State Corporatism on the Rise

Summary

The Dispatch Podcast – "State Corporatism on the Rise"

Date: June 16, 2026
Host: Steve Hayes
Panelists: Kevin Williamson, Scott Lincecum, Megan McArdle

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the increasing momentum behind state corporatism in the United States, specifically the growing calls for the federal government to take ownership stakes in top AI companies. The panel analyzes recent proposals from both progressive and conservative politicians—to the point of bipartisan support—for government equity in tech, the related “sovereign wealth” taxes, the national debt crisis, and America’s economic outlook. The discussion closes with a rare optimistic note from the participants after a bracing exploration of heavy topics.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Growing Momentum for State Corporatism in AI (00:07–16:26)

• Bipartisan Calls for Ownership Stakes

  • Bernie Sanders recently proposed a "50% one time confiscation tax" on AI giants, advocating for government-held equity and influence (00:56).
  • Trump has also expressed support for public ownership:

    "If we do that, the public will become very rich, the people in our country, because that's the kind of money we're talking about." – Donald Trump (quoted at 01:36)

• Panel Reaction: Caution and Critique

  • Scott Lincecum: Firmly opposes, citing politicization and capital misallocation.

    “You’re injecting politics into private entities that you want to be operating on based on solely commercial considerations… That’s classic capital misallocation.” (04:08)

    • Notes precedent: now 20+ government equity stakes in various industries, leading to widespread gaming of the system (05:20).
    • References Intel as an example: share price buoyed by government backing but at the expense of other, potentially more innovative players (05:52).
  • Megan McArdle: Emphatic skepticism—government lacks the tech talent and adaptive capacity:

    “Merciful heavens, have you ever dealt with a government website?... You want to take the technology frontier…and put the government IT people in charge of this?… It would essentially be slaughtering our fastest growing native industry.” (09:17)

  • Panel jokes about the misfit between political claims of “the common good” and actual outcomes, highlighting their doubt about politicians’ motivations and competence (07:18–07:42).
  • Kevin Williamson: The move is not about helping Americans but gaining board control:

    “If what you want is some claim on the revenues…you already have that. It’s called the tax power. What they really want is board seats—that’s what this is about.” (20:14)

• Political Implications

  • The Overton window has shifted: Owning and controlling business assets has moved from fringe to mainstream conversation, leaving traditional free-market opponents at a rhetorical disadvantage (19:01, 20:14).
  • Both parties increasingly endorse interventionist policies reminiscent of Europe’s more corporatist systems, even as European governments divest from state ownership following poor performance (24:32–24:56).

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2. The National Debt Crisis & Entitlement Reform (38:44–53:11)

• Scale and Urgency of the Debt Problem

  • Kevin Williamson: U.S. obligations now exceed the world’s annual economic output; entitlement promises are mathematically unsustainable:

    “The obligations…the US Government has…exceed the annual economic output of the human species—literally more than all the money in the world.” (38:44)

  • Megan McArdle: The debt has shifted from manageable to dire, with growth in pandemic and financial crisis spending. Real solutions are painful and unpopular:

    “Budget hawks just act as if we can claw back these payments painlessly. You cannot… And so now debt is 100% in GDP... and it’s only getting worse.” (45:03)

  • Both parties refuse to discuss genuine entitlement reform due to political risk. Voters demand mutually exclusive outcomes (“don’t cut, don’t tax, but balance the budget”), making action nearly impossible (49:04).

• Voter Psychology & Political Deadlock

  • Even after being shown the math, voters “come back with the same answer”—incoherent and impossible to enact (49:04).
  • Scott Lincecum: Even modest reforms, like tracking Social Security to actual inflation rather than an inflated index, are politically toxic:

    “The most basic reform we could do…would be a huge budget helper… That alone is politically toxic.” (51:08)

  • The U.S. enjoys “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s financial safe haven, but profligacy risks losing that, at trillions in lost value (52:12).

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3. National Security & Tech: Does Government Need to Own AI? (30:35–36:42)

• Expertise Argument

  • Steve Hayes raises: Wouldn't government stakes give it access to technical know-how and insight into national security risks (e.g., AI vulnerabilities)? (30:35)
  • Megan McArdle: No; tech leaders already volunteer expertise to policymakers—what’s missing is politicians’ willingness to learn, not board seats (32:06).
  • Government ownership isn't necessary for collaboration; it's already attainable via dialogue (34:11–35:10).

• Danger of Blurring Lines

  • Government as both referee and player distorts incentives, opens path to regulatory capture, and entrenches national “champions” at the cost of innovation (15:10–15:14).

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4. Notable Comparisons & Geopolitical Risks (24:32–30:35)

• European Model as a Warning
  • The U.S. is following Europe's corporatist path just as Europeans are retreating from it, realizing state control depressed innovation and growth (24:48–24:56).
  • China envy at play, but Chinese industrial policy comes with “trillions” in lost wealth; their “zombie companies” are not a model to copy (29:22).
  • AI and Geopolitical Values: The panel warns that weakening U.S. innovation risks ceding the future of AI—and its values—to Chinese-style authoritarianism and censorship (28:25–29:21).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Disbelief at Politicians as Guardians of the “Common Good”:

  “For those of you who are listening rather than watching...the entire panel like suppressed smirk and laughter…”
  – Megan McArdle (07:18)

• Explicit Rejection of Anti-Democratic Justifications:

  “To which I say horse hockey, triple distilled, balderdash, high test nonsense. Because again, you don't need to take a stake in the company for any of that…”
  – Megan McArdle (12:48)

• What’s Really at Stake:

  “It’s not just a way around the democratic process. It’s a way around things like the First Amendment.”
  – Kevin Williamson (22:09)

• Government IT Competence:

  “Have you ever dealt with a government website?...We don’t have the talent. And the talent that we do have is hamstrung by incredibly dumb regulatory and bureaucratic...rules that make it impossible to do tech well.”
  – Megan McArdle (09:17)

• America’s Fiscal Situation:

  “The obligations…the US Government has… exceed the annual economic output of the human species—literally more than all the money in the world.”
  – Kevin Williamson (38:44)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:07: Introduction and framing of AI ownership debate
• 02:48: Scott’s take on government equity stakes
• 06:19: Steve and Megan on political motivations
• 07:18: Panel laughter at “common good” argument
• 09:17: Megan’s case against government technical capacity
• 14:15: Scott and Kevin on regulatory capture and uneven competition
• 20:14: Kevin: "This is about board seats"
• 24:32: European corporatism as a cautionary tale
• 28:25: AI’s global values and China’s censorship
• 38:44: Kevin on the national debt crisis
• 45:03: Megan on the impossibility of easy, painless entitlement reform
• 51:20: Scott: Even modest Social Security fixes are “politically toxic”
• 53:39–57:24: Roundtable on optimism and “real America”

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Optimism: “Not Worth Your Time” (53:39–57:24)

• Megan McArdle: Optimistic about American creativity, adaptability, and decency:

  “This is a great country with tons of energy and people who are way better than they behave online...I think America's best years are still ahead of it.” (53:39)

• Kevin Williamson: Finds hope in faith (“I know that my redeemer liveth.”) (54:34)
• Scott Lincecum: Finds optimism in America’s abundance and how foreign visitors marvel at everyday American comforts (54:50)
• Steve Hayes: Senses a rise in local community engagement and people acting rather than waiting for politicians (57:05)

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Summary & Takeaways

• Current bipartisan trend: There is real, bipartisan political momentum behind the idea of government ownership in major AI companies, framed as restoring democracy or protecting the common good.
• Panel consensus: The Dispatch panel sees this as profoundly misguided, likely to breed inefficiency, regulatory capture, technological stagnation, and ultimately undermine American innovation while failing to solve underlying problems like inequality or national security concerns.
• Broader context: The discussion connects state corporatism to the more fundamental challenge of debt and entitlement reform—problems which neither party is willing to tackle, as voters simply won’t accept the tradeoffs required.
• Cautionary tales: Policymakers are cautioned not to repeat the mistakes of Europe or China, whose state interference has depressed innovation and prosperity.
• Glimmers of hope: Despite dire assessments, panelists find optimism in America’s resilient creativity, strong communities, and enduring capacity for renewal.

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The episode delivers a sobering but wide-ranging critique of state corporatism, with a side of hopeful American exceptionalism.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the increasing momentum of state corporatism and the growing calls for the federal government to take an ownership stake in America's top AI companies. Then we'll return briefly to a discussion on the national debt and what it's costing us right now. And finally, for not worth your time, a dose of optimism. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleague Kevin Williamson and dispatch contributors Scott Lincecum and Megan McArdle. Let's dive in. Welcome everyone. Over the past two weeks, we have seen a flurry of activity from the proponents of what would have once been considered a fringe idea, the US Government taking a significant ownership stake in the companies whose extraordinary growth is driving the US economy. If this had been proposed in, say, the 1980s, it would have been an opinion piece in the nation, along with frenzied debates on college campuses, all culminating in legislation from Ron Dellums, former national leader of the Democratic Socialists of America. And it would get, you know, four or five sponsors, that legislation and then it would die and it would go away. Not today. On June 3rd, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont, wrote an op ed in the New York Times making the case for the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a 50% one time confiscation tax, he calls it, of the stock of the largest AI companies in, in the world. The head of one of those companies, Sam Altman, quibbled with the 50% stake but was more or less on board. Donald Trump, the Republican president who's already pushed the government into taking ownership stakes of several other private companies, has been making a similar argument. The president said last week, if we do that, the public will become very rich, the people in our country, because that's the kind of money we're talking about. Trump said, I think they'll do that and I think it'll make it very popular. With the national debt now above $38 trillion, depending on how one one counts, and other fiscal problems, the United States and the prospect of Americans being thrown out of jobs because of the AI revolution, this all makes a lot of sense, doesn't it, Scott?

[B]

No, it definitely does not. Look, you know, I think you can make these rather superficial arguments regarding, oh, we're going to make our money back. You hear that one a lot on some of these equity stakes, that, yes, the government needs to have some skin in the game and that it can use these stakes to attract private capital. Those are all the ideas, right? But look, there are, I mean, Fingers and toes, numbers of reasons why this is a terrible idea. And this is of course something I've written for the Dispatch and elsewhere. We at Cato are actually launching a big project on this in a couple months because of course it isn't just AI companies. We're now up to around 20 of these equity stakes, depending on how you measure it. Because now the companies are now acquiring other companies. So it's very hard to keep track. It's kind of, you know, tentacles are spreading. But look, there are the obvious seen problem is you're injecting politics into private entities that you want to be operating on based on solely commercial considerations. Right? Especially at the tip of the spear of American innovation. You don't want politics to start creeping into their decision making in terms of where to locate server farms and how to train their AIs. And then when you're talking about hard things, about factories and jobs and all this kind of stuff, and we've already seen, seen it with things like US Steel, which now Trump took a golden share, keeping open certain old antiquated blast furnace mills that just happen to be in politically important places. That's the type of stuff that, you know, honestly, with a steel company, eh, it's bad, but whatever for artificial intelligence, for this potentially transformative technology that right now the United States is in the lead on, that's pretty scary. Now that's though only the tip of the iceberg. The reality I think in fact more problematic probably are all the unseen costs with all this stuff because once the government starts backing certain companies, well the everybody else starts changing their behavior too. Look at a company like Intel. We now have an equity stake in Intel. Well, Intel's share price has skyrocketed. Trump brags about this all the time. And some of that is intel has made some management changes. They've gone from being, they were really struggling, they've made some changes, they're, they're riding this AI momentum wave as well. But there's still a huge delta, a big difference between intel share price and everybody else is in this space share price. And that's just private capital flooding into the government backed champion. Right? And that's private capital that could have gone to companies that are more productive, more innovative, smaller, you name it, right? So that's classic capital misallocation. You have all of these other questions about now companies need to do deals with these government backed champions because they need regulatory approvals or they just don't want to upset King Trump and the rest. So all of these things are happening in invisible ways. Right? And I think that's where the huge problems with all of this lie, that this is not a one off deal. We now have 20 of these and investors, capital markets, companies, you name it, are all trying to game the system and figure that out. And that's. That just means a slower, less productive, less awesome US economy.

[A]

So Megan, if you look at some of the arguments that Scott made there, they're answered by the people who are proposing these kinds of things or backing these kinds of things. It's not an accident that politics would be part of the decision making process and it's not a bad thing that politics would be part of the decision making process because politicians are looking out for the common good and these tech oligarchs and capitalists and venture capitalists are just looking out for their own profits and their own biases. Bottom lines, no greater authority than Bernie Sanders made this argument in his New York Times op ed. No longer with the future of AI and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of big tech oligarchs. The federal government would have the power through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company's board to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them. Are you like Scott, opposed to helping our citizens?

[C]

By the way, for those of you who are listening rather than watching this, you need to know that when Steve said the politicians are looking out for the common good, the entire panel like suppressed smirk and laughter and everybody seized up thoroughly.

[D]

And you see the expression on my face too. You should really.

[A]

Am I not doing a very good job of steel manning here, Kevin, Check

[D]

us out on YouTube. You're missing a lot here.

[C]

Some real soft iron.

[D]

So look, I am put in mind of PGR work's great aphorism. You know there's a name for this indeed, the peoples of Poland and Czechoslovakia had some very pungent names for it that look quite apart. We can debate whether the government has the best interests of the people at heart and always acts in the public interest, but we have mechanisms. If you are worried about the income effects, we have an income tax and an unemployment insurance system and various other things. If you are worried about the like the job impacts, what have you or some sort of negative externality. We have a regulatory state that is meant to deal with companies that create negative externalities. Which is just a fancy way of saying like if I play my music really loud I'm really enjoying myself. And you are maybe not. And you know the fact that I live with an audiophile has nothing to do with the fact with that particular example springing lightly to mind. But pollution's a classic negative externality if you think that they are creating a problem. But, you know, like, disruptive growth is not generally considered a problem of that sort in American history. And for good reason. It is the reason that we are not all. Actually, I guess it's 9am I was going to say huddled in huts, but in fact all of the men on this podcast and all of the men in the audience would now be out wrestling with a large animal, attempting to make enough food to survive the winter come out of the ground, often failing. The women would probably be at the farmyard somewhere hauling water. Disruptive growth is the reason we don't have to do those things, and so we don't think of that as an externality that should be controlled. It can have bad impacts on individuals, and the government has ways to alleviate those impacts, such as unemployment insurance, such as various programs designed to make sure that no one is totally immiserated and unable to survive. What the reason to take a stake in this company is that you want to control it without passing laws, without bothering with regulations. You just want to be able to say, nice business, There you have their shame if anything happened to it. In fact, this is a way to do an end run around the democratic mechanisms that we have to set rules of the road so that companies are not making money unfairly by cheating, but have to do it by providing value to consumers. The other thing I would say is merciful heavens. Have you ever dealt with a government website? The state capacity of the United States government compared to other governments is low in general, but its technological state capacity is abysmal. We are for a bunch of reasons. Number one, because we have this very tight GS scale for paying civil servants, we can't really compete with the private sector in key areas like tech. But more generally, the way that we do regulation, the way we do procurement, it freezes everything in amber and makes it incredibly difficult to innovate. So we don't have the talent. And the talent that we do have is hamstrung by incredibly dumb regulatory and bureaucratic and procurement rules that make it impossible to do tech well. So you want to take the technology frontier, companies that are powering American growth right now, that are giving us an incredible national security and economic advantage over the rest of the world, and you want to put the government, IT people in charge of this. You want to put people who aren't even Smart enough to oversee. I shouldn't say smart. Who are not even tech savvy enough to oversee those folks and you want to put them in charge of it. It would be a disaster. It would essentially be slaughtering our fastest growing native industry, I guess because we think China doesn't have enough advantages and it's unfair that we got this head start. And so we're gonna voluntarily hobble ourselves so that China can catch up and surpass us. No, thank you, sir. I say no thank you.

[A]

But Megan, let me push back on that at least a little bit. Bernie Sanders would say, in fact, what he's doing is not trying to make an end run around democracy. In fact, he's trying to restore democracy to the process. He's introduced this as legislation. He's out making arguments, he's trying to persuade people. He's trying to win over the approval of the President of the United States. And I think it's fair to say he would argue that the way that this is happening now is anti democratic. This there's nobody looking out for the interests of the American voters because these big tech oligarchs are flooding campaigns with money. They don't have to be responsive to anyone. The politicians are happy to go to these big tech companies with their hand out. They can raise unlimited amounts of dark money to fund their campaigns. That's what's anti democratic.

[D]

To which I say horse hockey, triple distilled, balderdash, high test nonsense. Because again, you don't need to take a stake in the company for any of that. If there is a law that should be restricting what these guys do, pass the law. Right? If there is money that we need to get from them to ease whatever displacement, I don't think the displacement is gonna be as fast as people fear. Then you can pass a tax, take the money and redistribute it. The object of getting a 50% stake, which is a majority stake, is to make is to give yourself a vote on everything. The ability to hire and fire and remove managers. And to say that it's happening undemocratically, one could as easily say that the cup of coffee I am drinking happened undemocratically. No one voted on what brand of coffee that I decided to choose. Who knows what geopolitical implications came from choosing Costa Rica coffee over Rwandan. I don't even know how many Rwandans I may have killed this morning with this cup of coffee. This is totally ridiculous. It's a transparent ploy to basically take control of this thing and Once they take control of it, they will kill it because they not kill it. That government is just not good at this kind of disruptive innovation. There are things that only government can do, but running companies is not one of them.

[B]

Yeah, there are two things I think buried in there and of course bullied all of what Megan said. But I think there's two other things that are really important buried in there. First is I've yet to hear a coherent argument from the folks that champion these equity stakes for why other government mechanisms aren't sufficient. And these are free market things, you know, permitting reform, tax reform, that kind of stuff. But also, you know, know, government non market things, whether it's regulation or subsidies or other type buy American rules, you name it, right? There are all sorts of levers the government can pull to influence corporate behavior as an independent arbiter, not as a participant in the private market. And that's really the difference. Government is going from being a referee in a game to a player and that raises all sorts of weird incentives

[D]

and while reserving the right to still call the plays.

[B]

Right, right, exactly. And that gets to the second thing. If you really care about the regulation of these tech champions, you should actually be quite worried about them getting tied up with the government because they're going to get favors. That when you become a national champion, suddenly you get different regulatory approach. You get maybe a so and this has already happened again with some of these other companies. One of the rare earths companies in which we invested, we the government invested, was bragging the other day that it got streamlined permitting for a project and now you go, look, I want permitting reform, but do I want the government giving its champions that advantage and not letting the small startups the innovative, especially in tech, which is so dynamic and disruptive. Do you really want those champions to have that kind of advantage? And we know from 250 years of American government that this is how it works, right? Lobbyists descend upon Washington, they end up capturing the regulatory agencies that regulate them. It is just a terrible idea to further blur the line between regulator and private entity.

[A]

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the news lately has been full of stories about the untimely passing of people well before they might be expected to leave us. My thoughts turn immediately to the people they are leaving behind and the many challenges surviving family members face. Preventing those possibilities is one of the reasons I've had life insurance for many years now to make sure that the people I love would still be supported if life took an unexpected turn. Return With Ethos, you can apply for life insurance fully online with plans starting around $30 a month and coverage available up to $3 million. You can get a quote in seconds, complete the application in minutes, and may even qualify for same day coverage with no medical exam required and just a few health questions online. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free [e-mail] dispatch that's ethos.com dispatch Application times may vary and rates may vary. Running a small business means constantly balancing priorities. As the CEO and editor of the Dispatch, I have responsibilities on both the editorial and business sides of our operation, so I need tools that help us simplify what we do and streamline our workflow. Improving how your business runs day to day is something you can manage. That's why I think Gusto is a smart tool to look into. It helps simplify payroll in hr, cuts down on repetitive admin tasks, and gives you more space to focus on your team, your customers, and growing your business. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. Get direct access to certified HR experts who can support you through any tough situation, and enjoy a quick, seamless switch to Gusto by simply transferring your existing data. Plus, you won't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try gusto [e-mail] dispatch and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free [e-mail] dispatch one more time. Gusto.com dispatch we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in.

[C]

Kevin, I am here.

[A]

17 minutes in and I get to Kevin.

[C]

Well, McArdle came loaded for bear today, which is always fun.

[D]

Elephant, Kevin, Elephant.

[A]

Yeah, no, I'm listening to Scott and I'm listening to Megan and I've got

[C]

an elephant rifle right there.

[A]

They are making, as always, the best arguments one can make on behalf of the positions they're arguing. I will just note that in the over the course of each of their arguments, they have pointed to things like increased regulation, additional taxes, arguments that you don't hear from Megan and Scott very often as an alternative to government stakes in these companies. Is that some measure of the political bind that opponents of these things are in? I mean, when you Have Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and the heads of these companies making these arguments. You have Democratic politicians across the country in Democratic primaries outmaneuvering one another to see who can take the most anti AI positions in these areas and calling for additional regulation, calling for government ownership of these companies. Is it the case that the people who are behind this argument, making this argument, have a political upper hand right now?

[C]

This is when usually you say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, something overton window, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. I think rhetorically what you're seeing here is the effect of three libertarians on a panel who are always conscious of trying not to sound like crazy people, as libertarians so often do. But I think McArdle gets to the point here, which is what this is really about is the board seats, right? So if what you want is some claim on the revenues of these companies in this fast growing industry to use those for constructive social purposes, you already have that. It's called the tax power. As everyone has pointed out here, you can tax them as much as you want. But what the Trump proposals and proposals going back to people from like Elizabeth Warren for other kinds of companies, Sanders and the AI stuff, what they all really have in common is they want board seats. And often these ideas, particularly ones from Elizabeth Warren, have come with bigger ideas about forms of corporate gifts, governance, particularly when it comes to things like political spending, political communication, campaign donations, things like that. So they want to control these companies because they want to control their use of the resources outside of what they pay in taxes. So whatever you're going to tax these companies at, you can have a corporate income tax of 50% if you want to. I mean, there are countries that have done it. You can have one higher than that, but they're going to have some money left over and they're going to be able to do with that what they want. And some of what they're going to do with that is pay people in ways that these people don't like. Some of what they're going to do with it is spend money on issue advertising saying we shouldn't do this, we shouldn't do that. Some of what they're going to do with it is campaign contributions or supporting. They're going to make donations to Cato, God help us, and help pay Scott.

[D]

Okay, now I'm, I sorry, I just realized I'm now in favor of this. This is like, if we can, if we can stop them from paying Scott's

[A]

salary, switch your position. Hey,

[C]

they might throw a few dollars over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute to up the writer in residence fee over there.

[B]

After Cato.

[C]

Yeah, after Cato, something like that. And they want to be able to put a stop to that stuff too. So it's no longer enough to use the tax power and the regulatory power to act like you're in charge of the company. It's. You have to actually be in charge of the company if you want to control everything the company does with all of its resources, not just with its share of income that's subject to taxation and it's activities that are subject to regulation. So it's not just a way around the democratic process. It's a way around things like the First Amendment. You know, if you go back to this whole dumb conversation we've been having for however many years now about political spending as speech, it started with the question of whether someone was allowed to show a movie that was critical of a political candidate before an election. And the law at the time said, no, you can't do that. And when this case went to court, the judges asked, hey, could we you rather ban a book under the same line of thinking, well, of course you could. And they said, well, hell with that. We got this thing called freedom of speech and freedom of the press here and we're not going to allow that to happen. And that's really the root of what we're talking about here. So as long as you've got a First Amendment that's protecting political spending, political speech, activism of various kinds, the government can't really, through any sort of regulatory mechanism, come in and stop that. But if the government has half your board seats and, and three or four or some half of the remaining board seats are people who are allied with those government people because they're on other boards and they've got other financial interests and other needs of favor seeking related to the government, then you can control that whole thing. So the Luddite in me that really hates AI slop is kind of happy about this stuff in some ways because, yeah, kill the industry. Why not? Sure. Although I don't think the Chinese version of it's going to make anyone very happy. You know, it's my. Do we go back in time and strangle baby Steve Jobs to keep him from inventing the iPhone and putting Twitter in everybody's pockets and making the world a better place? Someone brought up intel earlier and, you know, I'm old enough to remember when intel was cool. Like when I was in college, if you were a tech guy and you're like, at the Top of the class. Like intel was one of the places you wanted to go work. And now it's just, it's essentially, it's Con Ed, you know, it's basically being turned into a utility. And that's not a great trajectory, I don't think. I guess it beats bankruptcy. I guess it beats having your capital redistributed to more competitive enterprises. But I don't really want to see that done to the tech industry at large because like anyone else who's ever lived in New York City, I'm not a huge fan of con Ed and I don't think it's exactly the model you want for the entire economy at large.

[D]

I would just add that this is the European model of governance where you just entangle companies and government in, in ways where there's not like a clear democratic mandate. They have that too. They have like a ton of regulation and so forth, or it was.

[C]

But they've been divesting themselves. You know, I mean, Sweden and Norway and these other companies have been like, well, we don't really need all these state owned enterprises. This is not actually the greatest way to do things.

[D]

But just in general, government is much more kind of in the business of European companies in ways that is, are not always transparent and are often much more about like kind of backroom deals and so forth. And I don't know if people were paying attention this weekend. So Anthropic rolled out this version of. If you've heard about Mythos, this was the one that caused the freak out because it found all the bugs in various kinds of open source software. So they rolled out like a defanged version to customers and then abruptly withdrew it because Amazon had jailbroken it and figured out how to make it do stuff it's not supposed to do. And the US government freaked out and slapped export controls on it and basically said, you cannot let any foreign national access this. And since they can't tell who's a foreign national on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog or whether you're a German dog or a French poodle. But so this was interesting because it coincided with the release of a kind of scenario that I highly recommend everyone. It's written by Tom shivers, it's called Europe 3031AI. And it was an exact instance of what this scenario talked about, which is that Europe is starting to realize that having strangled innovative industries in the name of worker solidarity has been a really bad bet. And it wasn't visible for a long time. And now they Basically can't bootstrap an AI industry for a bunch of reasons. Their labor law makes it really hard to shut down a company and therefore really risky to start one. Especially in a really disruptive field where you might easily go bankrupt and then owe your workers two years of severance. Their capital markets are thin. Their capital markets tend to focus capital on existing companies rather than on new startups. There's a whole bunch of reasons. And so because of this they're freaking out because America and China are basically the only players in the AI race and they basically destroyed their tech industry in the name of solidarity. And what Bernie Sanders would like to do is that what Elizabeth Warren would like to do is that they would like the government to control everything, to make sure nothing that they don't approve of ever happens. And then when another country, unfortunately they can't control everything. Hilariously, Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, a bunch of left wing economists basically like released a plan a couple weeks ago for a degrowth world government that was going to like shut down growth and redistribute it from the rich world to the poor world. And this is like, this is how they think. This is what Elizabeth Warren would like. She would like a world in which not Elizabeth, Elizabeth Warren and basically all of the bureaucrats in the EU are in charge of everything. And they won't ever let anything disruptive happen because that would be bad because it would challenge the power of people like them. And it's not going to happen. The best you can do is hurt America. You can't stop this thing from happening. Knowledge is out there. It is not stoppable. All you can do is make it so that America is also ran and China. And this is not just a, like a geostrategic problem in terms of they will have better AI and therefore better military capabilities. Not even an economic problem in the way that they're manufacturing. You know, the fact that they're so dominant in manufacturing has given them all these economic advantages. It would be a tech problem because China likes to export its censorship regimes. It has used its economic power to force, for example, movie companies to pretend that Taiwan is part of China, to erase the record of Tiananmen and a bunch of other stuff. And you can see this in their open source AI models where if you mention Tiananmen, it'll either freak out or say nothing happened. If you mention that Hong Kong, the Hong Kong protests, it will say that they were all violent outside paid agitators. I am like giving hypothetical examples. I'm not giving you the actual thing it says, but it does all of that on these hot button topics. Do we want the AI of the future that's exported to the rest of the world to have Chinese authoritarian values? I don't think so. And it's not just because like I'm kind of a red, white and blue American patriot. It's also because I think even if I were outside of America and I had to choose between our values, whatever the problems with them, and, and Chinese censorship and dictatorship, I would choose the open version. I would choose the open society. And the problem is we've got these politicians who don't want to choose the open society. They kind of envy China.

[B]

Not just kinda. Not just kinda. I mean, the China envy is explicit on both sides of the aisle these days. You hear it a lot. Now the unstated part of this is that study after study shows that all of that Chinese industrial policy and those subsidies and the state owned enterprises, it's produced some stuff, but it's come at a massive economic cost. The capital misallocation, I mean, you're talking about trillions of dollars in lost wealth because it compounds over time because you have these state champions that just kind of sit around and are zombie companies, do all this bad stuff. So maybe that makes sense for a authoritarian developing country like China, but it makes no sense for the United States.

[C]

Right?

[B]

Tip of the spear, productivity, very innovative. It makes literally no sense. As a humorous aside to what Megan just said, I was giving an interview in the fall with a French publication. We were talking about the, these equity stakes which were building at the time. And literally at the end of the interview they said, what you guys are doing is just like France in the 1980s. Don't you think that's. And I'm like, oh my gosh, yes, that's exactly what we're doing. And that is, that's not even. They recognize that's a very bad thing. Unfortunately, a lot of folks in Washington don't seem to recognize the same.

[A]

I take your point. I mean, this is really one of the, I think key questions at the heart of this debate is kind of freedom versus anti freedom, US versus China. But there are serious national security implications to some of this that ought to be given real consideration. We published a piece from Clown Kitchen back in April about Mythos, which Megan mentioned in her answer. Klan wrote a frontier AI lab just decided its most capable model was too dangerous to release. That model, internally called Mythos, autonomously discovered thousands of zero day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, including bugs that experts had failed to catch for decades, and goes on to talk about the United States government now racing to address that before adversaries can match it. And it is true, as you said earlier, Megan, that the US Government lags behind and even its understanding of these things. When we talked about AI a few weeks ago, I mentioned conversations that I'd had with tech executives who talked to me about how difficult it was to even have conversations when they would go visit members of Congress on Capitol Hill because the knowledge gap was so vast that they weren't even speaking the same language about these things. Wouldn't it be advantageous to have, if the US Government had a stake in these companies, you can make available the experts who are putting these things together, who can help you understand the gaps in information, who can point out these vulnerabilities before they're released. Why wouldn't we want to do that?

[D]

I mean, these guys are doing nothing but Washington tours. And I will say, like, they'll bring their experts. You can ask them anything you want. You won't understand anything they said, but you can definitely ask them. I mean, like, the number of dinners and so forth that I have been invited to with people from the AI companies in the last six months, they are very cognizant of the challenge of explaining their product to senators and so forth, who are not, by and large, tech mavens, many of whom, like, barely write their own emails. Right. They have staffers to do all of this for them. But I will say this is that in my experience in those meetings, Silicon Valley is as naive about Washington as Washington is about AI. And Scott's nodding. So I expect he has had this experience too, where I was sitting in one of these things and someone was like, okay, well, what's the policy? Ask. Right. What would you like the government to do about this problem that you have outlined? It was something about security. And then they kind of said, well, we want Washington to get involved and think about. We're like, no, no, no, this is not how Washington works. You have to have a thing that you wish to happen that is executable by the government. And it cannot be a general. Like, it would be nice if things were different. Right? And so there's a lot of learning to happen on both sides. And I will say that Silicon Valley in general, I think because it's not a big physical industry, it kind of got by for 20 years without interacting with Washington most much other than on national security stuff with, like, chips and that was a mistake. And it was a mistake on multiple levels. It was how the social media companies ended up alienating Republicans by deciding that they would, just for the sake of their liberal employees, they would just ban inconvenient conservatives. They're gross. No one wants them on the platform anyway. That was a huge mistake. And like, I don't. I wouldn't say came close, but there was a real threat. They were gonna get basically regulated out of existence as a result of that mistake. And had they had a closer presence in Washington, they would not have made that mist. And I think in general, they.

[C]

Do you remember when Bill Gates used to brag about Microsoft not having an office in dc?

[D]

Yeah. And I hate to say this, this, like, pains my libertarian heart. To be clear, I would like to live in a world where you don't need an office in Washington.

[C]

Sure.

[D]

But they did need offices in Washington and they didn't have them. And they just have a massive deficit to make up. In terms of understanding, like, this is going to be a regulated industry. It's going to be like steel, it's going to be like cars. Not in the same way. I'm not advocating for it. I am merely reporting the fact. Which means that you need to think like a regulated industry. You need to have a lot of people on this, building relationships with Washington, explaining your product. But that said, like, they can get it explained to them if they want it and if they are prepared to put in the work it will take to understand the explanation. But they don't need. They don't need to own the company for that. Again, these guys will be happy. Like, they're bringing their, like, senior VPs of development to talk to, like, me. They'll definitely talk to a senator if the senator wants it.

[B]

Yeah. And I think that's also. That goes back to what you were saying earlier, Steve, that now we have a bunch of libertarians being pro regulation. Just to be clear, I think we can reasonably differ on the level of taxation and regulation and the rest, but I think we can agree with our more leftist friends out there that, okay, that's a debate worth having. That's fine. We're gonna be at different ends of the spectrum, but an equity stake is a different animal. It's really. It's like a. It's not even apples and oranges. I mean, it's like apples and cars. I mean, it's just a totally different universe, and it opens up a whole different set of very bad issues. And that's, I think, the difference. Right. And that's why when I say, well, there's all these other levers. Well, yeah, and I'm gonna disagree with you about exactly where those levers should be set.

[D]

Set.

[B]

But at least we're agreeing on. Okay, that's the toolkit. When you start going down this road. I mean it. Look, we're already at 20 something companies and a year ago we were at one. I wrote my oh no US steel piece a year ago in the Dispatch and Now we're at 20 something and we can't even keep track. Right. And of course, when a Democratic president wins the next presidential election, whenever that might be, then we're going to get a whole other set of these industries that are getting targeted. So the box is wide open. And that's I think a huge problem because again, we've moved away from the standard government regulatory taxation toolkit.

[C]

Yeah, it'll be banks and financial firms next. Yeah, that's what they really want. I mean that's the, that's the golden goose.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[A]

And the fact that you have prominent Republicans, including and especially the President of the United States now making these arguments openly and publicly with virtually no pushback from, from inside the putatively small government, low regulation, anti statist political party, you know, collaborating with the big government. We've always wanted to take stakes in companies, I think portends bad things for the future. I want to turn real quickly to the national debt to pick this conversation up and turn us in a positive direction. One of the arguments that you hear people making in connection with the government taking ownership is hey, shouldn't the taxpayers benefit from this? I mean, Elon Musk, SpaceX went public. Elon Musk is in AI. He became a trillionaire. There are going to be lots of other trillionaires at some point in the future. Shouldn't the American public share this wealth? And one way to have the American public share this wealth is to have the taxpayers take a cut. This is an argument that you hear directly from Donald Trump regularly and he talks about, and Elon Musk has talked about the ability of private industry to help the US government wipe away this $38 trillion in debt. Let's just set aside that part of the argument for now because I want to focus just for the next five minutes or so on the problem. Kevin, you had a piece a couple weeks ago and I'm not going to read the whole thing, tempting as it is to read the whole thing. But I will summarize in teeing you up for you to make your own argument. I will summarize what one of the many gray lines from this piece you wrote. The bosses here at the Dispatch have asked me to keep the profanity to a minimum. So I'm not going to write in plain English what it is that we are. Let's just say that it is a problem we have not ducked. What's the problem? What's the threshold we have crossed, and what does it mean?

[C]

Yeah, so there are different ways of looking at this. You know, there's the formal debt. There's the, you know, portion of the debt held by the public. Different people talk about different things. Things. You can look at it in terms of the total unfunded liabilities of the government. Once you're looking at, you know, Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements, and if you take the biggest picture of obligation, you know, including all the unfunded liabilities and all that stuff, then the. The obligations that the US Government has that it doesn't know how to pay for, like, exceed the annual economic output of the human species, literally all the. More than all the money in the world. Like, if you take a really broad measure of money, you know, currency, checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, and all that stuff, it's more than that. So, yeah, we are kind of. There's a word there that I wasn't allowed to use in the Dispatch. I assume I'm not allowed to use on the podcast, but that's sort of where we are.

[D]

Kind of ducked.

[C]

Yeah, kind of ducked. Kind of ducked. And it's a big duck, and it's going to be a real ruthless duck. I think, you know, on the trillionaire thing, though, you know, the best thing that ever happened to millionaires was billionaires, because the conversation went from talking about we need to tax these millionaires to we need to tax these billionaires and other billionaires all over the world just breathing a sigh of relief, saying, thank God for these trillionaires, because Bernie Sanders is going to be asking, why can't we at least tax these trillionaires? And the billionaires can be like, hey, I'm just living in my house in Aspen and I'm great. And, you know, I'm just a mere billionaire. And mere millionaires are going to be, like, getting, you know, checks or something. So that's going to be great.

[B]

Social Security checks.

[C]

You know, the problem, of course, with this is you could turn around and seize 100% of Elon Musk's notional wealth tomorrow and not solve the problem or even get close to solving the problem, you'd pay for like a year of Social Security spending. If you had all that we. Would it be a year? Yeah, I guess roughly that trillion ish dollars. And so the problem isn't just the amount of debt that's been accrued, it's the structure of our spending and our income. So as long as we have entitlements structured the way they are, as long as the debt continues to pile up the way it is and increases the cost of financing the debt that we already have, it's just going to be a really, really hard problem to solve. So if, you know, the federal government won the government version of the Powerball and it got $40 trillion tomorrow and it could pay off all its debts, it wouldn't solve the problem problem because we have this huge problem going forward just because of the structure of our government, the entitlement system, and these permanently undeliverable promises we've made. And the real conversation going forward is not about how do we go about making good on these obligations, it's what are we going to do in the course of not making good on them. Because when it is more than all the money in the world, when it is more than the economic output of the human race, you're not going to make good on those promises. There are Social Security checks that are not going to happen, at least at the rate that they've been promised. There are other sorts of promises that have been made that are not going to be kept. The bondholders probably will get paid first over the entitlement holders because bondholders can stop lending you money. And government as a pay on you go system is just no fun at all for anybody. You know, democracies that can't borrow money are just no fun to run. So it's going to be, it's going to be ugly. But the one thing that has to happen, of course, is the one thing that everyone refuses to talk about, which is entitlement reform reform. And you've got a Republican president and now a Republican Party that is frankly, flatly refuses to talk about the issue and is at least as demagogic on it as the Democrats used to be. So, you know, in five years, when the Democrats come up with some kind of, you know, fiscal reform program, it's going to be the Republicans running ads of some Democrat pushing grandma over the cliff in a wheelchair. You know, that's how it's going to be. And there's, yeah, there's no one there who takes the problem seriously. And it's a serious problem that deserves to be taken seriously.

[A]

Before we take an ad break, we're recording a special live episode of the Dispatch podcast on Tuesday, June 23rd in New York City, and you don't want to miss it. We're bringing the roundtable together to discuss what's left of the right. Jonah and I will be joined by Dispatch contributors Megan McCardle and Chris Stirewalt in Manhattan to discuss the biggest news stories of the day and the evolving identity of conservatism in the Trump era and beyond. What does the war in Iran mean for Trump's coalition? Ahead of the midterm elections is maga, a conservative movement who is the future of the Republican Party. The show starts at 7pm on June 23rd in New York City. Head to the events page at 92ny.org that's 92nd Street. Yes. And purchase your tickets today. Okay. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Megan. This past week, for the first time, Kevin is of course right that neither of the major political parties is taking entitlement reform seriously. Entitlements are what's driving our debt, along with higher interest rates. The Republicans tried to tackle this in 2011-2016 time frame. They even included it in their actual budgets. In Congress, Paul Ryan pushed, and for the most part, with very rare exceptions, neither party's talking about it seriously. Neither party's proposing it. But last week there was a moment. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who does not come in for much praise on this podcast, gave an interview at a radio station and said, entitlement's our problem. We can't keep ignoring this debt. And we Republicans have a plan to address entitlements, to reform entitlements, and we'll share it with you after the election. And he was immediately savaged by Democrats. I mean, if you Google Mike Johnson and entitlements, you'll see every Democratic entity in the country has put out a statement on this, demagoguing it as one might expect. And Mike Johnson himself sadly, quickly walked it back and said, you know, really what I'm talking about is waste, fraud and abuse. We're going to get at waste, fraud and abuse, which we understand is not the problem. Is there any hope here? Megan, you had a terrific piece. You called it America's Most Boring Crisis or something to that effect.

[D]

Most boring nightmare.

[A]

Yes, most boring nightmare. We will link all of these articles that we are referring to in our show Notes. Does Kevin overstate it? How screwed are we? And Is there any prospect of addressing this in a serious way in the near future? Which I think is what needs to happen.

[D]

I am doubtful. Look, I have been writing about this since I started writing, which is now 25 years, which is itself kind of terrifying. And when I started writing, the national debt was not that big. It was was like a third of gdp. Our deficits were not tiny, but they were manageable. So one thing that's somewhat hard to explain to people is that a healthy country can basically run a deficit forever because unlike a household where eventually you're going to die and everything has to. All the books have to be balanced, right? If you just keep running a small sustainable deficit, economic growth and inflation will just erode the value of your past debt relative to gdp and you can just keep going. The United States is not in that position. And we are not in that position because we accumulated a ton. Most of the debt, by the way, before people want to complain about, like, spending or tax cuts, most of the debt was accumulated not on wars, not even on Obamacare. It was accumulated by spending on the pandemic and on the global financial crisis. Obamacare did sort of beef it up a bit, in part because it took. They were scraping to make it to say that it wasn't going to increase the budget deficit. And so what they did was they scraped basically any conceivable savings from Medicare that was not going to cause some lobby to descend on Washington with their hair on fire and pitchforks in hand. And they used that to pay for Obamacare. And I complained about this at the time, and I was like, look, there is a fear fixed amount of savings that you can do without really either hurting people or just making them super mad. And they've used all of it. And as a result, we have not done future reforms. We're now fighting over whether we're going to reform Medicare Advantage to make the payments less generous. But people really budget wonks. And I consider myself a budget hawk. But budget hawks just act as if we can just claw back these payments painlessly. You cannot claw back these payments painlessly. Those are going into extra benefits for senior citizens who have Medicare Advantage. If you take them back, those seniors will be super frigging mad. And so now debt is 100% in GDP. That's not even counting. I've been talking about let's do something about entitlements. And I remember Paul Krugman saying, well, nothing's going to even happen until 2037. And I was like, well, that sounds very fine for you, sir, but that's the year I'm supposed to retire. But also, actually, the year has moved up five years. It's now 2032 when the trust fund runs out. And the other thing is, the trust fund is meaningless. Right? The trust fund is an IOU from the government to itself. We are already closing Social Security's budget gap and Medicare's budget gap with general revenue, general fund revenue. And that means we're borrowing our deficits now almost 6% of GDP. And that's not just running up future debts for future generations to pay, it's raising the cost of capital right now. It is one reason that we are struggling to get inflation under control. Because having a fiscal policy that's this expansionary. It's like having expansionary monetary policy when you are spending more than you got, it's gotta go somewhere. And what it goes into is driving up prices and it's also raising interest rates for households. So anything that you buy on debt, whether it's a house or a car, those costs have already gone up and it's going to get worse. And it's also compressing capital to firms. Now, we're very lucky that people seem willing to invest essentially any amount of money in an AI company. But there are other kinds of companies that should be expanding, investing, upping their innovating, and they're not, because the government is crowding that out. They are soaking up so much debt that there's less left over to make the economy more productive and make us richer in the future. And this is all really bad. And the problem, the worst thing, though, is the reason this is happening is that voters do not. It's not. Yes, our politicians are feckless. They're terrible. But it's also that voters aren't demanding it.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

When you poll voters, they routinely say, do not cut entitlements, which is the bulk of our spending, other than interest on the national debt and defense. Do not cut entitlements. Maybe they want to cut defense, but only if they're Democrats. And then they don't want to cut things like VA benefits, which are a part of defense, and abuse big part of our spending. Also, don't raise taxes on anyone except billionaires or like, really, really rich people. And also, I want the budget deficit balanced. And so I was talking to a pollster about 10 years ago who I this is a perennial problem, and the only thing you're allowed to cut is foreign aid, which is like nothing. It's a trivial part of our budget. And so A pollster basically forced people to confront this. They basically polled them. They got the same response everyone gets. And then they said, okay, here's the math. Now what would you like to do? And they came back with the same answer, right? This is mathematically impossible. You cannot do that. But that's what they want. And they get super mad if anyone says, well, we're gonna have to do some of this stuff. Right. And there are ways to do this. You could cap Social Security benefits at $100,000. Right. And that would actually free up some real money to help Social Security. And that's a lot of money. Right, Right. That's enough money to keep the wolf away from the door, as my grandmother used to say. But people are insane on this topic. They want to make the benefits. They want to make Social Security and Medicare more generous. And in part, I think it's because they don't have an idea of scale. Right. They understand line items that are big. Like you paid 58 billion for a plane or something. I have no idea what a plane costs. What they don't understand is that smaller line items that are for like 100 million people are bigger than like a very, very, very expensive plane in the context of the U.S. budget. And so they're like, well, Social Security benefits, it's not even really that much money. My grandmother's really struggling. Surely we can increase that. But like, when you increase it over a whole lot of people, it really adds up fast. And. But people, they can't. Like, people don't even really understand any number that ends in ilion is the same number to most people.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And so it's a really difficult problem.

[B]

I actually wrote a column on that for the Dispatch many years ago. Everybody's enumerate. It's a huge problem, particularly when it comes to budget entitlement stuff. Just to add to Megan's discussion and analysis.

[D]

Impassioned rant is I think what you meant to say.

[B]

Well, look, I mean, it really is important to understand the political problem and the bottom up voter resistance. You don't have to be a Twitter addict like me that, you know, anytime I mentioned entitlements, I get lots of vitriol. But the most basic reform we could do for Social Security is simply having Social Security benefits track actual inflation. Because they don't track actual inflation. They actually adjust above inflation. Very wonky reasons. My colleagues at Cato have done the math on this. This alone would be a huge budget helper. Right. It's not going to fix the problem, but it would Be, oh, no, heaven forbid you actually have benefits that simply track real inflation instead of this fake formula that gives over generous adjustments every year. That alone is politically toxic. I mean, doing anything like capping benefits.

[D]

Are you kidding?

[B]

Megan, come on. You're immediately impeached. So it's a huge, huge issue. The one thing I did want to add before we go on the other, I think, economic thing that's critically important here is that, you know, the United States is and remains a kind of a global safe haven for capital. And this has been, they call it an exorbitant privilege over the years. Right. And at some point the gravy train is going to end, probably. Right. And there was actually a brand new paper today published on what would be the economic effects of the United States losing this exorbitant privilege. So other way. We're just another country. Our debt isn't that attractive. An entire year of US GDP will be lost. That's $32 trillion. Poof. Gone. Because we just simply can't get our own fiscal house in order.

[D]

That's not in one year, to be clear. Because that would, I mean, it's not like, literally we're going to have to like, give everything we've made.

[B]

Right.

[D]

We're not creditors.

[B]

But I apologize. Yes.

[A]

Thanks for that optimism, Megan. We appreciate that. And it previews where I want to go with this. We have very few moments left and I wanted, I had a feeling that this discussion was going to take the turn and the tone that it has over the course of this hour. So my not worth your time today is a very simple one. And I'll start with you, Megan. What are you optimistic about?

[D]

I'm optimistic about America. Look, you know, honestly, like, this is a great country with tons of energy and people who are way better than they behave online. You know, like, when I go out in the world, I don't see people behaving like they do to each other online. They like each other, they're nice to each other, they're polite, they're decent. But just the fact that the incredible creativity of America, the generativity, the ability to take smart people from all over the world who, like, don't speak English and be like, in 10 years, we've turned them to Americans. They're wearing their baseball caps, they're eating brisket at a gas station in Texas. Like, like, this is a great, amazing country. And look, you know, we're having some issues, but as Adam Smith liked to say, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. And I think America's best years are still ahead of it.

[A]

Okay, Kevin, what are you optimistic about?

[C]

I know that my redeemer liveth.

[A]

I mean, it's a good thing to

[C]

be optimistic about that in Canada, I guess.

[A]

I'm not going to even ask you to walk us through your optimistic why you're optimistic about Canada. Although I am curious. Scott, what are you optimistic about?

[B]

Well, I thought Megan was going to steal mine for a second, but I'm glad she didn't. Yeah, I'm going to stick with the Americana theme. I too am optimistic about large parts of real America and I've been thrilled to watch it play out on the much hated social media. If you have been watching over the last week as the World cup has been kicking up, not only is the World cup this wonderful spectacle of global sport, but also we have a lot of foreigners are visiting the United States for the first time and they are traveling across the country and seeing all of these things that we Americans take for granted but that are part of our everyday prosperity. Costco, of course, Buc EE's bottomless chips at the Mexican food restaurant. So there are these, all of these things and they are delighting online as to these hallmarks of American abundance that we of course, all totally take for granted. And so I'm very thankful for not just that abundance, but also those folks reminding us that yes, we have our problems, but we also have a lot of really awesome things too in the real world.

[C]

Did you happen to see that New York Times story on Japanese soccer fans and their, their particular tradition?

[B]

Yes. Yeah. And they did it yesterday. Cleaning up the garbage after.

[C]

Right? Yeah, I.

[B]

And this, you know, honestly, I am a soccer fan generally, of course, you know, globalist soccer fan, of course. But it's really been fun to see it up close. When the World cup came to the United States in 94, I was a high schooler, got to go to a game in Dallas, but I didn't, you know, you didn't have the kind of smartphone cameras and this kind of omnipresent media which we, of course, we denigrate all the time. But in this case it's great because you're getting all of these firsthand accounts of the fans experiences. You know, the Dutch arriving in giant orange buses, the Japanese with their little blue trash bags. It's very, very cool and a really optimistic American and global experience.

[C]

And in a hundred years when there are six Japanese people left, Steve can ask them what they're optimistic about.

[B]

Well, the robots, the Japanese robots will clean will clean up the stadium.

[A]

Can we give them all citizenship? It's interesting, Scott. First of all, I'm glad to have a fellow soccer fan on the podcast. We talked briefly about the World cup last week, and not briefly enough. Nobody else was. Nobody else was going to be watching. And I was very glad to have watched the US Triumph over Paraguay.

[B]

Great game, fantastic.

[A]

Paraguay, I don't think is very good, but I'll be optimistic about the US Team, see how far we can, how far we can go. And I'll my, my bit of optimism. I think there's a theme that we're seeing here and my bit of optimism. This is really hard to capture. I don't have any way of quantifying this, but I do get the sense just in conversations that I've been having with people, including dispatch members, non dispatch members, folks at church folks sort of beyond Washington, that the people that David French had long argued were the exhausted majority people in communities around the country are, I think, increasingly coming to the realization that they have to act in their own communities, that we're not going to solve these problems at once with sort of a swift, positive movement at a national level led by our politicians and elected officials, that if people want to make these kinds of changes, they're going to have to make them on a community by community level and by getting involved rather than watching. And I know that sounds in some ways like the most horrible cliche, but I do get the sense in talking to people that people are sort of waking up to that fact and returning to sort of the Alexis Dedouqueville power of association and community activity. Here's hoping at the very least, because these are big challenges. Thank you to both of you for joining. Thank you to Megan, who had to leave early. This was a good conversation, if a sobering one. So maybe now everybody go and get a beer.

[C]

It's 10am Steve.

[A]

See you next time. Before we end today's show, I wanted to let our listeners know about an upcoming live SCOTUS Blog event. On Wednesday, July 8, 2026 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg center in Washington, D.C. the SCOTUS Blog crew and a cast of brilliant legal minds will come together to explore this blockbuster Supreme Court term. If you'd like to register your interest, you can find the link at the top of the SCOTUS Blog homepage or in the Advisory Opinions newsletter, and we'll pop that link in our show notes here at the Dispatch Podcast. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email [e-mail] we read everything, even the ones from people who aren't optimistic at all. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and PETA Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.