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A
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.
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Now Mint Mobile is offering you the.
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Gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan.
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Equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only.
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A
Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com hey folks, Scott R. Andersen here. Winter has arrived. The Mercury is dropping perilously close towards freezing. Biking to work has gotten very uncomfortable. If I'm being honest, I'm sipping hot tea and wearing a comfy office cardigan as I record this. And of course the holidays are just around the corner. Both you and your loved ones need to be well equipped to make it through the cold months to come. And and that's where Quince comes in. They have all the essentials you need to beat the cold weather at amazing prices that can't be beat. That includes their fantastic Mongolian cashmere sweaters which are still just $50, tariffs be damned. But it doesn't stop there. They've also got down jackets, wool top coats and all the hats and gloves you can handle personally. In addition to a couple of those sweaters, I've been leaning hard on their men's dress socks which are thick and warm while keeping things office appropriate. And when I'm relaxing at home, one of their stretch sweater fleet shirts is just the blend of comfy and rugged I've been looking for. Everything Quince makes is high quality, classically styled and well made. They'll be in your closet for years to come. And by partnering directly with ethical producers and designers, Quince can deliver premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. And Quint's isn't just about clothes. They've got bedding, housewares, jewelry, furniture, everything you need for your home. All the best in quality for the lowest possible prices. Something to bear in mind when you're sorting through your naughty and nice list in a couple of weeks. So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.comsecurity for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q I n c e.com Security Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Security now let's get back to the show. Hey folks, Scott R. Andersen Here it is the end of the year and that means that we will be doing our special end of year episode where we talk about the topics and discuss the object lessons that you share with us. So if you have some topics you want us to hash through, or if you have some object lessons you want to share with other listeners, send them our way@rationalsecurityawfirmmedia.org Again, that's rationalsecurityawfirmedia.org Just send them to us by the end of the day on Sunday, December 21, so we can work them into this year's episode. Thanks so much and have a happy holidays.
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I continue to be sick because my children are Geneva Convention violations.
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A
Yeah, I have a similar technically, the Geneva Convention I don't think said a lot about biological weapons. I think that's subsequent treaty regimes. But yes, that's fair.
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B
You know what, possibly there are war crimes.
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Anyway, anyways, I believe me, man, I'm coming off the worst week I think I have ever had involving me missing every single holiday celebration of the season, more or less because of sick children and including canceling one of my own. And I never actually got sick, but I tested positive, so therefore had to cancel all my plans to be a responsible citizen.
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B
The key is if you never test, you can never test positive.
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A
That was, I believe, America's strategy until.
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C
About 2021, and we're going back to that.
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A
So, you know, yeah, kind of. I guess that's right. I guess that's right. I felt like I did. I took so many tests. I like realized I didn't realize you could get flu tests. Honestly, I didn't hadn't processed that you can do them just like Covid tests now. So I spent a small fortune on flu tests all last week and tested a bunch. And I did three in a row that were negative in one day because my whole family had the flu. But I felt fine. And I was like, I think I can do this. I think I can go out in the world. So I actually went to an event with a senior foreign official I got invited to and then I went to a holiday office party. And then the next morning I tested positive for the flu. And I'm like, okay, so I may have just infected my colleagues. I may have caused an international incident.
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B
By getting someone basically typhoid now.
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A
Exactly. I could take out a part of the senior foreign dramatic corps. I mean, who knows exactly what could happen as a result of this. But then I never, despite canceling all my weekend plans. I never actually got sick. I just got tested positive. I felt fine most of the weekend. It's infuriating.
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C
We need an EO on Scott Anderson also being a weapon of mass destruction.
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A
Yes, exactly. Just the Typhoid Mary. The best kind of Typhoid Mary. The healthy kind. But I did have a small Christmas miracle which was delightful. Which never happens, which is that my still fairly sick children on. I think it was Friday or Saturday when I was sad having to stay home, having canceled all my holiday plans for the weekend. They kindly piled up on me. Both babies and lied on top of me for the entirety of a month. It's Christmas Carol. And watched the entire thing. I think the baby actually had to go to bed at the last half hour mark. But the older one stayed awake for the whole thing, which was great because usually they won't sit through the movies that I like. My son just wants to watch K Pop Demon Hunters nonstop. But even in the holiday season. But at least we had that moment of Zen.
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C
That's lovely.
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B
There is nothing better than a small, warm human who has just decided that you are a source of comfort and will now nap on you for like 15 minutes.
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A
I mean, I think you just described the premise of the movie Alien.
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B
On you, not in you. On you, Scott.
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A
Prepositions. Complicated. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security. I am your host, Scott R. Andersen. Thrilled to have you back with us for another edition of the podcast. We invite you to join members of the lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's date, big national security news stories, and what a team we have with us this week. We have a little something old and a little something new. A little something old this week.
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B
How dare you, Scott.
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It's, well, new. It's really not very good on either front, but I do this a lot. I do this every week. Guys, I got to come up with some new way to introduce people.
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Not old enough to be comforting, not new enough to be exciting. It's Alan Rosenstein, everybody.
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A
That's exactly right. Co host emeritus Alan Rosenstein back on the podcast. Alan, always good to have you back on the pod. Thank you for joining us.
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B
Oh, hello. Hello.
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A
And of course, we are joined by one of our newer additions at lawfare. Although this point you're fairly seasoned and veteran. We are of course joined by Ari Tabatabai, our latest public interest fellow, or one of our recent public interest fellows here at lawfair. Ari, thank you for coming back on the podcast.
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C
Thanks for having me.
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A
Wonderful. Well, we have a lot to talk about. It's been a big week in the news as we enter into the home stretch here before the holidays. There's stuff happening overseas, some stuff happening at home. We're going to focus on some international developments, mostly related to a topic that is a favorite of Alan's. We, of course, talk about somewhat regularly here on the podcast. That is the question of artificial intelligence. But not exclusively. And not exclusively artificial intelligence qua artificial intelligence. Instead, we're going to be talking about its intersection with a few other issues of concern. Topic one for this week, once you pop, you can't stop. The Trump administration has given a green light to Nvidia to export its powerful H200 chips to China, opening a potentially significant new market while jumpstarting China's strategically significant AI industry or perhaps making it reliant on US Technology. What explains this decision and how does it align with the Trump administration's broader reframing of strategic competitive with China as a primarily economic problem, something we see reflected in the recent National Security Strategy.
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B
Can we also address the question of whether or not you're allowed to talk about AI chips without making a potato chip pun? Or is that the only pun that's allowed?
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A
It's the only pun that's allowed. It's the only pun that's allowed. I don't think I've used this one before. I think this is the first one I've done that. Once you pop, you can't stop.
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B
It's Pringles. Are those even?
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A
I guess those are potato chips. It's like they're just kind of anonymous.
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B
Well, the other one you could have done was lay's, which is. Right. You can't just have one.
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A
You can't have this one.
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B
That's ruffles or something.
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C
That's a fact.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Ooh, you could do ruffled, like ruffled feathers. Kind of get the.
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A
I don't think that's better than mine.
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B
All right, moving right along.
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That's why I'm the host. Alan. This is also because you left, but that's fine. Topic two, lavatories of democracy. I may have used this one before. I'm a little worried, but that's okay. I still like it. Lavatories of democracy. Late last week, President Trump signed an executive order setting up a number of mechanisms intended to assert federal preemption over and otherwise deter state efforts to raise, regulate the development and use of AI, an executive branch only effort. That followed a failed push to insert a related legislative provision into end of year legislation? How effective is this measure likely to be and how wise is it to try and stop the states from regulating AI in the first place?
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B
So I promise I will not comment on every single intro, but I will say I would love an actual Lavatories of Democracy segment where the President issues an EO trying to override NIMBY restrictions on building public bathrooms across the country.
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And that was this is literally could happen anywhere that could happen.
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I'm here for it. I'm here for that one.
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They're taking over municipal golf courses in Washington, D.C. that is that is like one of the ongoing literal executive orders that was issued last week. So don't pretend like that's not on the table. There's micromanaging to an extreme around these things, but regardless, Topic 3 some things you can't make light of over the weekend, a pair of gunmen inspired by the Islamic State executed a brutal massacre at a hanukkah event on Australia's Bondi beach, killing 15 people plus one of the attackers and injuring 40. The violence has shocked Australia, a country with strict gun control laws where incidents anti Semitism have been on the rise. As in much of the world, what is there to learn from the attack and its aftermath and what could its ramifications be both in Australia and further abroad? So for our first topic, let's talk about the H200 chips. This is a huge, really significant development, something that has been a big point of debate with the Trump administration kind of from the outset. We had the Biden administration tape a very restrictive approach to the broader diffusion of AI technology generally, not just to China, up to a lot of targets, but particularly in regard to China as a major strategic competitor. They essentially had a kind of small yards, high fences strategy where they would say we're going to share our AI technology with a relatively small number of ideologically aligned Democratic partners. Did not even include Gulf states, notably as a point of controversy that the Trump administration revoked a few or reversed a few months ago at this point, but did say we're our biggest chips that we're certainly not going to share with China, our main strategic rival. Trump administration has come in, kicked the doors open to a variety of diffusion, some of which we've talked about on the podcast before, some of which I will say I think is actually a good idea. I think the Biden administration may have drifted too far in the anti diffusion sort of direction on a lot of fronts, but this is the one part of the anti diffusion part of which there seem to be a lot of consensus among a lot of people, particularly among the more traditional China hawks that are centered in the more conventional parts of the Republican party's foreign policy apparatus. Competition over AI is seen as one of the premier frontiers of strategic competition these days, primarily with China less of a deal with Russia, obviously. And our control over our major chipsets is supposed to be our biggest comparative advantage. They have critical minerals and access to those as they've been leveraging the last few weeks. But we have access to these chipsets and this would give them access to not actually the top of the market, top production chipsets. There's whole new architectures. My understanding is that this is kind of the one generation back architecture of this chipset, but the most advanced of those chips. I think it's called the. Is it the Hopper architecture? I can't remember off the top of my head. But now we have Blackwell models and kind of whole new architectures that aren't yet being provided to China. But this is still a huge jump in the type of access they were provided to. Previously, China had access to, I think it's H2.0 chips, not H200 chips, H20 chips, which were basically a deliberate step down to avoid hitting certain benchmarks in U.S. export controls. And now those export controls have been lifted to allow this more full chipset to be exported. Different assessments have reached different conclusions. Some have said, well, we're doing this because what the strategic reason this is not inconsistent with our strategic goals is because we want to cut the legs out from under China's development of its own indigenous chip manufacturing. We don't. We want them to get reliant upon our chips and therefore we're going to provide them their chips so that, yeah, they will be able to develop their AI industry. But if they want to keep developing models, they want to keep running these data centers, this is going to let them set up, they're going to be reliant upon our chipsets moving forward and that gives us more leverage and more control. Other people say, yeah, but they will have in the meantime developed massively more powerful AI models that they otherwise would have trouble doing. Although there's some dispute about exactly the impact this will have on the industry. And you are going to. In the meantime, this really seems like the primary thing it does is offer up huge new markets to Nvidia, a company that we know has really been actively lobbying the Trump administration, engaging with them aggressively, developing a very personal relationship between Trump and Nvidia's chair. Trump administration taking stakes in Nvidia Things like that as a way, as different sorts of sweeteners. And a lot of people are saying, well, this seems like it's more of a business decision that's compromising the national security equities. I want to start with you on this, Ari, to put this in the context. Talk to us about what this episode tells us about the Trump administration's broader approach to China, which I will say, and I think I've said on this podcast before, I think is the hardest part of the Trump administration's worldview to figure out what it actually says and means at this point. Even though we just got a national security strategy, as we talked about last week, that says more than it said before on it. Right. Because we, I think, are used to the Donald Trump that in his first term in office was an extreme China hawk, aggressive China hawk, a China hawk to an extent that made a lot of people uncomfortable on the left, a lot of people on the right uncomfortable, saying pretty inflammatory things, especially once the COVID pandemic kicked off and China became a focus of blame for that, targeting Chinese Americans in ways that made people uncomfortable, or Chinese nationals working here in academic institutions. A lot of these endeavors that people thought went too far during the Trump administration era. First 1.0, Trump administration 2.0. Very different sort of beast. Its approach and attitude towards China, towards Taiwan, towards a bunch of these other issues, much harder to read. Very different. It doesn't have the same touchstones that the first Trump administration did, a lot of which it shared with other prior Republican administrations and even with the Biden administration, which took a fairly, I think, hawkish view on China. So talk to us about how this fits into what it seems like the Trump administration's worldviews on Asia are and how that informs the logic of behind it, potentially.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. I think you're seeing just a lot of tension within the administration, and I think it is pretty obvious when you read the national security strategy that there are different sides of this debate within the administration. You know, last time I was on this podcast, we talked about kind of the divisions within between State and DoD, for example, and how different camps sort of see this issue set. And I think we see more of it in this document. So a couple of things to highlight here just broadly, before we even dive into this H200 episode, which I think is just like the epitome of it really is a good case study for all of these tensions. The national security strategy contradicts itself on the regional piece of the equation. Right. It talks about the prc, as I think, Scott, you noted last week, not in the context of great power competition or strategic competition, as we've been talking about this kind of relationship over the past seven, eight years. But it does talk about it at the context of regional competition, and it highlights the role of allies and partners specifically in that competition. It does seem to acknowledge that we benefit greatly economically, security wise, from having these alliances and partnerships so that we can compete in the Indo Pacific region. But then it goes on to undercut all of these alliances, as the administration does pretty much day in and day out, especially when it comes to the Europeans. So it's almost like you have these different sides of the House that wrote different parts of the document and they didn't really clear it with one another and they didn't really have this kind of like final piece of final step of the process where you have a cohesive look to make sure that everything kind of like, you know, everybody's singing from the same sheet of music and you're all driving in the same direction to use a bunch of very mixed metaphors. And that's very apparent in the document itself. So it's kind of like to me, there are pieces of the National Security Strategy that read as kind of this legacy language about alliances, partnership, competition. And then we go on to have this kind of civilizational language that is designed to kind of like undercut, you know, alliances and allies and, you know, Europe's value system altogether. The second piece I want to highlight here with the kind of tensions within the administration's worldview and the National Security Strategy, is that it talks about the administration investing in emerging technology and basic science. But it's doing that as it talks, as the administration itself is going on cutting funding for research institutions, waging a war on institutions of higher learning, making it more difficult for the United States to attract talent, which is key to developing these sectors. And at the same time, you have a China, along with many other countries, but her focus is China that is doing more to actually attract that talent. Right. So China has introduced this K visa that is designed to attract STEM talent. And so none of these policies that the administration has been pursuing over the past year seem to be driving in the direction that the National Security Strategy tells us it wants to go in. So now to zoom in a little bit on the tech piece, I think the National Security Strategy gets one thing right. I agree with it wholeheartedly, which is that it rightly identifies the challenge of prc state led and state backed companies building physical and digital infrastructure. It also correctly, I think, diagnoses the fact that we and our allies have not really had an adequate response to that so far. But then again, it does that and acknowledges that. But the administration is intentional in itself when it comes to actually trying to rectify this challenge that it's identifying. And so you can't at the same time claim that you want to address this issue and also bemoan the fact that we're not doing more in the Global south specifically to help build digital and physical infrastructure, while at the same time withdrawing from the world and while at the same time making it more challenging for us to have joint. It talks about a joint plan with allies and partners. In that sense, you can't have that when you're, you know, basically your entire policy is designed to undercut allies and not be viewed as a reliable partner for people. Right. Like one of the things that we've done, I think, over the past, you know, few years is talk to allies and partners about Huawei specifically. Right. And the challenges and the vulnerabilities that come with working with Huawei. And often the response is, okay, well, what do you have to offer that will do the same thing that Huawei does, but does not come with the vulnerabilities? And we don't have a very good kind of set of answers here. But what we typically had to kind of compensate for it was that we could say, listen, when you work with China, you get strings attached. They're not the most reliable. There's all these vulnerabilities that come with it. And working with US Companies, you're not going to get all of those shortfalls. And I'm not sure that that is necessarily a winning argument anymore. And the last piece before I kind of kick it back to you, Scott, is one thing that was really interesting to me reading the National Security Strategy is the mention of semiconductors only in the context of Taiwan, which is quite a departure from the Biden administration National Security Strategy, where it was more holistic. Right. The way it talked about semiconductors, it talked about reinvigorating the supply chain, it talked about in the context, national security and competitiveness. And then, of course, the investments made by the Chips and Science Act. And here I was surprised by just how narrow the focus was. So I don't know if that signals anything substantive or if it's just a case of this goes back to the question you were asking last week. How seriously should we take this document? But interested in what you guys think and how you reacted to it when you were reading the document.
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A
Yeah, it's really interesting question. I think the case study of H200 really does put the issues to the fore to say how does this actually translate into policy? These broad, sometimes vague, sometimes not always consistent. It seems policy statements, ideological statements, strategic statements in the security strategy which reflect broader. There's of course a specific AI action plan that is a similar strategy document. There's lots of other statements the administration has been making. How does this actually fit into those? So Alan, let me turn to you on that then. Somebody who looks at the AI industry and technology a little more closely than I think Ari or I do talk to us about like how big a deal this actually is and what its strategic ramifications seem to be on the technology side and how that fits in with the broader, I guess, tech policy perspective and where, maybe where that intersects with these broader strategic questions.
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B
Yeah, so I think a lot of it's just unclear and I want to say I don't think this is an, this is an obvious policy question here about exporting chips to China. You know, if I had to make the call, I would probably not. But I think more because that's the quote, unquote, safer call, that's more of the status quo call rather than me being particularly confident that from a long term perspective this is the right geostrategic answer. And that's because, although again, the case against giving these chips to China is very clear, which is that we do not lead China in brain power, we certainly don't lead China in energy. If anything, we actually quite, quite trail China in. The thing we lead China in is compute. Both in terms of our ability to design these chips, though of course we don't really make them, they're made in Taiwan, but at least designing them, that's the thing that we lead in. And if you think, and I tend to, and I think most people in this White House tend to think that US China competition is important and that one of the terrains on which this competition will be fought is AI giving China more computer compute is potentially a problem. Right. Or helping China catch up with compute is a problem. And although you can say, well, the H2 hundreds are no longer the premier chip because now there's this new black hole generation, that's not really how compute works. COMPUTE is additive. There's a point at which the chips are just no longer useful for anything. But at the end of the day, what you're really doing with compute, especially inference compute, which is to say once you've trained the model now you want to run it at scale is you just need a bunch of chips. And yes, if you had the newest chips, you could have fewer of them and they would take less power because they're more efficient. But you can largely make up for that if you have enough of the older chips and you're willing to, you know, dig up every bit of coal out of the mountains and burn it, or, you know, in China's case as well, you know, build a lot of renewables. So I think the case against it is very clear. At the same time, the case for exports is certainly not a trivial case. Right. And you know, we can make a couple of arguments just to steel man for a second. First is, yes, maybe from Jensen Huang's perspective, he's the head of Nvidia, he has an obligation to shareholders to maximize shareholder value. And Nvidia is only a $4 trillion company and he'd love to make it an $8 trillion company. And the best way of doing that is to sell chips to China. Fine, fair enough. At the same time, it is also true that a huge amount of innovation right now is being funded by these private companies with all their free cash flow. One thing that's really notable about this current generation of technological innovation is that the government is evolved in the way it was in previous generations. This is much more like the Bell Labs model of innovation where you have these giant companies, some of whom are monopolies, some of whom are just really big, and they're using a lot of their free cash flow to do this fundamental R and D that has massive public positive externalities. And so, you know, one, one can argue, and again with a straight face, that what's good for Nvidia is good for the country in, in the long term. Right? And so that, that is, that is, that is one argument. Another argument is that that look, if we don't export these chips to China, China will develop its own in house capacity. It has obviously its own companies. And we've seen how in domain after domain, China is really able to catch up to the United States, right? Whether it's in power production, whether it's in automobiles. Now, again to argue against that, the answer is, well, it's going to be that much easier for them to do it if they have a bunch of Nvidia chips to squint at. Though, again, you can respond to saying, well, there'll always be some Nvidia chips to squint at because of the black market anyway, you can do this all day is my point, Right. And I just know how it nets out. Right. And so far I've only been talking about this issue as if it were just a US China AI chips issue. But of course these are always embedded and this is to Ari's point, in much broader strategic questions of well, what's the rest of our China relationships? What's our relationship with our allies in Asia and in Europe? So I am open to the possibility that there is a world in which this makes sense. The problem is that this administration, let's just say that I have no reason to think that its policy apparatus is particularly robust. And it's not because David Sachs is a Silicon Valley venture capital bro. I tend to think that there is a real trade off with getting industry expertise in the White House and the associated sort of capture insider risks that that creates and then trading that off against starving the White House of that talent. I tend to think that whatever sort of low level corruption, and I'm not accusing sort of David Sachs here like actual corruption, but the kind of low level capture solve corruption is probably worth it. At the end of the day, I think, you know, particular Democrats, I think I've been sometimes a little too wary of bringing industry in. So that's not my concern about the policy process. Again, I have no reason to that David Sachs is very good at his job either. I'm just saying that's not, I think there's been a lot of press about David Sachs and like that's not the thing that I care about. The thing that freaks me out is the addition of this idiotic 25% kickback which Trump has announced is going to be part of this deal where for every chip that Nvidia sells to China, it has to pay 25% of that to the US government. The problem with this is, well, first of all, it might be illegal under both the applicable statutes and the Constitution. You know, maybe it's a, it's a tax on exports which is unconstitutional. Even if it's, even if it's instead recharacterized as a tax on imports because the chips are imported from Taiwan and they're kind of under this regime kind of transshipped to, to China. It may very well violate a bunch of US Import laws. We're going to publish a great piece on lawfare at some point in the near future going through these legal issues. Putting aside the legality of it, the idea that whether the United States earns some commission on this is in any way an appropriate consideration given the geopolitical stakes here is Just farcical. It's idiotic. Now, I suspect what happened was that this policy was cooked up in the White House kind of on its, quote, unquote, its own merits. And then the way they sold it to Trump was, Mr. President, now you're gonna be able to go brag about how you got a great deal for the United States by adding this 25%, right? So it may very well be that the 25% kickback was not a motivating factor, which I guess makes me feel a lot better. But the very idea that we're operating in a policy environment or in a policy planning environment, a policy generation environment, where idiotic, truly asinine considerations like, like can we make some money off of this deal is even being considered next to the profound strategic questions here makes me very uncomfortable thinking that any of these people have thought this through properly right now. To be clear, it's not like the last year of the Trump policy process has made me generally comfortable with how good these people are. But even relative to that, the addition of this kickback provision makes me really, really concerned that this is not being thought through at a very high level.
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A
Hey, folks, Scott R. Andersen here. Winter has arrived. The mercury is dropping perilously close towards freezing. Biking to work has gotten very uncomfortable, if I'm being honest. I'm sipping hot tea and wearing a comfy office cardigan as I record this. And of course, the holidays are just around the corner. Both you and your loved ones need to be well equipped to make it through the cold months to come. And that's where Quince comes in. They have all the essentials you need to beat the cold weather at amazing prices that can't be beat. That includes their fantastic Mongolian cashmere sweaters, which are still just $50, tariffs be damned. But it doesn't stop there. They've also got down jackets, wool top coats, and all the hats and gloves you can handle personally. In addition to a couple of those sweaters, I've been leaning hard on their men's dress socks, which are thick and warm while keeping things office appropriate. And when I'm relaxing at home, one of their stretch sweater fleece shirts is just the blessed of comfy and rugged I've been looking for. Everything Quints makes is high quality, classically styled and well made. They'll be in your closet for years to come. And by partnering directly with ethical producers and designers, Quince can deliver premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. And Quint isn't just about clothes. They've got bedding, housewares, jewelry, furniture, everything you need for your home. All the best in quality for the lowest possible prices. Something to bear in mind when you're sorting through your naughty nice list in a couple of weeks. So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with quints. Don't wait. Go to quints.com security for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's q I n c-e.com Security Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Security now let's get back to the show. What are you reaching for? If you're a smoker or vaper, you could be reaching for so much more with Zyn Nicotine pouches. When you reach for Zyn, you're reaching for 10 satisfying varieties and two strengths for a smoke free experience that lets you lean in for chances to break free from your routine and a unique nationwide community. Whatever you're reaching for, reach for it with America's number one nicotine pouch brand. Find your Zen wherever nicotine products are.
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B
Sold near near you. Warning.
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A
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Nicotine is an addictive chemical.
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A
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.
- [31:10]
B
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A
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B
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A
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- [31:38]
C
One other piece here is the kind of the PLA piece of the puzzle, right? And I don't know enough about how you utilize these things and military capabilities to have a very educated thought on it. But there is a really good piece I recommend folks read by Sam Bresnik and Cole McFall of CSET Hill where they talk about PLA procurement documents actually and break it down. And again from kind of like my very top line knowledge of this, I tend to agree with everything they say, which is that look, the PLA is looking to develop AI enabled military capabilities. This may not make or break said capability, but we should be maintaining every inch of superiority that we have. And we know that the PRC has used every single insight into our capabilities that they've gained to advance their own. And then we've had to play catch up in pretty much every single one of those programs. And so there is this kind of. There is beyond all the things that Alan laid out, all of which are. Make total sense to me, there is this piece of the kind of defense PLA modernization piece that we should be really thinking about as well.
- [32:52]
A
Yeah, well. And I think, to me, that really pulls out what the core tension is here and where I think the intersection is between the worldview and the National Security Strategy, which I do think actually brought some things into focus, particularly around Asia and this deal and the general weirdness around the Trump administration's approach to AI in particular. And strategic competition generally begins to come into focus a little bit. I mean, tell me what you all think of this, but this is kind of where I've landed on this. The National Security Strategy describes Chinese competition in strictly economic terms. It's about trade balancing. It actually doesn't really talk about military conflict, except the possibility around Taiwan. And then it makes the point, okay, we need to set up lines of deterrence to avoid a military conflict over Taiwan. Maybe makes a passing glance at the South China Sea, but basically says, look, Taiwan, we need because of chips and semiconductor. That's it. It's not about democratic norms. All this other stuff that usually finds sway in the past, particularly Republican national security strategies, it's not there this time. This time it's really just about the second offshore with Taiwan, which is kind of a passing thing elsewhere. The National Security Strategy says, hey, with both China and with Russia, it's just a matter of striking the right balance. They actually say it quite expressly. Powerful states, it's a natural that they want to exercise control over the things around them. And that's not even inappropriate. We just have to strike a right regional and global balance of power. I think it reads a lot. I said this on a podcast we recorded with Dan Viman and Corey Schottke and Ben Wittes earlier this week for Law Firm, which I encourage folks to check out. I think it reads a lot like spheres of influence, which is a different vision of what strategic competition is. Right. The strategic competition through the Obama administration, to the first Trump administration, through the Biden administration, was this idea that China and Russia are offensively seeking to rewrite the rules of the international system that otherwise benefit the United States and its allies, providing kind of rules of the road, and that there needs to be an effort to constrain them from doing that. It's kind of like a rough parallel. I think offensive realism in IR schools thought the idea that China and Russia are on the warpath, are actively competing and going to contest with us and we'll keep pushing the envelope and we need to be prepared to push back. Instead here, the Trump administration is taking much more a posture about saying, you know what, maybe we can all get along on the major power front if we all accept we're all great powers, we all get our own sphere of influence. And they basically imply, hey, Russia, we've got to strike the right balance with the Western Europe, which is kind of within our sphere of influence, but otherwise we just have to strike the right balance and maintain a sustainable relationship with them. China, we got to right size our economic trade imbalance. That's what we care about, but that's our core interest there. It's not about maintaining this kind of broader architecture. If you accept that, then it becomes much less of a zero sum game and the ability of seeing more wiggle room around. Well, maybe we can accept that China has a little bit more advantage in AI because there's no reason to see it as a strictly zero sum game because there's no inevitable military conflict, because maybe we just don't actually care about that much. We need to prepare for the contingency, maintain strength, but it's not an imminent concern like it was phrased by the Biden administration, by the first Trump, Trump administration. I think that actually begins to make a little bit of sense and it opens up a lot more space for other weird priorities that this administration has, like 15% kickback, which again, makes no sense for the reasons Alan noted. Right. Like if you wanted to supercharge the US AI development internally on the corporate side, the Bell Lab side, you'd give that 15% to Nvidia to spend on research. Right? But you're not doing that. Or maybe you force them to kick it into public AI labs at least and like sink it into universities and other things. You're not doing that. It's just going to the general treasury. We don't know what this 15% is going to be used for. Right. If it's even legal, which again, reasonable questions there. It just becomes this much more loose sort of domain. I think the real question becomes like, well, is this actually a worldview that is motivating and informed by something that's driving these policies, or is it just an effort to ad hoc rationalize what is in the end, a somewhat incoherent bundle of policies? And the truth is, with all these documents, it's kind of both. What I think it does say here is that I think when we argue about like, well, look, isn't this really going to give China an edge in developing their indigenous AI industry? I think the Trump White House's answer is, yeah, why is that a problem? And when you get to that point, the people who are talking about China policy and China competition, they're just completely ships passing in the night because there's just not as much commonality there as you may think. And I don't think the Trump White House can come out and say it quite that expressly like they acknowledge, oh yeah, we are going to compete, we are in a degree of competition, but I just don't think they actually rank that competition as zero sum or as high a priority as other people think. And you can see in the national security strategy, what do they talk about? The Western hemisphere, immigration, that's what they care about. They don't care about all of these other issues that are reserved for chapters at the end, even though they were front and center for the last 15, 16 years of US foreign policy. I will say the question for me that really comes down to, because Alan, I think you did a good job carving out the two different sides of this issue is what are the dynamics around diffusion in this context? This is kind of a broader question of diffusion generally, diffusion being essentially the exporting of AI technology. There's a really good argument out there that you actually want the world working off of US controlled AI models, right? Because in theory, five to 10 years from now you are going to have AI integrated with all sorts of things around the world. And A, if they're Chinese dominated or Chinese controlled, particularly state run, you'd worry about all sorts of backdoors or weird waitings or all sorts of ways it could be manipulated. And B, you want to be able to exercise that degree of control role, right? And maybe that lends into like concentrating data centers and energy production in US and allied hubs. But you know, it's not clear to me how that, how exactly this intersects with that, like how much is this actually going to cultivate dependence or not.
- [38:37]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. I think with the answer is we just don't know. The diffusion question is extremely complicated and there are different answers depending on whether you're focusing on the software side or the hardware side. So on the software side, there's a separate conversation to be had about whether or not you want the world running on America's AI systems or rather on, let's say China's open source models or open weight models to be a Little more accurate. And there, I think there's a good argument to be said that look, especially in countries that are choosing what used to be called the third world or the developing world, I'd rather have Saudi Arabia run off of American models than off of Chinese models, let's say. Now the question of what that has to do with chips is a little complicated. You can run any model on any chip. Obviously depending on how the models are architected, you can get some performance. There are performance differences based on the chips you run them on. So it's not a one for one. On the hardware side, again, I think the argument that Nvidia or David Sachs would make is you want everyone operating off of American hardware because then they're locked into the American hardware stack and something something, and that's good. And it's often a little underspecified what the something something is, is. Right. And you know, in part because very quickly get into these very, very important, right, but very technical questions about. Well, you know, right now the reason people use Nvidia is because of this thing called Cuda, which is Nvidia's low, basically low level systems language for essentially programming its GPUs and getting the maximum performance out of them. And so if everyone uses Nvidia chips, they'll all be using Cuda and maybe that'll be useful in the future. On the other hand, you know, perhaps it'll be alternatives to CUDA that will pop up because it's not just Nvidia that wants to sell chips, it's also amd. Google has its own entire fleet of what are called tensor processing units that use other stuff. So maybe this will end up being not so important in the future. Again, this is kind of a non answer, but it's all to say that you're dealing with an extremely, extremely complicated technical question and an extremely complicated geopolitical question. And the interconnection between those are very complicated. And the game theory of it is complicated and solving for equilibrium is complicated. And all this to say this is complicated. Which on the one hand gives me some degree of sympathy for the people in the White House and in the Commerce Department who are dealing with export controls. But then I just come back to. And then they throw in this idiotic 25% kickback, which again just makes me very doubtful that the policy process is a good one. And that's just where I come down on this.
- [41:07]
C
There's also a Chinese perception question here, right? I mean, yes, there's the technical questions, there's the Geopolitical questions. But there's also. So does China say they acquire these chips right. Are they going to be satisfied just kind of working with these and not developing their own or are they going to ultimately view it as in their interest to be self reliant and continue their own development?
- [41:33]
A
Yeah, I mean certainly the US strategic posture been to begin onshore chip development, that's been a major priority here as I think it has been in China. And one way I've heard this policy, this move sold is an effort to undercut that. But. But how effectively does that undercut that? I think that is fundamentally the question you would in a market economy you imagine all of a sudden you would have immediately available relatively cheap Nvidia comparatively then having to sink all this money into developing it. But China's not a market economy strictly Right. So if the government decides no, we actually do want to prioritize domestic development, we'll put the resources to it maybe that they could in a way that that kind of market logic doesn't bar. It is a really complicated set of questions. I think it's really interesting. It's something we'll come back to. But for the time being we need to turn another aspect of AI policy that has popped up on the radar in the last week and that is this question of this executive order President Trump issued in the last week, I think at the very end of last week, seeking to forego, bar, prohibit, preempt to the extent it can, a lot of state activity around regulation of AI. Alan, talk to us about the executive order. This is an issue we talked about before. We know there's a legislative effort percolating around this that ultimately fell flat, died with Senate Republicans as I rec call maybe the House. I don't even think it made it through the House either. But regardless, never made it through, couldn't get the support even in the Republican Congress. This administration went forward with it anyway on an executive branch level. Talk to us about the politics about it, what it does and then how feasible it actually is.
- [43:00]
B
Sure, yeah. So I think you really have to I need to give a little bit of background on the legislative efforts because I think that really sets up the scene for the executive order. So zooming out just a bunch and I should say we did a scaling laws episode. This is a lawfare's AI podcast about this last week. So folks who want to really deep dive into the executive order should go check that out. So for a long time there's been this question about where AI regulation should come from. And who should decide? Should it be done at the state level or the national level? Some questions are obviously only appropriate for the nation to decide at the national level. Right? AI in the military is not something that anyone thinks states have a legitimate role in. On the other hand, there are some questions where, where it's entirely a state question. A state government should choose if it wants to use AI for its own operations. Obviously the federal government shouldn't really care about that. And then there's this whole set of questions, kind of everything in between, where you can make an argument that this is something where both sides, both the federal government and the state governments, have something interesting to say. This is everything from economic impacts to AI and discrimination to building data centers and so on and so so forth. There have been a lot of AI regulations over the last couple of years. There will likely be a bunch more AI regulations in the next, you know, few years. And this has raised concerns among some, both in the AI industry and then in Washington D.C. actually in both parties. I think it's important to recognize this is actually not quite as a partisan issue as it may initially appear, that this raft of state AI legislation is going to threaten America's ability to develop AI, which is important for national economic growth and benefits. But also in particular, kind of harkening back to our previous topic, geopolitical competition, especially with China. And so there has been this core in the White House, led obviously by sort of David Sachs and that crew, but then in Congress in particular, led by Senator Ted Cruz, to push for federal preemption, sort of explicit federal preemptions where the federal government passes a law saying this is our domain, states you cannot regulate in this area. There was a high profile effort, as you pointed out, Scott, last year that failed. Then there was another kind of short lived effort earlier this year to slip a set of preemption provisions into the ndaa, the must pass defense authorization bill that failed. And so what we have now is the White House issuing this executive order. And the reason I think this background is important is because even if you support preemption, and I am one of those people that supports some degree of federal preemption of AI legislation, especially when it comes not so much to AI use, but to the development of frontier AI systems, one has to think about the politics here because at the end of the day, and I'll get into why this is in a second, but at the end of the day, if you want really durable preemption, it's going to have to come through Congress Right. Only Congress exercising itself, its Commerce Clause authority really can durably say this is the federal domain, either because we have our own set of regulations that we want to push or just because we think the current essentially kind of laissez faire status quo is the appropriate regulatory scheme. And I'll just go on a sidebar for a second. It's totally fine to criticize Congress for not regulating AI, but one talking point that I do sometimes hear that I think is important to push back on, just as a conceptual point, is that it's somehow inappropriate for Congress to preempt state legislation if it does not offer its own regulatory alternative. Alternative. That is not how preemption works. Congress is allowed to preempt state legislation and not provide its own alternative, either because it can't get its act together or because Congress thinks that the laissez faire status quo is the appropriate situation. Right. Sometimes the free market is the appropriate regulatory alternative. Now, you don't have to believe that. You can say I think Congress is also wrong to believe that. But you hear some, some slippage. Right? And so I think you want to push that away. Right. If you want to say that Congress should not probably preempt, it should be like, because you think Congress should not preempt, not because you think that for Congress to preempt, it also needs to regulate. That is just not a thing that is true. But I keep saying Congress because if you really want durable preemption, you need Congress to get involved here. And one thing that I think all proponents of preemption should worry about is that this executive order is not only going to be ineffective, it's going to actively backfire because it's going to kind of poison the well.
- [47:17]
A
Right.
- [47:17]
B
It's going to piss off people in Congress who might be amenable to preemption, but are not going to be be interested in this happening through not terribly well thought out executive orders. Okay, so this is a very long wind up. Apologies. But now let's talk about the executive order says. So again, I've read, I've read some not great news coverage that suggests that President Trump has quote, unquote preempted state legislation. That that is not what he has done. He does not have the authority to do that every time there's an executive order. And because I'm TikTok guy, I've had to deal with so many of these executive orders over the last year. I always trot out the thing I like to say, which is an executive order is not magic. It is just. Just a truth Social post on Nicer Stationary. Right. An executive order, fundamentally, in almost all circumstances, is a command. It's an interoffice memo, I think, is the best way to think of what an executive order is. It's an internal bureaucratic command to other parts of the executive branch to do stuff. And preempting state legislation is not something any part of the executive branch can do. So what can it do? The main thing this executive order does is it directs the Department of Justice, create a task force to go out and look for state laws that are already illegal or unconstitutional under a variety of theories and then to litigate that and to try to get courts to strike down state laws that do that. There are a lot of theories upon which this can happen. The most, I think, well thought out is what's called the dormant Commerce Clause. And that's the constitutional principle that an implication of the Commerce Clause, which is the explicit grant of authority for Congress to regulate interstate commerce, is that even in the absence of congressional preemption, explicit congressional preemption, the states, as a matter of constitutional law, are not allowed to regulate if that regulation has essentially a excessive, disruptive impact on interstate commerce. Now, the problem here, and again, you can go listen to the Scaling Loss podcast, and where my co host Kevin Frazier and I kind of get into this a little bit, is that the dormant Commerce Clause is extremely complicated doctrine. It's actually currently in flux. There was a case from a few years ago that really unsettled it and made its contours extremely unclear. It kind of exists and doesn't exist in this almost Schrodinger's like way. And people truly are not sure what the scope of the dormant Commerce Clause is. But this is something fundamentally for courts to decide, and DOJ will go and now litigate. It's an interesting question. This itself raised some interesting legal questions about whether DOJ has the standing to just start suing states. There's a. There's like a very niche group of AI lawyer nerds who. We've all been trying to figure this out, like over group chats in the last week. And I think our. I don't want to speak for anyone here, but I think our sense is that courts generally are somewhat solicitous to federal government standing when it comes to defending interstate commerce. So, like, maybe the feds could get into court on this. Whether or not you need the feds to get into court on this, to tee up these cases is not at all clear. I imagine there will be a Private litigant, dormant commerce clause suit against all of the laws that might interfere with the dormant commerce Clause anyway.
- [50:18]
A
Because the AI companies that don't want to comply will almost certainly sue to challenge them if they have the backing of the Trump administration.
- [50:24]
B
Exactly. So it's not clear what this will do, but I think this is kind of the sort of marquee part of this. There are other parts of the eo I just kind of take really quickly through them where the FCC is supposed to go and study whether or not there are some federal communications statutes that that might preempt state laws that try to require disclosures. There's a command to the Federal Trade Commission to see if this is particularly far fetched if state laws requiring changes to model outputs for like, algorithmic bias reasons might violate deceptive federal deceptive trade policy. And if that doesn't quite make sense of how that could possibly be, it's because it doesn't really make sense. And then the last part that has gotten a lot of attention is this spending conditions. There is this pot of what's called bead money. This is basically money for broadband expansion. And it went through various iterations in the Biden administration, I think first Trump administration and this latest Trump administration. And so Trump has basically told the agencies who administer this to see if they can condition some of the spending on whether or not states are interfering with AI too much. Again, again, we're also going to publish a lawfare piece about this at some point in the near future. A really great analysis from someone about this. Whether or not the government even has the power to withhold this funding. The short answer is it probably doesn't. But again, putting the legal issues aside, even if it did, this is not such a huge pot of money that it probably will, that it will discourage the states that really care about this, in particular California, but also other states like New York, from regulating AI. And in fact, again, it might backfire because again, it might just be viewed as another heavy handed attempt by the federal government to interfere with state sovereignty. And again, just to zoom out, it is an interesting observation that here the valence is flipped, right? Usually it's people on the left who are somewhat skeptical of these kind of laboratories of democracy arguments and arguments that we shouldn't encroach on state prerogatives, whereas conservatives are, are quite a fan of those kinds of arguments. And here you have a Republican administration.
- [52:30]
A
I'm not sure that is a stereotype that has held up for many a year at this point, Alex, maybe Not.
- [52:34]
B
I believe that is maybe not.
- [52:35]
A
That is the historical. That is the stereotype of our youths. I would agree.
- [52:39]
B
When I went to law school in the early 2010s, that was still the vibe. But you're right, maybe that has long since changed.
- [52:47]
C
Yeah, that's now twice that Scott has called Alan old on this podcast.
- [52:51]
A
There you go.
- [52:52]
C
I just wanna note this.
- [52:54]
A
I mean I will say this is a really wild so I have a broad theory. We often get in fights at lawfare, polite fights on slack over when the administration issues an executive order, whether it's complete horseshit or not. And I am strongly in the horseshit camp 90% of the time. I think that has been less true during the first. Basically, the longer you get in the administration, the ratio of horseshit dramatically increases throughout.
- [53:17]
B
What do you mean by horseshit?
- [53:18]
A
Like just performative in a consecutive order that is almost entirely performative or whose stated impact is dramatically greater than the actual likely impact is going to be. This administration has done a lot of very influential things with executive orders. Don't get me wrong, it's done a lot of it. Although frankly, the sheer number of executive orders issued still does not track to a correlate in a normal way with the amount of impact those executive orders have had on.
- [53:43]
B
Fentanyl is now a weapon of mass destruction.
- [53:45]
A
Maybe one word we've been talking about recently where I tend to think that it smells of horse poo poo pretty aggressively.
- [53:52]
B
That's a doo doo eo if I've ever seen one.
- [53:54]
A
And I have to say I think this artificial intelligence one does kind of fit in the same vein. It does do some things. I'm just not sure that things add up to much because you said, like you said, you have a litigation threat. The Justice Department could threaten to litigate a bunch of things. That is true. They can do that anyway. People are probably going to litigate these things anyway if there really is an argument there. Maybe you get a little extra weight from the executive branch weighing in. If you really think this administration had so much credibility with the courts or even the Supreme Court, that it would be taken very seriously when it says things like, oh, this threatens US national interest, stuff like that. Fortunately, this administration has burned that credibility like cheap paper. So it is really not then have that much of it saved up with maybe at the Supreme Court level, but I doubt it, particularly on a lot of this stuff. And it'd take a while to get there. The spending thing I think is a real problem. We've seen them try to use these exact same spending tools in the context of sanctuary cities. Since the first Trump administration, it's a very mixed bag. It's not very successful, ripe to legal challenge. There has to be some sort of nexus between the purpose for which money is appropriated and the conditions you put on it. It doesn't need to be tight, but there doesn't need to be some sort of loose nexus there. I don't this gets close to passing that muster, but it's something they can threaten to do. And so the question then becomes like, well, maybe the threat's enough. And this administration loves to threaten things and it does sometimes get wins from that, and maybe they'll get a little bit of win from here. But this is also happening in a context where who are a lot of these state governments they're worried about? They're blue state governments who have the political incentive to want to fight the Trump administration on something for most of the part. Right. If anything, I kind of think that this kind of makes a lot of state legislators looking for a political cause to say and political attention to say, yeah, I had this idea for an AI regulation thing. I don't know how effective it'll be or won't be. I would enact it in the ordinary course. Maybe it wouldn't be a top priority. But now it's going to get me national press because it's going to be contested by the Trump administration. The Trump administration is going to be accusing me of undermining the AI industry. And guess what? If I am any liberal state legislature in California, that may be exactly what my constituents want, because they're worried about AI and the AI industry. So it's really, really a perverse and odd set of incentives that I think really borders on foolhardy and is not likely to have much effect of the types that they're actually proposing to have here, let alone preemption. A statute could actually do it. And for the record, I tend to think preemption is not a good idea. I don't think it won't ever be a good idea. Maybe a state will do something dumb and then you should preempt it. In the meantime, I buy into the laboratories of democracy idea, and I kind of think that you should let them operate that way. Ari, I don't want to cut you out of this conversation. Let me cut you to you on where this intersects with our past conversation, because I do talk a little about the global aspect of this and how it fits into the global kind of macro strategy. Where do you see this Reflected obviously their argument for this is that we need a national strategy so we can play it to the edge and we're going to be absolute bleeding edge of AI technology, which is a little in tension with some of the Nvidia stuff already that we're talking about, including that 15% kickback and everything else. But talk to us about how, where you see this fitting into the broader kind of AI strategy question.
- [56:51]
C
Yeah, exactly. Again tension is I think my kind of like take on all of this. Right. But yeah, it does talk a little bit about enhancing global AI dominance, but mostly through the lens of quote unquote minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI, which reads to me as though the administration is essentially buying into this notion. Curious on you guys thoughts on this that you know, companies are pushing, which is that regulation will, will essentially mean that we will cede the ground to China when it comes to AI competition. So they need less regulation at home so that they can compete internationally with China. Now China's been kind of putting out some of its own documents over the past year, year and a half that are I think interesting to read and digest. They're much more comprehensive. Although you know, this administration is kind of rolling things out. It's done a, you know, we talked about the action plan and so on and so forth forth. The Chinese kind of documents tend to be a bit more comprehensive roadmaps that they put out more in kind of like a single bundle here. But there was the AI initiative that was launched last year and then the State Council over the summer released a directive on its implementation which is a very comprehensive document that gets into kind of how they see AI generally and how they view themselves as competing in this space globally as well. Well the thing that is interesting to me is two points actually I guess that I think are going to be a challenge for the administration and for the United States in terms of competition. The first is that the previous AI action plan talked about exporting US AI infrastructure, if you want to call it China is so well positioned to do this because they have the state led model of the soup to nuts kind of approach, approach that they are able to take to the global south and take care of all of their needs. And I don't know that whereas our companies are as capable of doing that. And the second piece, again going back to the kind of tension of what the administration is doing on the one hand and what it's saying it wants to achieve on the other, which is that we are cutting the diplomatic infrastructure upon which we have relied to advocate for U.S. businesses, for the U.S. models. Right. And so with the reorgs at the State Department, with the RIFs, at the State Department, with the nixing of the USAID, USAID generally that has been helping to build local connectivity projects, we are making it more challenging, I think, to compete in this space. And so like again, I don't know that going back to your question of is there a cohesive sort of worldview or are all these things siloed and being done completely independently from one another? I think in this case we're looking at the latter. But interested in what you guys kind of how you guys interpreted that. And again, it's really interesting to me that it's all framed very kind of domestic centric. Even though it talks, it kind of like it's a seconds kind of, you know, it's yeah, we should be competing globally, but it doesn't really dig into it too much to tell us how. And what does that even mean? What does winning the AI race actually mean?
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A
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- [60:42]
A
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- [63:22]
C
I thought I said it was the latter, but we're not.
- [63:25]
A
Oh really? Okay, maybe that's right. I should double check that. But we know that's a big part of this discourse. At the same time we know the person who's come out as a hero from this Ahmed Al Ahmed, an Australian national, also an immigrant, played a key role in bringing down the surviving shooter and disarming him. So it is. Obviously there's an immigration angle here. There is the anti Semitism angle which has become a huge global trend, particularly since the October 7th massacre and ensuing conflict in Gaza in A lot of corners in the world, including in Australia. But also it's occurring in the context of Australia, a country which installed some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the world and hasn't really experienced that many mass shootings since the one in the mid-1990s that inspired that set of laws. But this is a notable one. This is a big one, and it appears to have been at least so far. I don't think, again, we've gotten a full media account to this yet. But the firearms you can see and that are reported the individual were using were a bolt action hunting rifle and shotgun, which very well may have been legally procured, although perhaps modified to some extent under Australian laws, even the restrictive laws that exist. As the father of the duo is believed to be a member of a firearms club and hunting club, I believe I saw one report that said he had six firearms legally purchased under Australian law, which may well include these two. So it's a really complicated story and you have to think about what jumps out of this on top of the human element about this. That I think is important to keep in mind. Ari, I want to come to you first on this. I'd be kind of curious about what your reaction was to this. I know your spouse has worked in international security for a long time. These incidents have popped up in various contexts while you're in government. Well, I've been in government as well. They obviously had these sort of policy ramifications. What jumps out, as you, is particularly noticeable here. That's worth kind of focusing on from those sort of policy perspectives and the different issues that intersect at a horrible event like this.
- [65:14]
B
This.
- [65:15]
C
Yeah. So two, I think, big buckets of things on this horrific attack. The first is that this is the deadliest terrorist attack in Australia, which is noteworthy, and it is happening, or it happened in the context of a series of plotted attempted terrorist attacks. There was news, I think, earlier this week or over the weekend about some individuals suspected of planning an attack on a Christmas market in Germany. There was something about a plot in Southern California. And meanwhile, to bring it back to the theme of many of my comments today, the National Security Strategy. Counterterrorism is very much an afterthought in that document. It's almost as though we are wishing for the terrorism challenge to go away. And if we do what my cat does and close our eyes, then nobody can see us and nothing, it all goes away. And it is very much wishful thinking. So that's the first thing here. The second thing, zooming in on this particular attack is obviously the general trend of rising antisemitism which you talked about. And we've had this conversation in this country since October 7th to some extent. But it's often been very fraught and very much wrapped in the context of campus politics, Israel, Gaza, foreign policy issues, First Amendment issues. And so it's been very politically controversial and challenging. But it is something that we need to be able to, I don't know if we can, but we do need to be able to depoliticize this conversation around rising antisemitism at home and then work with like minded countries globally to tackle it. Because this is a global trend. It is not a US Only trend. It is not an Australia only trend. It is a trend we're seeing across the globe. So just to name a few incidents over the past few months alone, just a couple of months ago, I think it was on Yom Kippur, there was an attack in Manchester in France over the summer, a series of synagogues and Jewish owned businesses, the National Holocaust Museum were attacked. Germany, I saw put out a number that they've seen. They saw a 20% rise in antisemitic attacks in 2024. And then the number that really has stuck with me is Australia itself has seen 3700 anti Semitic attacks since October 7th. And this was as of this fall. That is an outrageous number. Right. So you know, we, this is a global problem. It's a problem that is escalating. And in the Biden administration we had the anti Semitism strategy that was put out. I don't know if the Trump administration, for all of its rhetorical comments about antisemitism, is planning on doing something like that, doing its own version of an anti Semitism strategy. But if it is something that was missing from the Biden administration strategy was actually this kind of global focus. It talked obviously, rightly it was focused on domestic related issues, but it didn't do enough in my mind rereading it recently to talk about how we would be working with other nations to learn lessons from how they're tackling this problem, where we collectively have shortfalls and what we should be doing together to counter this issue, to tackle this issue. And that is I think, bit of an opportunity for this administration, if it were to kind of think about this, to address that and to really work with allies and partners who are also experiencing similar trends in their own countries.
- [68:48]
B
I mean, I wish I had anything intelligent to say about this. To me, I just, it's hard not to take this personally, right? You Know, it's moments like this when I, when I reflect on the fact that there are not even 16 million Jews in the world. World, that is 0.2% of the global population. Right. There are just not that many of us and we are not particularly well liked. We have not been particularly well liked for several millennia. The last, you know, there was a kind of golden age, I think, from, I don't know, maybe the 80s to the early 2000s, at least when I was growing up, where you could sort of forget that. But history has reasserted itself with quite a vengeance. And it is just, you know, it is, it is hard not to view instances like this with just deep, deep, deep pessimism because there are just not that many places where I think there are particularly warm feelings to this fairly small group of people. The irony, of course, with these attacks is that to the extent that they are motivated in the minds of these individuals by whatever's happening in Israel and Gaza, the message that they send is actually, you're not safe in the Diaspora. Well, where are the Jews going to go? Exactly. They're going to go to Israel. And that country, whatever you think of it, has several nuclear weapons. It's not going anywhere. So the effect of all of this is simply to underscore the very point that I think the perpetrators of this attack, to the extent that they have well thought out ideologies, which, you know, is always, always a question, but yeah, it is, it is a very depressing thing. You know, I would also say, I mean, I, I would hope that events like this make clear to people why there are lots of Jews, including many who hold very nuanced and often critical views of the current Israeli government, that when they hear phrases like globalize the interference intifada, they react quite strongly to them. Because there is a version of globalized intifada that includes this. Right. That doesn't mean that every time someone says globalize the intifada, this is what they mean. Plenty of people don't. Plenty of people mean just a more general solidarity with Palestinians. And, you know, that's an interesting set of discussions to have, but this is an example of the intifada being globalized. And I think after a decade of many of us hearing about the importance of inclusion and microaggressions and all of this, it was quite disappointing over the last years when these phrases, which certainly evoke these kinds of violent acts were often sort of brushed aside. Now it raises the question, of course, okay, well, what do you do? Right. What does it mean? To combat antisemitism. The thing that I worry about is that especially in countries, countries that do not have the same free speech tradition that the United States has, combating anti Semitism means clamping down on speech. But I don't think that ends well either. I don't think it ends well generally for society. But even if you're just focused on what ends well for Jews, I don't think it ends well either. Right. I think one of the great tragedies for many Jews is that when they look to their left, they no longer see many allies. And so then they look to their right because the people to their right, right. Often dislike Muslims more than they. More than they dislike Jews. And so they say, okay, well, I'll at least throw my lot in with the people who dislike someone else more than they dislike me. Okay, fine, I understand that impulse. But that doesn't end well either. Right. Because the sort of nativist blood and soil nationalism never stops. Right. Never stops with Muslims or with immigrants or whatever. Right. It always comes for the Jews in the end of the day either. Right. Again, going back to the fact that this is 0.2% of the global population, which has always been viewed as not just an Other, but the kind of archetypal other. So it's a very difficult situation to figure out. What do you do about this problem? Right. What does it mean to combat antisemitism?
- [72:58]
A
Right.
- [72:59]
B
What does it mean to combat anti Semitism in a liberal democracy where you don't want to sacrifice speech? What does it mean to combat antisemitism in a world of a lot of migration, including from parts of the world where antisemitism is extremely high? How do you do that in a way that's also liberal? I have no idea. I don't know the first way to think about this problem.
- [73:19]
A
A few things that bounce off to me from that I think it's worth bringing in mind about. And there's a lot of discourse around this event. These events, I think puts it in a different light. I've seen this trend of anti Semitic event that definitely is tied towards October 7th worldwide, worldwide. This attack is a little different though, related to that trend, but also feeding off a different trend which is legacy of Islamic State inspired attacks that have taken place across Western countries really for a decade or more now. Pretty horrific attacks, and notably on an ideology that has a element that is anti Israeli and anti Semitic and has had for a very long time, but that is also strongly anti Western, anti imperialist sort of framing and Specifically, according to the media reports that I've read in the aftermath of this attack, talking about some of the active recruiting of the Islamic State, which is heavily diminished from its height a number of years ago at this point, particularly in terms of geographic control. What do they encourage people to do? They say, target the countries that were engaged in the military campaign against us during the defeat. ISIS campaign from 2014-20? Well, kind of ongoing still, but the bulk of it through 2019 or 2020. Right. Among those targets, many of them have had. Some have targeted Jewish communities a disproportionate amount, but there's also been lots that targeted other folks as well. Think of the Bataclan attacks like being one of the most vicious and deadly ones. Right. Which attacked broad swaths of Parisian society. I say this to note that this is a trend that is not isolated to Jewish communities in terms of targeting. This is a reality of terrorism that is a persistent threat and a reality. Is it the number one national security threat or policy concern like it was for many years after 9, 11, or at least framed that way? Should it have ever been less sure about that? But it is a reality. And here in the United States, at least, we are in a system where we know the vast majority of resources committed to combating and preventing acts of terrorism like this have been channeled to, frankly, immigration. So that should be a point of concern. I think this should be a reminder to people that these sorts of attacks can still happen, are still being actively encouraged by people out there, not just targeting, targeting Jews in parts of the world, although they get a disproportionate amount of the hostility, but also a variety of other people as well. The other element of this, I think, bears into this question of antisemitism is the fact that in the United States you have this facilitation of the October 7th sentence. Sentence has been a very facilitating sort of target. But this allocation of it and tying it to it to either advocacy for the Palestinian cause or immigration status, there are people who fit those categories who are involved in all these attacks. There's also been lots of anti Semitic attacks, particularly in the United States and in Australia, where that is not the correlation. Right. There are lots of people involved where they see a broader social milieu that seems critical, that sparks something, that sparks some sort of reason to take targeted violent action. You look at the list of anti Semitic violent incidents that have occurred in the United States in the last several years, only less than half of them fit that exact, exact mold. There's a broader problem about anti Semitism that's not just rooted in those. And so if your idea of combating anti Semitism is suppressing rhetoric around Palestinians, you're not actually addressing the problem. And I think that's an issue that this administration really wrestles with.
- [76:38]
B
Oh, and not just that. I think you're actually underselling anti Semitism. Right?
- [76:42]
A
Oh, 100%.
- [76:44]
B
Because you're saying it's funny if know, often, often one critique of sort of tone deafness from the left, which I think is a fair critique is, you know, whenever there's some anti Semitic attack or event, people say, well it's, you know, we have to really understand the Israel Gaza problem. Right. As if, as if that is kind of the triggering thing. And if only, you know, Israel wasn't doing this thing, then like, you know, these Jews would be, would be, would be left alone. Right. And people on the right often, I think correctly criticize the left for this.
- [77:10]
A
For the record, I have heard very few actual people on the left ever say something like that, except for a few vocal people who then get to trumpeted and made an example of. I think this reflects the kind of broader weird bifurcation of the discourse and framing around this in a way that is dangerous.
- [77:24]
B
Fair enough. But the point I was trying to make was. But then when the right reacts to anti Semitism by saying we need to clamp down on pro Palestinian speech, the implication is itself to underplay the reality of anti Semitism. Right. Anti Semitism is a 2000 year old conspiracy theory that long predates the Palestinian problem and will not go away if we have some marvelous two state solution.
- [77:48]
A
Right.
- [77:48]
B
Which is the source of my depression. Right. Because you know, I look at what happens when you have 0.2% of the global population, that plenty of people, you know, in the Middle east and in Europe and you know, all sorts of places have hated for 2,000 years. Yeah, it, it, I don't, yeah. And then I just trail off because, because to, because to play the, the tape forward is too depressing.
- [78:12]
A
The last part of this I do think is worth talking about is the gun control element of it, obviously. Because I've seen a lot of strange discourse around the idea like is this a failure of the Australian gun control system? The Australian government itself is talking about how they're going to ratchet and lean into gun control even more after the incident response to this incident because of course these attackers did get six weapons. I got to say my initial reaction when I saw this is this is a real case Study and exactly how those laws are really affecting effective. Oh yeah, because if you saw two attackers armed with those sorts of weapons you can buy in the United States, I cannot imagine how many more people will be dead. Right now they were using, they did not even have available to them semi auto weapons. They're talking about bolt lock rifle. I mean you have to manually advance each round. And a shotgun, I don't know actually what model shotgun it was. I don't think semiautomatic ones are legal in Australia. It's my understanding. Compare that to the Mandalay Bay shooting where you had one individual with a semiautomatic weapon and a bump stock. Now legal again as a of thanks to the Supreme Court last year and the sheer volume of devastation. It's just amazing. And no gun control law will probably ever be able to completely stop something horrible like this from happening. In European countries. You have an Islamic State actively encourages car attacks and knife attacks and those are part of the broader milieu of these sorts of acts. But when you don't have access to the weapons as easily, you limit the scale when these horrible things do happen. And you know, if this had been America, so many more people would be dead. And that's a horrible thing to say, but it's I think, a reality we have to reconcile ourselves with in a way that is a scary thing to think about.
- [79:52]
C
And I don't know how much training and what kind of training the terrorists actually underwent, but there is reporting that they went to the Philippines, they received some training. Right. So at a minimum they had some baseline here, which I think with the kind of weapons that we have kind of just on our streets would have been just even worse. Right. And here we have folks who don't really. Who pick up a gun for the first time and do a lot more, even more damage.
- [80:20]
A
Well, I think we'll have to leave this topic there. We felt it was an important one to talk about. Such a horrible incident occurred at this particular moment. But lots of things to think about, things we need to engage. I think some of the discourse around this stuff pretty critically and hopefully there's a step in that direction at least. Obviously there's a lot more to talk about as well. But for now, we are out of time for this episode. But this would not be your Oscar if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Alan, what do you have for us?
- [80:47]
B
So speaking of everyone hating the Jews, my object lesson is the hit Broadway musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which I have Been obsessed with since I was a small child.
- [81:00]
A
So, like, all good juice.
- [81:02]
B
So when I was a kid, When I was a kid, we had our family car, had one of those. Had a CD player, right? Because cars used to have those. And it was very fancy. It had a.3 CD players. You could put three CDs in.
- [81:14]
A
Alan is moving his finger in a circle. Like, we don't remember what CDs are. I think the same age.
- [81:18]
B
Alan, CD players. No, no, no, this is good. This is my object lesson for the elder millennials. And so my dad's car, There were only three CDs, I think for like, seven solid years. It was just the same three CDs. It was the Beatles, one album. It's a great album. Mozart's Requiem, fabulous piece of music.
- [81:39]
C
Fantastic.
- [81:39]
B
And Jesus Christ Superstar. Right. The kind of original movie cast. And so I just listened to those three. I feel like this says something about my sake as I'll listen to. And so this reason I was listening for this week is because there's, I guess, a current national tour. And so I got to see it last week in the Twin Cities. I basically was. Every few months, my wife and I sit next to each other on the couch, and we, like, go through the listings of the various cultural organizations in town and, like, what should we watch? And stuff like that. And so, like, I yelped out loud when I saw six months ago that this was coming to town. So I was like, hannah, I know you hate musicals, but you just. You have to take me to this. Like, I'm. So. I'm calling in a marital favor. Like, you just. You need to take me on a date to this. Like, I need to see this before I die. And so I went and I saw it. It is so much more unhinged than I realized. I mean, Jesus Christ Superstar, which truly is one of, I think, the, like, great works of the last 50 years. Like, I will, like, absolutely. I like no irony. I think it is one of the great cultural musical works of the last century. Is a completely insane piece of art, right? It's like a psychedelic early 1970s rock opera, basically telling the gospel according to Judas, and it just only gets more insane from there. But the thing I did not appreciate is that when you see it live and you see it performed, it is so much more insane than. Than one realizes. The reason I think it's such a genius piece of work is because I think it captures the craziness of early Christianity. Like, I think after 2000 years of institutionalized Christianity, and, you know, sitting there and listening to, like, you know, the. The. The Matthew Passion of Bach and all this, which is, like, amazing. You get a much more, like, sanitized version of Christianity and we realize what it actually is, right? Like an itinerant anarchist Jewish preacher who is crucified as a common criminal and then is made into the Godhead, like, by a third of humanity.
- [83:29]
A
It is an insane. It's a.
- [83:31]
B
It's a. Dude. That story, it's metal. Like, that is a hardcore story. And having it retold as, like, a Completely lunatic 1970s hippie rock opera is, I think, actually much closer to the original gospel than, like, anything you could get today in mainstream Christianity. So all this to say it was awesome. I have, like, never been more excited. It's fucking awesome, right? If you can see the production, go see it. If you. If not, watch the original 1970s cinema version. It's so good. The person, the actor who plays Judas is still the best Judas of all time, but just like, rock on, man. It's the best thing I've seen in a long time.
- [84:09]
C
This just brought me back to being in college, sitting, you know, on a couch at, like, 10pm and some dude who has been smoking way too much comes in and starts just, like, doing exactly what Alex.
- [84:20]
B
I just, like, really, guys. I was just like.
- [84:21]
A
Was it Lloyd Webber that he came in and started photographing the cats, The Phantom?
- [84:26]
B
Well, that's the.
- [84:27]
A
What's amazing.
- [84:29]
B
That's what's amazing, right? Like, the same dude that wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, then wrote Cats? Like, how is it the same person?
- [84:37]
A
Yeah, I don't know. I kind of see it, but that's okay. But I'm with you. I'm with you. Was Tim Rice involved with Cats? I don't think he was, no. That's like the difference maker. He did Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamco too, right?
- [84:49]
B
I think he may have, but I.
- [84:50]
A
Think he did the whole. The biblical.
- [84:52]
B
I think what happened to Andrew Lloyd Webber is that he lost Tim Rice. And, like, after he lost Tim Rice, like, Tim Rice was the hardcore one, right? But after he lost Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber sort of, like, became the guy who wrote Cats.
- [85:05]
A
Yeah, perhaps. Perhaps.
- [85:06]
B
It's metal, man. It's awesome.
- [85:08]
A
There you go. Well, I don't have anything quite as exciting for my object lesson, although maybe something easy to experience. It is the holiday season, so of course I try and lean in to the holiday season for my object lessons. I'm going to be honest with you, I am running up Dry. Because I've done doing this for five years and I have used a lot of my good ones. But then I realized I have yet to share what is cocktail or something.
- [85:26]
B
You should have a cocktail.
- [85:28]
A
I've been trying to find one. Honestly, I did kind of perfect the hot toddy, I think the other day. I'll save that. It's not technically a holiday season, but there's one baked good, which I'm not a baker, but I occasionally will dabble. This is one that's in my family recipe. That is the thing that signifies the holidays more than anything to me. It's not necessarily a holiday thing, but it is my grandmother's sour cream coffee cake. It's an amazing old recipe. It's really, really good. It is so bad for you, you cannot eat it. Except maybe around the. And maybe one other time of year. But it's really, really phenomenal. Dense. Awesome coffee cake with like brown sugar and nuts.
- [86:02]
B
Is it tangy from the sour cream?
- [86:04]
A
A little bit of thumbs.
- [86:04]
B
I do love it. I do love real tangy bakery.
- [86:06]
A
It's got almost like a. Like a not quite a pound. It's like a lighter than pound cake that's got that kind of density and moisture, you know?
- [86:13]
B
You know a holiday dessert is good just by weighing it. Like if it's.
- [86:15]
A
No, exactly. It's so heavy.
- [86:17]
B
If it like gives you a neck cramp, just holding it like this really.
- [86:20]
A
Tells you because you can. The cake is very heavy. You can't eat too much at once. But you.
- [86:23]
C
You're incorrect.
- [86:24]
A
You can freeze it. And so then it sits and it freezes perfectly and then thaws perfectly.
- [86:29]
B
If you can shot put with it. That's what I want to eat for.
- [86:33]
A
It is dense. It's good. It's calories. It's like, you know, it keeps you going through the holiday season. So I'm going to put this recipe, which I thought I had and I don't have with me currently, so I would read it out. But I'm going to procure it or reprocure it for my mother and I'll post it online to share it. She made one while I was out of town for Thanksgiving and she had like two slices left in the fridge that I saw and immediately devoured until I stopped myself and forced my children to each try a bite so that they could have a piece. I realized I don't think that either of them ever had it before. So it's amazing. So I highly recommend it more. It's probably my favorite baked good in the world. Pass that along for you, Ari. Bring us home. What do you have for an object lesson this week?
- [87:08]
C
Okay. Mine is much less exciting and much less joyful. So I watched a fantastic movie on a plane that I highly recommend. It's called Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and it is a movie that came out, I think, last year. It's a South African movie. It's an adaptation of a book that came out in the early 2000s. It's about a white Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush war, and it just deals with a lot of nuance and a lot of just beautifully with issues of colonialism, race, alcoholism, grief, trauma, you name it. It is beautifully done, really well acted, well written, just a fantastic movie. Maybe to save it for after the holidays, though, because that's heavy.
- [87:53]
A
Yeah, seems like a little bit of a downer, but it sounds amazing. I'll have to check that out first.
- [87:57]
B
You watch Jesus Christ Superstar and then you just immediately roll into this movie.
- [88:01]
A
I'm not sure that's appropriate for the holidays either before kind of for the other direction, but that's okay. I threw away depends on the holiday. I guess that's fair. Well, regardless, this is, of course the end of this week's episode. Barratta Security is a production of Lawfare, so be sure to Visit us@lawfairmedia.org for our show page with links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfair's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to visit Lawfare on social media. Wherever you socialize your media, be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening. And sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfairmedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was me of me, and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan. We are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests, Ari and Alan, I am Scott R. Anders and we'll talk to you a couple weeks. We're going off until the New Year's, but we'll talk to you in 2026. Except for a special holiday episode which will be coming forward before the end of the year. Keep an eye out for that one. Until then, goodbye.
- [89:06]
B
If you're a smoker or vaper ready.
- [89:09]
A
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