The Bulwark Podcast - Derek Thompson: The Party of Vicemaxxing

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Republicans never defend Trump’s corruption on the merits. Their lot in life is just to serve up anti-moral excuses for his repeated acts of immorality. And the Dems are currently in a bit of a moral dilemma of their own over the latest Platner revelations, given the moral imperative of having a Senate that obstructs Trump’s worst policies. Questions of morality also surface with AI, particularly if we allow machines to do the thinking for us. Plus, the Dems need a Wemby, an American debt crisis seems inevitable, the global fertility crisis may be too hard to fix, and why is the English-language world the most unhappy? Derek Thompson joins Tim Miller.show notes “The Next Level” pod will be out later today Derek’s piece on vicemaxxing Derek on the great AI cost panic The “Plain English” pod, hosted by Derek “Mere Christianity,” by C.S. Lewis “Pluribus”

Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. There is so much political news on this Tuesday. We've got primaries tonight in Iowa, big Senate primary, California, governor and mayor's primary, also New Jersey, Montana, and New Mexico. Right as we started taping as well, Donald Trump appointed his director of the federal housing finance agency and chairman of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bill Pulte, to serve as director of national. intelligence. That's right. Bill Pulte, the hack, grifter that used to be like the rich guy that gives away 500 bucks to people on Twitter if they follow him. The same guy who was digging into the mortgages of every opponent to Donald Trump, you know, who went after Tish James and others based on their mortgages. He is now going to be the DNI. He has no intelligence experience, no experience at all. I think it is pretty obvious why Donald Trump is putting somebody who has shown complete, unapologetic shamelessness in going after his foes. And a position will have access to a lot of material that will allow him to go after his foes.

It's extremely alarming. So we'll get to Pulte. We get to the primaries and a bunch of other stuff on the next level, which will be out here later on Tuesday. So make sure you're subscribed to the next level feed. But on this show, we're bringing back a long-time tech culture and political writer at the Atlantic. He's got his own substack now. He's those to plain English. He wrote some books, including abundance.

He's got a new book coming out. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man? What's up, man? Great to see you again. Good to see you. What to start with one of the other news items? Then we'll kind of tick through some of the stuff you've been covering.

Yesterday, after we taped, the administration said that they were going to drop the thug fund, the slush fund after a couple of court rulings against them. Mine are good news, I guess, that the administration is following court rulings now. They had some pushback from Republicans on the Hill. We don't really know, you know, like, is the immunity part of the deal gone? Is Trump going to go back and try to get another deal? There's some unknowns. But I'm wondering what you make of the pullback on the slush fund.

It's incredibly welcome. I feel complicated about the fact that, the justice system, the court system, seems to be like the one bulwark, so to speak, against Trump's immorality. Like, you know, like, it's every time he overreaches, like, the Republican Congress doesn't step up. The Republican Senate doesn't step up. Republican commentators, I suppose, object when it's the war in Iran. I'm actually been very interested to see how much objection there's been

among some of the top podcasters and commentators about the war in Iran, because typically this man has just been allowed to do whatever he wants. But over and over again, it's been the court system that provides any kind of blockage, any kind of limitation, any kind of constraint on someone who is so unlimited and unconstrained in his clear interest in being a dictator and being a king. I mean, there's just no question to me that if that third branch of government didn't exist, that Trump would be, you know, slashing the federal workforce more. He'd be cutting programs even more that he thinks are part of the woke mind virus. he would be creating slush funds of not 1.8, but $10.8 billion, $100 billion for his friends and his thugs and people who he believes have been either heard by the Democratic Party or who he thinks can bend the knee and he can get something out of them. So it's the same story over again. You know, this happened with the tariff policy where Trump was just essentially, and I think what did I call it at one point? Like the way they treat the law is as kind of like a control F monarchy function. Like they pull up all of the laws and all of the laws and all of the the regulations and they essentially do like a control F function to see like what kind of esoteric law they can use in order to sort of rest kingly powers themselves. That's what they were doing with

the tariff rule. That's what they were doing with this $1.8 billion slush fund. And again and again, when there's constraint, it's constraint that's imposed by the courts. So it's not so much that I think the courts have this like uniform system of moral excellence in American politics. But to date, It is the one, I won't use the B word again, but the one ability we have to stop the president from essentially being a king. So to that extent, yeah, it's welcome news. I want you to start using the word bulwark as often as you use capacious, you know, like you have some words you like and it would be good, like, kind of, you know, subversive branding for

us. So you kept using it. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I guess I would add there was not like the legislative, the traditional pushback you would want from the hill, really. But there was consternation among senators. And I think that, like, Trump, it is demonstrated that Trump can be pushed back against. And I think that sometimes, you know, particularly in left media spaces, there is like a fatalism to all of this.

When he fails and his authoritarian aspirations are successfully pushed back on, it's just important to note, I think, as far as spine stiffening is concerned. Because, you know, this has happened now in a series of various things that he's had to back off on, whether it be the El Salvador prison. or Jimmy Kimmel or whatever. I mean, it's not how the system should work, but it's important, I think, to note that it's workable. Actually, can we pause there? Because this is actually really an issue to me. I did see these little burblings that were coming up from the Senate

and the Congress that were Republicans were expressing some consternation about the slush fund. And I wondered, to what extent did you think that that, I considered it somewhat light pushback, but let's call it pushback. We'll hold the noun. Sure. To what extent was that about

the slush fund itself versus the accumulation of forces outside of the slush fund. The fact that the Iran war has gone terribly, the fact that affordability is becoming more and more this wraith that is haunting the Republican Party, this albatross around their neck, plus the fact that this president's approval rating

has clearly sunk so far below the political Mendoza line that more Republicans who aren't up for election or aren't in primaries in Texas feel like they can say, I'm sorry, Mr. President, I have to draw a line here. We're not creating a $2 billion slush fund for you to pay out to your friends and, you know, various people who were indicted by January 6. Like, is it about the slush fund itself, or is it about this, this cosmos of things that's happening around the slush fund that is piercing this impression of invincibility that's surrounded Trump for the last few years? I think definitely the cosmos of things.

I'd add one more thing, which is his revenge tour, which is working in the micro and getting rid of Republicans that opposed him but is backfiring a little bit and the dynamics on Capitol Hill. You know, you have Bill Cassidy, Tom Tillis, John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell. In addition to the people that are now making political and choices based on incentives, like there's a small number of Republicans that are like, shit, I'm up for re-election, he's getting less popular. You have this other category of people that Trump has went after and who are now lame ducks and retiring who are like more free, I think, to speak their mind.

And so I do think that that confluence of political realities is affecting him. And I think that just one way to look at this is just kind of a rule of thumb is if this was June 2, 2025, I don't think that there would have been any pushback on the hill about this. I agree with that. And so I think that shows that there are at least some elements of political gravity that are applying to him. So you wrote an article about this where you lumped in the slush fund in with a bunch of other stuff that's happening. talking about Trump's like vice maxing and how they're trying to maximize all the corruption in every way possible.

And there's so much of it. It's my beat and I miss stuff. I was just looking this morning. My friend Justin Canoe over the Tennessee Hollow was posting about the Albania. There's like an out there's this huge outrage in Albania right now over a property that the government there was working with Kushner on and their protests.

And these guys are making money in so many places all around the world that it's like hard to even keep track up. And so you have that. on top of, you know, I've written in the past about like the vice signaling in the Republican Party, going for Paxton, being the latest example of this. You wrote this, like, you're concerned about this being a never-ending cycle that we can't break out of. And you're right, the in-group's bad behavior is justified so long as the out-group's behavior is appropriately condemned. And I don't want to say that like this backing off of the slush fund ends that cycle. But I'm just

wondering kind of where your heads at on it. And I think it kind of informs a little bit the conversation people have been having this week about Graham Platner too. Yeah, I mean, this was an essay written out of a really deep sense of frustration that I had about the decline of morals in politics. And this is not going to be a pox on both sides' situation. I think this is clearly worse on the Republican Party. But of course, it's not as if the Democratic Party has no moral problem. So I want to be clear that, like, I don't think the Republican Party has a monopoly on lack

of ethics, but the ethical problem, I think is clearly much, much, much, much, much. worse among the Republican Party. And I've just been so frustrated by this mode of excuse-making that I had seen among Republicans. Or, you know, you've got Trump taking hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto money from desperate followers and then, you know, a month later, you know, slashing funding for medicine for dying children or, you know, soliciting billionaire donations in exchange for pardons and tax cuts at the same time that he's cutting health care for the poor and the one big, beautiful bill. Just the unbelievable. reliable rank corruption of essentially letting billionaires off scot-free as long as they give him

political donations. This just struck me as stuff straight out of the Gilded Age, but worse in a way, because in the Gilded Age, I mean, at least the corrupt politicians tried to hide, tried to hide their vices, whereas I call this vice maxing, right? Or you could call it vice signaling. This utter lack of embarrassment about that which everyone recognizes as being corrupt. And I want to make sure that I emphasize that point again. I genuinely do think that everyone, including the Republicans who excuse Trump's behavior, recognize that it is catastrophically and categorically unethical to take tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from someone who has been convicted of violating the law and then immediately turning around and pardoning them and even going into

business with them in the bright light of day. This was happening so often, and this excuse I kept hearing was always, will Biden's also bad? Well, woke is bad. Will Democrats are bad? And sort of entirely separately from my life following politics, I was reading this book called Near Christianity, which I'm a reformed Jew, so it's not a classic in my world, but it's a classic, I take it, among Christians, a book by C.S. Lewis, that is essentially Lewis's defense of sort of Christian morality. And he says in the first chapter of the book, and I thought there's just such a lovely, smart idea that you can learn a lot about the foundation of moral thinking by watching people fight. That often when people have fights with each other, you'll have someone say,

that's my seat. I was here first. And the other person doesn't question the principle. They tend to come up with some kind of special exception for why the principle doesn't apply to them. Like, oh, I thought you'd gotten up, right? It's rare for people to say, well, I'm stronger and taller than you. Therefore, I should get the seat and you should not, right? That would be suggesting that the principle doesn't exist. Instead, you come up with special exception to the principle. Biff from Back to the Future stuff.

Very few people who aren't psychopaths in the real world, not back to the future, are actually Biff, unless you're the President of the United States. And so I thought, oh my gosh, like I had like a eureka moment reading this book that I thought didn't apply to politics at all. I was like, that's what Republicans are doing. They don't actually defend Trump's corruption on the merits. Instead, they always back into this idea of, well, look at Biden's pardons. We'll look at the Democratic Party.

Let me remind you how much we all hate woke so we can distract you from the fact that Trump is. Hunter, Clinton Global Initiative. And so I thought, you know, my God, like when will we escape this cycle of vice maxing, of excusing that which we know is immoral? By saying, essentially, I think you summed it up well. The in-group is always defensible so long as we can accuse the outgroup of being a worse evil. And I just got really, really mad about this theme that I was seeing sort of take over politics, this explicitly anti-moral excuse for immorality. And I just wanted to warn people that I saw a lot of different pockets of politics slipping into this excuse-making,

where the follies or the sins of the in-group were always excusable so long as the out-group was evil enough. Like a softer example of that that one of my favorite George W. Bush lines that he used at a funeral one time was he says that we're judging people on our side by our best intentions

and others by their worst examples. You know, and like there's this evidence that that is like a natural kind of human instinct and now we've like hypermax that. We're not even, you don't even have to like give nod to best intent. Right. It's just like it is okay as long as it's rationalized, you know, based on the worst examples or even imagined examples that you've seen on the other side. The cycle of this is what

I wanted to ask you about, though. And again, no comparison between, and I did a long Platter thing yesterday. And so, you know, listeners know my kind of view between like his old posts or his personal behavior and his marriage and like what we're seeing from the president. But like, whether it's Plattenor or whether it's some of the rhetoric around what Democrats should do if they get back in power in 2029. Like, I see this impulse in myself, right? Which is, you know, going back to the old rules, like, or, you know, playing ball or taking the high road, that doesn't maybe seem right, you know, and it seems like the right thing to do is fight fire with fire. And maybe there should be times where, you know, it makes sense for the Democrats to be in league with somebody that has

moral failings, you know, because that worked for the Republicans or do some light authoritarian on their own to send the signal to the other side that this isn't a one-way street, right? Like, that's the tougher conundrum for me a little bit of, like, how to break out of that cycle after we've been through this last decade, because in some ways, that's rational, right? Like, at a CS Lewis level, you know, I understand, you know, the moral weakness in it. But at a, like, practical living in the real world, you know, wanting to ensure that there's not one set of rules for one side and not one set of rules for the other side, like, it makes sense to use those rationalizations a little bit.

It's a really good and hard question. How do you stand up for universal morals? And at the same time, pay homage to the principle that one side really is worse, I think, right now, than the other side. So even if the morals are universal, what level of individual moral failing is acceptable among Democrats, who we still believe to be better or more moral than Republicans. I think a one sentence thesis that really sums up where I stand on this issue

is the deck to Jerusalem Demsus' article today about Graham Platner, who is someone that I have to be honest. I try to stay abreast a lot of topics at the same time. I have not followed his story very closely until it just broke the Internet over the weekend. This is her one sentence. Graham Platner is a scumbag Mainers should vote for. Think about what that sentence does.

Think about what the work that sentence does. It recognizes that the moral failing exists. It doesn't do what Republicans do for Trump, which is to avoid talking about the sins of his corruption by consistently pivoting to describing the Democrats as being worse. Instead, it recognizes that it's bad to sext 12 women, including by taking a selfie that covers up strategically the quasi- or actually Nazi tattoo that you got in Croatia in 2007. That's bad.

Like, that's bad behavior. And we should just be able to say, that's bad behavior. And we're not standing up for that as good behavior. Nonetheless, it is morally significant for Democratic. to take back the Senate and to keep in check someone who is averse to practically every principle of liberal democracy. Like, both those things are true. And I like people like Jerusalem who have the moral clarity to say that they're both true, both that the individual moral failing exists and is bad. And also to say, taking back the Senate is a high moral cause in order to

continue to restrain this man who has despotic and kingly tendencies, they're both true. And we can just say it as simply as one sentence. Graham Platner is a scumbag manor should vote for. We're going to come back to this topic more, you know, if it seems like the Democrats might ever take power again, because I think maybe there's some more complex moral questions than Graham Platner as one of 100 senators ahead of us. But I want to get you on a couple other things. I don't think you're going to be surprised to learn.

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I know. I know what I'm supposed to do. But I just don't, I don't ever do it. And one thing that makes it easy, then I get excited about it is when I see the little purple button at the top of the payment options. Because that button means I'm going to be able to shop without any friction. And that button means I'm shopping with Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the United States from household names like Alberds and Heinz to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise and everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond.

tackle all those important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go ching with Shopify and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash the bulwark. go to Shopify.com slash the bulwark. That's Shopify.com slash the bulwark. I want to express frustration with you on two topics about your podcast.

The second topic we're going to get to in a minute. It's really your parenthood. But the first is on AI. The name of your podcast is called plain English because you're supposed to explain things to dummies like me in plain English. And on the topic of artificial intelligence, I've been leaning on you. Because in my head, I'm like, you know, I recognize that, or I think at least, that in my area of expertise, which is media,

I think that AI is basically an unadulterated evil and pernicious. Like maybe there are a couple of useful things for it, but almost entirely I think it's going to be harmful to people's ability to understand what's real and, you know, there's a whole list of issues. But I recognize in other areas that might not be true, right? There are other areas where it seems like it's already extremely helpful. And on your podcast, I turn. to it to get some clarity.

And it seems like you don't have any clarity. Is AI going to reshape everything, or is it hype? Will there be major job destruction? Or will it be the opposite? Will it gain jobs? Are we in a bubble or not? There's just a lot of uncertainty. And that's frustrating for me.

I'm a simple man. I like certainty, Derek. So can you help me? No, it's frustrating for me, too. I sometimes wonder whether my job is, to be honest, when I feel uncertain or to respect the brand of

Planned English and profess a kind of certainty that I don't have. And like sometimes... I don't like that. The first one is right. Yeah. And sometimes I feel bad when I can feel myself going back and forth on a question like

is artificial intelligence a bubble. But the truth is that the facts on the ground are changing really quickly. I mean, in 2025, a year throughout which I was quite certain that artificial intelligence was a classic bubble. And I thought AI was a bubble for a really simple reason, which was that demand wasn't rising fast enough to justify the supply that was being built out. The hyperscalers, these companies that are building, that are buying the chips and building the data centers, they're spending like $500, $600, $600 billion a year. That's completely insane. No private

sector project has ever cost this much in the history of capitalism. And so obviously, I thought, this is clearly going to be a bubble because demand is going to have to rise at a rate that is literally historically unprecedented. And then what happened, Tim, is that between November and April, demand revenue rose faster than anything we've ever seen in the history of corporate accounting. Like the rise of so-called autonomous agents, which maybe listeners have heard of as Claude Code from Anthropic or Codex from OpenAI, cursors, another company in this space. They've essentially seen demand, especially from software engineers, absolutely soar to the point that Anthropic, which a year ago was valued at something like $300 billion, is looking now

to IPO over a trillion dollars. Their annual run rate, I think, increased from roughly $7 billion late last year to over $44 billion this year. We just haven't seen anything like it. And so the fact that revenue was rising faster than anything by the fact that revenue, ever seen pushed me on the margin back toward, okay, well, maybe it's not a bubble. Or if it is a bubble, the bubble's going to pop later because revenue is rising so quickly. But the latest, right, so we've sort of gone through two chapters here, right? Chapter one, it's a bubble. Demand isn't

rising. Chapter two, it's less likely to be a bubble because demand is rising. We're in chapter three right now. And chapter three is the reckoning over value. You have all these companies now that have spent hundreds of thousands, in many cases millions or even tens of millions of dollars, buying tokens, which are the unit of computation in artificial intelligence, buying tokens to write code or do something else if they're a law firm or a marketing firm. And you're seeing, I think you and maybe a lot of listeners are seeing and hearing that a lot of companies are starting to wonder whether all that spending is worth it. And so there's this question now of like, is the revenue real, so to speak? Like did anthropic grow?

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

they ended up spending $500 million in a month or half a month, which I calculated is on pace with what Americans spend annually on shampoo. So like just the developers and Amazon were spending the equivalent in like a two to three period of what Americans in that period spent on like all shampoo, like all of us, all 300 million of us. I thought it was interesting just because of what the company is. And Vidia said it was a VP. So they were looking at it and I think maybe the cost of AI for this one, this VP's team was more than what humans would have been.

And so you had the swing where you had, right, the era of it's clearly a bubble because demand isn't rising. The era of maybe it's not a bubble because people are buying so much AI. This is exactly what's needed to justify all of the spend to now, wait, what's the value? Are we spending money on a technology that we thought might replace our software engineers, but actually costs even more than the software engineers that it's designed to replace. We're in this sort of bizarre period right now where I think a lot of companies are going to try to figure out exactly what kind of AI spend is worth it for them. And that's going to make it hard, I think, to figure out what is the trajectory of spending. So that's just the question about AI as a bubble. And I know you

didn't even ask about that specifically, but I do think it's representative of how this is a story that as a macroeconomic phenomenon, is just changing really quickly month to month. And so the question for me is like just like trying to be an honest journalist is like, should I like come up with one thesis that I like post on the front of my house? And that's the thesis that I always try to defend just month after month no matter what the underlying data says. Or should I try to be someone who is willing to have a new thesis depending what the underlying data is doing? And I've gone with the latter, but I understand if it's maybe been confusing because it leads me to doing podcasts that are like, Here's the case where AI is a bubble.

Here's the case why AI isn't a bubble and everything else. So that's an economic question. There's also this moral question that I find really interesting. So if you want to go into that, I know that AI is not merely a macroeconomic phenomenon. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. I have an interview that's coming up on AI and writing. And one that's really interesting is there's been a lot of research now on what AI has done to student essays on college applications.

And this one study by a Georgetown, a professor named Adam Green, found that he looked at more than 300,000 student essays. And it finds it on an individual basis, the writing on average in these student essays in the post-Chatchabit era gets better. The sentence construction is more refined and polished. But if you look at all of these essays together in the post-Chatchabit era, post-2020, the diversity of ideas. The diversity of ideas significantly declines. And so I think that's a really interesting and sophisticated way to look at what artificial intelligence can do to art. I mean, obviously student essays and college applications aren't the apotheosis of art, but I think it's useful representative sample. Sure.

It can make certain things better. It can make certain things seem more polished. It can certainly make certain pieces of the artistic or thinking process feel easier. But because large language models are trained to come up with specific answers, it limits the diversity of expression. And so I think that's a really wonderful way to capture the danger of artificial intelligence. It's not so much... This is why Pluribus for me?

Did you watch Pluribus? I didn't, no. Okay. Good. Because it's the best, and Gilgivins Gilligan says that it wasn't AI that I inspired, which I find almost impossible to believe, but whatever. But the world gets a hive mind, basically. And then I forget what it is, like six or eight people that it didn't work on them. And so they exist with their normal brains and everyone else has a hive mind. And it's like, everyone gets really smart, like really fast, like, because you know all of the world's knowledge. But then the hive minds are getting very dumb. Interesting. Right. Because they're not gaining any new. you know, there's like this limit, right? Like everybody has to think the same.

There's not new information. There's not new discovery. You need the weirdos to like, you know, have theories that, you know, about new ideas. Yeah. You remind me, there's this, there's this concept in intelligence research that says the talk about the difference between divergent and convergent intelligence. So convergent intelligence would be something like, you know, do you know the capital of Croatia, Rwanda, right?

Answers for which there are specific accurate answers. math is a lot of convergent intelligence. But divergent intelligence is more like if I give a child a set of blocks, how many things will a child build with that set of blocks, right? How much can you do with a set amount of information? And it's clear to me that most people use artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence is best at a kind of convergent intelligence. But that's bad in the realm of art, because art is all about divergence.

Art is all about allowing the human being to express their individuality. And if you instead are relying on this external system that converges on answers that have nothing to do with the individual prompting that machine, that's the opposite of art to me. And so on top of all the problems of artificial intelligence in like the macroeconomic world or, you know, in existential risk, I'm also concerned about what it will do to especially young people, but just anybody who uses it and how it will allow them to almost like self-lobotomize without recognizing that they're self-lebotomizing

because they'll think they're producing polished answers. What they're actually doing is outsourcing the work of thinking for themselves. I'm very worried about that. When people hear that Mint Mobile plans only 15 bucks per month, a lot of them wonder what's the catch? Well, there isn't one. There's no gimmicks, no gotchas, just unlimited talk text and data, fast-reliable coverage

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and restrictions supply, see Mintmobile for details. Your last AI podcast offered me like a little bit of a tiny glimmer of potential. possibility, where it was talking about how maybe the jobs apocalypse isn't as significant as we think. He talked about the lump of labor theory and Jevin paradox, and people can clawed that if they want to learn what that is. You know, it's like more jobs. See, that's conversion intelligence, right? Definitions are convergent. Yeah, exactly. And it combined with something else, I was watching Mark and Dresen do an interview because I hate watch Mark and Dresen interviews. Are you actually going to walk me into another Mark and Driesen commentary? No, I'm not. I'm not going to

No, I'm about to compliment him. I forgot I baited you into a Mark Andresen fight the last time you're on. No, not this time. He said something that I was like, you know, that's good. Like, that's smart. And he kind of did it in a dickish manner that I wouldn't have done it in. But basically he was saying that one thing he likes about AI is that people that work for him, you know, it's like if he asked him to put together a deck for his next presentation and they

work on the deck. And then they come to him. And he's like, eh, I'd rather the deck being purple and yellow instead of red and black. And then they go back and they work three more days. turn it into purple and yellow, and then they come back to him. And he's like, ugh, actually turns out red and black was better. He's like, the person gets pissed at me, you know, because it's like, I wasted their time. And like, the AI doesn't get pissed at me.

And I was thinking about that and I was thinking about your interview. And I was like, there are a lot of jobs in our world, like adjacent, not really journalism, but like friends of ours in the whatever college educated professional class. They're like pretty unfulfilling, actually. And I think that those are the jobs that, who, whoever the sad person is that making Mark Andreson's PowerPoint decks, like they're getting paid a lot, but their job is very unfulfilling. And it feels like AI is coming for those jobs.

And if the, you know, Jevins paradox is correct. And that would mean in theory that some of those people could maybe go find other more fulfilling work that we haven't thought about. That's the most positive spin I've had on AI recently. Yeah. Let me complicate that positive spin. I think Mark is saying two different things, which are important. the first thing he's saying is that there's a lot of jobs that are kind of crappy.

There's a lot of jobs that are actually, or tasks, I should say, that are very simple and a little bit crappy. And it's probably just better to build a large language model or some other artificial intelligence system that does those tasks better, faster, that doesn't waste the time, mental capacity and emotionality of someone that you actually hired. They can focus on something else. A Stanford crowd, probably. Should somebody who went to Stanford grads doing that job? Should folks who went to the Graduate School of Business in Stanford actually spend hours of their week, like changing the pixel colors of PowerPoints that Andreessen Horowitz partners are going to use to deliver to conferences? Is that really the highest level of flourishing for someone who graduated from GSB? Probably not.

And so in this case, I welcome the machines. Like, please take over the job of in three keystrokes entirely changing the color scheme of the PowerPoint presentation. That's a fantastic use of artificial intelligence. But it really is nobody's full-time job to just change the color of PowerPoints. And that fits into this broader idea that Alex Emas and I were talking about that jobs tend to be O-rings. They tend to apply to this theory of the O-ring job. The O-ring is a reference to the part of the challenger, the tiny part of the challenger, the tiny ring of the challenger that was faulty that blew up the entire rocket. Most jobs have, let's say, five, six different tasks.

And maybe the next few years will find that artificial intelligence is really good at doing three or four of those tasks, maybe even five of the six tasks. But if they can't do the final task, then it remains in the province of four humans only. And in fact, because AI is doing five of the six tasks, the human is doing that task, keeping that job and becoming more productive in it and therefore maybe even higher paid. So there's a way in which artificial intelligence can take over, I think, a lot of white-collar tasks while not replacing the same level of white-collar work, but actually maintaining the current employment level and making people more productive and therefore making them higher paid. That's, I think, the positive vision that one could spin out of the Andreessen story and that you also spin out of some real economic research work that's been done on O-ring jobs. So that's the positive side. But let me point out a dark side of that Andreessen story. Mark is not just saying there are some simplistic tasks that we should just have AI do so that humans can do more interesting stuff.

He's saying, I don't want to deal with annoying people. He's also saying, I don't want to deal with annoying people. he's also saying I don't like disagreeable interpersonal relations and look I myself do not like disagreeable interpersonal relations I don't like being angry at people I don't like feeling like I'm making other people angry at me you know like a lot of life a lot of relationships a lot of like work both in a relationship and in a company it's about becoming comfortable telling the truth and working with people who are not you and therefore hold the

possibility of disagreeing with you. And if we start to do this thing where we let AI do every task that it's like B plus a minus at, at what point are we insulating ourselves from the burden of having to deal with other human beings? And as you know, like, this is something I think about a lot, that like this is what I've called the antisocial century. We spend more time alone than we ever have. We have fewer friends than we've ever had. Just did a podcast that I think, I think it came out today with Lori Santos, a happiness researcher at Yale University, finding that the share of men who say they have no close friends tripled in the last two decades from 5 to 15%.

What kind of world is it? Were the Mark Andrescans of the world, not Mark specifically, now I'm going to get in trouble with another clip that seems like I'm making fun of Mark. We won't clip you on this one. We'll cope you on, let's pick another fight after this. Yeah, yeah, good. But like, you know, what kind of world is it where we essentially say, I find that people are true disagreeable. And therefore, if I have a psychotherapy question, I ask AI. If I have a parenting

question, I ask AI, if my toe kind of hurts, it's a little bit discolored, I take a photo of it, I give it to AI, why I go to the doctor? Like, on a one by one basis, these things are defensible. But if you sort of cum them all up, what you're talking about is self-deporting yourself from human relations. And that doesn't seem so good to me. So I think that what Mark is saying there is interesting, but I think it's also more complex and as simple as, oh, well, AI's good at some tasks, and we can let it do those tasks without fully disemploying the entire workforce. Now, having to deal with people that annoy you is a pretty important element of the human experience. You know, it just is what it is.

Or especially if it's having to deal with people that on balance that you like, but I know you occasionally, you know, if you completely exize that from your life, you're going to have a pretty lonely retirement period. I would imagine, and maybe even before that. This relates to the happiness question. There's kind of these two intersecting issues. I'm trying to decide which one I want to talk to you about. You mentioned the happiness thing.

So let's talk about that. I was fascinated by a recent podcast you did where happiness is down basically since the pandemic, everywhere a little bit, but in the anglosphere a ton. And you worked with somebody and they did research. They did Gallup research and they isolated like Quebec versus the English-speaking part of Ontario and people, and particularly younger people and the rest of Ontario. were sadder than the people of Quebec. And my friend over who's from Spain yesterday,

and I said I was an avionne, and I was just batting around. Like, that's such an interesting conundrum. Like, what could that possibly be? I'm wondering what you think. Well, so let me make sure that I spell this out because it's genuinely one of the most interesting and job-dropping things

that I've ever worked with a researcher on. John Helliwell is one of the folks who runs the World Happiness Study. And we spoke a few years ago about the fact that the World Happiness Study, which asks thousands, tens of thousands of people around the world about their subjective well-being was showing that American happiness, especially among young people, was just plummeting. And I was like, what is this?

And John says, you know, what's interesting is it's really only youth in English-speaking countries that we see this. And I was like, huh, I'd never heard that before. It was like, yeah, you know, if you look at Spain, if you look at Eastern Europe, certainly, if you look at Eastern Asia, you don't see this decline in happiness in the last few decades. And I said, well, What's a way that we could test this? And he went away and emailed me a few days later, and he said, you know, just to spell out the story that you told, he goes, you know, we should look at Quebec because 80% of the population in Quebec speaks French. And in neighboring Ontario, less than 4% of the population speaks French. So if you really wanted kind of like, you know, controlled trial here, Canadians, that are the same in every way, except we're just changing the language, does that have an effect on their self-reported happiness?

And the answer was yes. This is the quote for the research that you shared with me. In Gallup data, used for the world happiness report, life satisfaction for people under 30 in Quebec fell half as much as it did for people in the rest of Canada. In a separate analysis of Canada's general social survey, which asks respondents about their preferred language, researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta, found that young people who speak French at home saw a smaller decline in happiness than those who speak English at home, end quote. This is fascinating to me. What is it about speaking English that is making us miserable? There's a lot of different theories. You might have one that

is more right than mine. Let me give you, tell you the way that I kind of think about it. America is amazing at exporting our culture. We're incredible at it. I mean, if you travel to foreign countries that speak very little English, you'll still see Coca-Cola bottles. You'll still see American pop stars. You'll still see Disney characters on shirts and water bottles. We're incredible exporting culture. Lollapalooza, Sao Paulo I went to a couple years ago. It was like an unbelievable experience because it's like mostly Brazilian music with like American pop stars and like American brand installations and the kids dressed like kids in America were two years before, you know? So my theory is that a certain form of American anxiety is the new Mickey Mouse.

a certain form of American anxiety is the new Coca-Cola. A combination of what researchers sometimes called diagnostic inflation. The fact that more Americans now are diagnosed with anxiety or even things like autism, even controlling for underlying symptoms. We diagnose more people with illness. We ask people in the U.S. to pay more attention to their mental health. our social media is drenched with a kind of performative attitude about anxiety and other mental health disorders, people talking about how PTSD is their identity. And I want to pause at least to,

like, create this parenthesis here that says some of this is good. Like the world of 1950s were not talking about anxiety was bad. Maybe talking about anxiety in every conversation also bad, sort of. Thank you. You did it fast than I was going to. And I think maybe we just created this culture. And we've exported it to the English-speaking world, and the English-speaking world has picked up on it and now sees people throughout the world now see themselves with this kind of sort of anxious, ruminating, self-derigating sense of like, is there something wrong with me? Am I anxious? Do I have PTSD? Do I have OCD? And we've just accidentally exported a kind of sickness to the world. And so that's my, that's my operating theory is that it's basically America's fault.

I had two theories. That one is my more right coded theory, which you took. So, you know, which is maybe therapy culture is a little out of control. The left coded theory that I think intersects when I was talking with my friend last night was in kind of a similar way that therapy culture got out of control, maybe like American consumerism got out of control. We're like, I like consumerism and consumer culture. Like when it's in your face all the time on social media, like that creates like a jealousy, you know, culture. And, you know, she was like, when I moved to America, you know, she's like, I bought a steamer. And the steamer broke a couple months in. And I called my mother. And my mother told me, you know, go to the repair shop, whatever.

And then, you know, she said that. And then my friend who introduced us, they're now married, came home from work. And she's like, where's a repair shop for the steamer? And he's like, just throw the fucking steamer away and go back to Walmart. Right. It's a silly story kind of. But it's like, There is just this, I don't know, like this kind of unending desire to want more and more that intersects maybe with like Instagram culture in a way that's unhealthy everywhere, but like particularly unhealthy here. I think it's an excellent theory. Yeah, the term that researchers use that I've picked up on is one of the clearest findings about how smartphones are bad for us is that they create negative social comparison among young women. they feel awkward about themselves, they log on Instagram or TikTok,

they see people who are rich and beautiful and carefree and happy, and rather than feel rich and beautiful and carefree and happy, they measure the distance between themselves and the people that they're seeing and feel their deficits and then feel bad about that deficit.

And I can absolutely imagine that a broader form of negative social comparison is a core piece of American social media and American even social media inflected with American capitalism, and that in addition to a certain attitude toward our mental health and the way that we think about our own minds, we're also exporting this negative social comparison and this impossible dream of getting richer, richer, richer, more and more and more beautiful. And that because no one is the richest person in the world, unless you're, I guess, Elon Musk,

and no one is the most beautiful person in the world, you will always feel that deficit when you spend a lot of time looking at your phone. I think that's it too. And I guess the last thing that I would put on that is that like, and maybe this is right-coded as well. But I'm very interested in the fact that like while I think individualism does a lot of good and that countries that have no sense of individualism tend to be locked in in traditions that are bigoted and backward and anti-woman and anti-gay, there is something about sort of American secular individualism that seems to like put it all on us without supporting institutions to help us when we're down. And it seems to lead to a lot of aloneness, and it seems to lead to a decline in time spent with friends and time spent in community.

And I just think that life is hard. And if you're going to adhere to a certain kind of extreme individualism that cuts yourself off from the buttresses that have historically helped us when we feel fallen, that's not going to feel very good either. And so maybe there's an aspect of sort of toxic individualism that's affecting this as well. I want to move to the bulwark pet issues section. You have two podcasts recently that go over things that my TNL colleagues, Sarah Longwell, and JVL care about. The first one is the debt crisis. Federal debt in 2001, back when we were all good Republicans concerned about tightening our belts, it was 31% of GDP back then.

It's 101% now. You did a podcast. Oh, fuck, I'm forgetting on who you did it with. Justin Wilfers. Justin Wilfers, yeah. You guys explored both being kind of on the center left. and not not caring about balancing the budget, but kind of dismissing some of the more alarmist takes from the right on this topic,

you know, 10, 20 years ago. And now both of you kind of coming towards maybe starting to maybe not be alarmist, but be more worried about the problem. Why don't you summarize that journey a little bit? Basically, I was concerned about the debt trajectory back in 2009, 2010, when it was the debt was 30% of GDP. I just saw the facts and the goals. ground as I saw them. I was like, look, we've got a country where Social Security and Medicare and

Medicaid, which are all programs that I support, are growing faster than GDP. At the same time that every leader of both parties is finding reason to cut some taxes. You know, you've got Democrats saying we want to cut taxes for the poor. I often support that. You've got Republicans who say we want to cut taxes on the rich or on corporations, on C-Corps and S-Corps, which got enormous tax cuts in one big, beautiful bill. And I just saw, look, if we're in a world where entitlement spending is going to rise fast than GDP, and we're never going to be able to raise taxes, clearly we're going to have an inability to control deficits and therefore debt, and that's the world that we have. And right now, I think it's particularly difficult because interest rates are high and seem

like long-term interest rates are going higher, which means that the interest we pay on the debt, which is already not particularly productive spending, I believe is already higher now than military spending for the first time in modern American history, for the first time in post-war American history. And you've got that, you've got a situation where it doesn't seem like we're going to fix that. It's just going to get worse and worse for the foreseeable future

because interest rates are high and neither party wants to raise taxes anywhere. So I don't know how this ends. I want to be clear that one of the parts of the podcast that was both interesting to me and also frustrating to me is just how difficult it is to actually spell out what an American debt crisis would look like. Because there is no debt crisis right now. Like, I am worried about the debt, but I also don't think this is just like climate change,

where the problem is here and it's going to get worse. With the debt crisis, it's more like evidence of the problem seems to be almost here, but the problem hasn't actually hit our shores. So I, you know, I trust Justin understands this. And most economists like him say, the thing we should fear is that America gets into a situation where people don't want to buy our debt anymore. As a result, we have to raise interest rates. As a result, interest rates rise overall. That leads to higher cost of money, more expensive mortgages, more feeling that cost of living in this country is tougher. And I think a debt crisis in the U.S. will probably feel a lot like a cost of living crisis. That's really bad when you see what a cost of living crisis has done to whatever party has power in America. When

Democrats had power in America, the cost of living crisis, absolutely walloped them at the polls and at the ballot box. When Republicans are the party in power, cost of living concerns are really, really crushing them in off-year elections and will, I think, crush them in the midterms. So you do not want to be the party in power when you have a debt crisis that creates a cost of living crisis. And it seems to me like a lot of smart, sober, left-of-center economists who you do not think of as typically worrying about the debt, are starting to worry that a debt crisis is inevitable. I was also intrigued with a podcast about the fertility crisis. The other complaint I had aforementioned was you took off way too long

for paternity leave. Yes, sir. The right-coded issue, I'm like, dads are needed for like a week, really. I mean, you know, you can get another bonus. I feel like you should get like another bonus week of paternity leave, like when the kid is like six months. You should get another bonus couple of weeks maybe, but you're doing a lot of sitting around the first three months as the dad. I just, I just want to throw that out there. But you took a healthy paternity leave, but maybe that's the solution to this other problem, which is the fertility crisis. I was, most fascinated by the podcast because like when jvill wrote his book about it you know the view was basically this was kind of like a first world college educated problem right where kids or people

who are having economic success and women who are going to the workforce weren't having kids and i didn't really realize like the degree to which that's almost reverse now and like in places where you think they're having a lot of kids like like working class latin america for example or also having you know really declining birth rates while like college educated whites in America are like increasing their birth rates slightly. But anyway, did you have any thoughts on the fertility crisis? Yeah, let me make my summary relatively brief because nobody don't have so much time left. My guest, Jesus Fernandez Vill Verde, made this really lovely point that I haven't forgotten, which is that there's one set of issues that tends to make birth rates fall

toward a replacement rate of 2.1. And that's things like economic development. It's things like women are going to college and they're working. It's things like a country is getting richer, women have more freedom, contraception exists, etc. All things that we tend to think are basically good. But there's a separate set of things that seems to make a birth rate fall from two to one to below one. And those tend to be things like housing is expensive. Smartphone culture is making it harder for people to couple up in the first place. It's having people spend too much time alone, and so they don't actually go out to date, and therefore they don't have that kid. And so he made over and over again this point that in many cases, it's countries like Thailand

and its cities in Latin America where birth rates are falling below what they are in upper middle income America. And that suggests to me that this is a problem we might not know how to fix. And if you just run the basic arithmetic and you ask like what is a country with a total fertility rate of like 1.5, which is becoming quite common around the world, what effect does that have on a population, say, with the distribution, the age distribution of China? It tends to reduce the population without immigration, by like 30% over the next 50 to 60 years. I mean, what do we say about cities in America that have 30% depopulation? Like, we call them basket cases, right?

It's like Youngstown. We talk about how we need to save these cities in Washington because they're the the Rust Belt towns that are emblematic of like 1960s golden ages that we want to bring back. There's basically no example of a country, of a, of a, of a place. that loses 20% of its population that we think of as a success story. But if you just do the basic arithmetic, 20% depopulation rates seem like a mathematical inevitability in many, many cities and countries around the world. And so, look, 60 years is a long time. A lot can change. Fragility rates can go up. A lot of things can happen. I'm not claiming this is inevitability. But it's absolutely

something that maybe like a debt crisis is the slow burn problem. that I think we should begin to think about. It was a great pod. You also do good science stuff. We're out of time, and I don't want to lose time for my final most derricky topic. So, yeah, great progress on pancreatic cancer, et cetera. And people should go read Derek's work on various science breakthroughs. So we both are big NBA pod consumers.

You did a recent pod with my friend Tim Albertton and all the problems that the NBA has. And a lot of them seemed kind of intractable. And I just had this little light bulb go off that connected our interests when Wembee won on Saturday night against the awful thunder who are unwatchable and unbearable. And I'm thinking we have this Knicks, San Antonio Spurs final. And it is such a gift to Adam Silver who had all these problems about injury and the, like, the season and foul bait. And you can just, for an NBA person, you can just list all of the problems that the NBA has.

And they've all been washed away. And so my grand unifying theory of how to fix our politics is the Democrats just need a wendy. The Democrats just need a wemby. I don't know who that is. A tall person? Yeah, 7.7 alien who can just, you know, whose skills are such that it overcompensates

for all the structural problems underneath. Yeah, absolutely. That would be great. I mean, look, was Obama a Wembe? By this description? We thought so. It turned out, no, actually. It turned out he was more like a LeBron, I guess.

That was great, but the structural problems continued. I see. I mean, I think the same way that Wemby doesn't fix the structural problems of the NBA, which is that the season's way too long, and at least a third of the games don't matter, and at least a third of the teams are going to want to tank anyway, because they recognize that a good

chance that a draft pick is worth more than the outcome to any particular, you know, March Tuesday's game. There's a bunch of structural problems that Wembe can't fix. And the same way that Wembe is an absolute gift to the NBA finals, like what the Democratic Party needs is someone who,

who transcends the problems of the party by becoming an individual, a personality that people believe in, even if they don't believe in the larger institution. That's what Wembe is. And that's what this finals are. I mean, it's Gotham versus the alien. It sounds like a comic book.

It's perfect. It's the most exciting player in the NBA, playing against the most sorry yet storied franchise of the last three decades. It's absolutely perfect as much as Blockbuster Gold is concerned, but it doesn't solve the other problems that this league has, which is that they're too greedy to ever shorten the regular season.

But the length of the regular season is such that even the teams themselves don't care. I mean, Janice Sancho, the third, fourth, best player in the NBA, was begging his team to let him play. And his team was like, no, we're good. Janus, we're good. Like, you stay home, watch the NBA, catch up on, you know, pluribus. Yeah, Greek dramas. We don't want your services.

Yeah. In what other sport is the team begging the equivalent of like Aaron Judge? No, no, no, please don't come back. Paul Skene's, please don't pitch for us. Like, there just aren't a lot of other scenarios where the regular season is so worthless that you have teams begging the third best player in the NBA to not play. So Wemby's awesome. This series is going to be awesome.

Who are you really excited about Gotham versus the alien? What does the heart want? The heart won seven games. And the heart's going to figure out who I'm rooting for in the middle of the seven game, I think. Does that make sense? I'll know in the first quarter. I don't know. Maybe the first quarter of the first game I don't necessarily voting for, but I don't know yet.

I think I want the next, but I need to see the court. I need to see Dylan Harper come in because I love Dylan Harper. He's my personal alien. How fucking unfair is it that, like, in fact, three consecutive seasons, the Spurs draft, Castle, Wembe, and Dylan Harper. I think it was three consecutive seasons. So basically it's like two extraordinary guards and the best center. Maybe since Korean. If you can stay healthy. It's crazy. It's crazy. So we'll see. I think I'm going to be for the Knicks. But I don't know, Dylan Harper really, what did Chris Matthew say about

Obama? He sent a tingle up my leg. Dylan Harper sends a tingle up my leg. He's a tingler? Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. That's Derek Thompson. Go check out his substack or plain English. and we left a lot of stuff on the cut of room floor so we'll see you again soon all right now all right we'll see you next time all right everybody else we'll be back here tomorrow for another dish in the show see you all then peace peace how to ins me we're serving rock or deserted blacks trying to cause a frenzy to profit quickly I'm passing by my pockets empty trying to make illegal dollars seem harder than guard and wimby when you're hardly six feet tall if somehow I could ball I better work hard on

my handles because niggas gonna try to rip me don't want a r-r-p but if I leave no got to lift me I'd rather sit inside of bintley and be the board podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.