Alex Wagner

What's up, guy? Thanks for having me on the pod again. What's up, guy?

I don't go anywhere without them. They're the best in the biz. We call this a dark circus. Dark circus. Dark circus.

I went to one of the protests. We literally got off the plane and went to these Tuesday protests they've been having every week to protest Orban's crackdown on pride, but really it's framed in the broader context of his attack on democracy, civil liberties, the freedom of assembly. And it's really amazing.

I got to say, like, I think in the US we're a little bit like we have kind of a high bar for what protests sort of like stop us in our tracks. But Hungary does not have a culture of civil unrest. It is a very big deal that people are coming out and amassing and, you know, under threat of government crackdown.

Orban said he will use facial recognition technology to prosecute people who are seen at these protests. And it was like absolutely exhilarating. But sorry, you probably had a question in there.

It is. I mean, I will say, I talked to one of the leaders of the opposition movement. His name is Martin Tamposh. And he was like, you know, this is about pride. This is, of course, about the LGBTQ plus community. But it's also, you know, this is about standing up against Orban. And it's happening at a time when Orban is weak. I think people haven't really focused.

I mean, we've been focusing on our own little autocracy here in the United States, right? Yeah. But there's so many similar parallels between Trump and Orban, not just in terms of policy, the focus on marginalized communities, immigrants, the media, the courts, but in terms of posture, the obsession on the part of the far right wing with Orban. He's a regular at CPAC conferences.

Trump very much fashions himself in terms of Orban and being a strong man.

Yeah, he's politically weak.

Because he's steered Hungary's economy into the dumpster.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a challenger in the wings. His name is Peter Magyar, and he's a wild man. He's not a progressive, but he has been really speaking out about corruption. He's been putting in a lot of time speaking across Hungary.

He is a traditionally handsome man. He is very traditionally handsome man. I think that that's not hurt, his case. But I think part of the reason people feel emboldened enough to do what they're doing to come out every Tuesday is because they think this could be the turning point. They think the 2026 elections could be where Orban is ousted finally. I mean, he's been in power for 15 years, Tim.

And he has transformed that country. He has consolidated the media landscape. He has attacked civil liberties. I mean, it is stunning what he has done. And I think part of the reason, I mean, I know part of the reason we wanted to go over there is because I think America can learn a lot about its near future by looking at Hungary and its recent past.

I mean, I actually think that's the thing. I was talking to Marta Pardavi, who is an amazing civil rights, civil liberties lawyer. And she said, actually, in 2015, Orban was really successfully able to scapegoat the migrant population, the European refugee crisis.

She said, we thought because Hungary has this history of being a place for refugees and immigrants that there would be more pushback, but there wasn't. He was really successfully able, I mean, in similar ways to Donald Trump, right?

But the pride thing, because I think the opposition movement has learned something in the interim, they framed it not just as an attack on that community, but as this bigger question of like, can we have protests? Can we speak out? We are under threat of prosecution for just being here.

Because Orban has been so punitive in his attack here, they see this as a much bigger affront to basic tenets of democracy that Hungary purportedly stands for. And so in a way, surprising, I think, both of us, you know, pride has become more of a galvanizing issue, in part because they don't think of it just as pride. They think of it as like the sort of seminal attack on basic tenets of freedom.

Yeah. So, I mean, there's something to learn there, I think, in the U.S. as well, right? How do we frame these issues so that it doesn't feel like, you know, the libs are too woke, but it's like, no, no, an attack on one is an attack on all.

Over and over again, that has to be the line. It has to be a broader context. And Martin Tomposh, that opposition player that I spoke to, was like, the Democrats have made this stuff too narrow and too siloed. It needs to be bigger. It needs to be something that people feel brought into, even if they have no particular stake in the fight.

I gotta say, and I'm obviously, I'm a little bit biased in terms of my interests, but the way Orban consolidated the media and cracked down on the fourth estate is, first of all, he was so successful, right? He basically had his friends and allies buy up all the newspapers, all the media outlets, all the editorial outlets that were once, you know, real robust journalistic endeavors.

Like the New York Times of Hungary was purchased and then shut down within a several week period. But there is a real robust independent media landscape in Hungary. And these guys are reporting on real shit. They're reporting about corruption. They're doing exposés on the son-in-law, Orban's son-in-law, who... Oh, the son-in-law thing is a thing that's universal, I guess.

Hotel and tourism industry. And they're doing it and they're so tenacious. And I said, do you ever wonder why you're still doing this given... how much money the state funnels into state propaganda in the form of these news outlets, just the steel, what is the metaphor, the iron fist with which Orban and his allies sort of censor and rule the national media.

And they said, you know, we're doing this because this is, they believe in democracy, they believe in the fight. And it was so inspiring. I think for like a jaded, you know, fourth estater from the US, it's like, what the fuck are we complaining about? First of all, our institutions still remain strong. There's so much of an appetite for information.

Donald Trump has not shut down the White House briefings as yet, even if One American News Network is getting in a front row seat.

we do. And it's all the more reason. I mean, it's like, go through the looking glass, go to Hungary and see the people who've been doing it and continue to do it at, you know, at great peril and the audience that still wants it. The information is essential.

And I came back exhilarated by, you know, first of all, the privilege that we have in the U S and the opportunity we have to still fight, you know, the encroachment of autocracy in a real, real way.

If we're scared, then everyone else is fucked, right? Like, so these guys were supposed to have, they've been marching across this bridge. the Elizabeth Bridge. And the Orban government was like, oh, it's Tuesday. You're going to try and do this again. We're not going to give you the permit. So instead of marching across the bridge, they start jaywalking across the street.

And then the cops were like, yeah, we're going to arrest. There's like tons, hundreds of riot police there with helmets and tear gas. And they're like, you can't jaywalk across the street. So they have this purple smoke bomb. It's like a smoke candle that the leader of the opposition uses to signal to everybody, it's time to move.

So they walk literally hundreds, if not thousands of people across town to a different bridge. And they cross that bridge and they sit on the bridge and And they're there and the police come up and eventually they have to be moved, but they get it done. The sense of tenacity, and I don't want to say this the wrong way, but there is a joy in their resistance that seems real absent in ours, right?

And I think part of the way you win is... is by bringing back a zeal and an optimism, maybe even some humor. There's a sort of very Central European dark humor in all of this, right? That they're fighting. It's almost Sisyphean, sometimes it feels like. but they continue to do it.

And I think, I'm not saying that we have to categorize or think of our work as Sisyphean, but like the joy of it, the joy of trying to fight for a better thing is like, we need to bring that back, I think, to the American sort of protest movement and the opposition.

And you know this, Tim, the thing that people miss about Trump and those Trump rallies, it's a dark joy, but there's a joy there. It's a church revival. Yeah. And like the left needs to find its own sort of spiritual belonging in all of this, some sort of catharsis and joy. And I think that that's got to power it as much as the anger and the discontent and the rage.

Well, I'm sad that this is the end of my 100-day experiment in the sense that there's so much more work to be done. I think we as media have really failed the American people by being so focused on the eastern corridor of the United States. We don't tell the stories of the human beings who are directly affected by this stuff and really on both sides of the aisle.

Like I was super moved by the story of the cancer survivors and the cancer deaths in Louisiana, your state. And what it means to dismantle environmental justice programs at the EPA and the human cost of that.

Likewise, I was fascinated talking to January Sixers who had just gone out of jail and the sense of renewal and belief and the sort of like waiting army that exists for Trump should he choose to mobilize it. And on the same note, talking to farmers in the center of this whole tariff war who are still... you know, they're still standing with Trump.

And I'm not saying that they converted me to like, oh yeah, Trump's really got, he knows what he's doing. But I think in order for anybody to sort of move this country forward in a real way that you have to talk to people, you have to listen to what they're saying. You don't have to agree with them, but we as journalists need to do a better job of covering that.

And I, I'm like so grateful in a way this has been so exhausting. My kids are so angry at me. Um, But, like, it's been eye-opening, and I hope to do it. You'll be hearing more about my projects in the next coming months, Tim. Deep tease.

Wait, you're saying it's not made in that state, Tim?

Yeah. I mean, I just think there's a time and a place for the analysis and the rancor and the, you know, that sort of steam valve opening, but that shouldn't be it. And like, we have to better understand what's actually happening in the country because otherwise you keep getting hit with a tidal wave every four years, you know?

Thanks, Tim.

You know, there was this cable that the German ambassador to the U.S. sent back to Germany. Did you see this? It was reported of like... And there was just something sort of chilling about it because we've read the American cables that are going back to D.C. in 31, 32, 33 from American ambassadors.

So here's a German ambassador basically saying he's going to try to undo and remake the constitutional order. This is the cable that he sends back to Berlin. And I think that – That's the project here. Again, I don't think Donald Trump could articulate in those terms.

But a new constitutional order that is around essentially a kind of personalist cult of personality around the president as the only figure with any authority in the constitutional order. Well, that's exciting. All right. Things are going great. Things are good. Life's good. But look, can I just say – Yeah, please. I don't think –

That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

if people are listening to this and like getting bummed out, if I think public opinion matters a tremendous amount, I think like calling up representatives matters a huge amount, going to their offices, like calling your Senator, no Democrat should vote for Russ vote.

And if you're in a state that has a Republican center, you should call them up to like public opinion still does matter and still should matter for some of these people. And right now there's this kind of, it's this weird period. I feel like between like,

the lightning and the thunder, where people haven't gotten their kind of wits about them, and they're trying this kind of blitzkrieg to mow everyone down. But public backlash isn't going to go away. I truly believe that. It's a question of whether it gets organized, formalized, and wielded in enough time to stop some of this damage.

Yeah, I mean, the argument I make in the book is that, you know, we live in the attention age. Attention is the defining and most important resource of the age. And that in the public realm and in politics, Donald Trump has kind of intuited that more than any other figure.

And the key insight there is that it's better to get lots of attention, dominated attention, even if a lot of it's negative attention. than to choose to not get attention so that you don't get people outraged at you. Right. This this tradeoff is the key. And again, the tradeoff has drawbacks. Like Donald Trump has had been upside down and underwater in favorability most of his political career.

He barely pulled out this hat trick the first time he got elected. He lost the second time after being the incumbent, which is fairly rare. You know, he won this time, but it's not like this foolproof thing. magical quality that means he's like, you know, rolling up 1964, 1984, 1972, you know, FDR kind of margins. It's narrow, but it's effective. And I think Democrats operate in

in this fear of attention because that might be negative. They operate in a universe in which attention is very mediated. It's amazing how much Democratic politicians worry about what the Washington Post editorial board will say. They genuinely do.

Well, there's two things there that I think is also important. You can't talk about this distinction between the two parties without talking about this, which is... Like I care a lot if I get something wrong on my show because it's important to me to tell the truth and be correct.

Like independent of the attentional universe, like as a human being who has an ethical commitment to the work that I do. So part of you caring about getting fact-checked was like you guys didn't want to be wrong about stuff.

Within the bounds of campaign discourse. And I think part of what we see here, too, is that like the other uncomfortable truth here is that this attentional environment, which I describe as like a Hobbesian war of all against all, selects for sociopaths. You know, you can't. You can't fake it. This is really the key thing.

The reason Trump can pull this off is because he is so broken at such a deep level. This is the only way he can operate as a person. But if you try to pretend to be that broken. you get the DeSantis campaign.

You can't pretend to be that shameless or be that broken. Like, this is really a deeper problem, right? Because it's like, I don't want politicians that have that brokenness in them as the thing that's selected for here. There are people who do seem to have a gift for the attention age that are not coming from that. I think AOC is really the best example of someone who doesn't seem...

to me, like a sociopath and has a real intuitive feel for attention. And part of what she does is a great example. When she does those Instagram lives, like I'm talking to you as a former comm staffer, like right now I'm talking to you just to pull back the curtain. My PR people are on this podcast. Okay. What's up Natalie? Because they're like, they want, they're nervous.

I'm going to say something. Right. I mean, they trust me, but like, that's part of their job. Okay. Sure. Like when she does an Instagram live, like, That's scary for staff. Yeah.

There's a few different tracks in which they're operating on, but one of them is, and we started to see this last week with people finding out that their National Institutes of Health grant panels were being canceled. clinical trials being canceled, like, oh, skin cancer drug.

You can say all that and be like, what I will fight is like, taking cop beaters and putting them out on the street to menace our members of law enforcement. What I will fight is freezing all cancer funding in this country and scientific research. Like you could do that whole thing and then wield some sort of attack. But they're all everyone's flat footed. Everyone's second guessing themselves.

But again, here's where this is an important thing. And again, I write about this at some length in the book that's about the politics of this. It's not like that caution hasn't also paid off for Democrats. So, like, one of the most cautious gubernatorial campaigns that I've ever seen was the Arizona- Katie Hobbs.

Exactly. Katie Hobbs runs for governor in Arizona against Carrie Lake, who's, like, the ultimate attention age figure. She was a news broadcaster. She says outrageous things. Hobbs was just, like, low profile, kept it tight, disciplined, didn't court a lot of attention. And she won that race. And-

Republicans have lost a lot of races with Trump like figures who have ended up on the wrong side of this negative attention trade. So, again, it's not so clear cut that like it's just the case that if you're a troll, you have power. It takes a special kind of person to pull it off.

They are trying to break the whole thing because they want to refashion it such that the entirety of the federal government is an object tool of the one person who occupies the presidency and nothing else. There are a bunch of statutory requirements in place that

Yeah, no, I agree. And I think partly that is... I don't know how much that's a Trumpian transformation, though, too. I mean, I think partly it is. Obama participated in that. Obama was an enormous cultural figure. I mean, he's the most famous person in the country and the biggest star in the world. That was the attack ad from John McCain. That was a very funny attack ad. People forget this.

It was like, he's the biggest star in the world. And it was like, the attack ad was like, this guy is so popular. People love him so much.

for you he's such a famous fancy boy like justin bieber famous fancy boy he's a fancy lad but but yeah i think the other thing that i think is worth thinking about here in the context of like attention as resource and how it functions in politics is the less public attention there is on a political race the more it could function in the old way Right.

So, you know, state rep races are still a lot of knocking on doors and talking to people. And I think what you're saying is, yes, it's probably there's still a lot of that at the gubernatorial level.

But once you get to the presidential level, raising a lot of money and running a bunch of ads or and door knocking campaign, which the Harris campaign, to be clear, did very well and pretty effectively. Like something I always tell people that the Harris campaign is look at the margins of that race in New York, New Jersey and California.

The campaign was actually pretty darn effective because the environment sucked. Like, they did much better in the swing states where they were running a focused campaign than in the states where there was zero campaign. The states with zero campaign... Those numbers are nuts, right? That's why he won the popular vote.

And yet, it wasn't enough to overcome the overall attentional environment, which is the thing that Trump dominated.

I mean, it's unbelievable how predictable.

One of the examples of someone who is unpredictable is John Fetterman.

Don't just listen to the white pod boys. It's actually pretty good advice. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying this to praise Fetterman's politics because he said some things that I, like, truly, really, actually, like, upset me. Some of the stuff that he's talked about Gaza, particularly just from, like, a human empathetic level, not independent of, like, his politics of who he supports.

But, yeah, he definitely is pretty good at getting attention in his own strange way. And he is definitely not predictable, like, to the point where, like, when he voted against Hegseth, I was like, okay...

are geared towards the presidency serving the public interest, and they want to turn it into a 19th century urban machine with nuclear weapons.

Yeah, I think that's right. And again, I think that's just because when they're in that interview, they're not thinking about how do I keep people's attention? They're thinking about how do I not screw up and make news? I mean, again, that's that is that's the key part of the orientation here.

The broad thesis is that we live in an age, you know, if the defining resource of the industrial age was fossil fuels, and if you look at 1961 of the top 10 companies by, you know, assets, it was like oil companies and like DuPont and General Motors, right? Physical production and... If you look now, it's attention companies and that's Google and it's meta. It's to a certain extent, Microsoft.

It's definitely Apple, which, of course, inaugurated the attention age with the birth of the iPhone in 2007. It's the guys on stage next to Donald Trump. And there's a few important things I think to say here. One is it's already intuitive that we have this like break between the old industrial economy and the new digital like information economy.

But we really tend to think of it as an information economy in which the important stuff is information. Information is what's powerful information. What's important? People talk about like data is the new oil. And I think that just fundamentally misapprehends. the world we live in because information is infinite. It's generative and it's replicable.

Like think about your own personal data, which people talk about all the time. It's like if your personal data, Tim Miller, is in the hands of 10 companies or 100 companies, it does not change your life one iota. Maybe it changes a little bit the ads you get. If your attention is somewhere else in a given moment,

That actually does change your life, like from moment to moment, if your attention is being taken as opposed to your data. And so Herb Simon, who's this brilliant political scientist, economist in the 1970s, he just writes this paper about how you design an organization for an information rich world. And what he says is information actually consumes something and what it consumes is attention.

And if you think of it that way, if you think the more information there is, the more asks there are on our attention, but attention is finite, you come to see that the information age is necessarily actually the attention age. And the resource that's being used and consumed and pulled on is our attention.

Yeah, right. I mean, yes, the spoil system is an example. But now the other thing about this OMB thing that's nuts to me is it's also as with a bunch of other stuff we could talk about. It's, I think, flatly illegal. They have this theory, which they have said that despite the fact that the founders were very clear about who has the power of the purse. and put that in Article I to Congress.

Yeah, I think I did. I mean, I think the important foundational insight here is that The way attention works as a necessary evolutionary inheritance is that our attention can be compelled without us willing it to be so.

Like if a siren is going off in an ambulance down the street, if you're in a party and someone drops a glass, if you're on a flight and a baby's crying, your attention goes to it before you get to weigh in consciously or not. And this aspect of attention is a really key one because it's at war with the conscious self.

And when you create competitive attention markets, they are going to drive towards that compelled attention, right? And that's what we have. So we're constantly struggling to reassert our own volition over where we put our mind because part of what we've inherited is the faculty for our mind to be pulled away from us.

And one of the key insights and aspects of the world we live in now, there's an incredible bit of literature on the cocktail party effect, which is if you're in a room and you hear your name, in another conversation, it will wrench you out. It will penetrate your consciousness and your attention will go to it. And no other stimuli works in the same way.

And we've got psychological literature on this. And that's because we also have inherited this desire and need for social attention. This is what's been so commercialized in the attention age. From the moment we come crying into the world, we necessarily depend on other human attention.

And because that inheritance is so deep, we now have a situation in which social attention from others can be experienced at scale in a way it never has before in the history of humankind. Getting social attention from strangers used to be something that like a tiny fraction of a sliver of people, you know, movie stars or politicians now like extremely hot people or extremely hot people.

Now, any teenager with a phone can experience this. Everyone can. And in fact, you see it like Elon Musk and a lot of people get driven insane by this in real time as you watch.

Lasted about half a day. So I think that's... You're mucking with the stuff in us that's pretty deep about who we are and how we view ourselves. And you're putting it in the hands of... corporations that are engineered to try to do this at scale. And I think the closest analog we have is basically, and I write about this at some point in the book, the industrial food system, right?

Like we have biological inheritances where we like sweet things and we like fat and we like salt. And if you're going to try to sell food to a billion people or 2 billion people, you get Coca-Cola and you get McDonald's, right? And so our relationship to food is this same kind of weird war between like the self that's like, I want to eat healthier.

I want this and the kind of desiring biology beneath that dynamic has now been replicated inside our minds in the attention age where the sort of very parallel set of things are happening constantly moment to moment determining where we come to rest our thoughts.

Not once. Not once. I love carpet cleaning videos. They're so soothing.

Yeah, like in bed or sitting on the couch. So the point about if you watch piglets nurse, it's really wild. The mom just lays there and then they just like fight each other in the most like ferocious way. And you actually get to see like what it means to be a runt, which is that you don't get to nurse and then you like waste away and die basically. But like the difference between how humans like.

Barron has... Yeah, the founders gave Barron the power of the purse. Okay.

deal with this part of life and how the mammal world deals with it is pretty wild.

Yeah, I mean, I use this argument by this...

russian emigre philosopher named alexander kuyyev who working off of hegel he makes he makes i think this very profound point that like the constitutive feature of being human that the fundamental human desire is recognition which is to like be seen and recognized as human by other humans like that's the stuff of relationships it's what we seek and desire in the world of love friendship even like good relationships with co-workers like you're not seen as a means to an end you're not seen as like

Thanks for clearing that up. Some listeners might not be constitutional scholars. In Madison Federalist 45, he says, there shall be a tall son, and he shall... No, they're very clear about the power of the purse. It's like we all learned this, you know, day one of constitutional structure, that they're the appropriators. All of this stuff has been appropriated duly by Congress and passed.

the fullness of your consciousness is like grappled with. And what social media presents is like this synthetically adjacent thing, which is social attention. Social attention is not recognition, but it feels close enough

That what you do is you go out into the world of social media seeking recognition and getting back attention, which just kind of gives you like a little bit of a taste but doesn't ever make you full. Because the thing that can make you full are mutual relationships. This is the other key thing about social attention.

Other things that we want socially in life are fundamentally like bilateral, right? They're like a romantic relationship or a relationship of parenting. Like you have a relationship with the person and they have a relationship with you. That's how it works. Social attention is separated. You could put social attention on Brad Pitt. You don't have a relationship with him, right?

People could put social attention on you on the internet. They don't have a relationship with you. And when you break apart that kind of covalent bond, you sort of end up spinning off into some very weird world where it's very easy to get a kind of lost, a kind of vertigo sensation.

I think another part of it too, is just that I learned this lesson a little early on. I would say when I first started writing, like remember I first write a piece for the Chicago reader and, which was the weekly alternative paper in Chicago. And I remember going to get it. It would come out on Thursday afternoon. It would be in these piles in bar vestibules.

And going and seeing my name there and feeling that, whatever that little thing about my personality, I felt good about that. And then it was like, that was kind of it. This was sort of pre-internet. It just was out there in the world. And one of the things that I realized was that like,

if I didn't actually like doing the work itself, that whatever little dopamine hit from that micro instant of seeing my name was not going to be enough.

That's the other thing is that you have to just be satisfied with like the actual making of the thing you're making as a thing that you want to do and feel proud of and feels worthwhile and is satisfying to you because of the value of it is what stranger social attention gets put on it. It's never, ever, ever going to feel good enough.

Their position is the president has ultimate veto over every cent that gets spent. It's

Yes. One small concrete thing to do is to spend 20 minutes for your thoughts every day, meaning some 20 minute period. Just me and my thoughts. Just you and your thoughts. Not the TV, not other people. No podcasts, no phone. Maybe that's a commute. Maybe that's a drive. For me, it's a walk every day without listening to anything.

We have gotten out of the habit of living with our own thoughts, but that's who you got to live with the rest of your life. And so if you're constantly seeking diversion so you don't have to do that, you're going to have a harder and harder time when you do have to be alone with your own thoughts.

The first time around, there was a lot more wink and nod, like cutesiness. For instance, the Muslim ban. Yeah. It was always the case that a... Ban based on religion was flatly unconstitutional. So when it came time to do a Muslim ban, they had this sort of like plausible fig leaf and they like threw in North Korea.

How does that sound? It sounds great. Yeah, and it's pretty astonishing. I definitely spent a good part of Friday and then through the weekend just reading as much as I could about this because it is one of those moments in tech where you see happen and you don't really believe it's real until... You get confirmation. We do have confirmation that this is real.

So basically what this team in China has done is they have made an architectural breakthrough. And I'm going to try to explain this in plain English in the development of AI models. So basically the way that Silicon Valley has been approaching the development of AI models to date.

has been you put about as much money as possible into building these things by building massive data centers and throwing as much data as you possibly can into the process. And then you get better results. And that's proved true every time. And the architectural advancement that's been made in China is they have been able to build a model that's as good with much less money.

And this is the most important thing that costs about three to five percent of what it costs the other models to run. So let's say you're spending a dollar to run an algorithm or some sort of process with OpenAI. You can spend five cents to do it. With this Chinese model, bringing down the cost of using things like their chatbot, but also building any application on top of the model.

So first of all, it's so funny because all of the worries about AI was that it was too expensive, right? People were seeing the fact that you have to spend these billions of dollars. Like OpenAI last year raised the biggest funding round in history at $6.6 billion. And the big complaint was, well, this... AI technology is too expensive to use.

They're losing billions just to run it and train it every year. And so therefore the industry is going to fall apart. Now everyone's worried because it's too cheap, which I think is just so funny. But basically, look, this is the way that the AI industry was always running. OpenAI's stated goal was to make intelligence that's too cheap to meter.

Basically, the idea was we want to be able to provide this stuff at a cost that is so inexpensive that you'll be able to do whatever your heart's desire is to build with AI. And, you know, really what these Chinese engineers have done is they have used some new techniques that have largely been like thanks to some of the constraints that they've had.

So they haven't been able to use the state of the art NVIDIA chips, which means this process that we're doing over here in the United States of just making the servers bigger and making, you know, adding more data has not been available to them. So they've had to introduce some tricks to make the models more efficient.

Remember, they like threw in North Korea and Venezuela, I think, because there's like, oh, it's not a Muslim ban. It's like these countries that we have some reason to be fearful of. Yeah. This time around, they are doing things flatly constitutional legal in a flatly unconstitutional legal manner with no fig leaf. They are firing the IGs. They are firing career people at DOJ. That's illegal.

And I could get into all the technical details if you want, but basically the way to think about this is they have used the constraints to build a much more efficient model than anybody else has through some different techniques that have just been starting to roll out in the Western models, things called reasoning, reinforcement learning.

And they've just basically speed run the entire industry and found a way to offer this effectively same or better model than a lot of the cutting edge that we have today at a cheaper cost.

Compare and contrast it to ChatGPT for me. So I have played with it. The real innovation here has been the DeepSeek R1 model. And by the way, no AI company knows how to name anything.

They should have some screenwriters in-house because the naming is disastrous. But here, basically what it does is it's reasoning. So you can go to DeepSeek right now and use the model. And the thing about this is it will share its chain of thought. So you'll actually see the model be able to reason through trying to figure out what your question is and then give you the best possible answer.

And the nice thing about reasoning is... The AI does a lot of the thinking on its end. So there used to be this whole idea like, oh, prompt engineer is going to be a new job in the world because you'll have to figure out exactly how to prompt AI models to be able to use them.

And what these reasoning models do is they basically take a lot of that work out of the equation because they figure out what you want. But Tim, I think it's important to talk about like the ways to use this thing, because yes, there is the chatbot that DeepSeek has set up that you can go and log in with your Google account and see all this happen.

But the important thing is they have actually open sourced this model. So if you are an AI developer, you can download the architecture. and then run it for yourself. So you can use DeepSeek without actually having to be on the DeepSeek proprietary website.

And that opens up a range of possibilities because whereas DeepSeek might be censoring some things, like you can't really ask who the president of Taiwan is on their website, you can go to Perplexity right now and use the DeepSeek model that they've downloaded and removed a lot of the censorship from, and it will give you the right answers.

So that to me is like the real core thing here, which is that you can not only use their chatbot, You can not only use their technology, but American firms and firms worldwide today are downloading this model. They're running it as efficiently as the folks in China, and they're able to customize it and build on top of it in a way that might go against the values that the DeepSeek team has.

But it doesn't matter because it's open source and available to everyone.

They can't do it. They are... stopping grants, they're freezing cancer research because they think courts will say it's fine.

Oh, yeah. I think you're nailing the core point here, Tim, which is that, you know, I've had people replying to me, have fun using the app that's going to send all your data to the CCP. And it's actually, that's only a tiny part of it, right? The fact that anybody can download this innovation and use it on their own is actually the really interesting thing.

And you're already seeing it in production and perplexity. You're going to see American startups and startups worldwide start to download it and use it maybe instead of other open source models. like MetaLama until they catch up. So it can be used outside of deep seek servers. And that's why I think this is going to have staying power.

If it was just proprietary to deep seek, we'd be having a completely different conversation, but now we're talking about the technology that, Because the technology can really be used outside of the auspices of a Chinese firm. But yeah, why do they want to do it? We don't fully know yet. It could be that they just like discovery, right?

That would be sort of like the most naive and it's a possible explanation. They're a hedge fund, right? So could they have basically set their sights on creating something that's this efficient and shorted NVIDIA, right? NVIDIA was down 16% yesterday, right? It's bounced back a little bit as of this recording. I mean, that's another possibility.

And the third possibility that I can think of is that this was something that the Chinese government basically directed resources to. And we're only seeing the tip of the spear in terms of what was needed to develop the model. There was definitely a lot more money spent than the few hundred million that we know or the couple million that we know was spent for the last iteration.

And maybe that's a way to sort of assert China supremacy on AI and undercut the American AI initiative. But the bottom line here, I want to put this pretty clearly, is that this was coming. This was going to happen. whether it was going to come from an American firm or a Chinese firm.

And what deep seek proved was that you can do this with inferior chips and you can do this with a smaller team and you can do this much more efficiently. And I think, you know, that was going to happen one way or the other. So like the grand, like conspiracy theory thinking of like, you know, this is a Trojan horse that China has thrown into the United States to destroy our industry.

Doesn't really hold water to me. It's what everybody in the U S was aiming toward.

Yeah, I mean, isn't it amazing that Stargate and DeepSeek R1 come out like basically at the same time? And it was, I mean, I wrote about this in my newsletter last week. It was just like, wow, like these two things seem like they're barreling towards each other and something has to give. So, okay, so why didn't the US firms develop this? Couple reasons.

First of all, it could just be a natural resource curse. Honestly, without the constraints, they didn't have to think about this way. Now, their models have become much more efficient over time. And that makes a big difference because they've been, again, heading this direction. It just hasn't been an imperative toward them.

So they've been making the models more efficient, but it hasn't been the only way they can do things. And so therefore, they haven't been forced to innovate this way. I think if they had similar constraints as the DeepSea team did, they probably would have come up with it. So that's one. But the other side of it, and I think this is what they would all tell you, is that they still believe that

scaling up like Elon Musk is putting together a million GPU data center. Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to build a data center that's like the size of half of Manhattan. We already know that Altman's been out there with Trump talking about this $500 billion initiative, which might be like a fifth of the size in the end, but it's still big.

And I think there's still a lot of belief in Silicon Valley that Bigger is still better, and you can build better models if you throw all these resources toward it. The most optimistic case is that they will take the innovations that they're seeing with DeepSeek and then they will use that efficiency to make even more use out of the architecture that they have.

We'll put that in a layman's term, the chips that they have, right? And build something that's even more intelligent than what we have today and start to solve some of the next order problems that they're looking at. Building chatbots with memory, building chatbots that really understand you, that can go out in the world. and take action for you.

And then eventually maybe some that can, you know, help lead to scientific discovery, which is something they always talk about. Like we, they've been limited by the, by the hardware.

Yeah, people are mostly excited outside of, let's say, NVIDIA shareholders. The entire AI industry has been figuring out how to build better things with less resources. And this is going to give them a chance to do that. It will give them the chance basically to be able to build AI without having to rely on nuclear power plants or these massive...

massive data centers as much as they needed to, like in a dream scenario. So I think everybody's pretty stoked about that. They might still end up using all the power in the world to build the next iteration, but at least this iteration we know can be built with less. And Marc Andreessen is such an interesting case.

You always have to look a little bit deeper into what he's saying to try to find his true motivations. And I think one of the interesting things is he thought about participating in the OpenAI $6.6 billion round last year. And ultimately didn't.

And, you know, might've seen something like this coming around because for him, and I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, it's what you can build with the technology that's going to create the most value and not like the models that underlie that thing. Like this is basically going to take the cost of intelligence, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, down by an order of magnitude.

Yes, because their position, the way these two things are sort of different sides of the same coin is that the only person with any power is the president and everything flows from him. And therefore, any part of the administrative state or the executive that doesn't do exactly what his whims are moment to moment is illegitimate.

And now the rubber is going to meet the road. We're going to see like what applications can be built, what programs can be built. what type of experiences can be built in a much more efficient way, in a way that maybe the expense of building these things might have been holding back the companies previously. So for anyone that's interested in building... Time to build.

Time to build is Marc Andreessen's thing. It's a pretty exciting moment.

A moment also to reflect on failures to build. Oh, he doesn't do that. He doesn't do that.

Yeah. Did you see he was on Lex Friedman and he was talking about like Andrew Uberman's protocols of like, you know, you got to put your phone away before bed. And he's like, the most masculine thing you can do is stare at your phone for three hours before bed and fall asleep. Like Mark Andreessen's got some problems and put it that way.

Oh, yeah. Those red sirens are blaring where I am as well. I think that like one of the interesting things about the blockchain innovation was that it was supposed to enable like a new web built on top of decentralized protocols. And what have we gotten instead? A speculation machine. We haven't seen anything built on top of this.

So therefore, all these coins are just entirely speculation oriented. There are rug pulls waiting to happen. I think Bitcoin obviously is different. It's got some staying power. There's a floor for Bitcoin. And people have made a lot of money on it. But is crypto good for anything else? I haven't seen it yet.

I actually don't know that there are a lot of other businesses like that. Yeah, but what crypto really needs is a deep seek moment. Honestly, technology is inefficient. It needs to be made orders of magnitude more efficient to make any sense outside of speculation. And maybe if and when that happens... then we'll be able to see some real promise there.

But until then, I don't really believe it's much more than speculation. Maybe Bitcoin is a store of value in some way, but the rest, I'm not getting on board the Trump and Melania coin right now. Sorry.

Tim, it's such an interesting point because the Bitcoin folks, they're the maximalists, right? They think that there should be no crypto outside of Bitcoin and all the attention should be in Bitcoin and everything else is a distraction. However, I would say the one variable here is they're getting rich. And they are making so much money.

Exactly. And you're right. If they start to raise a fuss over what Trump is doing and he says, you know what, let's put somebody in the SEC that's going to actually put some rules in, then Bitcoin 150,000 or Bitcoin 1 million looks less likely than it might in their eyes right now. Yeah.

I guess we don't do that anymore, Tim.

I kind of look back at the tariffs from the first Trump administration. And as you saw, there was trade wars and tariffs, but Tim Cook pays a visit to the White House. And next thing you know, Apple products can be made in China without any duties on them or any additional duties. And

I think what you're alluding to is really interesting because there might be some pauses that hurt the tech industry. And I think we're going to see over and over again that the tech industry cozying up to Trump is going to pay off for them. And maybe for this precise reason, where a blanket pause in funding certain things.

It might go on for a day or a week, but once David Sachs gets Trump's ear or Elon or any number of tech executives that are now close to the White House, that funding might be restored. And I think that we're just going to see this story play out in various iterations over the course of the next four years.

Again, I mean, what they've done in the Department of Justice, as my favorite dog on the internet, Southpaw, said, would be a scandal, an administration-consuming scandal. Like, there's a bunch of stuff they've done already. For instance, dropping cases hasn't happened in the post-Watergate era that Active cases just get dropped on day one, the way that they've dropped cases against Jan 6 folks.

Yeah. For example, the Hunter Biden case was not dropped. Not only was it not dropped, they got a little special little universe to keep going.

Yeah, they gave it a bonus unit. So, right. That's a great comparison. The conception of the Department of Justice as basically... serving the president specifically and personally, as opposed to serving the nation, the constitution, which is clearly what they view is totally new.

And the firing of career department of justice officials, which again, who have statutory legal civil servant protection, which makes it illegal to fire them in this manner, just full stop. Like, do you want your Meat inspection and the people running nuclear safety and the frontline prosecutors to be people who were in Donald Trump's truth, social replies or were hanging around him at Mar-a-Lago.

And that's the reason they got the job. Or do you want people who know how to inspect meat, preserve nuclear safety, prosecute cases like they are? Like when I said a machine politics with nuclear weapons, this is purge. of merit-based hiring. Can I say one more thing? Can I do one riff here? Please. Dude, just go.

Okay. I'm dealing with the gaze of strangers. I'm pretty used to it by now, but it'll mess you up a little bit in the beginning. Actually, the press tour is weird. Like, I don't... I think when I was younger, I liked it more. I don't love being the object of press. Hmm. You know? Probably because there's like a control issue. Yeah, right.

Literally, the way that we conceive of the civil service protections that happen starting in the late 19th century under the Hayes administration and continue that turned the federal government from a spoil system machine to what we have now. is a merit system. The incredible thing is what they are doing is they are attacking the merit system.

The merit system is what we have that protects the civil servant because what replaces that is flunkies, lackeys of the president, like political apparatchiks. So what they are doing is destroying the merit system.

Forget the fact that there are other accusations of essentially misconduct. Right. hostile workplace environment, forget the fact that he like appears to by the accounts of multiple people, including his ex sister-in-law in a signed affidavit, have a genuine and wrenching, frankly, drinking problem. Put all that aside. Okay. Let's say none of that is true. And the guy was totally upstanding.

He ran two little nonprofits and ran them into the ground. And he's a weekend cable news host who is now going to run the most powerful military in the history of human civilization. Is that bad? It is a ludicrous. His resume, I assume you've done some hiring before. His resume comes in the door. It gets a half a second look and is put in the pile to not interview.

Like, when it's your show, you control it, whereas with... It's other people that are controlling it, which is... The reason that a lot of powerful people don't like...

He is a absolutely ludicrous pick. And the idea that Republicans... who presumably genuinely do in their hearts care about, for instance, American military strength, dominance, and protection of the American people. Some of them. I mean, they don't, though. That's the thing. If you voted for Hegseth, you don't.

Fundamentally, the Hegseth vote is a test, because if you voted for him, you genuinely do not care about that.

They're like public corruption people.

journalism like fundamentally right you don't have if you're a powerful person you're used to people like deferring to you and being very differential and and having control over them and like that's just not the way journalism works like it's like it's interesting that you can see all this rage by all these powerful people about against journalists and fundamentally it's because the power dynamics of journalism are intentionally not in the hands of the most powerful people

Oh, it's the worst case scenario. The worst for you? I mean, trending towards the worst. I mean, I think it's definitely more towards a frontal assault on the constitutional order to be remade in the form of a personalist Donald Trump authoritarian state.

I don't think that figures one way or the other, because I think that's it's so transactional.

I don't think they have much power to check him or I don't even know how much desire they do. I think they want to get out what they get out. So much of that has to do with this very specific thing around tech and AI and like the end of the rainbow, basically.

When I say trending towards worst case, I think it's important to distinguish between what they're going to try to do and whether they'll succeed. But I think that the first week, to me, the pardon of everyone from Jan 6 was such an indicator that like... whole hog is kind of be the, the way to go.

I mean, the order they signed that he signed yesterday in which he kicked all trans folks out of the military, calling them dishonorable and liars.

It's dishonorable and a liar. Yeah. It's also a flatly, I think, unconstitutional order because it orders the military to discriminate, which is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and equal protection, you know, again. They're going to be keeping the courts busy. That's my high take.

So I'm not saying they're going to be successful, but I think in terms of like what their ambitions are – and I'm saying they here because I do think to your point – Vote Miller. Exactly. Like Donald Trump didn't write that OMB order. Does Donald Trump care whether they freeze funding or not? Like –

That's a project that is in his orbit that animates his hatreds, but he doesn't have ideological projects like that. That's an ideological crusade by people who have sold him on it because they hate the same people.

And, you know, it's a Biden problem that is, you know, now landing on our doorstep. But they're about to install someone at HHS who has like zero capacity to deal with any kind of national health crisis and, in fact, could make it meaningfully worse. I'm surprised that at no point, because they had a lot of gimmies on this one. They could have taken a mulligan and just been like, you know what?

they're going full steam ahead with someone who could make one of, I think, really a practical economic problem for them considerably more problematic. So that, to me, more than the, you know, spinelessness of Senate Republicans, I thought was surprising.

I thought there's actually a vested interest they have in, you know, installing someone vaguely competent at HHS, but they're not going to do that, I guess.

I was doing this show called The Circus, which I know you're quite familiar with, seeing as you did several seasons. And I remember John Heilman and I went out to see Susan Collins. right before her vote on Brett Kavanaugh. And she was so angry at the threats and the left-wing sort of cabal coming after her on the issue of abortion. And she was just defiant.

And it was clear she was going to vote for Kavanaugh. And I thought, you know what? This is like, the only thing you're known for is like trying to protect a woman's right to choose. And you are going to, you are going to like let the fox into the hen house. And look what happened, Tim.

Look what happened. That for me is the moment where I was like, oh, these guys truly don't care about anything other than staying in the good graces of the party and staying in power. And there have been so many times since then where they've proven their spinelessness and proven their...

you know, allegiance to the loudest voice, most powerful voice in the room rather than the, oh, I don't know, the constitution. So yeah, if you had told me, this is a long windup to use a baseball term.

If you had told me on November 6th, these clowns would be the people installed, I think I would have believed you because it just comes down to whether the Senate Republicans have any ounce of integrity left. And I think they've proven to us that they don't.

Well, the Merrick Garland thing. I mean, once you say we're going to change the rules to benefit ourselves and like we're going to adulterate the institutions in a naked power grab, like then, OK, fine. Like he basically drew a blueprint that everybody's been working off of in the intervening years.

Turns out you got got. Turns out the Federalist Society is too mainstream. The goalposts can move out of the stadium. See, this is a football metaphor. I'm not quite as good at it. The goalposts can move out of the stadium and down the block into a different zip code. Nobody thought about that, did they? No. Mitch McConnell sure didn't.

I stopped reading after that. I saw that and I was like, okay, no, we're done.

Finally, is what I say.

And beach. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like the deepest, darkest part of masculine insecurity that we're seeing on center stage.

Well, I mean, I guess. It's like the dark part of it. I don't think that it's the strong part of masculine. I mean, first of all, I guess. I guess we have to put this in kind of obvious gender tropes. The return of the white guys. I think it is at Democrats' peril that they ignore the yearn for traditionalism, which seems to be a huge part of MAGA.

I mean, this is like my question. It's like, can you imagine, by the way, can you imagine the crowd sizes debate litigated in Trump 2.0? I mean, I feel like you have that clip.

I don't think that means a capitulation to it, but there is something shifting. There's something going on socioculturally. I don't mean to quote Barack Obama, but here I go quoting Barack Obama. The idea that America should be for the waking and not just the woke. I think there's something there about a greater tolerance for not the retrograde and not the diminishing, but

something that seems more on its face traditional. I don't know how to say this in a way that is not controversial.

I'm not.

I want to podcast. But I do think that we have to examine what's happening here and why people elected Donald Trump who ran on the, like, I'm the daddy who's going to spank you. That is not to say Democrats need to be daddies who spank people, but why is that happening? What is the platform of the left missing in terms of

its inclusivity or its messaging or its policy that is like opening up this space for this insanely ass backwards version of like the American family and American gender roles. Like why, why is this happening? What is going so wrong that this is the snapback that we get?

I mean, I don't disagree with you. I guess I wonder, does that look that different than what Tim Walz tried to do? Do you feel like it was too overt? Because I think the media narrative is one thing, but just as a practical matter of strategy, I feel like it was like, he's a football guy, and he loves his wife, and he likes Kamala Harris, and he's going to roll with her and be her vice president.

It wasn't like, I am explicitly beta. Yeah.

You think it was just trying too hard.

I mean, can I just say the difference between then and now is it was just stupid Sam Spicer embarrassing himself, you know, like becoming a national parody. And now there's actual retribution. The idea that the AP is not being allowed in, is being punished for adhering to reality. It's not good, Tim. Very George Orwell. All of this.

Yeah. I mean, I see what you're saying. Like, make it, like, do it, but make it less obvious. Just do it in a more natural, less forced, less, like, kind of like... you're making a thesis argument for a different kind of masculinity to the American public rather just like behave, show them do.

Wait, the right saying that I don't think being nice.

Yeah, I mean, so maybe what you're suggesting is a tougher edge with the same expansive ideas about gender. Like an ass-kicking version of a beta cuck. I'm kidding. Like...

And there's kicking someone in the nuts. Can we do all... I mean, it's... Listen. But can I just say part of it is not about politics. It's just kind of where we are as a society and we're trying to fucking grapple our way through the darkness. It's complicated. It's complicated. It's really hard. And I got to say, like...

People who have been marginalized for a long time and are just getting heard and seen are like, yeah, fuck you. I'm not going back into the darkness. And the people who are on the downslope, which is to say or feel like they're on the downslope or becoming less powerful in society are like, yeah, fuck that. No way. I like my seat just fine. Thank you so much.

And we're in a very intense hinge point, I think, as a society and as a country. And we have it worse than most because we're a really diverse, cacophonous democracy. So this is where we're at, regardless of partisan affiliation.

Oh my god, I have no control over my schedule. I'm actually in the field. I'm at the protest.

I'm talking to the fired IGs. I'm talking to the federal workers. I'm with the Jan Sixers outside the jail.

Can I just say, it is so hard. It's so worth it. And I felt like we needed to do something different. Like Trump 2.0. Yeah. There are people doing great work at MSNBC HQ. I don't mean to diminish that at all. But I just felt like given my background doing the field reporting, it was like, dude, I just want to go out and understand what's happening to this country a little bit better.

And so in that way, it's been really worthwhile.

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I think just talking to the people who are at the center of all of this stuff, whether it's the January 6th families or Chris Rufo or migrants who are being targeted in raids and federal workers who are like, I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, whether I have a job or not. I think that it has cultivated a sense of, I always try and

work from an empathetic center, but I do think that I am... I feel the chaos and pain more acutely, and I think that that's good for all of us who can get, as consumers and journalists, who can get real desensitized to this. It's very abstract in a lot of ways, and it's ongoing. It's a fire hose of... you know, hell and so, and chaos.

And so this helps really distill, like, I think it's really important to hear individual stories and that's been like profoundly enlightening for me. But in terms of like, like a hot take that I wouldn't have had, um, I got to say, and I think it's probably more on the Trump side that I've had the revelation.

This guy, I think, has refashioned American politics and expectations that are set for presidents. I don't agree with almost a single thing he's ever done, let alone in this second term. But he has delivered in a huge way. And the people who believed him when they voted for him feel so vindicated.

And it is both a cautionary tale, but also for a Democrat who comes into office, the expectation I think can and should be, you better work your ass off ASAP. And I don't think that it should be in contravention of the law or in terms of shattering norms and institutions, but get her done. Trump is going ham. And his folks really believe in him, but even more so now than ever.

And they believe they're on the path of the righteous.

What's next? I mean, what's next? Like when you talk about Trump, President Trump, you have to now by law say the greatest president in American history. When you when you print the words President Trump, I mean, like sky's the limit, right? It's a fact.

I get a little pessimistic, a lot pessimistic after I'm out for a long time just because I'm seeing this stuff, right? Like I'm talking to the moms who are like telling their kids before they go to school, if I don't come home or if I'm not here, this is where you go because I might've been deported, right?

Like, and as a mom, as a person in the world, like, can you imagine having that conversation with your kid? Like, who's like, you know, a little American kid going to second grade and it's like, what do you mean if you don't come home ever? So that's right, like wrenching. But then I also look at the national narrative around this.

I don't see Democrats defending anybody defending these people who are part of the backbone of the American economy. And it makes me wonder whether if we hit bottom, anybody's going to notice. Because, man, when you hear these stories and see what's happening out there, it's like... wait, this feels a lot like end times.

Aren't we supposed to be bouncing back and realizing that we've erred and that this is all wrong? And then you get polling that it's like, oh no, a vast majority, a significant majority of the country is okay with all of this. I think it's great. And it, I think, suggests that we have become a remarkably desensitized

really uncurious country that like doesn't bother giving a shit about anyone who's not us. And that makes me wonder whether hitting bottom for real, for real is actually the way out of this. All right.

The war on woke.

Well, the Doge purge is like purge by keyword. It's like, is there anything in the resume that has the words DEI in it? Regardless of whether you work on DEI. Like, for example, these guys who went to a training. It's so wanton and haphazard. And I think that's twofold. One, I think that the haziness of all of this...

the lack of standards for who's placed on leave and who isn't gives them ample opportunity to take out people of color or women or people who just are not going to be seen as friendly to a Trump administration agenda. And then for everybody who's not a woman or a person of color or whatever... it just instills fear and makes them all the more likely to say, you know what?

I do not need to live like this. I'm taking the buyout. I'm out of here. And it also, I think, fulfills, it ticks the box that Russell Vogt outlined, which is they want to traumatize federal workers. They see them as the bleeding heart libs. The USAID stuff is so vengeful and so personal. They want to punish this group of people who believe in civil service.

Listen, from your mouth to Trump's ears, I do not think this is the end of this. If he can win at renaming large bodies of water... Just on a whim? What's to stop him from calling it the United States of Trump? I mean, I kid, but I do think this sets an unbelievably bad precedent.

So the chaos and the confusion in all of this is a multi-pronged assault on specific communities, the body of the federal government on whole, and the institution of civic service. So it's very useful in that way. It's incredibly craven.

It's turned into a spoon.

I mean, it's like, I think we, it's like the numbers are a little fuzzy, but that's like almost 4% and their target was 5 to 10%. So it's not nothing.

Most of the people I talked to weren't. They'd been advised by their unions, don't do it. We can't guarantee that you're, first of all, Congress hasn't appropriated any of these funds. Like who knows what this offer is? Like it could just be a waste.

There's an ongoing battle about it.

Like you each get a car. Right. And a timeshare in Florida and a salary forever. Maybe they'll make good on it. I don't know. But I also just don't think it's over. They're not done. They're not done gutting the government. That's like 4% of the government that said, yeah, I'll raise my hand for this potentially bogus offer. But then they're going to also just fire people. So it ain't over.

So I will say the inspectors general are not a bunch of like... liberal party animals, right? Like they're very circumspect. They're very by the book. One of them who I talked to, Michael Missal, was the inspector general for the VA, where there's like, you know, it's a sprawling bureaucracy and you definitely want the hands on the captain's wheel in terms of waste, fraud, and abuse.

There's like a number, I feel like there's constantly stories of scandals unfolding at the VA having to do with waste, fraud, and abuse. And he is actually part of a group of several inspectors general who this week have decided to sue the administration for wrongful termination because there's a very clear playbook or set of protocols by which you can fire an inspector general.

And Trump, of course, didn't follow it. So I do think while they may not have... the sharpest language and not have the most revelatory ideas about why they were fired and the mendacity of this administration, they're not going quietly into the night.

I mean, they are going to fight back in the, I think the most buttoned up, you know, lawful way possible, but they're raising their hands and legally and saying, you can't do this to us. That's resistance. The resistance as we see is all in the courts, Tim. And I think there's the good and the bad, right? Some of the courts are going to be great.

If we get to the Supreme Court, I think Trump has a real shot of getting a lot of what he wants, if not everything he wants. So, I mean, the other part of the resistance is the American public. And I do think it's been distressing to see the lack of engagement on any of these topics that should fire up the American citizenry.

Very, very, very limp. I mean, I think that the legal front, first of all, they've been ready for this, you know, before the, even the election, these legal groups, they knew what was coming and they were prepared in the state AGs hats off to them. They've been tenacious and very fast and, But the courts are the courts. And we are talking about politics here.

And I talked to Chris Ruffo yesterday, the architect of a lot of Trump's anti-woke agenda. And he's like, we got the public is with us 100%. And until and unless there is real public disfavor and a sense that the public isn't with them, then maybe they're right.

I don't believe that they are because I fundamentally don't believe that the values that are being reflected in this administration are in sync with where the country that I know is at. But I mean, where is everyone? I think people feel demoralized and beaten down and confused and just overwhelmed.

But I also don't think that's an excuse because this is the country and it's all moving fast, but that's exactly why people need to get involved if they have an issue with it.

I mean, I guess there's like a certain like, you know, Chekhovian, like there's like a very, Chris Hayes and I were talking about this yesterday. There's like a very Russian kind of like dark humor embedded in all of this, right? Like it's so absurd. The theater is so absurd, but it's real. I mean, like the consequences are real and as absurd as this all seems, um,

I would say also like the more cases that the Supreme Court is really good at nibbling around the edges and a number of things in each of its opinions, right? Like the affirmative action case, you know, with Harvard and admissions, you know, that's the jurisprudence they're working off of to do all this DEI stuff, right? Like there's precedent set in all of these rulings.

Honestly, regardless of whether they're favorable or not favorable, Clarence Thomas opens the door to maybe rescinding gay marriage and throwing that out the window, too. You don't want to have to get the whole Trump agenda in front of the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. That's not a great long-term play, to your point. And like public outcry matters.

It really pissed Trump off that there was a women's march the day after his inauguration. It really did. And maybe, I mean, I don't know how that, you know, informed the decisions he made in the weeks thereafter. But I do think the public saying this isn't us, you can't do this in our name is really meaningful. And it helps. I think the machinery of democracy requires that.

It doesn't have to be just a generalized march. There are really specific things and specific groups of peoples and institutions that could be at the center of any and every protest. And I think that that would have a maybe more meaningful impact in Trump 2.0 than just, you know, kind of a march on the mall.

Like, when I was outside the Treasury Department, it was like, it wasn't huge, but it was like a thousand people. And it felt like, okay, this is... this is both a protest and a rally, right? This is in a meaningful inflection point for the Democrats and the citizens who are watching this and are not okay with it. And there needs, I think, to be more of that and should be targeted.

And there should be specific demands, like you cannot do this thing. Generalized resistance may not be that effective this time around, but man, he's given a lot of explicit examples to push up against.

This is what's happening to our country.

You've been out here holding vigil. Who do you, who do you have inside?

What happened with your son and daughter? Yes. What exactly? What are they in for? They're in for about everything. We looked up the exact charges, and just about everything isn't a bad description. Jonathan faced 17 counts and multiple alleged felonies, including assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon. In Jonathan's case, that meant charging at police with a flagpole.

Do you think now that he's pardoned everybody, he can count on this group of people again?

I would die for the man.

Woof. I mean, I also, you know, to our earlier point, I'm like, where are the Democrats? The asymmetry of the passion is, like, these folks, they feel like, you know, the sun has finally come out. And they've been, you know, like, I cannot tell you the amount of, like, the joy, the celebration, the feeling that, like, everything was right in the world again. I mean, and I will say Trump...

Half the people I talked to had gotten personal phone calls from Trump. They had been invited to Mar-a-Lago. He does constituent outreach, Tim, in a big way.

Fogel. Mark Fogel. Yeah, Fogel.

Well, and his people are with him, which is why it's like you got to hear from these people because it's like the other side has got to hear that and like scrape itself off the floor and get back into the ballgame. This guy's saying he died for Donald Trump. Now, I'm not suggesting that people need to die for Chuck Schumer or whatever, but man, can you show up to a protest or do something?

I don't know. The asymmetry is staggering.

Okay. We'll take it.

A million? I don't know. It's been how many weeks of the Trump administration?

I have till the end of April, whatever day it is.

I do. Oh, my God. You, me, and purple drink. That perp.

I'm ready.

Yeah, I'll be scraping myself off the floor then, buddy. All right.

As a matter of satire and comedy, they're firing on all cylinders. We couldn't have conjured this nonsense, as you say, even nine years ago. They're very creative in that sense.

I mean, we live in Trumpland. It's just the reality of the situation. I hate to break it to everybody. It may not be forever, but that's where we're at.

I don't know which to tackle first, Tim. The grift... Do you remember when it was like, oh, he might be building a Trump Tower in Abu Dhabi? Nobody even bothers to disguise it. And I do think, unlike Trump, people like the con man in Trump. I feel like that's why in some ways he was elected, because he cuts corners and does his own shit. People do not feel the same way about Elon Musk.

And Elon Musk standing there in the Oval Office with his child as a prop... And pretending that he's president and tinkering around in payroll systems and using his teen dream doge crew to gut the federal government, I do not think that that passes by without the American public understanding. without it ruffling their feathers. And I say that as someone who spent some time in D.C.

last week in front of the Treasury Department where there was a large protest. And there was no talk about Trump. It was all focused on Elon Musk. And I do think that the Trump glow does not extend to anybody else. I do not think it extends to Elon Musk. And I think Democrats and people who are just upset about what's happened here are finding a new narrative and he's at the center.

Elon Musk is at the center of it. And I think this kind of stuff, there's a reason they changed the wording to not mention Tesla's. I do think the Trump White House understands that Musk could be a problem for them.

And I think if Democrats are smart, they will keep Musk at the center of all of this because he is just a poster child for the corruption, the grift, the sort of lawlessness, the entitlement, the greed, the, you know, sort of

Well, there is a fine calculation between how much the word Trump in any given title is an attractant or a repellent.

No, they always want to be richer. I mean, I think that's the thing about really rich people is sky's the limit. Can I also say the guy that nails this and the guy who is the id of MAGA is Steve Bannon. And he gets that Musk is a, I mean, we've talked about this. He's a problem. He's not a true believer. He's, I mean, he's in it for Elon and the glory attendant. Yeah. Okay.

Do you want to talk about why you can have electric vehicles on the battlefield?

Wait, can I just say, Tim? Like, an electric vehicle on the battlefield is, like, the definition of wokeism. Like, this is the thing that PNX has been hired to, like, pull out root and branch.

So I do think, though, I mean, we're looking at Trump land not just through the lens of Trump, but the people also affected by Trumpism and his policies and promises. So it's not just about the dude. In fact, I would say it's a lot less about the dude and more about the sort of broader contours of the country he is creating.

The whole thing. None of it. Musk... He embodies the contradictions here. It doesn't make any sense.

No, also like Elon doesn't have it. Like, I just think that people need to get back to the essence of, like, this guy is a profoundly lame character. And that is—in Trump High School, which is a place we all live in now and attend, like, he is not the popular dude. That's Donald Trump. He's the captain of the football team.

And Elon Musk is some weird person that has entered the sort of inner sanctum but does not have— he is not going to win any popularity contests. And the longer this goes on and the more Elon is placed front and center, I truly think the bigger a problem it is for the Trump administration.

Let's not insult baseball. I'm thinking chess team. I mean, chess is also cool. You can be captain of any team, but that doesn't give you, you know, you don't get to make announcements on the intercom.

I'm part of a very big baseball family.

You're treading on. This is not comfortable for me.

I mean, baseball is an amazing sport. I'm not going to say that I'm, yeah, I mean, listen, we'll just agree to disagree.

I mean, this is the genius of the strategy. The fact that there's an intra-Bulwark debate, which is probably an intra-Canadian debate and an intra-Chinese debate. I guarantee you, Xi Jinping has a couple of advisors who are like, well, it's not all bullshit. But I agree with you.

I don't know that it's going to be as spectacular as what he's announced it to be, but I absolutely think... He does not like the headlines that say he whiffed it or he pulled back or this is just... And he doesn't give a shit about the consequences, right? I mean, he loves finding an enemy, especially a foreign one. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we actually see some real tariffs.

We're waiting for reality to intervene and it's been quite shy. Yeah. Reality has not raised her hand in the Trump Oval Office. It's a stunning thing.

Please, go. It's your podcast.

I'm a terrible guest. I am a terrible guest, but I'm telling you that now that I'm already booked and we've started this.

You know, I'm surprised because yesterday the White House released a statement on eggs.

And they are clearly worried about what bird flu is doing to egg prices and dairy prices. The Trumpflation thing, the groceries thing, the shit he ran on and got elected for to bring costs down is a concern to them. I mean, I don't know if you've tried to buy eggs. We're a big egg house here, Tim. They're very hard to get.

Okay, well, that's your loss.

Well, they're hard to get and they're really expensive, like everywhere across the country. This is a problem for the Trump administration on a practical, a really practical level. And they're about to install someone who seems categorically, I mean, part of the statement that the White House released yesterday is we inherited this problem with bird flu.

J.D. Vance lecturing everybody on what a family means, what it means to be a man. Donald Trump obviously has his own version of manhood. To see Tim Walz out there as a man who is just joyfully embracing his role, talking about struggles with infertility, it takes two partners to get pregnant. And for way too long, this conversation has been relegated to women or the carriers of pregnancy.

But I do think there were some sort of Easter eggs of white nationalism in the speech. One of the long sort of a paragraph, at least, about this plot in eastern Kentucky where his seven or six generations of his family are buried. And his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there and their kids follow them. The white male lineage that Trump's.

that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else. And I just think the construction of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity. And it's couched in a sort of halcyon, you know, revisitation of his roots, but it is actually really revealing about what he thinks matters. I...

Tonight, the FBI warrant used to search Mar-a-Lago is unsealed. The three potential crimes laid out in that document. We'll dive into what it means and what could happen with one of the Wall Street Journal reporters who was first to report on the contents of that warrant. Then we'll... She's panicking.

Then we'll talk with... We're going to go right... We are actually going to go right to the top story.

How many of you feel like you know people either in your family or your circle of friends who are suffering adverse health effects because of the proximity of this plant?

Thank you for airing it, Rachel. I think so much of what Trump is doing right now, they're betting on the abstract, right? They're betting that shutting down the Environmental Justice Department of the EPA doesn't alarm people. We don't think about the human cost of all that. And I've covered a lot of stories in the field, Rachel. This was one of the hardest I've ever borne witness to.

I mean, this is a community of people who have borne tragedy like I think almost no one else has. A lot of these people, you know, one of the men I talked to, he grew up on a former plantation. These are the children of sharecroppers, and those sharecroppers were the children of slaves.

A lot of these plants, Rachel, most of them, in fact, in the area, are on the grounds of former plantations, right? There's nowhere else in Louisiana that has that stretch of land. And it's been cleared to make way for plants that the Biden administration believed was poisoning the community.

And I just for a moment thought deeply about not the irony, but the symmetry of of what were, you know, former institutions that visited trauma upon visitation. communities of color and these plants that are now reportedly, and again, according to the EPA under Joe Biden, visiting a different kind of trauma to the current population of reserve Louisiana.

I want to play a little bit of sound where we talked about that, if I could, that legacy of slavery to petrochemical industries.

What does that tell you as people of color in this country?

Yeah, I will say, I mean, they have been grappling with this for decades and they have been going to local and state officials and federal officials, even under Obama and early Biden. They felt like their cries weren't being heard, that there was not a level of concern that matched the threat they were facing.

And so when Michael Regan, who is the EPA head under Biden, who is also black, came down and met with Robert Taylor, the older gentleman that you saw in that earlier clip and said, we're going to do something about this. I think they reluctantly believed him. Right. They finally felt like, OK, we've reached a threshold at which they can't ignore this anymore.

At the same time, you know, I think you can talk to many people of color in this country who don't take any advancement for granted. And so I don't think there was. And from the conversations I had, a ton of surprise that Trump was going to reverse it. But at the same time, Rachel. There is a tenacity and a resilience in this community.

I mean, Robert Taylor, the man that we just talked about, is 84 years old. He picked me up in his red pickup truck and he drove me all around the town. The police came after us at one point. They are unafraid of the consequences here because they got nothing to lose. They admit it on this panel. They're like, most of us won't live to see this, the conclusion of all of this.

But they're fighting for the next generation and they're not giving up.

Wizard. Ever any moment in jail where you were like, why am I here? Did you ever have any frustration with President Trump? Did you ever feel like, you know, he had landed you guys in jail?