← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Tim Miller
Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a double header. I called in Alex Cantrowitz, a tech reporter, to try to educate me on what in the hell is going on with Deep Seek, the Chinese AI advancement that Markey and Reason called a Sputnik moment for the country. Sputnik. So I wanted to figure out what the hell's going on with that. So he'll be up in segment two. But first I get to turn the mic around on somebody you might know, you might have heard of it, that he wrote about in his book that he's kind of a big deal. He's kind of a minor celebrity that gets noticed in the airports now. His name's Chris Hayes. He's on MSNBC and he's got a new book out, the Sirens Call How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. How you doing, man?
- [01:18]
Chris Hayes
I'm great, man. How are you?
- [01:20]
Tim Miller
I'm doing well. You're dealing with the gaze of strangers.
- [01:23]
Chris Hayes
Okay, I'm dealing with the gaze of strangers. I'm pretty used to it by now, but it'll mess you up a little bit in the beginning. Actually, the, the press tour is weird. Like, I don't. I think when I was younger, I liked it more. I don't love being the object of press, you know, partly because there's like a control issue. Like, when it's your show, you control it, whereas with, it's other people that are controlling it. Which is the reason that a lot of powerful people don't like journalism. Like, fundamentally.
- [01:50]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [01:50]
Chris Hayes
You don't have. If you're a powerful person, you're used to people like, deferring to you and being very differential and, and having control over them. And, like, that's just not the way journalism works. Like, it's, like, it's interesting that you can see all this rage by all these powerful people about against journalism. Fundamentally, it's because the power dynamics of journalism are intentionally not in the hands.
- [02:13]
Tim Miller
Of the most powerful people, they like attention and control. You know, they like to be lavished, praised, praised to be lavish.
- [02:19]
Chris Hayes
Exactly.
- [02:20]
Tim Miller
That's exactly, exactly the manner which they wish for it to be lavished on them. Okay, yeah, you have some interesting insights about that I dealt with in therapy about the difference between attention and recognition. So we're going to do deep thinking, but unfortunately we have to do news too. There's some news. Last night the Office of Management and Budget, this seems where all the problems are going to be coming from in the next administration put out a memo ending all grant making. They put a stop work order on all grants. This include USAID and others. Among the potentially the things affected by this is the program that helps women, infants and children that need food, the WIC program. Thoughts?
- [03:00]
Chris Hayes
There's a few different tracks in which they're operating on. But one of them is, and we started to see this last week with like people finding out that they're like National Institutes of Health grant panels were being canceled, clinical trials being canceled, like oh, or skin cancer drug. They are trying to break the whole thing because they want to refashion it such that the entirety of the federal government is an object tool of the one person who occupies the presidency and nothing else. There are a bunch of statutory requirements in place that are geared towards the presidency serving the public interest. And they want to, they want to turn it into a 19th century urban machine with nuclear weapons. Like that's the goal here.
- [03:53]
Tim Miller
I was going back even further than that. I was thinking like spoil system.
- [03:57]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, right. I mean, yes, the spoil system is an example. But now the other thing about this OMB thing that's nuts to me is it's also as with a bunch of other stuff we could talk about, it's I think flatly illegal. They have this theory which they have said that despite the fact that the founders were very clear about who has the power of the purse and put that in Article 1 to Congress.
- [04:21]
Tim Miller
And who was that that has the power of the purse? Is that the Trump family organization?
- [04:25]
Chris Hayes
That's Barron. Barron has Baron. Yeah, the founders gave Baron the power of the purse.
- [04:30]
Tim Miller
Okay, good. All right, good. Thanks for clearing that up.
- [04:33]
Chris Hayes
Some listeners might not be Madison Federalist 45. He says there shall be a tall son. And he. No, they're very clear about the power of the purse. It's like we all learn this, you know, day one of constitutional structure. They're the appropriators. All of this stuff has been appropriated duly by Congress and passed. Their position is the president has ultimate veto over every cent that gets spent. It's ludicrous, but that's what their contention is.
- [05:04]
Tim Miller
And I think they'll probably have some friendly courts as to that effect. And we've seen some of this.
- [05:08]
Chris Hayes
It's interesting. The first time around, there was a lot more wink and nod, like cutesiness. For instance, the Muslim ban.
- [05:18]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [05:19]
Chris Hayes
It was always the case that, that a ban based on religion was flatly unconstitutional. So when it came time to do a Muslim ban, they had this sort of, like, plausible fig leaf. And they, like, threw in North Korea. Remember, they, like, threw in North Korea and Venezuela, I think, because there's like, oh, it's not a Muslim ban. It's like these countries that we have some reason to be fearful of this time around. They are doing things flatly constitutional, legal, in a flatly. In an unconstitutional legal manner with no fig leaf. They are firing the IGs, they are firing career people. The DOJ, that's illegal. They can't do it. They are stopping grants, they're freezing cancer research because they think courts will say it's fine.
- [06:01]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it's interesting. I guess maybe I should have had your wife on for this question. But it's, in some ways it's kind of the inverse of the other conservative big legal win, actually, during the Biden years, which was the Chevron case. Right. Which was like, essentially like they were arguing that the agencies didn't have carte blanche to interpret ambiguous laws. Right. Like they didn't want the EPA going rogue and doing things that they didn't. That weren't specifically prescribed by Congress. But they're saying that you. The EPA can stop doing things that were specifically prescribed by Congress.
- [06:35]
Chris Hayes
Yes. Because their position, the way these two things are sort of different sides of the same coin, is that the only person with any power is the president, and everything flows from him. And therefore any part of the administrative state or the executive that doesn't do exactly what his whims are moment to moment is illegitimate.
- [06:56]
Tim Miller
That takes us to the other news item that I wanted to cover. The acting attorney general moved on Monday to fire several Justice Department officials who worked on the federal criminal investigations into Donald Trump. In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, again, the acting attorney general wrote that he did not believe they, quote, could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president. Is that the job of career Justice Department officials to faithfully implement the president's agenda? That seems like a change in their. In their scope.
- [07:28]
Chris Hayes
That's a change again. I mean, what they've done in the Department of Justice, as my favorite dog on the Internet, Southpaw said, would be a scandal, an administration consuming scandal. Like there's a bunch of stuff they've done already. For instance, dropping cases hasn't happened in the post Watergate era that active cases just get dropped on day one. The way that they've dropped cases against jan6 folks.
- [07:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah. For example, the Hunter Biden case was not, was not dropped.
- [07:57]
Alex Kantrowitz
Right.
- [07:57]
Chris Hayes
Not only was it not dropped, they like, they got a little special little universe to keep going.
- [08:04]
Tim Miller
They gave it a bonus unit.
- [08:05]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, they gave it a bonus unit. So. Right. That's a great comparison. The conception of the Department of Justice as basically serving the President specifically and personally as opposed to serving the nation, the Constitution, which is clearly what they view as totally new. And the firing of career Department of Justice officials, which again, who have statutory legal civil servant protection, which makes it illegal to fire them in this manner just full stop. Like, do you want your meat inspection and the people running nuclear safety and the frontline prosecutors to be people who were in Donald Trump's truth social replies or were hanging around him at Mar a Lago and that's the reason they got the job? Or do you want people who know how to inspect meat, preserve nuclear safety prosecute cases like they are? Like when I said machine politics with nuclear weapons. This is purge of merit based hiring. This is. Can I say one more thing? Can I get you on riff here? Please, dude, just go literally the way that we conceive of the civil service protections that happen starting in the late 19th century under the Hayes administration and continue that turned the federal government from a spoil system machine to what we have now is a merit system. The incredible thing is what they are doing is they are attacking the merit system. The merit system is what we have that protects the civil servant because what replaces that is flunkies, lackeys of the president, like political apparatchiks. So what they are doing is destroying the merit system.
- [09:52]
Tim Miller
Yeah. The prime example of this is. Have you paid attention on the show to the gentleman that's been put in place? Place is the acting district attorney for D.C. yeah.
- [10:00]
Chris Hayes
Oh, yeah. Nice guy.
- [10:01]
Tim Miller
Eagle Ed. Eagle Ed Martin.
- [10:04]
Chris Hayes
Yep.
- [10:04]
Tim Miller
I mean this is again, it's hard to keep track of all these people that are being hired. Like this is a preposterous choice to be the attorney. The district attorney. Yeah.
- [10:12]
Chris Hayes
He's like a Stop the Steel guy who represented a bunch of Jan6 folks.
- [10:15]
Tim Miller
And was like, before that was like Phyllis Schlafly's butt boy. I mean, he was not. This is not like.
- [10:20]
Chris Hayes
Well, that's your, that's your characterization.
- [10:22]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it was, it was mine. I wasn't putting it on to you. I know, but like, this is not, you know, this is not somebody that like has a bunch of experience, you know, prosecuting or is, you know, a constitutional expert. No, yeah, like you, you know, you have people such as that. Like, you can say what you want about Neil Gorsuch. You know, you might not like his politics, but like, he's thought seriously about the Constitution and the laws.
- [10:46]
Chris Hayes
Yes, he is up. He is plausibly credentialed to be a Supreme Court justice. I mean, look at Pete Hegseth. I mean, to me the Hegseth thing was really the test for the entire Republican Party because, yeah, Pete Hegseth forget the fact that there's an extremely serious accusation of sexual assault, that he denies, that he paid a woman to settle $50,000. Forget the fact that there are other accusations of essentially misconduct, hostile workplace environment. Forget the fact that he like, appears to, by the accounts of multiple people, including his ex sister in law in a signed affidavit, have a genuine and wrenching frankly drinking problem. Put all that aside. Okay, let's say none of that is true. And the guy was totally upstanding. He ran two little nonprofits and ran them into the ground. And he's a weekend cable news host who is now going to run the most powerful military in the history of human civilization.
- [11:49]
Tim Miller
Is that bad?
- [11:50]
Chris Hayes
It is a ludicrous. His resume, I assume you've done some hiring before his resume comes in the door, it gets a half a second look and is put in the pile to not interview. He is a absolutely ludicrous pick. And the idea that Republicans who presumably genuinely do in their hearts care about, for instance, American military strength, dominance and protection of the American people, some of them, I mean, they don't though. That's the thing. If you voted for Hegseth, you don't like, fundamentally, the Hegseth vote is a test because if you voted for him, you genuinely do not care about that.
- [12:28]
Tim Miller
And the prosecutors, I mean, this is why this true about the Hexa thing. But I think it's interesting, right? Like you would presume we don't know, like among these dozen of prosecutors that have been removed are people that like, did a good job prosecuting criminals and like moved up through, you know, the government.
- [12:42]
Chris Hayes
Dude, these are people that. Their resumes are like, they're all like, public. They're like public corruption people.
- [12:47]
Tim Miller
Right. So, you know, again, you would think that if you did genuinely care about holding. Holding criminals to account in law and order, then, like, you could at least have gone through the resume pile of these people and said, okay, well, we'll keep a couple of you.
- [13:00]
Chris Hayes
Yeah.
- [13:00]
Tim Miller
All right. The very first night we were together on the night Donald Trump, the great and good American people, bestowed upon him a second presidency, you were coming off the set, I was going on for the late night shift. I don't know why I agreed to that. And we were chatting for a second.
- [13:14]
Chris Hayes
Is that election night?
- [13:15]
Tim Miller
Election night? Yeah. Yeah.
- [13:16]
Chris Hayes
Oh, yeah, that's right. I did see you in the handoff.
- [13:19]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And I was very. The only thing I was thinking about is don't be on one of those, like, YouTube reels.
- [13:26]
Chris Hayes
Yeah.
- [13:27]
Tim Miller
Like, that was my only obligation. That night was challenging. But during our brief handoff exchange, I was like, what do you think you just said on the set? And we just followed up on it that, like, the interesting thing about this, there's a lot of bad. But, like, the interesting thing is, like, at that moment, like, you didn't really know. Right. Like, might he just, like, have decided that he got his get out of jail free card, he won, he's just gonna golf and, like, the government will just do whatever it does and he won't really care. You know what I mean? And, like, he'll just, like, want to hang out with rich people and. And want people to call him sir and stuff. Or, like, you know, the other side of the spectrum is.
- [14:04]
Chris Hayes
Yep.
- [14:04]
Tim Miller
You know, start immediately moving to, like, create an Orban estate, like, here in America. Right. And. And it could be anywhere in between those things. I'm wondering now, like, two and a half months later, what where you assess our TR is on that spectrum.
- [14:17]
Chris Hayes
Oh, it's the worst case scenario. I mean, the worst. I mean, trending towards the worst. I mean, I think it's. It's definitely more towards a frontal assault on the constitutional order to be remade in the form of a personalist Donald Trump authoritarian state. I mean.
- [14:38]
Tim Miller
Okay, good. Well, between you and JVL, JVL's newsletter yesterday, his Triad newsletter, was talking about how. How we shouldn't limit our imaginations that we might be on a path towards Putinism. I'm summarizing it. It's very long, but it was kind of talking about how Putin wasn't Putin in 1998. And, like, you didn't really know. I mean, I thought that was a little Much, even for me. And I've got about the darkest sunglasses on that you could have. I don't know. I guess my one caveat to that is like in some ways it's just horrifying, right, that like you have the four richest people in the world essentially like hanging out around Donald Trump. Unlike the other hand. Wouldn't I rather that than like Corey Lewandowski, you know, and might there be some sort of check? Like the fact that these like noxious people that we're about to get into next, the Mark Andreessen's of the world and the Zucks, like, isn't the fact that they're calling him like a little bit of a check or no for you?
- [15:31]
Chris Hayes
I don't think that figures one way or the other because I think that's it's so transactional.
- [15:36]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [15:37]
Chris Hayes
I don't think they have much power to check him or I don't even know how much desire they do. I think they want to get out what they get out.
- [15:43]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [15:43]
Chris Hayes
So much of that has to do with this very specific thing around tech and AI and like the end of the rainbow, basically. When I say trending towards worst case, I think it's important to distinguish between what they're going to try to do and whether they'll succeed. But I think that the first week, to me, the pardon of everyone from January6 was such an indicator that like whole hog is kind of be the, the way to go. I mean the order they signed that he signed yesterday in which he kicked all trans folks out of the military, calling them dishonorable and liars.
- [16:20]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I don't have it in front of me, but there was some statement. It just kind of got lost in the shuffle a little bit. But there was like a sentence in there that was like any man that's pretending to be a woman doesn't have.
- [16:30]
Chris Hayes
The whatever integrity is dishonorable and a liar. It's also a flatly, I think, unconstitutional order because it orders the military to discriminate, which is a violation of the U.S. constitution and equal protection.
- [16:42]
Tim Miller
You know, again, they're gonna be keeping the courts busy.
- [16:44]
Chris Hayes
That's my high take. So I'm not saying they're going to be successful, but I think in terms of like what their ambitions are. And I'm saying they here because I do think to your point, Vote Miller. Exactly. Like Donald Trump didn't write that omb or does Donald Trump care whether they freeze funding or not? Like that's a project that is in his orbit that animates his hatreds, but is not. He doesn't have ideological projects like that. Like, that's an ideological crusade by people who have sold him on it because they hate the same people.
- [17:14]
Tim Miller
That's a good observation. And I mean, look, I go back to the secret video about Rezvot that the. I forget the organization did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll shout them out in the show notes. But, like, he gave away the game all right there. I mean, like, the guy, I guess you got to hand it to him. Do you have to hand it to isis? I guess you got to hand it to Res. Vote. Like, he was like, I've spent the last four years basically writing all these executive orders that we've seen in the last week. Like, it's essentially what he said. Like, they were prepared. They knew, you know, where the weak spots and the soft spots were, where they could challenge the courts. In some cases, they don't really care if there's a weak spot or soft spot. But it has been just a, you know, an organized and regimented effort to tear down anything in the government that they don't think serves them, which is basically everything.
- [18:00]
Chris Hayes
You know, there was this cable that the German ambassador, US Sent back to Germany. Do you see this? It was reported of, like. And there was just something sort of chilling about it because, like, it's, you know, we. We've read the American cables that are going back to D.C. in 31, 32, 33 from American ambassadors. So here's a German ambassador basically saying he's going to try to undo and remake the constitutional order. This. This is the cable that he sends back to. To Berlin. And I think that that's the project here. Again, I don't think Donald Trump could articulate in those terms, but the Constitution, a new constitutional order that is around essentially a kind of personalist cult of personality around the president as the only figure with any authority in the constitutional order.
- [18:48]
Tim Miller
Well, that's exciting. All right. Things are going great. Things are good. You're good, Life's good.
- [18:52]
Chris Hayes
But can I just say, I don't think if people are listening to this and, like, getting bummed out if I think public opinion matters a tremendous amount. I think, like, calling up representatives matters a huge amount. Going to their offices, like calling your senator. No Democrat should vote for Russ vote. And if you're in a state that has a Republican senator, you should call them up, too. Like, public opinion still does matter and still should matter for some of these people. And right now, there's this kind of. It's this Weird period, I feel like, between the lightning and the thunder, where people haven't gotten their kind of wits about them and they're trying this kind of blitzkrieg to mow everyone down. But public backlash isn't going to go away. I truly believe that. It's a question of whether it gets organized, formalized, and wielded in enough time to stop some of this damage.
- [19:44]
Tim Miller
That kind of backs me into the book. So we'll do the politics part of the book first, and then we'll kind of end with the phones and the social element of it. Because, you know, you talk about how we're in the attention age and the way that Trump, Trump has leveraged that. Right. And the way that in some ways that the Democrats, I think, particularly at the presidential level, have not quite figured out how to leverage it in the same way. And just in this specific example, first, my colleague Sam Stein, your pal, wrote this this morning. He writes, the two parties running at different speeds. Senate Democrats are holding a press conference today to condemn the pardoning of January Sixers. That was a week ago. Unclear if there is anything today to go after the OMB power play to take over all federal grant money. And there is something to that. Like, you could imagine this being a moment where either a single Democratic figure or sort of a Democratic organization or some leader on the Hill seized this moment to grab a bunch of attention for themselves. And that hasn't really happened. You can shout out random people, Chris Murphy's been out there. AOC has been talking. But that hasn't really happened anywhere kind of near the scale of how like, Trump would have done it.
- [20:55]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I mean, the argument I make in the book is that, you know, we live in the attention age. Attention is the defining and most important resource of the age. And that in, in the public realm and in politics, Donald Trump has kind of intuited that more than any other figure. And the key insight there is that it's better to get lots of attention, dominated attention, even if a lot of it's negative, than to choose to not get attention so that you don't get people outraged at you.
- [21:21]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [21:21]
Chris Hayes
This, this trade off is the key. And again, the trade off has drawbacks. Like Donald Trump has had been upside down and underwater and favorability most of his political career. He barely pulled out this hat trick the first time he got elected. He lost the second time after being the incumbent, which is fairly rare. You know, he won this time, but it's not like this foolproof, magical quality that means he's like, you know, rolling up 1964, 1984, 1972, you know, FDR kind of margins.
- [21:50]
Tim Miller
It's.
- [21:51]
Chris Hayes
It's narrow, but it's effective. And I think Democrats operate in. In this fear of attention, because that might be negative. They operate in a universe in which attention is very mediated. It's amazing how much Democratic politicians, like, worry about what the Washington Post editorial board will say. Like, they genuinely do.
- [22:12]
Tim Miller
No. And even back to me, I'm laughing, but just to be honest, just. I'm just. This is how quickly things have moved in eight years. I was running communications for Jeb Bush eight years ago. We cared. You were fact checked. Yeah. If we. If we got a negative fact check, we cared. Jeb cared. The campaign cared. We did not want to be fact checked. Like, that seems so in some ways, kind of nice and earnest and cute, but also, like, absurd.
- [22:34]
Chris Hayes
Well, there's two things there that I think is also important. You can't talk about this distinction between the two parties without talking about this, which is like, I care a lot if I get something wrong on my show because it's important to me to tell the truth and be correct, like, independent of the attentional universe. Like, as a human being who has an ethical commitment to the work that I do, that. So part of you caring about getting fact checked was like, you guys didn't want to be wrong about stuff.
- [23:01]
Tim Miller
Right. We wanted to have a modicum of integrity, like, within the bounds. Within the bounds of campaign discourse.
- [23:07]
Chris Hayes
Within the bounds of campaign discourse. And I think part of what we see here, too, is that, like, the other uncomfortable truth here is that this attentional environment, which I describe as like a Hobbesian war of all against all selects for sociopaths. It. You know, it. You can't. You can't fake it. This is really the key thing. The reason Trump can pull this off is because he is so broken at such a deep level. This is the only way he can operate as a person. But if you try to pretend to be that broken, you get the Desantis campaign.
- [23:45]
Tim Miller
You get Desantis. Those was exactly what was in my.
- [23:48]
Chris Hayes
Head before you said it can't pretend to be that shameless or be that broken. Like, this is really a deeper problem. Right. Because it's like, I don't want politicians that have that brokenness in them as the thing that's selected for here. There are people who do seem to have a gift for the detention age that are not coming from that. I think AOC is really the best example of someone who doesn't seem to me like a sociopath and has a real intuitive feel for attention and part of what she does. This is a great example. When she does those Instagram lives. Like, I'm talking to you as a former comm staffer. Like, right now, I'm talking to you just to pull back the curtain. My PR people are on this podcast.
- [24:30]
Tim Miller
Okay, what's up, Natalie?
- [24:33]
Chris Hayes
Because they're like, they want. They're nervous I'm going to say something, right? I mean, they trust me, but, like, that's part of their job. Okay, sure. Like, when she does an Instagram Live, that's scary for staff.
- [24:46]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [24:47]
Chris Hayes
For comm staff, it's scary for her to do an Instagram live, but it's also no risk, no reward.
- [24:52]
Tim Miller
There is an authentic way to get attention. It doesn't have to be. You don't have to be a total sociopath. It does help to be shameless. Sociopath. It is Trump's superpower. But I hate to pick on Gretchen Whitner, but it just, it happened yesterday, and I was watching her on CBS this Morning, and my buddy Peter Hamby at Puck wrote about this, and he writes, this interview wasn't bad or embarrassing. It was just rote, cautious and forgettable. I want to play one clip from it just to give people an example of what we're talking about.
- [25:16]
Gretchen Whitmer
I think this is the story of Michigan.
- [25:18]
Chris Hayes
Right.
- [25:19]
Gretchen Whitmer
We're a very diverse state. We are a state that tends to go back and forth and likes some balance in our politics. And I've won twice with big margins within two years of Donald Trump also carrying Michigan. And so, as I said in my recent address, I'm not out looking for fights. I'm always looking to collaborate first. Won't back down from an important one, that's for sure. But I got a job to do, and we're going to stay focused on moving forward and trying to find common ground where we can.
- [25:45]
Tim Miller
What's the lesson in that split ticket situation for you as governor now?
- [25:49]
Gretchen Whitmer
I think it's to keep listening to the people. And it's part of what I talk about in my book that we've just made for young adults. These are less that you can use at any age. Right. Learning how to listen is a superpower that not enough people tap into.
- [26:04]
Tim Miller
I mean, that's nice. That's all nice.
- [26:07]
Chris Hayes
That's fine, that's fine.
- [26:08]
Tim Miller
But Donald Trump is like, tearing apart the government right now. And you are plausibly supposed to be one of the people running against him in 2028. Like he is shutting down all grants for any organization. He's firing people that it's a night of the long knives. And you're like, you know, we got to find some common ground right now.
- [26:25]
Chris Hayes
You could say all that and be like, what I will fight is like taking cop beaters and putting them out on the street to menace our members of law enforcement. What I will fight is freezing all cancer funding in this country and scientific research. Like, you could do that whole thing and then wield some sort of attack. But they're all, everyone's flat footed, everyone's second guessing themselves. But again, here's where this is an important thing. And again, I write about this at some length in the book that's about the politics of this. It's not like that caution hasn't also paid off for Democrats. So like one of the most cautious gubernatorial campaigns that I've ever seen was the Arizona.
- [27:06]
Tim Miller
I wanted to be a Jin of the bunch.
- [27:08]
Chris Hayes
Exactly. Katie Hobbs runs for governor in Arizona against Carrie Lake, who's like the ultimate attention age figure. She was a news broadcaster. She says outrageous things. Hobbs was just like low profile, kept it tight, disciplined, didn't court a lot of attention and she won that race. And Republicans have lost a lot of races with Trump like figures who have ended up on the wrong side of this negative attention trade. So again, it's not so clear cut that like it's just the case that if you're a troll, you have power. It takes a special kind of person to pull it off.
- [27:43]
Tim Miller
I do think though that presidential races and governor's races, we kind of like lump all this stuff together.
- [27:48]
Chris Hayes
No president is just totally different.
- [27:50]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it's a different. In 1992 it was so, you know, I said this about Jebboys, like he was very much like his father. Like his father in 1992 was in a good shape to run a presidential race. It was a very different world. Right. And I don't think H.W. bush would have been president if he was running in 2016. He would have been like Mitt Romney probably. It would have been that sort of race. Right. And it's just, it's a different time. And you can be Tony Evers and be a good governor of Wisconsin who is cautious and whatever, but like the type of attention on a presidential race.
- [28:18]
Chris Hayes
Roy Cooper.
- [28:19]
Tim Miller
Yeah, Roy Cooper. People don't talk about their governors. Right. Like you're on the local. Like really, governor's races are not all that different from 1992. They're a little different, but not all that different. Like, presidential races now are all consuming. They're like celebrity figures. You're talking about them on the Nelk Boys and on Sports Pocket. Right. Like, and fitness influencers everybody's talking about. You know what I mean? Different.
- [28:41]
Chris Hayes
Yeah. No, I agree. And I think partly that is. I don't know how much that's a Trumpian transformation though too. I mean, I think partly it is.
- [28:49]
Tim Miller
Obama participated in that.
- [28:51]
Chris Hayes
Obama was an enormous cultural figure. I mean, he's the most famous person in the country and, and the biggest star in the world. That was the attack ad from John McCain. That was a very funny attack ad. People forget this. It was like, he's the biggest star in the world. And it was like the attack ad was like, this guy is so popular. People love him so much. It's like, I'm not sure this works for, for you.
- [29:12]
Tim Miller
He's such a famous fancy boy. Like Justin Bieber.
- [29:16]
Chris Hayes
Famous fancy boy. He's a fancy lad. But. But yeah, I think the other thing that I think is worth thinking about here in the context of like, attention as resource and how it functions in politics is the less public attention there is on a political race, the more it could function in the old way.
- [29:36]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [29:37]
Chris Hayes
So, you know, state rep races are still a lot of knocking on doors and talking to people.
- [29:41]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [29:42]
Chris Hayes
And I think what you're saying is, yes, it's probably. There's still still a lot of that at the gubernatorial level, but once you get to the presidential level, raising a lot of money and running a bunch of ads or and door knocking campaign, which the Harris campaign, to be clear, did very well and pretty effectively. Like something I always tell people about the Harris campaign is look at the margins of that race in New York, New Jersey and California, the campaign was actually pretty darn effective because the environment sucked. Like, they did much better in the swing states where they were running a focus campaign than in the states where there was zero campaign. The states of zero campaign. Those numbers are nuts. Right. Like, that's why he won the popular vote. And yet it wasn't enough to overcome the overall attentional environment, which is the thing that Trump dominated.
- [30:30]
Tim Miller
Right. It's NBA versus high school basketball. You can, you can improve on the margins in the NBA if you have good bounce passes and dribbling and fundamentals.
- [30:37]
Chris Hayes
Right. Yeah.
- [30:37]
Tim Miller
End of the day, you need top level talent. The other thing, I'm just curious your take on this. I think that the Democrats are missing on the attention thing that maybe is not related to sociopathy. So I'm trying to kind of encourage good behavior. There's a little unpredictability. You can get attention right now by being unpredictable and that I kind of know what every Democrat's gonna say before they even say it.
- [31:03]
Chris Hayes
I mean, it's unbelievable how predictable.
- [31:05]
Tim Miller
And you're an interviewer, right? So you know this. Like you could probably do the interviews in your slee.
- [31:10]
Chris Hayes
One of the examples of someone who is unpredictable is John Fetterman. Man, we are really.
- [31:16]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Well, it's because it's obvious. It's maybe a problem if two white pod boys think that's so much the same. Maybe the Dems should zag away from everything that we're suggesting right now.
- [31:26]
Chris Hayes
Don't just listen to the white pod boys. It's actually pretty good. Pretty good advice. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying this to praise Federman's politics because he said some things that I like, truly, really actually like upset me. Some of the stuff that he's talked about Gaza, particularly just from like a human empathetic level, not independent of like his politics of who he supports and. But yeah, he definitely is pretty good at getting attention in his own strange way. And he is definitely not predictable, like to the point where, like when he voted against Hegseth, I was like, okay, good.
- [32:02]
Tim Miller
But you talk about the book and you compare it to in cable news, right? Like you gotta grab people's attention and then hold it. Right. And being unpredictable is kind of part of holding attention. I mean, I hear from people anecdotally, I hear from listeners. They're like, you have a politician on. And sometimes I fast forward halfway through because I know what they're gonna say, you know what I mean? And so it's kind of my job to try to make it unpredictable. But they could participate in that a little bit.
- [32:29]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I think that's right. And again, I think that's just because when they're in that interview, they're not thinking about how do I keep people's attention. They're thinking about how do I not screw up and make news? I mean, again, that is. That's the key part of the orientation here.
- [32:42]
Tim Miller
All right, let's talk about the sociocultural part of the book. I guess what is just the broad thesis about putting the politics aside, about how we are kind of managing our attention in the box of screams age.
- [32:54]
Chris Hayes
The broad thesis is that we live in an age. If the defining resource of the industrial age was fossil fuels, and if you look at 1960, one of the top 10 companies by assets. It was like oil companies and then like dupont and General Motors, right? Physical production. And if you look now, it's attention companies. And that's Google and it's Meta, it's to a certain extent Microsoft. It's definitely Apple, which of course inaugurated the attention age with the birth of the iPhone in 2007. It's the guys on stage next to Donald Trump. And there's a few important things I think to say here. One is it's already intuitive that we have this like break between the old industrial economy and the new digital, like information economy. But we really tend to think of it as an information economy in which the important stuff is information. Information is what's powerful information, what's important. People talk about like data is the new oil. And I think that just fundamentally misapprehends the world we live in, because information is infinite, it's generative and it's replicable. Like think about your own personal data, which people talk about all the time. It's like if your personal data, Tim Miller, is in the hands of 10 companies or 100 companies, it does not change your life one iota. Maybe it changes a little bit the ads you get if your attention is somewhere else in a given moment that actually does change your life, like from moment to moment, if your attention's being taken as opposed to your data. And so Herb Simon, who's this brilliant political scientist economist in the 1970s, he just writes this paper about how you design an organization for an information rich world. And what he says is information actually consumes something and what it consumes is attention. And if you think of it that way, if you think the more information there is, the more asks there are on our attention, but attention is finite. You come to see that the information age is necessarily actually the attention age and the, the resource that's being used and consumed and pulled on is our attention.
- [34:57]
Tim Miller
So there's kind of two sides of this that you get into. One is how we manage in this age dealing with all of the different attention stimuli and how we channel our attention for good. And then the flip side of the coin, which is the democratization of getting attention. Right. And so let's just talk about the first part first a little bit and whether. I think you had one line in there that the book was an attempt to find some peace on this project. Did you find any for people?
- [35:27]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I think I did. I mean, I think the important foundational insight here is that the way attention works as a necessary evolutionary inheritance is that our attention can be compelled without us willing it to be so. Like if a siren is going off in an ambulance down the street, if you're in a party and someone drops a glass, if you're on a flight and a baby's crying, your attention goes to it before you get to weigh in, consciously or not. And this aspect of attention is a really key one because it's at war with the conscious self. And when you create competitive attention markets, they are going to drive towards that compelled attention, right? And that's what we have. So we're constantly struggling to reassert our own volition over where we put our mind, because part of what we've inherited is the faculty for our mind to be pulled away from us. And one of the key insights and aspects of the world we live in now, there's an incredible bit of literature on the cocktail party effect, which is if you're in a room and you hear your name in another conversation, it will wrench you out, it will penetrate your consciousness and you'll. Your attention will go to it. And no other stimuli works in the same way. And we've got, you know, psychological literature on this. And that's because we also have inherited this desire and need for social attention. This is what's been so commercialized in the attention age. From the moment we come crying into the world, we necessarily depend on other human attention. And because that inheritance is so deep, we now have a situation in which social attention from others can be experienced at scale in a way it never has before in the history of humankind. Getting social attention from strangers used to be something that, like a tiny fraction of a sliver of people, you know, movie stars or politicians, now, like any extremely hot people or extremely hot people now, any teenager with a phone can experience this. Everyone can. And in fact, you see it like Elon Musk. And a lot of people get driven insane by this in real time as you watch.
- [37:42]
Tim Miller
You wrote this Elon thing. I'd write this down. He wrote in 2022 that. Where is it? Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks. Will try my best to be heads down, focused on doing useful things for civilization. You wrote that in 2022.
- [37:59]
Chris Hayes
Hot Echo lasted about half a day. So I think that's. You're mucking with the stuff in us that's pretty deep about who we are and how we view ourselves. And you're putting it in the hands of corporations that are engineered to try to do this at scale. And I think the closest analog we have is. Is Basically, and I write about this some like in the book the industrial food system. Right. Like we have biological inheritances where we like sweet things and we like fat and we like salt. And if you're going to try to sell food to a billion people or 2 billion people, you get Coca Cola and you get McDonald's. Right. And so our relationship to food is this same kind of weird war between like the self that's like, I want to eat healthy or I want this. And the kind of desiring biology beneath that dynamic has now been replicated inside our minds in the attention age where the, this sort of very parallel set of things are happening constantly, moment to moment, determining where we've come to rest.
- [39:02]
Tim Miller
Our thoughts on kind of the receiving of attention side of this. I was intrigued by the point about babies, right. That we get attention immediately, that in other animals, like, you know, babies don't need attention quite as much, you know.
- [39:13]
Chris Hayes
Have you ever watched, by the way, have you ever watched like a litter of pigs nursing?
- [39:17]
Tim Miller
I don't think I have. You watch a lot of weird shit. I did notice in the book you also were like, I've once watched carpet being cleaned for hours.
- [39:26]
Chris Hayes
Not once. Not once. I love carpet cleaning videos. They're so soothing.
- [39:30]
Tim Miller
You watch it while you do other stuff or just you. It's just you and your mind looking at carpet cleaning videos.
- [39:36]
Chris Hayes
Yeah. Like in bed or like, you know, on it, sitting on the couch. That's something to the point about if you watch Piglet's Nurse, it's really wild. The mom just lays there and then they just like fight each other in the most like ferocious way. And you actually get to see like what it means to be a runt, which is that you don't get to nurse and then you like waste away and die, basically. But like the difference between how humans like deal with this part of life and how the mammal world deals with it is pretty wild.
- [40:05]
Tim Miller
So then this leads to the more grown up problems. Which is the thing that really resonated with me, which is, was an attention recognition paradox.
- [40:13]
Chris Hayes
Yeah.
- [40:13]
Tim Miller
And you know, you write about how a lot of the people that are ruining our society right now have been unable to navigate the attention recognition paradox. But I think it's something that all of us deal with. So talk about that a little bit.
- [40:26]
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I mean, I, I use this argument by this Russian emigrate philosopher named Alexander K. Who working off of Hegel, he makes, he makes, I think this very profound point that like the constitutive feature of being human, that the Fundamental human desire is recognition, which is to like, be seen and recognized as human by other humans. Like, that's the stuff of relationships. It's what we seek and desire in the world of love, friendship, even, like, good relationships with co workers. Like, you're not seen as a means to an end. You're not seen as like, the fullness of your consciousness is like, grappled with. And what social media presents is like this synthetically adjacent thing which is social attention. Social attention is not recognition, but it feels close enough that what you do is you go out into the world of social media seeking recognition and getting back attention, which just kind of gives you, like a little bit of a taste but doesn't ever make you full because the thing that can make you fuller. Mutual relationships. This is the other key thing about social attention. Other things that we want socially in life are. Are fundamentally like bilateral, right? They're like a romantic relationship or a relationship of parenting. Like, you have a relationship with the person and they have a relationship with you. That's how it works. Social attention is separated. You could put social attention on Brad Pitt. You don't have a relationship with them, right? People can put social attention on you on the Internet. They don't have a relationship with you. And when you break apart that kind of covalent bond, you sort of end up spinning off into some very weird world where it's very easy to get a kind of lost, a kind of vertigo sensation.
- [42:09]
Tim Miller
Oh, my God.
- [42:10]
Chris Hayes
Do you feel that?
- [42:10]
Tim Miller
I feel it in a big way. No. This is what I did. I literally had to do. I was doing therapy about. Because I was like, you write at length in the book about famous people, reading their comments, and you admitted to the fact that you once searched Chris. Not once, but at one time in your life before you dealt with us, you had searched Chris Hayes was like name searching, read mean people attack you. And it was like, why is this? Like, why do I care? Why? You know, why is this something that people who are successful like, shouldn't they feel fulfilled? And one of the things that I was, you know, shout out to my therapist was like, that is related to this attention recognition paradox is like, I was getting attention, but I did not necessarily feel good about what I was providing to the world, if that makes sense. Right. And that, like, you can resolve this somewhat and you still have the human nature of wanting to be liked, but, like, you can resolve it somewhat if you do the internal work to feel good about yourself and you build up relationships with people that value what you're actually doing. And that, that is much healthier than the low calorie, you know, retweet attention. And obviously it's, it's not quite as, you know, like the, the barriers are, are not walls here that you kind of can flow back and forth a little bit between.
- [43:25]
Chris Hayes
And I do all the time.
- [43:26]
Tim Miller
Yeah, but, but there was something to that for sure. And I definitely. It resonated for sure.
- [43:30]
Chris Hayes
I think another part of it too is just that I learned this lesson a little early on, I would say, when I first started writing. Like I remember I first write a piece for the Chicago Reader, which was the, you know, weekly alternative paper in, in Chicago. And I'd, I remember like going to get it. It would come out on Thursday afternoon. It would be like in these piles in like bar vestibules and going, seeing my name there and like feeling that whatever that little thing about, you know, my personality that felt good about that and then it was like that was kind of it. Like this is sort of pre Internet. It just was out there in the world. And one of the things that I realized was that, like, if I didn't actually like doing the work itself, that whatever little dopamine hit from that micro instant of seeing my name was not going to be enough. That, that's the other thing is that you have to just be satisfied with like the actual making of the thing you're making as a thing that you want to do and feel proud of and feels worthwhile and is satisfying to you. Because if the value of it is what stranger social attention gets put on it, it's never, ever, ever gonna feel good enough.
- [44:37]
Tim Miller
Yes. And then it's particularly exacerbated in my case, when I was putting out things that I actually didn't think were good for the world. So that's the other side of the same spectrum. That's where it gets even uglier. All right, last thing. In case Donald Trump shuts down msnbc, which he's threatening to do the free speech president, and you have to become a pop psychologist full time. Do you have any other pop psychology advice for. Not for minor celebrities, but for humans out there trying to navigate the attention age?
- [45:04]
Chris Hayes
Yes. One small concrete thing to do is to spend 20 minutes for your thoughts every day, meaning some 20 minute period.
- [45:12]
Tim Miller
Just me and my thoughts.
- [45:13]
Chris Hayes
Just you and your thoughts.
- [45:14]
Tim Miller
Just not the tv, not other people.
- [45:16]
Chris Hayes
No podcasts? No. No phone. Like, maybe that's a commute, maybe that's a drive. For me, it's a walk every day without listening to Anything. We have gotten out of the habit of living with our own thoughts. But. But that's who you got to live with the rest of your life. And so if you're constantly seeking diversion so you don't have to do that, you're going to have a harder and harder time when you do have to be alone with your own thoughts.
- [45:40]
Tim Miller
Just me and me. Tis. Watching cleaning carpets while I have my own thoughts. Does that count or. No, nothing. No other.
- [45:47]
Chris Hayes
No, nothing. Zero. Yeah. Not even carpet cleaning videos.
- [45:51]
Tim Miller
All right. Boy, that's going to be tough, but I'll do my best. Chris Hayes, thanks so much. He also has a podcast. I don't know if I mentioned in the beginning. Why is this happening? It's mostly great. It's like mostly great. Like seven out of ten. I'm like, these are awesome.
- [46:06]
Chris Hayes
Mostly great.
- [46:07]
Tim Miller
Thank you. And then like, two or three, they're like, that's fine. Yeah. Which is pretty. I think that's a pretty good podcast rate. If I was doing seven out of 10 great podcasts, I'd feel really good about it. Why is this happening if people haven't listened to it? And the. The book again. The Sirens Call. How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Thanks, homie. We'll see you on your show.
- [46:23]
Chris Hayes
You bet.
- [46:23]
Tim Miller
Up next, Alex. All right, we are back. He's host of the Big Technology podcast and he writes Big Technology on Substack. I'm a subscriber, and he formerly covered Silicon Valley for BuzzFeed. It's Alex Kantrowitz. What's up, man?
- [47:03]
Alex Kantrowitz
Hey, Tim. Great to see you.
- [47:04]
Tim Miller
Good to see you, too. Yeah. I text you yesterday because I'm not as deep in the tech world as I used to be. I'm monitoring your newsletter when I can, but there's other news I've got to pay attention to, unfortunately. I don't know if you've noticed a lot happening in Washington. And so. So the deep seq thing really kind of blindsided me. It was this new AI application. I guess you're going to explain in a second, I guess. Chinese hedge fund pushed out, but it had massive market implications. It's going to have massive, I think, geopolitical implications. So I was like, I got to get smart on this and understand what's happening. So I was hoping you could educate me. How does that sound?
- [47:40]
Alex Kantrowitz
It sounds great. Yeah. And it's pretty astonishing. I definitely spent a good part of Friday and then through the weekend and just reading as much as I could about this because it is one of Those moments in tech where you see happen and you don't really believe it's real until you get confirmation. We do have confirmation that this is real. So basically what this team in China has done is they have made an architectural breakthrough. And I'm going to try to explain this in plain English in the development of AI models. So, basically, the way that Silicon Valley has been approaching the development of AI models to date has been you put about as much money as possible into building these things by building massive data centers and throwing as much data as you possibly can into the process, and then you get better results. And that's proved true every time. And the architectural advancement that's been made in China is they have been able to build a model that's as good with much less money. And this is the most important thing that costs about 3 to 5% of what it costs the other models to run. So let's say you're spending a dollar to run an algorithm or some sort of process. With OpenAI, you can spend $0.05 to do it with this Chinese model, bringing down the cost of using things like their chatbot, but also building any application on top of the model. And that's really what's gotten Silicon Valley and Wall street in a bit of a frenzy right now.
- [49:07]
Tim Miller
3%, that seems a lot cheaper.
- [49:10]
Alex Kantrowitz
Way cheaper.
- [49:11]
Tim Miller
The question is, is that, like, how is that possible? And I saw there's a lot of, you know, conversation I saw online, and you can immediately get into conspiracy land, right? Which is like, are the Chinese, Are they lying about this? Like, was it actually that much more expensive? Or, you know, were they using, like, chips, Like American chips? It's like, what. Like, what is at this point, like, the consensus on, like, how and why they managed to create a model that's so much cheaper?
- [49:37]
Alex Kantrowitz
So, first of all, it's so funny because all of the worries about AI was that it was too expensive, right? People were seeing the fact that you have to spend these billions of dollars. Like, OpenAI last year raised the biggest funding round in history at $6.6 billion. And the big complaint was, well, this AI technology is too expensive to use. They're losing billions just to run it and train it every year. And so therefore, the industry is going to fall apart. Now everyone's worried because it's too cheap, which I think is just so funny. But basically, look, this is the way that the AI industry was always running. OpenAI's stated goal was to make intelligence that's too cheap to meter. Basically, the idea was, we want to be able to provide this stuff at a cost that is so inexpensive that you'll be able to do whatever your heart's desire is to build with AI. And you know, really what these Chinese engineers have done is they have used some new techniques that have largely been like, thanks to some of the constraints that they've had. So they haven't been able to use the state of the art Nvidia chips, which means this process that we're doing over here in the United States of just making the servers bigger and making, you know, adding more data has not been available to them. So they've had to introduce some tricks to make the models more efficient. And I could get into all the technical details if you want, but basically the way to think about this is they have used the constraints to build a much more efficient model than anybody else has through some different techniques that have just been starting to roll out in the western models, things called reasoning, reinforcement, learning. And they've just basically speedrun the entire industry and found a way to offer this effectively same or better model than a lot of the cutting edge that we have today at a cheaper cost.
- [51:21]
Tim Miller
Have you played with it? So like the Deep SEQ is it just chatgpt, compare and contrast it to chatgpt for me.
- [51:29]
Alex Kantrowitz
So I have played with it. The real innovation here has been the deep seq R1 model. And by the way, no AI company knows how to name anything.
- [51:36]
Tim Miller
It's horrible. It's like if you wanted to name something that was in a thriller movie about a computer that takes over the universe, it feels like it's all aimed at that. It's all these sci fi nerds naming this shit.
- [51:51]
Alex Kantrowitz
They should have some screenwriters in house because the naming is disastrous. But here, basically what it does is it's reasoning. So you can go to Deep Seek right now and use the model. And the thing about this is it will share its chain of thought. So you'll actually see the model, be able to like, reason through trying to figure out what your question is and then give you the best possible answer. And the nice thing about reasoning is the AI does a lot of the thinking on its end. So there used to be this whole idea like, oh, prompt engineer is going to be a new job in the world because you'll have to figure out exactly how to prompt AI models to be able to use them. And what these reasoning models do is they basically take a lot of that work out of the equation because they figure out what you want. But Tim, I think it's Important to talk about, like the ways to use this thing, because yes, there is the chatbot that Deepseek has set up that you can go and log in with your Google account and see all this happen. But the important thing is they have actually open sourced this model. So if you are an AI developer, you can download the architecture and then run it for yourself. So you can use Deep SEQ without actually having to be on the Deep Seq proprietary website. And that opens up a range of possibilities because whereas deepseek might be censoring some things, like you can't really ask who the president of Taiwan is on their website, you can go to Perplexity right now and use the Deep SEQ model that they've downloaded and removed a lot of the censorship from and it will give you the right answers. So that to me is like the real core thing here, which is that you can not only use their chatbots, you can not only use their technology, but American firms and firms worldwide today are downloading this model. They're running it as efficiently as the folks in China, and they're able to customize it and build on top of it in a way that might go against the values that the Deep SEQ team has. But it doesn't matter because it's open source and available to everyone.
- [53:46]
Tim Miller
Holy shit. Yeah, so this gets to the kind of CCP of it all. I guess it's hard for me to ask you to divine the motivations of the people that are behind this new technology, but that does seem strange. I guess the natural concerns that would pop up for people in the political or national security space is, oh man, people are going to start using this model. The same kind of data concerns that people have about TikTok might be relevant here. The same concerns about, you know, who knows how they could jigger the algorithm, you know, in various ways that might be pernicious, but if it's open source and people can build on it, you know, off of their platform, then a lot of those, like security and other related concerns don't seem to be as stark. But then you kind of wonder then, well, shouldn't the CCP be. Have some feelings about that?
- [54:45]
Alex Kantrowitz
Oh yeah. And I think you're nailing the core point here, Tim, which is that, you know, I've had people replying to me, have fun using the app that's going to send all your data to the ccp. And it's actually, that's only a tiny part of it, right? The fact that anybody can download this innovation and use it on their own is actually the really interesting thing. And you're already seeing it in production in perplexity. You're going to see American startups and startups worldwide start to download it and use it maybe instead of other open source models like Metalama until they catch up. So it can be used outside of Deep Seek servers. And that's why I think this is going to have staying power. If it was just proprietary to Deep Seek, we'd be having a completely different conversation. But now we're talking about the technology because the technology can really be used outside of the auspices of, of, you know, a Chinese firm. But yeah, why do they want to do it? We don't fully know yet. It could be that they just like discovery, right. That would be sort of like the most naive. And it's a possible explanation. They're a hedge fund, right. So could they have, you know, basically set their sights on creating something that's this efficient and shorted? Nvidia. Right. Nvidia was down 16% yesterday. It's bounced back a little bit as of this recording. I mean, that's another possibility. And the third possibility that I can think of is that this was something that the Chinese government basically directed resources to. And we're only seeing the tip of the spear in terms of what was, was needed to develop the model. There was definitely a lot more money spent than, you know, the few hundred million that we know or the couple million that we know was spent for the last iteration. And maybe that's a way to sort of assert China supremacy on AI and undercut the American AI initiative. But here, the bottom line here, I want, I want to put this pretty clearly, is that this was coming, this was going to happen whether it was going to come from an American firm or a Chinese firm. And what Deepseek proved was that you can do this with inferior chips and you can do this with a smaller team and you can do this much more efficiently. And I think, you know, that was going to happen one way or the other. So like the grand like conspiracy theory thinking of like, you know, this is a Trojan horse that China has thrown into the United States to destroy our industry doesn't really hold water to me. It's what everybody in the US was aiming toward.
- [57:00]
Tim Miller
Why didn't they do it? Why weren't they able to do it? And there is a little bit of, you got to kind of laugh a little bit at our masters of the universe, who spent the last week suckling up to Donald Trump in a reality TV show. And going to inaugural balls and talking to him about how we need the government to be supportive of these AI endeavors. You have this big announcement that Sam Altman put out about all the money that we're going to be investing in this. And then like, two days after that, a Chinese hedge fund is like, well, actually, we've already lap changed. Yeah.
- [57:33]
Alex Kantrowitz
I mean, isn't it amazing that Stargate and Deep Seagar one come out, like, basically at the same time? And it was. I mean, I wrote about this in my newsletter last week. It was just like, wow. Like, these two. These two things seem like they're barreling towards each other and something has to give. So, okay, so why didn't the US Firms develop this? Couple reasons. First of all, it could just be a natural resource curse. Honestly, without the constraints, they didn't have to think about this way. Now their models have become much more efficient over time. And that makes a big difference because they've been, again, heading this direction. It just hasn't been an imperative toward them. So they've been making the models more efficient, but it hasn't been the only way they can do things. And so therefore, they haven't been forced to innovate this way. I think if they had similar constraints as the Deep Sea team did, they probably would have come up with it. So that's one. But the other side of it, and I think this is what they would all tell you, is that they still believe that scaling up. Like Elon Musk is putting together a million GPU data center. Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to build a data center that's like the size of half of Manhattan. We already know that Altman's been out there with Trump talking about, you know, this $500 billion initiative which might be like, you know, a fifth of the size in the end, but it's still big. And I think there's still a lot of belief in Silicon Valley that bigger is still better and you can build better models if you throw all these resources toward it. And the most optimistic case is that they will take the innovations that they're seeing with Deepseek, and then they will use that efficiency to make even more use out of the architecture that they have. Put that in layman's term, the chips that they have. Right. And build something that's even more intelligent than what we have today and start to solve some of the next order problems that they're looking at. Building chatbots with memory building, chatbots that really understand you, that can go out in the world. And take action for you, and then eventually maybe some that can help lead to scientific discovery, which is something they always talk about. They've been limited by the hardware.
- [59:38]
Tim Miller
All right, yeah, we'll see about that. I saw Andreessen tweeted yesterday this is a Sputnik moment. And as you mentioned, the big tech stocks had a pretty rough day yesterday. What is the sense of, you know, among your sources, people you talk to in that world? Is there, like, panic? Are they excited about, you know, the opportunity? I don't know. What's the vibe check in Silicon Valley?
- [60:03]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, people are mostly excited. Outside of, let's say, Nvidia shareholders, the entire AI industry has been figuring out how to build better things with less resources. And this is going to give them a chance to do that. It will give them the chance, you know, basically to be able to build AI without having to rely on, you know, nuclear power plants or these massive, massive data centers as much as they needed to, like in a dream scenario. So I think everybody's pretty stoked about that. They might still end up using all the power in the world to build the next iteration, but at least this iteration we know can be built with less. And Marc Andreessen is such an interesting case. You always have to look a little bit deeper into what he's saying to try to find his true motivations. And I think one of the interesting things is he thought about participating in the OpenAI $6.6 billion round last year and ultimately didn't, and, you know, might have seen something like this coming around. Because for him, and I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, it's what you can build with the technology that's going to create the most value and not like the models that underlie that thing. Like, this is basically going to take the cost of intelligence, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, down by an order of magnitude. And now the rubber is going to meet the road. We're going to see, like, what applications can be built, built, what programs can be built, what type of experiences can be built in a much more efficient way, in a way that, you know, maybe the expense of building these things might have been holding back the companies previously. So for anyone that that's interested in building, you know, time to build and, you know, time to build is Mark Andreessen's thing. It's a pretty exciting moment, though.
- [61:37]
Tim Miller
Maybe should have been a little bit of a, I don't know, a moment also to reflect on failures to build.
- [61:43]
Alex Kantrowitz
Well, he doesn't do that.
- [61:44]
Tim Miller
He doesn't that's not a popular word. No. Therapy.
- [61:47]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, he was. Did you see, he was on Lex Friedman and he was talking about Andrew Uberman's protocols of like, you know, you got to put your phone away before bed. And he's like, the most masculine thing you can do is stare at your phone for three hours before bed and fall asleep. Like, Marc Andreessen's got some problems, put it that way.
- [62:04]
Tim Miller
The definitions of masculinity among these fellows are pretty interesting, though. I don't know. Mark Zuckerberg's new haircut is. That isn't as bad as some people think. I don't think some of the crypto folks, even some of my listeners who are pro crypto, aren't really loving my anti crypto pivot of late. But I don't know. I was looking at the coinbase traffic over the weekend and it was like 20% of the trades were on that coin that's named after the co founder's cat. I'm blanking on the name right now. About 5% were on the Trump coin, which is a totally worthless scam and a rug pull being run by the President of the United States. We've got a bunch of people around him now who I think are motivated to ensure that the government is not staffed with people who are going to investigate this sort of thing. Given what happened with ftx, I just, I don't know. I mean, obviously people are going to make money on this in the short term, you know, not regulating crypto. And we're having kind of a crypto moment. But there's some red sirens blaring for me. I don't know what you think about that.
- [63:09]
Alex Kantrowitz
Oh yeah, those red sirens are blaring where I am as well. I think that one of the interesting things about the blockchain innovation was that it was supposed to enable a new web built on top of decentralized protocols. And what have we gotten instead? It's a speculation machine. We haven't seen anything built on top of this. So therefore all these coins are just entirely speculation oriented. There are rug pulls waiting to happen. I think bitcoin obviously is different. It's got some staying power. There's a floor for bitcoin and, you know, people have made a lot of money on it. But is crypto good for anything else? I haven't seen it yet, no.
- [63:48]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I don't know. Some of the folks that pro crypto folks were mad at my coinbase attack. They're like, well, yeah, it's just. It was just one day. It's just one weekend day, you know, and hey, every other business that have, you know, the platforms that have things on them that aren't valuable, I was like, really? Are there, are there other businesses where like a third to two thirds of the traffic on a given day? There are basically scams and Ponzi schemes with no value. I actually don't know that there are a lot of other businesses like that.
- [64:18]
Alex Kantrowitz
Yeah, but what crypto really needs is a deep seek moment. Honestly. Technology is inefficient. It needs to be made orders of magnitude more efficient to make any sense outside of speculation. And maybe if and when that happens, then we'll be able to see some real promise there. But until then, I don't really believe it's much more than speculation. Maybe bitcoin is a store of value in some way, but the rest, I'm not getting on board the Trump and Melania coin right now.
- [64:46]
Tim Miller
Sorry, I don't understand. I guess maybe there's some of this. Again, you're more in this world than me. Why aren't big advocates for bitcoin more mad at Trump? I would imagine a world like. Again, back to Andreessen. Somebody that does think that there will be really powerful, amazing use cases for this. It is a credibility destroyer to have the incoming now president of the United States launch something that is a completely worthless, obvious scam. Right? I mean, wouldn't they want something like a structure, a superstructure that is going to make things, you know, more credible?
- [65:25]
Alex Kantrowitz
Tim, it's such an interesting point because the bitcoin folks, they're the maximalists, right? They think that there should be no crypto outside of bitcoin and all the attention should be in bitcoin and everything else is a, is a distraction. However, I would say the one variable here is they're getting rich and they are making so much money.
- [65:43]
Tim Miller
Why be mad when you're getting rich? Exactly.
- [65:44]
Alex Kantrowitz
And if you're right, if they start to raise a fuss over what Trump is doing and he says, you know what, let's put somebody in the SEC that's going to actually put some rules in, then Bitcoin 150,000 or Bitcoin 1 million looks less likely than it might in their eyes right now.
- [66:01]
Tim Miller
Well, good thing there are no morality tales or no kind of historical lessons about the issues that might be associated with just ignoring fundamental problems. As you get wealthier and wealthier. That never comes back to vitamin.
- [66:15]
Alex Kantrowitz
I guess we don't do that anymore, Tim.
- [66:17]
Tim Miller
All right, last thing this is all just kind of developing. So I don't think you're going to have any deep reporting on this or anything, but I'm interested on your kind of top line thought. There's been a pause put on all grants and research. We just talked about that with Chris Hayes for a little bit from the feds. And the first thing people start talking about with relation to that is medical research. And a lot of stuff that there are a lot of folks who are sympathetic to that, maybe not particularly folks in the Trump coalition, but, but there is also a lot of grant making that supports the tech world. I know that David Sacks might not like to admit that, but there is a lot of federal funding that's kind of underlying a lot of this research. I do wonder what your thoughts are on that, if there's a pause on that, whether there'll be any backlash or pushback within the tech world or anything that those folks might be concerned about.
- [67:09]
Alex Kantrowitz
I kind of look back at the tariffs from the first Trump administration and as you saw, like there was trade wars and tariffs. But Tim Cook pays a visit to the White House and next thing you know, Apple products can be made in China without any duties on them or any additional duties. And I think what you're alluding to is really interesting because there might be some pauses that hurt the tech industry. And I think we're going to see over and over again that the tech industry cozying up to Trump is going to pay off for them. And maybe for this precise reason where a blanket pause in funding certain things, you know, might, might go on for a day or a week, but once David Sachs gets Trump's ear or Elon or any number of tech executives that are now close to the White House, that funding might be restored. And I think that we're just going to see this story play out in various iterations over the course of the.
- [68:04]
Tim Miller
Next four years, maybe, maybe only over the course of the next year or two until they lose this battle internally with Stephen Miller and Russ Vogt and the band and Wing. But that will be something for us to monitor. Man, thank you so much for your reporting on this, educating me, and hopefully we can do this again soon. For folks that want more on the tech world again, Alex Cantwood's podcast, Big Technology, a substack. Big Technology. We'll be back tomorrow as always, with another edition of the Bulwark podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace.
- [69:18]
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- [70:12]
Tim Miller
Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.