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Chapter 1: What political news is discussed at the beginning of the podcast?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. There is so much political news on this Tuesday. We've got primaries tonight in Iowa, a big Senate primary, California, governor and mayor's primary, also New Jersey, Montana, and New Mexico. Right as we started taping as well, Donald Trump...
appointed his director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bill Pulte, to serve as director of national intelligence. That's right. Bill Pulte, the hack grifter that used to, like... He'd be like the rich guy that gives away 500 bucks to people on Twitter if they follow him.
The same guy who was digging into the mortgages of every opponent to Donald Trump, you know, who went after Tish James and others based on their mortgages. He is now going to be the... DNI. He has no intelligence experience, no experience at all.
I think it is pretty obvious why Donald Trump is putting somebody who has shown complete unapologetic shamelessness and going after his foes in a position will have access to a lot of material that will allow him to go after his foes. It's extremely alarming. So we'll get to Pulte, we'll get to the primaries and a bunch of other stuff on on The Next Level, which will be out here later on Tuesday.
So make sure you're subscribed to The Next Level feed. But on this show, we'll bring back a longtime tech culture and political writer at The Atlantic. He's got his own sub stack now. He goes to plain English. He wrote some books, including Abundance. He's got a new book coming out. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man? What's up, man? Great to see you again. Good to see you.
I want to start with one of the other news items, then we'll kind of tick through some of the stuff you've been covering. Yesterday, after we taped, the administration said that they were going to drop the Thug Fund, the slush fund, after a couple of court rulings against them. Minor good news, I guess, that the administration is following court rulings now.
They had some pushback from Republicans on the Hill. We don't really know, you know, like, is the immunity part of the deal gone? Is Trump going to go back and try to get another deal? There are some unknowns, but I'm wondering what you make of the pullback on the slush fund.
It's incredibly welcome. I feel complicated about the fact that The justice system, the court system seems to be like the one bulwark, so to speak, against Trump's immorality. Like, you know, like it's every time he overreaches, the Republican Congress doesn't step up. The Republican Senate doesn't step up. Republican commentators, I suppose, object when it's the war in Iran.
I've actually been very interested to see how much objection there's been among some of the top podcasters and commentators about the war in Iran, because typically this man has just been allowed to do whatever he wants. But over and over again, it's been the court system that provides any kind of
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Chapter 2: Why is the slush fund significant in the current political climate?
And he says in the first chapter of the book, And I thought there's just such a lovely, smart idea that you can learn a lot about the foundation of all moral thinking by watching people fight. That often when people have fights with each other, you'll have someone say, that's my seat. I was here first. And the other person doesn't question the principle.
They tend to come up with some kind of special exception for why the principle doesn't apply to them. Like, oh, I thought you'd gotten up, right? It's rare for people to say, well, I'm stronger and taller than you. Therefore, I should get the seat and you should not, right? That would be suggesting that the principle doesn't exist. Instead, you come up with...
Special exception to the principle.
Like Biff from Back to the Future. That's what Republicans are doing. They don't actually defend Trump's corruption on the merits. Instead, they always back into this idea of, well, look at Biden's pardons. We'll look at the Democratic Party. Well, let me remind you how much we all hate woke so we can distract you from the fact that Trump is Clinton global initiative.
And so I thought, you know, my God, when will we escape this cycle of vice maxing? of excusing that which we know is immoral by saying, essentially, I think you summed it up well, the in-group is always defensible so long as we can accuse the out-group of being a worse evil.
And I just got really, really mad about this, this theme that I was seeing sort of take over politics, this, this, this explicitly anti-moral excuse for immorality. And I just wanted to warn people that I saw a lot of different pockets of politics slipping into this excuse making where the follies or the sins of the in-group were always excusable so long as the out-group was evil enough.
Like a softer example of that, that one of my favorite George W. Bush lines that he used at a funeral one time was, he says that we're judging people on our side by our best intentions and others by their worst examples. You know, like there's this evidence that that is like a natural kind of human instinct. And now we've like hyper maxed that. We're not even, you don't even have to like judge.
give nod to best intentions, right? It's just like, it is okay as long as it's rationalized, you know, based on the worst examples or even imagined examples that you've seen on the other side. The cycle of this is what I wanted to ask you about though. And again, no comparison between, and I did a long Plattner thing yesterday.
And so, you know, listeners know my kind of view between like his old posts or his personal behavior and his marriage and like what we're seeing from the president. But like, Whether it's platinum or whether it's some of the rhetoric around what Democrats should do if they get back in power in 2029. Like, I see this impulse in myself, right? Which is...
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Chapter 3: How does the justice system act as a bulwark against political corruption?
But I want to get you on a couple other things. I don't think any of y'all are going to be surprised to learn. I'm bad at remembering passwords. I'm bad at remembering the little three-digit code on the back of my credit card. And I like to shop for things from time to time on the internet. Those are a combination of traits that I have. And...
you know, that makes things challenging, makes things annoying. You know, when you want to get something and then you're like, well, fuck, what password is it? I know I'm supposed to have a password saver. I know, I know what I'm supposed to do, but I just don't, I don't ever do it.
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With Shopify and their Shop Pay button, sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash the bulwark. Go to shopify.com slash the bulwark. That's shopify.com slash the bulwark. I want to express frustration with you on two topics about your podcast. The second topic we're going to get to in a minute, it's related to your parenthood. But the first is on AI.
The name of your podcast is called Plain English because you're supposed to explain things to dummies like me in plain English. And on the topic of artificial intelligence, I've been leaning on you. Because in my head, I'm like, you know... I recognize that, or I think at least, that in my area of expertise, which is media, I think that AI is basically an unadulterated evil and pernicious.
Maybe there are a couple of useful things for it, but almost entirely, I think it's going to be harmful to people's ability to understand what's real. And there's a whole list of issues. But I recognize in other areas that might not be true, right? Like there are other areas where it seems like it's already extremely helpful. And on your podcast, I turned to it to get some clarity.
And it seems like you don't have any clarity. Is AI going to reshape everything or is it hype? Will there be major job destruction or will that be the opposite? Will it gain jobs? Are we in a bubble or not? There's just a lot of uncertainty there. And that's frustrating for me. I'm a simple man. I like certainty, Derek. So can you help me? No, it's frustrating for me too.
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Chapter 4: What is vicemaxxing and how does it relate to American politics?
You know, if you completely excise that from your life, you're going to have a pretty, pretty lonely retirement period, I would imagine. And maybe even before that. This relates to the happiness question. There's kind of these two intersecting issues. I'm trying to decide which one I want to talk to you about. You mentioned the happiness thing, so let's talk about that.
I was fascinated by a recent podcast you did where happiness is down basically since the pandemic everywhere a little bit, but in the Anglosphere, a ton.
and you you worked with somebody and they did research they did Gallup research and they they isolated like Quebec versus the English-speaking part of Ontario and people and that and particularly younger people and the rest of Ontario were sadder than the people of Quebec and I like I my friend over who's from Spain yesterday and I said I was gonna have you on and I was just like batting around like what that's such an interesting conundrum like what could that possibly be I'm wondering what you think
Well, so let me make sure that I spell this out because it's genuinely one of the most interesting and like jaw-dropping things that I've ever like worked with a researcher on. John Helliwell is one of the folks who runs the World Happiness Study.
And we spoke a few years ago about the fact that the World Happiness Study, which asks thousands, tens of thousands of people around the world about their subjective well-being, was showing that American happiness, especially among young people, was just plummeting. And I was like, what is this?
And John says, you know, what's interesting is it's really only youth in English speaking countries that we see this. And I was like, huh, I'd never heard that before. He was like, yeah, you know, if you look at Spain, if you look at like Eastern Europe, certainly, if you look at Eastern Asia, you don't see this decline in happiness in the last few decades.
And I said, well, what's a way that we could test this? And he went away and emailed me a few days later. And he said, you know, just to spell out the story that you told, he goes, you know, we should look at Quebec. Because 80% of the population in Quebec speaks French, and in neighboring Ontario, less than 4% of the population speaks French.
So if you really wanted a kind of like, you know, controlled trial, here in Canadians, they're the same in every way, except we're just changing the language. Does that have an effect on their self-reported happiness? And the answer was yes. This is the quote from the research that he shared with me.
In Gallup data used for the World Happiness Report, life satisfaction for people under 30 in Quebec fell half as much as it did for people in the rest of Canada. In a separate analysis of Canada's General Social Survey, which asks respondents about their preferred language,
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