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- [00:00]
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- [00:39]
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- [01:22]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A quick correction on yesterday's show received many notes that a 55 year old is not in fact a boomer. And while that is technically true, colloquially on this podcast, anyone who's a single day older than me is actually a boomer. And so it's not Gen X erasure, it is just more about my Peter Pan syndrome. Glad to welcome to the show. Today, one of our faves. Longtime tech and culture political writer for the Atlantic, but now he's got his own substack. He also hosts a Plain English podcast. His books include Hitmakers and another one that didn't get much attention called Abundance, which he co wrote with Ezra Klein. It's Derek Thompson. What's up?
- [02:00]
Derek Thompson
Hey, how's it going, man? Am I older than you? Am I a boomer?
- [02:03]
Tim Miller
No. Okay, good. No, we're just. We're millennials. Okay.
- [02:07]
Derek Thompson
Okay.
- [02:08]
Tim Miller
It's fine.
- [02:08]
Derek Thompson
I think so.
- [02:09]
Tim Miller
We're dealing with the linear nature of time differently in different ways, but we're just doing our best to survive it. As typical. When you're on, I just have a whole kind of grab bag of various things. We're going to hop all over the place to various Derek interests and Derek interviews on the Plain English pod, which I'm a frequenter. I Don't think I've heard your opinion on this yet, so we'll see if you have one ready. But you, I associate you with, like, you know, having unified theories of various things, a unified theory of everything, or, you know, a theory of how something explains something else. I wonder if you have a unified theory of what we're doing in Iran, because currently we have American soldiers dying, gas prices rising, tariffs going into effect this week, we're arming the Kurds. We have no clear regime transition plan. Donald Trump, his whole careers, and J.D. vance, like they said they weren't for this sort of thing. Why are they doing it? What are they doing, do you think?
- [03:02]
Derek Thompson
I just had Ruben Gallego on my show, or at least interviewed him yesterday. That show's coming out on Friday. And I said, have you, A, seen any evidence that suggests that an attack from Iran was imminent? B, heard any consistent justification for what we're doing in Iran? C, heard any consistent description of the end game in Iran? And he said, no, no, and no. So what's the universal theory of Iran? The universal theory of attacking Iran is that Donald Trump does whatever the hell he wants, whenever the hell he wants, and doesn't ask Congress for permission. And the Republicans in Congress roll over and say, sure, take whatever Article 1 power you want and make it the new prerogative of the executive branch. That's the story of Trump 2.0. It's the story of the last 14 months. And so to a certain extent, there's no possible unifying theory of foreign policy that explain what we're doing in Iran. And to another extent, like, this is just an extension of the president's personality. We don't have a political economy. We have Trump's personality. Right? He says, I'm going to slap a tariff on you. And then if you're Switzerland, you're like, here's a gold bar. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to reduce your tariff by 50% because I love gold bars. That's not political economy. That's just Trump loving it when people pay homage to him and loving to do whatever he wants to so that he can force people into positions where they bend the knee. So to a certain extent, maybe this is just another expression of his personality. He wants to bomb Iran because he wants to bomb Iran. He hopes that they change something so that he can declare victory and move on to do the next thing that he wants to do. And I don't know that it's thought out more than the next 15 minutes. Or 15 seconds ahead of the present time. That's the best I have for you.
- [04:37]
Tim Miller
You described though kind of a gangsterism and corruption that defines him. And so that's kind of what I keep coming back to is he's obviously doing a lot of business in the Middle East. Supposedly MBS was for this. MBS is funding his son in law doing business with the Emiratis and the Qataris. He and Bibi have close relationship. Obviously there's political business being done there, potentially financial business with what's happening with Gaza. So like maybe it's as simple as that. Because when you say like Trump does whatever he wants, that's a little bit unsatisfying to me because I feel like I'm an expert Trump ologist. If nothing else, I'd rather not be. But unfortunately I had to spend 10 years thinking about him. And, and to me, invading Greenland made a lot of sense for me. With Trump, he's bullying somebody. It's a real estate play. You get a new toy, you get to put a building in nuke that has a big flashy Trump on it. That makes a lot of sense to me. Bombing Iran doesn't make any sense. There's not going to be a Trump resort and casino in Tehran anytime soon, I don't think. And so that takes me back to the other players involved.
- [05:41]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I think with Trump, the personal is professional for sure. And I don't know the conversations that he had with BB or MbS, but surely Israel wanted to take out the Supreme Leader, Khamenei and wanted to take out the other clerics that lead the Islamic Republic. And it's clear that, you know, MBS also saw an interest in taking down the current regime in Iran. Maybe they got on the phone and were persuasive and maybe sort of sprinkled their conversation with allusions to future deals. And Israel and Saudi Arabia. That's totally possible. I think I agree with the first thing that you said most, that Trump does whatever he wants leaves a lot to be explicated. Why does he want what he wants? And there again, I think that Trump is sometimes made to be more complicated than he is. Fundamentally, this is someone who likes homage, likes money, likes the feeling of winning. And so most actions that he takes are about making more money, being dignified, feeling like he's getting one over the counterparty, feeling like he's winning a zero sum exchange. But what exactly we're doing in so clearly subverting one of the first principles of Maga in the 2024 election, which is no new wars, we're the peace ticket, no foreign interventions that stay out of the Middle east, as far as military engagements are involved. It's surprising. One way that it was explained to me, so I did a show on this with Karim Sajadpour, who's an Iranian analyst, and you know what he said to me that I thought was kind of interesting is he said both Khamenei, the supreme Leader of Iran, and Trump have been acting from a place of significant hubris, that Khamenei, for his part, felt like he was untouchable, that the US Wasn't possibly going to come after him directly. And that was clearly wrong. He's dead. Trump is also a little bit on tilt. You could say that now that he's seen that he can decapitate the regimes of other countries by, say, abducting the leader of Venezuela, and now we're talking about maybe, you know, decapitating the leadership of Cuba. Maybe he felt like, you know what? Regime change isn't as hard as I thought it was. You don't need boots on the ground. You just need a really well timed, AI inflected drone or missile operation that takes out one guy at one time. And then when you take out the top guy, democracy will just grow.
- [08:02]
Tim Miller
It's like he's on a hot craps table. It's like you're on a hot craps table. Sometimes you're making a lot of money, you have a lot of chips, then all of a sudden you look down and you're like, oh, I'm betting $800 on this next roll. Like, I'm used to only betting $40, but I'm just, I'm high at the moment. You know, let's just keep going.
- [08:18]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, there's something to that. I definitely, I don't want to get over my skis and like, equating war that's killing hundreds of people with like a, a, a hot streak in the craps table. But at some psychological level, what Kareem Sajadpour was saying is there's something similar between those two phenomena. The feeling of, oh, Venezuela was easy, maybe Iran is easy, maybe Cuba is easy, and we're stuck in the middle of some kind of on tilt hot streak that at the moment is just, at least, it seems to me, sort of unspooling out of control.
- [08:50]
Tim Miller
Trump being a winner is another psychological thing I like. I think that he's pretty impressed with Israel's military capabilities, the Mossad's military capabilities, and then coming to him being like, we know where this guy is, and we're like twice 20 of his top leaders, and they're all meeting on Saturday. And, you know, and CIA was involved in that as well. But like, Israel has been. Has demonstrated, you know, the pager thing. I think Trump thinks all that is cool, right? And he's like, oh, wait, we can ride shotgun with people that are winning and know what they're doing here. I think there's an element of that to it, too. Anyway, none of those explanations, whatever it is, I don't think are going to be very satisfying for people whose gas prices are going up and who are now worried that they might have family members or friends being sent into the region and put at risk, or who have friends who are living in the region who are at risk. And just like the risk calculation for some psychological Donald Trump thriller is, I don't think that's a good risk calculation for him, but we'll see how it plays out.
- [09:45]
Derek Thompson
No, I think at the end of the day, this is already. Most military campaigns that the US Embarks on begin at some relatively high level of Poland. One of the reasons why maybe you begin something like The Gulf War 1.0 under George H.W. bush, or the Afghanistan War under W. Bush, or even the Iraq War under W. Bush, is that there's an initial approval tacit among the American people or explicated specifically by the Congress. This is one good reason to have Congress vote for wars, not only because it's in the Constitution, but also you get a sense of whether or not the legislature elected by the people are for this particular move. It's really unusual to have the executive branch, especially one that's as sensitive to public opinion as the Trump executive branch has been, to engage in something that's so demonstrably unpopular within the MAGA coalition.
- [10:36]
Tim Miller
Even if he stopped today and did the Trump thing and declared victory. And it's like, had you polled two weeks ago and said, hey, we're gonna bomb Iran, we're gonna take out the supreme leader, six American troops are gonna die, your gas prices are gonna go up, we don't know who is gonna replace him, I think that that prospect would have pulled it like 30% or 20%. I mean, it would have been an extremely unpopular prospect. And it seems like it's going to get worse from here.
- [11:01]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, this is put a little bit crudely, but. Right. We're going to kill someone that most of you have never heard of in a country that most of you never think of. And the cost of the American people is that they're going to pay a dollar more at the gas station for every gallon they put into their car. I mean, that doesn't sound, I think, to a lot of people, like a good deal. I mean, just from a strategic standpoint, it doesn't sound like the kind of America first that I think Trump is on soundest foot articulating. Like, I do believe that one distinguishing quality of his 2015 candidacy, and you're in it, you're in a good place to tell me if I'm right or wrong here, is that he was willing to say things that were unpopular among elites but popular among the public.
- [11:40]
Tim Miller
The distinguishing thing about his 2015 candidacy was that he was willing to be overly aggressive and bigoted towards immigrants and brown people and that he didn't want to go to war. Those were the two things that Trump was saying. There were 16 people on stage. Nobody else was saying it. He was the one who was being like, no, we should ban all Muslims and we should deport everybody here, and also, we shouldn't go to dumb wars. No one else was saying either of those things. He did both, and the people were with him on both. And so it's a total betrayal of his original case to the voters.
- [12:14]
Derek Thompson
Right. So I don't know what he's doing, and the fact that I don't really understand what he's doing makes me wonder. And this is really a question for you, you've studied this more closely. How long are we going to do this before Trump just says, look, we won, the war's over. I'm declaring the war over. We did what we wanted to do, which is to assassinate the leader of Iran. Iran. It's up to you to pick up the pieces. Rise up, Iranian people, if you want to rise up. I'm going to go back to talking about various domestic issues and sicing ice on various innocent US Populations. At what point do you think it just becomes utterly necessary to turn the page? Because this is someone who looks at the stock market and looks at oil markets and looks at polling in a lot of cases and seems at least somewhat, if not controlled by those metrics, then at least sensitive to them. I don't see those metrics sort of blinking green for several weeks in a way that's going to make him want to keep this up.
- [13:09]
Tim Miller
It's a low confidence prediction for me. I was literally just texting with one of my friends about this this morning. We're going back and forth. There's a news story that the Pentagon's preparing for being there till September. What. And my response to him is, what I think is that Pete Hegseth is very excited about this. And Pete Hegseth likes to play war, and it's like kind of make a wish Secretary of Defense now, and he wants to bomb stuff. And he thinks that bombing that ship in the Indian Sea, that that was no threat, like, was cool and, like, that's what he's in it for. But I also think that Trump is going to look at all the polls and markets and gas and pat them on the head eventually and say, no, okay, war over. Good luck to the people of Iran and the Kurds and the mullahs, and you guys can fight it out. Like, that's what I think he's going to do. But it's low confidence that. Because, like I said, I just, I thought he was going to taco on this. Like, I really. I just, I fundamentally didn't think he was going to do it. So I'm missing something about, about the Trump psychology on this one I wanted to ask you about. There was something that was more satisfying on your various unified theories of how to look at Trump. He posted this the other day, and it was kind of in the context of the anthropic dispute. I want to get into that, but let's talk about just more broadly first, which is you wrote that you continue to think a useful way to look at this administration as kind of a systematic control f monarchy search function to discover the tools of authoritarianism embedded deep in the legal code. I liked that. Talk a little bit more about that.
- [14:32]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I'm working on a piece about this. So this is actually a really great opportunity, Tim, to sort of structure the argument. Yeah. I have for a while been really interested in this mode of the administration where they continually seem to be executing the same playbook over and over again in the realm of domestic politics, trade and international politics. And that is they seem to consistently do the following. They declare an emergency. They revive some dormant or esoteric code that gives the executive branch extraordinary power to essentially do whatever it wants to do, and then they duke it out in the courts. I mean, this is what they were doing in terms of finding, I think it was called statute 10, where they. That allowed the National Guard to be deployed in California to put down protests. Statute 10, like, it was an incredibly random code just hiding somewhere in the legal system that they unearthed in order to defend what seemed like a clearly unconstitutional use of National Guard force, ipa, which is the law that was initially cited to justify The Liberation Day tariffs recently struck down by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, look, the word tariff doesn't appear in this law. This law is clearly not intended for these purposes. And so this is not legal. And now we're going to, I think a 1974 law passed after a Richard Nixon initiative that's being used to justify the next round of tariffs never before used. Who knew it was there? Well, the Trump folks did. It seems like over and over again, the administration is almost like teaching us a lesson in the degree to which American law justifies authoritarianism if you dig deep enough. And so it's like this search function. I said control f monarchy. Like, go through the entire US Statute and do a control F for anything that gives the executive branch emergency power to do whatever it wants in domestic and foreign policy. And they're using this over and over again. And it just disturbs me as a moral matter, but also interests me to the degree to which we can predict what the Trump administration is going to do next. Like, it almost makes maybe like a smarter, like, maybe legal reporter want to use, like, an advanced version of ChatGPT or Claude to essentially, like, have a swarm of agents look through the law and predict where are the examples of latent authoritarianism hiding in the US Legal code that the Trump might use in the next two and a half years to justify some completely cockamamie scheme that we couldn't currently imagine that that might be a way to almost run ahead of the administration and predict what they're going to do next.
- [17:20]
Tim Miller
The first thing that comes to mind when you suggest that is the Insurrection act and other emergency powers around elections. And this ties to just the previous conversation we have. Some people would say that part of the rationale for what Trump was doing in Venezuela and Iran is that there are people in the administration, Stephen Miller in particular, that want us to be in wartime because it gives them greater emergency powers both around immigration and elections. And I think that's a coherent theory that's obviously true on immigration, I think TBD on elections, but certainly plausible given their past behavior.
- [17:57]
Derek Thompson
Right. I mean, and you set this question up with an example that I didn't even give in my answer, which is that Pete Hegseth, after contract negotiations broke down with the AI company Anthropic, labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk under section 3252, which is a section that has typically only been applied to foreign companies that are essentially saboteurs, like Huawei, the Chinese company that we worried had a backdoor to the Chinese government. We currently, because of our use of section 3252 on anthropic, are treating them like an enemy of the state, treating them worse than many Chinese AI companies that we know have a backdoor to the military or the intelligence of the ccp. So here again, we have, like, who would have thought that, like, a contract negotiation that breaks down ends up with, like, the nuking from outer space of an AI company using this esoteric statute? Right. It's this idea that we're in a period where the executive branch is essentially ruling by emergency, almost again, teaching us all sorts of ways that the legal code reserves for the executive branch such extraordinary powers. If it can be proved that we are in an emergency, that is both terrifying as a sort of matter of US democracy, but also, again, from an analytic standpoint, I think it's interesting because once you see the formula of an adversary or an organization that you're criticizing, once you see the formula, then you can run ahead of them and detect it. And so I'm hoping that lawyers can sort of get ahead and maybe, maybe make their arguments, for example, of the Insurrection act, if that's going to be used in the midterms for 2028, get those arguments ready under the understanding that under the prediction that something in the realm of an emergency might be declared for future elections.
- [19:56]
Tim Miller
All right, y'. All. There's nothing more important than a good night's rest. I'm a big rest advocate. A lot of people don't believe it because I'm doing eleventy hours of content a day, but yet I'm still resting. It's important. I apologize for those of you who are listeners who struggle getting to sleep. Not me. I hit the mattress and I'm out. The problem is, though, sometimes when I wake up hitting middle age, geriatric millennial, my back starts to hurt. And so it's important that I have a mattress that suits my needs. And luckily we got one of those from our friends at Helix. Helix helps you sleep better. A study they ran found that 82% of those involved saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle while sleeping on a Helix mattress. And it's creating a problem in our house. Okay, I'm just going to be honest with you. In this attitude, it's important to be radical candor. We got our new Helix mattress thanks to our sponsors. But before we heard that Helix wanted to support this podcast, we just got a new mattress in our bedroom. And so we put the Helux mattress in the guest room and it's cozy and kind of makes me want to sleep in the guest room sometimes. So I guess that's a benefit when I get in trouble at home. But it makes a big difference. And the guests raving they're not alone. Helix is award winning. Tons of positive feedback from experts and reviewers. You get free shipping and seamless delivery. That's true. And you also get 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. So go to helix.com thebullwerk for 27% off site wide Exclusive for listeners of the bulwark podcast. That's helixsleep.com thebullwerk for 27% off site wide make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com thebullwork I want to go deeper on Anthropic, but your answer there piqued one thought in my mind that it's tied to the Abundance book and how Democrats should think about this sort of thing. And that is, does this realization make you think differently? I know you're going about how the other side can govern. Right. And so in a lot of ways that the Democrats have been vetoed from getting their priorities through by activist groups that look through the code and look for ways to slow down projects that they don't like, as was what you wrote about in your book. Should a Democratic administration in the future think about how to inverse that to be a benevolent control f monarchy?
- [22:23]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, there's a part of me that was almost wishing you wouldn't ask this question because I struggle with it a little bit. I was just having this conversation with a friend.
- [22:29]
Tim Miller
I was on a Jon Stewart couple over Christmas and he basically asked a version of this question with him being enthusiastically on the side of yes, we need a benevolent soft authoritarian on the left. And I vacillate back and forth wildly based on the example provided. And I think that there are some examples of just do things that are absolutely right and others that get me very nervous. So anyway, go ahead.
- [22:54]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, it's a really, really great, great question. And this is also literally thinking out loud. You keep hitting on on articles that I want to write. Maybe after this podcast is over I'm going to go back and just listen to myself and be like, oh yeah, here's like my five years of you
- [23:05]
Tim Miller
want to just team up the Derek Jackson substack with the Bulwark? We do have an editing team. Just something to think about.
- [23:10]
Derek Thompson
Fair point. Here's I think a useful place to begin. Abundance wants to follow the law. We also just want better laws. We want zoning laws to be better. We want permitting laws to be better. We want energy construction project laws to be better. I don't want a future that's just dueling parties claiming emergency powers to do whatever the executive branch wants until the end of time. That doesn't seem like a particularly healthy path for democracy. That said, Donald Trump is definitely pushing on a really interesting point, which is that I think that liberals, the Democratic Party in the last 50 years in particular, and this is a thesis that's latent or sometimes even made explicit in abundance, have been too consumed with process, have been too obsessed with. Let's make sure that we create processes that listen to every possible group before moving forward with the outcome, rather than focusing on outcomes in the first place. That's absolutely a theme of abundance, this liberal, almost fetishization of process. Donald Trump does not fetishize process, that's for damn sure. And so there's a way in which he's almost like the wario of the opposite of. And he points the ways in which you can go too far on both dimensions. You can be a party that is too obsessed with procedure, and you can be a party that is so uninterested in procedure and so taken with the ability of the executive branch or whatever ruling party is in power, to just run roughshod over the law by claiming emergency powers forever. Those are two different extremes. I want to land somewhere in the middle. There are examples from the book of Democratic leaders declaring an emergency and using that emergency to do what I think is objective good. So the classic example from our book is when the I95 bridge fell down in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro declares an emergency. He sweeps away a bunch of and NEPA rules in order to build the bridge back as fast as possible. I think the line we quoted from the book is that under typical conditions, that bridge would have taken nine years to build and instead it took only a matter of months. That's fantastic. I want bridges to be built faster in America, especially when those bridges fall down and they typically carry millions of cars. I don't want those same emergency powers to be used in order to terrorize Hispanic Americans. So one can believe that it is possible for the President to move faster than the executive branch typically moves and also believe that one can move fast to do terrible things and one can move fast to do good things. And that's why you simply try to win elections. It's why it's important to be the party in power. Who has the power to use those same laws to move outcomes in a good direction rather than a direction of terrorizing people.
- [26:00]
Tim Miller
It's funny that you mentioned Wario, that he's a Wario, because for some reason that was sticking to my head. When I was reading Dario's memo and the information yesterday, I was like, dario, it's kind of like we have now a Mario and a Wario, and Dario is kind of like a different type of bizarro archetype. He was the head of Anthropic. For people who don't know, here's his memo. Derek kind of laid out the backstory that messed up. Basically, the Department of War was using Anthropic's AI tool, Claude, for military purposes. And TOG wanted to put like some pretty normal limits on the use of this tool. Like you can't use it for mass surveillance of Americans. Not you can't use it for surveillance. You can't use it for mass surveillance of Americans, and you can't automate it so that the tool itself shoots weapons like a human has to do it. That's kind of a short thumbnail of what the limits were. This was what started the fight that you just referenced, Derek, where the government now turned Anthropic into an enemy company that they're trying to kill. Dario's comments about why this happened. An internal memo to staff this week was this. We haven't given dictator style praise to Trump while Sam has talking about Sam Altman of OpenAI, which is now going to take on the contract. We have supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We've told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement, and we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees. What do you make of like this, the fight that is now emerging where he's trying to position, I guess a white hat and a black hat AI company, or a blue versus a red AI company maybe competing in the public square. What do you think the implications are of that?
- [27:39]
Derek Thompson
There's something I feel very strongly about and there's something that I'm still trying to work out my feelings about. I'll start with what I feel very strongly about, and that is that Pete Hegseth labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and essentially saying therefore, that a that Anthropic can't do business with any company that does business with the Pentagon. Companies that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft. That's an attempt to murder a company as the result of simply not getting what they want out of negotiations. That is a direct violation, I think, of the principle of private property. You cannot be the government and enter into a contract with a private company and say, we have terms. Those terms could include the price. It could include restrictions on use and say, if we don't get what we want, we reserve the power to destroy your company by saying that you can't do business with any company that does business with the US Government. That's unbelievably, unbelievably Maoist, I think. And it is sharply ironic that when the Trump administration came into power, one of the big differences between their perspective on artificial intelligence and the Biden administration's perspective on artificial intelligence was on the issue of regulation. The Biden administration was much more pro regulation of AI, especially in the future, than the folks who came in, in the Trump administration. And now you have Pete Hegseth essentially establishing the federal government as the most aggressive regulator of artificial intelligence in the developed world. If you essentially have the government being able to say, we can destroy your company if we don't come to terms. So that's what I feel most strongly about. That this is egregious behavior on the part of. I can't believe I have to say it, but the Secretary of War.
- [29:21]
Tim Miller
War is how we do it. You have to make fun of war. Sorry, yeah.
- [29:24]
Derek Thompson
Excuse me. There was no guttural accent there. War. What I feel less strongly about is whether Anthropic had any business being a contractor with the federal government or with this federal government. I believe that, like two parties in a contract can simply agree to disagree. I spoke to folks in the administration about this case. I spoke to folks in the administration I think are uncrazy. And they said this to me. They said, look, if Lockheed Martin was doing business with the US Government and they sold the US Government one of their fighter jets, and they said, by the way, we have certain restrictions on the use of these fighter jets. You can't use this jet to bomb Iran, we would really prefer you don't even fly these jets in the Middle east at all because of the morals and the values of this company. If the Defense Department was simply like, okay, we're not going to buy your planes, Lockheed Martin, no, thanks. That's how things go.
- [30:23]
Tim Miller
Yeah, right.
- [30:23]
Derek Thompson
I think it's okay for the US Government for the Pentagon to have said, look, you want certain restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence. And it's my understanding that this really broke down when it came to autonomous technology. Even more than the surveillance piece that's being talked about a little bit more in the media. It's my understanding it really broke down over autonomous use, autonomous drone swarms and things like that. If Anthropic has different values than the Pentagon, I think two parties can simply say, this deal can't go forward. Yes, we signed a $200 million contract with you. This would be the perspective of Anthropic a year ago. You want to change the terms of that contract? We're not comfortable with that. Goodbye, the contract is over. That's normal behavior. You want to sign a contract that allows for AI use of autonomous drone swarms, you can go to OpenAI, you can go to Gemini, you can go to whoever else, and you can sign that contract. That's freedom. That's the kind of capitalist freedom that I believe in using as a back pocket tool. We nuke your company from outer space if you say no. That's egregious. That's insane, insane behavior. And I honestly almost wonder. This is maybe a hope I'm putting out in the world. It's so insane. I don't know if it lasts a month. I don't know if that supply chain restriction lasts the month because it's so unbelievably crazy and demonstrably anti capitalist. And the truth is, the folks who are running AI policy for the Trump administration, like David Sacks, you can say a lot of things about them. They're capitalists. They are neoliberal capitalists.
- [31:59]
Tim Miller
Some of them are getting a little fond of Chinese capitalism, I think.
- [32:02]
Derek Thompson
Yeah. But even there, it's just, it's weird. I don't support this policy, but it's interesting that they are more willing to sell Nvidia chips to the Chinese in the Biden administration. That's neoliberalism. The idea of, like, unfettered globalization is the very thing.
- [32:16]
Tim Miller
Or it's corruption.
- [32:17]
Derek Thompson
Well, yes, yes.
- [32:18]
Tim Miller
You could, you could simultaneously liberalism, or maybe it's corruption.
- [32:21]
Derek Thompson
Here's my point. You could simultaneously describe it. I'm not trying to bend over backwards to make their policies, to sanewash their policies. You can simultaneously describe it as Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, being the tail that wags the dog of the Trump administration. Right. That is a, I think, a valid interpretation. And there's another interpretation that says, how ironic is it if the Trump administration's centerpiece of economic policy is tariffs? Tariffs, tariffs. But how do they treat artificial intelligence? One, they exempt tens of billions of dollars of computer parts from tariffs. AI is exempt from tariffs. Number two, they sell the parts promiscuously around the world. We have a protectionist policy for everything that isn't AI and a neoliberal globalization policy for everything that is AI. That's interesting and I think it's true. And it makes deeply ironic the fact that this hyper capitalist approach to AI policy now sits alongside this frankly Maoist approach to punishing companies that don't sign the right contracts with the Pentagon. That is an incredibly weird juxtaposition of policies.
- [33:29]
Tim Miller
You basically echoed this. I don't know how much there's to add, but it's worth noting that, you know, it's not just us like lib cucks that are advancing this. Like Dean Ball, who was in the Trump administration doing AI, made essentially the case you just made about the perniciousness.
- [33:44]
Derek Thompson
I may or may not have just gotten off the phone with Dean Ball five minutes ago.
- [33:47]
Tim Miller
Okay. Yeah. Okay. So is there anything that. And I think the interesting thing, and he basically echoed the case you just made, so we don't need to repeat it, about why this policy in particular is pernicious.
- [33:56]
Derek Thompson
Worth saying for folks who don't know. Dean Ball is one of the co authors of the AI action plan from the Trump administration. He worked for the administration for five months.
- [34:03]
Tim Miller
Yeah. So he's against us. But then he made kind of even a broader case about how this is kind of a sign of the end of the American republic. Maybe a little dramatic, but that it's just one, you know, one more advancement in institutional decay and in advancement of tyranny through the executive. I don't know if you have anything to add about that.
- [34:24]
Derek Thompson
I don't want to steal thunder from my own podcast. I think the show is going to come out on Tuesday. Let me steel man Dean's case because I don't see everything from his point of view, but I think I see what he's getting at here. Imagine two trains coming down two tracks barreling into this entity that is a stable American democracy. One train is the extraordinary concentration of power in the executive branch that we've seen surely under the Trump administration, no elaboration necessary, but that we've also seen in the last few administrations, the growth of executive orders. The book the Imperial Presidency was written by Arthur Schlesinger 60 years ago. So the idea that the executive branch is growing in its power and that the legislative branch, Congress, is becoming more and more of a sort of shriveled do nothing rump of American democracy, that's something that has certainly been accentuated by the last 14 months, but is a theme that pre existed Trump's election. Sure, that's the first trend that's coming toward us. The extraordinary monarchical power of the executive branch that's emerging. Trend number two is that artificial intelligence is simply going to be able to give to certain executive authorities powers that they've never had before. One of the big worries that the Biden administration folks have of AI being sold into China is that China would build a surveillance state that would make 1984 look like kindergarten. They would be able to use all the technologies that exist on the bodies of Chinese people and along the streets of China in order to surveil people such that they create a kind of 21st century panoptagon that eliminates any sense of personal or private freedoms. It's not crazy to think that an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence could do the same in the US In a way that would allow an executive branch of the future to use all sorts of private data to eliminate freedoms that we somewhat come to expect. That, for example, if you want to use my computer and search data in order to make some kind of case against me, if you're an administration and I'm a critic, it's a little bit labor intensive to ask a bunch of different people at NSA or some other agency to track down all this information and put it together into some kind of cache that builds this case against me. But what if you have a team of AI agents that can pull together extraordinarily personal information about Americans? The drop of a hat. Well, now what you've essentially done is transform the microeconomics of government surveillance. And so if you think about these two trains coming down the track, the rise of monarchical powers in the executive branch and the incredible falling price of mass surveillance and the things that autonomous AI agents could do with it, that's a frightening picture. And so that's part of, I think, what he's worried about when it comes to, like, what does American democracy really look like if we have this super empowered executive branch that's also making use of a technology that's more facile at getting into our lives and combing across data than anything we've had before?
- [37:52]
Tim Miller
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month, BetterHelp has taken a moment to celebrate women and all the work that they carry at Work and Relationships and Families March includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress. And BetterHelp wants to remind women how much they matter and that if needed Therapy can offer a space for them to take care of themselves in the way they deserve. Better help. Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US of A. They do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means a typically get it right the first time, but if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recs. Your emotional well being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com thebullwork that's betterhelp.com thebullwork I want to talk about expand on this a little bit through the conundrum of how our tech oligarchs think about all of this because there is a little bit of a paradox here where as you kind of laid out, they were very upset with the Biden administration's plans for AI regulation. They don't want that. So I guess the question is what do they want? And maybe they want the Panopticon, I don't know. But I want to play for you. There's this clip that's been going around for a while now I want to get your take on. And in this clip, Andreessen is talking about what a supposed Biden administration official was telling him about their plans for AI regulation.
- [39:31]
Marc Andreessen (quoted)
AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't start, don't do AI startups. Like don't, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point. They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government and we're going to basically wrap them in a paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap, wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition, we're going to control them and we're going to dictate what they do. And then I said, well I said I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because like the math for, you know, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the cold War.
- [40:14]
Derek Thompson
We.
- [40:14]
Marc Andreessen (quoted)
We classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to the math underneath. AI.
- [40:29]
Tim Miller
Wow.
- [40:30]
Marc Andreessen (quoted)
And I said, I've just learned two very important things, because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.
- [40:39]
Tim Miller
I'm kind of skeptical this conversation even happened, to be honest. Or at least happened how he said it. But Mark Anderson claims in that he's talking to some Biden administration AI official and that they were saying, mark, don't even start AI companies, right, because government's going to regulate this and control it. We're going to pick a couple of winners and call it good. He objected to that because he wanted the world to flourish. The AI world to flourish, that is. But it's pretty interesting in the context of what we're seeing with Anthropic. Just wondering what you think about it.
- [41:13]
Derek Thompson
I was in the room. I have no idea what the Biden folks said to Mark Andreessen, but here's a statistical fact. Y Combinator is probably the most famous startup incubator in the Bay Area for new companies. So if you want to understand, like, what are new companies in America interested in in the realm of tech, go to Y Combinator. Under Joe Biden, the share of Y Combinator companies that were AI companies rose from something like 20 to 90%. So this idea that the Biden administration wasn't going to allow AI startups to exist certainly runs in the face of the evidence that dozens and dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of AI startups not only existed under Joe Biden, but the number kept growing. So I don't know what that conversation exactly was about. But if the Biden administration's policy goal was to stop AI startups from happening, that was the least successful Joe Biden policy that exists and that it has. It's a competitive category. That's point number one. Point number two is, I would point out the obvious irony that Marc Andreessen supports an administration that is currently dead set on controlling Anthropic and destroying the company. If they aren't able to control their defense relationships, that's a little ironic. If your fear of the Biden administration is that they were going to exert too much regulatory power over the artificial intelligence industry, then why aren't you unbelievably furious at the amount of Regulatory might currently being brought in order to punish anthropic. There's an irony more broadly, like, what do the tech oligarchs want? I don't know, but I think it's always important when describing a group that feels like an outsider group. This happens with billionaires, it happens with CEOs, it happens with any out group. It can happen with other ethnicities. Sometimes when we're trying to describe an outgroup, we describe them as a homogeneous thing. And then the more you learn about that out group, the more you realize how much heterogeneity exists inside of it. So it's one thing to easily say billionaires want X, tech CEOs want X. But do you know Sam Altman and Dario Amadei? If you know their history, if you know that Dario Amadei left OpenAI in order to start anthropic, if you know that, like, they hate each other to the extent that like there was recently a photo op on a stage in India of like AI CEOs sort of like holding each other's hands and Sam and Daria were right next to each other and their hands were just up like this, not making contact with each other. These are really, really different people. And I think that, I do think they want different things.
- [44:01]
Tim Miller
Does Sam like to be touched? Are you sure that's not like a spectrum thing?
- [44:04]
Derek Thompson
I think he was holding the hand. I'm not going to do a whole Zapruder film thing on like, exactly who was touching.
- [44:10]
Tim Miller
Sam seems like the kind of person that doesn't like to be touched, but okay, I take your point.
- [44:14]
Derek Thompson
I think the bottom line here is that in trying to describe, like, what do the artificial intelligence architects want from this technology? I think it's hard to say for a couple reasons. One, some of them deliberately started their companies in opposition to companies that existed.
- [44:27]
Tim Miller
Well, then, can we just narrow the question then to the Trump loving oligarchs? You know, the Andreessent and the Thiels and you know this?
- [44:34]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. They want to make money. They want to make money and they think they feel like Donald Trump is a counterparty that they can negotiate with and the Biden administration was with people they couldn't negotiate with. I think that's as parsimonious an answer as I can possibly give. I don't think that the entire tech right necessarily feels like Donald Trump really is as great as, as they let on. I think that in private conversations that, you know, are not being, you know, live tweeted My sense is a lot of them are willing to say this action is crazy, that action is crazy. But fundamentally, these are people who got into business to do business, and they ended up lining behind Trump not only because they were ideologically aligned with him and against some kind of like, you know, wokery that was incipient Silicon Valley around the country, but also fundamentally because they were like, Donald Trump is a counterparty that we can do business with and that we can get rich with. And we're concerned that the Biden folks are going to stand in our way in various ways, whether it's crypto regulation or something in artificial intelligence. I want to be clear, like, there's some questions that you ask me where I'm like, I feel very confident about this because I've done the work. I have not done the work understanding exactly what these guys want.
- [45:35]
Tim Miller
Yeah. I ask it just because this is where I get into like the bulwark info wars territory sometimes. But I don't know. I just look at the behavior of what we've seen from them. Fully getting on board with Donald Trump centering basically around crypto and AI as the reasons and wanting to have total deregulation of that and becoming overly hostile to Biden over some pretty minor, frankly, attempts to put reasonable regulations on those two products. I don't think what I see is some libertarian desire for no government control. I think what I see is that they want to gain as much power as possible outside of the government with their AI and monetary tools and then have apply it government that works in concert with them. I think it's just a different brand of authoritarianism. I think that that's what they want.
- [46:30]
Derek Thompson
Maybe you think you're drawing a distinction and maybe you are drawing a distinction. I don't see much daylight between our answers. I think fundamentally these are venture capitalists with limited partners who want to return their limited partners as much money as possible and think that the Biden administration's rules and personnel were likely to get in the way of that end and saw in the Trump administration a group of people that were very interested in making deals with more conservative VC capitalists and essentially doing whatever they want. And to a certain extent, you have to admit that a part of that bet has definitely paid off when it comes to, say, crypto regulation. The Biden administration was absolutely regulating crypto. You said the regulations were minor. I think folks in crypto would say the regulations were significant. It doesn't matter. The point is it is an objective fact that crypto has been significantly Deregulated. And see, regulation has also come under unregulated. Yeah, unregulated. I mean, you look at, you look at the Trump deal with Binance alone. I mean, it's just absolutely pure.
- [47:24]
Tim Miller
You cannot do crypto crime now. There's no, there's no enforcement of crypto crime.
- [47:28]
Derek Thompson
No, that's right.
- [47:28]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [47:28]
Derek Thompson
Yeah. Crypto crime. Right. It's a paradox.
- [47:30]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [47:30]
Derek Thompson
And so, so there I do think, yeah. Their prediction that the Trump administration would not only roll over on crypto regulations, but also they were interested enough in making hundreds of millions of dollars on crypto would mean that they would have a counterparty in the White House. I do think that that was a part of the calculation.
- [47:46]
Tim Miller
I think it's a bad bet because you've seen how this has gone poorly with stupid populist authoritarians and the big industrialists that cut the deals with them. There's just a lot more technology around at this time.
- [48:01]
Derek Thompson
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- [48:31]
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- [49:02]
Tim Miller
while we're doing the big industrialists and trying to figure out what's happening, would you have a hot take for me on the Paramount WBD merger at all? I just look at our friend Zaz and I've got to think, as the capitalist wing of Antifa over here at the Bulwark, I find myself sometimes frustrated with the capitalist part of our mission. Because this is a person that took over a company, added absolutely no value to the world at all, fired a lot of people, made the product less appealing, more expensive, less viable. In the market and then just sold it to a Nepo baby for way more than it's worth because the Nepo baby wants to influence the government. And he is applauded in business circles as a great capitalist. And I'm like, this is crazy to me.
- [49:53]
Derek Thompson
Yeah. I mean, I think I'm quoting from the scripture of Matt Bellany, my fellow podcaster at the Ringer and also author of a great Puck newsletter on Hollywood, that it's a little morally sickening for someone to make, as I think Zaslav will make 800 to 900 million dollars by executing a sale that is almost certainly to result in the loss of thousands of jobs. The idea that you can make $900 million by simply cutting jobs really sucks.
- [50:29]
Tim Miller
I had a preferential tax treatment on that too, which is nice. You know, you're not paying at the income tax rate. That's nice.
- [50:34]
Derek Thompson
I do think that there's like two layers to the story. Like, I do think one layer is the story of the merger. Netflix's bid, the rejected bid, the fact that yet again, you have the Trump administration using antitrust as an extension of personnel policy, basically picking winners and losers based on who are friends of the administration. And it's important to say here, and I think you started this ball rolling. David Ellison, the head of Paramount, which is buying Warner Brothers Discovery, is the son of Larry Ellison, who's one of Trump's best billionaire friends and I think his soon to be neighbor. He's a CEO of Oracle. I think Ellison is buying some property near Mar a Lago very soon. So there's that story which is. Which is like, really sickening. It's sickening at a moral level, at a legal level. But it's in this. It's in this broader. And this is sometimes where people hate me, where I talk about macroeconomics. It's so cold. But it is existing in this broader context where Hollywood is just really struggling. The reason that Warner Brothers Discovery is a distressed property is that it's an old school legacy player in a world that's being completely transformed by streaming and TikTok. I mean, just two statistics give people a sense of just how. In what trouble the movie industry is in. Number one, in the long picture, Americans used to buy 35 movie tickets a year in the 1940s. Now we buy 2.5, 2.7 movie tickets a year. That's an enormous decline. But that change is not just over, say, 80 years, just since the pandemic. I think Morgan Stanley. Yeah. JP Morgan recently did this Analysis where they looked at different businesses in terms of their recovery since the pandemic. And so they showed that restaurant sales were up like 20% and you know, cruises were up and hotel revenue is up like 20% since the pandemic. And then you go all the way down to movie tickets bought, and it's down 40 to 50% since the pandemic. I mean, the movie industry is never coming back. Films sold about 1.2, 1.6 billion movie tickets a year every year of the 21st century before 2020. At this rate, at current trajectory, Americans will never buy 1 billion movie tickets ever again. Ever again. The movie industry will never get back to 2019. And in that context, you're dealing with companies that just aren't built for the next five, 10, certainly 20 years. And as a result, something's going to have to be done. Some jobs are going to have to be cut. And that absolutely sucks. And I certainly don't think that Zaslav should be paid $900 million for executing a deal that manage that decline. Exactly. For managing the Roman decline. Like, there's a reason why we don't talk about the Roman emperors in the backside of, you know, Pax Romana as being great. Like, they didn't necessarily do a great job. They just, they were just there as the roller coaster was rolling down the hill. But I do think it's important to say just a matter of like understanding the big picture here, that like Hollywood is in trouble. And the reason why you have these distressed assets being passed around is that Netflix and TikTok and YouTube are eating everybody's lunch.
- [53:42]
Tim Miller
I agree with that. This is why we have our dueling expertise and obsession. Because I just would add on to that, the simultaneous story is that the Ellison's wildly overpaid for that product that you just laid out that is declining. Not because they think that they've got a great business idea. This isn't capitalism in the purest sense. When you're talking about how you have somebody who's got a new idea about how they can create more value out of this company, they're going to purchase it or they're going to find efficiencies. It's not any of that corrupt. It's just corruption. They want to get favor with the government and they want to have more influence over the flow of information. Simple as that. Like, that's why they bought the company, not because they want to create more value. Does anybody think they could make money in this deal? Like, I don't think anybody even thinks they could make money on this deal, I don't think.
- [54:30]
Derek Thompson
And we didn't even mention the fact that I believe the debt receipt. Right now, I think it's $79 billion in debt that this company is holding.
- [54:37]
Tim Miller
Who's covering that? The Saudis, the Emiratis and the Qataris, tying us back to the original.
- [54:42]
Derek Thompson
And the rough thing for the folks working in this industry is it's really, really hard to pay off that debt, given the future sort of earnings of this company without cutting a lot of jobs. And so essentially the debt's going to be serviced on the backs of a lot of people who work in Hollywood. It all really, really sucks.
- [54:57]
Tim Miller
Having a Saudi Arabian Batman to pay off the debt. That's nice. Based in Riyadh.
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- [56:30]
Tim Miller
Okay, we gotta go fast on these last ones because as always, we're going over. I'm cutting some of them. You have an orality theory of everything podcast. It was great. People should go listen to that. How metrics make us miserable.
- [56:40]
Derek Thompson
Joe Eisenthal.
- [56:41]
Tim Miller
I totally agree with that. So I'm anti metric. You're in your aura ring and talking about how that's making you sad. People should go read about that. I want to get you on three more things. Rapid fire, just on abundance stuff, updates. I had Morris Katz on yesterday's pod, who is Zoran's media consultant. And on the Internet you would think that there is a massive debate over your book between left populists who think that you're in the thrall of rich billionaires and then you have others who are more pro abundance who just think that, I don't know, Democrats should provide better services to people and that the left critics are crazy. At the elite level though, you have to feel pretty good that kind of. Across the Democratic spectrum at least people are at least taking elements of this. And Zoran in particular. I'm wondering how you would kind of grade him on an abundance scale in the first couple months.
- [57:37]
Derek Thompson
Super early to offer a grade, but I'm really, really glad you pointed this out. I think my first column for my substack was about an idea that I called the poster politician divide where I said that if all you do is pay attention to the debate about abundance on the Internet or just poster versus poster, it's going to look like the left versus the center left absolutely hates each other. And that you can either be an economic populist or believe in some abundance principles like making it easier for people to build housing. That's an illusion. It's an illusion of Twitter. It's an illusion of posting. The reason there's a poster politician divide is that Zoran Hamdani looks at the example of Jersey City just across the river where supply side reforms allowed them to build more housing which pushed rents down, not just rent freeze, rents down. And he said, I like that there are a lot of abundance peeled folks who are housing advisors to the Mamdani administration. As maybe you were hearing from Katz, your guest the other day.
- [58:34]
Tim Miller
Well, it's kind of funny. When I asked him why that happened, he was like, you know, when you're in executive role, you have to start making practical decisions. And I was like, oh great. Reality is.
- [58:43]
Derek Thompson
Yeah. Do you want to call it practical? Yeah, yeah, if you want. Sure, if you want. If you want to call it, yeah, a negotiation with practicalities, that's fine. But I think it's important to say this is not just Mamdani, right. Elizabeth Warren is the co author of a very good, very promising housing bill that has a lot of abundance principles in it. Even though I'm sure a lot of folks who work for Elizabeth Warren believe that I am brought to you by The Ellisons. Chris Murphy, I think, is a progressive. He has talked about abundance being something that can exist alongside economic populism. James Tallarico, I know for a fact because I've spoken to him as someone who likes abundance and also talks about how the problems in America aren't left versus right, but up versus down, the 1% versus everyone else. There again, you have economic populism and you have abundance. You know, Ro Khanna, another example of a progressive representative who on the one hand is definitely thought of as maybe like one of the most famous advocates of Medicare for all, which to a lot of people doesn't sound an idea that sort of leaps from the pages of abundance. And has also spoken, not only publicly but also privately, about how much he likes a lot of what's in abundance, especially the stuff about increasing state capacity, of the effectiveness of governance. I'm glad you pointed that out because I think that conflict is great media. And so definitely don't make this the headline of the clip. Yeah, yeah. Conflict is good media.
- [60:00]
Tim Miller
It'll probably be me making fun of Mark Henry.
- [60:01]
Derek Thompson
That's absolutely fine.
- [60:02]
Tim Miller
That'll do a little better because conflict sells.
- [60:05]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, conflict sells.
- [60:06]
Tim Miller
I should have made fun of his cone head when I was doing that. That would have done even better.
- [60:10]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I'm not going to get in on that, but feel free to make that the clip. At the end of the day, the cash value of politics is what happens in the world. Right. Why does politics matter? Because the people who win power do things with that power. If people who run for office who agree with aspects of the book don't want to put permitting reform on a bumper sticker, I don't give a shit. Win Abundance is what happens. If the bumper sticker works and you win. How do you make people's lives better? That's what I care about.
- [60:37]
Tim Miller
The last two topics are tenuously related because in, I GUESS it was 23 and 24, you did an end of year article for the Atlantic about the scientific advancements of the year. I always really liked that article, Breakthroughs of the Year. Yeah. And you'd come up and you'd come on this podcast, we'd go through the breakthroughs of the year. You'd learn me some things about science, because that was the category I did the worst in on my act. We didn't get to do that this year. Because you're a parent now. Yeah. So you took off twice over. Yeah. Yeah. And so I want to first hear if you have a breakthrough for me, something to make Me feel good. And then we'll close with a little parenting, though.
- [61:10]
Derek Thompson
Most interesting thing that's happening right now in medical sciences, I think, is we're in a phase of the GLP1 revolution where these drugs were developed for diabetes. They were found to have weight loss principles. And then we realized there's a bunch of other things that they reduced inflammation among people who weren't even losing weight, that they were good for cardiovascular health again among people who weren't even losing weight. And right now, I did an interview in my podcast with Dave Ricks, who's the CEO of Eli Lilly, which is the company behind Mounjaro and Zeppbound. And they're now in phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials of versions of these drugs designed specifically for things like addiction or neurodegenerative health, dementia, Alzheimer's. So this idea that GLP1s initially seemed like this incredible drug that pushed one button, it now turns out that it's more like a splayed hand that's pushing five buttons at once. And companies like Eli Lilly are trying to figure out, could we design a drug that's really, really good at pressing this button over here without side effects, really good at fixing addiction, but doesn't cause nausea, really good at slowing plaque growth that is indicative of Alzheimer's without causing this other side effect that's common among people who use the highest dosage for type 2 diabetes or weight loss. That's really exciting because these are problems. Dementia in particular.
- [62:41]
Tim Miller
I really don't want dementia, so I'm finishing this.
- [62:43]
Derek Thompson
I don't want it either. Yeah, I really don't want it either.
- [62:46]
Tim Miller
The scariest one for me, drowning and dementia are. Might be my two biggest fears, alliterative fears.
- [62:51]
Derek Thompson
I appreciate that. And I also, like, this is an area where we've tried really hard. We have spent billions of dollars trying to find something, anything, that can slow dementia and Alzheimer's. And we have struck out again and again and again. There's a theory of the plaque hypothesis that might have been like, a total dead end on this sort of dosing side and the pharmacological side that may have just caused the waste of billions of dollars of medical research. Tens of billions of dollars maybe might have really hur in clinical trials as well. And so just how wonderful would it be if it turned out that this worked? I don't know if it'll work right. You don't know until the Phase 3 clinical trial is over. But, you know, we've talked about some depressing things. I Think there's some optimism. This really does seem like a drug that, for a variety of complicated reasons, is pressing a lot of buttons at once. And it'd be great to isolate some of those effects and make specific drugs for things like addiction and dementia.
- [63:42]
Tim Miller
Lastly, your most recent piece was about parenting, which was very cute. And you talked about falling in love with a stranger and how. How parenting teaches you about that. I feel like a little addition to it, but why don't you?
- [63:52]
Derek Thompson
So I just think it's. Being a parent is really interesting. It's also an incredible cliche, and I try to go directly at that, that, like, there's nothing about parenting that isn't a cliche, which makes it hard to write about in an interesting way. But one thing that I feel that I don't think is articulated enough by parents is the degree to which you have a baby or one's wife has a baby, or someone else has a baby that you adopt and the baby comes home and that baby is not the same baby. Week three. It's not the same baby Month six And you know, my kids are two years and two months old, but it's not the same baby, I imagine at 5 years old, at 10 years old, at 20 years old. And so in a way, I think what I said is like, in a phenomenological sense, you don't raise a singular baby. You raise a series of babies that keep changing, yet retain the basic facial structure of the baby that the woman gave give birth to. And there's something really beautiful about this idea that being a parent therefore means falling in love with the sequence of strangers that keep reappearing behind your child's face. And I think an indelible part of parenthood, an indelible part of enjoying parenthood, is making peace with that inevitable change. I think there may be a larger lesson here about if you can make peace with the changes intrinsic to your child, and maybe you can make peace with the changes that are intrinsic to life and to being alive. But that I think is probably the deepest and most true thing about parenting is that your kids are this sort of sequence of strangers that never stop changing. And I think that's kind of beautiful.
- [65:24]
Tim Miller
My related observation that I've been struggling to put my finger on, that you had my neurons firing over was my child's being adopted was even more of a literal stranger because it doesn't share the DNA and you don't know kind of what she is going to develop into. And my. My brother had his first kid like six Months before we adopted her. And I remember being in the hospital with him and his wife, my sister in law and seeing that kid when he was born and he looked like me and my brothers did when we were kids. You could just see it. He was very much strong genes, my brothers, we all look alike and the baby looked like us. And this baby now kind of reminds me just of me now he's nine and he's the first child. He's very much like me. But at the time I was. It gave me this fear that I was like, am I going to love this kid because of the familiarity more? Right. Like, and will I ever be able to overcome that? And that fear dissipated like hour three of my daughter's life. I was just like, wait a minute, no. And it's hard to figure out why that is. Is it something about like how we're wired with the nurturing? Is it something about like what you were talking about, how there is this extra joy that comes from learning about the new person and loving this stranger as they develop and grow. And I don't know, I was reading your piece and I was like, I still don't feel like I've quite put my finger on what it is that makes that connection even deeper. But I was sure happy it worked out for me.
- [67:00]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I think it's a lovely thought. My wife and I might adopt in the future. And I've thought about that. How does a parent think about a biological child versus an adopted child? But I think your experience is probably instructive and probably very common. I don't think people are. This is like an evolutionary psych thought. So some people hate it and some people might not hate it, but I don't think we're meant to do that many things. We're built to eat, we're built to drink, we're built to reproduce. Certainly the genes don't survive without that. We're built to stay alive. But one of the things we're clearly built to do one thing the species could not survive without. We are built to fall in love with our children. If we didn't, if it were hard to fall in love with your child, you and I wouldn't be here. Because this species would have died out millions of years ago. And so like, I think more interesting
- [67:48]
Tim Miller
to eat your child, for example, than
- [67:49]
Derek Thompson
to, I think, I think. Right. I think, I think loving your child, I think, I think it's, it's a, it's certainly a, it's a blessing of natural selection that loving your child is Easy. It's like. It's like falling off a lot. It just happens, and that's great and not something worth fighting. So I think it's lovely that you had that experience.
- [68:04]
Tim Miller
I appreciate you, brother. Your stuff's always good. Go check him out. Plain English podcast. Almost always a hit for me. I do say sometimes it's my napping podcast. So every once in a while, it kind of vacillates back and forth between Derek and his guests, have my neurons firing, and I'm thinking new things. And I'd like that when the podcast does that for me. Other times, it's like, this is kind of a peaceful meditation on what's happening, and I'm starting to doze off a little bit, but then come back, wake back up, and you're still going. And I'm like, okay, now I've signed back in. That's pleasant. Kind of like watching the Masters.
- [68:39]
Derek Thompson
It's like. It's like a pill. It's like pill parties that, like, you know, teenagers have where, like, they spread out the pills to their parents. They don't know if it's an upper or a downer. They're just like, I'm just gonna take the pill and see what happens. I'm glad I had the plain English exist in that category.
- [68:51]
Tim Miller
Exactly. There you go. So go check him out. Plain English Derek Thompson on substack for the rest of y'. All. We'll be back tomorrow for a Friday edition of the pod. See you all then. Peace, baby.
- [69:01]
Derek Thompson
I finally know what I'm going after.
- [69:06]
Tim Miller
I'm learning to let in all the laughter. Holy moly.
- [69:12]
Derek Thompson
You're so funny.
- [69:13]
Tim Miller
You crack me up.
- [69:15]
Derek Thompson
You crack me up.
- [69:17]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
- [69:24]
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- [69:30]
Rebel.com Advertiser
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- [69:38]
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- [69:48]
Rebel.com Advertiser
Eduardo.