The Texan Podcast - Executive Orders, New Conservatives, AI Sputnik: SMSS Ep. 12

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

On this episode of Send Me Some Stuff, Cameron and Rob explore the executive orders signed, the confirmation hearings, and the newly President Trump, back in office. Listen to more Send Me Some Stuff podcasts from our team wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, subscribe and leave us a review.

I'm very skeptical of most of this stuff, and I think it's probably because I like a lot of sci-fi that I actually think that this is more of a product of science fiction than anything in reality. And I think that when AI companies come out and say this kind of stuff, I think they're doing it to just drum up support for their software. That's my opinion. Well, we're probably on opposite sides of this argument, and I think many of the examples you just brought up support my argument because of what you just said. Hello and welcome back to Send Me Some Stuff, episode number 12. 12, that's a big number. I can't believe we've made it to number 12 here. I think this is going to be our first pod of the new year.

I believe so, yeah. We didn't do one in January because we had one coming out right around the new year. Right. So now it's been about a month and our first one, and what a January it has been. It's been crazy. It's been very, very busy because this is coming to the listeners on February 3rd, even though we're recording it

on January 31st. So we've had quite the month to go over. Yeah, ever since Trump has taken the oath of office, it's been unrelenting on the number of news stories that have come out and not just politically focused stories lots of technology news lots of cultural interest stories and so we're gonna cover quite a bit of those today we're gonna talk a bit about the executive orders we'll talk about some of these confirmation hearings we'll talk about this New York mag piece that's caught quite a bit of attention online because of the photo on the cover. Photo on the cover, the title. The title. It's an interesting title.

Just the content of the article is a very, it's very interesting. It's a lightning rod. Yeah, well, it's fascinating to kind of see how the progressive left, especially the progressive left that is in the media world, has reacted to the emerging Trump right, which is not the normal conservative vision that many may have had. So we'll get into that a little bit. And then I also want to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence, deep seek. I think that's going to have a tremendous impact on the Trump administration going forward just because of the explicit focus Trump has put on artificial intelligence with some of the people he has named as czars and for different appointments. Well, indeed, in the general connection that his administration seems to be forging with this emerging brologarchy. The brologarchy, the tech right, the tech overlords,

however you want to characterize it. Absolutely. It's a contention. There's a lot of tension between the MAGA base and the tech right. They say politics downstream from culture, but we have politics, culture, and technology that all seem to be increasingly just downstream from each other. Right. With no, it's a three body problem. We don't know how, we don't know exactly how this interaction works, but, but that's what we're here to untangle.

Yeah. We'll talk about that. But we, one of the big things for us here at the Texan is we had our kickoff event. Absolutely. 89th session kickoff. 89th session kickoff. It's hard to believe we've been doing this now for 89 sessions. The Texans have been working hard for the last 180 years. Yeah. Maybe we'll be there one day. Here's hoping. Yeah.

But this was our second kickoff event. And I thought our event, when was it? This week was flawless. It went great. We didn't really have any big hiccups or issues or anything. No, and if you've ever done event planning, you know that you always have hiccups and issues. And yet the thing pretty much went off smoothly, which was very nice. The Texas Public Policy Foundation was very gracious to host us and allow us to use their facilities.

Everybody who showed up seemed really interested in the panels. Our lawmakers gave fantastic comments about just all the big issues going on in Texas politics. I know you were running around quite a bit. I was like a gopher, right? So I was a, um, my job was just to run around and take care of all the little things that needed to be done. Make sure there were enough chairs on stage. There were water bottles ready to go. There were, you know, everything like that was being taken. People were being checked in, getting their name tags. Did you catch any of the panels? Did you, was there anything in particular that someone said on one of the panels that really caught your attention and you thought

was interesting? Well, I, like pretty much everybody else did actually crowd into the auditorium to listen to a little bit of Speaker Burroughs for his one-on-one conversation with, it was Brad, right? Yeah. They, from what I understand, had a very good conversation. Unfortunately unfortunately i didn't get to see the whole thing because you know somebody had to be at the check-in desk but i am very excited for when um all of those panels are going to be hitting hitting video and going on our website as i'm certain all of our listeners are going to be to see what their favorite lawmakers had to say about the big issues in the one-on-one conversations with Burroughs, uh, comptroller Glenn Hagar, who I know Brad was very excited to interview and, um, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. Yeah. Yeah. There were all those were really great conversations.

And once they go up on the side, I encourage everyone to go watch and listen. Absolutely. Uh, but we did have an after party we did that was really fun lots of movers and shakers got to rub elbows with which is always interesting because get to sit in and hear some conversations that are always off the record and but i wanted to ask you there was some food for us that was available. Yeah. Did you have a favorite? Oh, did I have a favorite?

Favorite item at the after party? Piece of food? They had these little lemon meringue tarts. And I like lemon. As you know, I keep a box of lemon tea on my desk because that's like my mid-afternoon snack. Yeah. And there's lemon meringue tarts that they had with like blueberries and blackberries and raspberries. And blackberries are probably above lemon as my favorite fruit.

So that was really good, especially after a long day of being on my feet the entire day. That kind of sugar rush was really nice. It was really nice at the very end to kind of boost myself up. Yeah, you deserved it. Yeah. There was a lot of work that was put in. Absolutely. Maslin Jordan, our media and marketing manager put so much work into this event, and it absolutely paid off. The entire thing went off totally smoothly. And it's one of those things where we're so happy we did it. And we're so happy we're done with it now. And now we can, you know, the entire team can take a collective breather before the next thing starts, which of course we're going to have a lot going on this legislative session. Well, let's get into some of

that. Starting off at the top, everyone who's listening, everyone who pays attention to politics knows there's been a flurry of executive orders. I want to talk about maybe one of the more controversial ones at the top here. There was an executive order issued regarding birthright citizenship, clarifying under the 14th Amendment, there is a section of the clause that says subject to the jurisdiction of. There is a argument that the Trump administration and many conservatives for a number of decades now have put forward that a illegal immigrant or an illegal alien in the country is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

Thus, if they have a child as an illegal alien in the United States, that child is not a citizen of the United States. Right. And thankfully, we had a border and immigration panel, and I got to ask this question to some of the lawmakers. We had a Democrat who was skeptical of this executive order being held up as it goes through the court process. But we also had Representative Chip Roy stepped in. Absolutely. Congressman. Congressman. Very nice to have him there. Yeah, and he defended the executive order. And it's an interesting contrast to the different ideological factions within the United States, right?

Someone like J.D. Vance, who gave an interview on, was it, Meet the Press. I think it's going to be two weeks ago after this airs, where he defended the executive order as well when confronted with the idea that America is a nation of immigrants. Right. But his defense was, well, when the Mayflower arrived, there was no nation. The people who came created the nation of America. Yeah, this has been a big, I've seen this as well. People say, well, the whole country was kind of founded by illegal immigrants. But, of course, that would posit that there was some kind of unified government for people to be illegally immigrating into. So it's one of those things, I think, where it's just not helpful in politics to kind of try to transplant contemporary problems onto history. You know me,

I'm a big history guy. And one of the worst things you can do in trying to understand the past is to try and take models that we use to understand the present and simply push it back several hundred years, because that stuff really starts to break down, uh, the further back you go. So. Yeah. And it's the trying to create some sort of relativistic argument between the past and the present, uh, has you, especially as we've seen who, uh, for people who are making arguments against this executive order, kind of finds herself in a difficult arguing position. So this is something I'm going to be following

because I'm always deep in the weeds on many of these philosophical arguments when it comes to the American governance system. So I actually pulled up a really interesting article on this executive order that was published in Unheard, and it was carried also in the American Mind, which is a Claremont Institute outlet. And the article was published by Ryan Williams of the Claremont Institute, and he goes into the legal history and actually the arguments for and against this 14th Amendment, because as he argues here, I'm reading from the article here, the 1866 Act was meant to secure the full benefits of citizenship for recently freed slaves and their descendants and all black citizens for that matter. The law's proponents were determined to convert it from legislation to constitutional text, thus insulating its protections from change by future Congress. And so if this gets into the originalist versus the textualist interpretation of these amendments, which is an ongoing discussion for the Supreme Court jurors.

Sort of the ongoing discussion. Which this birthright citizenship question is something they're going to have to confront in a few months here, I'm sure. Absolutely. As it works its way out. Well, I'm one of those people who believes that Trump is filing or signing so many of these executive orders precisely because he wants it to go to the Supreme Court, right? I believe that this order has already been challenged by a judge. It has. And so now, of course, the Trump administration

is going to appeal that to SCOTUS. And SCOTUS is going to have an opportunity to overturn the prevailing precedent that, again, you know, anybody who is any child born in basically any circumstances in the United States, whether their parents are legal resident aliens or illegal aliens or citizens or whatnot, is a citizen. So I think that Trump's perspective now is I'm going to sign this order and they can challenge it and we'll take it to SCOTUS and SCOTUS gets the final say.

And I think for those who have been finding issue with how Trump has issued these executive orders, and they've painted this as some sort of authoritarian action by the executive branch trying to take control of government. Whereas you just articulated, this is really the co-equal portion of these three branches. Well, you know, that's a big debate. You say co-equal well you know that's a big debate you say co-equal because obviously there's a big debate within the conservative sphere over whether or not the legislative branches should be understood as equal branches that kind of have their own domains and they're allowed to butt heads but you know well the constitutional questions are settled by those

disputes or the view right that the um the, for example, the legislature is the supreme branch. And I think this goes back to John Locke is the English philosopher wrote that, you know, all power is vested in this legislature, which from which the authority is delegated by the people, right? This is what happens, he says, when a people transition from a state of nature to a state of civil society. Now, it's just you can debate whether or not John Locke's perspective on that applies one to one to the American system. But, yeah, it's a big dispute within the right. Well, John Locke, definitely inspiration for many of the founders. Of course. dispute within the right well john lock definitely inspiration for many of the founders of course um but yeah it'll be interesting to see how this birthright citizenship uh executive order works

its way through the court system a couple other executive orders i'd like to hear um your thoughts on there was one to end the gender transition for individuals under 19 years old, I believe. The order titled Protect Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation seeks to end federal support for gender transition treatment for minors. Now, when you say end federal support, does this simply mean that it is illegal for anybody under 19 to have a gender modification procedure? Or does it simply mean that the federal government will not be putting any money towards it? What exactly does that mean? Well, so the executive order would direct federally run insurance programs, including TRICARE and Medicaid to exclude coverage for gender affirming care for minors, instructing the Secretary of Health and Human Services

to implement regulations to halt these interventions for young people, mandating federal entities to revoke guidance from the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, or WPATH, which WPATH is something that has come up quite a bit in our reporting, especially when we've covered which bill was SB14 during the 88th session, and then also encouraging Congress to adopt laws allowing individuals who regret receiving gender-affirming care or their parents to sue providers. Again, something that's come up quite a bit, especially when we've seen these detransitioners become more prominent in the public sphere,

saying they have no recourse for the type of damage they say has been done to their bodies by these doctors. So, you know, another issue that Trump ran on specifically, as we've mentioned before, one of the most effective ads Trump had was the They Them Kamala Harris ad. Right. The one that said Trump is for you, Kamala Harris is for they, them. Right. That's the one. Yeah. Right. So this is Trump upholding one of those promises that he made during the campaign, I would think. Do you have any thoughts on this executive order specifically? Well, so I remember seeing some people reporting it as, you know, Trump bans transgender health care for Americans under 19, which is obviously not a that's not what happened. It's ending federal support for it, which is not the same thing as making the entire procedure illegal. One thing that I was curious about, though, is why it was 19 years old as opposed to 18, which is, you know, the legal age of majority.

So I don't know the exact reasoning for that. I don't know if it has something to do with healthcare law. I mean, you know, I don't know if maybe 18 year olds technically count as minors. And I don't know enough about the specifics of healthcare. You know, it's, it's obviously nobody really wants to think too hard about their healthcare plan, right? So it's always a headache. But I mean, it's one of these things where, again, I think it's going to go to the courts. I think that this is what Trump is. I mean, obviously, I think he would be very happy if his executive orders were just carried out without being challenged.

I think he'd be happy with that. But I think he'd also be happy if they were being sent to the court so that, in his mind, the court can overturn what he believes to be bad precedent, which a lot of people within the Trumpian sphere believe to be bad precedent. Of course, Justice Clarence Thomas has a lot of cases that he thinks were improperly decided that he would want overturned. So I think that that's what I think of that. Yeah. Well, there's another, there's another one order that is, yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Related to establishing there's only two sexes. Absolutely. Yeah. Establishing that male and female are the only two sexes recognized by the federal government. It's one of those things where sometimes, you know, you wish you had a time machine. I wish I could go back to 2012 and be like, just so you know,

this is going to be a controversial issue. You know, it's just one of those things how you really don't know what's coming around the corner. You know what I mean? It's one of those things that shows how, especially in the information age, how fast the issues can change, you know? Well, I only think it's controversial for a small majority of the Democratic Party. But for some reason, we've seen the Democratic Party attach themselves to these more, the increasingly fringe ideas that have become a part of their platform.

And we saw it with the Kamala Harris presidential campaign did not help her get elected. And we've seen people arguing that the Democrat Party needs to get rid of the woke. Yeah. Well, this has been a big claim that, of course, the right likes to make is that, you know, wokeness is an albatross around the Democrats necks. And there are a lot of more centrist liberal Democrats who say kind of the same thing, right, saying we need to abandon this ideology that seems, you know, rather hostile to a large portion of Americans or seems rather hostile to what the majority of Americans believe is, you

know, true or normal, right. And, you know, it might be one of those things where it goes and becomes more popular in state parties, but it loses its support among the national party. You know, there's been a lot of talk that the U.S. is entering a more conservative period overall. Nate Silver, you know, had a Substack post talking about this call, like, are we entering a new conservative golden age, right? It's interesting because Nate Silver, obviously, you know, got his start during the Obama years, if I recall correctly, predicted, I think it was every state for the 2012 election, which made him a very, very famous guy very quickly. Turn around, of course, in 2016,

and Trump comes along and shocks everybody. But that's the thing about Trump is everybody said that his detractors said it was a fluke, right? You know, they said, well, he didn't really win the election because he won the Electoral College. But you know, he, he got away, he cheesed it, right? Because of course, there are a lot of people who don't think the Electoral College is a legitimate institution. They think it's they think it shouldn't exist, right? But when Trump won this time winning the popular vote, which of course, as we talked about, I was rather surprised too. I did not believe that was going to happen. It really showed just how unpopular a lot of those ideas had become, that a lot of people were willing to vote for, and not just willing to take a chance on Trump.

Like in 2016, like, oh, you know, he's relatively new to politics. What does he have to say? Everything over the last eight years and the majority of Americans deciding between him and Harris chose him. So it's interesting to see this kind of stuff, you know, make it into the executive order and, of course, possibly into the court. Because I think it does represent a very real shift away from the much stronger progressive cultural ideology that peaked, I'd say, in like 2020, right? Very strong at that time. And over the course of the Biden administration, just seems to have declined, for lack of a better word, and just gone down over time.

Well, I think that's going to, the direction of the Democrat Party is something I think a lot of people are going to be paying attention to over the course of the next four years, really in the next two years when we have midterms. Are they going to pivot on the focus on wokeness? I sent you a clip earlier today about DNC chair candidates all blaming sexism and racism for Kamala Harris's loss. So it doesn't seem like they're that willing to get rid of those things. But we have seen maybe some elected officials trying to pivot away from that. You've seen, for example, John Fetterman, you know, Democratic senator that a lot of Republicans really didn't like John Fetterman.

And now he seems to be a lot more. He's a lot more, I think, willing to reach across the aisle than people expected. And I think—my personal prediction is that that kind of politics is probably going to— Well, reach across the aisle on very specific issues. Yeah. But high-profile issues that matter a lot to conservatives. For example, Israel. Right. That's a very big high-profile issue that matters a lot to conservatives. For example, Israel. That's a very big high-profile issue that matters a lot to conservatives.

But is he going to vote to confirm Tulsi if she gets to the floor? Is he going to vote to confirm RFK when he gets to the floor? I guess we'll have to wait and see. Is he going to vote to confirm Kash Patel when he gets to the floor? Do you want to talk about the confirmation hearings, Cameron? I think we should get into it. I think that's a good idea one of the uh more the most controversial of these confirmation hearings they all seem to happen this week there was like i mentioned rfk jr

tulsi gabbard and kash patel uh rfk jr as everyone knows ran for president 2024 dropped out a million years ago well when Well, he tried to run as a Democrat. They wouldn't allow him to challenge Biden, so he ran as an independent. He gained quite a lot of popularity among a very specific segment of the electorate. There were people who thought he'd be a spoiler candidate for Trump, that it would deliver Biden another win because RFK was supposed to siphon a kind of like a Teddy Roosevelt situation. Right. You know, where the majority of people would have voted Republican except for the fact that they split.

Well, and then once it became clear it was just going to be Trump versus Biden and then Harris, RFK drops out of the race, endorses Trump. A new movement called MAHA emerges to coincide with MAGA. So there's these two movements happening simultaneously. And Trump had said RFK is going to be part of his cabinet. It wasn't very clear what it was going to be. Came to fruition as his nomination to Health and Human Services to be the secretary. We had the hearing in front of the health committee in the Senate this week. Quite a number of viral moments. I think- Quite a number, yeah. I think the most viral moment was Bernie Sanders. Oh, you think it was Sanders?

Well, I'll tell the—you can bring up yours, but the Sanders one, when Bernie Sanders is questioning RFK about his work with the Child Defense Fund, Children Defense Fund. And Bernie Sanders had a poster board of baby onesies that said, no vax, no problem sort of thing. And just the back and forth of bernie sanders yelling at rfk jr with giant pictures of onesies behind them was a sight to see bernie sanders is kind of a meme machine right he is he has a very strong support among a small number of people that are very online and are constantly making

memes about the guy. He's a very idiosyncratic politician. I mean, we were just talking about this in the office the other day, right? Bernie plays the bongos and Trump plays the accordion, right? That's, you know, they could, they could be a, um, some kind of German folk music. I don't think bongos are in German folk music, but you know, nonetheless, I mean, you've got, you've got that and you've got that. Absolutely. Well, and see, I was thinking of Adam Schiff know, nonetheless, I mean, you've got that and you've got that. You've got the bongos, yeah. Absolutely. Well, and— See, I was thinking of Adam Schiff with Kash Patel, you know, going after him. And it's really something to behold, the way that he's like, you know, will you tell us what you said in that grand jury statement?

And Patel is like, well, no. And he's like, why not? You know, he's just going— he's just, he's getting very, very excited. Well, on the RFK junior hearing, there was quite a bit of concern expressed by Democrat senators about some views of RFK in the past about his vaccine skepticism. And it's quite obvious, yes, RFK is a vaccine skeptic in many instances. But during this hearing, you can see how he moderates his views in order to attempt to be confirmed through first the hearing and then on the floor saying, I support vaccines. Well, as everybody would. I mean, you know, anybody, it's a job interview, right?

He's not going to be going in and saying every single, you know, every single skepticism he might have that might cause enough senators to not vote for him. Well, that's the entire thing about these Senate confirmation hearings is you have to understand the game of politics like many of these cabinet picks especially the more controversial ones have said things on podcasts and interviews and things that got them popularity with the the base of people that help them get into the position that they are. But once they're in front of these senators, they have to play the game.

Right. And they have to say the right thing in an attempt to be confirmed. And so someone like RFK, he's caught some strays from people on the conservative side of government pushing vaccines on people, government lockdowns, especially during COVID. So that in the COVID period, really, you can say red pilled a lot of people. Well, it's kind of a reset button, I think. I think what's what, in my opinion, what we've had in the last eight years was, then there has been a political realignment. And that realignment revolves around like, a view of politics as something kind of technocratic, where, you know, you have to have your academic, academic, credentialed, competent, professional people who are put in charge of things and run them efficiently versus the view of the more sort of populists who believe that these credentialed, professional bureaucrats are running everything into the ground. I mean, you have people like

RFK Jr. who is skeptical of, you know, he's skeptical of a lot of like mainstream vaccine science, skeptical of the pharmaceutical science, the pharmaceutical industry, Tulsi Gabbard, who I believe also, right, she did used to be a Democrat. I'm not making that up. She was the vice chair of the Democratic Party. Well, that explains it then. And she's like a foreign policy skeptic, right? She's very skeptical of this idea. I mean, during her confirmation hearing, you know, they were asking her, oh, do you, you know, do you have ties to Bashar al-Assad? You know, the former dictator of Syria, now former actually, now he's hanging out in Russia, I suppose. You know, do you have ties to Vladimir Putin? I believe she was accused of having ties to Hezbollah. And she said, I just hate Al-Qaeda.

And so I'm, you know, she's willing to work with and this is something Trump did as well, actually, there's a willingness to work with people that are kind of perceived opponents in order to get at a worse enemy, right? So kind of an enemy of the enemy of my enemy is my friend situation, but they were all they're all skeptical of these kind of mainstream narratives. They're all populists, in they were all they're all skeptical of these kind of mainstream narratives they're all populists in some sense they're all trying to have like a they're all trying to overturn a prevailing a prevailing precedent overturning prevailing precedent might be the the theme of the entire trump phenomenon yeah outsiders having a voice. Exactly. And, you know, I heard it articulated in the context of Tulsi and her skepticism of the intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex as she is support in support of the war on terrorism.

She disagrees with how it's been conducted as a war for terrorism. Yeah. And because there's been lots of information that's come out over the previous decades about the use of the CIA and funding of rebel groups in many of these areas where there are governments that disagree with the United States and then those rebel groups then turn on the United States. I mean, you've seen the famous image of, it was a newspaper article of talking about Osama bin Laden, talking about when the Taliban, the Mujahideen were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan saying,

you know, Islamic warrior puts his country on the path to peace, right? And of Taliban, the Mujahideen were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan saying, you know, Islamic warrior puts his country on the path to peace. Right. And of course, the problem is those same people then turned around once they kicked the Soviets out and said, America, we don't want you here either. And we were like, what do you mean you don't want us here? And, you know, it's it's a it's a tragic thing to see how, unfortunately, that can. Yeah, you can get mired in something. We were mired in Afghanistan for 20 years. And I think that's where much of the electorate and more generally the United States populace is skeptical of American interventionism. Well, you say interventionism. Warriorism, maybe. Well, it's an interesting thing because, like, a lot of Americans right after 9-11

obviously supported retaliation against the opponents of the United States, the people who had done this, right? People wanted justice, right? But there's a difference between a retaliatory— there's a difference between retaliating with a show of force in order to ensure nothing like this ever happens again, and getting bogged down in a 20 year quagmire, right? That's a total difference. There's a difference between something like the Iraq war, where a lot of people said, you know,

what does Saddam Hussein necessarily have? And that's Tulsa Gabbard said during her during her confirmation hearing, she called like the Iraq war a mistake. Remember when, you know, Trump was one of the first Republicans in the mid 2010s to come out and say, the Iraq war was a mistake. And now this is just kind of, I think, become a mainstream view. I think there's only like a small number of more pre Trumpian conservatives who will maintain that the Iraq war was not a mistake. It's it's, it's amazing to see how, considering the fact that it was rather popular at the time. I mean, there were a lot of protests, but at the same time, support for Bush was rather high. And now I think there's almost nobody who likes it, whether you're a Republican

or a Democrat. Well, I wrote an entire newsletter quite a few, probably six or eight months ago. Worth reading like all your newsletters. It's called How to Be Anti-Anti-War. And where I get into some of these ideological differences on the right in regards to foreign intervention. I encourage people to go check that out. But one thing left to mention about these confirmation hearings, the Kash Patel hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee, that was very interesting to watch as well. I believe it was the Judiciary Committee, right?

Do I have that correct? I'm trying to think off the top of my head here. Let's see. but Cash Patel obviously Yes, it was the judiciary committee. Okay, Cash Patel up for FBI director. And again, someone who has made a number of controversial, you can say controversial. Controversial, I think it's an objective.

It's true, it was controversial. But the problem is, is that a lot of people in media use the term controversial as a pejorative. For them, the fact of a controversy is a point of criticism, even when it shouldn't be. The fact that something is controversial doesn't mean anything more than the fact that it's controversial. It doesn't mean it's good or bad. Yeah. And so that was really interesting to follow that confirmation hearing, because for many people, they might be just familiar with Cash Retail as a talking head on with his background on a number of things. And I think got a chance to articulate that in front of the Senate committee. But we'll see, again, another one that's going to be tough to confirm possibly. many quote-unquote establishment Republicans that remain in these Senate positions that still

believe in upholding the FBI to a certain degree. And if anyone's come out and criticized it, they see them as an outsider enemy, someone who can't be brought into the fold. Yeah, they put a lot of prestige on the institutions and the way that they've worked. Whereas, actually, that's really the right word for it, isn't it? It's not populist or, like, anti-elitist. I think anti-institutional is the best way to describe Trump's coalition. Patel, Gabbard, Kennedy, Trump himself, they're all very anti-institutional. They believe that these organizations need to be kind of scrapped and started over effectively, hard reset. So speaking of, though, you talk about establishment Republicans.

What about these new Republicans, though? I think we can get into this, a great article from the New York Magazine, right? Yeah, you read this piece. I york uh new york magazine right yeah you read this piece i've been reading reactions to the piece oh there have been so many reactions but let's just read the headline and the subheader okay the cruel kids table among the young confident and casually cruel trumpers who after conquering washington have set their sights on america it's one of those interesting articles where it's filled with attempts to like, it's just filled with descriptions of the kind of things that the

all of these young, I guess, Trumpian, I prefer I think Trumpian sounds better than Trumpist. So I'll say Trumpian, the sort of young Trumpian conservatives, right? A lot of these people who are college students or in their 20s, you know, people who were teenagers people trying to describe a kind of new, the sort of the new state of the young conservative, right? Which is funny to me, because I think it largely just parallels the yuppie phenomenon of the 1980s. You know, all of these young people making a bunch of money, conservative voting republican you know i think the what's interesting about this uh new trump faction uh the trumpian coalition is it's comprised of so many different types of people not just ideologies but just. Right. And that's why it's anti-institutional. That's what the coalition is.

I mean, you can have a hardcore, like, you can take, for example, hardcore Roman Catholic conservative Christian who, you know, believes that Trump is good because he is going to, you know, all of them view him as, I guess, a wrecking ball. And they all believe that once the building has been demolished, they can kind of swoop in and rebuild it, right? Because how does somebody like, you know, R.F. Kennedy Jr. and somebody like, you know, these hardcore social conservatives, what do they have in common? Kennedy Jr. is not a social conservative. You know, he's still liberal on most of these issues, but he aligns because precisely of that anti-institutional. Yeah, and I think people, at least in this new burgeoning right faction, are willing to say, okay, there's these 20 issues. If we can get ourselves aligned on four or five, we can get along. Well, it's like the fusionism of the 1960s, right?

You know, you had all of these, because there wasn't a conservative movement in the United States really until after World War II. Fusionism has been tried quite a bit. You know, the Rothbardian, Buchananites. No, no. Those guys are outside of fusionism. Those are way out over here. No, I'm saying that, like, we didn't have a conservative movement as, like, a unified ideological thing in this country really until after World War II and really, really until, likeerate the 1950s. And then you had conservative people like Russell Kirk walking around the 1950s saying this is the laissez-faire economist types. You had the social conservatives and you had the war hawks who were deeply opposed to the Soviet Union and hated this new position the Soviet Union had in the aftermath of World War II. If anti-communism was the uniting feature of the old fusionism, then anti-institutionalism is the uniting feature of the

new fusionism. And it's a lot more focused, of course, on domestic policy, I think, this time around than, you know, I guess there's still obviously a view of the U.S.'s relationship to the world, but that anti-institutionalism, I think, really does describe a kind of new fusionism. Well, and I think going forward, if this new fusionism is going to work, it can't be instituted through a top-down government structure because there are so many competing factions that it needs to be decentralized. Yeah, there is nothing like what they, you know, the old fusionists, of course, had National Review, which wanted to be the gold standard publication for, you know,

the gatekeepers of conservatism, right? No such thing exists. And in fact, if, you know, that's might be a feature and not a bug in this kind of the postmodern information age we find ourselves in where there's no objective standards anymore, right? It's more so this seem sort of these consensuses that... Consensuses or consensuses? It's consensuses, right? Yeah. more so this seem sort of these consenses that, consenses or consensuses? It's consenses, right? Yeah. Okay. These consenses that build up on social media from lots of different influencers and activists and anonymous accounts that, you know, kind of coalesce into a worldview. Yeah, well, and that's where a lot of these differing personality types, differing ideologies, this fusionism happens is online. And right now it's being done in places

like X. And X, because Elon Musk was able to purchase it a few years ago, has allowed for this freedom of expression and freedom of speech on this platform, where years ago people were unaware that there were other people out there that thought the same way they did. And maybe, again, the popular opinion at the time was not the true consensus. The progressive social position was not the consensus.

And we're going to be moving into, I think, in the next decade, a radically new technological environment. And what does that mean for these differing factions on the right yeah are they going to attempt to try and implement their intake control of this new party this new new Republican Party is one ideology gonna win out or are they gonna be able to continue to be happy with only portions of their policy wants and needs to make it in because it seems like right now with you know going back to what we started at the very beginning with the executive orders trump is

really keeping promises to a lot of these different factions that helped him get elected, whether it be the libertarians, pardoning Ross Ulbrich, the Bitcoin bros. We'll be getting into that. The Bitcoin bros, you know, saying he's going to start up a Bitcoin reserve to the social conservatives. There's only man and woman. Rolling back the social conservatives. There's only man and woman. Rolling back the transgender policies. And so he is doing this, but is there a Trumpism after Trump

that can keep this multi-pronged faction of the Republicans together? What do you think? So here's my thoughts. I think that Trump is a lot more like Richard Nixon than he is like Ronald Reagan in the sense that Trump, I don't think he's a very ideological person. I think he's one of those people who does, I mean, he has said this in like Fox News interviews where he says, you know, I'm not conservative. I just have common sense. And I really think that that's how he believes. He doesn't believe that his, he does not perceive his policy positions as like being far right or something. I don't even think he views them as particularly conservative. I think he just views

himself as a person with common sense who does whatever seems to be, you know, the right thing to do at that time. And it's a lot more like Richard Nixon, for example, who is a much more pragmatist Republican, as opposed to, you know, Reagan, who is very, you know, stood very much on principle, right, had a very conservative, he was a conservative idealist, if you will. Yeah. Whereas Trump has kind of been just maintaining similar policy positions since the 1980s, you know, talking about all of this stuff, you know, about, oh, foreign countries taking advantage of our trade deals. You know, why can't the U.S. throw its weight around a little bit more? Why can't we make deals that are explicitly good for us? We don't have to be charitable in these deals.

I think when you say Trump's common sense, I think it's a really a philosophical pragmatism that is core to the American ethos, which has helped build what the not just industrial base, but the culture that we have. This work ethic is built is rooted in a pragmatism, a common sense nature. And what Trump probably unconsciously understands how to do is sell the idealism, sell the dream, but operate in a pragmatic, common sense way. Interesting. It's a hard balance to strike, obviously, but we'll see if there'll be a way to articulate that vision for the next generation, especially since it seems like someone like J.D. Vance, who has done very well on confrontational interviews, is he able to sell the jury to the electorate to be elected, but then also act in

pragmatic faction? Well, see, I was finished. Well, this is this is what I think you asked us. Is there a Trumpism after Trump? My mentality is to say that the Trump coalition will not last after Trump, basically, like the specific coalition of factions, because Trump kind of doesn't really belong to any of them. He kind of stands above the whole thing, right? However, if Trump, you know, when Trump eventually steps away, it's going to be the members of the factions themselves competing to see who's kind of going to be in charge, right? And I think this is, I know I've said this before about Trump, but like Trump is kind of going to be in charge, right? And I think this is, I know I've said this before about Trump, but like Trump is kind of all things to all people, right? You can look at Trump and

you can imagine that he supports whatever it is that you believe in, right? So I think all these people attached to Trump specifically because he's this, he's a pragmatist who is basically willing to work with anybody. But I think what Trump is going to have a long-term effect on, you know, Trumpism might not survive as an actual political movement or as a coalition of specific, like, factions, but it is going to survive as kind of a, like, like a style of politics, right? And it gets back to this article about the cruel kids table

because it's this kind of like, you know, Trump, you've heard it described, Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person, right? If I if I was a billionaire, I'd have a penthouse apartment made of solid gold, right? I'd have, you know, I would do all this stuff. This is how I would do I would, you know, I would spend my money on these outrageous things. But he's also you know, he has an apartment made of solid gold. and yet he also buys McDonald's to host for dinners at the White House. Well, that's why I think Trump is a unique political figure.

And I don't necessarily think the Trump style of politics is what people think the Trump style of politics is. Let me explain what I mean. Go ahead. Trump's style of being confrontational, making hyperbolic statements, making outlandish claims about things, really being upfront with political opponents, you know, nicknames for people. I think that only works for Trump,

that style. But what Trump, his actual style is, is just authenticity, is he's just being himself. Where people have tried to mimic that same Trump style, it comes off as inauthentic. Incredibly fake. And so moving forward, I think is what people are wanting is the authenticity of the person in front of them, which is why someone like RFK Jr. was popular is because he didn't have that Trump style, but he had the Trump style in that he was authentically himself. See, it's interesting to bring up authenticity, because I think you're right. Because when you see Trump doing stuff like eating his McDonald's with the other future members of his cabinet, or when you see him dancing to YMCA, or talking about Arnold Palmer, or why he thinks pilots are all handsome or whatever.

You know that that's just him just, you know, he's, as the kids say, he's just yapping about like whatever kind of he wants to yap about, right? It's his stage. But see, when I'm talking about Trump, and this relates back to the whole New York Magazine article, is I think that Trump's whole idea is that he portrays an image of success that is aspirational, right? His whole thing is he's like, I'm wealthy, I live in luxury, and we can all live in luxury, right? We'll be swimming in the milk and honey, right? And you see this whole this, this, this photo that went very famous from this article of all these like young people, you know, in their in their suits and

dresses you know having like a fancy party they there's a line in the article which says many of the people at this party are hot enough to be uh cast in the upcoming american psycho remake which is first of all why are you remaking that movie but second of all um well it's a subtle dig of course it's not a subtle dig but it's also making a point that it's like, and you see on X, you see people saying, you know, why are you criticizing these, for these people who they perceive, of course, as being privileged, they say, why are we giving them even more attention or treating them as like a normative standard, right? Whereas the right, a lot of people on the right are saying because the aspiration is what drives people to succeed.

And so that's, I think, Ben, that's one of the biggest things I think about Donald Trump is because people view him as authentic. And they also view his, you know, it's like everything he touches turns to gold, right? I'm not saying that that's actually true, but I'm saying that that's definitely, that's what a lot of Trump supporters believe about him. Everything he touches turns to gold. And people want to, you know, they like gold. Well, that's why I don't think the Trump style is going to be able, people are going to be able to replicate it. But what they can replicate is the authenticity that he presents. J.D. Vance, as you mentioned, as somebody who kind of has a rags to riches story growing up in poor rural Appalachia to becoming a very wealthy, successful man.

He also has that kind of authentic, aspirational ethos to him, I think. Right. And so we've gotten into a lot of things. One thing I wanted to get into as well, really related to the Trump administration, the Trump phenomena is the intersection of wealth and power. Then, well, the intersection between the Trump base and the tensions between them and the tech right, the tech oligarch, as I love the term the bro look, are the bro look, are key. Because this was a big sea change in this past election. We saw people like Mark Zuckerberg come out and donate to the Trump Inauguration Fund. We saw at the inauguration itself, Mark Zuckerberg with also the Google CEO, with Jeff Bezos, with Elon Musk. A number of tech billionaires being supportive of Donald Trump.

And what are these tech billionaires interested in? They're interested in artificial intelligence. And we saw shortly after Trump took office, he came out and did a press conference with Sam Altman of OpenAI, with Larry Ellison of Oracle, and with the SoftBank CEO saying, Trump was saying he's going to encourage $500 billion of investment in AI infrastructure within the United States. And what happened just a few days after that was the release of the Chinese AI model DeepSeek. And what really shook the foundation of the whole AI industry with DeepSeek

was people had thought that it would cost billions of dollars in compute power to support these AI models. Because you would need better chips, you need more data processing. Chips, servers, clusters of servers, you need the infrastructure to support those servers. Fans to cool them down. Yeah, you need energy to support those servers. You need the fans to cool them down. Yeah, you need energy to power these servers. So it was billions of dollars to do this. of that and fractions of per output to where people who are building software companies on top of these ai models like open ai or anthropic where it was costing so much money to do this well these companies if they're able to do it for cheaper on deep seek they're going to be building companies off of chinese

models and there's not just the cost efficiency but it seems like the performance is similar but the big fear now is that two things that america is going to be beat in the AI arms race by China. But then also if people in the United States, American companies are building companies on top of Chinese artificial intelligence models, what sort of information is being then transferred to the Chinese government? And so it's a geopolitical issue there. I've heard it described as the AI Sputnik moment, the release of this deep sea.

Mark Andreessen said that. And again, the issue with the chips in this context, it's a number of issue areas that are crossing over here because with how our stock market is supported is on what's called the MAG7, seven different companies. And one of those companies is NVIDIA. NVIDIA produces these GPUs, these chips, that are part of the processing for these AI models everything is built off them well when this deep seek was released Nvidia experienced a

17 percent decline in stock price so it's a loss of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars can cause real volatility for people who have investments in the SP500, which is many of people's retirement accounts and things. So there's lots of volatility, not just in the stock market, but the AI industry with national security. So I don't know how much you've dug into this, but based on what I've told you here, what, what sort of ideas do you have with how AI might change the future of, of how we not just interact, uh, online, but maybe potentially with how we interact in the world more generally. Yeah. So, I mean, I've, you know, I'm a big fan of the matrix. I'm really looking forward to,

you know, I'm a big fan of cyberpunk fiction, you know, sci-fi stuff like that. But I do think, here's the thing. I'm fairly pessimistic when it comes to this AI stuff, because I believe, first of all, that a lot of companies are touting AI, you know, why is Google putting AI into their stuff? Why is Twitter putting AI? Why is why is this generative AI, you know, being shoved into everything? I believe that it's because a lot of companies want to please their investors by showing off the benefits of a technology that their investors might not 100% fully understand. I think that this is kind of a bubble. I think that it's a way for companies to,

you know, tout how good they are at, you know, taking advantage of new stuff. I think it pleases investors. But I do not, you know, Sam Altman came out and said that AI is going to require a new social contract, whatever that means. And I have no doubt that these technologies are going to continue to change, you know, the way that people live their life. I mean, think of all the technologies, right? It used to be the case that roads were places where people would walk in, in cities. But now, as we know, roads are places where cars drive on, right? Human beings who used to be able to walk on roads are now relegated to the sidewalk. Now, of course, for all of us, that's normal. But for people who lived through the transition from

no cars to cars, it would have been pretty shocking, right? To think that all of a sudden, the road, which is a place where people go on, you know, obviously, you'd have like carts and horses and stuff. But you know, it's a place where people go on becomes a place where cars go on, you have stuff like, you know, the book, right, the invention of mass printing changes the way people view all kinds of things in the world, right? Mass literacy changes things, you know, new technologies change human life. And I have no doubt about that about that however i do not believe we're going to invent some kind of ai god that is going to you know run everything in society and and completely change everything i'm pretty skeptical of the belief that we're going to truly invent like a a

sapient um sentient mind in a computer, which is called artificial general intelligence, right? Or that there's going to be this process by which an AGI can upgrade itself essentially infinitely and become exponentially smarter by the second, which has been called the singularity, right? Which is this hypothetical moment where a machine gains the ability to improve itself exponentially and becomes essentially near omnipotent, right? I'm very skeptical of most of this stuff. And I think it's probably because I like a lot of sci-fi that I actually think that this is more of a product

of science fiction than anything in reality. And I think that when AI companies come out and say this kind of stuff, I think they're doing it to just drum up support for their software. That's my opinion. Well, we're probably on opposite sides of this argument. And I think many of the examples you just brought up support my argument because of what you just said with the printing press was a revolutionary concept at the time.

And it's become incredible. And it's radically changed our societies in the generations after that. And it's just normal now. Same thing with the creation of cars and the internal combustion engine. How about this thing right here we're going to talk about what's changed a lot if it wasn't for this i think donald trump would never have become president yeah in the cell exactly so what might seem like fanciful yeah out there abstract ideas have become normalized we have historical examples for that. We could see the same thing with AI as it is

slowly introduced into our daily lives. It becomes, it grows in its use and it just is part of something that we use every single day. Yeah. And I have no doubt that it's going to be used every single day. I mean, you know, I mean, you already have something interesting I like to read about sometimes is how a lot of young people don't really understand how computers work. And trust me, I'm going somewhere with this. But it's, you know, there's a lot of young people who don't know what a file directory is. You know, they use these very intuitive systems like what you have on the Apple environment, you know, Mac OS or an iPhone or smartphones that are designed to be super user friendly. But you know, if you were good with technology in the 80s or 90s, you knew how these things actually worked, right? You understood the process behind a computer. Whereas for a lot of young people growing up now, the actual way that computers work is very opaque. They understand what to do, but they don't know why it works or how it works, right? That's exactly right. Well, that's the reason why I'm making my argument that I am. And I'm agreeing with you, because I think that AI will make these things so much more

intuitive. I mean, to the point where a phone might just be a box you speak to, and it speaks back to you, and you won't actually understand how any of it works. It'll be very mysterious. People, there's the science fiction author Williamiam gibson was once asked in an interview he wrote a very influential novel called neuromancer which is also what coined the word cyberspace this author very important um guy for um i can talk if i try really hard very important guy in the world of computer information technology yeah but he was once asked in an interview um about the future of computing and he said i don't know if our grandchildren will know the difference between what is a computer and what is not a computer

because he said he believes computer technology will be essentially in everything right it's called the internet of things this idea that every object you use will in some sense have some computer technology. There will be no analog technology anymore, right? You'll have your smart fridge, your smart home, your smart thermostat. With how many things operate already. Right. So what if there's an internet of things of everything? But the difference is, of course, I don't believe we're going to have

AGI. We might have ASI. The biggest problem in my mind. All the arguments you're making are supporting my argument. No, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I mean, maybe if every piece of technology in the world gets connected, it might resemble a mind. But again, I believe it's more likely people will start to confuse artificial specific intelligence for artificial general intelligence. Like you already have people who think that chat GPT is a living thing. The people who think like there was one, I believe one engineer at Google who actually started saying he believes that the, the, um, AI that Google was working on

is a real like living being essentially, even though it's, it's just spitting out, you know, probability, it's spitting out words based on probabilities you know i mean ask chat gpt to write a poem it sucks at doing that well i'll tell you that much maybe that and we don't have time to get into all these deeper questions of object oriented ontology no but we do have time actually for one last bit which i want to point out here which is all the stuff that i'm saying about how, you know, I think that this is all, you know, I, in my mind, it kind of comes off a bit as quackery, right? And I, my, my attitude is, you know, if it, if it quacks, then it's quackery, right? That doesn't, that didn't work. It's like, you know, quacks like a duck, then it's quackery. But that being said,

the AI stuff is part of the same anti-institutionalism that is firing the rest of the Trump coalition, right? It's the same exact people who come – like when Sam Altman says we're going to have to have a new social contract for this technology. This is brand new stuff. It's going to change everything. It's a very Trumpian attitude. It's the Silicon Valley attitude that you used to describe in the term move fast and break things. And that Silicon Valley attitude is very Trumpian. Well, there's a split even between the AI evangelists within the Silicon Valley, within the Trump movement, because there's people who believe it should

be centralized within a few companies. And then there's some people that think it should be completely decentralized. And the people who believe it should be decentralized have been winning out with Trump, especially with the appointment of someone like David Sachs to be the crypto czar. Crypto czar. There you go. Terms that, you know, I wish I could go back to somebody in 2012 and be like, you know, we're going to have a crypto czar. Like, what is that? Like a Bitcoin? What? I can't even buy a pizza with a Bitcoin, you know, we're going to have a crypto czar. You're like, what is that? Like a Bitcoin? What?

I can't even buy a pizza with a Bitcoin, you know, imagine, but well, we're wrapping up here. It's been a fantastic episode. We've gotten into a lot of different things. Um,

if you enjoyed listening to us on, send me some stuff like, and share the podcast with your friends. Um, and if you have anything interesting, send us some stuff. We're always interested to hear from you. So anything for the people, bro? Anything for the people.

Everything for the people. Everything for the people. All right. We'll catch you guys next time. Thank you.