Hi, I'm Molly john Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Elon Musk warns that excessive spending will plunge the US into debt slavery. Yeah, now he's worried about it.
We have such a great chill for you today.
Risk Reversal's own Dan Nathan stops by to tell us about businesses reactions to.
Trump's insane tariffs.
Then we'll talk to Alan Alrod about his brilliant article You're not crazy, America has gone mad.
But first of the news, so Molly, the CBO, which this weekend, Mike Johnson had to say, you know is a woke institution and you should believe it. But then they pointed out how often he cites it. He says that the trunk tax bill will add two point four trillion to the deficit a leave ten point nine million more on insured. Great work, great work, really serving the American people.
I want to talk about this bill because I know that I keep talking about this bill, but I just want all of our listeners to just take a minute to realize how stupid this fucking thing is. Okay, first, of all all Republicans in the House signed off on it, everyone from Marjorie Taylor Green to Mike Lawler. So if you're Mike Lawler and you're in a D plus one or an R plus one, you know a very swingy district,
which he is. Jesse is now going to look up what his district is, but it's a very tight district that is not supposed to elect a Marjorie Taylor Green. That guy also voted for this, so all of them have voted for this. In it, nearly a thousand pages, is a ton of pork, including crazy stuff like this crazy thing that limits judicial power and oversight of this administration. You're shocked to hear that, but I bet you're actually not shocked to hear that.
And in it there's also a ton of other stuff.
Work requirements for parents with children over seven for Medicaid and food stamps. That's right, if you have a child over seven, you need to be working. You need to be having a job, Okay, because children.
Over seven are adults. I mean, this is what this bill does.
And what this bill does is it saves a little bit of money clawing back Medicaid. That means rural hospitals and nursing homes, and then it spends a lot of money doing crazy tax stuff. And I want to have one second to talk about the crazy tax stuff because basically, this bill BBB, big beautiful bullshit is the purest distillation of MAGA. Right, it's a lot of Trump's campaign promises, no tax on tips.
How will they do?
No tax on tips? I feel like I'm going crazy, right, what's a tip? What's not a tip? There's no way to deliver this, And there's just a lot of more tax bullshit. And then there's also stuff in this big beautiful bullshit that is, you know, besides the judicial power stuff, there's other stuff in there that's just pork. So Elon
Musk has said now that it's a bad bill. Now I want to redo something from Jake Sherman at Punchbowl News, who was a really really really sourced congressional reporter, and he said a Republican aid on Elon Musk opposing the Reconciliation bill, the guy was pro the package until he realized he wasn't going to get his way on the ev tax credits. Right, none of these people give a fuck about the deficit. Elon wanted the ev tax credits
because he thinks it'll be good for TESLA. I want people to realize, like, nobody here is acting out of any interest but their own self interest.
Yeah, strong agree. So we're going to have a real survey of stupidity today, and analysis finds the majority of Trump cabinet tied to Project twenty twenty five groups. What a shocker. It's almost like we said this a year.
Ago, since you and I did this whole twenty twenty five thing, this YouTube series, and we kept at every point, we kept being like, I think you and I together would be like, oh my god, these people are just going to do twenty twenty five.
And yeah, the last episode we did of the thing where like we point out Trump lying and showing all the evidence that he's going to put exactly who he put in, Well, we were right.
It's like I definitely spend time in this election cycle thinking about the ways I was wrong. Well here's one where I was fucking right, And so we're you know, this was always the play.
Project twenty twenty five was the ethos.
Now there are things happening in this administration that are actually, I think scarier than Project twenty twenty five, and I'm thinking about like what RFK is is doing right now to research and science and health.
But do not.
Underestimate the damage that Ross Fought is doing at the Office of Management and Budget. And he was on the Sunday shows last week. He's doing that because they're trying to push this bills through the Senate and he's trying to get senators on board. On this show, Dana Bash asks, is it fair to say what you're doing now is in part enacting Project twenty twenty five, And of course Russvott.
Says absolutely not.
But this smart reporter pointed out that sixty to seventy percent of Project twenty twenty five's executive action proposals have been implemented or initiated, and those are things like environment education, and then thirty to forty percent of their proposals are being proposed as legislation, and those are Look, you and I both remember the goal of Project twenty twenty five
expand presidential power, take power away from Congress. This Congress was really happy to give it to Trump and to sort of make the presidency an imperial presidency.
And that's what we're watching happen in real time.
Yep. Well, the good news is is what we often see is that the small elections in between the big mid terms and the of course every four years where we pick up president, that we're seeing a lot of really good news in districts that could spell good things for us pushing back against this administration. Since we had just achieved a landslide election when in South Carolina for the Democrats.
Yeah, you know this is like history rhymes right, Remember in twenty sixteen, Democrats won every election, and there's a reason why. It's because the Republicans are doing something wildly unpopular. Work requirements for food stamps, for Medicaid, these are unpopular things. The reason Republicans are in such a hurry to get it past is a because they know that when people read the bills they.
Won't like it, right like what happened with Marjorie Dale Green.
And b because ultimately they know this is super unpopular.
So I think we'll definitely see.
More of these kind of amazing democratic landslides. You know, there are people listening to this podcast right now. A lot of people listen to this podcast, and you tend to be very civic minded, smart people.
So here's my.
Question for you. We see that there's going to be this grand swell, we see that Democrats are going to win. Why don't you run for office? If you're listening to this podcast you live in a red state or a blue state, or a city or a town, like, we cannot wait for these people to fix our problems. They are not motivated, they are not capable. So maybe you listeners are the ones that we've been waiting for.
Yeah, especially when we see incompetence like this that the White House is being mocked after they admit that they sent letters to remind countries about trade deal deadlines and now we're begging for them to cut deals.
Yes, well, you know who we haven't seen in a long time. Tell me Peter Navarro.
Oh where is that? Follow?
Where is Peter Navarro?
Because Peter Navarro promised me ninety deals in ninety days.
Mall, you're going to be in DC soon, you're going to put up missing signs.
Yes, I'm going to be like Peter. I think Peter's definitely going.
To come to my book reading.
He's a known reader. Yeah, so where are those ninety deals in ninety days?
You know how many deals. We have tell me one O one, we have one deal. And it's not even a deal, it's a framework of a deal. Dan Nathan is a c NBC contributor and the host of the Risk Reversal podcast.
Dan Nathan, Welcome to Fast Politics.
Favorite podcast other than my own, Molly Dalnas. Great to be here. I have a book to read, by the way, I'm really excited about I'm excited for you.
Thank you. How to was your mother out yesterday? Because you know, we got to self promote.
I was on a television show interviewing someone who is a very smart money guy economists, not an economist, but someone who does does what you do, and he was expressing, I think a lot of anxiety about the fact that the market seemed to be behaving quite rationally at this moment. Is that still true and can you explain to us why.
Yeah, A couple things here, So it depends which market you're talking about, right, So the stock market was the primary focus of most people, most citizens in this country when we were you know, post liberation day. I say that obviously in air quotes, because we saw the S and P koreem lower. That's the largest, you know, stock market in the US or at least indussy. And you know,
but there's other markets, right. There's the US treasury market, which you know is basically one of the most important you know, interest rates that a lot of stuff is kind of quoted against. Right. And then there was the currency market, the US dollar.
I want you to stop and talk about the treasury market, because that's been the really important indicator of this moment.
This treasury market is bond people.
Usually when the market goes down by bonds because it's a hedge against volatility.
But that's not what's happening right now.
Right, So Americans have been accustomed to buying US treasury bonds because the fact that the US Treasury is not going to default, right, And so you have this incidence where if you're pulling money, let's say, out of the stock market because you think it's risky for whatever reason, you can park money in the treasury market. Okay. But the problem is in this last couple months or so, is that some of the biggest holders of our debt
of US treasuries are China, are Japan. And when you come at some of these countries with like really exorbitant tariff rates and they are getting ready to go into a protracted trade war because they don't want to be bullied right into basically eating this kind of a whole new world order as it relates to trade in such a short period of time. They have leverage, they own these treasuries, right, if they start selling them, that means
interest rates go higher. And you know, when you think back to back in you know, March or so, when Treasury Secretary Besson started to kind of prepare investors for what might come right if they start, you know, kind of putting these big tariffs on, they said, we're more focused on the ten year treasure yield. They want that to go lower. They have to refinance a lot of debt. The higher the treasure yield is, the more expensive it is to refinance that debt. And they said, we're not
worried about the stock market. Well, the stock market koreamed in early April, and the US ten year treasure yield went up. Why because there were foreign sellers of our debt. It did the exact opposite of what the Treasury and the White House wanted to happen. And that's why, that's why we had that first taco experience back on April ninth,
which got the stock market going back higher. But the real problem is that the US ten year treasure yield is stuck at four point four or five percent, and it was where you know, it basically was in early April. And the US dollar has not rallied because those same sellers of treasuries have also been selling dollars and dollar denominated assets.
So the dollar is down, the debt is more expensive, right.
I would think about it this way. So the dollar is where it was in early April, and US treasury yields are basically in the ten year about the same spot. So to the point you were making about that market participant who says that the markets are not acting rationally, well that's the stock markets not acting rationally. Basically, investors are saying that the taco thing is going to happen.
It's going to happen again. He's going to chick it out again because pretty soon we're going to get to that ninety day period where he pushed out reciprocal tariffs right on the Chinese. He tweeted out last night that g is going to be a hard guy to do a deal with. I think he's already lowering expectations there. So then the question is do they ratchet it back up right, because we know that Chinese are going to ratchet it back up. And it brings me back to
the first Trump administration. They put tariffs on China in March of twenty eighteen. They did not have a framework for a Phase one deal until January of twenty twenty. If you think trade wars are easy to prosecute, well good luck with that. We've already seen that they're very difficult. And we also know that our major adversary is going
to call our bluff. And it's also interesting to know that the first two countries that we came after, Mexico and Canada to where our biggest trading partners, have yet to come to the table. And I think that emboldens the Chinese. Also.
I want to talk about Mexico and Canada because what happened there was such a self inflicted wound, right Mexico and Canada. You have to work really hard to make these people furious, and he did right, especially Canada, like they're run by a banker.
At this point. He's a liberal.
All he wants is to not have drama tried as hard as possible to keep Brexit from blowing up the UK economy. Now, Brexit fucking disaster. But Mark Carney is really like the leader you would want, Like, I mean, isn't he kind of your and mind too a little bit our dream president?
Yeah?
I mean, you know, here's a guy who actually has a strong fundamental knowledge of how markets work.
Right.
He understands the inner complexities of what we just went through. Right, what does the treasury market mean? What are interest rates mean? What is FED policy, which is meant to be independent of politics? What does that mean? What does the stock market tell you at certain times? The stock market, you hear this expression all the time, is a discounting mechanism, right, It looks at all the available news, and then investors
kind of put their money to work. And so you could say, right now, maybe that is what the stock market is telling you, that the worst case scenarios are off the table and maybe some like cooler heads like Mark Carney might prevail. If you think about Mexico, shine, they haven't really been engaging in a way that's particularly antagonistic. The EU has suggested that they will come to the table, but they don't know who they're negotiating with or what
we want that sort of thing. The UK that deal was a bit of a fugazy They just said, let's just get this out.
One works of a deal, right.
So to your point, I think that there's like some definitely level headed folks. But then let's go to a topic us. Let's go to a topic that I know is near and dear to your heart. Somebody who's kind of off kilter a little bit. That would be Elon Musk, who just left the administration and now all of a sudden he's got some real big issues with the tax policy, the tax plan. And don't think for a second that these things are not kind of related, because they really
are important if you think about it. If we're trying to reorient global trade, if we're trying to work on bringing down our national debt, I.
Mean, to re orient global trade.
In tariffs are that it's like taking a chainsaw, I mean, much better to give incentives to use a carrot rather than a step. I also wonder how much of Elon Musk's newfound frugality is his irritation that EV credits are no longer the I mean, this is a guy who democratic legislation created him, right, he became the richest man in the world, EV tax credits, all of this sort of you know, the help that his company's got.
Yeah, I mean, the one thing I just say about Elon and you know, I think he's a much more effective chaos agent than Donald Trump.
Right.
But the one thing that's consistent between the two of them is they always say the quiet part out loud, right, And so Elon coming out this tax bill, he has not really mentioned, you know, these EV tax credits. He's gone back and forth on that. By the way, over the last few years, he's gone back and forth over you know, some sort of trade barriers as it relates to China and evs. We don't really know where he
stands on this. I think one of the positions as it relates to Tesla in particular, has been that they're in a much better spot than not say GM and Ford to kind of have these credits go away. But that's actually not the case anymore. The fundamentals of their business could not be worse. Right now, the auto gross margins, the profit that they make on their evs is now in line with that of GM and Ford. GM and Ford are pulling back from the ev market and they're
going more for these plug in hybrids. So when I think about the way that he has gone about kind of, you know, dealing with a price war, the Chinese are eating their lunch. He's expected to have the second consecutive decline in deliveries this year at a time where the price war is eating into their margin. So he needs these credits. It's very important. But they haven't said it yet, and Trump hasn't come out and said it yet, and
this thing is going to be a bit worse. And I just think that the lobbing of the grenade at the tax bill is something that basically he's trying to maybe reorient the kind of what's going on with tax and the expectations about cuts to lower the taxes versus what's going on with trade and the fact that our government appears to be mired in problems with both of them at the same time. It goes back to the first administration. They went for tats Gary Khan came in.
He wanted to get tax cuts through. They got them through. It was a tailwind for the economy, it was a tailwind for the stock market, and then they focused on terrafts and trade. And I'm not saying that was effective, but it was a much more effective way about it.
Oh much more right.
I mean, you choice the economy with the tax cuts and then you go in there with the tariffs and it ends up being actually quite good because it tamps down some of the inflationary you know.
I mean that with Gary Cohen is not the same.
As you know, the people who are in charge right now, which is Donald Trump's lizard brain. I want to talk about China for another minute, because there's so much anxiety about China right what the next step is here? What's happening with Taiwan? We are really vulnerable to them. Also, the other thing I want to ask you about selling the bonds. I didn't realize that this was actually China Japan selling bonds. So that is now that's indisputable. It's not like technical traders.
No, I mean, like there's definitely market participants here and around the globe who basically have a trade on they called the carry trade. They kind of sell over there and they use the proceeds and they buy higher yielding assets over here. And one of the reasons why you saw that market volatility in most markets. You know, this is back in April, but we also saw it in late July in early August. When you see an unwind
of that, that's when you see markets go haywire. And so when you think about who has the leverage right in a situation like this, the largest holders of your debt have the leverage right. We also had a situation a few weeks ago where moody is one of the big rating agencies, came out and lowered the rating on our debt, which also makes us vulnerable. Treasury Secretary Bessett said the other day that we will not default on our debt, but we almost did, you know, about twelve
years ago. And so there's a lot of unknowns here. And so when you think about I'll just kind of bring it back to China, which you wanted to kind of talk about. You know, Okay, let's take the over on what they might do with Taiwan. You know, some of the easiest things they might do, or some sorts of blockades or some sort of trade sort of situations and that sort of thing. That is important because when you think about generative AI chips and this is the
new world order that we live in. This is going to be the most important commodity going forward, especially as we deal with our adversaries going forward. They are made in Taiwan, Okay, so if the Chinese try to disrupt anything as it relates to Taiwanese production of those chips, that could be a real problem for the entire globe. Right, So I think about, you know, how this kind of new world order is going to be set, Well, we
can't afford to have any disruption there. So when we think about China, you know, the national security as it relates to supply chains is really important. So how do the Chinese have leverage on our manufacturing? Okay? They are thirty percent of the global manufacturing, right, so we went through this with COVID that was a bit of a problem.
They also own a lot of the rare earth materials that into EV batteries and magnets in this sort, and they also own the purchasing power of let's say Boeing planes, right. So a headline that hit today is that they're considering by hundreds of planes from Airbus, which is obviously you know, a European company, it's French, and that would be in place of Boeing planes. Boeing has been mired in problems
for the last six or seven years. They had those plane crashes, these issues with the seven forty seven Max, and they've been missed you executing for a while. That could be a real big hit to our economy, not just from a manufacturing standpoint, but really from our stature, you know around the globe for American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism. Ha haha.
It's so funny that you just said this thing about Boeing, because I really do think part of what happened with Boeing, right is a question of regulation, right. I mean, things got at a hand because the regulatory environment wasn't what it needed to be to make sure these planes were safe. And remember Trump was in fact president from twenty sixteen
to twenty twenty. I just wonder how much like one of the things Trump loves to do is dismantle regulation, and we never ever see why that's bad, right, We only ever see him dismantling regulation and then a catastrophe like that trained derailment in Ohio. I feel like there is a straight line between deregulation and environmental fallout but also economic fallout.
Yeah, I mean that's the story of the two thousands, right, and a lead up to the financial crisis. You know, we had some significant regulations as it really to our financial institutions, and you know it was the Clinton administration that actually rolled a puncture those back, right. And you know, as you think about folks who have incentives right to kind of take financial instruments and kind of repackage them and do them in a way where they can make a lot of money on them and they can get
around regulations. I mean, that's really what happened in the financial crisis, and you have thought on the way out of that where so many individuals were really burned. They were the bag holders in that, and you had you know, Elizabeth Warren put in the CFPB and all that sort
of stuff. And I think this is the point you're getting to, is that the administration comes in in this new administration, it's one of the first things they do they get rid of the Consumer Protection Organization that was meant to shield everyday citizens from that sort of you know, predatory behavior.
And so here's because of two thousand and eight.
Because of the financial crisis, and then you can look to twenty and eighteen. So the Trump administration rolled back some regulation about capital levels for smaller banks. Okay, so do you remember in March of twenty twenty three, Silicon Valley Bank went down. There was a handful of other banks that went down. You can draw a line back to these capital requirements that were rolled back in the
twenty eighteen deregulation. And we lost some really important banks, and we also had some threats to the financial system at the time, different than two thousand and eight, but in some ways they could have had big not gun effects. And what did the government have to do And this was under obviously the biderministration. They had to go bail them out, right, And so we see this again and again.
If you give these financiers, if you give these folks enough room or enough rope, they will ultimately hang themselves because the incentives are too great in the near term, and they know that they can socialize the losses if things go bad.
Yeah, I was just going to say, privatize the gain, socialize the losses. Speaking of socializing the losses, the BBB, big beautiful bullshit bell will in fact cut a lot of things right. It'll cut snap benefits, food for hungry children, it will cut Medicaid, which will cut rural hospitals, nursing homes, but it will also provide these insane tax cut no tax on tips. I mean, what is that even? Like, no tax on tips? How would that even be implemented?
What does that look like? And what would the financial sort of fall out be? Right? I mean, clearly it'll juice the public markets, but what do you think it'll look like in six months?
Well, it's funny that sun tips thing is obviously a populous sort of move. When he would go to Nevada during the campaign, he would talk about that and you know, and again this goes back to maybe some of his political genius, but his lack of acumen when it comes to policy and the likes. So to me, that is probably a bit of a rounding era if you think about all the folks that will benefit from that, however they implement it, versus the expected maybe ten thirteen million
people in America. We're going to lose access to healthcare or to your point about snap or you know, free lunches and breakfast for you know, students of you know, lower income sort of families in the like, and I mean, those are the big things and ultimately, I think those are the things that are going to get felt right out of the gate. Do you feel them? How do these things get implemented? You know, who knows. But at the end of the day, I mean this sort of
cuts in a lot of red states. And that's the other thing. If you think about some of these policies that were put in place during the Biden administration, you could say, well, the IRA and the Chips Acts and all this sort of stuff, they deliberately put them in some of these red states, so the folks would actually have all the benefits of this government spend if you think about it, right, and it goes back to really
a social safety net. If Republicans want to push through a four and a half trillion dollar tax cut over the next ten years and throw three or four trillion dollars onto the national debt, which is the thing that they're supposed to care about, then they better be prepared for the repercussions because they lose the soul of the party. Right. If this is what and this is why Ran Paul and some of these folks, and even Elon Musk, we
don't know Elon Mus's intention. I never knew him to be a fiscal hawk by any means, and you think of the beneficiaries he's been able to enjoy from government spending. But this is one where I don't think it gets fixed too quickly. I don't think President Trump, as his approval rating goes down over these economic issues, especially as the trade thing gets pushed out, is going to have this sort of leverage over the Senate as he did over the House in the last few weeks.
That's the twenty four tillion dollar question. Danny. Then, thank you, thank you. I hope you'll come back.
Thanks Bally. Great to be here.
Allan L.
Rod is the President and CEO of the Pulaski Institute and a contributor to Liberal Currents.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Alan L. Rod.
You write a bunch of stuff, very smart. You write for Liberal Currents, which I think of as a very very smart literary magazine in the tradition of the New Republic, a little more lefty. And I want to talk about this essay, which is why I knew we had to have you on, because I was like, Holy moly, this is how I feel this. Why didn't I write this piece? And the title is You're not crazy America has gone mad.
So talk to me about sort of how you got here.
I've only been doing the sort of writing commentary pieces for a few years, and really it kind of came out of I head also trying to get this policy type organization off the ground here in Arkansas called the Plaski Institution that I started in twenty twenty one, and it is focused on a lot of the problems I think I described in this piece and some other pieces, which is challenges that are happening with democracy and with popularism, not just in the US, but in really a lot
of Western countries where there's a lot of breakdown in not just the electoral politics, but also just sort of broad cultural commitments to the important things that make a liberal democracy work. But I've tried to think about that in sort of heartland places, So that was sort of the idea I started writing to sort of try to get these ideas out there and bring attention to what I'm trying to do. And I've been really lucky. I think that that's turned into its own sort of separate
and really rewarding journey. In terms of I started writing an arc digital back in twenty twenty two, and really clicked with Brady Belvite or there and Nicholas Grossman, and luckily got to do some pieces for other places. And Liberal Currents was a place I got connected with thanks to anac Manus, who's actually a fellow at the plast Constitution. He said, you know, reach out to Adam Gurry if you're just sting in pitching them, and I did, and it was one of those kind of we all just
sort of clicked. I got in the little discord with the other editors and writers at Liberal Currents and there was a I think a very happy marriage of thought and opinion, and so lip O Currens became you know, I'm a contributing enditor.
Now, yeah, that's so great. But let's talk about what this idea is. So you start with a passage from Hannah Rand's origins of totalitarianism. Never has our future been more unpredictable. Never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules. And I think this is the most important point here, of common sense and self interest forces that look like sheer insanity if judged by the standard of other centuries. So
much of Trump administration at this moment. You know, from RFK Junior to Elon Musk, there's so many things that they are doing in this administration that strike me as just completely I mean, obviously there's often profit motives behind it, but I wonder if you could just talk us through some of these things that you see.
Yeah, So, I think I'm really trying to do at this piece is to capture something that I think is happening that's observable at a few different levels. Right, So when I think about you know, I'm not being sort of literal, right and kind of madness. I understand mental illness and that language can sometimes be touchy for people. But what I am trying to capture is there are a lot of ways in which we are not behaving
in ways that really makes sense. Right. You know, you mentioned profit motives, So there's clearly some self interest in the Trump administration, but there's a lot of things where the kind of even just rational principles of self preservation self interest don't feel like they're functioning. I mean, you know, what we're doing to our health system right now is crazy, and even since I wrote the piece, it's gotten crazier. Right. He said he wants to basically withdraw vaccines for most
age groups. Right, there's all kinds of further downsizing of the FDA. They want to take fluoride, not just not you know, earlier they were talking about discouraging fluoride. Now
there's talks about banning it in multiple states. It's really, I mean, this is just in the wealthiest country in the world, crazy, right, And he talks about fixing chronic disease, even and even if you wanted to take him at face value in that that's not being done right because they're defunding all of these research initiatives that have run for a year, some of them decades on the sorts
of disease as he says are important. So I think the Health Science Fund is a good place to look at that because you have individual kind of madness, you have influencers or are sort of peddling this stuff, and you can see how it got into the groundwater over time in the US. But you also have the institutional problem of like, our institutions are not behaving the way they should behave they are fully at this point captured by this, I think completely. I kind of feel dystopian
to me world view of yes, it's grift. But I always think that grift is a bad way to think about it sometimes because that implies it's just as simple as oh, they're just telling you a lie so they can get money. And I think that it's just far more irrational and sort of dysfunctional and chaotic than that.
Oh yeah, I wonder what you think about MAHA Make America Healthy Again. I wonder how much of MAHA is an It seems to me there's a straight line between the pandemic, MAHA sort of the corruption of multi level marketing and MAGA.
Do you think that's right? And how?
Yeah?
I mean, I do think that that's correct. I think what you saw on the pandemic was something that was already starting, which was a lot of these sort of health influencers who have just deeply on scientific beliefs about a lot of different things. That was really the I think the convergence point with them in MAGA, because there was a huge amount of objection to just the various health precautions that were being sure. I think in the
pandemic you saw I think a convergence. It had been building for a bit, but you saw this convergence between a lot of health influencers and people who were more I think you're sort of typical RFK type person, voter or just kind of interested in his stuff. That kind of person really get into the sort of maga world. And that's kind of what Maha is right. It is
this convergence of those two things. And some of that was about vaccine hesititency, but I think a lot of it was just more broadly about you know, the sort of existential dread of the pandemic and a lot of very unscientific and emotional reactions right to the pandemic. And so I think what is troubling to me about like Maha, is some of it is absolutely grift, but some of it is belief, right, and I think we have to reckon with that.
Right.
If I thought it was all just opportunism and grift, I don't think I would have written an essay called, you know, We've all Gone mad, because then it would just be sort of we're all cynical and we're all opportunists. But really, you know, for people to just kind of at once in large numbers reject these advancements we saw, I think the pandemic was just rocket fuel for this stuff.
It pushed something that had been there for a long time, existing in a kind of particular corner of Instagram and YouTube, and it just propelled it into a collision with the maga stuff that had been coming really since since Trump came down the escalator, and that combination I think has been really quite powerful and dangerous.
Oh for sure.
And I do think like part of it is there is real anxiety in modern life about what all of the things around us do and what they cause and what the possible. You know, we have younger people getting cancer things like that, that is real.
I mean, I don't know my own person.
Pecadillo is why is RFK Junior, you know, not focusing on the stuff that he you know, there's some of this stuff is not as crazy, right, this stuff about organic food or whatever, But that's not what he's focused on, right, He's focused on the stuff that's really vaccines, the stuff that the stuff that we were really scared he was going to do he is in fact doing.
Yeah, there is a kind of I think fundamental disorder. And this is kind of what I do mean is like to his thinking and to a lot of this thinking where he'll talk about and I think what it means is that we misunderstand him when we just let him say, oh, chronic disease is a real problem. We take that at face value when we say, that's not
so crazy. But that's not actually the sort of most front facing part of his belief system, Right, that's actually kind of a that's really a vestige of all this other stuff, right, and so, and I think that's made obvious in the fact that, like, when he actually says we're going to fix chronic disease, they're not doing that. And the things he seems to think count as chronic disease is also a bit strange. Right, So you already
are in a weird place. Once you probe that language even a little bit, I think what I am kind of You're right, there's there's this anxiety. There's this huge amount of anxiety. And I find that really interesting in the way anxiety has the capacity to disrupt and disorder our thinking and get us to cling to sometimes very sometimes emotionally comforting or persuasive ideas that are also quite
erratic and actually not very good for us. Right. I Mean, there's a sense in which a lot of this stuff I think got popular because people turn to things that made them feel better.
They needed answer, so yeah.
Yeah, and provide answers they kind of I mean, there's a religious aspect to this right where it kind of is it's basically sort of like it's providing a kind of you know, compass or map for how the world works and where you stand in it, and a certain set of truths that can make you feel I guess comforted. But it's all I mean, it's very it's I think disaggregated from reality.
And I do think.
That that that mixture of anxiety and disorder or what's so troubling because it doesn't feel like people are following tradition, the idea that the American electorate would say somebody who
wants to put this guy in power is trustworthy. I mean, I just you know, we talk all the time like Richard Nixon was a crook and a criminal and an opportunist, but Richard Nixon also helped, you know, enshrining the EPA and the Clean Air Act, because Richard Dixon wasn't actually a crazy person, right, And that's the distinction I think I'm kind of getting at is like Grift just to me does not feel like an explanation for what's happening here.
Oh yeah, a disintegration of ordered thinking feels like a better explanation. And it's happening at a cultural level, and it's also happening at an institutional level. Institutions that are supposed to mediate our thinking and our actions in rational ways are not doing that. If we think of them as communicative communicative sites, they're not functioning the way rational communication works anymore.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think I think that's a I think that irrationality is, you know, And I mean there's so many different hallmarks of it, from things like the tariffs, to things like the anti vax stuff, to the scientific stuff.
Can we talk about something that I am a little bit obsessed with, which is this idea that Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, has made almost all of his money on technology, right, stuff that has been created from science done in labs like at Harvard, Right, the kind of stuff that's made possible by.
Things like Ana.
So why do you think, I mean that irrationality is so striking to me? What do you think the operating principle there is or do you think this is all just kind of like post printing press madness that America is engaging in.
I'm glad you said the printing press, because I do think that, like a the the printing press challenge of our era, right, which is social media, it is invalant. Like, yeah, I mean, I think with Elon, it's this is a guy who you know, I can't speak to like how smart or insightful Elon might have been a decade ago, but I think it's pretty obvious that for the last few years he's spent his time. You know, he admits to taking inordinate amounts of ketamine.
Right, and the New York Times just had a big piece on that.
Yeah, go on, he spends like twenty hours a day just absolutely soaking in social media, and I mean, I think that is a place that just you know, it obliterates your sense of up and down. So you know, I mean, if he's just taking drugs and he's the richest man in the world, which itself can be kind of a narcotic, and he's spending more hours a day than many people are awake on his own social media platform, right, to me, that's just you're just swimming in a kind
of sea of irrational and sort of disordered behavior. I mean, social media doesn't bring out our best in most of us. And then you also have places like what he's turned to accent to, which is just a full on cess pool.
Let's go another minute on the printing press here, because I do really want to talk about that. I once was on a panel interviewing a very famous tech bro, you know, and he said everything.
Very you know, a lot.
Of that kind of stuff, the tech bro stuff. And then I said to you, do you think we're better off? And he said, well, we will eventually be better off, but it's like the printing press, we may have one hundred years of fuckeray.
Do you think that it's a one to one there?
No, because I think this is true of a lot of people who are in kind of the liberally you know. I came of age under the Obama years camp I was at one point fairly optimistic about this stuff, right. I was like, oh, Twitter in the Arab spring, and like look at Facebook and like this is pretty great. I say that as someone who did not start as a as a kind of lttite.
Or anything like that.
But no, because I think what we've seen is that one we know for a fact that the effect of screens is different. And I don't mean that in a kind of screen addiction way, which is its own thing. I mean we know psychologically that our capacity to recognize the humanity of a person we're interacting with on a phone screen is reduced, Like our brain just doesn't process it the way we process in person interaction. And when you read a text that someone wrote, that person is
not there for you to scream at. Actually, right, you go and find other paper and write about them. Social media is combining these things, so it's taking like the text you know, if you're on Twitter, the text based aspects right of the printing past, and it's fusing them with a bunch of other stuff that we're not evolutionary equipped for at all, like just interacting with millions of anonymous people. And I think we've seen very clearly that the stuff we're willing to say and do there is
just absolutely unhinged. And there's no you know, because of the whole debate over you know, we're not a publishing platform, et cetera. There's no editorial process right too. I stud wanted to try to write a book about how Molly is a terrible person.
Right now, you can write it.
I could self publish sure today, but like you know, at one point there'd be like a process somebody would have to be like agreed to run that and print that and like actually do it. And now I could just go onto these websites and say really anything I want. And so I just think the printing press analogy is it's seductive because what it says is don't worry. Look how great things are. Thinks to those advancements. That's how
they'll be because of this. But I think it really obscures all the way is that they're just not the same at all.
Oh so interesting, thank you saying you, saying you, saying thank you, thank you, thank you.
Now, Dan Nathan, Yes, Molly jonathast.
You are a special moment of fuckery guest.
So I'm going to set you up for a doozy Okay, are you ready?
I'm ready.
So it involves America's most I want to say something generous, but I'm not going to worst congress Woman Marjorie Taylor Green.
So in the big.
Beautiful whatever the fuck that thing is, there is an insane little bit of whatever that says.
And I'm going to read it to you.
It basically says that states cannot regulate AI. So it is the opposite of everything that Republicans have been saying for so long. And but you know, AI companies want it full transparency. I didn't know about this section on page two seventy eight to seventy nine of the obb B that strip states for the rights to make laws or regulate AI for a decade. I'm adamantly opposed all caps to this, and it is a violation of state laws.
And I would have voted no had I known what was in there or AKA read the bill, thought Stan Nathan.
Yeah, well, let's read the bills here, people, and maybe you make these big, beautiful bills something that are digestible of all people opining on. This is probably not one that I'm going to take to the bank and listen to what she has to say here. But at the
end of the day, I think you nailed it. It's like, okay, if Republican politics, okay, for the last call it, one hundred and fifty years have centered around whatever the party was, you know, prior to that have centered around you know what I mean, the states being able to kind of make their own laws. And put the power back in the people's hands as it relates to whatever the demographics or geographic issues specific to them. It just doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. You want
to turn this thing upside down, you know. And some of the folks that are these aisars or cryptosars that have come into the administration, you know, you would think that these people have a code, right, like they've kind of built things over amazing things and so it gote valid, you know, over the last thirty forty years, that sort of thing that have actually advanced the quality of life for so many you know, millions of not billions of people here, and that's some sort of conformity about this.
They recognize what the stakes are with AI. That would make a whole heck of a lot of sense. So in some ways, you know, taking the power from the States and taking the power from folks like Marjorie Taylor Green who don't understand any of it makes some sense
to me. But these people better get their act together because this technology is advancing at a pace that we've never seen right now, and it's really at the center of a lot of the sort of battles that are going to be fought over the next hundred years for like global supremacy. I know that sounds really dramatic. Backtion one hundred years and let's see how important this is right now that we get it right, because you know what, you know, who doesn't kind of mess around with this?
I know is the moment fuckery, so I could say, is the Chinese. They're taking a fifty year view about this and we are taking an every two year view as it relates to our midterms.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dan Nathan.
All Right, Mollie, thanks for having me.
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