Derek Thompson

I think the line we quoted from the book is that under typical conditions, that bridge would have taken nine years to build, and instead it took only a matter of months.

That's fantastic.

I want bridges to be built faster in America, especially when those bridges fall down and they typically carry millions of cars.

I don't want those same emergency powers to be used in order to terrorize Hispanic Americans.

So one can believe.

that it is possible for the president to move faster than the executive branch typically moves and also believe that one can move fast to do terrible things and one can move fast to do good things.

And that's why you simply try to win elections.

It's why it's important to be the party in power who has the power to use those same laws to move outcomes in a good direction rather than a direction of terrorizing people.

There's something I feel very strongly about, and there's something that I'm still trying to work out my feelings about.

I'll start with what I feel very strongly about, and that is that Pete Hegseth labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and essentially saying, therefore, that Anthropic can't do business with any company that does business with the Pentagon, companies that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

That's an attempt to murder a company, right?

as the result of simply not getting what they want out of negotiations.

That is a direct violation, I think, of the principle of private property.

You cannot be the government and enter into a contract with a private company and say, we have terms.

Those terms could include the price.

It could include restrictions on use.

And say, if we don't get what we want, we reserve the power to destroy your company by saying that you can't do business with any company that does business with the U.S.

government.

that's unbelievably, unbelievably Maoist, I think.

And it's sharply ironic that when the Trump administration came into power, one of the big differences between their perspective on artificial intelligence and the Biden administration's perspective on artificial intelligence was on the issue of regulation.