Derek Thompson: Ruling by Emergency

Hello, welcome to the board podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. A quick correction on

history show received many notes that a 55-year-old is not, in fact, a boomer. And while that

is technically true colloquially on this podcast, anyone who's a single day older than

me is actually a boomer. And so it's not it's not Gen X a racer. It is just more about my Peter

Pan syndrome. Do I talk to the show today? One of our phase long time tech and culture

playing a writer for the Atlantic, but now he's got his own sub-stack. He also has a plain English

podcast. His books include hit makers and another one that didn't get much attention called

abundance, which he co-wrote with as recline. It's Derek Thompson. What's up?

How's he going, man? Am I older than you? Am I a boomer? No. No. No. We're just

we're millennials. Okay. It's fun. We're dealing with the linear nature of time differently in

different ways, but we're just doing our best to survive it. As typical when you're on, I just

have a whole kind of grab bag of various things. We're gonna hop all over the place to get various

Derek interests and Derek interviews on the plain English pod, which I'm a frequenter. I don't

think I've heard your opinion on this yet. So we'll see if you have one ready. But you I associate

you with having unified theories of various things, a unified theory of everything or a theory

of how something explains something else. I wonder if you have a unified theory of what we're doing

in a rot because currently and we have American soldiers dying gas prices rising, tariffs going

into effects this week. We're arming the curds. We have no queer regime transition plan. Donald Trump

his whole careers and JD Vance, like they said, they weren't for this sort of thing. Why are they

doing it? What are they doing, do you think? I just had Ruben Guyago on my show or at least

interviewed him yesterday that she was coming out on Friday and I said, have you a seen any evidence

that suggests that an attack from Iran was evident be heard any consistent justification for what

we're doing in Iran. See heard any consistent description of the end game in Iran and he said no,

no, and no. So what's the universal theory of Iran? The universal theory of attacking Iran is that

Donald Trump does whatever the hell he wants, whenever the hell he wants and doesn't ask Congress

for permission and the Republicans in Congress roll over and say, sure, take whatever article one

power you want and make it the new prerogative of the executive branch. That's the story of

Trump 2.0. The story of the last 14 months. And so to a certain extent, there's no possible

unifying theory of foreign policy that explain what we're doing in Iran. And to another extent,

like this is just an extension of the president's personality. We don't have a political economy.

We have Trump's personality, right? He says, I'm going to slap a tariff on you. And if you're

Switzerland, you're like, here's a gold bar. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to reduce your

tariff by 50% because I love gold bars. That's not political economy. That's just Trump loving it when

people pay homage to him and loving to do whatever he wants so that he can force people in a

position where they bend the knee. So to a certain extent, maybe this is just another expression

of his personality. He wants to bomb Iran because he wants to bomb Iran. He hopes that they

change something so that he can declare victory and move on to do the next thing that he wants to

do. And I don't know that it's thought out more than the next 15 minutes or 15 seconds ahead of

the present time. That's the best I have for you. You described, though, kind of a gangsterism

in corruption that defines him. And so that's kind of what I keep coming back to is he's obviously

doing a lot of business in the Middle East, supposedly on BS was for this and BS is funding his

son-in-law doing business with the Emirates and the Qataris. He and BB have close relationship.

Obviously, there's political business being done there, potentially financial business with

what's happening with Gaza. So maybe it's as simple as that because when you say like Trump does

it every once and that's a little bit unsatisfying to me because I feel like I'm an expert

Trumpologist. If nothing else, I'd rather not be. But unfortunately, I had to spend 10 years

thinking about him. And to me, I, invading Greenland made a lot of sense for me with Trump.

You know, he's bullying somebody. It's a real estate play. You get a new toy. You know, you get to

put a building in nuke that has a big flashy Trump on it. Like that makes a lot of sense to me.

Bombing Iran doesn't make any sense. There's not going to be a Trump resort in Casino and

in Tehran anytime soon. I don't think. And so that like takes me back to the other players involved.

Yeah, I think with Trump, the personal is professional for sure. And I don't know the conversations

that he had with BB or MBS, but surely Israel wanted to take out the Supreme Leader Hamani and

wanted to take out the other clerics that lead the Islamic Republic. And it's clear that, you know,

MBS also saw an interest in taking down the current regime in Iran. Maybe they got on the phone

and were persuasive and maybe sort of sprinkled their conversation with illusions to future

deals and Israel and Saudi Arabia. That's totally possible. I agree with the first thing that you

said most that Trump does with every once leaves a lot to be explicated. Why does he want what he

wants? And there again, I think that Trump is sometimes made to be more complicated than he is.

You know, fundamentally, this is someone who likes homage, likes money, likes the feeling of winning.

And so most actions that he takes are about making more money, being dignified, feeling like he's

getting one over the counterparty, feeling like he's winning a zero-sum exchange. But what exactly

we're doing in so clearly subverting one of the first principles of MAGA in the 2024 election,

which is no new wars. We're the peace ticket, no foreign interventions that stay out of the

Middle East as far as military engagements are involved. It's surprising. One way that it was

explained to me. So I did a show on this with a Kreme Sajjapur who is an Iranian analyst. And,

you know, what he said to me that I thought was kind of interesting is he said,

both harmony, the Supreme Leader of Iran and Trump have been acting from a place of significant

hubris. That harmony for his part felt like he was untouchable, that the US wasn't possibly going

to come after him directly. And that was clearly wrong, he's dead. Trump is also a little bit

untilt, you could say, that now that he's seen that he can decapitate the regimes of other

countries by, say, abducting the leader of Venezuela. And now we're talking about maybe, you know,

decapitating the leadership of Cuba. Maybe he felt like, you know what, regime change is just

hard as I thought it was. You don't need boots in the ground. You just need a really well-timed

AI-inflected drone or missile operation that takes out one guy at one time. And then when you take

out the top guy, democracy will just grow. So he's on a hot craps table. It's like you're on a hot

craps table. Sometimes you're making a lot of money, you have a lot of chips that all of a sudden

you look down and you're like, I'm betting $800 on this next role. Like I'm used to only

betting $40, but I'm high at the moment, you know, let's just keep going. Yeah, there's

something to that. I definitely, I don't want to get over my skis and like equating war that's

killing hundreds of people with like a, a, a, a, a, a, a, hot streak in the craps table. But it's

some psychological level. What Karim Sajadpur was saying is there's something similar between

those two phenomena. The feeling of, oh, Venezuela was easy. Maybe Iran is easy. Maybe Cuba is easy.

And we're stuck in the middle of some kind of on tilt hot streak that at the moment is just at

least it seems to me sort of unspooling at a control. The Trump being a winner is another

psychological thing. I like, I think that he's pretty impressed with Israel's military

capabilities and the Assad military capabilities. And then coming to him being like, we know where

this guy is and we're like 20 of his top leaders and they're all meeting on Saturday and, you know,

and the CIA was involved in that as well. But like, Israel has been, has demons, you know,

the page or thing. I think Trump thinks all that is cool, right? And he's like, oh, wait, I can,

we can ride shotgun with people that are winning and know what they're doing here. I think

there's no element of that to it too. Anyway, none of those explanations, whatever it is, I don't

think it's going to be very satisfying for people whose gas prices are going up and who are now

worried that they might have family members or friends being sent into the region to input at risk

or have friends who are living in the region who are at risk. I just like the risk calculation

for some psychological Donald Trump thriller is, I don't think that's a good risk calculation

for them, but we'll see how it plays out. No, I think at the end of the day, you know,

this is already, you know, most military campaigns that the US embarks on began at some relatively

high level of polling. Right. Like one of the reasons why maybe you began something like

the Gulf War 1.0 under George H.W. Bush or the Afghanistan war under W. Bush or even the Iraq war

under W. Bush is that there's an initial approval tacit among the American people or

explicated specifically by the Congress. This is one good reason to have Congress vote for wars,

not only because it's in the Constitution, but also you get a sense of, you know, whether or not

the legislature elected by the people are for this particular move. It's really unusual to have

the executive branch, especially one that's as sensitive to public opinion as the Trump executive

branch has been, to engage in something that's so demonstrably unpopular within the MAGA coalition.

Even if you stopped today and did the Trump thing in declared victory, you know, and it's like,

had you pulled two weeks ago and said, hey, we're going to bomb Iran. We're going to take out the

Supreme Leader. Six American troops are going to die. Your gas prices are going to go up. We don't

know who is going to replace him. I think that that prospect would have pulled it like 30 percent

or 20 percent. I mean, it would have been extremely unpopular prospect. It seems like it's going

to get worse from here. Yeah, this has put a little bit crudely, but right, we're going to kill

someone that most of you have never heard of in a country that most of you never think of,

and the cost of the American people is that they're going to pay a dollar more at the gas station

for every gallon to put into their car. I mean, that doesn't sound, I think, to a lot of people

like a good deal. I mean, just from a strategic standpoint, it doesn't sound like the kind of

America first that I think Trump is on sound just foot articulating. Like, I do believe that one

distinguishing quality of his 2015 candidacy, and you're in a good place to tell me if I'm right

or wrong here, is that he was willing to say things that were unpopular among the elites,

but popular among the public. It would be the distinguishing thing about his 2015 candidacy was

that he was willing to be overly aggressive and and begoted towards immigrants and brown people,

and that he didn't want to go to war. Like, those were the two things that Trump was saying. There

are 16 people on stage. Nobody else was saying it. He was the one who was being like, no, we should

ban all Muslims and we should deport everybody here. And also, we shouldn't go to dumb wars.

Like, no one else was saying either of those things. He did both and the people were with him

on both. And so it's like, it's a total betrayal of his original case to the voters.

Right. So I don't know what he's doing. And the fact that I don't really understand what he's

doing makes me wonder, this is really a question for you. You study this more closely.

How long are we going to do this? Before Trump just says, look, we won. The war is over. I'm declaring

the war over. We did what we wanted to do, which is to assassinate the leader of Iran. Iran,

it's up to you to pick up the pieces, rise up Iranian people. If you want to rise up,

I'm going to go back to talking about various domestic issues and sicking ice on various

innocent US populations. Like, at what point do you think it just becomes utterly necessary

to turn the page? Because this is someone who who looks at the stock market and looks at oil

markets and looks at polling in a lot of cases and seems at least somewhat, if not controlled by

those metrics, and at least sensitive to them. I don't see those metrics sort of blinking green

for several weeks in a way that's going to make him want to keep this up. It's a low confidence

prediction for me, but I was a little just texting with my friends about this this morning. They're

going back to what there's a news story that Pentagon's preparing for being there till September.

What? I like my response to them is what I think is that Pete Higgseth is very excited about this.

And, you know, Pete Higgseth likes to play war. And, you know, it's like kind of make a wish

secretary of defense now, and he wants to bomb stuff. And he thinks that like bombing that ship

in the Indian sea that that was no threat, like, was cool. And like, that's what he's in it for.

But I also think that Trump is going to look at all the polls and markets and gas and pat them

on the head eventually and say, now, okay, war over. Good luck to the people of Iran and the Kurds

and the Mullahs and you guys can find it out. Like, that's what I think he's going to do, but it's

low confidence that because like I said, I just, I thought he was going to talk on this.

Like, I really, I just, I fundamentally didn't think he was going to do it. So I'm missing something

about about the Trump psychology on this one. I want to ask you about there is something that

was more satisfying on your various unified theories of how to look at Trump. He posted this the

other day and it was kind of in the context of the end topic dispute. I want to get into that. But

let's talk about just more broadly first, which is you wrote that you continue to think of

usually the look at this administration is kind of a systematic control F. Monarchy search function

to discover the tools of authoritarianism embedded deep in the legal code. I liked that. Talk a

little bit more about that. Yeah, this is I'm working on a piece about this. So that this is actually

a really great opportunity. It's time to sort of, you know, structure the argument. Yeah. I have

for a while been really interested in this mode of the administration where they continually seem

to be executing the same playbook over and over again in the realm of domestic politics, trade,

and international politics. And that is they seem to consistently do the following. They declare

an emergency. They revive some dormant or esoteric code that gives the executive branch extraordinary

power to essentially do whatever it wants to do. And then they do get out in the courts. I mean,

this is what they were doing in terms of finding. I think it was called statute 10 where they

that allowed the National Guard to be deployed in California to put down protests. Statue 10,

like it was an incredibly random code just hiding somewhere in the legal system that they unearthed

in order to defend what seemed like it could clearly unconstitutional use of National Guard force.

IEPA, which is the law that was initially cited to justify the liberation de tariffs recently

struck down by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, look, the word tariff doesn't appear in

this law. This law is clearly not intended for these purposes. And so this is not legal. And now

we're going to, I think in 1974 law passed after a Richard Nixon initiative that's being used to

justify the next round of tariffs. Never before used, who knew it was there? Well, the Trump folks did.

It seems like over and over again, the administration is almost like teaching us a lesson in the degree

to which American law justifies authoritarianism if you dig deep enough. And so it's like this

search function, I said, control F. Marnecke, like go through the entire US statute and do a control F

for anything that gives the executive branch emergency power to do whatever it wants in domestic

and foreign policy. And they're using this over and over again. And it just disturbs me as a moral

matter, but also interests me to the degree to which we can predict the Trump administration's

going to do next. Like it almost makes maybe like a smarter, like maybe legal reporter,

one I'm used like an advanced version of chat GPT or cloud to essentially like have a swarm of

agents look through the law and predict where are the examples of latent authoritarianism hiding in

the US legal code that the Trump might use in the next two and a half years to justify some

completely cockamimmy scheme that we couldn't currently imagine that that might be a way to almost

run ahead of the administration and predict what they're going to do next. The first thing comes

to mind when you suggest that is the insurrection act and other emergency powers around elections.

And this ties to just the previous conversation we have some people would say that part of the

rationale for what Trump was doing in Venezuela and Iran is that there are people in the administration,

Stephen Miller in particular, that want us to be in wartime because it gives them greater emergency

powers both around immigration and elections. And I think that's a coherent theory. That's

obviously true on immigration. I think TVD on elections, but certainly plausible given their past

behavior. And you set this question up with an example that I didn't even give in my answer,

which is that Pete Hegseth, after contract negotiations broke down with the AI company in

Thropick, labeled and Thropick a supply chain risk under section 3252, which is a section that

has typically only been applied to foreign companies that are essentially saboteurs like Huawei,

the Chinese company that we worried had a backdoor to the Chinese government. We currently,

because of our use of section 3252 on in Thropick, are treating them like an enemy of the state,

treating them worse than many Chinese AI companies that we know have a backdoor to the military or

the intelligence of the CCP. So here again, we have like who would have thought that like a contract

negotiation that breaks down ends up with like the nuking from outer space of an AI company using

this esoteric statute. It's this idea that we're in a period where the executive branch is

essentially ruling by emergency. Almost again, teaching us all sorts of ways that the legal code

reserves for the executive branch, such extraordinary powers, if it can be proved that we are in an

emergency. That is both terrifying as a sort of matter of US democracy. But also, again, from an

analytics standpoint, I think it's interesting, because once you see the formula of an adversary

or an organization that you're criticizing, once you see the formula, then you can run ahead of

them and detect it. So I'm hoping that lawyers can sort of get ahead and maybe make their arguments,

for example, of the Insurrection Act, and that's going to be used in the midterms or 2028.

Get those arguments ready under the understanding that under the prediction that something in the

realm of an emergency might be declared for future elections. All right, y'all, there's nothing

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I want to go deeper and anthropic, but your answer to their peaked one thought in my mind is

tied to the abundance book and kind of how Democrats should think about this sort of thing. And that

is, you know, does this realization like make you think different about how the other side can

govern, right? And so in a lot of ways that the Democrats have been vetoed from their

from getting their priorities through by activist groups that look through the code and look

through look for ways to slow down projects that they don't like. And this is what you wrote about

your book. Should a democratic, you know, administration in the future think about how to how to

inverse that to, you know, be a benevolent control of monarchy. Yeah, there's a part of me that

was almost wishing you wouldn't ask this question because I like I struggle with it a little bit.

I was just having this conversation with a friend. I was on a John Stewart couple like over Christmas

and he basically asked a version of this question with him being like enthusiastically on the side

of yes, like we need kind of benevolent soft authoritarian on the on the left. And I just I like

vacillate back and forth wildly based on the example provided, you know, and I think that there's

some examples of just do things that are absolutely right and others that that get me very nervous.

So anyway, go ahead. Yeah, it's a really, really great, great question. And this is also

literally thinking out loud. You keep hitting on articles that I want to write. Maybe after this

podcast is over, I'm going to go back and just listen to myself and be like, oh, yeah, here's

like my five minutes. You're just team up. The exact same stuff with the bull work. We do have an

editing team. Just something to think about. You're fair point. Here's the thing a useful place to

begin. Abundance wants to follow the law. We also just want better laws. We want zoning

loss to be better. We want permanent loss to be better. We want energy construction project laws

to be better. I don't want to future. It's just dueling parties claiming emergency powers to do

whatever the executive branch wants until the end of time. That doesn't seem like a particularly

healthy path for democracy. That said, Donald Trump is definitely pushing on a really interesting

point, which is that I think that liberals, the Democratic Party in the last 50 years in particular.

And this is a thesis that's that's latent or sometimes even made explicit in abundance

have been too consumed with process, have been too obsessed with. Let's make sure that we

create processes that listen to every possible group before moving forward with the outcome,

rather than focusing on outcomes in the first place. That's that's absolutely a theme of

abundance. This this liberal almost fetishization of process. Donald Trump just not fetishized

process. That's what him sure. And so there's a way in which he's almost like the the warrior of

the opposite of. And he points to the ways in which you can go too far on both dimensions.

You can be a party that is too obsessed with procedure. And you can be a party that is so

uninterested in procedure and so taken with the ability of the executive branch or you know,

whatever ruling party is in power to just run a rough shot over the law by claiming emergency

powers forever. Those are two different extremes. I want to land somewhere in the middle.

You know, there are examples from the book of Democratic leaders declaring sort of an emergency.

And using that emergency to do what I think is objective good. So the classic example from our

book is when the I-95 bridge fell down in Pennsylvania. Joshua Peirot declares an emergency.

He sweeps OA a bunch of permitting and NEPA rules in order to build the bridge back as fast as

possible. I think the line you quoted from the book is that under typical conditions that bridge

would have taken nine years to build and instead it took only a matter of months. That's fantastic.

I want bridges to be built faster in America, especially when those bridges fall down and they

typically carry millions of cars. I don't want those same emergency powers to be used in order to

terrorize Hispanic Americans. So one can believe that it is possible for the president to move faster

than the executive branch typically moves and also believe that one can move fast to do terrible

things and one can move faster to do good things. And that's why you simply try to win elections.

It's why it's important to be the party in power who has the power to use those same laws to

move outcomes in a good direction rather than a direction of terrorizing people.

It's funny that you mentioned warrior that he's a warrior because for some reason that was sick

in my head when I was reading Darios memo and the information yesterday. I was like Darios,

it's kind of like we have now Mario and a warrior and Dario is kind of like a different type of

bizarre archetype. He was the head of Anthropics for people don't know. Here is his memo.

Derek kind of laid out the backstory for people that messed it basically. The Department of War

was using Anthropics AI tool Claude for military purposes and talked wanted to put some pretty

normal limits on the use of this tool like you can't use it for mass surveillance of Americans.

Now you can't use it for surveillance. You can't use it for mass surveillance of Americans.

And you can't automate it so that the tool itself shoots weapons like a human has to do it.

That's kind of a short thumbnail of what the limits were. This was what started the fight that

you this reference Derek, which where the government now turned Anthropic into, you have an

enemy company that they're trying to kill. Darios comments why this happened in internal

memo to staff this week. It was this. We haven't given dictator style praise to Trump while Sam

has talking about Sam Altman of open AI, which is now going to take on the contract. We have

supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We've told the truth about a number of AI

policy issues like job displacement and we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than

colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees. What do you make of like

this the fight that is now emerging where like he's trying to position like I guess a white hat

in a black cat AI company or a blue versus a red AI company maybe competing in the public swear.

What do you think the implications are that? There's something I feel very strongly about and there's

something that I'm still trying to work out my feelings about. I'll start with what I feel very

strongly about. And that is that Pete Hegseth labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and essentially

saying therefore that a it Anthropic can't do business with any company that does business with

the Pentagon companies that include Amazon Google Microsoft. That's an attempt to murder a company

as the result of simply not getting what they want out of negotiations. That is a direct violation

I think of the principle of private property. You cannot be the government and enter into a contract

with a private company and say we have terms those terms could include the price it could include

restrictions on use and say if we don't get what we want we reserve the power to destroy your company

by saying that you can't do business with any company that does business with the US government

that's unbelievably unbelievably nowist I think and it's is sharply ironic that when the

Trump administration came into power one of the big differences between their perspective on

artificial intelligence and the Biden administration's perspective on artificial intelligence

was on the issue of regulation. The Biden administration was much more pro regulation of AI

especially in the future than the folks who came in on the Trump administration and now you have

Pete Hegseth essentially establishing the federal government as the most aggressive regulator

of artificial intelligence in the developed world if you essentially have the government being able

to say we can destroy your company if we don't come to terms. So that's what I feel most strongly

about that this is a grigis behavior on the part of I can't believe I have to say it but the secretary

of war is how we do it you have to make fun of it. There's no gutter all accent area war

what I feel less strongly about is whether in the topic had any business being a contractor

with the federal government or with this federal government I believe that like two parties in a

contract can simply agree to disagree right I spoke to folks in the administration about about

this case I spoke to folks in the administration I think are are uncrazy and they they said this to

me they said look if Lockheed Martin was you're doing business with the US government and they sold

the US government one of their fighter jets and they said by the way we have certain restrictions

on the use of these fighter jets you can't use this jet to bomb Iran we would really prefer you

don't even fly these jets in the Middle East at all because of the morals and the values of this

company if the defense department was simply like okay we're not going to buy your planes Lockheed

Martin no thanks that's how things go yeah right I think it's okay for the US government for the

for the Pentagon to have said look you want certain restrictions on the use of artificial

intelligence and it's my understanding that this really broke down when it came to autonomous

technology even more than the surveillance piece that's being talked about a little bit more in

the in the media it's my understanding it really broke down over over autonomous use like a

autonomous drone swarms and things like that if anthropic has different values in the Pentagon I think

two parties can simply say this deal can't go forward yes we found a $200 million contract with you

this would be the perspective andthropic a year ago you want to change the terms of that contract

we're not comfortable with that goodbye the contract is over that's normal behavior you want to

sound a contract that allows for AI use of autonomous drone swarms you can go to open AI you can

go to Gemini you can go to whoever else and you can sign that contract that's that's freedom

that's that's the kind of capitalist freedom that I believe in using as a back pocket tool we

nuke your company from outer space if you say no that's a grigis that's that's insane insane behavior

and I honestly almost wonder this is maybe a hope I'm pretty out in the world it's so

insane I don't know if it lasts the month I don't know if that if that supply chain restriction

lasts the month because it's it's so unbelievably crazy and demonstrably anti-capitalist and the truth

is the folks who are running AI policy for the Trump administration like David Sacks you can say a

lot of things about them they're capitalist they are neoliberal capitalist some of them are getting

a little fond of Chinese capitalism I think yeah but even there it's just it's weird I mean I don't

support this policy but it's interesting that they are more willing to sell

and video chips to the Chinese and the Biden administration right that's neoliberalism the idea

of like unfettered globalization is the very thing or it's corruption well yes yes you could you

could say I'm not trying to bend over backwards to make the policies to say and watch the policies

you can simultaneously describe it as Jensen Wong the CEO of NVIDIA being the tale that wagged

the Trump administration right that is a I think of a valid interpretation and there's another

interpretation that says how ironic is it if the Trump administration's centerpiece of economic

policy is tariffs tariffs tariffs but how do they treat artificial intelligence one they exempt

tens of billions of dollars of computer parts from tariffs AI is exempt from tariffs number two

they sell the parts promiscuously around the world we have a protectionist policy for everything

that isn't AI and a neoliberal globalization policy for everything that is AI that's interesting

and I think it's true and it makes deeply ironic the fact that this hyper capitalist approach to

AI policy now sits alongside this frankly malice approach to punishing companies that don't sign

the right contracts with the with the Pentagon that is a that is an incredibly weird

juxtaposition of policies you basically echo this I don't know how much there's to add it's worth

noting that you know it's not just us like lib cucks that are advancing this like dean ball

who was in the Trump administration doing AI made essentially the case you just made about

the perniciousness I may or may not have just gotten off the phone with dean ball five minutes ago

okay yeah okay so is there anything that and I think the interesting thing I mean he basically

the case you just made we don't need to repeat it about about how wide this policy in particular

is pernicious we're saying for folks you don't know dean ball is one of the co-authors of the AI

action plan from the Trump administration he worked for the administration for five months

yes he's against us but then he made kind of even a broader case about how this is kind of a

sign of the end of the American Republic be a little dramatic but that it's just one you know one

more advancement and institutional decay and in you know advancement of tyranny through through

the executive I don't know if there's anything to add about that I don't want to steal thunder

from from my own podcast I think the show is going to come out on Tuesday let me steal man dean's

case because I don't see everything from his point of view but I think I see what he's getting

at here imagine two trains coming down two tracks sort of barreling into this entity that is a

stable American democracy one train is the extraordinary concentration of power in the executive

branch that we've seen surely under the Trump administration no elaboration necessary but that

we've also seen in the last few administrations the growth of executive orders the book the imperial

presidency was written by Arthur Slesinger and 60 years ago so the idea that the executive branch

is growing in its power and that the legislative branch congress is becoming more and more of

a sort of shriveled do nothing rump of American democracy that's something that certainly

being accentuated by the last 14 months but is a theme that pre-existed a Trump selection sure

that's the first trend is coming toward us the extraordinary monarchical power of the executive

branch that's emerging. Trin number two is an artificial intelligence is simply going to be

able to give to certain executive authorities powers that they've never had before one of the

big worries that the Biden administration folks have of AI being sold into China is that China

would build a surveillance state that would make 1984 look like kindergarten they would be able to

use all the technologies that exist on the bodies Chinese people and along the streets of China

in order to surveil people such that they create a kind of 21st century panopticon that eliminates

any sense of personal or private freedoms it's not crazy to think that an incredibly powerful

artificial intelligence could do the same in the US in a way that would allow an executive branch

to the future to use all sorts of private data to eliminate freedoms that we someone

come to expect that for example if you want to use my computer and search data in order to make

some kind of case against me if you're an administration and I'm a critic it's a little bit

labor intensive to ask a bunch of different people at NSA or some other agency to track down all

this information and you know put it together into some kind of cash that that builds this case

against me but what if you have a team of AI agents that can pull together extraordinarily

personal information about Americans the drop of the hat well now what you've essentially done

is transform the micro economics of government surveillance and so if you think about these two

trains coming down the track the rise of the anarchical powers the executive branch and the

incredible falling price of mass surveillance and the things that autonomous AI agents could do with

it that's a frightening picture and so that's part of I think what he's worried about when it comes

to like what does American democracy really look like if we have this super empowered executive

branch that's also making use of a technology that's more facile at getting into our lives and

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I want to talk about you expand on this a little bit through the conundrum of how

our tech oligarchs think about all this right because there is a little bit of a paradox here

where as you kind of laid out they were very upset with the Biden administration's plans for

AI regulation they don't want that so I guess the questions what do they want and maybe they want

the panopticon I don't know but I want to play for you there's this clip that's been going around

for a while now to get your take on and in this clip in recent it's talking about what a

supposed Biden administration official was telling him about their plans for AI regression.

AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control

this is not going to be a startup thing they actually said flat outs don't start don't do AI

startups like don't don't fund AI startups it's not something that we're going to allow to happen

they're not going to be allowed to exist there's no point they basically said AI is going to be a

game of two or three big companies working closely with the government and we're going to basically

wrap them in a you know they I'm paraphrasing but we're going to basically wrap them in a government

cocoon we're going to protect them from competition we're going to control them and we're

going to dictate what they do and then I said well yeah I said I don't understand how you're

going to lock this down so much because like the math for you know AI is like out there and

it's being taught everywhere and you know they literally said well you know during the cold

war we we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and

and and and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed and that if

we if we decide we need to we're going to do the same thing to to math to the math underneath AI

wow and I said I've just learned two very important things

because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were you know even conceiving

of doing it to the latter I'm kind of skeptical this conversation even happened to be honest

really happened how he said it but Mark Anderson claims that that in that that he's talking to

some Biden administration AI official and that they were saying Mark don't even start AI

companies right because government's going to regulate this and control it we're going to

pick a couple of winners and call it call it good he ejected to that because he wanted the world

the flourish the AI world the flourish that is but it's pretty interesting in the context what we're

saying with with Anthropic so what do you think about it I was in the room I have no idea what

the Biden folks said to Mark Andreessen but here's like a statistical fact why combinator is probably

the most famous startup incubator in the Bay Area for new companies so if you want to understand

like what are new companies in America interested in in the realm of tech go to a combinator

under Joe Biden this share of why combinator companies that were AI companies rose from

something like 20 to 90 percent so this idea that the Biden administration wasn't going to allow

AI startups to exist certainly runs in the face of the evidence that dozens and dozens if

not hundreds and hundreds of AI startups not only existed under Joe Biden but the number kept growing

so I don't know what that conversation exactly was about but if the Biden administration's policy

goal was to stop AI startups from happening that was the least successful Joe Biden policy that

exists and that it and it has some competition it's a competitive category that's point number one

point number two as I would point out the obvious irony the Mark Andreessen supports an

administration that is currently dead set on controlling controlling Anthropic and destroying

the company if they aren't able to control their defense relationships that's a little ironic if

you are if you're fear of the Biden administration is that they were going to exert too much regulatory

power over the artificial intelligence industry then why aren't you unbelievably furious at the

amount of regulatory might currently being brought in order to punish Anthropic there's an irony

more broadly like what do the tech oligarchs want I don't know but I think it's always important

when like describing a group that feels like an outsider group this happens with with billionaires

it happens with CEOs it happens with with any out group it can happen with you know other other

ethnicities sometimes when we're trying to describe an out group we describe them as a homogeneous

thing and then the more you learn about that out group the more you realize how much heterogeneity

exists inside of it so it's it's one thing to easily say you know billionaires want x tech CEOs want

x but you know Sam Altman and Dario Amade if you know their history if you know that Dario Amade left

open AI and we'll just start Anthropic if you know that like they hate each other to the extent that

like there was recently a photo op on a stage in India of like AI CEOs sort of like holding each other's

hands and Sam and Dario were right next to each other and their hands were just up like this not making

contact with each other these are really really different people and I think that I do think they

want different things does it Sam like to be touched are you sure that's not like a spectrum thing

I think it was holding a hand I'm not going to hold do a whole as a puter film fan are like exactly who

is to some things that the kind of person doesn't like to be touched but okay I take your point I

think I think the bottom line here is that in trying to describe like what do the artificial

intelligence architects you know one from this technology I think it's hard to say for a couple

of reasons one some of them deliberately started their companies in opposition to companies that

existed well then can we just narrow the question then to the Trump loving oligarchs you know the

and recent in the deals and you know this yeah I mean I don't know they they they want to make

money they want to make money and they think they feel like Donald Trump is a counterparty that

they can negotiate with and the Biden administration was group people they couldn't negotiate with

I think that's as parsimonious an answer as I can possibly give I don't think that the entire tech

right necessarily feels like Donald Trump really is as great as they let on I think that in private

conversations that you know are are not being you know live tweeted my sense is a lot of them are

willing to say this action is crazy that action is crazy but fundamentally these are people who

got into business to do business and they ended up lining behind Trump not only because they were

ideologically aligned with him and against some kind of like you know Wilkery that was incipient

Silicon Valley around the country but also fundamentally because they were like Donald Trump is a

counterparty that we can do business with and that we can get rich with and we're concerned that

the Biden folks are going to stand in our way in various ways whether it's crypto regulation or

something artificial intelligence I want to be clear like there's some questions that you ask me

where I'm like I feel very confident about this because I've done the work I have not done the work

understanding exactly what these guys want yeah I ask it just because I this is where I get into

like the bull work info worst territory sometimes but I don't know I just look at the behavior of what

we've seen from them fully getting on board with Donald Trump centering basically around crypto and AI

as the reasons and you know wanting to have a total deregulation of that and and becoming

overly hostile to Biden over some pretty minor frankly attempts to put reasonable regulations on

those two products I don't think what I see is like some libertarian desire for no government

control I think that I see is that they want to gain as much power as possible outside of the

government with their with their AI and and monetary tools and then have

apply it government that works in concert with them I think it's just a different brand of

authoritarianism like I think that that's what they want maybe you think you're drawing a distinction

and maybe you are drawing a distinction I don't see much daylight between our answers I think fundamentally

these are you know these are venture capitalists with limited partners who want to return their

limited partners as much money as possible and think that the Biden administration's rules and

personnel were likely to get in the way of that end and saw in the Trump administration a group of

people that were very interested in making deals with more conservative VC capitalists and essentially

doing whatever they want and to a certain extent you know you have to admit that a part of that

bet is definitely paid off when it comes to say crypto regulation the Biden administration was

absolutely regulating crypto you said the the regulations for minor I think folks in crypto would

say the regulations were significant it doesn't matter the point is it is an objective fact that

crypto has been significantly deregulated regulation is also come on yeah unregulated I mean

you look at you look at the Trump deal with finance alone I mean it's just absolutely sure

you can do crypto crime now there's no there's no enforcement of crypto crime no that's right yeah

crypto crime right it's it's a paradox yeah and so so there I do think yeah their prediction

that the Trump administration would not only roll over on crypto regulations but also they were

interested enough in making hundreds of millions of dollars on crypto would mean that they would

have a counterparty in the White House right I do think that that that was a part of the calculation

I think it's a bad bet because you know you've seen how this is going poorly with you know stupid

populist authoritarians and the big industrialist the cut the deals with them there's just a lot more

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well we're doing the big industrialists and trying to figure out what's happening would you have

a hot take for me on the paramount wvd merger at all i just look at our friend zaz and i've got to

think is as the capitalist wing of antifa over here at the bulwark you know i find myself sometimes

frustrated with the capitalist part of our mission because like this is a person that took over

company like added absolutely no value to the world at all fired a lot of people made the product

less appealing more expensive yes less viable in the market and then just sold it to a nepo baby

for way more than it's worth because the nepo baby wants to influence the government and he is

like applauded in business circles has like a great capitalist and i'm like this is crazy to me

yeah i mean i think i think i'm i'm quoting from the scripture of mat bellany my fellow

podcaster the ranger and also author of a great puck newsletter on hollywood that it's it's a

little morally sickening for someone to make as i think zaz level make eight hundred to nine hundred

million dollars by executing a sale that is almost certainly to result in the loss of thousands

of jobs the idea that you can make nine hundred million dollars by simply cutting jobs really sucks

at a preferential tax treatment on that too which is nice you know you're not saying at the income

tax rate that's nice i i do think that there's there's there's there's like two layers to

the story like i do the one layer is is the story of the merger netflix is bid the rejected bid

the fact that yet again you have the top administration using anitrust as an extension of

personal policy basically picking winners and losers based on who are friends of the administration

and it's important to say here and i think you started this ball rolling david elison the head of

paramount which is buying Warner brothers discovery uh is the son of larie elison who's one of

trump's best billionaire friends and i think he's soon to be neighbor he's a CEO of or of work all

uh i think elison is is buying some property near marlago very soon so there's there's that story

which is which is like really sickening it's sickening at a moral level at a legal level but it's in

this it's in this broader and this is sometimes where where people hate me where i talk about macro

economics it's so cold but it is existing in this broader context where hollywood is just really

struggling at the reason that Warner brothers discovery is a distressed property is that it's an old

school legacy player in a world that's being completely transformed by streaming and tech talk

i mean just two statistics it'd be a lot of sense of just how in what trouble the the the movie

industry is in number one in the long picture americans used to buy 35 movie tickets a year

in the 1940s now we buy 2.5 2.7 movie tickets a year that's an enormous decline but that change

is not just over say 80 years just since the pandemic i think morgan stanley yeah jp morgan

recently did this analysis where they looked at different businesses in terms of their recovery

since the pandemic and so they showed that restaurant sales were up like 20 percent and you know

cruises were up and hotel revenue is up like 20 percent since the pandemic and you go all the way

down to movie tickets bought and it's down 40 to 50 percent since the pandemic i mean the movie

industry is never coming back film sold about 1.2 1.6 billion movie tickets a year every year of

the 21st century before 2020 at this rate at current trajectory americans will never buy one

billion movie tickets ever again ever again the movie industry will never get back to 2019 and in

that context you're dealing with companies that just aren't built for the next five 10 certainly

20 years and as a result like something's going to have to be done some jobs are going to have to

be cut and then absolutely sucks and i certainly don't think that zazlash we paid 900 million dollars

for executing a deal exactly for managing the roman decline like there's a reason why we don't

talk about the roman emperors and the backside um of of you know packs romana we as as being great like

they didn't necessarily do a great job they just they were just there as the rollercoaster was

rolling down the hill but i do think it's important to say just the matter of like understanding the

big picture here that like hollywood is in trouble and the reason why you have these distressed

assets being passed around is that netflix and tech talk and youtuber eating everybody's lunch

i agree with that this is what we have our dualing expertise and obsession so because i just would

like add on to that the simultaneous story is that that is that the elisons wildly overpaid

for that product that you just laid out yep that is declining that because they think that they've got

like a great business idea this isn't you know capitalism in the purest sense we're talking about

how you have a you know somebody who's got a new idea about how they can create more value out of

this company and so they're going to purchase it or they're going to find efficiencies like

it's not any of that it's just it's just corruption they want to get favor with the government and

they want to have more influence over the flow of information simple as that like that's why they

about the company not because they want to create more value does anybody think they could make money

on this deal like i don't think anybody even thinks they could make money on this deal i don't

i don't think i know and and we've even mentioned the fact that i believe the debt receipt right now i

think it's seventy nine billion dollars in debt that this company is holding it's covering that

the south the kassaudis the emorades and the kitaris tangus back to the original and the rough

thing for the for the folks working this industry is it's really really hard to pay off that debt

given the future sort of earnings of this company without cutting a lot of jobs and so essentially

the debt's going to be serviced on the backs of a lot of people who work in hollywood

it all really really have an Saudi Arabian Batman to pay off the pay off the debt you know

it's nice based in riyadh okay we got to go fast in these last last ones because as always we're

going over i'm cutting some of them you have an orality theory of everything podcast it was great

people should go listen to that how metrics make us miserable i totally agree with that so i'm

anti metric you're in your aura ring and talking about how that's making you sad people should go

read about that i want to get you on on three more things rapid fire just on abundant stuff updates

i had more us caps on yesterday's pod who is zoran's media consultant and um on the internet

you would think that there is like a massive debate over your book between like left populists

who you know think that you're in in the thrall of rich billionaires and then you have like

others who are more pro-abundance who just think that i don't know democrats should should provide

better services to people in fact and that the left critics are crazy at the elite level though

you have to feel pretty good that that kind of across the democratic spectrum at least people

are at least taking elements of this and and zoran in particular i'm wondering how you would

kind of grade him on an abundant scale in the first couple months super early to offer a grade

but i'm really really glad you pointed this out i think my first column for my substack was about

an idea that i called the poster politician divide where i said that if all you do is pay attention

to the debate about abundance on the internet we're just poster versus poster it's going to look like

the left versus the center left absolutely hates each other and that you can either be an economic

populist or believe in some abundance principles like making it easier for people to build housing

that's an illusion it's an illusion of twitter it's an illusion of posting the reason there's a

poster politician divide is that zoran mamdani looks at the example of jersey city just across the river

where supply side reforms allowed them to build more housing which pushed rents down not just rent

freeze rents down and he said i like that there are a lot of abundance piled folks who are housing

advisors to the mamdani administration is maybe you were hearing from from cats you're you're

guessed the other day was kind of funny when i asked him why that happened he was like you know when

you're an executive role you start to start making practical decisions and i was like oh great

so yeah you want to call it practical yeah if you want to you want to call it yeah a

negotiation with practicalities that's that's fine but i think it's important to say it's this is

not just mamdani right Elizabeth Warren is the co-author of a very good very promising housing bill

that has a lot of abundance principles in it even though i'm sure a lot of folks who work for

Elizabeth Warren believe that you know i am brought to you by the elephants you know Chris Murphy

i think is a progressive he has talked about abundance being something that can exist alongside

economic populism james taleriko i know for a fact because i spoke into him as someone who likes

abundance and also talks about how the problems in america aren't left versus right but up versus

down the one percent versus everyone else there again you have economic populism and you have

abundance you know rocona another example of a progressive representative who on the one hand

is definitely thought of as maybe like one of the most famous advocates of medicare for all which

to a lot of people doesn't sound an idea that sort of leaps from the pages of abundance and is also

spoken not only publicly but also privately about how much he he likes a lot of a lot of

was in abundance especially the stuff about increasing state capacity at the effectiveness of

governance i'm glad you pointed that out because i think that conflict is great media and so like

definitely don't make this like the headline of the club yeah it conflict is good media it'll

probably be making fun of market injuries that's absolutely a little bit yeah conflict conflict

cells yeah conflict cells i should have made fun of its cone head when i was doing that that would

have done even better yeah i i'm not going to get in on that but feel free to make that the clip

at the end of the day like the cash value of politics is what happens in the world right like

white is politics matter because the people who win power do you think with that power if people

who run for office who agree with aspects of the book don't want to put permitting reform

on a bumper sticker i don't give a shit like win abundance is what happens if the bumper sticker

works and you win how do you make people's lives better like that's what i care about plus your

topics are like tenuously related because in i guess it was 23 and 24 you did an end of year article

for the Atlantic about like the scientific advancements of the year i always really liked that article

breakthroughs of the year yeah and you'd come up and we'd come in this podcast we'd go through

the breakthroughs of the year you learn me some things about science because that was the category

i did the worst in on a ct we didn't get to do that this year because you're a parent now yeah

so you took it off twice over yeah yeah and so i want to first here if you have a breakthrough

for me it's something to make me feel good and then we'll close with a little parenting now

most interesting thing that's happening right now in in medical sciences i think is we're in a phase

of the gop1 revolution where these drugs were developed for diabetes they were found to have weight

lost principles and then we realized it a bunch of other things that they reduced inflammation

among people who weren't even losing weight if they were good for cardiovascular health again

among people who weren't even losing weight and right now i did an interview in my podcast with

the davrix who's the CEO of ilai lili which is the company behind minjaro and set down and they're

now in phase two and phase three clinical trials of versions of these drugs designed specifically

for things like addiction or neuro generative health dementia Alzheimer's so this idea that

gop1s initially seemed like this incredible drug that pushed one button it now turns out

that it's more like a splayed ham that's pushing five buttons at once and companies like ilai lili

are trying to figure out could we design a drug that's really really good at pressing this button

over here with outside effects really good at fixing addiction but doesn't cause nausea really good

at slowing plaque growth that is indicative of Alzheimer's without causing the southern side effect

that's common among people who use the highest dosage for type two diabetes or weight loss

that's really exciting because these are problems dementia in particular i really don't want

dementia so i don't want it either yeah i really don't want it either and the truth is drowning in

dementia there might be my two biggest fears a literative fears i appreciate that and i also like

this is this is an area where we've tried really hard we have spent billions of dollars trying to

find something anything that can slow dementia and Alzheimer's and we have struck out again and

again and again there's a theory of the plaque hypothesis that might have been like a total dead end

on this sort of dosing side and the pharmacological side that may have just caused the waste of

billions of dollars of medical research tens of billions of dollars maybe might have really hurt

some people in clinical trials as well and so just how wonderful would it be if it turned out that

this worked i don't know if it'll work right you don't know until the face of your clinical trial

is over but you know we talked about some depressing things i think there's some optimism this really

does seem like a drug that for a variety of complicated reasons is pressing a lot of buttons at once

and it'd be great to isolate some of those effects and make specific drugs for things like addiction

and dementia that's the most recent piece was about parenting which was very cute and you talked

about falling in love with a stranger and how parenting teaches you about that yeah a little

addition to it but why don't you so i just think it's being a parent is really interesting it's

also an incredible cliche and i try to go directly at that that like there's nothing about parenting

that isn't a cliche which makes it hard to write about an interesting way but one thing that

i feel that i don't think is is articulated enough by parents is a degree to which you have a baby

or one's wife has a baby or someone else has a baby that you adopt and the baby comes home

and that baby is not the same baby week three and it's not the same baby month six and you know my

kids are two years and two months old but it's not the same baby i imagine at five years old the

ten years old the twenty years old and so in a way i think what i said is like in a phenomenological

sense you don't raise a singular baby you raise a series of babies that keep changing yet

retain the basic facial structure of the baby that the woman gave birth to and there's something

really beautiful about this idea that being a parent therefore means falling in love with the

sequence of strangers that keep repairing behind your child's face and i think an indelible part

of of parenthood an indelible part of enjoying parenthood is making peace with that inevitable

change i think there may be a larger lesson here about if you can make peace with the changes

intrinsic to your child i know you can make peace with the changes that are intrinsic to life

and into into being alive um but that i think is like probably like the deepest and most true

thing about parenting is that your kids are this sort of sequence of strangers that

never stop changing and i think that's kind of beautiful i related observation that i've been

struggling to put my finger on that you know you're you had my neurons firing over um was

my child being adopted was like even more of a literal stranger right because like doesn't

share the DNA and um you don't know kind of what she is going to develop into and my brother had his

first kid like six months before we adopted her and i remember being in the in hospital with him

and his wife my sister and mom and seeing that kid when he was born and like he looked like me

and my brothers didn't wear kids like you could just see it or like we he's very much you know

strong strong genes like all my brothers what we all look like and the baby looked like us and

this baby now i kind of reminds me just of me now he's like nine and he's like the first child

he's very much like me but at the time i was it gave me this fear that i was like and i

gonna love this kid because of the familiarity more right like and will i ever be able to like

overcome that and like that fear dissipated like hour three of my daughter's life you know i was

just like wait a minute no it's hard to figure out like why that is like what i guess it is it

something about like how we're wired with the nurturing you know is it something about like what

you were talking about how there is you know this extra joy that comes from like learning about

the new person and growing and loving this stranger as they develop and grow and i don't know

i was reading i was reading your piece and i was like i still don't feel like i've quite put my

finger on on what it is that makes that connection even deeper but i'm sure happy it worked out for me

yeah i think it's a lovely thought you know my wife and i might adopt in the future and i've

thought about that right like how how does a parent think about a biological child versus an

adopted child but i think i think your experience is probably instructive and probably very

common you know i don't think people are this is like an evolutionary psych thought so some people

hated some people might not hate it but like i don't think we're meant to do that many things

like we're built to eat we're built to drink we're built to to reproduce certainly you know the

genes don't survive without that um we're built to stay alive but one of the things were clearly

built to do one thing the species could not survive without we are built to fall in love with our

children if we didn't if we if we were hard to fall in love with your child you and i wouldn't be

here because this species would have died out millions of years ago and so like i i think it was more

interesting to eat your child for example then sure i think i think right i think i think loving

your child i think i think it's it's a it's certainly a it's a blessing of natural selection

that loving your child is easy it's like it's like falling off a log it just happens and that's great

and not something worth fighting so i think it's lovely that you had that experience i appreciate

you brother um your stuff's always good go check him out uh plain english podcast almost always a hit

for me i do say sometimes it's my napping podcast so you know every once in a while you know it kind

of vacillates back and forth between like Derek and his guests have my neurons firing and i'm like

thinking new things and i'd like that when the podcast does that for me other times it's like this

is kind of a peaceful meditation on what's happening and i and i and i'm starting to doze off a little

bit but then come that wake back up and you're still you're still going and i'm like okay i'm now

now i've just signed back in that's pleasant kind of like watching the masters it's like it's like

it's like it's like it's like pill it's like pill parties that like you know teachers have or like

they spread out the pills their parents they don't know if it's an upper or a downer they're just

like i'm just gonna take the pill and see what happens i'm glad another plain english exists in

that category exactly there you go so go check them out plain English direct tops and on sub stack

for the rest of y'all we'll be back tomorrow for a Friday edition of the pod see you all then peace

i'm learning to live in all the life the holy moly is so fun you crack me up you crack me up

the board podcast is produced by katie kooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason

she's in bra