran wasn't close to a nuclear weapon, then being forced to walk that back, then being forced to say that The Iranian nuclear program was obliterated, and then having to go along and justify a war to destroy the nuclear program that had already been obliterated a year before. So she completely sold herself out, sold her principles out for a whiplash of misinformation and to justify whatever it is that Trump either did or said he accomplished. And look, I think what's consequential about it, though, is that this move from Trump away from MAGA, core MAGA, anti-interventionist MAGA, is now cemented. I mean, they're dunking on her on the way at the door, but without Tulsi, without Joe Kent, who's left over there? It's Marco Rubio, noted neocon. It's Pete Hegseth, 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. There's no MAGA people left. Yeah. Tommy Vietor 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 were kind of like failed and ineffectual and then ultimately seeming sounds like you were pushed out. But I don't know, whatever. But to your point about the who's left, I mean, the principal deputy director of national intelligence is a person named Aaron Lucas. He will serve as the acting director. ([Time 0:25:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56b51f0b-ab21-4582-baf1-6654b497fadd)) - **Papal Encylclical Frames AI As Moral Problem** - Pope Leo's 42,000-word encyclical reframes AI as a moral and human question, urging 'disarmament' from economic and cognitive competition. - Rhodes sees the Pope filling a leadership void as tech races and governments fail to coordinate global AI safety. Transcript: Tommy Vietor We are talking about Pope Leo's 42,300 encyclical on artificial intelligence. So a papal encyclical is a formal letter written by the Pope about some major issue. Pope Leo's treatise, it's fascinating. It covered the morality and ethics of AI, its use in war, its impact on democracy and 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. Ben Rhodes Artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death. Let's not fear artificial intelligence, but constantly keep the question of the human in play. 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, let us learn to listen to one another, face the present challenges with courage and cooperate in building a more Tommy Vietor Human and fraternal society. So funny to hear a Pope speaking in like slightly Chicago-accented English. I'm just like, not over it yet. So again, this is a huge document, 42,000 plus words, covered a lot of stuff. But just a few things that jumped out at me, Ben, I'd love to hear what you heard about it. And only about its impact on humanity. There's almost always some element of economic competition from the companies or like nationalism and competition from political leaders. Like we got to beat China. We got to do this. There was none of that here. It was just about like the impact on us as humans. And that was frankly nice. One of the key phrases he used was he talked about the need to disarm AI, but it was an expansive definition of disarming. So he wrote, disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive Phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger data sets driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. Very important idea there. He was adamant that artificial intelligence is not alive or human. He said, so-called artificial intelligence 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 And 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 XIII's encyclical about the Industrial Revolution. More recently, it comes after Anthropik'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 going to 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 the economic race. So Ben, huge document, super interesting stuff. What'd you make of what you read? Ben Rhodes 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. AI. And he spoke about something that was in that anthropic 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 can add to that from a national security perspective, the risks of AI generating recipes for biological weapons and new pandemics, or being somehow involved in nuclear command And control. So there are all these risks. And the reason I found this so interesting, Tommy, is that in normal times, right, as recently as 15 years ago, this would have been a subject of massive global convening. You probably would have had summits taking place with world leaders. You probably would have had the United Nations taking some role in the formulation of, if not treaties, at least the development of standards. You probably would have had some effort to standardize AI safety regulations across the globe. The kinds of things, for instance, that Rishi Sunak actually is the only person who had like an AI safety summit towards the end of his tenure. But the kinds of things that were being discussed in the latest Anthropic model, governments testing AI models before they're released and testing them on some agreed upon set of standards For what you're looking out for. Tommy Vietor Instead, you're the opposite. The United States, like J.D. Vance running around the world, like lecturing anyone that tried to slow down the advancements of the technology. It's like we're just completely, we're just arsonists in this whole conversation. Ben Rhodes 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 ([Time 0:34:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1798ed19-e22c-4280-a63b-f7ecb612d2c4)) - **Get Nontechnical Voices Into AI Governance Now** - Include broader stakeholders in AI governance beyond engineers: religious leaders, civil society, scholars, and governments. - Rhodes and Tommy urge political leaders to offer values-based narratives and regulation proposals to fill the global leadership void. Transcript: Ben Rhodes 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. AI. And he spoke about something that was in that anthropic 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 can add to that from a national security perspective, the risks of AI generating recipes for biological weapons and new pandemics, or being somehow involved in nuclear command And control. So there are all these risks. And the reason I found this so interesting, Tommy, is that in normal times, right, as recently as 15 years ago, this would have been a subject of massive global convening. You probably would have had summits taking place with world leaders. You probably would have had the United Nations taking some role in the formulation of, if not treaties, at least the development of standards. You probably would have had some effort to standardize AI safety regulations across the globe. The kinds of things, for instance, that Rishi Sunak actually is the only person who had like an AI safety summit towards the end of his tenure. But the kinds of things that were being discussed in the latest Anthropic model, governments testing AI models before they're released and testing them on some agreed upon set of standards For what you're looking out for. Tommy Vietor Instead, you're the opposite. The United States, like J.D. Vance running around the world, like lecturing anyone that tried to slow down the advancements of the technology. It's like we're just completely, we're just arsonists in this whole conversation. Ben Rhodes 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. Tommy Vietor Yeah. And how much people just don't trust the technology companies who are obviously like, I feel like, I don't know, I feel this backlash brewing within myself, Ben, which is like so many Of the same people that did grave damage to our society, to young people, to our economy through social media and consolidation of technology power around, you know, advertising are Now running it back and in charge of artificial intelligence with even fewer safeguards. And it's like, why are we letting this happen? And it's nice to hear the Pope come out and like talk about all of this in such a holistic way. Ben Rhodes I think, yeah, what's really notable is, look, Anthropic played a role in this. Anthropic is coming out with kind of their hands up and saying, please, please regulate us. We know how to build this technology. We need somebody else to control it. Because if not, it's going to be a race to the bottom. ([Time 0:39:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9f111a68-25fa-4f5a-a8d8-bf6b173c5636)) - **Pausing Taiwan Arms Sales Undermines Deterrence** - The administration paused a $14B arms sale to Taiwan citing munitions needs for the Iran war, effectively using Taiwan sales as a negotiating chip without receiving concessions. - Rhodes warns this undermines the Taiwan Relations Act and could embolden Beijing to act during a perceived U.S. window of weakness. Transcript: Tommy Vietor Ben, last week we dug into Trump's visit with China. And, you know, frankly, at the time said we hoped that like AI and coordination and safeguards would be part of that conversation. But all signs coming out of it, it was it's kind of just a dud of a meeting, except for that the White House was preparing to sell out Taiwan, or at least signaling that specifically Trump Was making comments to the press about using Taiwan arms sales as a negotiating chip. That was a quote. The sellout is now official. So last Thursday, Trump's acting secretary of the Navy told the U.S. Senate that the U.S. Had paused a recent $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan to make sure that, quote, we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury, which we have plenty. We're just making sure we have everything. But then the foreign military sales will continue when the administration deems necessary. So it's funny to watch these guys get stuck in their own kind of lies, right? Because he's saying, we're not running short of these critical munitions because of the war with Iran, but we need to pause the arms sales to Taiwan in case we are, but we'll be fine. We'll get back to it, right? So they're just like tied up 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 ag 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 APEC meeting and 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? What do you think that means if there's just this constant pushing out of these arms sales for Taiwan security? Ben Rhodes First of all, what's extraordinary about this is he's describing it as a negotiating chip, but he's not getting anything in return. So he's basically negotiating away 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, you know, Taiwan, they passed a law that said that the United States Will commit to helping Taiwan defend itself. And so it was up front with China and Taiwan. Part of what we're going to do to kind of maintain peace across the Taiwan Strait is make sure that Taiwan can sufficiently defend itself against an invasion. Nobody on earth thinks Taiwan is going to use those weapons to attack China. It's purely for their defense as a means of preventing a war. The more Taiwan has got a capable and competent armed forces, the less likely it is that China invades them. So if that gets taken away, if Xi Jinping was able over the course of the year to essentially invalidate the Taiwan Relations Act and the United States is just 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. 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, 2027 and 2028, to do something. And that something could be everything from an invasion of Taiwan to like a blockade of Taiwan, which is another scenario, where they're just squeezing and squeezing and trying to Force them to capitulate. That's clearly the play that China's running. And it's not clear what Trump is trying to get in exchange for this huge gift to the Chinese. ([Time 0:47:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ea39293-dffa-47bb-9e85-20a381ead1e2)) - **Weak Global Health Capacity Amplifies Ebola Risk** - The current Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda worsens because it was detected late, lacks vaccines, occurs in conflict zones, and faces local distrust. - Rhodes says dismantling USAID and U.S. WHO disengagement removed the usual international coordination and surge capacity from 2014 playbook. Transcript: Tommy Vietor 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 World Health Organization has now classified the outbreak as a, quote, public health emergency of international concern. That's a notch below a pandemic in their UN alert system. And the International Rescue Committee said on Tuesday that the outbreak could become the deadliest outbreak on record without urgent international action. So far, there's been more than 900 suspected cases and 222 deaths. There's a few factors making this outbreak worse than normal. The first is that it was just caught pretty late. So the response is likely weeks behind the spread of the virus at best. Second, there's no vaccine or effective treatment for this particular strain of Ebola. That's usually a critical tool of sort of putting a ring around an outbreak and stopping the spread and protecting 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 have these healthcare workers who are trying to battle the virus itself, but they're also dealing with traditional customs. Like, for example, there's a tradition in the region of 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 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 U.S. From the World Health Organization. So there's less coordination and communication. So great work all around, gang. Who could have seen this coming? Everybody. The U.S. Has already restricted travel to the U.S. From people who have been to the affected areas. There's increased screening at airports. So the risk of an Ebola outbreak coming to the U.S. And spreading in the U.S. Is still quite low. But it's very likely to get worse in Congo, in Uganda, and to spread to other countries in the region like South Sudan, where it's probably spread already. So Ben, you were around in the Obama administration in 2014 when there was another very serious, scary Ebola outbreak. Any lessons from that time worth sharing and kind of like things you're watching here? Yeah. Ben Rhodes 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 effective 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. So, I mean, this is not us gratuitously 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. ([Time 0:54:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cfd0daa6-9722-40e1-a22e-8693c87b37dc)) - **Extreme Awareness Stunt Goes Viral In UK** - A UK stunt: John Stevenson pulled a car with his genitals while set on fire to raise awareness for prostate cancer and bullying. - The hosts react with disbelief and dark humor about using extreme attention tactics in the attention economy. Transcript: Tommy Vietor All right, you game? I'm ready. So we're going to roll the clip and you tell us what's happening and why. Oh my God. Ben Rhodes It's going to go out again. Any thoughts? Your wildest guess is not going to get it. 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. Tommy Vietor He's from West Yorkshire, England. He's pulling a Renaults Clio RS car with his penis. Ben Rhodes And then someone lights him on fire. I didn't see that twist. Tommy Vietor Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, Ben, this is how this gentleman decided he would, quote, raise awareness about prostate cancer and bullying in schools. So we slotted this into the pod save the world rundown because it happened in England, I guess. Where does Michael find these? The New York Post is actually the answer on this one. What does that have to do with bullying in schools? And how are those linked? Ben Rhodes 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. Tommy Vietor 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. Ben Rhodes I don't plan on having any more kids, guys. It's just hanging about, so I thought I put it to work. Tommy Vietor I thought I put it to work. Ben Rhodes Well, maybe they're – look, I will say, Labour is looking for a new prime minister. Yeah. Are we aware of this man's politics? Because he's clearly willing to engage in the attention economy in a way that current labor leadership doesn't seem to be. Tommy Vietor He's putting it on the line. Yeah, no, that's more of a Lib Dem move, pulling a car with your flaming dick. Anyway, we thought that would be fun. ([Time 1:00:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b9f6599-52ff-489e-826a-2f508442a09f))