Dan Nathan, David Enrich & Lawrence Lessig

to say it out loud. One of the very few good things to come from Elon Musk's stint in the ruling us like a god king has been that he doesn't have the energy to lie, so he just I mean, he still lies, but he is slightly addicted to telling us what he's what he's actually going to do, and in this case, he's actually going to try They're going to try to cut medicaid and we saw this coming.

I mean, they're cutting the Oceanic, the national They're doing everything they said they were going to do in Project twenty twenty five. And you're going to be shocked to hear that even though Trump said he wasn't going to do it, He's actually going to do it. It's shocking. And Musk has got a lot of lies going. You know, why are there twenty million people who are definitely dead marked as alive in the Social Security database? This has

been debunked a bunch of times. The way the code is written, it makes people seem older than they are because of the way of the old fashioned code which adds, you know whatever.

practice prony capitalism, which Donald Trump also hoped. But Elon has just been so incredibly strident and loud about his views he has alienated potential buyers. And remember, Tesla's are electric cars, so the people who tend to buy electric cars are people who believe in climate change, and the people who believe in climate change tend to not want to support someone who espouses far right wing views and does things like these straight arms salute you will remember.

This has gotten Trump very upset. He truthed on truth social we're using truth with scare quotes that radical left lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's great automakers and Elon's baby, in order to By the way, not buying things is not illegal, at least not yet.

when you work for the government, you're supposed to be transparent. Now, when you're running transparency and efficiency, Andre Elin Musk, you do everything in secret because of transparency Ergo Maga. US District Judge Christopher Cooper and Washington sided with the government watchshop groups Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and finding that the Department of Government Efficiency was likely an

agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act. For this ruling, the first of a kind, marks an early victory for advocates seeking to have some accountability for the fucking government. Look, this is how government works in this country. We are not a Banana republic. We should have accountability.

He is now he has been sent to a jail in Louisiana because the Trump administration thinks that this Louisiana jail will be more favorable to whatever they want to do to this person. This is the opening of the door of something real bad. Okay, you don't have to like these protests, you don't have to like Palestinian activists,

you don't even have to like anything. But you have to know that when the government starts deporting people who are in this country legally because they don't like what they're saying, this is the beginning of a real bad stuff. And you know, I had this grandfather, Howard Fast. I've talked about him at nauseum. Right, he was jailed by the House of an American Activities for his refusal to name names in the Communist Party, which he was a member.

don't like their views. This is going to be very, very, very problematic four years and hopefully I mean and this is just AOC is completely right, tyrannical and on American. This is if you look in the dictionary, this is the definition of un American. You cannot depour people because you don't.

juiced the economy, it juiced the stock market. And then in twenty and eighteen, then they went after trade and tariffs and the like here and so they had a bit of a buffer. So now they come in and rather than focusing on the sorts of things that you would think would help bring down prices to bring down inflation, which is the promises made, supposedly promises kept, they actually

did it the other way around. And so now you know, you have a market that is reacting to the potential of a recession that was not really priced in if you think about it three to six months ago. And so that's one of the reasons why we've just basically

had this downward volatility in the markets. And you know, when you have markets heading lower, that actually weighs on consumer confidence, right, and so consumer confidence if it starts to get worse, then consumers start pulling back from making purchases. And though that's one of the things that I think is happening right now.

our best technology. Okay. Taking another step here in twenty and twenty twenty five, rather than starting with China, they went after our biggest trading partners, which is the EU, it's Mexico and it's Canada, and so not only are their biggest trading partners, there are also three of our best allies if you're thinking of the EU as a block here. So there's another issue of just going asked

backwards about this rather than focusing on China. And really, you know, again, from a technology standpoint, this has been going on for you know, decades. Actually, this kind of forced technology transfer that the Chinese were doing on US companies who wanted access to it, But to kind of pick fights with our biggest trading partners who are also our allies, doesn't make a lot of sense. The other thing I'll just say is they're becoming more emboldened. And

it's not just from an economic standpoint. If you think about just kind of some of the threats about annexing Canada and you know, the stuff about Mexico, and then the EU just kind of not kind of leaning into the responsibilities that we have relating to NATO and kind of pulling back from Ukraine and the like. So if the our allies are starting to see US as a less reliable partner on multiple facets, then they have to get emboldened and they have to figure out how to

do some of this alone. And when you think about the Canadian elections, you know, the new prime minister is a former central banker, you know. So if there's anyone you know, really set up to kind of deal with this sort of trade war with a partner like the UA, yes, I think it's there. So again, I think you're going to continue to see if you know, our allies in Bolden, I think they also have a playbook from the first time.

They also know that if the markets keep going lower, then Trump's going to have to pivot a bit on this, and then it just gives less teeth to the threats of tariffs.

adversary at this moment. Right, they have not respected a lot of the patent stuff they have our country completely hooked.

because he operates like a mob boss. Right, And if you think about how you know, all of these companies or these industries are going to come to him and they're going to grovel for some sort of carve out of their products. And he really likes that, right, So he loves to be able to say, Okay, Tim Cook came to me and they want exclusion of iPhones you know, coming into the US, that sort of thing, and.

But they are thinking about their own prospects. They're thinking about their own products and their own services and how you know, essentially what's the sort of leeway they're going to have. But to be very frank, most of those companies don't do business in China. If you think about it, our digital companies, right, they're not going to be doing business in China, and the one that actually has most

at stake is actually Elon Musk with Tesla. Right, So, China remains like a huge issue for us because obviously our digital companies are not there for the most part. Are hardware companies are there, and a lot of the manufacturing goes on there, which actually creates lots of conflict of interest. And I know you've spent a lot of time talking about that as relates to Elon Musk.

they go to the EU. Well, the EU has had big tariffs on Chinese ev So if you are a US auto manufacturer and you are making the cars in China but selling them to the U, you're going to be subject to those tariffs. So they've been in a price war. The stock had been going down since the highs in two thouy and twenty one to the lows. Just last year it was down nearly forty some percent. Now, after the election, because of Musk helping the president get

electioned his proximity to the president, the stock doubled. It literally went from three quarters of a trillion dollars in market capitalization to one and a half trillion. But since late December the stock has given all of that back. As you and I are talking right now, the stock is trading at two hundred and twenty six dollars. It was trading as high as four hundred and ninety dollars a month and a half ago. So what's going on there? Well,

the fundamentals of this company are total crap. So the competition that they have in China is really bad. The price war that they have here in the US, they just keep going lower and lower. You obviously have the pushback of a lot of consumers here in the US, but also nationalistic tendencies in China, nationalistic tendencies in the EU, in France and Germany. The our sales last month were down fifty percent. Just think of that, right, And here's

the other point here in the US. I think this is almost a hilarious headline that Donald Trump said when he's out of office, he's going to buy a Tesla to support Elon Musk. Let me tell you another thing about MAGA voters. They don't believe in climate change. They're less inclined to buy electric vehicles. And I think all of this is kind of weighing on the brand of Elon Musk, the brand of Tesla, and basically the fundamentals the company are really shit.

really did start there. And you know, we think about this sort of stuff all the time. I mean, like, how do we be inclusive in an economy like this? How do we take a guy who's obviously a very excellent entrepreneur and make him feel welcome and bring him into the fold because he's always been treated like an outsider and now he's kind of flexing a little bit. Now your question about Tesla. Here's a guy who is not particularly liquid. He has a big steak in SpaceX

that is a private company. He has a big steak in x Twitter and XAI. It's not particularly liquid, right, So the more that Tesla goes lower the potential that he has to actually have to sell stock. Because he lends the stock out to banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as collateral for capital that they give him. Right so, at some point if the stock continues to go lower, he will have margin calls and the banks

will have to sell his stock. So again, who knows if we're close to that, But at the end of the day, he's going to have a fallout sooner or later. With Trump. Trump wants to kill EV tax credits. The most profitable business that Elon Musk has at Tesla is selling tax credits to his competitors, right, and that's pure margin, right, So if you get rid of the EV tax credits, that's a huge problem for him. And there's a whole host of other things that like basically the government wants

to do. They want to kill these charging stations. That would be very bad. If you're a new buyer, one of the issues that you have is charging anxiety. You have to figure out how to kind of go and just adopt this new behavior with an EV after you know, decades, if you're someone like me of using a car that you fill up with gas. So there's a whole host of issues that are really massive headwinds to his business.

of the stock? If you think about all the bros that bought the stock, you know, starting the day after the election, you know, somewhere around two hundred and fifty dollars, and they were buying it all the way up to basically four hundred and ninety dollars. With the stock down here at two twenty seven, every single person who has bought this stock since the election has lost money. And the same goes for all the grift that went on with the Trump coins and all that sort of stuff.

just that simple. If you can't demonstrate the utility or the value for an asset, it could be a stock, it could be a crypto currency or something like that, ultimately it will fail. And all you have to do is look at the DJT. They're losing tens of millions of dollars on a few million dollars in revenue, and there's no reason for that thing to go up. It is not a going concern as a business.

of these things rallied a great deal. So Bitcoin in particular, the whole idea that the un and this is what was floated was going to set up a strategic reserve to buy bitcoin and hold it, and a lot of folks thought that would be very good for the price. Ultimately, because there is a finite amount of bitcoin, Well, basically they're not going to do that, all right, and then regulation is going to continue to be a bit opaque. So investors are folks that bought it because of all

that have been selling out. So essentially you've seen a round trip of a lot of these trades that were meant to be pro growth because of this administration, or it was going to be pro regulation where there was going to be better to find regulation and these risk assets should go higher. So a lot of those things have come unwound over the last month or two.

You need to spend on R and D. So if you are a company that is going to face headwinds from a trade war, right, increase input prices, whether you're a manufacturer, a whole host of different things, then you all of a sudden now have to take a step back, right, You have to kind of weigh what's going to happen to the economy. Just this week, we have seen Delta

and American Airlines cut their earnings forecasts dramatically. We've seen this by a bunch of retailers over the last couple weeks, Walmart, costc. These are companies that are supposed to do well in high inflationary periods because you have consumers trading down to the lowest priced Retailers are not doing nearly as well as they were a year ago. So we're starting to

see some pressure waning on consumers. So again, if if you were a company and you are not spending right to grow your business, then ultimately that is going to

put downward pressure on the economy. The stock market is meant to sniff that out ahead of time, right, It's meant to take all the available data that we have, whether it be economic data, whether it be messaging from companies' earnings and the like here, and it's basically meant to process that, right and so right now, I guess the takeaway is that the uncertainty caused by a trade war

is likely to weigh on the US economy. And the last thing I'll just say about this is that you know, the Trump administration, by doing things asked backwards relative to the way they did it in seventeen and eighteen, they're really playing chicken with the US economy and then ultimately the global economy. And oftentimes when you see this sort of behavior when it relates to a massive economy like this,

that is literally the tail wagging the dog. In one way, shape or form, is that you can't change things on a dime. If companies start to slow down spending, if countries stop trading with each other because of these sorts of impediments, to turn that back on is really hard, So you could face the potential of a recession. And

what happens during recession, people get fired. People stop buying things, right, They stop investing in the stock market, they're not buying new homes, they're not actually upgrading, you know, like making additions to their home and that sort of thing, and all of this activity slows down. And then you have a situation where what does the government do to restimulate demand. They have the lower interest rates, they have to do more fiscal spending. And that's the very stuff over the

last few years that caused inflation. So one of the issues right now is that you have slower growth, but you have inflation that sticks around, and that's something they call stagflation. You and I have talked about that before. And in that environment, prices of risk assets and homes will not do particularly well. Hiring will not do particularly well either.

in house lawyers. We're really experienced dealing with these things and it's okay, we deal with it. It got me thinking that what this would be like to be on the receiving end of letters like this and trits like this if I worked at a smaller news outlet, or if I was an independent publisher.

kind of privileged group. So I sort of fanning out to just journalists all over the country at anything from like community newspapers or local newspapers, to independent bloggers or people with a substack, or podcast hosts and things like that, and I just started hearing these horror stories about how and it ranged from people who were writing pieces about Russian oligarchs and trying to expose their secrets to much kind of more prosaic things like writing a piece about

a local real estate developer who is doing something kind of sketchy, or even like a local politician or a local business owner. And the threats sometimes we're just letters,

other times they were actually litigation. In some cases people were encountered physical threats, and the situation really it became really clear to me that this was casting a pall over the entire journalism industry in the US in ways that was leading many many journalists to either censor themselves and avoid kind of sensitive controversial topics or writing about religious people, or they were not censoring themselves and were

with some frequency encountering ruinous litigation and really serious threats that were taking a severe business toll or psychological toll. And I also realized that some of the same people who were making these threats and filing these lawsuits, the lawyers behind this, were some of the same lawyers who on a national level were becoming increasingly outspoken advocating to overturn decades of Supreme Court president that basically protected journalists

and others from this type of weaponized lawsuit. And that's Soliman, Yeah, that's New York Times versus Sullivan. One of the things that I found really interesting in reporting this book, by the way, is that like New York Times versus Sullivan in I guess maybe constitutional law, NERD Circles is like really famous, but virtually no one else knows about it. It's not like one of those decisions like Roe v.

Wade or something browny Board that is famous. So the short version of this is that in nineteen sixty supporters of Martin Luther King ran a full page ad in the New York Times. The ad list it kind of rattled off a whole list of nasty things that Southern officials were doing to preserve white supremacy, and there were a couple of facts frown. The gist was completely right, but some of the facts were they're wrong or exaggerated.

And the guy who was in charge of the Montgomery, Alabama Police Department sued The New York Times for defamation, even though he wasn't even named in the ad, the ad did say some things about the Montgomery police force. He won his lawsuit. It was tried in a courtroom by another white supremacist, a judge who happened to be

a pedophile. The Times appealed. They lost their appeal to state Supreme Court, and so their final effort was to appear to the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court in nineteen sixty four heard the case, and their decision became really important because what they ruled was that the way Alabama's court system had interpreted the First Amendment as allowing libel lawsits like this to go forward was it basically meant that news outlets were not going to be

able to cover the civil rights movement, which by the way,

was by design. That was the entire purpose of this lawsuit, the Supreme Court established a standard that's become known as the actual Male standard, but said that if you're a journalist or a member of the public writing about a public official or a public figure and you get a fact wrong, as long as you aren't lying, like deliberately gaining the fact wrong, or as long as you are not acting with reckless disregard for the accuracy of the statement,

you cannot be successfully sued for damages. And so the idea was basically that journalists and others need breathing room to be able to kind of have Vetero's discourse about people that wield a lot of power in society. And if there's ruinous litigation hanging over your head every time you do that, you're going to self sense. And so the standard that is created basically ushered in a golden era of journalism.

person is a pedophile, that's fine. If you have reason to believe the person is a pedophile, that's fine, but it's really I mean, the way that this has become i think essential to modern day journalism and modern day just public advocacy in public speaking is that if you have reason to believe something, and you've done a little bit of due diligence and you believe that what you're writing is okay, and this is a public figure or a public official that you're writing about, you cannot be

sued for defamation. And this is a standard that it protects people across the political spectrum and has four decades and until really quite recently, there's a very broad bipartisan consensus that these were important safeguards the protected free speech and the freedom of the press.

Court's interpretation of the First Amendment. But he kept going on and on and on about this, and it really took hold, and I think it inspired a lot of right wing activists and lawyers and judges to take it kind of a closer look at the ways that Sullivan and some subsequent cases were allowing the modern day media to vigorously report about him. And his rhetoric also kind of inspired legions of copycats all over the country who were filing lawsuits or threatening to file lawsuits against media

outlets and journalists large and small. And that, by the way, is the trend that I was picking up on several years later when I started working on this book. And Trump's rhetoric and his allies rhetoric coincided with a couple of very successful lawsuits against major media outlets, most notably the one against Gawker. It was financed by Peter Teel

that literally destroyed Gawker. And so that the accommindation of a lawsuit that took down a media outlet, plus Trump on the campaign trail kind of successfully bashing the media and arguing that the media was so reckless and so irresponsible that we need to be able to sue them

more easily. That it really created a movement in essence, and all of a sudden you had some very prominent lawyers, activists, and judges leaping on this Trump bandwagon with the very clear stated goal that they want to make it easier to sue the media because they view the media as biased against Republicans and conservatives, and therefore the solution to that is to subject them to waves of litigation that will either make them no longer exist or it'll make

them think twice before deeply investigating or criticizing powerful people.

to open up the libel laws. But then a bunch of people who are very smart and savvy and importantly have a lot of money behind them kind of I guess like professionalize that idea essentially and turn it into something that, while you might disagree with it strongly, is not insane and has a plausible kind of path to

being realized. So in this case, that took a few different forms, and this coincided with the rise of this cottage industry of small law firms, small but well financed law firms that whose entire business revolved around suing media companies and threatening media companies and journalists. And a couple of those lawyers, as they were successful in a small number of these cases, developed a national profile. I mean that the most obvious one to me is a lawyer

named Libby Locke. What a great name, and she became a favorite of Tucker Carlson and Fox News. And so basically every time the media was accused of doing something wrong that's a slight excentation. Often when the media did something wrong, she was called on to Tucker Carlson, and she would use that platform to advocate for not just the media behaving better or being held accountable, but for

basically loosing, well not loose. Every time she was on TV, she would say things like we need to overturn new conference Slivan and that sort of kept to God. And the more she said that, and the more other people like her said that, activists at groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute and the Federalist Society started organizing conferences around this idea, and so they kind of got the bringing juices of the conservative legal movement flowing.

And by twenty nineteen, Clarence Thomas had jumped on this bandwagon in an opinion where he called for overturning Sullivan, and that in some way was kind of the most important moment.

powerful court in the country. And this is a guy who had known Thomas, had been friends with Thomas back dating back to before he was a judge, back when he was at the EEOC in Washington. And his name is Larry Silverman, and he issued a year after Thomas initially made this argument, he issued a scathing opinion that said Sullivan should be overturned. And the entirety of his argument was that it should be overturned because the media is supposedly liberal and therefore should be punished. It was

really an extraordinary argument. It was. Look, obviously, that is a large part of what the First Amendment is meant to protect, not having judges or other government officials discriminating against people's ability to speak based on their viewpoints. But really that was the moment that it has really started getting tremendous momentum, and it has not stopped since then.

And on the fifth and final day, Thomas was asked about the Sullivan decision and actually gave what was probably the most direct answer he'd given during the entirety of its hearings, and he was very supportive of Sulivan and he said that even though it's uncomfortable for public officials like him to be in the media spotlight. It's really important that we have those rates, and it's important for

democracy and it's important for accountability. And that was the day before the Anita Hill allegations surface, where Thomas was obviously and rightfully dragged through this uncomfortable spotlight, and his views on the media at that point really started to

shift radically. I narrated this in the book, but he basically had complete mental health breakdown at that time and was really incapacitated for a while because he was so upset about this, and I think he came to view the media as the cause of his suffering, not his

own actions. That began this period where over the next twenty or thirty years where Thomas clearly stopped thinking about First amend of Protections for Journalists being important to democracy and started feeling that First Ament of Protections for journalists were basically enabling the media fair to him, right, yeah, unfair to him and to like pursue of INNDBTA against him.

You can kind of understand that, right for someone like him, And certainly by the time twenty nineteen rolls around and Trump is in the office, his hatred towards the media was really it was kind of overflowing, and he has had some allies not just activists and politicians, but judges as well who were It was like this has been kind of festering for a long time and finally.

on the super Court to outright overturned Sullivan. I think what's probably more likely to happen, and I Shad caveat this by saying, I have a terrible track record making right.

further than that. So at the risk of like making a fool of myself, I mean, I think what is more likely than Sullivan being overturned out rays there are a bunch of kind of subsequent cases that basically prevented lower rungs of public figures from suing the media, So like you're like run of the mill billionaire, for example, And I think it's more likely that the Supreme Court would kind of ship away or maybe reverse some of those subsequent precedents, which, by the way, would have a

huge impact, and it would mean that it was all of a sudden, like a real risk to write critical things or investigate like the richest person in your town or your city, or someone like Elon Musk potentially before he was in the government.

the media and threaten the media. And by the way, if not just the mainstream media, or this is something that's already happening even with Sullivan still in place. It's having across the country and creating hazardous conditions for anyone, whether it is someone with a subsec newsletter or someone who wants to leave a nasty restaurant review online or

start a petition about something in their community. All of that type of activity is protected by SELIV and these subsequent decisions and all of those things are already those types of actions can face and do face litigation and legal threats that are deliberately designed to get people to shut up. And I think, obviously, if these Supreme Court presidents that we can, we're going to see a whole lot more of that.

We got here, but we've got to find a way out.

average American recognizing just how screwed you are. You know, we've been now celebrating fifty years where the average income for ordinary workers has not gone up at all, literally not at all, and so you can imagine in that world the frustration that leads people to say, just break it down and let's start all over again. And he appear to that. Now, you know, the reality is it's just a con game and its actual strategy is to empower entrench the wealthiest, and that's in fact what he's

executing on right now. And so the only question is whether that eventually breaks through people realize the populism that they are celebrating that I celebrate. I totally idea. I totally identify with the populist message here, but it's got to be a populist message. It's actually helping ordinary people as opposed to just more help for the billionaires.

Reagan said, are you better off today? I mean nineteen eighties that are you better off than you were four years ago? I think we should start saying is your government working better today than it was four years ago? Because what's absolutely clear is that this Doge strategy of taking a chainsaw to everything is going to break government. Government is not going to be able to function. So the clearest thing that's going to come out of all of this is like, no real savings and just make

the government so it doesn't work anymore. And like nobody can celebrate that. Nobody should celebrate that except the crazy libertarian Peter Thiel types who just want to get rid of government and just live in their little I rand island somewhere and do whatever else they do.

And the ethos of it is the sort of dream of all Republican donors, right strip the government to the studs and all the FDR stuff and all the Carter stuff go in there and just you know, have taxes and that's pretty much it, you know what I mean, like ultimately, and so as we watch that happen, there are definitely a percentage of Trump's people who are just delighted to see the organization fail.

out the support of the state. But the rest of us, you know, we depend upon like services, security, infrastructure, all the things that makes it possible to function. So the point is like to the extent those people's lives become worse because of this chaos, they'll begin to wake up to it. And I think that's the question. That's the opportunity. Well, I mean, that's the chat, that's the that's the opportunity that we've got to find a way to act on.

We've got to find a way to channel people's attention to not this perpetual anti Trump rheteric, right, but the but the rhetoric around populism, like let's celebrate the idea of a government that actually is efficient and working for people and delivering you know, and that terrible ad that they did where they're trashing the trans support that Harris did and that ends with she's for they them, he's for you. Well, okay, who is who's the you in

that statement? Like it turns out it's just the super wealthy and it's again any he plays this game and again and again it gets away with it. We finally got away got to get away to like focus people enough so that they can see it, because they're gonna feel I mean, unlike the first Trump administration, Like you know, he came in and he promised the same tax cut, saying like middle class task cut. And of course by the time the dealing was done, all the middle class

stuff was taken out. It was only a tax cut for the super wealthy and corporations. The same thing's gonna happen this time, but that wasn't as noticeable to ordinary people as this breaking government will be. Like when the government's just broken, people are gonna be like, what shiites this ridiculous. I don't get my chat, my my social Security check or Medicare is being cut or whatever.