The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1034: Derek Thompson: Trump's War on Dolls

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Just imagine Fox's histrionics if a President AOC had said that American kids have too many dolls and that she's raising the price on them. Now the supposedly pro-family administration is doubling down on 'just pay more’ for toys, while it waits for China to blink on tariffs—an unlikely event given that it makes a lot of the things the world needs and wants. Meanwhile, AI's economic threat may be here for recent college grads, Marc Andreessen has deep thoughts on VC, and the NIH (and future American Nobel Prizes) are being burned to own the libs. Plus, the Dems should zero in on how Trump is making America less affordable—and very much like 2020 again. show notes Derek's piece on the job market for recent college grads Derek's podcast, "Plain English" The book, "Abundance," by Derek and Ezra Klein Tim's playlist

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to welcome back staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the Work in Progress newsletter, his latest book you might have heard of. There's only been about 272 podcasts about it. It's called Abundance, co-written with some guy named Des for Klein. He also hosts the very excellent podcast, Plain English. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man? Hey, man. Let's make it 273.

All right. Let's do it. Let's do it. Well, we're going to get to Abundance at the end. And I'm sure we've got some bulwark daily sickos who have not listened to your other 272. So we'll do a little bit on it. But we've got some more pressing matters first. And I would like to begin with what I've been dubbing the Rick Santelli Tea Party rant for the capitalist left. That was you on CNBC. And for those who haven't heard it, let's play it right now. Be totally honest, Kelly. I've been listening the last 10 minutes of the show.

I cannot believe what I'm listening to. I heard your last guest say if the economy shrinks, that's good. If the stock market goes down, that's good. If the housing market crashes, that's good. If there's a trade war, that's good. When did the capital class get taken over by de-groather protectionists seeking 19th century autarky? It goes on for about two minutes and literally the CNBC house just like responds to you like,

what are you talking about Derek? Didn't you say that you wanted housing prices to go down? Is what is wrong with housing prices? The housing market collapse. I was like, what am I watching? What happened? I had an aneurysm on live television, obviously. I was in this chair. This is my chair to have a mental breakdown in, in this very room.

And it was funny, you know, because you do podcasts all the time, I was actually like talking to the producer, like setting up the shot, right? Like setting up this shot, like move a little bit to the left, move a little bit to the right. And I could just hear between her instructions, these little like murmurings from I think it was

Kyle Bass, a hedge funder, basically saying like, Oh, yeah, the stock market goes down. That's great for young people, they'll buy it at a lower price, the housing market crashes. Fantastic. That makes housing prices cheaper. And I kind of expected a little bit of a pushback from the CNBC hosts. And the fact that they weren't pushing back was just slowly making me enraged. I should say as a matter of framing my mental breakdown here, I had just not 30, 90 minutes earlier come back from a two week book tour.

So I was tired. I was unwashed. You have nothing to apologize for. I was coming off of a connecting flight. I had a sit in at O'Hare for like nine hours in the tarmac. I was, I was feeling pretty punchy. And when I heard these folks essentially cheering the decline of the economy and an impending recession, that's when my head left my body.

And it was- The bulging eyes are noticeable. Now, your eyes are definitely a little bit more normal shaped right now. Insect. Yeah. Autarky is my word for the year though, ever since that. I've heard been hearing Autarky Now, your eyes are definitely a little bit more, more normal-shaped right now. Autarky is my word for the year though, ever since that. I've heard, been hearing autarky a lot, and it does feel like we're coming back to that. So far, listeners, do you want to educate them on what 19th century autarky was? Oh, yeah, sure.

19th century autarky just basically means you think that your economy should essentially provide everything that people consume in that economy. So all of the avocados that Americans eat, they should be grown in the US of A, right? All the bananas that Americans eat, they should be grown in the US of A. All of the coffee we consume should be grown in the US of A.

The problem with that, however, is that I don't know if you've ever seen one of those maps of like where coffee grows, like basically none of it grows within the American border. We kind of have to import all the good coffee. There's some pretty good Duluth beans. There's some nice beans in Duluth.

I don't know. I haven't checked in on Northern Minnesota and the quality of their chocolate and coffee. It doesn't seem quite tropical that maybe give it 35 years. So yeah, you don't want autarky. It's really cool when you can drink coffee from Columbia and Indonesia and have apples and bananas

that are grown in other countries that we buy and then we give money to those countries and then they get richer and we get delicious fruit, right? Trade is good. Trade is positive sum, but this is an administration that does not believe in the concept of positive sum engagements. And so apparently this is an administration that believes that we should, you know, source all of our own coffee.

I have a social science question for you that's related to this to the economy. Cause the thing that's been most bewildering to me that's related to your rant, it's like the finance crowd is still like pretty sanguine. Right? I mean, like there was a moment there where, what did Trump say? They got the yippies or something.

They got the yips. Yeah, they got a little yippy and they got a little yippy for a minute. But the markets like basically back to where it was not on inauguration day, but on liberation day, you know, it's kind of gained back. It's monthly. Yep. I've been consuming more CNBC lately. I was not watching you live, which I regret in that moment, but you do hear a lot of like rational, like post-hoc rationalization for all this stuff like happening.

And I don't quite get it. Like, I feel like if this was Bernie Sanders, like doing the exact same policy, CNBC would be, you know, like people on fire, like throwing pots and pans at each other. I think it would be insane. Like, you know, everybody would be having a total meltdown in the business world, and that's not happening. Do you have a theory on why that is? Yeah, I think a little bit of it is fear.

Trump has shown very clearly that if he doesn't like you or your institution, whether you're a university or a law firm or a media company, Paramount, 60 Minutes, he's going to come after you. He's going to treat you unfavorably, especially if you're interested in doing business that the government has some say over, you know, like Paramount, 60 minutes, he's going to come after you. He's going to treat you unfavorably, especially if you're interested in doing business that the government has some say over. Like Paramount, for example, wants to execute a merger. And so there's a thinking that they're getting a little bit more involved in their news coverage to make sure that their news divisions don't piss off Donald Trump, who then will put pressure

in the DOJ to not allow Paramount to go through with its merger. There's a lot of fear that this guy is vindictive and incredibly petty, and that his politics is highly interpersonal rather than institutional, and so you don't wanna get cross with him. I do think that a little bit of that is definitely happening. I also, to your point,

that this just makes absolutely no effing sense. He just said, was it yesterday or the day before, that Americans are just going to have to accept that they can't buy all the dolls that they want to buy. An enormous number of dolls that baby girls in this country get, I've got one 20 months old, come from China. China, I think, makes 90 to 95% of the imported toys that Americans buy every single year. So if you're going to raise tariffs by 145% on everything coming from China That means a lot more expensive baby dolls. What Trump was saying is hey, it's no big deal. It's patriotic

Buy fewer dolls pay more for the dolls. It's gonna go down great I was like we pause at least three things one to your point imagine if President Sanders or president AOC said, it's patriotic America for you all to spend 3X on toys. We're just going to raise the cost of toys in this country by a factor of three, that's patriotic. You would have an absolute backlash.

I mean, this is obviously a kind of state controlled economy that's incredibly reminiscent of precisely the kinds of socialism that a lot of Americans despise. I mean, the Jesse Waters show, he'd be hosting it from inside FAO Schwartz. Yes, exactly. You know, like he'd have a whole doll, you know, set up all behind him, kind of like PTI, but instead of the head, he'd be... He would have a lineup of cute little girls,

one after another, just crying, crying, crying about the fact that their baby dolls are no longer being imported from China. I mean, you would have, I think, a very glitzy, highly dramatic and highly catastrophic recording from Fox News about how President AOC is destroying American childhood. And here's President Trump,

elected in an affordability election, right? The number one thing that people who switched the Democratic to Republican columns said about the election was, life is unaffordable, bragging about the fact that toys are gonna be twice to three times more expensive under him. So that's number one,

that if you just replace the letter after the name, it's just wild to think what the reaction of Fox News would be to Trump announcing that toys are more expensive. That's number one. Number two, this is just so effing stupid. The strategy that's being communicated here is that we have to raise tariffs from China and other countries in order to reshore manufacturing of goods that are critical to our national security.

Elsa dolls are not critical to our national security. It's totally fine if they're cheap. And like there's no part of the semiconductor manufacturing process that flows through the manufacturing of Elsa dolls. It's totally orthogonal. You don't need to bring back advanced robotics and say, step one, we have to make sure that all the Elsa dolls are made in America. Completely different thing.

And the final thing is that this really, truly does scale, I think, across all of Trump's policies. That if you hear the stated reason for the policies, and then you look at the inputs, they've nothing to do with one another. Like one other quick nerdy example. A lot of Trump folks say they want to bring back nuclear power to America. We want to build some nukes. That's a manly thing to do. Creates a lot of energy. 1950s economy. Let's bring back the nuclear power plants. Hell yeah, I'm for that. I'm for that too. I would love to have more abundant, clean energy in this country. Sorry, we're not going to skip ahead to that bit. Yeah, you got it.

Love a little ding or something. When we say we're a bulwark against something Trump is doing, or we need a more abundant thing, we'll just have a little, Jason put in a sound effect. Yeah, we'll see if we can get a little tic-tac-toe here. What do you do? What do you do at the federal policy level if you want to build more nuclear power plants? Well, nuclear power is literally the most expensive thing you can build. I believe one person told me that the last nuclear power plant that America built cost

12 times more than the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. You need billions and billions of dollars filled with your power. And the only game in town that is lending that kind of money over the time horizon that's needed to build is the Department of Energy loan programs office, LPO. We're getting a little bit nerdy, but this is important. Okay, no, let's do it. So if you wanted to build nuclear power in this country, the first thing you'd want to do is to supersize the LPO, make sure it was working at absolutely top notch efficiency.

What does Doge and the Trump administration do? They dismiss 60% of the LPO team. So it's again, the same way that you've Donald Trump saying we have to reassure advanced American manufacturing, and also by the way, we're taxing baby dolls, you have an administration that's saying we want to build nuclear power and also we're going to destroy the most important institution for financing nuclear power. Again and again, the outcomes are just completely disconnected from the process. I want you to assess what you think is happening a little bit more broadly in the economy here

because there are a couple, you know, we're getting a little bit of mixed signals. I mean, as I mentioned, it's kind of a straight, I guess market stability is not the right word because, you know, there's been kind of a lot of volatility, but within a band, right? Meanwhile, my colleague JVL yesterday is writing that the Trump recession is already here. People just haven't realized it yet. We shrank 0.3%. We'll probably shrink next quarter and two quarters of shrinkage and GDP is a recession.

Uh, you wrote something alarming is happening in the job market for the Atlantic, which we'll get into, but we had a job report this morning. You know, pretty good, I guess. I mean, we gained 177,000 jobs. Wasn't, it wasn't amazing job report. Wasn't recession job report. I, how do you match all of that stuff? Like the warning signs in the economy with the kind of stability in the top line stuff?

Yeah. I think the first thing to say is, look, things are changing constantly. And so if you have one theory about the economy and you're just, you're just grasping it with white knuckles, you're probably not paying attention to what's happening. You'll be right eventually though. It'll come around. You'll be right eventually, right exactly.

If you grasp for 15 years, maybe the economy will pass through your thesis. So if you look at a couple of things happening, yeah, they don't entirely make a clean amount of sense. As you said, the stock market, which I consider a pretty high quality gauge of real-time information, is right back to where it was on April 2nd,

right back to where it was on Liberation Day, which seems to suggest just from that indicator that the market is somewhat shrugging off the effect of tariffs. Now, the market knows a lot, so to speak. Which is crazy because we currently are essentially in a trade embargo with our biggest trading partner. I agree. I realize we brought back a lot of the other tariffs, but anyway, continue. And the average tariff rate is extremely high on this country.

So on the one hand, I think you've got the market saying, I think we can weather this. Now here's the next shoe to drop. A lot of folks who are pretty read up on supply chains say that trade has shut down with China to the extent that the container ships that are currently crossing the Pacific and will be unloaded at docks across the country, those are significantly down from where they were a month, three months, 12 months ago, which means that we could see very soon shortages

in price hikes as Americans go to stores, the Home Depot, FAO Schwartz, Target, Walmart, and realize that for every 100 items that might have existed six months ago in stock, there's only going to be 60 or 50. So those shortages are about two to three weeks away. And I think the market is just sort of holding on and waiting to see what happens when the tariffs really bite the supply chain. There's another thing that's happening that you teed up, which is that the labor market

is starting to show some interesting signs of possibly weakening. And this kind of goes back a few quarters. You're absolutely right. We're talking at 12, 13 p.m. Friday. We just had a jobs report about four hours ago, which indicated just under 200,000 new jobs being created. That's decently healthy. But one thing that I've been looking at is the unemployment rate for new college graduates, which I've read from a bunch of different indicators seems to be weakening. The New York Federal Reserve keeps

a pretty steady survey on the unemployment rate for recent college grads and found that it recently spiked to about 6%. It's highest in a long time. And what we're seeing is just what the article that I wrote about in the Atlantic was really focused on, is this disconnect where recent grads are doing significantly worse than the overall job market, rather than like 10, 15 years ago, doing significantly better. Something weird is happening in the job market for recent grads. It might have to do with the fact that a lot of companies are just freaked out about the tariffs. And they're like, I'm not going to hire young people, because that's an expensive investment in the long term. It could be just a couple

weird thing compiling in the economy, like the long term decline of the college wage premium and a little bit of uncertainty about the future. It also could be and this was the last theory that I had in the piece, I look at Genitive AI. I think this is an incredibly powerful tool. It is very good at reading, at synthesizing, at putting together reports, at giving you 10,000, 15,000 word documents with deep research to tell you all about a certain industry. It's good at doing

a lot of the things that we frankly ask of 22 to 25 year old recent college graduates, right? Like, what do these typical people do? They become paralegals, they work for consulting firms, they work for publishing houses. And I'm looking for that indicator that suggests that some white collar firms are replacing college graduates with machines. And I don't think that I have the slam dunk facts to back up the case that right now today we're looking at major substitution of machines for people. But I think this would be the indicator to look at rising unemployment among college grads.

Good news for certain people is that the AI revolution is not gonna be a problem for VCs, but we're gonna talk about that in a second. I wanna just go a little bit deeper on China and what's happening with the trade war and the ships. My buddy John McCormick wrote about, he interviewed somebody who's a small business owner here who like has goods on ships that are currently coming from Asia.

And he's like, I hope the ships sink. He's like, for the business to survive, I need the ships to sink because I can't pay the tariff on the goods as soon as they hit the port here. I'd rather just lose all the goods. And so that's how dramatic it is. And so I do wonder, just again, putting a finer point on it, I don't really get why the market isn't worse given the China trade rate. Maybe there's an assumption it'll go away. So just if you have any other thoughts on that,

I'll take them. But in addition, you also wrote an article recently about the trade war and you mentioned the toys, but there's just a lot of other elements to this and thinking about like, who is more resilient between us and China in the short term, right? Because, you know, Scott Besson was out making the case last weekend, basically, that like China is going to blink because they can't sustain this quasi embargo that we have. And I certainly think there'll be some pain in China, but reading your article, I'm not sure that that is the bet I would make if I was the U S treasury secretary.

I'm curious your take on all that. Yeah, let's start with the stock market first, and then I'll do some commentary on China. It's a classic and famous fool's errand to try to explain the stock market with a simple story. Because the stock market is this aggregate of thousands, millions of people around the world making a bunch of different decisions about what they think the future is going to be. And the fact I would say that that aggregate has moved the stock market up in the

last two weeks suggests to me one of two things or the following two things. Number one, that people think that Trump is becoming more like a typical corporate Republican. That if you compare what he is saying and what Besant is saying to what happened on April 2nd. The direction we are moving in is a direction from wild and crazy Trumpism to something a little bit more like Mitt Romneyism. Now as you said, tariffs are still 10% around the world and still 145% on China. But now we're talking about free trade deals. We're talking about getting China to the bargaining table.

And I think there's just a lot of crossed fingers out there in the investing community that eventually this is going to pull us back toward the world we had on March 30th rather than the world we had on April 3rd. That's my guess. Good luck, guys. Good luck. Right. And look, we're just going to know a lot more in two weeks, right?

All these supply chain experts I've spoken to, that the folks at Bloomberg constantly talk to, they say, it's really the middle end of May, where we're going to begin to see the kind of shortages that are just inevitable with tariffs this high in our largest or second largest trading partner. So the real conversation to have about this probably isn't May 2, it's June 2, but we'll see what happens in a month. On China, I think it's really important to observe that while the US is the richest country in the world, the largest economy in the world, if you're just judging an economy based on

what it makes, no one comes anywhere close to China. China makes 70% of the world's cement and steel, right? 90% of our toy imports, 80% of electric vehicle exports. It's just an enormous export juggernaut. 99% of child safety seats you had in your article too. Child safety seats with hard plastic shells, I believe was the line item in the Excel that I read. As natalists around here, as JVLs and natals, that doesn't seem great to be putting up, to putting an embargo on child safety seats, but what do I know?

Maybe we're going back, we're going back. Dude, this is the point that I forgot about what to make when I was talking about Trump and the dolls. I mean, it's not very pro-natalist to brag about the fact that you are purposely raising the cost of toys and dolls while at the same time saying the number one job this administration is to make it easier and cheaper to have a family like you're clearly not doing that. But on China you know what my fear is that they simply make a lot of everything that the world wants and the world needs cement and the world needs steel. need steel, and people want to drive cars and they want to use the robotics that come out and the electronics that come out of China. And so if the US doesn't buy those toasters and doesn't

buy those toys and coloring books, you know, my feeling is that China is going to find other trading partners, and they have a political system that is not exactly democratic, which means it is insulated from the short term pressures pressures to modify a policy in the face of a trade war. So for a lot of reasons, I am extremely pessimistic about the prospects of America having a trade war with China, despite the fact that I'm incredibly patriotic about wanting to build a lot of the advanced manufacturing products that even conservatives say they want to get out of this plan. Again, there's just no connection as you meant to the top.

Exactly. Like, tariffing child safety seats is not going to create a semiconductor industry here. I've got to hear you had a podcast about science cuts, the crisis in American science, it's called. My note here is this crisis in American science, let Derek cook. Okay. Yeah, it's actually the longest podcast we've ever done. It's three interviews over two hours. And look, science is incredibly important to me. I am obsessed with the idea that most Americans and most American politicians severely underrate how important science is

to progress. I mean, one of the most important reasons why Americans live longer today than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago is because of advances in cardiovascular medicine and cancer medicine and Alzheimer's that we've come up with in the last few decades. That requires an enormous investment in science. Fifty billion dollars is spent through the NIH to help some of the smartest researchers in America, and therefore in the world, investigate the most important unknown questions in science.

And right now the Trump administration is essentially trying, it seems to me, to destroy that. They're proposing budgets to cut 40% of the NIH and 50% of the National Science Foundation. You could say theoretically, oh, well, they're just trying to target the bad projects that are being done by only ho-hum scientists, the good projects we're going to hold onto.

But don't you think there's a lot of good scientists that say Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern? Well, we're also attacking those schools directly and withholding, in some cases, all of our grant spending from those schools, forcing hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts from our most advanced research centers. I mean, my big take here is if in a parallel universe, we lost a war to China in January 2025,

and we had a sign like an article of surrender akin to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Like China would force us to spend 50% less on science. China would force us to become an enemy of all of our trading partners. China might force us to pay more for manufacturing, imports. China would force us to do all these things that we're choosing to do for ourselves. So we're essentially signing our own article of surrender against China against the world and frankly against ourselves because at the end of the day, it kind of doesn't

matter who comes up with the next breakthrough drug and cancer. If Americans can use it, they benefit from it. But if you cut cancer research by 50%, you're taking away half your bets on the biggest breakthrough in cancer. So I think this is truly one of the most fundamentally inexplicable policies we're seeing today with a gauntlet of inexplicable policies. I think it just goes to show the sadness, the depressing fact, that if you make hating your opposition the core of your political identity as hating Libs and progressives is so clearly the core of mega conservatism,

you're going to cut off your nose to spite your face. And the NIH is just an unbelievably important and cherished institution. And we're essentially destroying it for the purpose of owning the libs. That makes absolutely no sense to me. It's a crisis and I think it could unfortunately turn out to be a tragedy because the cost is not just a project that are going on right now. If you cut NIH by 50%, you're interrupting the NIH-funded careers of tens of thousands of scientists who could be the Nobel Prize winning geniuses of the 2030s.

We just won't know if we don't invest in their education today. Were there any specific anecdotes over the course of the two hours that really like jumped out at you as far as like alarming things that we're losing that are being stopped that are in progress? Yeah, yeah, great question. You know, to me, the story that really shows

not only the cruelty, but also the ineptitude of these cuts is that in mid-April, it was reported by Science Journal and the New York Times that the NIH was going to cut by some extraordinary numbers, 70 to 80%, the longest and oldest longitudinal study of women's health. I believe it's called the Women's Health Initiative. This is the longest and largest study of women's health.

We were just going to destroy it, right? Maybe because it had like a gender term in the title or something. Yeah. Maybe because it had like a gender term in the title or something. So science reaches out to the Department of Health and Human Services and they say we're going to look into it. And 72 hours later, so embarrassed by the fact that for no seeming good reason, they've attacked women's health, HHS backtracks. Okay, so far so good, you could say. The media served as a watchdog and saved this all-powerful program.

But then, 24 hours later, RFK comes out, and now, with those cuts reversed, he accuses the New York Times of lying about the original cut now that they've reversed the cut. This is the level of dishonesty and the level of lack of care that you have to assume is being applied to every single science cut across the system. If this is how stupid and dishonest the cuts are to one program we identified, imagine the stupidity and dishonesty multiplied across $15 billion of cuts to science which are touching everything from cancer research, brain

cancer research, Alzheimer's research, ALS research. I mean it's just ludicrous that we're destroying these programs and for what? To own the libs? To express to Harvard our displeasure with their diversity programs? It's just terrible, I think, that we're essentially trying to wage a kind of ideological war against American academia and just burning science in the interim. Okay. Onto the, I guess, kind of related science, future of everything. Derek, I do want to get back to the AI question. I was listening to one of your podcasts recently kind of about a, that was about like the AI industry

and business, like what's being invested in. You were talking to an expert on that. And I'm curious like where you think things are going, like what the speed is and you know, how that also kind of relates to all these questions about having potentially the stupidest people in the world in charge of in charge of regulating it. AI is such an interesting industry where

many of the people who are most optimistic about the growth of the technology are also very pessimistic about what that optimism means if you know what I mean, right? Like most the time when someone's like a huge booster for say self-driving cars, it's because they think Waymo is cool. And it's gonna be awesome for everybody. We're gonna have fewer deaths, traffic deaths. You know, you can multitask in the car. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Right, they're predicting the fast growth of Waymo because they're fans of Waymo. AI is one of the only industries I know where many of the people predicting its fastest rates of growth are also terrified by the fastest rates of growth. And so that I think it's important to remember that because this industry is just like not like other industries.

So it's not just Sam Altman, it's not just spin artists that are saying that the growth is happening rapidly. It's just obvious. Well, look, you look at how much companies like Google or Meta is spending on AI infrastructure. It's not like one or two billion dollars a year. It's on the order of 60 to 70 billions of dollars a year per company. Hundreds of billions of dollars every single year are being plowed into this technology.

They're not doing it for kicks. We're talking about Apollo program style investments in a technology that each of these companies think is going to help make them a multi trillion dollar company. In many cases, they are, I suppose, multi trillion dollar companies. So let's say, you know, deca trillion dollar companies. Here's one thought I have about AI. I think that with every technology, there's a lag between what the technology can do and its actual use and its effects on the macro economy.

That's one of the reasons, Tim, why I was saying I'm really interested in finding, identifying what's the economic indicator that's going to tell us we've hit an inflection point, right? I think it's recent college grad unemployment because I am concerned that these tools, Genitive AI, Chat-shabby-T, Claude, are just really, really good at the stuff that we ask of 23-year-old graduates of Georgetown. But in the long run, I think this story could get very, very weird. I mean, listening to Mark Zuckerberg talk about the fact that people only have three

friends but then he's going to give them 12 new AI chatbot friends to make up the gap between how many friends you need to be happy and how many friends you actually have. That's pretty fucking weird. Just to start, I'm like, no thanks, actually, on the 12 Mark Zuckerberg AI bot friends. I don't know that that's going to lead to a healthy society. That's just me, maybe. It won't lead to a healthy society, but I do think it's going to happen. So let me give you two long-term predictions in very different categories. One sort of in changes to social

life and the other in geopolitics. Changes to social life. There are companies like Character AI that already have tens of millions of users who are just chatting to an AI bot all day long. Your face is being held depressingly in your hands. Internally, I want you to know that I am also holding my face depressingly in my hands. I think this is not only pathetic in a small way, but also sad in a very profound way. Antihuman. I don't know. I can't actually care about humans.

Let me just try to explain why I think this is happening and why I think it's going to grow in a way that I hope people don't intuitively think of as me endorsing this prediction as being good for the human race. Got it. Think about your relationship, phenomenologically, your relationship with people in your life who don't live around you, right? You text with them, right? In a way, those relationships exist in blue bubbles on your phone.

And you think about the fact that young people today who are being handed their first phone when they're whatever nine ten years old think of friendship as being something that in many cases or human relationship is being something in many cases almost purely a relationship between you looking at a pane of glass and seeing Dot-dot-dot and then blue bubbles appearing Is it really so different to just text an AI all day long? If that AI responds immediately, always validates your feelings, always has consideration for your deepest and darkest fears, is trained precisely to tell you how smart and good and right you

are about all of your worries and all the people you hate. There's a way in which what I've said before, before we build like a super intelligence of IQ, we'll have accidentally built a super intelligence of EQ, that in many ways, a lot of things that people want from relationships are actually kind of computationally shallow, right? They want validation, they want responsiveness, they want to feel better, they want to feel maybe like they've made something else feel something, but that can be engineered as well. The AI could simply say, that's a wonderful point.

I feel much better now. This is not a fulfilling relationship though, Derek. Fulfilling relationships that you have with people, like actual friendships that make you feel good and happy and fulfilled inside, or because you have been through things together. You've had happiness, you had sadness, you've, you know, you've had, you've argued, right?

Like all of that is necessary to make a full human relationship. You believe that, you believe that, and I believe that, because we're geriatric millennials. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm serious, I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious.

I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious.

I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. I healthy relationship. I don't think it scales across society well. Yeah, I wrote this 8,000 word cover story called the antisocial century that includes a 1,000 word section called, this is your politics on solitude.

And then it was like our AI future. I think this is coming. I think it is going to be a social crisis because many people are going to be seduced by the convenience of AI friendships and thus sacrifice the depth of human friendships. I am deeply, deeply worried about that. So that's piece number one. And that's going to be weird, right? If you think smartphones plus social media are dementing for our mental health or our

ability to focus, how about smartphones plus social media plus a roster of AI friends that an entire generation grows up talking to constantly just as or more often than they talk to their friends. I'm not trying, of course not trying to say this is good. So strange that Mr. Abundance Optimist is turning me into a doomer. No, no, I am.

Listening to doomers, listening to doomomers is making me feel like an optimist. Listening to you, and now I'm like, we are so fucking cooked. I think of myself as like a scientific optimist and cultural pessimist, right? I think that like science goes like this, it goes up into the left. And if you look in like the last 20 years of culture,

like how could you possibly say, oh, well, you know, also cultures isn't experiencing the exact same rates of progress to say, you know, computing or medical science. So that's one big prediction is that I am really worried about the social crisis that will be created by the convenience of AI relationships. The other piece I think is really interesting is that eventually the federal government is going to recognize that superintelligent AI is a weapon. If we have a tool that can be used to knock down foreign energy grids or that can be used to knock down ours,

that's a weapon. That's a digital bomb. What does the government do with incredibly significant weapons that exist at the frontier of technology? Like the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was not farmed out to Ford and GM. We didn't let the private sector just like, hey, could you guys just like disappear, try to build a bomb totally outside of government regulations and control and just let us know Ford, if you happen to succeed in building nuclear bomb? No, it's entirely centralized within the federal government. It is a federal secret. We go to

the middle of New Mexico and pay everyone to not talk to anybody else and entirely control the pipeline. We're still keeping other countries from getting access to the secret. So what happens control the pipeline. We're still keeping other countries from getting access to the secret. So what happens when the private sector builds a digital nuclear weapon? The debates that we're going to have about the nationalization of AI, those I think are about 18 months away. Real front page of your newspaper debates about whether aspects of OpenAI and Anthropic and these other companies

need to be brought under federal control. That's a conversation that is, I think, practically inevitable once you consider the fact that how are we going to control information flow? How do we trust private companies to control the possibility that spies from other countries are trying to sleep with them, steal their computers, get their information, right? If you take the metaphor seriously, that we are essentially at work on a technology so capacious that it includes the possibility of building a nuclear bomb,

why would we treat the 2020s Manhattan Project as a private enterprise while we treated the 1940s Manhattan project as a purely federal enterprise, right? These questions of how to nationalize AI, how to treat super intelligence as a military weapon. I think our, um, I think we're 18 months away from a really, really big national conversation about that.

And the guy maybe he'll be at the very center of that conversation I alluded to earlier, Mark Andreessen, uh, he was the inventor of Netscape, big VC. He was kind of like a typical, you know, kind of centrist technocrat, maybe leaning a little right Silicon Valley guy up until recently. When he got red-pilled, there's a big semaphore story about how he's in all these group chats, and he kept looking for more and more right-wing people to get into the group chats with, because he kept being annoyed by everybody. Um, he claims to have been radicalized in part by this topic you're talking

about, that the, that he had a meeting with somebody at the Biden administration who said that the Biden administration was looking into regulation of AI. He did not want this. This was one of the things that radicalized him. His retelling his recounting of that meeting feels apocryphal to me, or at least exaggerated significantly. But anyway, that's what he says. And just for kicks, before I get your take on, on Mark and sort of how

these guys all interact, I do want to play that audio that I alluded to earlier of them discussing which jobs will still be available once, once we really kick into high gear with AI. Let's listen to Mark. There's an intangibility to it. There's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology, by the way, a lot of it is psychological analysis, like who are these people?

How do they react under pressure? How do you keep them from falling apart? How do you, you know, how do you keep them going crazy? How do you keep them from going crazy yourself? Um, uh, you know, you end up being a psychologist half the time. Um, and so like like, it is possible, I don't want to be definitive, but like it's possible that that is quite literally timeless. And when you know, when the AIs are doing everything else, like that may be one of

the last remaining fields that people are still doing. That there is venture capital. So the only thing that the super genius AI won't be able to figure out is early stage investments in startup companies You need conehead Marc Andreessen to do that today. I won't be able to figure it out Anyway, just go take any of that that you wish to respond to Look the truth is I think he's right about every single thing in that clip except for the last sentence, right? Like yes, there will be lots of jobs available for people, even in a world in which artificial intelligence is essentially PhD or beyond PhD level smart at every single possible discipline. We will need taste, for example, in music, we'll still

listen to human musicians, we'll still eat food that's cooked by human chefs and delivered by human chefs with human, you know, line chef. He said at the end that like, VCs are basically like therapists will also need human therapists. He's funny that he was like, you know, sure. I, well, I look, I don't get me too deep into this. I do think that a lot of people will turn to AI therapy, but my hope is that it'll be like a, it'll be a little bit like Jevons paradox where if the cost of therapy goes down, more people will be asking like therapy like questions of AI, but fundamentally a lot of them will be like, you know what?

I think we already have too much therapy talk among among the Gen Z. I'm pro therapy, but I'm hearing way too many therapy words out of 13 year olds these days. I'm married to a clinical psychologist. So my feeling here is that therapy words are good and they belong in 15 minute therapy sessions and therapy words do not belong as a primary lens for interpreting our politics. I think there's gonna be a ton of jobs left for people even in a world in which AI turns out to be very, very good at a lot of different things. I'm not worried about full, full unemployment.

That said, it's, there are a lot of jobs that have taste and have an element of human to human therapatizing. VCs are probably on that list, but they're not like the final species, like the final cockroach that's going to survive, like the nuclear implosion of AI. They're one of like 20,000 jobs that have these features. And that's precisely why I don't think we're entering a world in which humans are fully disemployed.

Have you been as disappointed as I have been in our masters of the universe and these tech guys and I feel like if you had come to me 10 years ago and some of our listeners will be like, that's why you're so stupid 10 years ago, Tim. But if you'd come to me 10 years ago and said, in the future, there's a Republican president and you know, it's kind of like a, you know, maybe not the smartest guy in the future, there's a Republican president. And it's kind of like a, maybe not the smartest guy in the world, but somebody who has a good emotional quality, a good, has a nice ability to reach working class Americans and make them feel like their concerns are heard. And to accommodate for his shortcomings, he's going to bring in the guy that got us to space

with SpaceX and the inventor of Netscape and like all of these brilliant people that have the inventor of PayPal and like the people that created all this stuff and they're going to come in and they're going to look at the government and figure out how we can supercharge it and make it more efficient. I think 10 years ago, I'd have been like, sign me up for that campaign. Hell yeah. And these guys have been a fucking disaster. I mean, everything that you said, imagine if you then told your 10 year ago self, and the first cardinal policy that they'll employ in economics is to raise the taxes on

Elsa dolls being manufactured in China. Like, it's just so fucking stupid. It's mind-boggling how stupid it is. And none of them have been like, guys, wait a minute, how did we get signed up for this? Like, they got co-opted by the idiot. Yes. Like, the guy that invented Netscape and the guy that got us into space got co-opted by the fucking game show host who bankrupted all the companies. It wasn't the other way around. How did that happen?

It's funny that you said that like that entire question. I was like God I've literally had this conversation to myself in my head like if you had told 2015 Derek that there was a Republican administration and Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk the 2015 versions of Mark Andreessen Elon Musk Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk the 2015 versions of Mark Andreessen Elon Musk We're going to be two of the more important stewards of American science and tech policy If you asked me what the odds are on us cutting scientific funding by 50% I'd be like fucking 10,000 to one. Are you serious like Elon Musk? Overseeing an effort to cut the NIH by 40% no way cut the NSF which has a lot of physical

world nitty gritty like physics science not this you know, cellular stuff but just figuring out like the next generation of like energy construction. This is totally like 2015 Elon Musk shit. We're cutting it by 50%. The Trump nominated director of NSF just left because of what a disaster they're making it. I mean, even if you left the tariffs out of it, you said we're just going to evaluate what these guys are doing to American science

with the understanding that it was basic research in American science that built TCPIP, the technology that helped make Mark Andreessen a billionaire, and that made possible the photovoltaic cell, which is part of what well, even before the photovoltaic cell, lithium ion batteries, which are core to electric vehicle technology, basic research made these men billionaires, and then they got power and they are participants in

administration that is destroying the very thing that made their careers possible. It's so strange to me that this is happening. I mean, I understand it's an ideological purge of government. I understand why they're doing it at like an interpersonal level. But like at exactly the level of abstraction that you pose the question, I'm totally fucking flabbergasted. They've had one policy success, I will say. They have supercharged the economy around shitcoins, like fake currency. If you're investing in a cum rocket coin, things are going really great right now thanks to Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk and Donald Trump's influence.

The rest of the technology stuff, I don't know. We have to do abundance. We did it. 47 minutes. In the context of the Democrats, here's what I want to do. I want to do it in a meta way. I've asked this of several Democratic candidates. I don't know if you've heard this, but not candidates, politicians that have come through.

And I'm like, you know, my one critique, my main critique of the Democrats looking back the last 10 years, maybe not my main critique, let me be more precise, my main critique of the Democrats looking back the last 10 years, maybe not my main critique, let me be more precise. My main political strategy critique has been that if you look at the Clinton, Biden and Harris campaigns, if you asked 100 people what their main message was, you'd get 100 answers. The Biden campaign a little bit about the soul of America was a little bit better than the other two on that front but like none of them had a good answer and none of them had anything that could fit

on a hat you know and that's just bad politics. Forget all the policy stuff that's just bad politics. And so I've been posing to them this is something they should probably figure out in case we have another election you know and I'm like there's AOC and Bernie are out there kind of with some sort of this, just fight oligarchy. And I was like, these two geriatric millennial nerds, I have a book called Abundance that's offering a different perspective. And those are kind of two ideas that are out there.

And there is a very small group of people online that are very committed to the war between these two thoughts. And I don't really even think that that I think that that's imaginary. I think that it exists mostly in these people's heads. But I'm wondering like, kind of what you think about the political overhang of what you wrote in the book. So how do I want to frame this? We wrote this book in 2023 and 2024. Right? We added four sentences, maybe, maybe not, maybe seven sentences in November 2024 after the Donald Trump election. So this is a book that is not about 2025. This is a book about what Ezra and I think is most important in American policy that we hope Democrats focus more on. Housing abundance, clean energy abundance, high quality governance, a science policy

that makes sense, and a plan to build what we invent. That's the book in 15 seconds. The reason I wanted to summarize the book is actually like put its summary in the refrigerator for a bit while I make a second point Okay 2026 and 2028 are going to be about Donald Trump and Opposing Donald Trump effectively requires in addition to understanding the importance of Making and inventing more of what you need, the abundance message, understanding Trump's vulnerabilities, right? You have to pay attention

to what he is making vulnerable. Right now, Donald Trump's vulnerability, I think, vulnerability, I think, if the midterm were say in three months, is that the man was elected by swingable independence, because life felt unaffordable. And the first thing he did in office is raise tariffs, while collecting billions of dollars in shitcoins. Right, the argument you make is about the affordability of a typical family life, juxtaposed with the corruption that this man not only is raising the cost of your child's doll, he's also spending half of his time soaking money like a vampire squid out of every single possible

sycophant he possibly can. That's the message. affordability plus corruption. The positive vision is let's make American family life affordable, not again, but like in many cases, for the first time, a new kind of family life that we deserve in the 2020s and 2030s. That involves building what we know how to build like houses. It involves inventing what we don't know how to build like cures for diseases that ruin families. But then, as you know, a lot of politics is negative polarization.

A lot of politics is watching what the guy in power does and coming up with a very clean message of distinguishing yourself from the fallen incumbent, from the flawed incumbent, right? And fortunately for Democrats in a way, like Donald Trump is a fucking buffet of items that you can be negatively polarized against. He's doing so many things that are terrible. In a way, the real challenge is figuring out what is the thing you want to focus on. I'm disgusted by the deportation plans.

I'm disgusted by the tearing up of constitutional order. There are a lot of good nominations, but I would focus on the kitchen table issue, that this is a guy who said he'd make America 2019 again and instead he made America 2020 again. He's making America chaotic, right? He's making American manufacturers not know what's coming next. American buyers feel like there's shortages at the places that they're shopping at. I think that's where you would want to sharpen the message. And of course, there's ways that abundance plays into this. But I never want to answer questions about like the 2028 election by just like hawking the book that

seems dishonest because the book doesn't know what people are really going to care about in three months or three years. And I really want to be clear that effective politics is about paying attention and not white knuckling some theory as you move through time and the actual news items that work to your advantage change. Okay, so just one more on the intro Democrat element, because I do think that the way that the message you just laid out, right? And I don't know that I totally agree with you on focus on kitchen table issues, but we can argue about that another time. But the argument that you just laid out, right? That let's just take that as a table sticks. A Democratic

candidate should be talking about affordability for working people, affordability for everybody, for middle class people, in contrast with the corruption of Trump. And a policy rubric around the affordability message could look like what you guys are putting out. We need to build more, we need to make housing more affordable, we need to invest into the economy, or it could look like there need to be more government programs for people right like that we need to have more assist there needs to be more assistance there needs to be more federal assistance right like there's a way to talk about it by let's grow the pie make things

cheaper or let's figure out a way within the existing pie to you know to take from the rich folks and give it to the poor folks. These things aren't in total contrast, right? You can do a little bit of both, but I do wonder if like you think that ends up being at the core of kind of the intra-democratic argument over the topics that you guys cover in the book. Let me answer it this way.

Ezra has this term that I like, and we've been on the road long enough that I've begun to absorb some of his language. He talks about like... You guys both love the word capacious. Love capacious. I think that was me. I watched one interview where you used the word capacious, like the two of you use the word capacious like seven times in the first 30 minutes. I think that might have been me infecting him. So this is an example of the Vectra going the other way. Capacious bag. That's the only time that I allow it. It's a very capacious bag. I'll take that. I love how he sometimes talks about like making a cut. I want to make a cut here that I think

is really important. I never want pro-growth, say, Democrats to position themselves against redistribution. That's not the message. The message is that redistribution is good. Helping the poor is good. A moral society should judge itself based on how it cares for and looks out for the most vulnerable. But welfare is expensive. Redistribution costs money. It literally is

just money. And you know what's really, really good for growing your ability to spend money to help the poor? It's growth. Being pro-growth is being anti-poverty and for the marginalized and for those who don't have enough. Because helping people costs something. And if you have, say, a flat average tax rate and your economy is shrinking, by definition, you have less tax revenue that you can redistribute to those who need it most. If you have a flax tax rate and your economy is growing, by definition that same tax rate on a higher overall GDP means more money for people who need it. So I think it's really important, especially in an age of high deficits and high interest

rates, to say the path toward affording Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and the earn income tax rate and an expanded child tax rate and even more welfare that we think is important for helping them marginalize. The path toward all of that flows toward growth. So now let's talk about how to grow the economy. That's how I would advise a sort of abundance liberal to deal with this issue. I don't think you want to get, find yourself like in trench warfare where you're positioning your argument against welfare, right? This is a strategy to make it easier for us to afford our generosity to the low income. It's really wonderful.

Do you have any final things you want to riff on? You've got a lot of takes. Is there anything I didn't ask you about? Do you have any hot takes, NBA playoffs, some other random technology issues. When's this podcast coming out? Let's, let's finish on this podcast comes out in like three and the depend three and a half hours, give or take. Okay. So we got game seven nuggets clips.

Who we got? I'm fucking panicked about it. To be honest, I'm, I'm traumatized. This whole season, I've been living through the trauma of the game seven against the Timberwolves last year in the semiffinals where they were up 20 in the fucking third quarter. In the fourth quarter, sir. Was it, was it in the early fourth quarter? I'm literally on my phone because they were playing Dallas and they would have played

Dallas the Conference Finals. I am on my phone kayaking flights to Dallas because I've got a buddy in Dallas and I'm like, we're up 20. We got this thing. And then it was just Jamal Murray became totally incapable of getting around the bigger defenders, the more athletic Timberwolves. And I'm too traumatized by that to predict a Duncan's victory until I see it. So, I mean, Nicole Yook has just been unbelievable and he could certainly will us to victory But I just I'm deeply concerned about the team around them and I think even if they do get through it It's been a grueling seven game series and then you just have OKC sitting there waiting for you and they've they swept

They just been sitting around getting healthy. They're younger. They're more athletic. They're deeper So, I don't know. It's gonna end sometime. The end is nigh. I hope it's not Saturday, because I would like the pain. Like I kind of want the pain of a lost OKC. I wanna live through the fire. That's part of fandom. That's what I mentioned earlier. That's why you need real human friends.

Like you need the suffering to enjoy the success, but I don't see it happening for us. What do you think? I think you're screwed. You have a screw this round or you're screwed the next round. I don't see you guys beating OKC, that's for sure. My last question for you, look, you've got the best player in the world. You have maybe the most talented offensive player ever.

I mean, I know who Michael Jordan is, but like, I've also seen Nikola Jokic and his statistics. I mean, the ability to score with this efficiency and rebound and assist, it's very bizarre to have. Unbelievable. Bill Russell rebounding, magic assisting, Michael Jordan level scoring in terms of the numbers and also like weirdly like Steph Curry-ish three point percentages in the seven foot frame.

It's you have the best player in the world. You can't do the volume on the three point, but the percentages are there. And it's like when he misses, you're shocked. You know, he misses your shock. I mean, and he is, he's ridiculous. And it's like he did he in game, was it in game five, where he has the triple axle turnaround Sambor shuffle over a seven foot guy from like 16 feet. If any other player in the world takes that, you're like, that is the worst shot I've ever seen. And as soon as that went off his hands, I was like, he got this one. I was like, that's it.

Swish. It did not touch. I know exactly the shot. It did not touch rim. I don't think it came within somehow six inches of any part of the room. It was, it was literally in the center of the, of the basket. So my, my last question for you is this. You're the best player in the world.

He certainly toward the back half of his prime. You have to take advantage of this. Yeah. What's the one move you make? He's so magical. It's just, I feel so lucky to have been able to, you know, get half him as my distraction through the Trump years, watching 82 games. I think that they, they need more shooting and depth around it. They need another dynamic score This is the problem with Jamal and I worry more about Jamal's health and scoring ability and dynamism than I do Yokich I think that yokich if you look at his competitiveness, I think you'll get I think his prime might continue for quite a while I don't know. We don't know. I hope so. Maybe not but I look at Jamal, I'm just worried he does not have the athletic dynamism to compete with Shea and Ant and the other young players. And to me, I kind of, I have a weird view. Like, I think that like Jokic could make people who are other people's

problems wonderful if they're dynamic. Like I look at, I'm like looking, who are the people that'd be out there on the market that somebody else's problem? I look at like Trey Young. People would be like, come on, you could net, you don't want to want Trey Young. You know? And I'm like, I think that Trey Young would be unbelievable if you just think about how much they would spread the floor out and how much space would get created with somebody like that. I don't know.

I think Yogi could have made Zach Levine look great. They just, they need a creator. They need another person that can score and create. And even if they have some other issues, I think Jokic can mask them and they somehow need to be able to build depth. I don't, and I don't know how to do that. Like begging old people to sign for the minimum to come, you know, to come play with him because he's so great. They're in a real tough spot cap wise, but I basically keep Christian Brown and Aaron Gordon in your kitchen figure and figure it out.

Yeah, well the one name you didn't mention is Porter Jr. And you guys are paying him a lot of money to score eight points in game six. And did he have a lot of time sort of It was a quiet eight. Maybe it was eight. I think I looked at the box score

like four a.m. in the morning. But I think you're pretty much right. You know, look, I think you've got the most important piece and you don't quite have enough creative scoring and assisting talent around him, which means he's got these usage rates of 33%, 37%. I think as he moves into his thirties, you're going to want to bring that down. And I didn't think about someone like Trey Young, who I find incredibly annoying, but as you said, next to Jokic, who knows?

I mean, look at Russell Westbrook. I mean, almost like re-energized for being around Jokic. So I don't know. We will see. Maybe Luca will just make a karmic judgment to the Lakers that they don't deserve this and decide not to sign an extension and come with his Eastern European brethren and decide to create an

East Slavic super team. Maybe we could do that. I don't know. It's beautiful in a dream. Yeah. It is beautiful. Derek Thomas, thank you so much. You make my life easy on this podcast. I appreciate it. Everybody go check out Plain English. It is an awesome podcast and abundance too. You might have heard about that. We'll be seeing you soon. Derek, everybody else will be back here on Monday with Bill Crystal. See y'all then. Peace. When you don't need nothing to be worn I can feel myself getting older Getting colder

So I put on your coat and hat I can see lonely too, you don't need to tell me that I can see the weight you carry on your back And yes I'd like to put it down And watch it drown It must have been love But you need to learn to try and love again Yesterday don't have to be tomorrow And what about today, do you need a friend? You're gonna have to let go of your sorrows

Cause crying only feels good for a while And you're gonna have to smile If you wanna love again Do you need a friend? So If you really wanna know I'm barely making it through the days If you really wanna know I'm barely making it through the days People come and people go But the loneliness is always the same

If you really wanna know I'll bet you making it through the day If you really wanna know I'm barely making it through the day The Bullhorn Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.