Katherine Mangu-Ward

It's a nice big tech company you have there.

It'd be a shame if something happened to it is kind of the energy that a lot of these interactions have.

I, for one, don't mind Mark Zuckerberg trying to sell me or put in front of my eyeballs whatever videos of AI puppies and Chinese toys he wants to try to sell me.

I just don't want

to have consequences to my personal freedom.

And I think the fear there is that the state acts, not that the tech companies act.

Well, there are lots of types of libertarians, right?

So I actually think...

You know, I hate to be that guy, but it depends what you mean by power.

If you mean market power, not necessarily.

If you mean monopoly on violence in the.

Right.

And so this is this is where you get into a horrible circumstance, because any of the solutions that I might propose now at best are a balance of power solution where one part of government might constrain another part of government, but sometimes are just kind of like a cultural sea change type solution where we would just all agree in some way that this has gone too far and people would win.

So I think this is, you know, what what Trump has done, the places where Trump has really pushed the envelope in terms of corporate governance, and this is often with respect to big tech, although not always, is he's really moved into like full fledged economic nationalism in ways that his predecessors were not always refusing

to do, but a little more hesitant.

So this is the golden shares.

This is, you know, with Intel and other this is approval of the tick tock deal just arbitrarily kind of coming from the from the federal government, a bunch of other things like that where it's a much more direct intervention in the market.

And then when you pair that with the tariffs where

think trump just likes tariffs and he does tariffs because he just likes tariffs and that's a bizarre thing that i can't fully understand but what it does do is it creates infinite opportunities for cronyism and that's what you're talking about right you're talking about where um the prize of buying influence is worth the cost and so if we have a tariff but if you know the right guy you can get an exception from the tariff and if that guy is always

Donald Trump or one of his children, then that, you know, that creates all these opportunities for the kind of cronyism that for whatever reason, so often does seem to make Americans hate the corporations and not the government.