Just imagine Fox's histrionics if a President AOC had said that American kids have too many dolls and that she's raising the price on them. Now the supposedly pro-family administration is doubling down on 'just pay more’ for toys, while it waits for China to blink on tariffs—an unlikely event given that it makes a lot of the things the world needs and wants. Meanwhile, AI's economic threat may be here for recent college grads, Marc Andreessen has deep thoughts on VC, and the NIH (and future American Nobel Prizes) are being burned to own the libs. Plus, the Dems should zero in on how Trump is making America less affordable—and very much like 2020 again. show notes Derek's piece on the job market for recent college grads Derek's podcast, "Plain English" The book, "Abundance," by Derek and Ezra Klein Tim's playlist
Chapter 1: Who is Derek Thompson and what is his background?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to welcome back staff writer at The Atlantic, author of the Work in Progress newsletter, his latest book you might have heard of. There's only been about 272 podcasts about it. It's called Abundance, co-written with some guy named Desiree Klein. He also hosts the very excellent podcast Plain English.
It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man? Hey, man, let's make it 273. All right, let's do it. Let's do it. Well, we're going to get to abundance at the end. And, you know, I'm sure we've got some like, you know, bulwark daily sickos who have not listened to your other 272. So we'll do a little bit on it. But we've got some more pressing matters first.
And I would like to begin with what I've been dubbing the Rick Santelli Tea Party rant for the capitalist left. That was you on CNBC. And for those who haven't heard it, let's play it right now.
Chapter 2: What was Derek Thompson’s CNBC rant about the capitalist left?
To be totally honest, Kelly, I've been listening the last 10 minutes of this show. I cannot believe what I'm listening to. I heard your last guest say if the economy shrinks, that's good. If the stock market goes down, that's good. If the housing market crashes, that's good. If there's a trade war, that's good.
When did the capital class get taken over by de-growther protectionists seeking 19th century autarky?
It goes on for about two minutes. And literally the CNBC host responds to you like, what are you talking about, Derek? Didn't you say that you wanted housing prices to go down? What is wrong with housing prices? The housing market collapsed. I was like, what am I watching? What happened?
I had an aneurysm on live television, obviously. I was in this chair. This is my chair to have a mental breakdown in, in this very room. And it was funny because you do podcasts all the time. I was actually talking to the producer, like setting up the shot, right? Like setting up this shot, like move a little bit to the left, move a little bit to the right.
And I could just hear between her instructions, These little murmurings from, I think it was Kyle Bass, a hedge funder, basically saying like, oh yeah, the stock market goes down. That's great for young people. They'll buy it at a lower price. If the housing market crashes, fantastic. That makes housing prices cheaper. And I kind of expected a little bit of a pushback from CNBC hosts.
And the fact that they weren't pushing back was just slowly making me enraged. I should say, as a matter of framing my mental breakdown here, I had just, not 30, 90 minutes earlier, come back from a two-week book tour. Yeah. So I was tired. I was unwashed. You have nothing to apologize for. I was coming off of a connecting flight. I had to sit at O'Hare for like nine hours in the tarmac.
I was feeling pretty punchy. And when I heard these folks essentially cheering the decline of the economy and an impending recession, that's when my head left my body. The buzzing eyes are noticeable.
Now, your eyes are definitely a little bit more normal shapes right now. Yeah. Autarky is my word for the year, though, ever since that. I've been hearing autarky a lot, and it does feel like we're coming back to that. So for our listeners, do you want to educate them on what 19th century autarky was?
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Chapter 3: What does '19th century autarky' mean and how does it relate to current trade policies?
Oh, yeah, sure. 19th century autarky just basically means you think that your economy should essentially provide everything that people consume in that economy. So all of the avocados that Americans eat, they should be grown in the U.S. of A., right? All the bananas that Americans eat, they should be grown in the U.S. of A. All of the coffee we consume
Should be grown in the US of A. The problem with that, however, is that I don't know if you've ever seen one of those maps of where coffee grows. Basically, none of it grows within the American border. We kind of have to import all the good coffee.
There's some pretty good Duluth beans.
There's some nice beans in Duluth. I don't know. I haven't checked in on northern Minnesota and the quality of their chocolate and coffee. It doesn't seem quite tropical, but maybe give it 35 years. So yeah, you don't want Otaki. It's really cool. when you can drink coffee from Colombia and Indonesia and have apples and bananas that are grown in other countries that we buy.
And then we give money to those countries and then they get richer and we get delicious fruit, right? Trade is good. Trade is positive sum. But this is an administration that does not believe in the concept of positive sum engagements. And so apparently this is an administration that believes that we should source all of our own coffee.
I have a social science question for you that's related to the economy. Because the thing that's been most bewildering to me that's related to your rant, it's like... the finance like crowd is still like pretty sanguine, right? I mean, like there was a moment there where, where, what, what did Trump say? They got the yippies or something. They got the yips.
Yeah.
They got a little yippy and they got a little yippy for a minute, but the markets like basically back to where it was not on inauguration day, but on liberation day, you know, it's kind of gained back. It's monthly yips. I've been consuming more CNBC lately. I was not watching you live, which I regret in that moment. But, um,
You do hear a lot of like rational, like post hoc rationalization for all this stuff like happening. And I don't quite get it. Like, I feel like if this was Bernie Sanders, like doing the exact same policy, CNBC would be, you know, like people on fire, like throwing pots and pans at each other. I mean, I think it would be insane.
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Chapter 4: How is the stock market reacting to the China trade war and tariffs?
If President Sanders or President AOC said, it's patriotic America for you all to spend 3x on toys, we're just going to raise the cost of toys in this country by a factor of three, that's patriotic, you would have an absolute backlash. I mean, this is obviously a kind of state-controlled economy that's incredibly reminiscent of precisely the kinds of socialism that a lot of Americans despise.
I mean, the Jesse Waters show, he'd be hosting it from inside FAO Schwartz. Yes, exactly. He'd have a whole tall setup all behind him, kind of like PTI, but instead of the heads of people.
He would have a lineup of cute little girls, one after another, just crying, crying, crying about the fact that they're babies. dolls are no longer being imported from China. I mean, you would have, I think a very glitzy, highly dramatic and highly catastrophic recording from Fox news about how president AOC is destroying American childhood.
And here's president Trump elected in an affordability election, right? The number one thing that people who switched the democratic to Republican column said about the election was life is unaffordable. bragging about the fact that toys are going to be twice to three times more expensive under him.
So that's number one, that if you just replace the letter after the name, it's just wild to think what the reaction of Fox News would be to Trump announcing that toys are more expensive. That's number one. Number two, this is just so effing stupid.
The strategy that's being communicated here is that we have to raise tariffs on China and other countries in order to reshore manufacturing of goods that are critical to our national security. Elsa dolls are not critical to our national security. It's totally fine if they're cheap. And there's no part of the semiconductor manufacturing process that flows through the manufacturing of Elsa dolls.
It's totally orthogonal. You don't need to bring back advanced robotics and say, step one, we have to make sure that all the Elsa dolls are made in America. Completely different thing. And then the final thing is that this really truly does scale, I think, across all of Trump's policies.
That if you hear the stated reason for the policies, and then you look at the inputs, they have nothing to do with one another. Like one other quick nerdy example. A lot of Trump folks say they want to bring back nuclear power to America. We want to build some nukes. That's a manly thing to do. Creates a lot of energy. 1950s economy, let's bring back the nuclear power plants.
Hell yeah, I'm for that. I'm for that too. I would love to have more abundant, clean energy in this country. Sorry, we're not going to skip ahead to that bit. Yeah, you got it.
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Chapter 5: What are the economic impacts of tariffs on consumer goods like toys?
Yeah, I think the first thing to say is, look, things are changing constantly. And so if you have one theory about the economy and you're just grasping it with white knuckles, you're probably not paying attention to what's happening.
You'll be right eventually, though. It'll come around.
You'll be right eventually. If you grasp for 15 years, maybe the economy will pass through your thesis. So if you look at a couple of things happening, yeah, they don't entirely make a clean amount of sense, right? As you said, the stock market, which I consider a pretty high quality gauge of real-time information, is right back to where it was on April 2nd, right?
Right back to where it was on Liberation Day, which seems to suggest, just from that indicator, that the market is somewhat shrugging off the effect of tariffs. Now, the market knows a lot, so to speak.
Which is crazy because we currently are essentially in a trade embargo with our biggest trading partner.
I mean, I realize we brought back a lot of the other tariffs, but anyway, continue. And the average tariff rate is extremely high on this country. So on the one hand, I think you've got the market saying, I think we can weather this. Now, here's the next shoe to drop.
A lot of folks who are pretty read up on supply chains say that trade has shut down with China to the extent that the container ships that are currently crossing the Pacific and will be unloaded at docks across the country, those are significantly down from where they were a month, three months, 12 months ago. which means that we could see very soon shortages in price hikes.
As Americans go to stores, the Home Depot, FAO Schwartz, Target, Walmart, and realize that for every 100 items that might have existed six months ago in stock, there's only going to be 60 or 50. So those shortages are about two to three weeks away. And I think the market is just sort of holding on and waiting to see what happens when the tariffs really bite the supply chain.
There's another thing that's happening that you teed up, which is that the labor market is starting to show some interesting signs of possibly weakening. And You're absolutely right. We're talking at 12, 13 p.m. Friday. We just had a jobs report about four hours ago which indicated just under 200,000 new jobs being created. That's decently healthy.
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Chapter 6: What is happening in the job market for recent college graduates?
Dude, this is the point that I forgot about what to make when I was talking about Trump and the dolls. I mean, it's not very pronatalist to brag about the fact that you are purposely raising the cost of toys and dolls while at the same time saying the number one job for this administration is to make it easier and cheaper to have a family. You're clearly not doing that.
But on Shida, my fear is that they simply make a lot of everything that the world wants. And the world needs cement, and the world needs steel, and people want to drive cars, and they want to use the robotics that come out and the electronics that come out of China.
And so if the US doesn't buy those toasters and doesn't buy those toys and coloring books, my feeling is that China is going to find other trading partners and that they have a political system that is not exactly democratic, which means it is insulated from the short-term pressures to modify policy in the face of a trade war.
So for a lot of reasons, I am extremely pessimistic about the prospects of America having a trade war with China, despite the fact that I'm incredibly patriotic about wanting to build a lot of the advanced manufacturing products that even conservatives say they want to get out of this plan.
Again, there's just no connection, as you meant to the top.
Exactly.
Like tariffing child safety seats is not going to create a semiconductor industry here. I've got to hear you had a podcast about science cuts, the crisis in American science, it's called. My note here is this crisis in American science, let Derek cook.
Okay. Yeah, it's actually, it's the longest podcast we've ever done. It's three interviews over two hours. And look, science is incredibly important to me. I am obsessed with the idea that most Americans and most American politicians severely underrate how important science is to progress.
One of the most important reasons why Americans live longer today than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago is because of advances in cardiovascular medicine and cancer medicine and Alzheimer's that we've come up with in the last few decades. And that requires an enormous investment in science.
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Chapter 7: How resilient is China versus the US in the current trade war?
Were there any specific anecdotes over the course of the two hours that really jumped out at you as far as alarming things that were losing, that are being stopped, that are in progress?
Yeah, yeah, great question. You know, to me... The story that really shows not only the cruelty but also the ineptitude of these cuts is that in mid-April, it was reported by Science Journal and the New York Times that the NIH was going to cut by some extraordinary number, 70% to 80%, the longest and oldest longitudinal study of women's health. I believe it's called the Women's Health Initiative.
This is the longest and largest study of women's health. We were just going to destroy it, right? Maybe because it had like a gender term in the title or something. So, science reaches out to the Department of Health and Human Services, and they say, we're going to look into it.
And 72 hours later, so embarrassed by the fact that for no seeming good reason, they've attacked women's health, HHS backtracks. Okay, so far, so good, you could say. The media served as a watchdog and saved this all-powerful program.
But then, 24 hours later, RFK comes out, and now, with those cuts reversed, he accuses the New York Times of lying about the original cut, now that they've reversed the cut. This is the level of dishonesty, right? and the level of lack of care that you have to assume is being applied to every single science cut across the system, right?
If this is how stupid and dishonest the cuts are to one program we identified, Imagine the stupidity and dishonesty multiplied across $15 billion of cuts to science, which are touching everything from cancer research, brain cancer research, Alzheimer's research, ALS research. I mean, it's just ludicrous that we're destroying these programs, and for what?
To own the libs, to express to Harvard our displeasure with their diversity programs? It's just terrible, I think, that we're essentially trying to wage a kind of ideological war against American academia and just burning science in the interim.
Okay, on to the... I guess kind of related science, future of everything. Derek, I do want to get back to the AI question. I was listening to one of your podcasts recently that was about the AI industry and business, like what's being invested in. You were talking to an expert on that.
And I'm curious where you think things are going, what the speed is, and how that also kind of relates to all these questions about having potentially the stupidest people in the world in charge of regulating it.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of cuts to American science funding by the Trump administration?
It's so strange that Mr. Abundance Optimist is turning me into a doomer. Listening to Doomers make me feel like an optimist. Listening to you, and now I'm like, we are so fucking cooked.
I think of myself as a scientific optimist and cultural pessimist. I think that science goes like this, it goes up and to the left, And if you look in the last 20 years of culture, how could you possibly say, oh, well, also culture isn't experiencing the exact same rates of progress as, say, computing or medical science?
So that's one big prediction, is that I am really worried about the social crisis that will be created by the convenience of AI relationships. The other piece I think is really interesting is that eventually the federal government's going to recognize that superintelligent AI is is a weapon.
If we have a tool that can be used to knock down foreign energy grids, or that can be used to knock down ours, that's a weapon. That's a digital bomb. What does the government do with incredibly significant weapons that exist at the frontier of technology, like the Manhattan Project? The Manhattan Project was not farmed out to Ford and GM.
We didn't let the private sector just like, hey, could you guys just like disappear, try to build a bomb totally outside of government regulations and control, and just let us know, Ford, if you happen to succeed in building a nuclear bomb. No, it's entirely centralized within the federal government. It is a federal secret.
We go to the middle of New Mexico and pay everyone to not talk to anybody else and entirely control the pipeline. We're still keeping other countries from getting access to the secret. So what happens when the private sector builds a digital nuclear weapon? The debates that we're going to have about the nationalization of AI, those I think are about 18 months away.
Real front page of your newspaper debates about whether aspects of OpenAI and Anthropic and these other companies need to be brought under federal control. That's a conversation that is, I think, practically inevitable once you consider the fact that How are we going to control information flow?
How do we trust private companies to control the possibility that spies from other countries are trying to sleep with them, steal their computers, get their information, right? If you take the metaphor seriously, that we are essentially at work on a technology so capacious that it includes the possibility of building a nuclear bomb
Why would we treat the 2020s Manhattan Project as a private enterprise while we treated the 1940s Manhattan Project as a purely federal enterprise? These questions of how to nationalize AI, how to treat superintelligence as a military weapon, I think we're 18 months away from a really, really big national conversation about that.
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Chapter 9: How might AI affect the economy and social life according to Derek Thompson?
none of them had a good answer and none of them had anything that could fit on a hat, you know, and that's just bad politics. Forget all the policy stuff. That's just bad politics. And so I've been posing to them. this is something they should probably figure out in case we have another election, you know?
And I'm like, there's AOC and Bernie are out there kind of with some, some sort of this, just fight oligarchy. And I was like, you know, these two geriatric millennial, you know, nerds, I have a book called abundance. It's offering a different perspective. And like, those are kind of two ideas that are out there.
And there is a very small group of people online that are very committed to the war between these two thoughts. And I don't really even think that I think that that's imaginary. I think that exists mostly in these people's heads. But I'm wondering like kind of what you think about the political overhang of what you wrote in the book.
So how do I want to frame this? We wrote this book in 2023 and 2024. We added four sentences, maybe. Maybe seven sentences in November 2024 after the Donald Trump election. So this is a book that is not about 2025. This is a book about what Ezra and I think is most important in American policy that we hope Democrats focus more on.
Housing abundance, clean energy abundance, high quality governance, a science policy that makes sense, and a plan to build what we invent. That's the book in 15 seconds. The reason I wanted to summarize the book is actually like put its summary in the refrigerator for a bit while I make a second point. Okay. 2026 and 2028 are going to be about Donald Trump.
And opposing Donald Trump effectively requires, in addition to understanding the importance of making and inventing more of what you need, the abundance message, understanding Trump's vulnerabilities, right? You have to pay attention to what he is making vulnerable. Right now, Donald Trump's vulnerability, I think, if the midterm were, say, in three months,
is that the man was elected by swingable independence because life felt unaffordable. And the first thing he did in office is raise tariffs while collecting billions of dollars in shit coins.
The argument you make is about the affordability of a typical family life juxtaposed with the corruption that this man not only is raising the cost of your child's doll, he's also spending half of his time soaking money like a vampire squid out of every single possible sycophant he possibly can. That's the message. Affordability plus corruption.
The positive vision is let's make American family life affordable. Not again, but like in many cases for the first time, a new kind of family life that we deserve in the 2020s and 2030s. That involves building what we know how to build like houses. It involves inventing what we don't know how to build like cures for diseases that ruin families.
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