Derek Thompson: Ruling by Emergency

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Hello, welcome to the board podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. A quick correction on yesterday's 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 is a single day older than me is actually a boomer. And so, it's not Jen X-A-Racer. It is just more about my Peter Pan syndrome.

Glad to open the show today one of our favs on-time tech and culture and playing for the

Atlantic, but now he's got his own sub-stack. He also has a plain English podcast. His books include hitmakers 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 and 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 going to hop all over the place to

dip 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 associate you with having unified theories of various things, a unified

theory of everything, or a theory of how something explained something else. I wonder if you have a unified theory of what we're doing in a rot? Because currently, 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 in

“J.D. 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 room in the guy I go on my show, or at least interviewed him yesterday that's just coming out on Friday. And I said, have you a seen any evidence that suggests that an attack from Iran was imminent? D, heard any consistent justification for what we're doing in Iran, C, 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 or permission, and the Republicans and Congress roll over and say, sure, take whatever article one power you want and make it the new carogative of the executive branch. That's the story of Trump to point out. 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 person'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 then 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 the kind of a gangsterism and 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 NBS was for this. NBS is funding a sudden 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 simple as that because when you say like Trump does 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 me sense. There's not going to be a Trump resort in Casino in Toronto 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 NBS, but surely Israel wanted to take out the Supreme Leader, harmony and wanted to take out the other

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 whatever he wants, leaves a lot to be explicated. Why does he want

“when 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 wedding. 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 where 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 cream such a poor

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. At harmony for his part felt like he was untouchable, that the U.S. 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 as 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 like he's on a hot-crafts table, it's like you're on a hot-crafts sales and times 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 roll. Like I'm used to only betting $40, but I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm high at the moment, you know, let's just keep going.

Yeah, there's, 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 hot streak in a craftstable, 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.”

Minnesota, it's a 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, not 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

an element of that to it too. Anyway, none of those explanations, whatever it is, I don't think you're very, it's going to be very satisfying for people whose gas prices are going up and who are now worried that they, you know, might have family members or friends being sent into the region to input at risk or who have friends or living in the region or at risk. I mean, just like the the risk calculation for some psychological Donald Trump thriller is, I don't think that's a good

“risk calculation for him, 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 U.S. embarks on, began at some relatively high level of Paul. 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 to tacit among the American people or explicate it 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 mega coalition. Even if you stopped today and did

the Trump thing and 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's going to replace him. Like, I think that that prospect would have pulled it like 30%. Like, or any percent. I mean,

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 in the cost of the American

peoples that they're going to pay a dollar more at the gas station for every gallon they 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 is 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 elites, but popular among the public. If you'd be the distinguishing thing about his 2015 candidacy was that he was willing to be overly

aggressive and and bigoted 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 were 16 people on stage. Nobody

also saying that he was the one who's 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. All 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 studied this more closely. How long are we going to do this before Trump just says, look, we won the wars 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”

sickening ice on various innocent US populations. Like, at what point do you think it just becomes utterly necessary to turn the page? Because this, this is someone who who looks at the stock market 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. I was a little just text on some of my friends about this this morning. We're going back about those news story that the Pentagon's preparing for being there till September, and like my response to him is, what I think is that Pete Hague set is very excited about this. And, you know, Pete Hague set likes to play war. And, you know, it's like kind of it 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 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 pattern on the head eventually and say now, okay, war over. Good luck to the people of Iran and

“the Kurds and the Mollos 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 it on this. I can't 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 wanted to ask you about there's 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 the context of the end topic dispute. I want to get into that,

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

a useful way to look at this administration as kind of a systematic control f-monarchy search function to discover the tools of authoritarianism and better 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 just 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 a clearly and constitutionally use of national guard force. IEPA, which is the law that was initially cited to justify the liberation day tariffs recently struck down by the Supreme Court. This 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

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 left monarchy, like go through the entire US statute and do a control F for anything that gives the executive brand some 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, when I'm used like in an advanced version of chatchipy to your 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 cock-mimi-steete scheme that they 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 and 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, Steven 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. It's obviously drawn immigration. I think TVD on elections,”

but certainly plausible given their past behavior. Yeah, I mean, and you set this question up with an example that I didn't even give in my answer, which is that Pete's head chef after contract negotiations broke down with the AI company in Thropic, labeled and Thropic a supply chain risk under section 3252, which is a section that is 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 Thropic, 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 new king from outer space

of an AI company using this Soteric 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 right 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, if that's going to be used in the mid-terms 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.

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Democrats should think about the sort of thing. And that is, you know, does this realization make you think different? I know you're going to have that. And I know that's a lot. And a lot of ways that the Democrats have been vetoed from there, from getting their priorities through, by activist groups that look through the code and look for ways to slow down projects that they don't like. And this is what you wrote about in your book. Should a democratic, you know,

“administration, the future, I think about how to, how to inverse that to, you know, be a benevolent”

controlF, but not myarchy. Yeah, there's a part of me that was almost wishy and 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 a couple, like, over Christmas. And he basically asked

a version of this question with him being, I can do the askedically on the side of, yes, like we knew kind of the benevolent soft authoritarian on the left. And I, 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 get me very nervous. So anyway, go ahead. Yeah, it's, it's a really, really great question. And this is also a little

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 the, my five months just team up the day. The exact same subject with the board. We do have an editing and just have to think about the fair point. Here's a thing a useful place to begin. Abundance wants to follow the law. We also just want better laws. We want zoning laws to be

better. We want permitting laws to be better. We want energy, construction project laws to be better. I don't want a future that'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, and sometimes even made explicit in abundance, have been to consume the process, have been to 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 absolutely a theme of abundance. This liberal

almost fetishization of process. Donald Trump does not fetishize process. That's the time short. And so there's a way in which he's almost like the the warrior of the opposite of. And he points 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 whatever ruling party is in power,

to just run roughshod over the law by claiming emergency powers forever. Those are two different extremes. I want to land somewhere in the middle. 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 Iron only five bridge fell down in Pennsylvania, Joshua Piro declares an emergency. He sweeps away a bunch of permitting and

Neepa 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 fast in America, especially when those bridges fall down and they typically carry millions of cars. I don't want those 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 fast 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 out comes in a good direction rather than a direction of terrorizing people. Funny that you mentioned warrior. There is a warrior because for some reason that was sick of my head when I was reading Dario's memo

and Dario is kind of like a different type of bizarre archetype. He was the head of anthropic people out now. Here's his memo. Dario kind of laid out the backs where I've appealed that Mr.

Basically the Department of War was using anthropics AI tool clawed for military purposes.

I wanted to put like some pretty normal limits on this, 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. That's kind of a short thumbnail of what the limits were. This was what started, you know, the fight, the reference Derek, which were the government that turned

anthropic into an enemy company that they're trying to to kill. Dario's comments about 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 support AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We've told the truth

about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement and we 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? We're like he's trying to position like, I guess, a white hat and a black hat AI company or a blue versus a red AI company maybe,

“you know, competing in the public square. What do you think the implications are of 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 Higgs F, labeling and thropic 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 can 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, now-est, I think. And it's 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 in the Trump administration.

And now you have Pete Hexeth, 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. This is a gorgeous behavior on the part of, I can't believe I have to say it,

“but the secretary of war. War. That's how we do it. You have to make fun of war.”

Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well, excuse me, there's no gutter all accent there yet. War. I want to feel that strongly about is whether andthropic 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 this case. I spoke to folks in the administration, I think are are uncrazy. And they said this to me.

They said, look, if Lockheed Martin was doing business with the US government and they sold the US government one of their fighter jets. And they said, by the way, we've 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 Fence Department was simply like, okay, we're not going to buy your planes,

“Lockheed Martin. Oh, thanks. That's how things go. Yeah, right. I think it's okay for the US government,”

for the Pentagon to have said, look, you want certain restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence. And it's my impression 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 media. It's my understanding, it really broke down over autonomous use, like autonomous drone swarms and things like that. If inthropic has different values in the Pentagon, I think two parties can simply say,

this deal can't go forward. Yes, we sent a $2 million contract with you. This would be the

perspective inthropic. 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

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 greatest. That's insane. Insane behavior. And I honestly, almost wonder, this is maybe a hope and pre-ent in the world. It's so insane. I don't know if it lasts the month. I don't know if that, if that supplied 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 Sachs, you can say a lot of things about them. They're capitalist. They are neoliberal, capitalist. Some of them are getting a little fined of Chinese capitalism, I think. Yeah, but even there, it's weird. I don't support this policy, but it's interesting that they are more willing to sell Nvidia chips to the Chinese and the Biden administration. That's neoliberalism. The idea of

like unfettered globalization is the very thing. Or it's corruption. Well, you could, you could sign a sentence. Yeah, you could sign a sentence. Yeah, you could sign a sentence. I'm not trying to bend over backwards to make the policies to sane moisture policies. You can sign what you want to say to describe it as Jensen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, being the tail that wagged the dog of the Trump administration, right? That is 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. No. 2, 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 pentagon. That is an incredibly weird juxtaposition of

policies. You basically echo this, I don't know how to say that. It's worth noting that

it's not just us, like lipcocks that are advancing us, 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. Okay, yeah, okay, so is there anything that? And I think the interesting thing, he basically echoed the case, he just makes, we don't need to repeat it about how why this policy in particular is pernicious.

We're seeing 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. Yeah, so 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 of the little dramatic, but that it's just one more advancement and institutional decay and advancement of tyranny through the executive. I don't know if there's anything to

“add about that. I don't want to steal thunder from my own podcast. I think this 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 on 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 in 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 is certainly been accentuated by the last 14 months, but is a theme that pre-existed Trump's election. That's

the first train that's 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 of 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

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 in 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 put it together into some kind of cash 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 microeconomics

of government surveillance. And so if you think about these two trains coming down the track,

the rise of the norkacle powers in 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 is 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 in getting into our lives and coming across data than anything we've had before. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. This month, Better Help is taking a moment to celebrate women and all the work that they carry at work in relationships and families. Marks includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress. And Better Help once remind women how

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therapist at any time from their tailored wrecks. You're emotional well-being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/vubilwork. That's BetterHELP.com/vubilwork. I want to talk about expand on this a little bit through the conundrum of how our tech oligarchs think about all of us. Because there is a little bit of a paradox here where as you kind of laid out they were very upset with the by-demonstrations plans for AI regulation.

They don't want that. So I guess the question is 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 and to get your take on. And in this clip, Andreessen is talking about what the supposed Biden administration official was telling him about their plans for AI regulation. AI is a technology that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a

startup thing. They actually said flat-out to us. Don't do AI startups. 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, 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, I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because like the math for AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and entire branches of physics, basically went dark and didn't

proceed. And if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing 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. I always have been how he said it. But Mark Anderson claims 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 up. We're going to pick a couple of winners and call it good. He ejected to that because he wanted the world to flourish. They I world the flourish that is. But it's pretty interesting in the context what we're saying with anthropic. It's one of what you think about it. I was in the room. I have no idea what the Biden

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 why commentator?”

Under Joe Biden, the share of why commentator companies that were AI companies rose from something like 2290%. 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 that 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 it has some competition. It's a competitive category. That's point number one. Point number two is that I would point out the obvious irony. The Mark and Dresen 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're 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 outside”

a 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 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're just start anthropic. If you know that like they hate each other to the extent that like there was recently a photo up 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 each other. These are really, really different people. And I think that I do think they

“want different things. Does Sam like to be touched? Are you sure that's not like a spectrum thing?”

I think we're holding it. I'm not going to hold do a whole supporter film fan. I'm like exactly who has touched. Sam and Dario Amade does like to be touched. But okay, I take you at point.

I think I think the bottom line here is that in trying to describe like what did the Artiferson

intelligence architects, you know, wantfulness technology, I think it's hard to say for a couple 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 all the guards, you know, the injuries sent in the fields and, you know, this? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. 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 bottom administration was who 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 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 again, some kind of like, you know, wokeery that was incipients to the convalley 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 in 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 on understanding exactly what these guys want.

Yeah. I ask you just because I, this is where I get into like the bullworking, faux 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 total deregulation of that 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

I think it's just a different brand of authoritarianism. 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 regulations reminder, 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. The regulation is also coming on the unregulated process.

Yeah, unregulated. I mean, you look at the Trump deal with Binance alone and it's just absolutely sure that these crypto crime now. There's no enforcement of crypto crime. No, that's right. Yeah, crypto crime right. It's a paradox. And so there, I do think they're prediction that the Trump administration would not only roll over

uncrypto regulations, but also they were interested in nothing making $100 million on crypto

would mean that they would have a counterparty in the White House. I do think 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 authoritarian and the big industrialists that he holds with them. There's just a lot more technology around at this time. Well, we're doing the big industrialists trying to figure out what's happening. Do you have a hot take for me on the paramount WVD merger at all? I just look at our friends's ads and I've got to think as the capitalist wing of Antifa,

over here at the bull work, 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, fire it a lot of people. Made the product less appealing, more expensive, 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 as a great capitalist.

And I'm like, this is crazy to me. Yeah, I think I'm, I'm quoting from the scripture of Netbellany, my fellow podcast with The Ringer and also author of a great Puck Newsletter on Hollywood, that it's a little morally sickening for someone to make, as I think, as I will make,

$800 to $900 million by executing a sale that is almost certainly to result in the loss of thousands of jobs.

The idea that you can make $900 million 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, right? I do think that there's, there's like two layers of the story. Like, I do think one layer is, is the story of the merger, Netflix is bid, the rejected bid, the fact that yet again you have the Trump administration using am I trust as an extension of personnel 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 Ellison, the head of Paramount, which is buying Warner Brothers discovery, is the son of Larry Ellison, who's one of Trump's best billionaire friends.”

And I think his soon to be neighbor, he's a CEO of Oracle. I think Ellison is buying some property near Marlaga, very soon. So there's that story, which is like really seconding, it's seconding at a moral level, at a legal level. But it's in this broader, and sometimes where people hate me, where I talk about macroeconomics, it's so cold, but it is existing in this broader context. We're Hollywood, it's just really struggling. The reason that Warner Brothers discovery is a distress property is that it's an old school legacy player in a world that's being completely transformed by streaming and TikTok.

I mean, just two successes, it could be less sense of just how, in what trouble, 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,

And you go all the way down to movie tickets bought, and it's down 40 to 50% 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, a current trajectory, Americans will never buy 1 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 5, 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 Zazloosh, we paid $900 million for executing a deal. That means that for managing the Roman decline, like there's a reason why we don't talk about the Roman emperors and the backside of you know, tax Ramana. We as being great, like they didn't necessarily do a great job, they just they were just there as the roller coaster 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 TikTok and YouTube are eating everybody's lunch. I agree with that. This is what we have our dueling expertise and obsession, so because I just would like add on to that the simultaneous story is that that is that The Ellison's 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 pure essence or you'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. So it's not any of that. 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.

“That's why they bought the company. Not because they want to create more value.”

Does anybody think they could make money on this deal? I don't think anybody even thinks they could make money on this deal.

I don't think. And we've even mentioned the fact that I believe the debt received right now. I think it's 79 billion dollars in debt that this company is holding.

So we're not the South, the Cassaudees, the Emirates and the Kataris, tying us back to the original. And the rough thing for the folks working as 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 debts can be serviced on the backs of a lot of people who are going to Hollywood. It all really would have been a Saudi Arabian Batman to pay off the pay off the debt. You know, it's nice based in reality.

Now it's the cheese. A new keynote degree has been made for the Cassaudees. Now it's time to pay off the money. It's the best thing you can do is test it. And now it's time to test it. Now it's time to test it. Time to pay off the cash and the cash and the cash and the cash and the cash, the cash and the cash and the cash for it.

Okay, we've got to go fast. So he's last, last once because as always we're going over.

I'm cutting some of them. You have an orality theory of everything. It's great people should go listen to that. How metrics make us miserable and show I saw I totally agree with that. So I'm anti metric. You're in your oral ring and talking about how that's making you sad. People should go read about that. I want to get you on three more things rapid fire. Just on a button stuff updates. I had more cats on yesterday's pod is Zoran's media consultant.

And 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-abunded who just think that I don't know. Democrats should should provide better services to people in that in 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 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 grade, but I'm really, really glad you pointed this out. I think my first column for my sub-stack 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 Lombani 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.

Maybe you were hearing from cancer, you guessed the other day."

What's kind of funny when I asked him why that happened. He was like, "You know, when you're an executive role, you stepped to start making practical decisions." And I was like, "Oh, great." Sure.

“If you want to call it practical, yeah, if you want to call it an negotiation with practicalities, that's fine.”

I think it's important to say this is not just Mombani. Elizabeth Warren is the co-author of very good, very promising housing bill that has a lot of abundance principles. And even though I'm sure a lot of folks who work for Elizabeth Warren believe that I am brought to you by the elections. Chris Murphy, I think, is a progressive. He's talked about abundance being something that can exist alongside economic populism. James Talleriko, I know for a fact because I spoken to 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, Rokana, another example of a progressive representative who, on the one hand, is definitely thought of is 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 it's also spoken not only publicly, but also privately about how much he likes a lot of was in abundance, especially the stuff about increasing state capacity of 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, you know, conflict is good media. It'll probably mean making a fight of market injuries.

That's a little deal about conflict. It's kind of like self, conflict sells. I should have made fun of it's cone head when I was doing that. That would have done even better.

“Yeah, 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, why does politics matter? Because the people who win power do things 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. When 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 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 was really like that article. Yeah, and you'd come up and we'd come in this podcast, we'd go through the break through the year, you'd learn me some things about science because that was the category. We didn't get to do that this year, because you're a parent now, so you took it off. It twice over, yeah. Yeah.

And so I want to first hear if you have a breakthrough for me, something to make me feel good, and then we'll close with a little parenting now.

The most interesting thing that's happening right now in medical sciences, I think, is we're in a phase of the GOP one revolution, where these drugs were developed for diabetes.

“They were found to have weight loss principles, and then we realized it a bunch of other things.”

That they reduced inflammation among people who weren't even losing weight. That 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 Dave Ricks, who's the CEO of Eli Lilly, which is the company of the Hindman Jaro, 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 neurogenitive health, dementia, Alzheimer's. So this idea that GOP ones initially seemed like this incredible drug that pushed one button. It now turns out that it's more like a sprayed hand that's pushing five buttons at once. And companies like Eli Lilly are trying to figure out, could we design a drug that's really, really good at pressing this, and a drug that's really, really good at pressing this button over here without side effects.

It's 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 side effect. That's common among people who use the highest dosage for type 2 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.

I don't want it either. Yeah, I really don't want it either. Yeah, I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either.

I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either.

I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either.

I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. I really don't want it either. It may have just caused the waste of billions of dollars of medical research. Tens of billions of dollars may be.

It 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?

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. This pressing a lot of buttons it wants. It'll be great to isolate some of those effects

and make specific drugs for things like addiction and dementia. That's where your 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? I'll find out a little addition to it.

Why don't you use it? I just think it's being a parent is really interesting. It's also an incredibly cliche. And I try to go directly at that. 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 it 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. It's not the same baby months 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 phenomenal logical sense, you don't raise a singular baby. You raise a series of babies that keep changing,

it 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 parenthood, an indelible part of enjoying parenthood, is making peace with that inevitable change. I think maybe a larger lesson here about if you can make peace

with the changes intrinsic to your child. And maybe you can make peace with the changes that are intrinsic to life and to being alive. 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 the never stop changing.

And I think that's kind of beautiful. My related observation that I've been struggling to put my finger on that, you know, you had my neurons firing over was my child being adopted was like even more of a literal stranger. Because it doesn't share the DNA.

And 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 and his sister-in-law and seeing that kid

when he was born. And he looked like me and my brother is dead on weird kids. Like you could just see it or like he is very much, you know, strong, strong genes. Like all my brothers that we all look like and the baby

looked like us. And this way you know, I kind of reminds me just of me. And 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 got to love this kid because of the familiarity more. Right. And 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. And it's hard to figure out why that is. It's like what I guess is it something about like how we're wired

with the nurturing, you know, is it something that like what you were talking about how there is, you know, this extra joy that comes from like learning about the new person 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 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 your experience is probably instructive”

and probably very common. You know, I don't think people are, this is like an evolutionary psych thoughts so some people will hate it and some people might not hate it. But like, I don't think we're meant to do that

and many things. Like we're built to eat, we're built to drink, we're built to reproduce certainly. You know, the genes don't survive without that. We're built to stay alive.

But one of the things we're clearly built to do and one thing the species could not survive with that. We are built to fall in love with our children. If we didn't, if it were hard to fall in love with your child, you and I wouldn't be here because the species

would have died out millions of years ago. And so like, I think-- More interesting to eat your child, for example. Sure. I think, I think, I think loving your child.

I think it's certainly a blessing of natural selection that loving your child is easy. It's like falling off a log. It just happens. And that's great.

And not something worth fighting.

“So I think it's love that you had that experience.”

I appreciate your brother.

Your stuff's always good.

Go check him out. 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 vaculates 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.

on what's happening.

“And I'm starting to dose off a little bit,”

but then come that wake back up and you're still going.

And I'm like, okay, I'm not signed back again. That's pleasant.

Kind of like watching the masters.

“It's like, it's like pill parties that like,”

and changes have or like they spread the pills to parents.

They don't know if it's not for a down there.

They're just like, I'm just going to take the pal and see what happens.

“I'm glad I had the feeling which exists in the category.”

Exactly, there you go. So go check 'em out. Plaining, there's Derek Thompson on Substack. For the rest of y'all, we'll be back tomorrow for a Friday edition of the podcast.

See ya all then, peace. The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.