Jonathan V. Last: Trump's Decadence Is Rubbing off on Americans

Summary

The Bulwark Podcast

Episode: Jonathan V. Last: Trump's Decadence Is Rubbing off on Americans
Date: February 23, 2026
Hosts: Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last (JVL)

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Overview

In this episode, Tim Miller welcomes Bulwark editor and Triad newsletter author Jonathan V. Last for a deep dive into the current political climate under President Trump. The conversation explores how Trump’s personalist, decadent approach to power is corroding American norms and expectations. Miller and Last discuss recent news on Trump’s rumored military ambitions, the U.S.-Israel relationship, the state of American aid and tariffs, the social and political meaning of U.S. hockey’s gold medal win—and darker realities on the ground in places like Minnesota. Along the way, they reflect on the collapse of traditional foreign policy, the atrophy of systemic guardrails, and the challenge of sustaining outrage in a fast-moving, scandal-saturated era.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. America's "Decadence" and Loss of Norms

• Trump’s behavior as the template: Tim and JVL agree that Trump’s personalism and disregard for institutional norms is reshaping what’s tolerated in public life, not just at the elite level but throughout society.

  “The just do stuff, as you say, that works for destroying things… You can tear apart. It doesn’t work for building things really.” —JVL (51:16)

2. The U.S. Hockey Team, the FBI, and Political Corruption

• Discussion kicks off with how the U.S. men’s hockey team celebrated its gold medal win in Milan, including letting controversial FBI director Kash Patel party with them.

  • JVL's frustration: He’s not just angry at the official, but at the players themselves for celebrating someone responsible for “preventing investigations into the murder of Renee Good and Alex Preddy.”

    “The embarrassment isn’t really for the FBI. It’s for the US Hockey team…They want to put their gold medal around the guy who won’t allow an investigation in the murder of two US citizens.” —JVL (06:19)

  • Tim identifies a dissenter: At least one unnamed, possibly “woke” player surreptitiously recorded and leaked embarrassing footage of Patel.

    "There is one woke player who is at least 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon away from ProPublica, which published the video." —Tim (05:40)

  • Broader problem: Politico Playbook and the general public largely shrug off this episode as harmless fun, which both hosts reject.

3. Trump’s War Talk on Iran

• Significant concern is devoted to Trump’s renewed saber-rattling about Iran, especially after he posted a video advocating for regime change.

  • Levin and regime change: Trump amplifies a Fox News segment (Mark Levin: “That regime needs to be eliminated to save our children and grandchildren...”) (13:09), signaling openness to large-scale military action.

  • Dissecting motives: Several competing theories are discussed:

    • Wag-the-dog distraction
    • Netanyahu leading Trump
    • Internal administration hawks
    • Trump’s ego

    Ultimately, both agree Israel’s influence and Trump’s need for dominance are likely motivators.

    “It’s much better national interest for us to be, you know, good, good relations with Denmark and Germany, but we’re not. We’re in deals with Slovakia and Hungary instead.” —Tim (26:55)

    "I think the Netanyahu answer is probably most likely." —JVL (20:36)

  • Host skepticism: Miller admits, “I don’t actually understand what they’re doing,” emphasizing how unpredictable and personally driven Trump’s decisions are. (19:02)

4. U.S.-Israel Relations and the Left’s Dilemma

• JVL’s “Innovation” theory on foreign policy: Under Trump, alliances are transactional—countries aligned with Trump personally get policy favors, not necessarily those aligned with American interests.

  "A Government, which is nice to Trump... gets American foreign policy on its side regardless of whether or not it's in America's interests. Right. It's like the opposite of America first. It's not. It's just Trump first." —JVL (26:35)

• Implications for Democrats: They debate whether Democrats should overtly distance themselves from Netanyahu’s government, or even threaten to cut off aid to regimes that undermine U.S. democracy.

  “Shouldn’t Democrats take that approach to Israel and the Netanyahu regime?... America will go back to being allies with Israel when the government of Israel no longer attempts to curry favor with the authoritarian attempt that was ongoing in America?” —JVL (29:35)

• Strategic pause: Both agree that at minimum, reducing aid (as Ben Shapiro suggested years ago) is a politically safe place for Democrats to land.

5. Collapse of American Foreign Aid—and the Political Motivations Behind It

• Aid cuts: Internal emails reveal Trump’s plan to eliminate all humanitarian funding in 16 countries (37:00).

• Contradictory logic: JVL points out the contradiction between Trump’s hard line on immigration and simultaneously cutting the very aid that could stabilize troubled regions.

  “It is interesting that the American foreign policy now is both we don’t want any Somali immigrants to America, and also we don’t want to help make things better for Somalis in Somalia. Right. Those things would seem to be in tension.” —JVL (38:14)

• Racism and decadence: Foreign aid’s unpopularity is tied both to racist attitudes and a sense of national decadence.

  “I just don’t see any other way to see this except that it’s racism. Is that too reductive?” —JVL (40:58)

6. Tariff Chaos and Economic Sclerosis

• Constant change: Trump unilaterally raises global tariffs from 10% to 15% days after the Supreme Court overturns his previous tariffs (45:19).

• Business uncertainty: This “freezes economic activity,” with both foreign governments and U.S. businesses unable to plan.

  “It really freezes economic activity for at least 150 days. And 150 days from now, we will be awfully close to the midterm elections…You can’t make plans.” —JVL (46:46)

• Systemic failure: The hosts reflect on the breakdown of legislative guardrails and the rise of 'just do it' executive governance.

  “You can just go do the things you want and who’s going to stop you?” —JVL (48:33)

7. AI: Disdain for Humanity?

• Sam Altman’s energy comparison: JVL reacts with disgust to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s response that training a human (via food and 20 years) is less efficient than training an AI, showing a “Matrix-style” disregard for human life.

  “This is a guy who watched the Matrix and thought Neo was the bad guy.” —JVL (55:26)

• Political opportunity: Both agree that a smart Democrat could rally support by demonizing AI companies: “We're going to make these fuckers work for us.” —JVL (60:01)

8. Minnesota’s New Reality: Occupation and Ethnic Cleansing

• Human rights crisis: JVL recounts visiting Minnesota and learning about underground home births—organized by doulas—because pregnant women fear abduction by government agents at hospitals.

  “The hospitals are basically honey traps that DHS agents stake out… people have to give birth in their homes in secret because if they were to go to a hospital to have their baby, masked agents of the state would abduct them.” —JVL (61:37)

• Dark analogy: JVL directly likens the situation to “Anne Frank territory” and ethnic cleansing, starkly insisting this is not a hyperbolic future scenario but current reality.

  “It is white nationalism. It is ethnic cleansing, and it's happening.” —JVL (64:02)

• Media challenges: The national media, overwhelmed by Trump’s ceaseless controversies, has limited bandwidth to cover these abuses, putting the burden on citizens to sustain attention.

  “The president is trying to go to war against Iran. He is going to give a State of the Union address. He is changing tariffs by the day. Just physically, you cannot keep up with all this stuff and also keep covering what is going on in Minnesota.” —JVL (65:06)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The embarrassment isn't really for the FBI. It's for the US Hockey team… fuck these guys.” —JVL on US Hockey Team (06:16)
• “A Government, which is nice to Trump… gets American foreign policy on its side regardless of whether or not it's in America's interests.” —JVL on Trump’s foreign policy (26:35)
• “It is interesting that the American foreign policy now is both we don’t want any Somali immigrants to America, and also we don’t want to help make things better for Somalis in Somalia.” —JVL (38:14)
• “This is a guy who watched the Matrix and thought Neo was the bad guy.” —JVL on Sam Altman (55:26)
• “It is white nationalism. It is ethnic cleansing, and it's happening.” —JVL on Minnesota immigration raids (64:02)
• “The president is trying to go to war against Iran... you cannot keep up with all this stuff and also keep covering what is going on in Minnesota.” —JVL (65:06)
• “We're going to make these fuckers work for us.” —JVL, re: AI and policy (60:01)
• “He can make any news he wants. He could call AOC a man.” —Tim, on Trump’s ability to distract (21:00)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• U.S. Hockey/Patel discussion: 03:35–08:10
• Iran/war talk and regime change: 12:58–19:46
• U.S.-Israel policy and Democratic responses: 24:16–33:48
• American foreign aid, racism, decadence: 36:59–41:56
• Tariffs and breakdown of legislative/state guardrails: 44:16–51:46
• Sam Altman/AI discussion: 54:06–60:18
• Minnesota update and reflections on activism: 61:21–68:53

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Tone & Language

• Candid, often profane: JVL is especially blunt (“Fuck these guys”) and unsparing in his criticism of both Trump’s administration and those who enable or ignore systemic abuses.
• Dark humor and bleak realism permeate the episode, offset by moments of hope around small-scale activism and the need for ongoing vigilance.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a sweeping indictment of American “decadence” under Trump—from trivializing corruption, disintegrating policy norms, and transactional foreign alliances, to the dire consequences for human rights and democracy at home. JVL and Tim Miller move swiftly across global and local topics, always tying them back to the underlying theme of institutional decay and the challenge of maintaining a functioning civic conscience in the face of relentless disruption. The call to keep “yowping”—refusing to normalize abuses—resonates as both a diagnosis and an imperative for listeners.

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For full episodes and further analysis, see The Bulwark Podcast feed and the Triad newsletter.

Transcript

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[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, but Phil, Crystal and I couldn't work out the schedules. So what we did instead was I did a Sunday conversation with him, which you can get over on the Bulwark Takes audio feed or substack or YouTube. And today we got a special sub, a very special sub. It's my next level podcast co host. He's the author of the Triad newsletter, which if you aren't reading, I don't know what you're doing. He's also an editor at the Bulwark. It's Jonathan V. Last or jvl. What's up, buddy?

[Jonathan V. Last]

I'll try to make everybody feel a little more comfortable. All right, so Tim made me think about Bella Abzug. I remember being in dinner with her back and it was, I don't know, maybe it was 72. But you know, it's. It's funny. She was actually closer with. With Bill Buckley than you would have imagined. And, you know, it just shows that things used to be once upon a time back there in America.

[Tim Miller]

That was great for like 11 of us. That was really wonderful. We are back, me and jbl. I still have my cold. We're back from Minnesota. You know, my Lebanese ancestry, my Louisiana residents, I was not built for that. So I still have a cold, but I'm doing okay. We're going to save some time at the end because JBL's newsletter from over the weekend on Minnesota was really powerful and what we learned there. So I want to chew over that on the end. But we have some news first. Obviously, the big news is the Dutch have finally installed Rob Jeddon as Prime Minister. He's the first of many gay, millennial, neoliberal world leaders that we'll have. Everything will be well, once every country has a gay. The Dutch.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Jared Polis.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, he's kind of like the Netherlands. Jared Polis. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Is that a good thing for me?

[Tim Miller]

For me it is, yeah. I mean, you know, nobody's perfect. Jvl. Okay, yeah, sure. Nobody's perfect. But, you know, given the options on the table, it's not bad.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Fair.

[Tim Miller]

But I want to really start in Milan. We have the ecstasy and the ignominy.

[Jonathan V. Last]

How do you fucking say that word? Ignominy.

[Tim Miller]

Ignominy. The ecstasy and the ignominy of being an American. Watching U.S. hockey defeat Snow Mexico for gold in overtime. Just a beautiful victory. Jack Hughes and his handsome brother missing a tooth. I didn't get to watch it because I was live with Bill, but I watched the whole thing late last night on replay. It was wonderful. But then we had to suffer the embarrassment of the head of the FBI in the locker room pouring beer down his throat and being a make a wish kid. I was just wondering what you thought about the whole scene.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I mean, the embarrassment isn't really for the FBI. It's for the US Hockey team. I mean, they didn't just tolerate Kash Patel being there. They. One of them put their gold medals around his neck and they were treating him like the king of the world. He isn't the Secretary of the Interior. He isn't the Secretary of Energy or Labor. Right.

[Tim Miller]

He.

[Jonathan V. Last]

He runs the FBI, which has prevented investigations into the murder of Renee Good and Alex Preddy. That is the most notable thing that Kash Patel has done over the last six weeks. And the members of the USA Hockey team fucking love him.

[Tim Miller]

Well, great. I love that we have a disagreement right off the top because there's at least one woke hockey player and we may never know his name. We may never know who this great hero is. But initially, the only thing that we had seen, the only video we had seen of Cash was like, on one of the live Instagrams where he was embarrassing himself. You know, it was humiliating and shameful that the FBI director was there in the locker room, given all the news, which I want to get to. But we see the second angle of him shotgunning the beer, and it can only come from a player or a player's girlfriend. The phone is right there. And so there is one woke player who is at least 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon away from ProPublica, which published the video. So we have one woke dissident. Are you not happy about that? Can you not find some joy in that?

[Jonathan V. Last]

I mean, that's nice, I guess. That's nice, I guess. But it does show you that the hockey team itself. I mean, again, I just. I feel like a crazy person because none of this matters. It doesn't matter at all. And yet I found myself thinking, fuck these guys.

[Tim Miller]

Honestly, I love having JBL on.

[Jonathan V. Last]

They want to put their gold medal around the guy who won't allow an investment investigation in the murder of two US Citizens. Again, this is not. He is not a low level functionary. He is not running the usda. Right. He's not. He's not part of some meaningless part of the government where you're just like, oh, come on. Just because he's appointed by Trump, you're going to say that he's a bad person? Like, no, he. He is actively doing terrible things about the murder of Americans.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And they just think he's the greatest.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Just a bro. Just a bro. Fuck you guys.

[Tim Miller]

I feel like Sarah on the secret podcast right now. I thought, you know, I thought I'd bring up an easy content topic to start the show. We had make fun of Make a wish Cash. We'd attack him. We'd attack Politico Playbook, who wrote this morning that this was their assessment a little different from what you're getting here on the board podcast. And frankly, such as the national euphoria, a Team USA stunning double hockey golds that it's hard to imagine much serious public backlash to Cash in the locker room. Glorify backlash. I thought we.

[Jonathan V. Last]

It's to the. It's to the players.

[Tim Miller]

I thought we'd make fun of, you know, Cash and the media, but no. JBL is like, I'm going to do the harder thing. I'm going to do the more challenging thing. Also be mad at the players. Also be mad at the players. That's fine.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I'm more mad at the players.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, great.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Cash Patel is what he is.

[Tim Miller]

I can only be mad at who he is.

[Jonathan V. Last]

He is what he is.

[Tim Miller]

He is. Well, he's the director of the FBI.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Fair enough.

[Tim Miller]

You know, I can't pretend like I'm mad.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Fair enough.

[Tim Miller]

I'm not mad at. Fair enough.

[Jonathan V. Last]

But also, you know who else I'm mad at?

[Tim Miller]

Please.

[Jonathan V. Last]

People like Politico Playbook saying, like, the national euphoria over. I am sorry. This is hockey you're talking about. Hockey.

[Tim Miller]

He's a limey fuck from Britain. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't know anything.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Ten weeks from now, nobody will remember that this happened because it's Jack Hughes.

[Tim Miller]

Hockey. It'll be interesting to see Jack Hughes's name ID in 10 weeks from now. Not that great. Beautiful goal, by the way. We love and honor Jack Hughes. Here's just a couple other things for Cash because I think it'll get us into the dish. There's stuff happening in the world again I don't begrudge anybody. I like to have a good time. I can't shotgun a beer. I'm not good at shotgunning beers. But, you know, in theory, I would like to be in the locker room with the Nuggets after they win the championship this year shotgunning a beer. My job is podcast host. That was Cash's old job. You know, if in five years Gavin Newsom wants to make me head of the FBI, I think I would recognize I can't be shotgunning beers with Nikola Jokic when he wins his fourth NBA title. You know, even though I'd want to, cuz there's other things on the table. Here are things happening. Sunday. As Cash was partying in the locker room, Trump's discussing preparations for a potential attack on Iran. Now you might think, well, it's not really in the FBI's purview, but you think that decision could lead to threats on the homeland. There might be Iranian dissidents or other Islamists.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Counterterrorism is the remand of the FBI, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

It would be so you would think that that would be something. Nancy Guthrie is still not found. FBI. Pretty big job for the FBI finding Nancy Guthrie who's been kidnapped.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Well, Tim, in fairness to Kash Patel, the parents of her abductor have not turned him in yet. And so what is the FBI supposed to do? That's the way the FBI solves crimes these days, is they gotta wait for the parents of the perps to put a phone Call in saying, oh, I think my kid did this. That's how they solved it. So he's just waiting for the parents of whoever it was who abducted Nancy Guthrie to come to their senses and make a good choice. That's all the FBI can do in such situations.

[Tim Miller]

Timothy, I think it's probably not a Mormon, actually. This is the problem with the Mormons have high social cohesion, you know, and so the Mormon boys parents obviously had to jump in. We also have Americans in Mexico are sheltering in place because a drug cartel, top leader of a drug cartel, has been killed by the country's military. Things are, things are insane right now if you're at the Hilton in Puerto Vallarta. And again, some potential remit there for the FBI. The Secret Service said law enforcement officers had to kill a would be intruder at Mar A Lago. You'd think FBI would be involved in that, you know, identifying the perp, subsequent investigation. We should just say this guy was a Trump supporter who was unhappy with the Epstein files. Just throwing that out there as well as what we know initially. Obviously more investigation needs to be done. Not by the head of the FBI because he's hungover in Milan, but, you know, but we'll have to wait for more info. I'm sure there are other things out there we don't know about.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Could he get ahead of this sort of threat by maybe working on the Epstein files themselves? And maybe, I mean, because it could be there are some criminal indictments to be made or at least investigations of other people in the Epstein files who are obviously co conspirators. It does seem again, Latvia is able to launch some criminal investigations against people. Prince Andrew has been locked up in the Tower of London like other countries have done this, but it's Cash who hasn't been able to get it done. It's very strange also, correct me if I'm wrong, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Didn't somebody in the administration initially try to pretend that Cash wasn't over there?

[Tim Miller]

Not pretend. That's not quite right. The spokesman, Ben Williamson, who's a longtime MAGA hack. He is now. Yeah, Cash is whatever PR guy and I believe it was Ken Delaney and over at Ms. Now who reported first that Cash was going to go over there for the hockey game. He wanted to go there with the hockey game. And Williamson indignantly posts about how, no, no, no, no, no. He has real business over there. There are security meetings he has to do, you know, there's, there's a lot worth looking at their threats, you know, and he's gathering of this nature.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Right.

[Tim Miller]

So they didn't deny that he's going to be there, but they, they said that it was not actually because he wanted to bro out with the hockey guys, but he had very serious meetings. And then the video of him shotgunning the beer emerges and it's kind of like oopsie doopsy on that.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I mean, oops. Yeah, right. Where does, where does Ms. Now go to get their apology? Is anybody going to ask the fast about this?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, they asked, they asked, they, you know, whatever. I forget exactly what they said. Excuse Cash for love in America. I think was the sounds, right? Yeah, it was basically the spin there. So that's what we got with Cash. Let's go through some of the things that we mentioned that he was, you know, abdicating while he was throwing down in the locker room. I guess we should start with the Iran war because it seems like that is happening imminently. Here's one little piece of evidence we have for it. Trump was up late last night, bleeding as usual. There was one particular bleed I found interesting. It was a video of Life Liberty. And Levin and I want to play a little bit of that for.

[Jonathan V. Last]

You need to comprehend what we're dealing with. That regime needs to be eliminated. To save our children and grandchildren from having to deal with it.

[Tim Miller]

That regime needs to be eliminated. There's Mark Levin, not very popular on the nat con. Right. I will say maybe enemy number one. You can know that because it's like voice. He's a late night Fox News show on the weekends now. I don't know. I mean, you know, Kremlin ology here. It seems like if the President of the United States is posting videos of, of, you know, his favorite news anchors talking about regime change, it kind of seems like that's where his head's at to me.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Well, it, it seems like he's trying to warn off some of MAGA who is not happy about the prospect of. Right. And so he's, you know, because the way things work is everybody gets right with the policy once Trump does the policy. And so what he, his role is here is to make clear to people what he wants to do. Right. And so this way he can try to make people like Tucker and others who might be skeptical about attacking Iran try to get them to get their religion now because he knows that once, you know, once he drops bombs, they'll, they'll get onside less or more or they'll go quiet one or the other.

[Tim Miller]

Do you think that's going to Work in this one.

[Jonathan V. Last]

It depends. You can envision ways in which things go really pear shaped. And some of the more Israeli skeptic members of the Maga, right, decide like f this, like, I'm just going to say this is bad, but have to go pretty pear shaped, I think, you know, like, it would have to involve like the deaths of Americans and they'd have to be like combat deaths. They couldn't be. Iran launches a retaliatory strike in Qatar and somebody's killed on a base in Qatar. That would not be enough. I think they, they could, that wouldn't be enough.

[Tim Miller]

You don't.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I think they could stomach that. They could just be like, well, it wasn't really a combat death. I mean, he didn't put boots on the ground in Iran and they could talk themselves out of it. I mean, this is the question, right? Is Trump committed to going forward? We have three other data points in his attempts to saber rattle, right. We have Greenland, Iran won, and Venezuela. The difference between the two in which he went forward with his promised military action was that he moved assets to the area beforehand. He didn't move any assets to the North Sea. Right. He didn't put a carrier group off the coast of Greenland when he was pretending like he was going to invade it. In the case of Venezuela and the first Iran strike, he put a bunch of assets there. That costs a lot of money. It takes time. Once you go to that trouble, I feel like from his perspective, not going through with it feels like backing down. Yeah, I think he probably feels like he has to do it. I, I was pretty convinced you talked about this with Michael Weiss on Friday, the Financial Times, sort of criminology of the Iranian mullahs and like what their thinking is, I found that reasonably compelling actually, that they think that their position will be stronger after a kinetic conflict than it is now. But the other thing that that is suggests that he is interested in going forward is that he's already having members of his regime admit that Iranian nuclear program. And this is 30 weeks after declaring that the Iranian nuclear program was completely and totally obliterated. That was, that was the phrase.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, Witkoff, Steve Wyckoff, his buddy, the outer Borough real estate guy who's the point person for all negotiations, says Iran's a week away from having a bomb, which is pretty shocking.

[Jonathan V. Last]

A week away from having. You know, I remember some of us saying about the strike like, okay, well, it seems to have set the nuclear program back and if there wasn't significant blowback from it, then like that's basically okay, that's not a terrible outcome. But we shouldn't pretend that the nuclear program is gone, because that's not true. And the. The government lying to us about this is itself very concerning. And I remember getting my knuckles wrapped by. By some anti. Antis. But now. What are you talking about? It's gone. They've been set back years up, years upon years. It'd be decades before. Yeah, okay, well, 30 weeks. We are 30 weeks out and they are evidently fully reconstituted now, just a week away.

[Tim Miller]

I think I want to call it commaneology instead of criminology. That's nice.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Can I ask one other question of you though, Tim, please? What do you think the Levin broadside on this means? And when he says, I forget what he said. The exact construct, was it leadership or regime? That he said needs to go, let's

[Tim Miller]

just listen to it one more time. Let's just listen to it one more time.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Need to comprehend what we're dealing with. That regime needs to be eliminated to save our children and grandchildren from having to deal with it.

[Tim Miller]

Regime needs to be eliminated.

[Jonathan V. Last]

So the regime needs to be eliminated. And I mean, there are three options, right? The first option is a limited strike in which Trump then says again, hey, we totally destroyed it for real this time. Now it's really double. Completely obliterated.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, right.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Another is decapitation, where you eliminate like the, the top five, right. And you put your own Delsey Rodriguez in. And the third is a regime change. Regime change suggests something much broader than decapitation. Like, it isn't enough to say that, like, we're going to swap out the mullahs for the irgc. We are, we are getting an entirely new governing construct. And it is interesting that Trump chose the Levin quote, which is about regime change, but of course that's probably giving Trump too much credit. He just thinks like, oh, I gotta find somebody on our side who is in favor of this and I'll, I'll puff them up, but I don't know. What do you think is the most likely thing here?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I assume they're thinking about number two. I assume they're thinking about number just based on Venezuela. Just, you know, past performance is the best predictor of future results. But this is not what you're supposed to say as a content creator. But I don't actually understand what they're doing. I truly don't. I mean, like, there are some theories that people would throw out though. The Epstein theory. Oh, he's doing anything. It's a wagging the dog. Anything to distract from domestic problems. Okay, I guess. I don't know. Trump's really good at distractions, though. I feel like he could come up with other ones. Besides war with Iran, there's Israel theory. Like, BB's just dog walking them. Just like putting them on a leash and walking around the neighborhood.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yep.

[Tim Miller]

That seems like the most coherent of the various theories.

[Jonathan V. Last]

That's.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, there is. Like, what? That there's some people inside the administration that really want this. Like, Pete Hegseth is chomping at the bit for a war. I just don't think Trump listens to any of those people, really. Except Marco, maybe. But Mark, I think Marco is pretty focused on Cuba and decapitated Cuba. Right. So, like, I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. Israel pushing him into this is the theory that makes the most sense. Or also, like, maybe it's just machismo and Trump is just like, the Ayatollah won't do what I say, and so I have to bomb him. It's a little confusing because if he had a mandate for anything, it was basically the deportations and not going in Middle east wars. Like, those were the two things that his base was most excited about. So, like, what's he doing?

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah, I think the Netanyahu answer is probably most likely. I mean, honestly, if Trump needed distractions, he just pick a fight with, like, the US Women's hockey team. Right? Right. Like that. You could do that this week. It would get even more clock cycles than, you know. You just call them a bunch of woke. I don't know, call them trans or something. Woke. Trans something or another. Right. And that would be fine.

[Tim Miller]

And he's got a State of the union tomorrow. And, like, he could put anything insane.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Right? He can make. He can make any news he wants. Right? He could. He could call AOC a man.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, right.

[Jonathan V. Last]

We'll see whether or not it's real. I mean, the New York Times reporting today that he is eyeing an initial large strike. But then, like, being part of a partnership with Israel, that is a much larger force. That's interesting. I'd like to see it.

[Tim Miller]

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[Jonathan V. Last]

Can we talk about this under secret podcast rules? Sure.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, I can't help if somebody clips it, but yeah, sure.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I don't mean that. I just mean for the listeners. So what I mean is, for people who don't listen to the secret show, first of all, shame on you. But secondly, the rules Sarah and I operate on under the secret show is we have discussions about things we are not sure about and we will often say, like, what about this? Does this sound like a good idea? Does this make sense? And then we'll kick it around for 40 minutes and either not come to a conclusion or two weeks later we'll be like, yeah, actually that was wrong. You know, I'm working through ideas with you here, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, please, let's do it.

[Jonathan V. Last]

So Donald Trump has. Has created a real innovation in American statecraft. Prior to Donald Trump, the. The way American foreign policy worked was that America has national interests, and these national state interests governed our foreign policy. And so that would mean Israel was our ally, not because we liked Israel, but because Israel was a key country in the Middle East. The Middle east was an important region of the world. We had leverage over Israel. And yes, there's moral component to it, et cetera, et cetera.

[Tim Miller]

Sure.

[Jonathan V. Last]

But, you know, this is. It's all about state interest, and it was important for America.

[Tim Miller]

There was also some of the more abstractions, as Marco calls them, just, you know, form of government.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Right. And those are the nice things we tell ourselves about America. Right.

[Tim Miller]

But that was part of it, though. It was not zero percent of it.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Not zero percent. But again, again, history of foreign policy is that the determinant things are really about interests. And you know, you can overlook dealing with not nice governments like the Saudi government, because national interests dictate it. Right. You got to do business with bad people because this is what the country needs. Trump has inverted that. American foreign policy under Trump starts with the president's political interests and then conforms the national interests to those political and

[Tim Miller]

financial interests, we should say.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Correct, correct. Sorry, sorry. And so a Government, which is nice to Trump, like Bukele in El Salvador, gets American foreign policy on its side regardless of whether or not it's in America's interests. Right. It's like the opposite of America first. It's not. It's just Trump first.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, Hungary and Marco's trip to Hungary and Slovakia is the prime example of this. Right? Like, yeah, I mean, like, it's much better national interest for us to be, you know, good, good relations with Denmark and Germany, but we're not. We're in deals with Slovakia and Hungary instead.

[Jonathan V. Last]

So Trump has done something similar with Israel, or rather Israel has done something similar with Trump. Israeli foreign policy for the last eight years now has really operated in a way in which they took for granted that a Democratic president would honor the American Israel alliance because it works in America's national interests, but that they would have to politically be useful to Trump in order to secure Trump's help. And what that did was especially after the October 7 attacks, when Joe Biden was trying very hard to hug Bibi Netanyahu and help Israel however he could. At the end of the day, they thought they would do better under Trump and that Trump would be more useful to them. And so they undercut Biden and the government of Israel played favorites. It was in favor of the Republican Party. And it, I don't want to say it meddled in the election because Biden

[Tim Miller]

was frankly more favorable to them than a lot of even past Republicans were. I mean, Biden did more of what they wanted than Reagan did.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And I'm not saying they meddled in the election, but that Israeli policy was geared towards. Sure, we would like to make things difficult for Biden and put the Democrats in a difficult position because we would rather the Republicans win the presidential election. And I think that Democrats need to establish some deterrence going forward and to assure for the long term good of America, assure regimes that have done that sort of calculus, that they don't get to have it both ways. They don't get to assume that a Democratic president will be favorable to them and so undercut Democrats and try to help the authoritarians who are trying to do away with liberal democracy in America. And so, for instance, I have long thought that a Democratic president ought to make an example of Bukele and ought to come to power and say, you and El Salvador, we are going to do everything we can to make your life hard until this guy is gone. Again, just talking out loud, Tim is not advocating. I'm just asking just from a game theory Perspective. Shouldn't Democrats take that approach to Israel and the Netanyahu regime? Not that they're hostile to Israel, but they're hostile to the Netanyahu regime and say that America will go back to being allies with Israel when the government of Israel no longer attempts to curry favor with the authoritarian attempt that was ongoing in America?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a way to frame that same position up that's not just about, like, sticks for a bad prime minister, though, as satisfying as that might be, because Bibi has been a horrible prime minister. But look, just going back to your original frame, there's a lot of warning of Israel about this, about, like, the behavior after October 7th. Obviously, they're ready to defend themselves, but the scale of it and how that was turning off the world community. And they made a decision which maybe was a rational decision. I mean, I'm about to do David Frum's podcast. David Frum would say this was a rational decision for their own security, which is to say, I don't care about what the world thinks. We need to protect ourselves from these threats. Maybe that was a rational decision, but there were a lot of efforts during that period to say, hey, if you keep going in this way, you're going to ostracize the world and alienate the world. And you combine that with this Tucker interview with Huckabee, where I thought that the most news were the answer of it, and the most interesting answer was where Tucker is talking about, okay, well, if Israel has a biblical right to this land, why don't they have a biblical right from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is kind of like version of from the river to the Sea, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Right. And Huckabee's like, that would be fine if they did. And now that's not US Policy stated. But my understanding, talking to my friends who have done work over there is like that. That clip is everywhere. The Middle east now. So, anyway, my point is just simply that as long as Bibi is in there, saber rattling, I don't see us in the national interest. And then from a political standpoint, just circling back to the original question for the Democrats, to me, I think my secret podcast, we're thinking this through position on this is I was watching an old Ben Shapiro interview from, like, 10 years ago where he was doing this from a fiscal conservative standpoint and from like, an Israeli protection standpoint. And he, you know, as being a pro Israel guy, and he said, basically, I think the US should. Israel needs to be independent of the US like not, not allies, but like financially independent. Like the US should stop giving aid to Israel.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Right?

[Tim Miller]

Because he saw, I guess, give him one cheer for Ben Shapiro. He saw this coming, right, which was like, that there would end up being resentments and, you know, that would fray the alliance. And it's like, what? And Israel has enough resources and they shouldn't require this now. They're complicated things about what type of aid we give and all that. But like, I just think that to me, like, that's a safe, democratic space, is to just fall back on that and, and talk about the way that Bibi has, you know, frayed the alliance and say, look, you know, this is not about trying to turn Israel into South Africa or whatever. This is about saying Israel's got to stand on its own from an aid perspective. If they're going to, you know, prosecute wars in the manner in which they're prosecuting them.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I mean, that's America's position with NATO. Like, if it's okay to take that position with NATO, that is currently the American policy towards NATO. I want to sort of try to insulate myself a little bit. Somebody, somebody in the comments from the live show where, you know, I said something like this, said, oh, so you know, Israel isn't a perfect democracy, but, you know, jbl, you're sounding like you hate Israel. You know, isn't America imperfect too? And my response to that is, yes, I actually feel very similar to Israel and the Israeli people as I do towards America and the American people in this moment, in that the American people have chosen an illiberal anti democratic regime. And until the American people rectify that mistake, America is just doing bad things all the world over. And I really hope that, for instance, the Europeans and the Canadians resist us and are able to establish global security without us.

[Tim Miller]

And by the way, if I was a podcaster, you know, I don't know,

[Jonathan V. Last]

like, same thing, right?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, if I was a podcaster in Canada, I'd be like, yeah, I don't think Mark Carney should be giving military assistance to the Donald Trump regime. Like, that would be my position. Not that they are, that we need it, but to play out that counterfactual,

[Jonathan V. Last]

like, I don't know, like the, the Netanyahu regime has been, I don't want to call it a criminal regime because I'm not, not great. But from the perspective of American democracy, the Netanyahu regime has been firmly on the side of Donald Trump against. And again, this is this is historically bonkers because the way historically foreign policy works is you with your allies always take pains to make sure that you have deep ties to both sides of the aisle because you recognize that the other side will have power at some point and so you want to be on good relations with them and you don't take sides between the parties. You don't do things to try to make one party's life difficult and the others. Right. This is again, this is just Foreign Policy 101 all the way up through 2020 and that is not how they have conducted their foreign policy in Israel

[Tim Miller]

Behave in the comments of this jbl what are your comment rules on the triad? What does comments have to be so

[Jonathan V. Last]

they should be kind, necessary or true at least two of those three things. And hopefully all three. Right. The best comments are kind, necessary and true. But every comment should be at least two of those things.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I take necessary feedback on this. It's complicated. Not ad hominem. All right. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Vulnerable. Deleteme does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. Delete Me knows your privacy is worth protecting. Sign up and provide them with exactly what information you want deleted and their experts take it from there. They send you regular personalized privacy reports showing the info they found, where they found it and what they removed. It's not just a one time service, it's always working for you. Monitoring and removing personal information you don't want online. That mentioned this before is something that I just have to care about more now. We got email bombed the other day. My husband's a little worried about the various stuff we have online. So it's been wonderful to have Delete Me something that I can turn to constantly check in on it and make sure that we're doing the best we can to get stuff off the Internet that shouldn't be there. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your delete me plan. You go to JoinDeleteMe.com bulwark and use promo code Bulwark at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com bulwark code bulwark. Speaking of the bad things the United States is doing in the world and why people shouldn't give us aid, the Atlantic has a new item on the next step of the dismantling of our foreign aid. So there were some groups you might remember. So USAID gets shuttered, basically, and there's outrage over various things. And it's the way Trump administration works, you know, like a third world banana republic. You know, a few programs got saved here and there because, you know, either there was a bad news story that freaked them out about it, or there's a friend, Trump has a buddy that's on the board of it or whatever.

[Jonathan V. Last]

There was a megachurch.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

There was a mega church somewhere. There was a Texas megachurch that gave, you know, was working with some aid program, and they freaked out. And so they were able to get. Right. Yeah, that's how it is.

[Tim Miller]

Those programs that survived, they're on the chopping block now. Slated for cancellation. Internal State Department email obtained by the Atlantic said the administration will end all humanitarian funding it's currently providing as part of a responsible exit from 16 countries. I'm not going to go through all of them, but just here's one example. We can eliminate all aid to Somalia. For example, hundreds of health and nutrition centers were already shut down last year, according to Doctors Without Borders. In one regional hospital. Just to give an anecdote, Doctors Without Borders reports that deaths among malnourished children younger than 5 increased 44%. Some of those hospitals were still getting aid, and then that aid is set to be cut. So there we go.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah, two things here. I mean, so you had two things happening when USAID was fed into the wood chopper. You had half of the Trump administration saying, yes, we did it. We killed the whole thing. And then you had other people like Marco Rub, Rubio saying, nothing has changed. All we've done is shifted it in more responsible ways. Do you remember this?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

All the critical aid is still happening. That was just waste, fraud, and abuse. Right. And now we have, you know, you wait one year and then you're like, see, we can get rid of even this other stuff that we said we. We had saved. It is interesting that the American foreign policy now is both we don't want any Somali immigrants to America, and also we don't want to help make things better for Somalis in Somalia. Right. Those things would seem to be in tension. Right. If you, you know, if you are interested in controlling immigration flows, one way to do that is to help the. On the Ground situation in the sending countries so that people don't feel like they need to leave. Yeah, Just saying. There was a thing, one of the YouGov polls recently, I did a triad about this where Americans were being asked what need to spend money on? And a large plurality said, oh, the country should be spending a lot less money. You know, we. We just spend too much money in this government. We got to cut spending. And then it asked people, just individual programs, should we spend a little bit more? A lot more. A little bit less. A lot less. And on defense and Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, large pluralities or majorities saying lots more. Need to spend lots more on these things. The only line item they tested that people said we need to spend two, actually. Was there a second one? What was the second one? Yeah, I don't.

[Tim Miller]

Second one was ice. Oh, ice. Shows you how. It shows you how, you know.

[Jonathan V. Last]

But it was foreign.

[Tim Miller]

Sometimes reality can break through to the Volk. Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And foreign aid is like 1%, I think, 1 1/2% of total spending. Like, it's a very, very small part of government spending. And it is a place where you just get enormous roi, because again, nations have interests. When you spend foreign aid, you're not just like, helping people on the ground. You are also establishing dependencies from other governments on ours. You are spreading influence and our ability to influence, influence events on the ground elsewhere. It is part of our intelligence network. I regret to inform you that not every worker in there doesn't work for the CIA. Right. I mean, it's part of our intelligence gathering apparatus. And to be able to accomplish all of that in the way that we do. And also, it holds our adversaries at bay. It prevents China, for instance, from spreading their influence across the globe. And so it is a bargain at thrice the price. And we're just not going to do that because it goes to black people, right?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I mean, I just don't see any other way to see this except that it's racism. Is that too reductive?

[Tim Miller]

No, but it's. And it's also part of this. There is a nationalist fervor. Look, I understand the argument that, like, we should take care of ours. Like, there are elements of the America first part that I get. You know, I was ranting over the weekend about the, you know, this stupid thing where Jeff Landry, my governor, is like, we're gonna. We're sending this ship to Greenland, you know, it's a health ship to green Finland. And I'm like, wait a minute. We have terrible health outcomes in Louisiana,

[Jonathan V. Last]

one of the worst in the country.

[Tim Miller]

That is a take care of our people first mindset that I think would resonate across left and right. Right. And so I do think that there's some element of that, like, that is something that resonates. It is up to responsible leaders to make the case to people that you just made that. It's like, okay, hey, there's some benefits to this. It's a tiny part of the budget, but we do have fiscal problems. This isn't going to help it. We got to find other ways to whatever, either grow GDP or cut or tax people more, which are less popular. So we're just not really in a moment where a lot of people want to do the hard thing. So I think that there's a racism element to it, but there's also a decadence. So that should appeal to you.

[Jonathan V. Last]

You know what? You got me. I'll go with that. See the secret podcast rules. I've changed my view right here.

[Tim Miller]

Great. I love that.

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[Tim Miller]

Other ways in which we are harming our what should be relationships that are in our national interests, that serve our people, that benefit everybody, that lift all boats is the tariff conversation. We talked about this a little bit with Michael Weiss on Friday because right as we were taping, the Supreme Court overturned the tariffs. There's been a bunch of fallout since then. Hours after the court decision, Trump announced a new global tariff rate of 10%. He had a big temper tantrum at the press conference. Me and Sonny Bunch did a really, I think, funny kind of video over the weekend that just judged his performance. Kind of like using WWE and movie aesthetic rules. He had a very temper tantrum. The lighting was interesting. Anyway, he has this temper tantrum. He announces 10% global tariff rate. This was invoked using a never before used authority that's under some 1974, right?

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah. It's for 150 days, right?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. You get 150 days on Saturday, he reconsidered that and he said, you know what, we went back.

[Jonathan V. Last]

So you just went by 1%, no, 5%.

[Tim Miller]

We went back and looked at the. We blew the dust off the Trade act of 1974 and looked through it and we're like, you know what, we can do 15, so let's just go ahead and do 15. 15 is the maximum.

[Jonathan V. Last]

So you have to increase that by 50%. 50% increase on the thing I just announced 48 hours ago, correct.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. So that's what he did.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Let's do this and be legends. Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

This morning, Monday morning, he did this. The court has also approved all other tariffs. I don't think that's exactly what happened, but I think that what he's saying is the tariffs that didn't fall under the IEEPA tariffs, the court, the court did not challenge those. I don't know if they approved those, but they didn't challenge them, they didn't overturn them. And so what's Trump gonna do? This is in his own words. These other tariffs, quote, can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way. And so he intends to do that. He tends to be more obnoxious in using the other non emergency tariffs and putting those in place, harming our allies. The Europeans are pissed because a lot of them cut the deals. Remember all the deals? I forget what it was. 84 deals in 50 days or whatever it was it was supposed to be. Some of these countries have cut deals that were under the 15% rate. And so they're pissed and they're like, what the fuck? There were some economists out there that were saying this could be a big favor to Trump. They'll overturn it. It'll bring some certainty back to the marketplace. That doesn't seem to be what's happening.

[Jonathan V. Last]

No. And this is interesting because it really freezes economic activity for at least 150 days. And 150 days from now, we will be awfully close to the midterm elections. I haven't done the math in my head, but we'll be just about there. And you can't make plans. If you're a business who touches at all on, you know, international trade, you're a small business or you are somebody who is making capital investments because you're a big business and you're reliant on, you know, parts or silicon from someplace else. You can't go making those plans because there is a huge difference between 10% and 15%.

[Tim Miller]

Right?

[Jonathan V. Last]

It's 50% difference. Yeah. Here, look at me doing math. And it is amazing that we live in a world where the President does something as unhinged as this and nobody blinks anymore. Nobody goes, oh, Jesus, we got to get this. Somebody should do the 25th Amendment. We should impeach him. This is insanity. This is a guy running around our house lighting fires. Instead, everyone just like, yup, just Trump being Trump in many ways. He had another truth social tweet over the weekend where it was like, I have the power to destroy everything. Do you remember this?

[Tim Miller]

I can destroy the country. He was talking about the destroyer. Yeah. He was talking about other countries. But it's a funny quote from to say I can destroy the country. I do expect us to see that quote in some midterm ads from the Democrats.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I sure think so too. But he's not wrong, right? And this is the, like, you can just do stuff, right? This is all people are like when I say, gotta demolish the ballroom on day one. And people are like, oh, but you can't. Because I'm like, no, you could just do it and then move on the next day to something else. Right. I feel like that is one of the lessons of the Trump administration. You can just go do the things you want and who's going to stop you?

[Tim Miller]

It would be nice for people to do good stuff, to just say, hey, I'm going to do this and it's going to help people. This might ruffle a few feathers. We're just going to do it and then we'll see how it plays out in the courts. And it's not my preferred way of governing. The nice way of government would be to go, a bill becomes legislate. Yeah. Go through the committee process, you negotiate, it comes to the floor, it passes, then you get to execute it without random interest groups suing you all the time and preventing you from executing. Unfortunately, like, we've created a Rube Goldberg system that makes all that impossible. Now Congress doesn't want to legislate. You know, the people, the only people that do have agency are the people that sue everyone once they, once they sign a law to stop things from happening. And so I, unfortunately, this is like a real lesson, if we ever get out of this mess.

[Jonathan V. Last]

You're describing a sclerotic system which no longer functions.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And so, and this is, I mean, Sarah doesn't like to hear this. Sarah really doesn't like this. But if you look at our system and you decide that it is too sclerotic to function and that it can't actually work anymore, and a bunch of the things that we thought were guardrails were actually just the honor system and a bunch of other functions that were built in by the Constitution turn out not to function at all. Like the 25th Amendment doesn't work. The impeachment clause doesn't work.

[Tim Miller]

And then the only actual guardrail on things is kind of like the heckler's veto on random good shit we want to do. Like if three people show up to a city council council meeting, like, we don't end up getting to. Right. Like, it's broken on both sides. Right.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And so if that is the case, then you can do two things. You can just say, well, maybe it'll resolve itself someday. We're just going to keep going. Or you can look at systemic change. And this is where I think, I mean, if you want things to get, get better and different, you have to look at systemic change. And that's where I get to my, like, gotta add a state or two, gotta expand the Supreme Court, gotta, gotta do things differently. Because the thing is, the just do stuff, as you say, that works for destroying things.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Jonathan V. Last]

You can tear apart. It doesn't work for building things really. I mean not it works for building like buildings, right? But it doesn't work for like, like standing up new spending, right? When you are creating programs, those things really do for the most part need to go through a legislative process. And so if that doesn't really work anymore, although, I don't know, I mean, Joe Biden did it. Then it just turned out that people didn't like it that Joe Biden did the things.

[Tim Miller]

I think there are two theories of the case, right? One is that we're totally in a vibes placed politics, right? And it's like it doesn't actually matter that Joe Biden did anything and results don't really matter because people care more more about what, you know, whatever is in their social media feed telling them why things are bad. Like, or, you know, there is like the other theory of the case which is that like Joe Biden didn't take enough credit for shit, you know, and it didn't go fast enough, right? Like they didn't. It took years to get go through the, you know, the red tape and that he wasn't selling it. Like we don't really know. I'm not really partial to either side. Like I literally think it could be either. Like that maybe Joe Biden would have gotten credit if he would have done, you know, been better at touting himself and been better at building things faster. Or maybe we live in a society where truth is fake and nobody knows.

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[Tim Miller]

Speaking of that, let's go to AI where everything's going to get worse. On that front, I just have one clip. Okay. Then we'll finish with Minnesota. But I had to play this clip for you in particular. This is Sam Altman and he was responding to somebody who was concerned about the amount of energy consumption that the data centers are kind of grinding through. And his answer to that was pretty, pretty telling, I think. Let's listen.

[Sam Altman]

One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how, how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. The fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way.

[Tim Miller]

Seems like Sam Altman likes his machine more than he likes humans. It seems like there's no actual value to human life other than what it can produce. And the ones and zeros of what it consumes versus what it produces. That's how Sam Altman sees human life.

[Jonathan V. Last]

This is a guy who watched the Matrix and thought it was like Neo was the bad guy. Right? This is a guy who watched the Matrix and was like. Like that horrible, disruptive human has fucked up Agent Smith. How dare he? He saw the Matrix as a tragedy. I mean, just on a comms perspective, it amazes me that he could give that answer. Right. Can you imagine?

[Tim Miller]

Well, no.

[Jonathan V. Last]

CEO of a major company. I guess it does.

[Tim Miller]

I think it speaks to the bubble you're in, honestly. Right? Like you're in such a thick bubble where you're around other people who are AI pumpers and VCs and people who think that don't actually really value human life. A lot of them are socially awkward and strange and don't have real friendships. I just think that it speaks to the. I Mean, it's a comms thing. Yeah. But I think that you can only say that if you are in a social environment where that kind of talk gets rewarded, right? Where it's like, oh, yeah, we just have to think about the efficiencies, right?

[Jonathan V. Last]

And everybody thinks it. I mean, it's also crazy. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This is, you know, this is like laws of thermodynamics. But humans are, as they are growing up, creating value and that value gets transformed. Things like extracting energy from matter, that sort of thing. Sort of what I'm getting at, AI, pure consumption. The extent to which these guys seem to think that it is impossible for them to be regulated is a little scary to me because I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. We could choose to just not allow this shit. I mean, this view that, like, once the technology exists, it's impossible to stop it and put the toothpaste out, that's wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. You can make a bunch of legislative choices where you say this shit isn't allowed, or it's not allowed in this context, or it's not allowed in that context. The idea that AI will just replace the entire middle class and there's nothing to do about it, I don't understand that. Because if we were headed towards something like that, it would seem to me that in a functioning democracy, the people would simply vote to say, no, we're not going to allow that. You can't have AI automation doing these, these, these, these and these tasks. And the way you do that is you create ways in which relying on that creates legal liabilities for corporations. And it's all pretty achievable and we ought to be doing it. And it seems insane to be sitting back and just being, well, I don't know. They're creating God. And then, you know, once they have Dr. Manhattan, we can't stop. Yes, yes, you can stop them.

[Tim Miller]

This is why this clip is so important to me, right? Because it plays into that regulation question, right? Because it's a question of, does human life have any intrinsic value at all? I'm not a total anti AI Luddite. I'm like, could this technology serve us humans, the ones that created it, and help us flourish broadly? Not just like the 11 dudes on the spectrum who are going to make a trillion dollars, but everybody, all people, can AI can this product help people flourish? And I think the answer to that is yes. If you talk to more normal people who are pro AI, like Mark Cuban or whatever, I have some disagreements with him, we hashed this out on the pod. But he talks about that in those terms. It's like, think about the medical innovations and the entrepreneurships and entrepreneurship, the things that young people, how they can now build stuff for themselves. There are ways you could talk about this that puts it in the context of, okay, this technology can maybe make human life more enriching. Right. But the concerning thing is that it seems like all the people in charge of it don't give a fuck about that and actually dislike humans and don't care about humanity at all. And that is pretty hilarious.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I mean, Altman is not that far from Agent Smith when he is talking to Neo in the Matrix and saying that humanity is a virus. Remember, he's like, oh, please, you're gross and I don't like to touch you.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, that's how he treated his sister.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah, the whole thing is insane. And I think there is probably some space for a Democrat to really demonize these companies and run on a platform of. And by the way, we're going to make these fuckers work for us.

[Tim Miller]

And that's a good platform. Right? That's what I'm saying. That's not an anti. That's not like a Luddite, like, oh, we shouldn't invent new things. We shouldn't grow and build. No, it's like, they work for us. They're stealing our data. We pay the government, we can take back control of our own destiny. Much more on that another time. Okay, we're already going long. Good show. Long show. But I want to talk about Minnesota. Bill and I talked about this a little bit yesterday, and I kind of already gave my lessons learned, one of which was that I was very much focused on the political victory, which is real, by the way. There was a real political victory there. All credit to the humans that were flourishing in Minneapolis and the community and the way they organized together. But it's hard, I think, for good reason. The people in Minnesota can't focus on the political victory because they're still in the middle of an occupation. And I think the extent of that was made very real for me when I was there. And you wrote about this a little bit yesterday, so I want you to talk about that.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah, it's worse than it looks from afar, I think, at least to me, it struck me as worse than I expected it to be. I don't know about you if your thoughts were the same.

[Tim Miller]

Oh, significantly. I mean, I thought it was bad, but yeah, worse than I expected.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah, no, same. I'd written a bunch of hair on fire things about how dangerous this was, and it was an occupation and this was the government waging war on the citizens. And yet when you get there, you realize how deep you are into Anne Frank territory. So I just want to talk about one thing. Governor Waltz talked about a network of doulas who are organized to go and do secret home births for women, need to deliver a baby but can't go to a hospital because the hospitals are basically honey traps that DHS agents stake out. I mean, on the one hand, just sit with that for a moment, that people have to give birth in their homes in secret because if they were to go to a hospital to have their baby, masked agents of the state would abduct them. This is not like a, oh, if we're not careful, we get to the Handmaiden's Tale someday. This is like, this is real. This is lived reality right now. This is the country you live in. It's there. You may not have it in your neighborhood, but this is not like a little shanty town somewhere. This is a major American city. They got a bunch of professional sports teams. But then the other part of that is, okay, so they're now having kids at home. How is the record keeping working on that? Right? Are these kids getting birth certificates? Are they getting citizenship? Is the idea that they will then try to claim citizenship for the kids later? Is the federal government going to oppose that? Right. You see, like you are. This one thing creates all sorts of other problems because it really is something like ethnic cleansing. I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like an insane person. Maybe I do sound like an insane person, but that's what this program ultimately is about. It is white nationalism. It is ethnic cleansing, and it's happening. And. And I don't think that the American media can cover it. So when I wrote about this over the weekend, I was pretty angry that the national media seems to have decided to let this all go. But as I thought about it over the weekend, the media, when we talked about it, has finite capacity, right? There are only so many story segments that CNN or ABC News can run on a given day. Like, you can actually count them up, up, and you can say, look, they have space to run 125 segments or something like that. The New York Times can only fit six stories on the front page. And for the rest of the paper, they have a big newsroom, but not an infinite newsroom. It's not an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters. They can only produce so many pieces of journalism. And the president is trying to go to war against Iran. He is going to give a State of the Union address. He is changing tariffs by the day. Just physically, you cannot keep up with all this stuff and also keep covering what is going on in Minnesota. And so the burden for that really falls to the citizenry. Like, there are 340 million of us. That isn't infinite, but it's a lot. And if the American people can be infinitely concerned about this and keep this top of mind, that is kind of what needs to happen. And I don't know what to do except do my little barbaric yelp and try to shine lights and try to keep reminding people. But back to decadence. If some sizable majority of the American population can't keep this in their heads or don't understand what's happening, then what the fuck does it even matter, Right?

[Tim Miller]

Well, this. Honestly, though, this is why the OP is important. Like, really. And I think back to the Wright Thompson pod. I don't know. I was so struck by this when he was talking about his mom posting on Facebook, and she had lived through the civil rights era in Mississippi, and she was in Mississippi. And he's saying to her, like, why are you doing this? People are going to come to you. You're going to get yelled at. At the bingo game. She's like, I lived through this once. And I was silent. I'm not gonna be silent again. And I was like, I thought that was really powerful. But it's also right. I mean, it's a small thing, but in Minnesota, there's just a cycle to this, like, how news gets followed and covered, right? And Trump understands this, like, in a deep level, being a tabloid guy from the 80s in New York, right? And it's like, okay, I'm going to end this story line having been an apprentice person, right? It's like, we're going to send in a new guy. You know, we're going to tell them to chill out a little bit. They're going to now send the agents, disperse them, and they'll be out in different communities instead of in one community where they can get videotaped, and we're going to send ships to Iran and blah, blah, blah, whatever tariffs, people start talking about something else. And that's right. And that's what's going to happen naturally, for all the reasons you laid out. And that is why it's just so critical for folks like us. But for the people of Minneapolis and Others and folks who are in other communities to keep yawping because they were on the run on this. Politically, what they were doing in Minneapolis was not popular. And it was not popular because it was documented. And it was documented because people were organizing and shouting about it. And so, like, that stuff works and matters and they are changing their tactics. But, like, the, the program is continuing.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And anyway, Democratic polls have the capability to keep this elevated, too.

[Tim Miller]

Yep.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Right. I just don't see why every Democrat in the country isn't just talking about this constantly. I understand. It's not a kitchen table issue. It doesn't have to do with affordability.

[Tim Miller]

Kind of a kitchen table issue. If you are having a secret birthday in your home and that's relevant, I believe people. Your family's probably talking about that at the kitchen table.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yeah, yeah. But I don't know. I mean, can you imagine, like, trying to. If you're an undocumented immigrant and you have a kid and the kid should be a US Citizen, but you had to do it at home and, like, think the Trump administration is going to let you get citizenship for that kid? I mean, they're trying to undo birthright citizenship anyway. Right.

[Tim Miller]

Or even if not, I kind of hate doing the undocumented thing because it, like, gives too much to them, I assume. I don't know this for a fact, but at least one of those people were like, were a legitimate asylase. Right. You saw this all the time. It's people that did. It's not people that swam across the Rio Grande and whatever were smuggled in by cartels. It's people that came to the country, went to a port of entry, claimed asylum, have been doing their check ins as they were supposed to. They've been doing what everybody says that they should do. Wait in line, follow the rules, all that stuff. And yeah, and these guys are just treating them, you know, like they're criminals.

[Jonathan V. Last]

And you can get swept up and sent off to Texas in 24 hours. And once you're gone, you're on. Right. And maybe a court somewhere, if somebody knows you've been abducted, then maybe a court somewhere, eventually six weeks or six months from now will force the government to let you go. Okay. I mean, I'm not sure what to say to that. If you think that that answer for living in America is a sufficient one, then I don't know what to tell you.

[Tim Miller]

We went way long. We're just going to leave it with that. I'll leave it on an uplifting note. Bill Kristol said He's excited that I was replacing him with JVL because he's going to seem chipper and optimistic. So he gets a lot of feedback from people say that he's a little too dour and negative and so he feels like next week by comparison to jvl, he'll be the upbeat one. So you can get more of me and JVL on the next level. Tomorrow we're going to do a pre State of the Union show with Sarah. We talk about non State of the Union stuff and then I'm going to do a State of the Union live stream after Tomorrow Night on YouTube.

[Jonathan V. Last]

I am not going to do that.

[Tim Miller]

And we have the regular Bulwark podcast tomorrow. I don't know who that guest is going to be, but I'm sure they'll be good. So no shortage of content for you all. Well, hope you enjoy it. Jbl, thanks for doing substitute teacher duty and everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. Peace. Hurts, right? But I can't even talk to you about my effect on people. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Use math to make the world a better place.

[Tim Miller]

Become an actuary through the Society of

[Jonathan V. Last]

Actuaries and find solutions to the world's most pressing challenges.

[Tim Miller]

As an actuary, the only thing higher

[Jonathan V. Last]

than the pay is the satisfaction.

[Tim Miller]

Hello America. It's your new favorite podcast here.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Yes, it's James and Andy, two fourths of the British podcast no Such Thing as a Fish.

[Tim Miller]

That's right. We do facts. We do weird facts, fun facts, facts you've never heard before. James, give us a fact.

[Jonathan V. Last]

Did you know you may be able to cure chronically blocked noses with a snot transplant?

[Tim Miller]

Lovely, lovely fact. If you want to hear us, go

[Jonathan V. Last]

to wherever you get your podcasts and search for no Such Thing as a Fish.

[Tim Miller]

That's right. We'll see you there.