The Bulwark Podcast - Derek Thompson: Ruling by Emergency

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Not only is Trump failing to provide any clarity on why the United States went to war against Iran, the administration is also sticking to its habit of declaring an emergency based on some arcane legal provision that supposedly gives the executive branch the power to do whatever it wants. It's almost as though the American legal system can justify authoritarianism if a lawyer can dig deep enough. And Anthropic is currently feeling the sting of this monarchical-style power grab. Meanwhile, the tech overlords wanted free rein on AI under Trump, but they got a Maoist approach instead. Plus, Mamdani's embrace of abundance, the movie industry's troubles, and how parents fall in love with their children.Derek Thompson joins Tim Miller.show notes Derek's interview with Karim Sadjadpour on the "Plain English" pod Derek's Substack Tickets for our LIVE show in Austin on March 19: TheBulwark.com/Events.

Welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A quick correction on yesterday's show received many notes that a 55-year-old is not, in fact, a boomer. And while that is technically true, colloquially on this podcast, anyone who's a single day older than me is actually a boomer. And so it's not Gen X Eurasia. It is just more about my Peter Pan syndrome. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, one of our faves longtime tech and culture, political writer for the Atlantic, but now he's got his own substack. He also hosts a plain English podcast.

His books include hitmakers and another one that didn't get much attention called Abundance, which he co-wrote with Ezra Klein. It's Derek Thompson. What's up? Hey, has he grown, man. Am I older than you? Am I a boomer? No.

No. No, we're just, we're millennials. Okay. It's fine. I think so. We're dealing with the linear nature of time differently in different ways, but we're just doing our best to survive it. As typical when you're on, I just have a whole kind of grab bag of various things.

we're going to hop all over the place to get various Derek interests and Derek interviews on the plain English pod, which I'm a frequenter. I don't think I've heard your opinion on this yet, so we'll see if you have one ready. But you, I associate you with like, you know, having unified theories of various things, a unified theory of everything or, you know, a theory of how something explains something else. I wonder if you have a unified theory of what we're doing in Iran, because currently, and we have American soldiers dying, gas prices rising, tariffs going into effect this week. We're arming the Kurds. We have no clear regime transition plan. Donald Trump, his whole careers and J.D. Vance, like they said, they weren't for this sort of thing.

Why are they doing it? What are they doing, do you think? I just had Ruben Gallego on my show, or at least interviewed him yesterday. That show is coming out on Friday. And I said, have you, A, seen any evidence that suggests that an attack from Iran was imminent? D, heard any consistent justification for what we're doing in Iran. C, heard any consistent description of the endgame in Iran. And he said, no, no, and no. So what's the universal theory of Iran? The universal theory of attacking Iran is that Donald Trump does whatever the hell he wants, whenever the hell he wants, and doesn't ask Congress for permission and the Republicans in Congress roll over and say, sure, take whatever Article I power you want and make it the new prerogative

of the executive branch. That's the story of Trump 2.0. It's a story of the last 14 months. And so to a certain extent, there's no possible unifying theory of foreign policy that explain what we're doing in Iran. And to another extent, like this is just an extension of the president's personality. We don't have a political economy. We have Trump's personality, right? He says, I'm going to slap a tariff on you. And if you're Switzerland, you're like, here's a gold bar. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to reduce your tariff by 50 percent because I love gold bars. That's not political economy. That's just Trump loving it when people pay homage to him and loving to do whatever he wants so that he can force

people in a positions where they bend the knee. So to a certain extent, maybe this is just another expression of his personality. He wants to bomb Iran because he wants to bomb Iran. He hopes that they change something so that he can declare victory and move on to do the next thing that he wants to do. And I don't know that it's thought out more than the next 15 minutes or 15 seconds ahead of the present time. That's the best I have for you. You described, though, kind of a gangsterism and corruption that defines him. And so that's kind of what I keep coming back to is he's obviously doing a lot of business in the Middle East. Supposedly NBS was for this. MBS is funding his son-in-law. doing business with the Emirates and the Qataris.

He and Beebe have close relationship. Obviously, there's political business being done there, potentially financial business with what's happening with Gaza. So maybe it's as simple as that. Because when you say, like, Trump does whatever he wants, that's a little bit unsatisfying to me because I feel like I'm an expert Trumpologist, if nothing else, I'd rather not be. But unfortunately, I had to spend 10 years thinking about him.

And to me, like, invading Greenland made a lot of sense for me with Trump. You know, he's bullying somebody. It's a real estate play. You get a new toy. You know, you get to put a building in nuke that has a big flashy Trump on it. Like, that makes a lot of sense to me. Bombing Iran doesn't make any sense. There's not going to be a Trump resort and casino in Tehran anytime soon, I don't think.

And so that, like, takes me back to the other players involved. Yeah, I think with Trump, the personal is professional for sure. And I don't know the conversations that he had with BB or MBS, but surely is wanted to take out the Supreme Leader, Harmony, and wanted to take out the other clerics that lead the Islamic Republic. And it's clear that MBS also saw an interest in taking down the current regime in Iran.

Maybe they got on the phone and were persuasive and maybe sort of sprinkled their conversation with allusions to future deals and Israel and Saudi Arabia. That's totally possible. I agree with the first thing that you said most that Trump does whatever he wants leaves a lot to be explicated.

Why does he want what he wants? And there again, I think that Trump is sometimes made to be more complicated than he is. Fundamentally, this is someone who likes homage, likes money, likes the feeling of winning. And so most actions that he takes are about making more money,

being dignified, feeling like he's getting one over the counterparty, feeling like he's winning a zero-sum exchange. But what exactly we're doing in so clearly subverting one of the first principles of MAGA in the 2024 election, which is no new wars, where the peace ticket, no foreign interventions that stay out of the Middle East

as far as military engagements are involved. It's surprising. One way that it was explained to me, so I did a show on this with Khrim Sajadpur, who's an Iranian analyst. And what he said to me that I thought was kind of interesting is he said, both Hominy, the Supreme Leader of Iran and Trump, have been acting from a place of significant hubris.

that Hominy, for his part, felt like he was untouchable, that the U.S. wasn't possibly going to come after him directly. And that was clearly wrong. He's dead. Trump is also a little bit on tilt, you could say, that now that he's seen that he can decapitate the regimes of other countries by, say, abducting the leader of Venezuela. And now we're talking about maybe, you know, decapitating the leadership of Cuba. Maybe he felt like, you know what, regime change isn't as hard as I thought it was. You don't need boots in the ground. You just need a really well-timed, AI-inflected drone or missile operation that takes out one guy at one time. And then when you take out the top guy, democracy will just grow.

It's like he's on a hot craps table. It's like you're on a hot craps sales. Sometimes you're making a lot of money. You have a lot of chips. Then all of a sudden you look down and you're like, I'm betting $800 on this next role. Like, I'm used to only betting $40, but I'm just, I'm high at the moment, you know? Let's just keep going. Yeah, there's something to that.

I definitely, I don't want to get over my skis and, like, equating war that's killing hundreds of people with, like, a hot streak in the craps table. But at some psychological level, what Karim Sajadadpur was saying is there's something similar between those two phenomena. The feeling of, oh, Venezuela was easy. Maybe Iran is easy. Maybe Cuba is easy. and we're stuck in the middle of some kind of on-tilt hot streak that at the moment is just, at least it seems to me, sort of unspooling out of control.

The Trump being a winner is another psychological thing. I think that he's pretty impressed with Israel's military capabilities and the Mossad's military capabilities and them coming to him being like, we know where this guy is and we're like 20 of his top leaders and they're all meeting on Saturday. And the CIA was involved in that as well. But Israel has been, has demons, you know, the pager thing. I think Trump thinks all that is cool, right?

And he's like, oh, wait, we can ride shotgun with people that are winning and know what they're doing here. I think there's no element of that to it too. Anyway, none of those explanations, whatever it is, I don't think are going to be very satisfying for people whose gas prices are going up and who are now worried that they might have family members or friends being sent into the region to input at risk or friends who are living in the region who are at risk. And just like the risk calculation for some psychological Donald Trump thriller is, I don't think that's a good risk calculation for him. But we'll see how it plays out. No, I think at the end of the day, you know, this is already, most military campaigns that the U.S.

embarks on begin at some relatively high level of polling. Right. Like one of the reasons why maybe you begin something like the Gulf War 1.0 under George H.W. Bush or the Afghanistan war under W. Bush, or even the Iraq war under W. Bush, is that there's an initial approval tacit among the American people or explicated specifically by the Congress. This is one good reason to have Congress vote for wars,

not only because it's in the Constitution, but also you get a sense of whether or not the legislature elected by the people are for this particular move. It's really unusual to have the executive branch, especially one that's as sensitive to public opinion as the Trump executive branch has been, to engage in something that's so demonstrably unpopular within the MAGA coalition. Even if he stopped today and did the Trump thing and declared victory, you know,

and it's like, had you pulled two weeks ago and said, hey, we're going to bomb Iran, we're going to take out the Supreme Leader, six American troops are going to die, your gas prices are going to go up. We don't know who is going to replace him. I think that that prospect would have pulled it like 30 percent or 20 percent. I mean, it would have been extremely unpopular prospect. And it seems like it's going to get worse from here. Yeah, this is put it a little bit crudely, but right, we're going to kill someone that most of you have never heard of in a country that most of you never think of and the cost of the American people is that they're going to pay a dollar more at the gas station for every gallon they put into their car. I mean, that doesn't sound, I think, to a lot of people like a good deal. I mean, just from a strategic standpoint, it doesn't sound like the kind of America first that I think Trump is on soundest foot articulating. Like, I do believe that one distinguishing quality of his 2015, candidacy, and you're in a good place to tell me if I'm right or wrong here, is that he was willing

to say things that were unpopular among elites, but popular among the public. It would be the distinguishing thing about his 2015 candidacy was that he was willing to be overly aggressive and bigoted towards immigrants and brown people and that he didn't want to go to war. I was like, those were the two things that Trump was saying. There were 16 people on stage. Nobody else was saying it. He was the one who was being like, no, we should ban all Muslims and we should deport. to everybody here, and also we shouldn't go to dumb wars.

Like, no one else was saying either of those things. He did both, and the people were with him on both. And so it's like, it's a total betrayal of his original case to the voters. Right. So I don't know what he's doing, and the fact that I don't really understand what he's doing makes me wonder, and this is really a question for you. You study this more closely. How long are we going to do this before Trump just says, look, we won.

The war's over. I'm declaring the war over. We did what we wanted to do, which is to assassinate the leader. of Iran. Iran, it's up to you to pick up the pieces. Rise up. Iranian people, if you want to rise up. I'm going to go back to talking about various domestic issues and sicking ice on various innocent U.S. populations. Like, at what point do you think it just becomes utterly necessary to turn the page? Because this is someone who looks at the stock market and looks at oil markets and looks at polling in a lot of cases and seems at least somewhat, if not controlled by those metrics,

and at least sensitive to them. I don't see those metrics sort of blinking green for several weeks in a way that's going to make him want to keep this up. It's a low confidence prediction for me. I was a little just texting to my friends about this this morning. We're going back to what there's a new story that the Pentagon's preparing for being there until September. What? My response to him is what I think is that Pete Hagseth is very excited about this. And, you know, Pete Higgseth likes to play war.

And, you know, it's like kind of make a wish secretary of defense now. and he wants to bomb stuff and he thinks that bombing that ship in the Indian Sea that was no threat, like was cool. And like that's what he's in it for. But I also think that Trump is going to look at all the polls and markets and gas and pat him on the head eventually and say no. Okay, war over. Good luck to the people of Iran and the Kurds and the mullahs and you guys can fight it out. That's what I think he's going to do.

But it's low confidence bet because like I said, I just, I thought he was going to talk to on this. I just fundamentally didn't think he was going to do it. So I'm missing something about the Trump psychology on this one. I wanted to ask you about there was something that was more satisfying on your various unified theories of how to look at Trump. He posted this the other day. And it was kind of in the context of the anthropic dispute. I want to get into that. But let's talk about just more broadly first, which is you wrote that you continue to think a useful way to look at this administration as kind of a systematic control F monarchy search function to discover the tools of authoritarianism embedded deep in the legal code.

I liked that. Talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, this is, I'm working on a piece about this. So this is actually a really great opportunity to him, just sort of, you know, structure the argument. Yeah. I have for a while been really interested in this mode of the administration where they continually seem to be executing the same playbook over and over again in the realm of domestic politics, trade, and international politics. and that is they seem to consistently do the following. They declare an emergency. They revive some dormant or esoteric code

that gives the executive branch extraordinary power to essentially do whatever it wants to do and then they duke it out in the courts. I mean, this is what they were doing in terms of finding. I think it was called Statute 10 that allowed the National Guard to be deployed in California to put down protests.

Statue 10, like it was an incredible, randomly random code just hiding somewhere in the legal system that they unearthed in order to defend what seemed like a clearly unconstitutional use of National Guard force. Aipa, which is the law that was initially cited to justify the liberation day tariffs, recently struck down by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, look, the word tariff doesn't appear in this law. This law is clearly not intended for these purposes. And so this is not legal.

And now we're going to, I think in 1974 law, passed after a Richard Nixon initiative that's being used to justify the next round of tariffs. Never before used. Who knew it was there? Well, the Trump folks did. It seems like over and over again, the administration is almost like teaching us a lesson in the degree to which American law justifies authoritarianism if you dig deep enough. And so it's like this search function, I said, control F marnocky, like go through the entire U.S. statute and do a control F for anything that gives the executive branch's emergency power to do whatever it wants, domestic and foreign policy. And they're using this over and over again. And it just disturbs me as a moral matter, but also interests me to the degree to which we can predict the Trump administration is going to do next. Like it almost makes maybe like a smarter, like maybe legal reporter when I'm used like an advanced version of chat cheap. or Claude, to essentially have a swarm of agents look through the law and predict where are the examples of latent authoritarianism hiding in the U.S. legal code that the Trump might use in the next two and a half years to justify some completely Kakamimi scheme that we couldn't currently imagine that that might be a way to almost run ahead of the administration and predict what they're going to do next.

The first thing that comes to mind when you suggest that is the Insurrection Act and other emergency powers around elections. And this ties to just the previous conversation. We have some people would say that part of the rationale for what Trump was doing in Venezuela and Iran is that there are people in the administration, Stephen Miller in particular, that want us to be in wartime, because it gives them greater emergency powers both around immigration and elections. And I think that's a coherent theory. It's obviously true on immigration. I think TBD on elections, but certainly plausible given their past behavior. Right. I mean, and you set this question up with an example that I didn't even give in my

answer, which is that Pete Hegseth, after contract negotiations broke down with the AI company Anthropic, labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk under section 3252, which is a section that has typically only been applied to foreign companies that are essentially saboteurs like Huawei, the Chinese company that we worried had a backdoor to the Chinese government. We currently, because of our use of Section 3252 on Anthropic, are treating them like an enemy of the state, treating them worse than many Chinese AI companies that we know have a backdoor to the military or the intelligence of the CCP. So here again, we have like, who would have thought that like a contract negotiation

that breaks down ends up with like the nuking from outer space. of an AI company using this esoteric statute. It's this idea that we're in a period where the executive branch is essentially ruling by emergency. Almost again, teaching us all sorts of ways that the legal code reserves for the executive branch such extraordinary powers if it can be proved that we are in an emergency.

That is both terrifying as a sort of matter of U.S. democracy, but also, again, from an analytics standpoint, point, I think it's interesting because, right, once you see the formula of an adversary or, you know, an organization that you're criticizing, once you, once you see the formula, then you can run ahead of them and detect it. And so I, I'm hoping that lawyers can sort of get ahead and, you know, maybe, maybe make their arguments, for example, of the Insurrection Act, if that's going to be used in, you know, the midterms for 2028, you know, get those arguments ready under the understanding that, under the prediction that, you know, something in the wrong.

realm of an emergency might be declared for future elections. All right, y'all, there's nothing more important than a good night's rest. I'm a big rest advocate. A lot of people don't believe it because, you know, I'm doing 11D hours of content a day. But yet I'm still resting. I'm still, it's important. I apologize for those of you who are listeners who struggle getting to sleep. Not me.

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I want to go deeper on Anthropic, but your answer there peaked one thought in my mind that it's tied to the abundance book and kind of how Democrats should think about this sort of thing. And that is, you know, does this realization, like make you think differently about how the other side can govern, right? And so in a lot of ways that the Democrats have been vetoed from there, from getting their priorities through by activist groups that look through the code and look for ways to slow down projects that they don't like. This is what you wrote about in your book.

Should a Democratic, you know, administration in the future think about how to, how to inverse that to, you know, be a benevolent control-f monarchy? Yeah. There's a part of me that was almost wishing you wouldn't ask this question because I, like, I struggle with it a little bit. I was just having this conversation with a friend. I was on a John Stewart couple, like, over Christmas, and he basically asked a version of this question with him being like enthusiastically on the side of yes. Like we need kind of a benevolent, soft authoritarian on the left. And I just, I like vacillate back and forth wildly based on the example provided, you know.

And I think that there are some examples of just do things that are absolutely right and others that get me very nervous. So anyway, go ahead. Yeah, it's a really, really great question. And this is also literally thinking out loud. You keep hitting on articles that I want to write. Maybe after this podcast is over, I'm going to go back and just listen to myself and be like, oh, yeah, here's like my five next columns. If you want to just team up the Derek Thompson substack with the bulwark, we do have an editing

team, just something to think about. Fair point. Here's a thing a useful place to begin. Abundance wants to follow the law. We also just want better laws. We want zoning laws to be better. We want permanent laws to be better. We want energy construction project laws to be better.

I don't want a future that's just dueling parties, claiming emergency powers to do whatever the executive branch wants until the end of time. That doesn't seem like a particularly healthy path for democracy. That said, Donald Trump is definitely pushing on a really interesting point, which is that I think that liberals, the Democratic Party, in the last 50 years in particular. And this is a thesis that's latent and sometimes even made explicit in abundance have been too consumed with process. have been too obsessed with, let's make sure that we create processes that listen to every possible group before moving forward with the outcome rather than focusing on outcomes in the first place. That's absolutely a theme of abundance, this liberal almost fetishization of process. Donald Trump does not fetishize process. That's what to him sure. And so there's a way in which

He's almost like the warrior of the opposite of any points the ways in which you can go too far on both dimensions. You can be a party that is too obsessed with procedure and you can be a party that is so uninterested in procedure and so taken with the ability of the executive branch or whatever ruling party is in power to just run roughshod over the law by claiming emergency powers forever. Those are two different extremes. I want to land somewhere in the middle. There are examples from the book of Democratic leaders declaring an emergency and using that emergency to do what I think is objective good. So the classic example from our book is when the I-95 bridge fell down in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro declares an emergency. He sweeps away a bunch of permitting and NEPA rules in order to build the bridge back as fast as possible.

I think the line we quit it from the book is that under typical conditions that bridge would have taken. taken nine years to build, and instead it took only a matter of months. That's fantastic. I want bridges to be built faster in America, especially when those bridges fall down and they typically carry millions of cars. I don't want those same emergency powers to be used in order to terrorize Hispanic Americans. So one can believe that it is possible for the president to move faster than the executive branch typically moves and also believe that one can move fast to do terrible things and one can move fast and do good things. And that's why you simply try to win elections.

It's why it's important to be the party in power who has the power to use those same laws to move outcomes in a good direction rather than a direction of terrorizing people. It's funny that you mentioned Wario, that he's a warrior because for some reason that was stick to my head when I was reading Dario's memo in the information yesterday.

I was like, it's kind of like we have now a Mario and a warrior and Dario is kind of like a different type of bizarre archetype. He was head of Anthropic for people don't know. Here was his memo. Derek kind of laid out the backstory for people that missed it. Basically, the Department of War was using Anthropics AI tool clawed for military purposes. And Trag wanted to put some pretty normal limits on the use of this tool.

Like you can't use it for mass surveillance of Americans. Now you can't use it for surveillance. You can't use it for mass surveillance of Americans. And you can't automate it so that the tool itself shoots weapons, like a human has to has to do it. That's kind of a short thumbnail of what the limits were. This was what started, you know, the fight that you just referenced, Derek, which where

the government now turned anthropic into you have an enemy company that they're trying to kill. Dario's comments about why this happened in an internal memo to staff this week. It was this. We haven't given dictator style praise to Trump while Sam has, talking about Sam Altman

of Open AI, which is now going to take on the contract. We have supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We've told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement. And we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees. What do you make of like this, the fight that is now emerging where like he's trying to position like, I guess, a white hat and a black hat AI company or a blue versus a red

AI company maybe, you know, competing in the public square? What do you think the implications are of that? There's something I feel very strongly about and there's something that I'm still trying to work out my feelings about. I'll start with what I feel very strongly about. And that is that Pete Hagseth, labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk, and essentially saying, therefore, that Anthropic can't do business with any company that does business with the Pentagon, companies that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, that's an attempt to murder

a company as the result of simply not getting what they want out of negotiations. that is a direct violation, I think, of the principle of private property. You cannot be the government and enter into a contract with a private company and say we have terms. Those terms could include the price. It could include restrictions on use and say, if we don't get what we want, we reserve the power to destroy your company by saying that you can't do business with any company that does business with the U.S. government. That's unbelievably, unbelievably Maoist, I think. and it's sharply ironic

that when the Trump administration came into power, one of the big differences between their perspective on artificial intelligence and the Biden administration's perspective of artificial intelligence was on the issue of regulation. The Biden administration was much more pro-regulation of AI, especially in the future than the folks who came in in the Trump administration.

And now you have Pete Hexeth essentially establishing the federal government as the most aggressive regulator of artificial intelligence in the developed world if you essentially have the government being able to say we can destroy your company if we don't come to terms. So that's what I feel most strongly about, that this is egregious behavior on the part of, I can't believe I have to say it, but the secretary of war.

War, that's how we do it. You have to make fun. War, sorry. Excuse me, there's no guttural accent there. War. When I feel less strongly about is whether Anthropic had any business being a contractor with the federal government or with this federal government. I believe that like two parties in a contract can simply agree to disagree, right?

I spoke to folks in the administration about this case. I spoke to folks in the administration, I think, are uncrazy. And they said this to me. They said, look, if Lockheed Martin was doing business with the U.S. government, and they sold the U.S. government in one of their fighter jets, and they said, by the way, we have certain restrictions on the use of these fighter jets. You can't use this jet to bomb Iran. we would really prefer you don't even fly these jets in the Middle East at all

because of the morals and the values of this company. If the Defense Department was simply like, okay, we're not going to buy your planes, Lockheed Martin. No, thanks. That's how things go. I think it's okay for the U.S. government, for the Pentagon, to have said, look, you want certain restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence, and it's my understanding that this really broke down when it came to autonomous technology, even more than the surveillance piece that's being talked about a little bit more.

in the media. It's my understanding it really broke down over autonomous use like autonomous drone swarms and things like that. If Anthropic has different values in the Pentagon,

I think two parties can simply say this deal can't go forward. Yes, we signed a $200 million contract with you. This would be the perspective of Anthropic. A year ago,

you want to change in terms of that contract. We're not comfortable with that. Goodbye. The contract is over. That's normal behavior. You want to sign a contract

that allows for AI, use of autonomous drone swarms, you can go to OpenAI, you can go to Gemini, you can go to whoever else, and you can sign that contract. That's freedom. That's the kind of capitalist freedom that I believe in. Using as a back pocket tool, we nuke your company from outer space if you say no, that's egregious. That's insane, insane behavior. And I honestly almost wonder, this is maybe a hope I'm putting out in the world. It's so insane. I don't know if it's last the month. I don't know if that supply chain restriction last the month because it's so

unbelievably crazy and demonstrably anti-capitalist. And the truth is, the folks who are running AI policy for the Trump administration, like David Sachs, you can say a lot of things about them, they're capitalists. They are neoliberal capitalists. Some of them are getting a little fond of Chinese capitalism, I think. Yeah, but even there, it's just, it's weird. I don't support this policy. But it's interesting that they are more willing to sell. invidiat ships to the Chinese and the Biden administration. That's neoliberalism. The idea of like unfettered

globalization is the very thing. Or it's corruption. Well, yes, yes. You could simultaneously describe it. You could simultaneously describe it. I'm not trying to bend over backwards to make their policies, to sainwash their policies. You can simultaneously describe it as Jensen Wong, the CEO of Invidia,

being the tail that wags a dog of the Trump administration, right? That is a, I think, a valid interpretation. And there's another interpretation that says How ironic is it that the Trump administration's centerpiece of economic policy is tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. But how do they treat artificial intelligence? One, they exempt tens of billions of dollars of computer parts from tariffs. AI is exempt from tariffs.

Number two, they sell the parts promiscuously around the world. We have a protectionist policy for everything that isn't AI and a neoliberal globalization policy for everything that is AI. That's interesting, and I think it's true, and it makes deeply ironic the fact that this hyper-capitalist approach to AI policy now sits alongside this frankly Maoist approach to punishing companies that don't sign the right contracts

with the Pentagon. That is an incredibly weird juxtaposition of policies. You basically echoed this. I don't know how much there's to add, it's worth noting that it's not just us, like Lib Cucks that are advancing this, like Dean Ball, who was in the Trump administration, doing AI, made essentially the case you just made about the perniciousness?

I may or may not have just gotten off the phone with Dean Ball five minutes ago. Okay, yeah, okay. So is there anything to, and I think the interesting thing, and he basically echoed the case you just made, so we don't need to repeat it about why this policy in particular is pernicious. We're saying for folks you don't know, Dean Ball is one of the co-authors of the AI Action Plan from the Trump administration. He worked for the administration for five months.

Yeah, so he's against us. But then he made kind of even a broader case about how, this is kind of a sign of the end of the American Republic. It would be a little dramatic, but that it's just one more advancement in institutional decay and in advancement of tyranny through the executive. I don't know if you have anything to add about that. I don't want to steal thunder from my own podcast.

I think this show is going to come out on Tuesday. Let me steal man Dean's case because I don't see everything from his point of view, but I think I see what he's getting at here. imagine two trains coming down two tracks, sort of barreling into this entity that is a stable American democracy. One train is the extraordinary concentration of power in the executive branch that we've seen surely under the Trump administration, no elaboration necessary, but that we've also seen in the last few administrations, the growth of executive orders. The book, the imperial presidency was written by Arthur Schlesinger 60 years ago, so the idea that the executive branch is, is growing in its power and that the legislative branch, Congress, is becoming more and more of a sort of shriveled, do-nothing rump of American democracy. That's something that has certainly been accentuated by the last 14 months, but is a theme that pre-existed Trump's election.

Sure. That's the first train that's coming toward us, the extraordinary monarchical power of the executive branch that's emerging. Tray number two is that artificial intelligence is simply going to be able to give to certain executive authorities powers that they've never had before. One of the big worries that the Biden administration folks have of AI being sold into China is that China would build a surveillance state that would make 1984 look like kindergarten. They would be able to use all the technologies that exist on the bodies of Chinese people and along the streets of China in order to surveil people. such that they create a kind of 21st century panopticon that eliminates any sense of personal or private freedoms. It's not crazy to think

that an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence could do the same in the U.S. in a way that would allow an executive branch of the future to use all sorts of private data to eliminate freedoms that we somewhat come, come to expect. That, for example, if you want to use my computer and search data in order to make some kind of case against me, if you're an administration and I'm a critic, it's a little bit labor

intensive to ask a bunch of different people at NSA or some other agency to track down all this information and put it together into some kind of cash that that build. holds this case against me. But what if you have a team of AI agents that can pull together extraordinarily personal information about Americans, the drop of a hat? Well, now what you've essentially done is transform the microeconomics of government surveillance. And so if you think about these two trains coming down the track, the rise of anarchical powers in the executive branch and the incredible falling price of mass surveillance and the things that autonomous AI agents could do with it, that's a frightening picture. And so that's part of, I think, what he's worried about when it comes

to what does American democracy really look like if we have this super empowered executive branch that's also making use of a technology that's more facile in getting into our lives and combing across data than anything we've had before. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month, BetterHelp, is taking a moment to celebrate women and all the work that they carry at work and relationships and families. March includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress. And Better Help wants to remind women how much they matter and that if needed therapy, you can offer a space for them to take care of themselves and the way they deserve. Better Help therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US of A. They do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy,

goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment right means they typically get it right the first time. But if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored wrecks. Your emotional well-being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash the bulwark. That's betterhelp.com slash double work. I want to talk about, expand on this a little bit

through the conundrum of how our tech oligarchs think about all of this, right? Because there is a little bit of a paradox here where as you kind of laid out, they were very upset with the Biden administration's plans for AI regulation. They don't want that.

So I guess the question is, what do they want? And maybe they want the Panopticon. I don't know. But I want to play for you. There's this clip that's been going around for a while now. I want to get your take on.

And in this clip, Andresen is talking about what a supposed Biden administration official was telling him about their plans for AI regulation. AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups. Like don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist.

There's no point. They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're going to basically wrap them in a, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition. We're going to control them and we're going to dictate what they do. And then I said, well, I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because, like, the math for, you know, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And, you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community. and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed.

And that if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. Wow. And I said, I've just learned two very important things because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter. I'm kind of skeptical this conversation even happened, to be honest, really happened how he said it. But Mark Anderson claims that in that he's talking to some Biden administration AI official. and that they were saying, Mark, don't even start AI companies, right?

Because government's going to regulate this and control it. We're going to pick a couple of winners and call it good. He objected to that because he wanted the world to flourish. The AI world to flourish, that is. But it's pretty interesting in the context of what we're saying with Anthropic. I just wonder what you think about it. I was in the room. I have no idea what the Biden folks said to Mark Andreessen,

but here's like a statistical fact. Y Combinator is probably the most famous startup incubator in the Bay Area for new companies. So if you want to understand, like, what are new companies in America interested in the realm of tech? Go to Y Combinator. Under Joe Biden, the share of Y Combinator companies that were AI companies rose from something like 20 to 90%. So this idea that the Biden administration wasn't going to allow AI startups to exist certainly runs in the face of the evidence. that dozens and dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of AI startups, not only existed under Joe Biden, but the number kept growing.

So I don't know what that conversation exactly was about, but if the Biden administration's policy goal was to stop AI startups from happening, that was the least successful Joe Biden policy that exists, and it has some competition. It's a competitive category. That's point number one. Point number two is I would point out the obvious irony that Mark Andresen supports an administration that is currently dead set on controlling, controlling anthropic and destroying the company

if they aren't able to control their defense relationships. That's a little ironic. If your fear of the Biden administration is that they were going to exert too much regulatory power over the artificial intelligence industry, then why? Why aren't you unbelievably furious at the amount of regulatory might currently being brought in order to punish Anthropic? There's an irony. More broadly, like, what do the tech oligarchs want? I don't know.

But I think it's always important when, like, describing a group that feels like an outsider group. This happens with billionaires. It happens with CEOs. It happens with any outgroup. It can happen with, you know, other ethnicities. Sometimes when we're trying to describe an outgroup, we describe them. as a homogeneous thing. And then the more you learn about that outgroup,

the more you realize how much heterogeneity exists inside of it. So it's one thing to easily say, you know, billionaires want X, tech CEOs want X. But do you know Sam Altman and Dario Amadeh. If you know their history, if you know that Dario Amade left Open AI in order to start Anthropic,

if you know that like they hate each other to the extent that like there was recently a photo op on a stage, in India of like AI CEOs sort of like holding each other's hands and Sam and Darya were right next to each other and their hands were just up like this not making contact with each other.

These are really, really different people and I think that I do think they want different things. Does Sam like to be touched? Are you sure that's not like a spectrum thing? I think he was holding the hand. I'm not going to do a whole Zeprooter film thing on like exactly who was touching Sam. Sam seems like the kind of person

doesn't like to be touched, but okay, I take your point. I think the bottom line here is that in trying to describe like what did the artificial intelligence architects, you know, one from this technology. I think it's hard to say for a couple of reasons. One, some of them deliberately started their companies in opposition to companies that existed. Well, then, can we just narrow the question then to the Trump-loving oligarchs, you know, the Andrescent and the Teals and, you know, this? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. They want to make money. They want to make money. And they

feel like Donald Trump is a counterparty that they can negotiate with. And the Biden administration was group of people they couldn't negotiate with. I think that's as parsimonious an answer as I can possibly give. I don't think that the, entire tech right necessarily feels like Donald Trump really is as great as they let on. I think that in private conversations that are not being live tweeted, my sense is a lot of them are willing to say, this action is crazy, that action is crazy. But fundamentally, these are people who got into business to do business. And they ended up lining behind Trump, not only because they were ideologically aligned with

him and against some kind of like, you know, wokeery that was incipient Silicon Valley around the country, but also fundamentally because they were like, Donald Trump is a counterparty that we can do business with and that we can get rich with. And we're concerned that the Biden folks are going to stand in our way, in various ways, whether it's crypto regulation or something in artificial intelligence. I want to be clear, like, there's some questions that you ask me where I'm like, I feel very confident about this because I've done the work. I have not done the work and understanding exactly what these guys want. Yeah. I ask it just because I, this is where I get into like the bulwark info, worst territory sometimes, but I don't know. I just look at the behavior

of what we've seen from them fully getting on board with Donald Trump, centering basically around crypto and AI as the reasons and, you know, wanting to have total deregulation of that and becoming overly hostile to Biden over some pretty minor, frankly, attempts to put reasonable regulations on those two products. I don't think what I see is like some libertarian desire for no government control. I think what I see is that they want to gain as much power as possible outside of the government with their AI and monetary tools and then have a client government that works in concert with them. I think it's just a different brand of authoritarianism. I think that that's what they want. Maybe you think you're drawing a distinction and maybe you are drawing distinction.

I don't see much daylight between our answers. I think fundamentally these are, you know, these are venture capitalists with limited partners who want to return their limited partners as much money as possible and think that the Biden administration's rules and personnel were likely to get in the way of that end and saw in the Trump administration a group of people that were very interested in making deals with more conservative VC capitalists and essentially doing whatever they want. And to a certain extent, you know, you have to admit that a part of that bet is definitely paid off when it comes to say crypto regulation. The Biden administration was absolutely regulating crypto. You said the regulations were minor. I think folks in crypto would say the regulations

were significant. It doesn't matter. The point is it is an objective fact that crypto has been significantly deregulated. And see, regulation has also come under. De-unregulated, I would say. Yeah, unregulated. I mean, you look at the Trump deal with finance alone. I mean, it's just absolutely pure. You cannot do crypto crime now.

There's no enforcement of crypto crime. No, that's right. Yeah, crypto crime, right. It's a paradox. Right. And so there, I do think, yeah, their prediction that the Trump administration would not only roll over on crypto regulations, but also they were interested enough in making hundreds of millions of dollars on crypto would mean that they would have a counterparty in the White House, right?

I do think that that was a part of the calculation. I think it's a bad bet because, you know, you've seen how this has gone poorly with, you know, stupid populist authoritarians and the big industrialists to cut the deals with them. There's just a lot more technology around at this time. While we're doing the big industrialists and trying to figure out what's happening, would you have a hot take for me on the Paramount WBD merger at all? I just look at our friend Zaz. And I've got to think, as the capitalist wing of Antifa over here at the bulwark,

you know, I find myself sometimes frustrated with the capitalist part of our mission because, like, this is a person that took over a company, like, added absolutely no value to the world at all, fired a lot of people, made the product less appealing, more expensive, less viable in the market, and then just sold it to an EPO baby for way more than it's worth, because the Nepo Baby wants to influence the government, and he is, like, applauded in business circles as, like, a great capitalist. And I'm like, this is crazy to me.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm quoting from the scripture of Matt Bellany, my fellow podcaster at The Ringer, and also author of a great puck newsletter on Hollywood, that it's a little morally sickening for someone to make, as I think Zazlai will make, $800 to $900 million dollars by, executing a sale that is almost certainly to result in the loss of thousands of jobs. The idea that you can make $900 million by simply cutting jobs really sucks.

I had a preferential tax treatment on that too, which is nice. You know, you're not paying at the income tax rate. That's nice. I do think that there's like two layers to the story. Like, I do think one layer is the story of the merger. Netflix's bid, the rejected bid, the fact that yet again you have the Trump administration using antitrust as an extension of personnel policy, basically picking winners and losers based on who are friends of the administration. And it's important to say here, and I think you started this ball rolling,

David Ellison, the head of Paramount, which is buying Warner Brothers Discovery, is the son of Larry Ellison, who's one of Trump's best billionaire friends. And I think his soon to be neighbor, he's a CEO of Oracle. I think Ellison is buying some property near Mar-a-Lago very soon. So there's there's that story, which is like really sickening. It's sickening in a moral level at a legal level. But it's in this, it's in this broader, and this is sometimes where people hate me, where I talk about macroeconomics. It's so cold. But it is existing in this broader context where Hollywood is just really struggling. The reason that Warner Brothers discovery is a distressed property is that it's an old school legacy player in a world that's being completely transformed by streaming and TikTok. I mean, just two statistics. could be able a sense of just how, in what trouble the movie industry is in. Number one, in the long picture, Americans used to buy 35 movie tickets a year in the 1940s.

Now we buy 2.5, 2.7 movie tickets a year. That's an enormous decline. But that change is not just over, say, 80 years. Just since the pandemic, I think Morgan Stanley, yeah, J.P. Morgan recently did this analysis, where they looked at different businesses in terms of their recovery since the pandemic. And so they showed that restaurant sales were up like 20% and cruises were up

and hotel revenue is up like 20% since the pandemic. And then you go all the way down to movie tickets bought. And it's down 40 to 50% since the pandemic. I mean, the movie industry is never coming back. Film sold about 1.2, 1.6 billion movie tickets a year every year of the 21st century. before 2020, at this rate, at current trajectory, Americans will never buy one billion movie tickets

ever again, ever again. The movie industry will never get back to 2019. And in that context, you're dealing with companies that just aren't built for the next five, ten, certainly 20 years. And as a result, like something's going to have to be done. Some jobs are going to have to be cut. And that absolutely sucks. And I certainly don't think that Zazlosh, we paid $900 million for executing a deal. Manage that decline. Exactly, for managing the Roman decline. Like, there's a reason why we don't talk about the Roman emperors and the backside of, you know, Pax Romana as being great.

Like, they didn't necessarily do a great job. They were just there as the roller coaster was rolling down the hill. But I do think it's important to say just a matter of like understanding the big picture here that, like, Hollywood is in trouble. and the reason why you have these distressed assets being passed around is that Netflix and TikTok and YouTube are eating everybody's lunch. I agree with that. This is why we have our dueling expertise and obsession, though, because I just would add on to that the simultaneous story is that the Ellison's wildly overpaid for that

product that you just laid out. Yep. That is declining. That because they think that they've got like a great business idea. This isn't, you know, capitalism in the purest sense. talking about how you have a, you know, somebody who's got a new idea about how they can create more value out of this company. And so they're going to purchase it or they're going to find efficiencies. It's not any of that. It's just corruption. They want to get favor with the government and they want

to have more influence over the flow of information. Simple as that. Like, that's why they bought the company, not because they want to create more value. Does anybody think there could make money in this deal? Like, I don't think anybody even thinks they could make money on this deal. I don't think. And we didn't even mention the fact that I believe the debt receipt right now. $79 billion in debt that this company is holding. And who's covering that? The Saudis, the Emirates, and the Qataris, tying us back to the original. And the rough thing for the folks working this industry is it's really, really hard to pay off

that debt, given the future sort of earnings of this company without cutting a lot of jobs. And so essentially, the debt's going to be serviced on the backs of a lot of people who work in Hollywood. It all really, really sucks. We end up having a Saudi Arabian Batman to pay off the debt. You know, that's nice. Base in Riyadh. Okay, we got to go fast.

these last last ones because as always we're going over i'm cutting some of them you have an orality theory of everything podcast it was great people should go listen to that how metrics make us miserable i totally agree with that so i'm anti metric you're in your aura ring and talking about how that's making you sad people should go read about that i want to get you on on three more things rapid fire just on abundance stuff updates i had morris cats on yesterday's pod who is zoron's media consultant and um on the internet you would think that there's is like a massive debate over your book between like left populists who you know think that you're in in the thrall of rich billionaires and then you have like others who are more pro

abundance who just think that i don't know democrats should should provide better services to people and that and that the left critics are crazy at the elite level though you have to feel pretty good that that kind of across the democratic spectrum at least people are at least taking elements of this. And Zoran, in particular, I'm wondering how you had kind of grade him on an abundance scale in the first couple months. Super early to offer a grade, but I'm really, really glad you pointed this out. I think my first column for my substack was about an idea that I called the poster politician divide, where I said that if all you do is pay attention to the debate about abundance on the internet, which is poster versus poster, it's going to look like the left versus

the center left absolutely hates each other and that you can either be an economic popular, list or believe in some abundance principles like making it easier for people to build housing. That's an illusion. It's an illusion of Twitter. It's an illusion of posting. The reason there's a poster politician divide is that Zoranamdani looks at the example of Jersey City just across the river where supply-side reforms allowed them to build more housing, which pushed rents down, not just rent-free, rents down. And he said, I like that. There are a lot of abundance-pilled folks who are housing advisors to the Mamdani administration as maybe you were hearing from

from Katz, your guest the other day. Well, it's kind of funny. When I asked him why that happened, he was like, you know, when you're in an executive role, you stuff to start making practical decisions. And I was like, oh, great. Reality is interesting. If you want to call it practical, yeah, yeah, yeah, if you want to call it, yeah, a negotiation with practicalities, that's

fine. But I think it's important to say this is not just Mamdani, right? Elizabeth Warren is the co-author of a very good, very promising housing bill that has a lot of abundance principles in it, even though I'm sure a lot of folks who work for Elizabeth Warren believe that, you know, I am brought to you by the Ellisons. You know, Chris Murphy, I think, is a progressive. He's talked about abundance being something that can exist alongside economic

populism. James Tolariko, I know for a fact because I've spoken to him as someone who likes abundance and also talks about how the problems in America aren't left versus right, but up versus down, the 1% versus everyone else. There again, you have economic populism and you have abundance. It's, you know, Roe Kana, another example of a progressive representative, who on the one hand is definitely thought of as maybe like one of the most famous advocates of Medicare for all, which to a lot of people doesn't sound an idea that sort of leaps from the pages of abundance and has also spoken not only publicly, but also privately about how much he likes a lot of what's in abundance, especially the stuff about increasing state capacity of the effectiveness of governance. I'm glad you pointed that out because I think that conflict is great media. And so definitely don't make this like the headline of the YouTube clip. Yeah, yeah. Conflict is good media.

It'll probably be me making fun of Mark Andreessen. That's absolutely fun. That'll do a little better. Yeah, conflict. Because conflict sells. Conflict sells. I should have made fun of his cone head when I was doing that. That would have done even better.

Yeah, I'm not going to get in on that, but feel free to make that the clip. At the end of the day, like the cash value of politics is what happens in the world, right? Like, why does politics matter? Because the people who win power do things with that power. If people who run for office who agree with aspects of the book don't want to put permitting reform on a bumper sticker, I don't give a shit. Like, when abundance is what happens if the bumper sticker works and you win. How do you make people's lives better? Like, that's what I care about.

Plus your topics are like tenuously related because in, I guess it was 23 and 24, you did an end of year article for the Atlantic about like the scientific advancements of the year. I always really liked that article. Breakthroughs of the year. Yeah. And you'd come up on this podcast. We go through the breakthroughs a year. You'd learn me some things about science because that was the category

I did the worst in on my ACT. We didn't get to do that this year because you're a parent now. Yeah. So you took it off. Twice over, yeah. Yeah. And so I want to first here,

if you have a breakthrough for me, it's something to make me feel good and then we'll close with a little parenting now. Most interesting thing that's happening right now in medical sciences, I think, is we're in a phase of the GOP-1 revolution where these drugs were developed,

for diabetes. They were found to have weight loss principles, and then we realized there's a bunch of other things, that they reduced inflammation among people who weren't even losing weight, that they were good for cardiovascular health, again, among people who weren't even losing weight. And right now, I did an interview in my podcast with Dave Ricks, who's the CEO of Eli Lilly, which is the company behind Munjaro and Zepbound. And they're now in phase two and phase three clinical trials of versions of these drugs designed specifically for things like addiction or neurogenitive health, dementia, Alzheimer's. So this idea that GOP-1s initially seemed like this incredible drug that pushed one button,

it now turns out that it's more like a splayed hand that's pushing five buttons at once. And companies like Eli Lilly are trying to figure out, could we design a drug that's really, really good at pressing this button over here without side effects? Really good at fixing addiction, but doesn't cause nausea, really good at slowing plaque growth that is indicative of Alzheimer's without causing this other side effect that's common among people who use the highest dosage for type 2 diabetes or weight loss. That's really exciting because these are problems, dementia in particular. I really don't want dementia.

I don't want it either. Yeah, I really don't want it either. for me. Drowning and dementia, there might be my two biggest fears. Illiterative fears. I appreciate that. And I also like, this is an area where we've tried really hard. We have spent billions of dollars trying to find something, anything, that can slow dementia and Alzheimer's. And we have struck out again and again and again. There's a theory of the plaque hypothesis that might have been like a total dead end on this sort of dosing side and the pharmacological side that may have just caused the waste of billions of dollars of medical research,

tens of billions of dollars maybe, might have really hurt some people in clinical trials as well. And so just how wonderful would it be if it turned out that this worked? I don't know if it'll work, right? You don't know until the phase of your clinical trial is over. But, you know, we've talked about some depressing things. I think there's some optimism. This really does seem like a drug that, for a variety of complicated reasons, is pressing a lot of buttons at once. And it would be great to isolate some of those effects and make specific drugs for things like addiction and dementia. that's your most recent piece was about parenting which is very cute and you talked about falling in love with a stranger and how how parenting teaches you about that i think a little addition to it but why don't you so i just think it's being a parent is really interesting it's also an incredible cliche and i try to go directly at that that like there's nothing about parenting that isn't a cliche um which makes it hard to write about an interesting way but one thing that i feel that i don't think is is articulated enough by parents is a degree to which you have a baby or

one's wife has a baby or someone else has a baby that you adopt. And the baby comes home, and that baby is not the same baby, week three. And it's not the same baby month six. And, you know, my kids are two years and two months old. But it's not the same baby I imagine at five years old, a 10 years old, a 20 years old. And so in a way, I think what I said is like in a phenomenological sense, you don't raise a singular baby. You raise a series of babies that keep changing, yet retaining.

the basic facial structure of the baby that the woman gave birth to. And there's something really beautiful about this idea that being a parent therefore means falling in love with the sequence of strangers that keep reappearing behind your child's face. And I think an indelible part of parenthood, an indelible part of enjoying parenthood, is making peace with that inevitable change. I think there may be a larger lesson here about if you can make peace with the changes intrinsic to your child, and maybe you can make peace with the changes that are intrinsic to life and into being alive. But that I think is probably like the deepest and most true thing about

parenting is that your kids are this sort of sequence of strangers that never stop changing. And I think that's kind of beautiful. My related observation that I've been struggling to put my finger on that you had my neurons firing over was my child's being adopted was like even more of a literal stranger, right? Because like it doesn't share the DNA. And you don't know kind of what she is going to develop into. And my brother had his first kid like six months before we adopted her. And I remember being in the hospital with him and his wife, my sister-in-law, and seeing that kid when he was born. And like he looked like me and my brothers did when we were kids. Like you could just see it. He is very much strong, strong jeans. Like all my brothers, we all look

like and the baby looked like us. And this baby now like kind of reminds me just of me. Now he's like, and he's like the first child, he's very much like me. But at the time, it gave me this fear that I was like, am I going to love this kid because of the familiarity more, right? And will I ever be able to like overcome that? And like that fear dissipated like hour three of my daughter's life. You know, I was just like, wait a minute, no. And it's hard to figure out like why that is.

Like what, is it something about like how we're wired with the nurturing? You know, is it something about like what you were talking about how there is you know, this extra joy that comes from like learning about the new person and, and loving this stranger as they develop and grow. And I don't know. I was reading your piece and I was like, I still don't feel like I've quite put my finger on, on what it is that makes that connection even deeper. But I was sure happy it worked out for me. Yeah, I think it's a lovely thought. You know, my wife and I might adopt in the future and I've thought about that, right? Like how how does a parent think about a biological child versus an adopted child? But I think your experience

is probably instructive and probably very common. I don't think people are, this is like an evolutionary psych thought, so some people will hate it and some people might not hate it, but like, I don't think we're meant to do that many things. Like we're built to eat, we're built to drink, we're built to reproduce, certainly, you know, the genes don't survive without that. We're built to stay alive. But one of the things we're clearly built to do, one thing the species could not survive, without. We are built to fall in love with our children. If we didn't, if it were hard to fall in love with your child, you and I wouldn't be here because this species would have died out millions of years ago. And so like I think more interesting to eat your child, for example,

then. Sure. I think, I think, right, I think I think loving your child, I think, I think it's a, it's a, it's a blessing of natural selection that loving your child is easy. It's like, it's like falling off a log. It just happens. And that's great and not something worth fighting. So I think it's lovely that you had that experience. I appreciate you, brother. Your stuff's always good. Go check him out. Plain English podcast.

Almost always a hit for me. I do say sometimes it's my napping podcast. Oh, thanks. So, you know, every once in a while, you know, it kind of vacillates back and forth between, like, Derek and his guests have my neurons firing and I'm, like, thinking new things. And I'd like that when the podcast does that for me. Other times, it's like, this is kind of a peaceful meditation on what's happening.

And I'm starting to doze off a little bit, but then come back up and you're still going and I'm like, okay, now I've signed back in. That's pleasant, kind of like watching the masters. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like pill parties that like, you know, teenagers have where like they spread up the pills to their parents. They don't know if it's an upper or a down there. They're just like, I'm just going to take the pill and see what happens. I'm glad I heard the plain English exists in that category. Exactly. There you go. So go check him out. Plain English, Derek Thompson on Substack. For the rest of you all, we'll be back tomorrow for a Friday edition of the pod. See you all then. Peace.

The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.