Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But as with the Mexico-Canada situation, he never actually laid out any sort of success criteria. So what he ended up settling for, so far as I can tell, doesn't actually seem to be particularly consequential. I don't think you can use the same strategy.
But there's probably not an easy out like that in this circumstance. Now that you've laid this out and made all of these kind of grand proclamations and insisted that folks are going to do things that they've said they would not do for a very, very, very long time, you kind of have to put up at some point. And I'm just not sure there's any there there.
Moynihan, you mentioned that he was reading for a piece of paper, and I noticed that too. But it's not clear when that piece of paper was authored. It could have been moments before. Thank God.
Yeah, I don't know if it would be helpful, but to the extent Trump has qualities that I'm eager to embrace, one of those is being able to essentially utter uncomfortable truths that no one else is willing to look at and acknowledging the fact that this is a terrible situation. The status quo is completely unacceptable. We can't return to that. We have to do something bold and audacious here.
Let me just throw something out there. To do that in the kind of most responsible, delicate way possible while being sufficiently disruptive, I think is a very good thing. But in terms of achieving this kind of Riviera of the Middle East thing, the first and second order problems before you get to the end state where he could actually do the thing that he has done a bunch, build things.
They're just so hard. The security envelope that would be required to actually allow contractors to come in and do the construction, the effort to actually try to move people around, to perhaps force people out, it would just be extraordinary. And the potential for things to go wrong is enormous.
And not just there. Not just there.
Wow.
Nobody did. It's the acoustics.
I don't know. Are posthumous presidential orders a thing? That's not a thing, but it's fine. We get this point. I do appreciate the point. I presume that's correct, actually. Whoever your successor is, if they wiped out the president and the rest of the... We're coming for you. So yes, I presume that's correct. Obliterated.
They can do a lot. It's AI. It's AI. It's all the de-aging technology that they used in films like The Irishman. You can use all those things. And Joe Biden could be viable for another hundred years. He could be selling merchandise and products. Ice cream? I don't know. It could be. I think it's a savvy deal. Chocolate chip. That's the only thing Joe Biden was ever right about.
He would do all... He will be the new Max Headroom. He's going to make all his appearances that way.
I mean, Elon is clearly the most, I think it's just fairly true, the most consequential entrepreneur of our lifetimes, perhaps. I mean, between Tesla and SpaceX alone, that's a pretty big deal. The potential for something like Neuralink is even more profound and, quite frankly, has just become this kind of cultural icon as well.
At the same time, while he's raised his profile on the political scene, there are moments where Elon is tweeting that I wish he would just kind of pull back on the stick a little bit. There are moments where he's kind of like public hyperbole. I'm just like, dude, could you chill?
Because when I look at what Doge aspires to do, at least on paper, to the extent there is any kind of specific details about it, it's hard for me to get mad about that. Like being concerned, radically obsessed even with cutting the size of government, with reducing waste. It's just a noble and sensible goal.
And when I see what they're actually doing so far, to the extent anyone knows what's going on, there's a bunch of young kids with laptops or younger people with laptops, sometimes they get in trouble for using the word kid, are showing up in meetings and they're asking questions and they're trying to look at code bases. We don't actually know what the hell is going on.
There is nothing that suggests to me that the level of panic that has seized the Democratic Party and people who hate Donald Trump in general, and apparently Elon as well, there's nothing that seems to justify that at the moment. But I don't think that the way that they're going about things and the kind of attempts at provocation around these issues is necessarily great for Elon.
Maybe the Democrats kind of overstepped and are way out over their skis. At the moment, he's being accused of committing all kinds of crimes, and there's panic because these kids know how to code and are maybe coding things. People should probably be more panicked about the fact that the payment systems are written in these... old antiquated programming languages.
Nobody actually knows how any of this stuff works. It isn't well documented. The government has the capacity to screw things up all on its own with its long-time experts and long-time consultants. That is what they did with Obamacare. I'm not particularly frightened by programmers showing up and taking a look at code and trying to assess how things work and if they could be better.
Yeah.
Showing 321–340 of 460 · page 17 of 23
← Previous
Next →