Derek Thompson: The Party of Vicemaxxing

Summary

The Bulwark Podcast

Episode: Derek Thompson: The Party of Vicemaxxing
Date: June 2, 2026
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Derek Thompson (The Atlantic, Plain English podcast)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tim Miller speaks with tech, culture, and political writer Derek Thompson about the latest surge of political corruption—what Thompson terms “vicemaxxing”—particularly within the Republican Party and Trump’s orbit. They explore the erosion of political and moral norms, the role of courts in checking presidential power, and the psychology driving voters and politicians today. The conversation then shifts to technology, diving into AI’s disruptive impact, what’s hype versus reality, potential consequences for work, art, and social connection, as well as broader trends affecting happiness and fertility. The show wraps with lighter fare, including NBA musings and the quest for hope in politics.

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Main Segment Highlights

Trump’s Corruption, The Courts, and Vice Maxxing

[00:28–09:17]

• Trump’s Appointment of Bill Pulte: Miller and Thompson react to Trump installing Bill Pulte—a figure with zero intelligence experience and a reputation for online loyalty and vindictiveness—as Director of National Intelligence.

  • Miller: “He is now going to be the DNI. He has no intelligence, experience, no experience at all. I think it is pretty obvious why Donald Trump is putting somebody who has shown complete unapologetic shamelessness in going after his foes... It's extremely alarming.” (00:56)

• Slush Fund Withdrawn Under Court Pressure: The “slush fund”—recently nixed by the Trump Administration after court rulings—sparks a discussion about the courts’ role in protecting democracy.

  • Thompson: “It’s incredibly welcome. I feel complicated about the fact that the justice system... seems to be the one bulwark, so to speak, against Trump’s immorality… Over and over again, it’s been the court system that provides any kind of blockage, any kind of limitation, any kind of constraint on someone who is so unlimited and unconstrained in his clear interest in being a dictator and being a king.” (02:49)

• Political Gravity on Trump: Both note an accumulation of factors piercing Trump’s aura of invincibility—failed revenge campaigns, shrinking popularity, and a changing dynamic as some Republicans (especially lame ducks and those not up for re-election) begin to resist.

  • Miller: “If this was June 2, 2025, I don’t think that there would have been any pushback on the Hill about this.” (08:03)

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“Vicemaxxing” and Moral Decline

[09:17–18:09]

• Definition and Diagnosis: Thompson outlines “vicemaxxing”—the unchecked, shameless pursuit and celebration of vice as a political organizing principle and badge of group loyalty.

  • Thompson: “I call this vicemaxxing, or you could call it vice signaling—this utter, utter lack of embarrassment about that which everyone recognizes as being corrupt.” (10:08)

• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, and Excuse-Making: Citing Mere Christianity, Thompson explains how both politicians and their supporters justify bad behavior by pointing to the other side’s supposed flaws rather than defending their own on the merits.

  • Thompson: “They don’t actually defend Trump’s corruption on the merits. Instead, they always back into this idea of, well, look at Biden’s pardons, well look at the Democratic Party. Well, let me remind you how much we all hate woke so we can distract you…” (12:22)

• On Voting for Flawed People: Discussing the Maine Senate race and “Graham Platner,” Thompson distinguishes between recognizing real moral failings and the need for moral clarity about larger stakes.

  • Thompson: “Graham Platner is a scumbag Mainers should vote for. Think about what that sentence does. It recognizes that the moral failing exists… Nonetheless, it is morally significant for Democrats to take back the Senate… They’re both true.” (17:00)

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AI: Bubble, Threat, or Both?

[21:19–37:23]

• Uncertainty and Hype: Miller complains about the lack of clarity on AI’s impact; Thompson admits the landscape keeps shifting:

  • Thompson: “Sometimes I don’t like that the first one is right... the facts on the ground are changing really quickly.” (21:44)

• The “AI Bubble” Argument’s Instability: At first, it looked like a bubble because demand lagged behind investment. Then demand and revenue soared—especially for code-writing AI—but the latest chapter is companies questioning the real value of all that AI spending.

  • Thompson: “You had the era of it’s clearly a bubble... then maybe it’s not... to now, wait, what's the value?” (25:31)

• AI’s Effect on Writing and Creativity: Studies show individual essays are more polished but less creative in the ChatGPT era—diversity of ideas drops.

  • Thompson: “Because large language models are trained to come up with specific answers, it limits the diversity of expression... It can make certain things better… but that’s the danger.” (27:04)

• Art, Divergent vs. Convergent Intelligence: AI is good at convergent tasks (standard answers), bad at fostering creativity and divergence—bad for art and individuality.

  • Thompson: “Most people use artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence is best at a kind of convergent intelligence. But that’s bad in the realm of art, because art is all about divergence.” (29:28)

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AI, Work, and the Antisocial Century

[34:36–39:33]

• Jobs Lost and Gained: Some white-collar “O-ring” jobs may remain, as AI can handle many, but not all, work tasks. Humans may do more interesting or higher-value parts.

  • Thompson: “Most jobs have... five, six different tasks. And maybe AI is really good at doing three or four... but if they can’t do the final task, then it remains in the province of humans only.” (35:14)

• Risks of Social Disconnection: If AI handles every disagreeable or minimally fulfilling human interaction, the social bonds formed through those interactions erode further.

  • Thompson: “If you sort of cume them all up, what you’re talking about is self deporting yourself from human relations. And that doesn’t seem so good to me.” (39:08)

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The Happiness Crisis: English Speakers and Therapy Culture

[39:33–48:10]

• Stark Happiness Drop in the Anglosphere: Research shows young people’s happiness plunging in English-speaking countries, much less so elsewhere, even among otherwise similar populations (e.g., Quebec vs. Ontario).

  • Thompson: “What is it about speaking English that is making us miserable? … America is amazing at exporting our culture… a certain form of American anxiety is the new Coca Cola.” (43:15)

• Theories: Therapy, Consumerism, and Toxic Individualism: Miller and Thompson debate whether a culture of pathologizing normal feelings (therapy culture), relentless consumerism, and lonely individualism are uniquely corrosive in the Anglosphere.

  • Thompson: “There is something about... American secular individualism that seems to... put it all on us without supporting institutions to help us when we’re down.” (47:13)

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The Debt & Fertility Crises

[48:10–55:55]

• Debt: Both host and guest describe becoming more concerned about US federal debt as interest rates rise and both parties seem unable to make fiscal choices. The consequence could manifest as a cost-of-living crisis rather than an abrupt market panic.

  • Thompson: “Right now... interest we pay on the debt... is already higher now than military spending for the first time in modern American history... I don’t know how this ends.” (48:59)

• Fertility: Birth rates are declining around the world, even in places previously immune (e.g., Thailand, Latin America). This creates slow-burn demographic risks and could lead to widespread depopulation.

  • Thompson: “If you just do the basic arithmetic... 20% depopulation rates seem like a mathematical inevitability in many, many cities and countries around the world.” (54:13)

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Basketball, Politics, and the Need for a “Wemby”

[55:55–60:22]

• NBA Parallels & A Hope Metaphor: The Spurs (with Wembanyama) vs. Knicks finals provides an escape and an analogy—perhaps politics needs a transcendent, charismatic leader to inspire hope and distract from structural problems.
  • Miller: “My grand unifying theory of how to fix our politics is the Democrats just need a Wemby.” (56:52)
  • Thompson: “That’s what Wemby is and that’s what these Finals are… someone who transcends the problems of the party by becoming an individual, a personality that people believe in, even if they don’t believe in a larger institution.” (57:22)

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Notable Quotes

• On courts as bulwarks:
  “It’s been the court system that provides any kind of blockage, any kind of limitation, any kind of constraint on someone who is so unlimited and unconstrained in his clear interest in being a dictator and being a king.”
  — Derek Thompson (02:49)

• On Republican moral decay:
  “I call this vicemaxxing... this utter, utter lack of embarrassment about that which everyone recognizes as being corrupt.”
  — Derek Thompson (10:08)

• On excusing immorality:
  “They don’t actually defend Trump’s corruption on the merits. Instead they always back into this idea of, well, look at Biden’s pardons, well look at the Democratic Party.”
  — Derek Thompson (12:22)

• On art and AI:
  “Most people use artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence is best at a kind of convergent intelligence. But that’s bad in the realm of art, because art is all about divergence.”
  — Derek Thompson (29:28)

• On American anxiety and culture:
  “A certain form of American anxiety is the new Coca Cola... now sees people throughout the world now see themselves with this kind of... self derogating sense of like, is there something wrong with me?”
  — Derek Thompson (43:15)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Trump’s appointments/slush fund: 00:28–09:17
• “Vicemaxxing” and political ethics: 09:17–18:09
• AI: hype vs. reality: 21:19–37:23
• Social impact of AI and loneliness: 34:36–39:33
• Declining happiness & American culture: 39:33–48:10
• Debt crisis talk: 48:10–52:03
• Fertility crisis insights: 52:03–55:55
• NBA/politics parallel: 55:55–60:22

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Tone & Style

• Candid, intellectually curious, self-deprecating, and darkly humorous.
• Open about uncertainty and frustration—especially regarding big political and technological questions.
• Defends liberal democracy, worries aloud about moral drift, but ends with note of hope (or longing for rescue).

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Listen For...

• The concept of “vicemaxxing” and “vice signaling” in today’s political right.
• The metaphysical despair in American (and English-speaking world’s) society, as traced via happiness studies.
• How AI’s real-world impact is still murky, despite eye-popping economic stats and moral worries.
• Lively, relatable analogies between NBA fandom and national politics.

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For more in-depth analysis or ad-free episodes, check out Derek Thompson’s Substack and Plain English podcast, or subscribe to Bulwark+.

Transcript

[A]

Yes, you can.

[B]

A five minute quick and easy calorie burning workout. Give it a try. Come join our sweat sesh on TikTok.

[A]

Hello and welcome to the Bullock Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. There is so much political news on this Tuesday. We've got primaries tonight in Iowa, big Senate primary, California governor and mayor's primary. Also New Jersey, Montana and New Mexico. Right as we started taping as well, Donald Trump appointed his director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae Freddie Mac Bill Pulte to serve as director of National Intellig. That's right, Bill Pulte, the hack grifter that used to like, be, be like the rich guy that gives away 500 bucks to people on Twitter if they follow him. The same guy who was digging into the mortgages of every opponent to Donald Trump, you know, who went after Tess James and others based on their mortgages. He is now going to be the dni. He has no intelligence, experience, no experience at all. I think it is pretty obvious why Donald Trump is putting somebody who has shown complete unapologetic shamelessness in going after his foes in a position, will have access to a lot of material that will allow him to go after his foes. It's extremely alarming. So we'll get to Pulte, get to the primaries and a bunch of other stuff on the Next Level, which will be out here later on Tuesday. So make sure you're subscribed to the Next Level feed. But on this show, we're bringing back a longtime tech culture and political writer at the Atlantic. He's got his own substack now. He's hosted plain English. He wrote some books, including Abundance. He's got a new book coming out. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man?

[B]

What's up, man? Great to see you again.

[A]

Good to see you. I want to start with one of the other news items. Then we'll kind of tick through some of the stuff you've been covering. Yesterday after we taped, the administration said that they're going to drop Thug Fund, the slush fund after a couple of court rulings against them. Minor good news, I guess, that the administration is following court rulings now. They had some pushback from Republicans on the Hill. We don't really know, you know, like, is the immunity part of the deal gone? Is Trump going to go back and try to get another deal? There are some unknowns, but I'm wondering what you make of the pullback on the slush fund.

[B]

It's Incredibly welcome. I feel complicated about the fact that the justice system, the court system, seems to be the one bulwark, so to speak, against Trump's immorality. Every time he overreaches, the Republican Congress doesn't step up, the Republican Senate doesn't step up. Republican commentators, I suppose, object when it's the war in Iran. I've actually been very interested to see how much objection there's been among some of the top podcasters and commentators about the war in Iran, because typically, this man has just been allowed to do whatever he wants. But over and over again, it's been the court system that provides any kind of blockage, any kind of limitation, any kind of constraint on someone who is so unlimited and unconstrained in his clear interest in being a dictator and being a king. I mean, there's just no question to me that if that third branch of government didn't exist, that Trump would be slashing the federal workforce more, he'd be cutting programs even more that he thinks are part of the woke mind virus. He would be creating slush funds of not 1.8, but $10.8 billion, $100 billion for his friends and his thugs and people who he believes have been either hurt by the Democratic Party or who he thinks can bend the knee and he can get something out of them. So it's the same story over again. This happened with the tariff policy, where Trump was just essentially, I think, what did I call it at one point, the way they treat the law is as kind of like a control f monarchy function. Like they pull up all of the laws and all of the regulations, and they essentially do, like, a control f function to see what kind of esoteric law they can use in order to sort of wrest kingly powers themselves. That's what they were doing with the tariff rule. That's what they were doing with this $1.8 billion slush fund. And again and again, when there's constraint, it's constraint that's imposed by the courts. So it's not so much that I think the courts are this, like, uniform system of moral excellence in American politics. But to date, it is the one. I won't use the B word again, but the one ability we have to stop the president from essentially being a king. So to that extent, yeah, it's welcome news.

[A]

I want you to start using the word bulwark as often as you use capacious. You know, you have some words you like, and it would be good kind of subversive branding for us if you Kept using it. Yeah, man, I agree with that. I guess I would add there was not like the legislate the traditional pushback you would want from the Hill, really. But there was consternation among senators and I. And I think that like Trump, it is demonstrated that Trump can be pushed back against. And I think that sometimes, you know, particularly in left media spaces, there is like a fatalism to all of this when he fails and his authoritarian aspirations are successfully pushed back on. It's just important to note, I think, as far as spine stiffening is concerned, because, you know, this has happened now in a series of various things that he's had to back off on, whether it be the El Salvador prison or Jimmy Kimmel or whatever. I mean, it's not how the system should work. But it's important, I think, to note that it's workable.

[B]

Actually, can we pause there? Because this is actually really interesting to me. I did see these little burblings that were coming up from the Senate and the Congress that where Republicans were expressing some consternation about the slush fund. And I wondered to what extent did you think that. That I considered it somewhat light pushback, but let's call it pushback. We'll hold the noun.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

To what extent was that about the slush fund itself versus the accumulation of forces outside of the slush fund? The fact that the Iran war has gone terribly, the fact that affordability is becoming more and more this wraith that is haunting the Republican Party, this albatross around their neck, plus the fact that this president's approval rating has clearly sunk so far below the political Mendoza line that more Republicans who aren't up for election or aren't in primaries in Texas feel like they can say, I'm sorry, Mr. President, I have to draw a line here. We're not creating a $2 billion slush fund for you to pay out to your friends and various people who were indicted by January 6th. Is it about the slush fund itself or is it about this cosmos of things that's happening around the slush fund that is piercing this impression of invincibility that surrounded Trump for the last few years?

[A]

I think definitely the cosmos things. I'd add one more thing, which is his revenge tour, which is working in the micro and getting rid of Republicans that oppose him, but is backfiring a little bit. And the dynamics on Capitol Hill, you know, you have Bill Cassidy, Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, in addition to the people that are now making political and choices based on incentives like There's a small number of Republicans are like, shit, I'm up for reelection. He's getting less popular. You have this other category of people that Trump has went after and who are now lame ducks and retiring, who are more free, I think, to speak their mind. And so I do think that that confluence of political realities is affecting him. And I think that, and just one way to look at this is just kind of rule of thumb is if this was June 2, 2025, I don't think that there would have been any pushback on the Hill about this.

[B]

I agree with you.

[A]

Right. And so, yeah, I agree with that strongly. And so I think that shows that there are at least some elements of political gravity that are applying to him. So you wrote an article about this where you lumped in the slush fund in with a bunch of other stuff that's happening, talking about Trump's vice maxing and how they're trying to maximize all the corruption in every way possible. And there's so much of it. It's my beat and I miss stuff. Like, I was just looking this morning, my friend Justin Canoe over at the Tennessee Holler was posting about the Albania. There's like an huge outrage in Albania right now over a property that the government there was working with Kushner on and their protests. And these guys are making money in so many places all around the world that it's hard to even keep track of. And so you have that on top of I've written in the past about the vice signaling in the Republican Party going for Paxton being the latest example of this. You wrote this. You're concerned about this being a never ending cycle that we can't break out of and the in group's bad behavior is justified so long as the out group's behavior is appropriately condemned. And I don't want to say that this backing off of the slush fund ends that cycle, but I'm just wondering kind of where your head's at on it. And I think it kind of informs a little bit the conversation people have been having this week about Graham Platner, too.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this was an essay written out of a really deep sense of frustration that I had about the decline of morals in politics. And this is not going to be a pox on both sides situation. I think this is clearly worse wrong the Republican Party. But of course, it's not as if the Democratic Party has no moral, moral problems. So I want to be clear that I don't think the Republican Party has a monopoly on Lack of ethics. But the ethical problem, I think, is clearly much, much, much, much, much worse among the Republican Party. And I've just been so frustrated by this mode of excuse making that I had seen among Republicans, where you've got Trump taking hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto money from desperate followers and then a month later slashing funding for medicine for dying children, or soliciting billionaire don for pardons and tax cuts at the same time that he's cutting healthcare for the poor. And the one big beautiful bill. Just the unbelievable rank corruption of essentially letting billionaires off scot free as long as they give him political donations. This just struck me as stuff straight out of the Gilded Age, but worse in a way, because in the Gilded Age, at least, the corrupt politicians tried to hide. Tried to hide their vices. Whereas I call this vice maxing, or you could call it vice signaling this utter, utter lack of embarrassment about that which everyone recognizes as being corrupt. And I want to make sure that I emphasize that point again. I genuinely do think that everyone, including the Republicans who excuse Trump's behavior, recognize that it is catastrophically and categorically unethical to take tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from someone who has been convicted of violating the law and then immediately turning around and pardoning them and even going into business with. In the bright light of day, this was happening so often. And this excuse I kept hearing was always, well, Biden's also bad. Will Woke is bad. Well, Democrats are bad. And sort of entirely separately from my life following politics, I was reading this book called Mere Christianity, which I'm a reformed Jew, so it's not a classic in my world, but it's a classic, I take it, among. Among Christians, a book by C.S. lewis that is essentially Lewis's defense of sort of Christian morality. And he says in the first chapter of the book, and I thought there's just such a lovely smart idea that you can learn a lot about the foundation of all moral thinking by watching people fight. That often when people have fights with each other, you'll have someone say, that's my seat. I was here first. And the other person doesn't question the principle. They tend to come up with some kind of special exception for why the principle doesn't apply to them. Like, oh, I thought you'd gotten up. Right? It's rare for people to say, well, I'm stronger and taller than you, therefore I should get the seat and you should not. Right. That would be vi. That would be suggesting that the principle doesn't exist. Instead you come up with special exceptions.

[A]

Biff from Back to the Future.

[B]

Right. Very few people who aren't psychopaths in the real world, not Back to the Future, are actually Biff, unless you're the president United States. And so I thought, oh my gosh, like I had like a eureka moment reading this book that I thought didn't apply to politics at all. I was like, that's what Republicans are doing. They don't actually defend Trump's corruption on the merits. Instead they always back into this idea of, well, look at Biden's pardons, we'll look at the Democratic Party. Well, let me remind you how much we all hate woke so we can distract you from the fact that Trump

[A]

is Clinton Global Initiative.

[B]

And so I thought, you know, my God, when will we escape this cycle of vice maxing of excusing that which we know is immoral by saying, essentially I think you summed it up well, the in group is always defensible so long as we can accuse the out group of being a worse evil. And I just got really, really mad about this, this theme that I was seeing sort of take over politics, this, this, this explicitly anti moral excuse for immorality. And I just wanted to warn people that I saw a lot of different pockets of politics slipping into this excuse making where the follies or the sins of the in group were always excusable so long as the out group was evil enough.

[A]

A softer example of that, that one of my favorite George W. Bush lines that he used at a funeral one time was he says that we're judging people on our side by our best intentions and others by their worst examples. And there's this evidence that that is a natural kind of human inst. Instinct. And now we've like hyper maxed that you don't even have to give nod to best intentions. Right. It's just like it is okay as long as it's rationalized based on the worst examples or even imagined examples that you've seen on the other side. The cycle of this is what I wanted to ask you about though. And again, no comparison between. And I did a long Platner thing yesterday. And so listeners know my kind of view between his old posts or his personal behavior in his marriage and what we're seeing from the President. But whether it's platinum or whether it's some of the rhetoric around what Democrats should do if they get back in power in 2029, I see this impulse in myself which is going back to the old rules or playing ball or Taking the high road. That doesn't maybe seem right. And it seems like the right thing to do is fight fire with fire. And maybe there should be times where it makes sense for the Democrats to be in league with somebody that has moral failings because that worked for the Republicans, or do some light authoritarianism on their own to send the signal to the other side that this isn't a one way street. Right. That's the tougher conundrum for me, a little bit of how to break out of that cycle after we've been through this last decade. Because in some ways that's rational. At a C.S. lewis level, I understand the moral weakness in it. But at a practical living in the real world, you know, wanting to ensure that there's not one set of rules for one side and not one set of rules for the other side, it makes sense to use those rationalizations a little bit.

[B]

It's a really good and hard question, like how do you stand up for universal morals and at the same time pay homage to the principle that one side really is worse, I think right now than the other side. So even if the morals are universal, what level of individual moral failing is acceptable among Democrats who we still believe to be better or more moral than Republicans? I think a one sentence thesis that really sums up where I stand on this issue is the deck to Jerusalem Demsis article today about Graham Platner, who is someone that I have to be honest, I try to stay abreast a lot of topics at the same time. I have not followed his story very closely until it just broke the Internet over the weekend. This is her one sentence. Graham Platner is a scumbag Mainers should vote for. Think about what that sentence does. Think about what the work that sentence does. It recognizes that the moral failing exists. It doesn't do what Republicans do for Trump, which is to avoid talking about the sins of his corruption by consistently pivoting to describing the Democrats as being worse. Instead, it recognizes that it's bad to sext 12 women, including by taking a selfie that covers up strategically the quasi or actually Nazi tattoo that you got in Croatia in 2007. That's bad. Like that's bad behavior. And we should be able to say that's bad behavior. And we're not standing up for that as good behavior. Nonetheless, it is morally significant for Democrats to take back the Senate and to keep in check someone who is averse to practically every principle of liberal democracy. Like both those things are true. And I like people like Jerusalem who have the moral clarity to say that they're both true, both that the individual moral failing exists and is bad, and also to say taking back the Senate is a high moral cause in order to continue to restrain this man who has despotic and kingly tendencies. They're both true. And we can just say it as simply as one sentence. Graham Platner is a scumbag man you should vote for.

[A]

We're going to come back to this topic more if it seems like the Democrats might ever take power again, because I think maybe there's some more complex moral questions than Graham Platner as one of 100 senators ahead of us. But I want to get you on a couple other things I don't think any of you all are going to be surprised to learn. I'm bad at remembering passwords. I'm bad at remembering the little three digit code on the back of my credit card. And I like to shop for things from time to time on the Internet. Those are a combination of traits that I have and that makes things challenging, makes things annoying. When you want to get something and then you're like, oh fuck what password is. I know I'm supposed to have a password. I know I know what I'm supposed to do, but I just don't. I don't ever do it. And one thing that makes it easy, then I get excited about, is when I see that little purple button at the top of the payment options. Because that button means I'm going to be able to shop without any friction. And that button means I'm shopping with Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Allbirds and Heinz to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. Tackle all those important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go Ching with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com the Bulwark. Go to shopify.com the Bulwark. That's shopify.com the Bullwork I want to express frustration with you on two topics about your podcast. Okay, the second topic we're going to get to in a minute. That's really Dear Parenthood. But the first is on AI. The name of your podcast is called Plain English because you're supposed to explain things to dummies like me in plain English. And on the topic of artificial intelligence, I've been leaning on you because I'm, you know, in my head, I'm like, you know, I recognize that. I think at least that in my area of expertise, which is media, I think that AI is basically an unadulterated evil and pernicious. Like, maybe there are a couple of useful things for it, but almost entirely, I think it's going to be harmful to people's ability to understand what's real. And there's a whole list of issues. But I recognize in other areas that might not be true. There are other areas where it seems like it's already extremely helpful. And on your podcast, I turned to it to get some clarity, and it seems like you don't have any clarity. Is AI going to reshape everything, or is it hype? Will there be major job destruction, or will it be the opposite? Will it gain jobs? Are we in a bubble or not? There's just a lot of uncertainty, and that's frustrating for me. I'm a simple man. I like certainty. Derek, so can you help me?

[B]

No. It's frustrating for me, too. I sometimes wonder whether my job is to be honest when I feel uncertain or to respect the brand of Plain English and profess a kind of certainty that I don't have. And sometimes I don't like that the

[A]

first one is right.

[B]

Yeah. And sometimes I feel bad when I can feel myself going back and forth on a question like, is artificial intelligence a bubble? But the truth is that the facts on the ground are changing really quickly. I mean, in 2025 a year, throughout which I was quite certain that artificial intelligence was a classic bubble. And I thought AI was a bubble for a really simple reason, which was that demand wasn't rising fast enough to justify the supply that was being built out. The hyperscalers, these companies that are building, that are buying the chips and building the data centers, they're spending like 500, $600 billion a year. That's completely insane. No private sector project has ever cost this much in the history of capitalism. And so obviously, I thought, this is clearly going to be a bubble because demand is going to have to rise at a rate that is literally historically unprecedented. And then what happened, Tim, is that between November and April, demand, revenue rose faster than anything we've ever Seen in the history of corporate accounting, the rise of so called autonomous agents, which maybe listeners have heard of as Claude Code from Anthropic or Codex from OpenAI cursor is another company in this space. They've essentially seen demand, especially from software engineers, absolutely soared to the point that Anthropic, which a year ago was valued at something like $300 billion, is looking now to IPO over a trillion dollars. Their annual run rate I think increased from roughly $7 billion late last year to over $44 billion this year. We just haven't seen anything like it. The fact that revenue was rising faster than anything we've ever seen pushed me on the margin back toward okay, well maybe it's not a bubble. Or if it is a bubble, the bubble's going to pop later because revenue is rising so quickly. But the latest. Right, so we've sort of gone through two chapters here, right? Chapter one, it's a bubble, demand isn't rising. Chapter two, it's less likely to be a bubble because demand is rising. We're in chapter three right now. And chapter three is the reckoning over value. You have all these companies now that have spent hundreds of thousands, in many cases millions or even tens of millions of dollars buying tokens, which are the unit of computation in artificial intelligence, buying tokens to write code or do something else. If they're a law firm or a marketing firm and you're seeing, I think you and maybe a lot of listeners are seeing and hearing that a lot of companies are starting to wonder whether all that spending is worth it. And so there's this question now of like, is the revenue real, so to speak? Like did anthropic grow based on selling a product whose buyers now regret all the tokens that they bought?

[A]

I wrote down just a couple of the examples. Like Microsoft is putting a limitation on engineers use of external AI. They have an internal AI. Uber COO said it's getting harder to justify its AI costs because there's no way to show a link between that spend and an increase in features. Amazon had a leaderboard contest designed to incentivize employees use of AI, but they canceled it because employees used AI to cheat the contest. And it was. So they're using all this AI and

[B]

I believe they ended up spending $500 million in a month or half a month, which I calculated is on pace with what Americans spend annually on shampoo. So just the developers at Amazon were spending the equivalent in a two to three week period of what Americans in that period spent On All Shampoo, all of us, all 320 million of us.

[A]

I thought it was most interesting just because of what the company is. Nvidia said it was a vp, so they were looking at it, and they think maybe the cost of AI for this VP's team was more than what humans sort of bet.

[B]

And so you have this swing where you had. Right. The era of it's clearly a bubble because demand isn't rising. The era of maybe it's not a bubble because people are buying so much AI. This is exactly what's needed to justify all of the spend to now. Wait, what's the value? Are we spending money on a technology that we thought might replace our software engineers, but actually costs even more than the software engineers that it's designed to replace? We're in this sort of bizarre period right now where I think a lot of companies are going to try to figure out exactly what kind of AI spend is worth it for them. And that's going to make it hard, I think, to figure out, like, what is. What's the trajectory of spending. So that's just the question about AI as a bubble. And I know you didn't even ask about that specifically, but I do think it's representative of how this is a story that, as a macroeconomic phenomenon, is just changing really quickly, month to month. And so the question for me is just trying to be an honest journalist, is should I come up with one thesis that I post on the front of my house, and that's the thesis that I always try to defend just month after month, no matter what the underlying data says, or should I try to be someone who is willing to have a new thesis depending what the underlying data is doing? And I've gone with the latter. But I understand if it's maybe been confusing because it leads me to doing podcasts that are like, here's the case where AI is a bubble, here's the case why AI isn't a bubble, and everything else. So that's an economic question. There's also this moral question that I find really interesting. So if you want to go into that, I know that AI is not merely a macroeconomic phenomenon.

[A]

Yeah, go for it.

[B]

I have an interview that's coming up on AI and writing, and one that's really interesting is there's been a lot of research now on what AI has done to student essays on college applications. And this one study by a Georgetown, a professor named Adam Green found that he looked at more than 300,000 student essays, and it finds that on an individual basis, the writing, on average, in these student essays in the post ChatGPT era gets better. The sentence construction is more refined and polished. But if you look at all of these essays together in the post ChatGPT era, post 2020, the diversity of ideas significantly declines. And so I think that's a really interesting and sophisticated way to look at what artificial intelligence can do to art. I mean, obviously, student essays and college applications aren't the apotheosis of art, but I think it's a useful representative sample. Sure, it can make certain things better. It can make certain things seem more polished. It can certainly make certain pieces of the artistic or thinking process feel easier. But because large language models are trained to come up with specific answers, it limits the diversity of expression. And so I think that's a really wonderful way to capture the danger of artificial intelligence. It's not so much.

[A]

This is why Pluribus for me. Did you watch Pluribus?

[B]

I didn't, no.

[A]

Okay. You should, because it's the best. And Gil against Gilligan says that it wasn't AI that inspired, which I find almost impossible to believe, but whatever. But the world gets a hive mind, basically, and then I forget what it is, like six or eight people that it didn't work on them. And so they exist with their normal brains, and everyone else has a hive mind. And it's like everyone gets really smart really fast because you know, all of the world's knowledge. But then the hive mind starts getting very dumb.

[B]

Interesting, right?

[A]

Because they're not gaining any new. There's this limit. Everybody has to think the same. There's not new information. There's not new discovery. You need the weirdos to have theories that evoke new ideas.

[B]

You reminded me. There's this concept in intelligence research that says they talked about the difference between divergent and convergent intelligence. So convergent intelligence would be something like, do you know the capital of Croatia? Rwanda? Answers for which there are specific, accurate answers. Math is a lot of convergent intelligence, but divergent intelligence is more like, if I give a child a set of blocks, how many things will the child build with that set of blocks? Right. How much can you do with a set amount of information? And it's clear to me that most people use artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence is best at a kind of convergent intelligence. But that's bad in the realm of art, because art is all about divergence. Art is all about allowing the human being to express their individuality. And if you instead are relying on this external system, that converges on answers that have nothing to do with the individual prompting that machine. That's the opposite of art to me. And so on top of all the problems of artificial intelligence in the macroeconomic world or in existential risk, I'm also concerned about what will do to especially young people, but just anybody who uses it and how it will allow them to almost like self lobotomize without recognizing that they're self lobotomizing. Because they'll think they're producing polished answers. But what they're actually doing is outsourcing the work of thinking for themselves.

[A]

I'm very worried about that. When people hear that Mint Mobile plan is only 15 bucks per month, a lot of them wonder what's the catch? Well, there isn't one. There's no gimmicks, no gotchas, just unlimited talk, text and data, fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest 5.5G network and an award winning care team. We've been dealing with the phone question over here. It's just kind of unbelievable that this is the world we're in where I have an 8 year old who's demanding that she gets her own phone and every time I'm like no, just like, well so and so got one and I don't know, I need to vibe code an AI bot that goes and chastises the parents giving their 8 year olds the phones because it's creating a social contagion for me. But eventually, so you get a little bit older, you are going to want them to have a phone and you want to make sure it's affordable, you want to make sure it has all the features. Mint Mobile, that's one thing to look into. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right with premium wireless. For just 15 bucks per month. You can even bring your current phone and your number. Choose from three 6 or 12 month plans and say goodbye to a monthly bill. Ditch overpriced wireless. With Mint Mobile it's so easy to sign up online and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com bulwark that's mintmobile.com bulwark cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com bulwark that'S IT. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on the first three month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes Fees and restrictions apply. CMIT Mobile for details. Your last AI podcast offered me a little bit of a tiny glimmer of potential possibility where it was talking about how maybe the jobs apocalypse isn't as significant as we think. And he talked about the lump of labor theory and Jevin paradox. And people can Claude that if they want to learn what that is. It sounds like more jobs.

[B]

That's convergent intelligence.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Definitions are convergent.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And it combined with something else. I was watching Marc Andreessen do an interview, because I hate watch Marc Andreessen interviews. And are you actually going to walk

[B]

me into another Marc Andreessen commentary?

[A]

No, I'm not.

[B]

I'm not going to get you into.

[A]

No, I'm about to compliment him. I did. I forgot. I baited you into a Mark Andreessen fight the last time you were on. No, not this time. He said something that I was like, you know, that's good. Like, that's smart. And he kind of did it in a dickish manner that I wouldn't have done it in. But basically he was saying this. But one thing he likes about AI is that people that work for him, it's like if he asks them to put together a deck for his next presentation and they work on the deck and then they come to him and he's like, eh, I'd rather the deck be in purple and yellow instead of red and black. And then they go back and they work three more days and turn it into purple and yellow. And then they come back to him and he's like, actually it turns out red and black was better. He's like, the person gets pissed at me because it's like I wasted their time and the AI doesn't get pissed at me. And I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about your interview and I was like, there are a lot of jobs in our world adjacent, not really journalism, but friends of ours and whatever college educated professional class that are pretty unfulfilling, actually. And I think those are the jobs that whoever the sad person is that's making Marc Andreessen's PowerPoint decks, they're getting paid a lot, but their job is very unfulfilling. And it feels like AI is coming for those jobs. And if the Jevons paradox is correct, and that would mean, in theory, that some of those people could maybe go find other more fulfilling work that we haven't thought about. That's the most positive spin I've had on AI recently.

[B]

Yeah, let me complicate that. Positive Spin. I think Mark is saying two different things which are important. The first thing he's saying is that there's a lot of jobs that are kind of crappy. There's a lot of jobs that are actually, or tasks, I should say, that are very simple and a little bit crappy. And it's probably just better to build a large language model or some other artificial intelligence system that does those tasks better, faster, that doesn't waste the time, mental capacity and emotionality of someone that you actually hired. They can focus on something else.

[A]

Stanford grad, probably. Should somebody that went to Stanford doing that job?

[B]

Yeah. Should folks who went to the graduation school of business at Stanford actually spend hours of their week changing the pixel colors of PowerPoints that Andreessen Horowitz partners are going to use to deliver to conferences? Is that really the highest level of flourishing for someone who graduated from gsb? Probably not. And so in this case, I welcome the machines. Please take over the job of in three keystrokes entirely changing the color scheme of the PowerPoint presentation. That's a fantastic use of artificial intelligence, but it really is nobody's full time job to just change the color of PowerPoints. And that fits into this broader idea that Alex Emas and I were talking about, that jobs tend to be O rings. They tend to apply to this theory of the O ring job. The O ring is a reference to the part of the challenger, the tiny part of the challenger, the tiny ring of the challenger that was faulty. That blew up the entire rocket. Most jobs have, let's say, five, six different tasks. And maybe the next few years we'll find that artificial intelligence is really good at doing three or four of those tasks, maybe even five of the six tasks. But if they can't do the final task, then it remains in the province of four humans only. And in fact, because AI is doing five of the six tasks, the human is doing that task, keeping that job and becoming more productive in it, and therefore maybe even higher paid. So there's a way in which artificial intelligence can take over, I think a lot of white collar tasks, while not replacing the same level of white collar work, but actually maintaining the current employment level and making people more productive and therefore making them higher paid. That's, I think, the positive vision that one could spin out of the Andreessen story and that you also spin out of some real economic research work that's been done on O ring jobs. So that's the positive side. But let me point out a dark side of that interesting story. Mark is not just saying there are some simplistic tasks that we should just have AI do so that humans can do more interesting stuff.

[A]

He's saying, I don't want to deal with annoying people.

[B]

He's also saying, I don't want to deal with annoying people. He's also saying, I don't like disagreeable interpersonal relations. And look, I myself do not like disagreeable interpersonal relations. I don't like being angry at people. I don't like feeling like I'm making other people angry at me. You know, like a lot of life, a lot of relationships, a lot of, like, work, both in a relationship and in a company, it's about becoming comfortable telling the truth and working with people who are not you and therefore hold the possibility of disagreeing with you. And if we start to do this thing where we let AI do every task, that it's like B plus A minus, at. what point are we insulating ourselves from the burden of having to deal with other human beings? And as you know, this is something I think about a lot, that this is what I've called the antisocial century. We spend more time alone than we ever have. We have fewer friends than we've ever had. Just did a podcast, I think it came out today with Lori Santos, a happiness researcher at Yale University, finding that the share of men who say they have no close friends tripled in the last two decades, from 5 to 15%. What kind of a world is it where the Marc Andreessens of the world, not Marc specifically. Now I'm going to get in trouble with another clip that seems like I'm making fun of Mark.

[A]

We won't quote you on this one. Let's pick another fight after this.

[B]

Yeah, good. But what kind of world is it where we essentially say, I find that people are too disagreeable, and therefore, if I have a psychotherapy question, I ask AI. If I have a parenting question, I ask AI if my toe kind of hurts and it's a little bit discolored, I take a photo of it, I give it to AI. Why go to the doctor? On a one by one basis, these things are defensible, but if you sort of cume them all up, what you're talking about is self deporting yourself from human relations. And that doesn't seem so good to me. So I think that what Mark is saying there is interesting, but I think it's also more complex than as simple as, oh, well, AI is good at some tasks, and we can let it do those tasks without fully Disemploying the entire workforce.

[A]

No. Having to deal with people that annoy you is a pretty important element of the human experience. It just is what it is. Or especially if it's having to deal with people that unbalance that you like but annoy you occasionally, if you completely excise that from your life, you're going to have a pretty lonely retirement period, I would imagine, and maybe even before that. This relates to the happiness question and there's kind of these two intersecting issues. I'm trying to decide which one I want to talk to you about. You mentioned the happiness thing, so let's talk about that. I was fascinated by a recent podcast you did where happiness is down basically since the pandemic, everywhere a little bit, but in the Anglosphere a ton. And you worked with somebody and they did research, they did Gallup research and they isolated like Quebec versus the English speaking part of Ontario. And particularly younger people in the rest of Ontario were sadder than the people in Quebec. And my friend over who's from Spain yesterday, and I said I was going to have you on and I was just batting around. That's such an interesting conundrum. What could that possibly be? I'm wondering what you think.

[B]

Well, so let me make sure that I spell this out because it's genuinely one of the most interesting and jaw dropping things that I've ever worked with a researcher on. John Helliwell is one of the folks who runs the World Happiness Study. And we spoke a few years ago about the fact that the World Happiness Study, which asks thousands, tens of thousands of people around the world about their subjective well being, was showing that American happiness, especially among young people, was just plummeting. And I was like, what is this? And John says, you know what's interesting is it's really only youth in English speaking countries that we see this. And I was like, huh, I'd never heard that before. He was like, yeah, if you look at Spain, if you look at like Eastern Europe, certainly if you look at Eastern Asia, you don't see this decline in happiness in the last few decades. And I said, well, what's a way that we could test this? And he went away and emailed me a few days later and he said, just to spell out the story that you told, he goes, we should look at Quebec because 80% of the population in Quebec speaks French and in neighboring Ontario Less than 4% of the population speaks French. So if you really wanted kind of like controlled trial here, Canadians that are the same in every way except we're just changing the language. Does that have an effect on their self reported happiness? And the answer was yes. This is the quote from the research that you shared with me in Gallup. Data used for the World Happiness Report, life satisfaction for people under 30 in Quebec fell half as much as it did for people in the rest of Canada. In a separate analysis of Canada's General Social Survey, which asks respondents about their preferred language, researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta found that young people who speak French at home saw a smaller decline in happiness than those who speak English at home. End quote. This is fascinating to me. What is it about speaking English that is making us miserable? There's a lot of different theories. You might have one that is more right than mine. Let me tell you the way that I kind of think about it. America is amazing at exporting our culture. We're incredible at it. I mean, if you travel to foreign countries that speak very little English, you'll still see Coca Cola bottles, you'll still see American pop stars, you'll still see Disney characters on shirts and water bottles. We're incredible at exporting culture.

[A]

Lollapalooza, Sao Paulo I went to a couple years ago. It was like an unbelievable experience because it's mostly Brazilian music with American pop stars and American brand installations. And the kids dressed like kids in America were two years before.

[B]

So my theory is that a certain form of American anxiety is the new Mickey Mouse. A certain form of American anxiety is the new Coca Cola. A combination of what researchers sometimes call diagnostic inflation, the fact that more Americans now are diagnosed with anxiety or even things like autism. Even controlling for underlying symptoms, we diagnose more people with illness. We ask people in the US to pay more attention to their mental health. Our social media is drenched with a kind of performative attitude about anxiety and other mental health disorders. People talking about how PTSD is their identity. And I want to pause at least to create this parenthesis here that says some of this is good. The world of the 1950s, not talking

[A]

about anxiety was bad. Maybe talking about anxiety in every conversation also bad.

[B]

Sort of. Thank you. You did it faster than I was going to. And I think maybe we just created this culture and we've exported it to the English speaking world. And the English speaking world has picked up on it and now sees people throughout the world now see themselves with this kind of sort of anxious, ruminating, self derogating sense of like, is there something wrong with me? Am I anxious? Do I have ptsd? Do I have ocd and we've just accidentally exported a. A kind of sickness to the world. And so that's. My operating theory, is that it's basically America's fault.

[A]

I had two theories. That one is my more right coded theory, which you took, which is maybe therapy culture is a little out of control. The left coded theory that I think intersects when I was talking with my friend last night was in kind of the similar way that therapy culture got out of control. Maybe American consumerism got out of control. Where I like consumerism and consumer culture, when it's in your face all the time on social media, that creates a jealousy culture. And she was like, when I moved to America, she's like, I bought a steamer and the steamer broke a couple months in, and I called my mother and my mother told me, go to the repair shop, whatever. And then she said that. And then my friend who introduced us, they're now married, came home from work and she's like, where's the repair shop for the steamer? And he's like, just throw the fucking steamer away and go back to Walmart. It's a silly story, kind of, but it's like there is just this, I don't know, this kind of unending desire to want more and more that intersects maybe with Instagram culture in a way that's unhealthy everywhere, but particularly unhealthy here.

[B]

I think it's an excellent theory. Yeah. The term that researchers use that I've picked up on is one of the clearest findings about how smartphones are bad for us is that they create negative social comparison among young women. They feel awkward about themselves. They log on to Instagram or TikTok. They see people who are rich and beautiful and carefree and happy. And rather than feel rich and beautiful and carefree and happy, they measure the distance between themselves and the people that they're seeing and feel a deficit and then feel bad about that deficit. And I can absolutely imagine that a broader form of negative social comparison is a core piece of American social media and American, even social media inflected with American capitalism. And that in addition to a certain attitude toward our mental health and the way that we think about our own minds, we're also exporting this negative social comparison and this impossible dream of getting richer, richer, richer, more and more and more beautiful. And that because no one is the richest person in the world, unless you're, I guess, Elon Musk, and no one is the most beautiful person in the world, you will always feel that deficit. When you spend a lot of time looking at your phone. I think that's it too. And I guess the last thing that I would put on that is that. And maybe this is right coded as well. But I'm very interested in the fact that while I think individualism does a lot of good and that countries that have no sense of individualism tend to be locked in traditions that are bigoted and backward and anti woman and anti gay, there is something about sort of American secular individualism that seems to, like, put it all on us without supporting institutions to help us when we're down. And it seems to lead to a lot of aloneness. And it seems to lead to a decline in time spent with friends and time spent in community. And I just think that life is hard. And if you're going to adhere to a certain kind of extreme individualism that cuts yourself off from the buttresses that have historically helped us when we feel fallen, that's not going to feel very good either. And so maybe there's an aspect of sort of toxic individualism that's affecting this as well.

[A]

I want to move to the Bulwark Pet Issues section. You have two podcasts recently that go over things that my T and L colleagues, Sarah Longwell and jvl care about. The first one is the debt crisis. Federal debt in 2001, back when we were all good Republicans concerned about tightening our belts was 31% of GDP back then. Then it's 101% now. You did a podcast. Oh fuck, I'm forgetting on who you did it with.

[B]

Justin Wolfers.

[A]

Justin Wolfers, yeah. You guys explored both being kind of on the center left and not caring about balancing the budget, but kind of dismissing some of the more alarmist takes from the right on this topic. 10, 20 years ago. And now both of you kind of coming towards maybe starting to maybe not be alarmist, but be more worried about about the problem. Why don't you summarize that journey a little bit?

[B]

Basically, I was concerned about the debt trajectory back in 2009, 2010, when the debt was 30% of GDP. I just saw the facts in the ground as I saw them. I was like, look, we've got a country where Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, which are all programs that I support, are growing faster than GDP at the same time that every leader of both parties is finding reason to cut some taxes. You've got Democrats saying we want to cut taxes for the poor. I often support that. You've got Republicans who say we want to cut taxes on the rich or on corporations, on C Corps and S Corps, which got enormous tax cuts. And the one big beautiful bill and I just saw, look, if we're in a world where entitlement spending is going to rise faster than GDP and we're never going to be able to raise taxes, clearly we're going to have an inability to control deficits and therefore debt. And that's the world that we have. And right now I think it's particularly difficult because interest rates are high and seem like long term interest rates are going higher, which means that the interest we pay on the debt, which is already not particularly productive spending, I believe, is already higher now than military spending. For the first time in modern American history, for the first time in post war American history. And you've got a situation where it doesn't seem like we're going to fix that, that it's just going to get worse and worse for the foreseeable future because interest rates are high and neither party wants to raise taxes anywhere. So I don't know how this ends. And I want to be clear that one of the parts of the podcast that was both interesting to me and also frustrating to me is just how difficult it is to actually spell out what an American debt crisis would look like, because there is no debt crisis right now. I am worried about the debt, but I also don't think this is just like climate change where the problem is here and it's going to get worse with the debt crisis. It's more like evidence of the problem seems to be almost here, but the problem hasn't actually hit our shores. So I trust Justin understands this. And most economists like him say the thing we should fear is that America gets into a situation where people don't want to buy our debt anymore. As a result, we have to raise interest rates. As a result, interest rates rise. Overall, that leads to higher cost of money, more expensive mortgages, more feeling that cost of living in this country is tougher. And I think a debt crisis in the US will probably feel a lot like a cost of living crisis. That's really bad when you see what a cost of living crisis has done to whatever party has power in America. When Democrats had power in America, the cost of living crisis absolutely walloped them at the polls and at the ballot box. When Republicans are the party in power, cost of living concerns are really, really crushing them in off year elections and will, I think, crush them in the midterms. So you do not want to be the party in power when you have a debt crisis that creates A cost of living crisis. And it seems to me like a lot of smart, sober, left of center economists who you do not think of as typically worrying about the debt, are starting to worry that a debt crisis is inevitable.

[A]

I was also intrigued with the podcast you had about the fertility crisis. The other complaint I had aforementioned was you took off way too long for paternity leave. The red coded issue. I'm like, dads are needed for like a week really. I mean, you know, you can get another bonus. I feel like you should get like another bonus week of paternity leave. Like when the kid is like 6 months, you should get another bonus, couple of weeks maybe. But you're doing a lot of sitting around the first three months as the dad. I just want to throw that out there. But you took a healthy paternity leave. But maybe that's the solution to this other problem which is the fertility crisis. I was most fascinated by the podcast because is like when JVL wrote his book about it, the view was basically this was kind of like a first world college educated problem, right? Where people who were having economic success and women who are going to the workforce weren't having kids. And I didn't really realize the degree to which that's almost reversed now. And places where you think they're having a lot of kids, like working class Latin America for example, are also having really declining birth rates, while college educated whites in America are increasing their birth rates slightly. But anyway, did you have any thoughts on the fertility crisis?

[B]

Yeah. Let me make my summary relatively brief because I know we don't have so much time left. My guest, Jesus Fernandez Villaverde made this really lovely point that I haven't forgotten, which is that there's one set of issues that tends to make birth rates fall toward a replacement rate of 2.1, and that's things like economic development. It's things like women are going to college and they're working. It's things like a country is getting richer, women have more freedom, contraception exists, et cetera, etc, all things that we tend to think are basically good. But there's a separate set of things that seems to make a birth rate fall from 2 to 1 to below 1. And those tend to be things like housing is expensive, smartphone culture is making it harder for people to couple up in the first place. It's having people spend too much time alone and so they don't actually go out to date and therefore they don't have. That kid did. And so he made over and over again this point that in many cases it's countries like Thailand and its cities in Latin America where birth rates are falling below what they are in upper middle income America. And that suggests to me that this is a problem we might not know how to fix. And if you just run the basic arithmetic and you ask, what is a country with a total fertility rate of like 1.5, which is becoming quite common around the world, what effect does that have on a population, say, with the distribution, the age distribution of China? It tends to reduce the population without immigration by like 30% over the next 50 to 60 years. I mean, what do we say about, about cities in America that have 30% depopulation? We call them basket cases, like Youngstown. We talk about how we need to save these cities in Washington because they're the rust belt towns that are emblematic of like 1960s golden ages that we want to bring back. There's basically no example of a place that loses 20% of its population that we think of as a success story. But if you just do the basic arithmetic, 20% depopulation rates seem like a mathematical inevitability in many, many cities and countries around the world. And so, look, 60 years is a long time. A lot can change. Fertility rates can go up. A lot of things can happen. I'm not claiming this is inevitability, but it's absolutely something that maybe like a debt crisis is the slow burn problem that I think we should begin to think about about.

[A]

It was a great pod. You also do good science stuff. We're out of time, and I don't want to lose time for my final most Derek Y topic. So yay, great progress on pancreatic cancer, et cetera. And people should go read Derek's work on the various science breakthroughs. So we both are big NBA pod consumers. You did a recent pod with my friend Tim Alberto and all the problems that the NBA has, and a lot of them seem kind of intractable. And I just had this little light bulb go off that connected our interest when Wemby won on Saturday night against the awful Thunder, who are unwatchable and unbearable. And I'm thinking we have this Knicks San Antonio spurs final, and it is such a gift to Adam Silver, who had all these problems about injuries and the length of the season and foul bait. And you could just, for an NBA person, you just list all of the problems that the NBA has, and they've all been washed away. And so my grand unifying theory of how to fix our politics is the Democrats just need a win The Democrats just need a Wemby. I don't know who that is.

[B]

A Frenchman? A tall person.

[A]

Yeah. 7.7 alien who can just, you know, whose skills are such that it overcompensates for all the structural problems underneath.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. That would be great. I mean, look, was Obama a Wemby by this description?

[A]

We thought so. It turned out. No, actually, it turned out he was more like a Lebron, I guess that was great. But structural problems continued.

[B]

I see. I mean, I think the same way that Wemby doesn't fix the structural problems of the NBA, which is that the season's way too long and at least a third of the games don't matter and at least a third of the teams are going to want to tank anyway because they recognize that a good chance that a draft pick is worth more than the outcome to any particular March Tuesdays game. There's a bunch of structural problems that Wemby can't fix. In the same way that Wemby is an absolute gift to the NBA Finals, like what the Democratic Party needs is someone who transcends the problems of the party by becoming an individual, a personality that people believe in, even if they don't believe in a larger institution. Like, that's what Wemby is and that's what these Finals are. I mean, it's Gotham versus the Alien. It sounds like a comic book. It's perfect. It's the most exciting player in the NBA playing against the most sorry, yet storied franchise of the last three decades. It's absolutely perfect, as much as Blockbuster Gold is concerned. But it doesn't solve the other problems that this league has, which is that they're too greedy to ever shorten the regular season, but the length of the regular season is such that even the teams themselves don't care. I mean, Giannis Antetokounmpo, the third, fourth best player in the NBA, was begging his team to let him play and Asim was like, no, we're good, Giannis, we're good. Like you stay home, watch the NBA, catch up on Pluribus. We don't want your services. In what other sport is the team begging? The equivalent of like, Aaron Judge. No, no, no, please, please don't come back. Paul Skeens, please don't pitch for us. Like, there just aren't a lot of other scenarios where the regular season is so worthless that you have teams begging the third best player in the NBA to not play. So Wemby is awesome. This series is going to be awesome. I Couldn't be more excited about Gotham versus the Alien.

[A]

What does the Heart want?

[B]

The Heart won seven games and the Heart's going to figure out who I'm rooting for in the middle of the seventh game. I think on the seventh game. Does that make sense?

[A]

I'll know in the first quarter. I don't know.

[B]

Maybe the first quarter.

[A]

I think I want the season ready

[B]

for, but I don't know yet.

[A]

I think I want to the next. But I need to see the court. I need to see Dylan Harper come in. Because I love Dylan Harper. He's. He's my personal alien.

[B]

How fucking unfair is it that, like, in three consecutive seasons, the spurs draft Castle Wemby and Dylan Harper? I think it was three consecutive seasons. So basically it's like two extraordinary guards and the best maybe since healthy. It's crazy.

[A]

It's crazy. So we'll see. I think I'm going to be for the Knif, but I don't know Dylan Harper, really. What did Chris Matthews say about Obama? He sent a tingle up my leg. Dylan Harper sends a tingle up my leg. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. That's Derek Thompson. Go check out his substack or plain English. And we left a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor. So we'll see you again soon. All right, man.

[B]

All right. We'll see you next time.

[A]

All right. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for another edition of the show. See you all then.

[C]

Plus hide it. Ends meet we're serving rock on deserted blacks Trying to cause a frenzy to profit quickly I'm passing by my pockets empty Trying to make a legal dollar seem harder than God and wimpy when you're hardly six feet tall if somehow I cabal I better work hard on my handles Cause niggas gon try to rip me don't wanna rip but if I leave no guy to lift me I'd rather sit inside of Bentley and be.

[A]

The Bork podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.