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 a United States judge, a Reagan appointee, has blocked Trump's birthright citizenship overstep, or as we call it, his war on the fourteenth Amendment. We have such a great show for you today, Garbage Days. Ryan Broderick stops by to talk about how everything is downstream of internet
and Internet is everything. Then we'll talk to about an affairs Nick Bilton about Trump's pardon of Silk Road founder ross Olbrooke and also the tech wars. But first the news.
Somali another day of just awful news. Trump has issued many, many stupid directives about DEI what are you seeing here?
So you know it's funny. It's not funny. This is all horrible. None of us is funny. But I was saying to someone earlier today, I don't want to be one of those people quote to myself because that's very annoying. But just one thing on this, which is Trump's first term, Democrats were able to prevent him and some Republicans were able to prevent him from doing some of his worst instincts.
It was sort of the fuck around administration. This is the find out, right, this Trump's second term is find out, So we're finding out in real time. So one of the things Trump has done has targeted is targeting DEI diversity, equity inclusion. He feels it's unfair. He's very into fairness. The irony here of a affluent person who inherited wealth,
white guy. I mean, it's just whatever. Anyway, the point is, and I don't want to throw stones here, but I do want to say something that was quoted to me this morning from Michelle Obama, which is she said that affirmative action is inherited wealth, which is a really good point too. So anyways, so he's repealed this executive order, he's placed an executive order, and while doing this, he has rescinded an order from nineteen sixty five that was
put into practice by woke leftist Lyndon Johnson. It was an executive order and it was basically, you can't I'm going to read it to you because I feel like it's a really important just how vague it is. It was hardly like an affirmative action. It was so at sixty years old and basically Lyndon Johnson's executive order said. He said the order prohibited federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation,
gender identity, or national origin. That was what it said. So you couldn't discriminate. It was not that you have to only do things with a certain group. It was that you could not discriminate against people for what they look like or who I loved. Well, Donald Trump has put a stop to that unbelievably cruel language of telling people they can't discriminate. And now the federal government is allowed to go back to the time pre nineteen sixty
five when they were allowed to discriminate. It's very stupid, but it's also very cruel. And you'll remember, obviously the cruelty is the point.
You know, we were using this term for a while, Performative moronics.
Yeah, a favorite.
I have to say, I think that's the era we're in because here we have the Trump administration circulating photos of US troops loading shackled to TEMs onto military cargo planes.
I mean, this is the whole thing, right, They want people to be scared, they want shock and awe. Remember, this is the thing we've seen. Trump's sort of brain trust will use that loosely wanted to do. So. The White House has said they've arrested again like this is, They've arrested five hundred and thirty eight undocumented immigrants, supported hundreds more. Those numbers are actually less than they did
in twenty seventeen. But you know, again, none of this is meant to be real, right, This is show, This is kabuki theater. This is trying to scare people into believing that Trump is doing this fantasy of punishing immigrants and somehow making the world more fair for his people. And that's where we are. So here's here, this is what's happening, and we're watching it in real time.
So speaking of morons, we have ripped Andy Ugles here, who has a bill that would allow Trump to have a third term.
I'm shocked that this hasn't come up before because it's such a layup for these sycophants and the House Republican Caucus. They want the Republicans in Congress. Their whole shtick is filthy to Trump. So this makes a lot out of sense. I'm just going to read you a little bit of it. The language specifically prevents a president running for a third term if he were elected for two consecutive terms. We actually saw this coming and said that this might be
a problem. In other words, he thinks that because he did not serve two consecutive terms, he should be able to run for a third term. I just want to point out here in Earth one, where none of us live, because we cover Donald Trump, but if we did, we would live in Earth one. On Earth one, Donald Trump is like seventy nine years old, so in four years he will be eighty three, and if he were to run again, he would then be eighty seven. I don't know.
I mean, we just had a whole news cycle, a whole election cycle where we talked about how Biden was too old to run and Trump would be actually older. So make it make sense or just don't. That's fine too.
I understand. I don't know how you make that make sense.
And Broaderick as the editor of the newsletter Garbage Day, welcome back to Fast Politics, Ryan.
Thanks for having me back. Excited to talk about all the wonderful updates in American politics.
Things going just great. So let's talk about what's going on. Where do we start? You start because you've written about a lot of interesting stuff this week.
I would just say that the most important sort of thing that has happened in the first week of the second Trump presidency is the flurry of executive orders that to me feels like the biggest difference between Trump one point zero and Trump two point zero, which is that he entered the office very prepared.
Yeah, and that was what we talked about with Project twenty twenty five.
Yeah, they're pretty much going in order the blueprint.
Because what we told them they were going to do.
Yep, they said they were going to do it. Everyone was like, they're probably not going to do it. Trump was like, I've never heard of Project twenty twenty five, and now suddenly he's heard all about it and is happy to follow it.
Yeah, exactly. I just am curious, like, as you're reading this, your newsletter focuses on sort of the internet writ large. Is that correct? I mean, explained as exactly what your focus is.
Yeah, I primarily focus on internet culture, but over the years the concept of internet culture has opened up quite a bit. Is everything and Trump is funny because I don't see him as a particularly online person. I have a bet going with a few people that he doesn't maybe even use the Internet. I think he's very much this creature of TV, and his first presidency was literally him just live tweeting Fox and Friends. That that's kind of his whole deal. But the people around him are
very good at using the Internet. They're very aware of how to tap into the thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters, that is conservative internet spaces like x and in their first week in office with Trump at the Helm, they are following through on everything that they have ran then raved about online for the last ten years, like they really understand how to tap into the infinite idea machine that is conservative digital media.
Yes, exactly. What I think is really interesting is so much of Trump twenty sixteen was like boomer culture, and so much of Trump twenty twenty four is like boomer culture, but bucked up by the thoughts, comments and obsessions of people like Chris Rufo. So, Chris Rufo, you will remember as a man who wrote a thread about how bad DEI was, which basically has now inspired the entire second Trump presidency to go to war with DEI. I mean, obviously there's more than that, but it was sort of
a way to kind of target it. And so I'm wondering what other things like that are the sort of fever dreams of the swamp, the Internet swamp, are you seeing enacted in real time in this administration.
The DEI stuff is a really useful banner because Christopher Rufo, you know, he's written in public all about this for years, about the idea of expanding the concept of wokeness to effectively. I mean, at this point we're talking about I think we'll Stancil, you know, a political activist on X and Blue Sky recently sort of phrase it this way, which is that we're talking about civil rights. That that's what's
being walked back here. And it took them about a decade to create a coherent banner for all of this stuff to fall under. Because the right wing media is not aligned the way I think a lot of people think it is. They don't like each other. You have tons of little pockets like you have. You have the Christopher Rufo sect, you have the Elon Musk sect, you have the Nick Fuentes, Grouberg gen Z, you know, little fascist click and all of them have different ideologies that
are to an outsider probably negligible. But inside of these spaces, they really care about them, and so they spend a decade trying to figure out where the Venn diagram is between all of them, and it seems like they've finally figured it out. And I think that's the most important way to view Trump is that I don't think I Trump as an ideologue. I don't. I don't think he actually has any real political ideology. The man would have run as a Democrat if he could. He's a kleptocrat.
He's a thug. So the minute they can give him a playbook and say to him, if you follow this, you can rich yourself as much as you want, he'll be like, yeah, absolutely. So that's what's happening right now, is they've aligned to a degree, although you still see infighting like Steve Bannon and Elon Musker Duke getting it out right now, like they don't like each.
Other, and also Elon Musk and Sam Allman.
Right, there's all kinds of little like death of Stalin infighting happening right now.
That's the one bright spot right Otherwise just a disaster.
These people are messy as hell. I mean, it's it's and it's entertaining if it wasn't self frightening. But they are now very aligned on what they're calling anti DEI, which you know is just another euphemism for for basic civil rights in this country, and they are moving quickly.
I want to talk about this executive order. It's called one one two four six. It was originally signed by President Lyndon Johnson, woke leftist President Lyndon Johnson, wild radical in nineteen sixty five. It was an order that prohibited federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. So the idea was you can't be racist when dolling out government contracts.
Correct, I mean that is my interpretation of it.
Yeah, So it has now been rescinded. It was called the Equal Employment Opportunity Cause, and Trump has now rescinded it because LBJ must be stomped.
Yeah, as you said, he's just two woke LBJ, notorious progressive figure wocust.
Yeah.
I mean what a lot of these executive orders are trying to do is claim any when they can. I mean futurism. The Outlet had a great report this week about how a lot of these are being written or co written by AI and just churned out as fast as possible, and the point is to cause as much damage as they can so they can say, you know, we're doing stuff, because I mean, the first Trumpet presidency did not other than sort of installing a bunch of
trumpst judges across the country. Like it. It didn't really pass legislation as we think about it, especially if you were to compare it to the Biden administration. And I'm no fan of the Biden administration, but like they pass laws, these are not that. These are displays of power in the first week, and and they know that they can. They know that they can really flex on the federal government with executive orders because they have total jurisdiction there.
So they're another one there they're trying. I think they did pass this week was demanding back to office work for federal work. Yes, yes, which is, as you said, just such a boomerfied thing, like of all the things to care about, like, oh, they can't remote work anymore. Okay,
that's all this is. It's to appease a bunch of people who have all these insane beliefs that they've gotten from absorbing x dot com, the everything out for too long, and now they're just like, yeah, we can't have woke federal employees working from laptops anymore.
Okay, sure, yeah, what I am so interested in when we look at these executive orders? Right, I had a lawyer on an academic e lawyery person two weeks ago. I had a bunch and one said, you, these executive orders fall into three buckets messaging, right, which is there were seventy eight on Monday, and many of them were like, we will restore beautiful architecture, right, which is a massive right. It's a message like we will get rid of woke architecture, the classic canon.
You know, it's the idea of using that every city is getting a Confederate General statue in it starting twenty twenty five.
Right. And it's also trying to make classics a right wing thing, which, as someone who has one of my children is as is a classic scholar, Like it is so fucking stupid that the right has somehow decided they want classics, Like classics are just happy that anyone wants them, right, Like it's the poor sad kid that no one cares about, you know, they can't even get people to study it because they want to go back to olden times, because they want to reverse a lot of modern progress, because
they want to discriminate, and they want to have a Carbelande for that. So I wonder if you could just sort of like sort of talk us through. And then there are two other types of executive orders. One are the ones that are completely undoable and that will just be ways of pushing the discourse to the right, which he's been very successful with and you know, even like with the immunity decision, they'll go in and try it and it won't work, but who cares because even by trying,
they've moved the discourse the right. And then the third is this sort of this horrible nether region, the kind that might actually get some traction. I'm wondering as we sort of look on this, you know, Orwellian Milange, what you think are the kind of most dangerous or what has caught your eye in this wild world of sports.
The thing that I find most dangerous is the general chaos that's produced by these that that frightens me because like we saw this with the first Trump presidency, where there's no way for lawmakers lawyers, legal apparatus in this country to keep up. I mean, I don't know where we're at. We're recording this on Friday morning. I don't know what the total is at. He's been promising up to one hundred in the first week. I think it was like twenty five on the first day or something.
So imagine every single one of the requires some sort of legal challenge in some way if you can, which is a problem. So that's just going to clog up all the works. And in the meantime, you know, we already have reports of ICE agents doing raids based on the birthright Executive Order that is currently being challenged in twenty something states. So it's absolute chaos. And the institutional chaos creates a lot of real world harm. We know this.
And it also just like sucks a lot of energy out of the room for the media, or what's left of the media for activism or what's left of it. So we're already quite anemic in terms of how we respond to this stuff because four years of Trump and then four years of sort of dealing with the ramifications of the first Trump presidency has just really sucked the energy out of American progressive leftism, liberalism, whatever, and so they know that they know that they can steamroll this stuff,
and I don't. I mean, I don't know if you saw the video of like Trump like not even knowing which order he was signing, man to like tell him they don't care, like because the chaos, I don't know. The chaos to me seems like the point because even if they get some wins, you know, that's that's great, Like they can cheer it along and it's great propaganda.
So that's what worries me is that like by the time this is all over, let's say in six months or something, and he's settled into the White House, everyone's just so tired and worn down that we don't even know how to respond to this stuff.
Yeah, well, I think that's the goal. I also think though, and this is my hottest take. So one of the things we saw during Trump's campaign was that you would say, well, you know, He's going to do this, and people wouldn't believe you because Democrats were really actually quite good at
stopping Trump from doing a lot of stuff. Yes, so he wasn't so that you would say, well, you know, Project twenty twenty five is Trump and he would say no, it's not and people would say okay, and then you know, like you'd say, well, i'm pretty sure Trump says he's going to do this in this and people say, yeah, but he was president last time and none of that stuff happened or and so I do think part of
what didn't happen which will happen this time. And I'm not an accelerationist, like I hate all of this because I have the terrible disadvantage of believing the things I say on television. But I think there's a world in which because some of these things did not happen, people don't totally see what it is he's promising.
I think that's very very much the case. I think, you know, it's it's like the problem that where younger people are like, oh, it's so crazy that you guys all freaked out about Y two K when nothing happened, and it's like, well, no, we fixed it before it could happen, so stupid. Yeah, the hole in the ozone layer, I've heard the same thing. It's like, oh, you guys are freaking out with the hole in the ozone Layer's so yeah, we fixed it to a degree. So there's
a lot of that. The thing that sort of frightens me more than that, but in the same line of thinking is like I spend a lot of time over the last few years living in Brazil, and like, Brazilian politics are American politics times a million in terms of just like absolute insanity, and the average person is just even before Bolsonaro, the Trump of the Tropics, the Brazilian sort of equivalent, came to power a couple of years ago, there was still this just massive malaise from the average person.
Even journalists they're saying, you know, what can be done. The corruption, the cronyism, the dysfunction is so built into the system now that there's no way to remove it. And that is something that really frightens me about a second Trump administration, is that the oligarchical class that we're
pulling into our politics, you can't remove that. I mean, you look at other countries, like you know, Russia, or you look at sort of any dysfunctional sort of quote unquote democracy hobbling along somewhere else, and like you could argue that's already the case in America. Many leftists do, but there is a clear difference between pre Trump and post Trump and I just fear that the level of rot we're allowing in is unremovable.
That is the big question, and that's the Russia question. I mean, that is the big question about Trumpism, is will he be able to crush norms and institutions in a way that is not reversible? And that we don't know, right, I mean that we won't know until this presidency ends, which it might never So no, it won't never end. It will at some point he will not be president whatever. That looks like.
All dictatorships eventually end. That is true.
Congratulations with us.
You mentioned now on the first presidency there were Democrats who are sort of like stopping things from getting out of control, and I don't want to be like a cringe centrist, but there are also Republicans that were trying to hold up some sort of norm even if it was a conservative one, and I don't see that being
the case this time. I think that like the last ten years have been very clarifying for many Republicans and they are now going into this presidency with a big old wishless that they want him to do, and he's more than happy to do it, especially if you happen to buy some of his meme coin. There's all kinds of ways that he can enrich himself off, you know, different favors and financial contributions, And I think that that is a very hard thing to resist from a party
in power. I'm very cynical about that.
I think, Yeah, I mean that's the question. I do think, Like again, since we're going to go down the cringe centrist, I personally don't think it's a cringe, but I am much older than you are. We do have and again this is like the Pollyanna thing with me, Like, we do have two Republican senators, and we have some really
really crazy nominees coming down the pike. Right, there's a question, and it's not impossible that we might get Collins Murkowski and possibly Lankford and maybe you know this Utah senator to stop them from completely disassembling the Department of Health and Human Services. Not impossible, unlikely, but not impossible.
Right, And what bugs me about that is, like, it's so disheartening to be back in a situation where the only thing between us and the void are like hoping some people do the right thing. Like, right, I think of Pence on Insurrection Day and It's like if Pence hadn't done the right thing, god knows what the country would look like right now. It's the gravitational pull of trump Ism, where everyone essentially has to decide the moral
choice and whether they're going to make it. And it's four years of that where I think a lot of people now are more than happy to also enrich themselves. And I think I talked about this when I came on to talk about Project twenty twenty five. But I do really believe that at the heart of all of this that's what we're talking about. Of course, there are all kinds of ideologies that are got this, but at the end of the day, the center of Trumpism is self enrichment. It is corruption.
And there are some people who are there to dismantle the administrative state, which has been, of course a long dream of theirs.
Yes, especially in Silicon Valley, the Pewter teel Elon musk Strain, they've talked about it. They want the network state, the cyber feudalism, techno oligarchy, Curtis Yarvin nonsense. They want Silicon Valley to be its own country. All these kind of whack jobs see Trump as the wrecking ball for their particular brand of whack job.
Yeah, and that is what Project twenty twenty five is, is this collection of conservative fantasy is put together in a big book. Which is why it struck me so much that was so unpopular and that somehow voters believed him when he said, don't worry, I'm not going to do it, and then he's doing a surprise.
I did see, you know, take this with a massive grain of salt, because I saw this on Blue Sky. But I have seen some chatter since the election of certain left as activists being of arguing that, you know, perhaps we should give friendly politicians more of a pass when they seem like they could be on our side, but also have to sort of play to a mainstream audience, which is exactly what Trump did. Trump kept saying, Oh, all the fringe weirdos in my party are fringe and weird,
and I won't do that. And obviously he is now doing that. And it's the sort of purity politics demanded by both sides of the political spectrum on the internet. Right now, the right play a better game, right, the right.
Play better game? And that is a think about like Donald Trump pardoned this libertarian hero.
This side Ulbrick, yeah right.
Russ Albrooke and somebody blue skyde because that's where we live now. That it was like, imagine if Democrats had done something for the Green Party.
Right right, imagine imagine like.
They had just because here's Trump doing this for libertarians who doesn't even give a fuck about something to think about.
No, I think it absolutely is now. I have my own sort of feelings about all Brick because I do think what he was charged with was outrageous, but I'll save that for another time.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough of that. Also don't really care, but ye's go on.
I mean, I care, but I understand it's hard. It's hard to care about some of this stuff. But I do think the way that the different sections of the conservative side of America are working together right now, I hope is instructive to people on the other side because they have found ways to find some sort of overlap
between their concerns. I mean, I was reading a CNN report about the Democrats this morning which made me so dismayed I couldn't even actually finish it because it was talking about there going viral strategy in the Trump era and they were talking about this incredible sort of.
No, no, no more, We're out of time, Ryan, what are the odds out of time? Just when we're talking about something that's going to make me upset?
You know what I hear about the democrats viral media strategy for.
I cannot I cannot hear it. But I do hope some terrible, terrible political consultants is making billions of dollars, because that's where I want hard earned money to go. Ryan, will you please come back?
I will, I will absolutely come back to talk about how the Democrats hired the rizzler to do double chunk chocolate cookie reviews. Whatever.
Nick Bilton is the author of Hatching Twitter and a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. Welcome back to Fat Politics, Nick Bilton.
Thanks for having me on.
Delighted to have you so first. There's so many topics that you can cover today. I want you to start by talking us through Trump's controversial pardon of Silk Road Founder, subject of your book, Let's Go, one of your many.
Books, one of my many books. I have to say, it's very odd to have written a book that ends up leading to a presidential pardon by Donald Trump. I can't say I played any role in that.
Yeah.
I mean, look, the story I think is it's a really interesting story for me because, you know, Russ Olbricht was the creator of the Silk Road website, which was the first online drug marketplace. He was the pioneer, the one who started it all, and he was caught after two and a half years and has sold all sorts
of drugs and other crazy things on there. You know, when the site started, you could buy just weed and mushrooms and things like that, and it kind of escalated to cocaine and heroin, and then it was you know, cyanide and other poisons, and then the Chinese found out about it and started selling fentanyl and DMT and all these other drugs that are made in China and they're
all synthetic and incredibly dangerous. I come to believe that this was the beginning of that era of fentanyl on and then it escalated and escalated, and the site became so huge that at one point they're selling guns and
murder for hire and all of these things. And so what's happened over the past several years since Ross you know, he was caught in the early twenty ten and twenty thirteen or so, he went to trial, was sentenced in twenty fifteen, and then there was a movement that came about to free Ross Olbrick and that was libertarian driven
and so on. And what's been really fascinating is that, you know, Ross was responsible for these attempted murder for hires, even though they ended up being scams by some rogue d agents and so on and sillports but which we can get into. But that stuff's all been kind of washed away. And now he's just a guy on a computer who started a website that you know was no different to Amazon.
That was what. So how did he do this? How did he become just a guy online and starting another Amazon.
He was a very very smart guy. He grew up in Austin, Texas, got a sixteen hundred on his SAT. He's a very sweet guy. He always was thinking about
other people. There's this one great anecdote that's in the book where he's walking down the street with a friend and he stops at the flower stall where this woman works and he buys a hooqueve roses and then he hands them back to the woman and says he's it for you and then just keeps walking and his friend goes, what was that, and he said, you know, no one ever buys flowers for the person who works at the flower stall. So that was like his personality, you know,
very thoughtful, incredibly smart. Went to Ivy League school to study astrophysics, but he also had he was raised to believe this, but he also had this philosophy of he became an extreme libertarian, you know, like an Ann Randian libertarian, and he believed that the government should have no say what you can and cannot put into your body with drugs or alcohol. If you want to murder yourself but suicide,
then you should be allowed to do that. And you know, I think a lot of people that are in their twenties in a fancy college kind of you know, get some weird thoughts that enter their mind and they usually grow out of them, like you know, hey, Hamas is good or something like that, which was today's version of it. But I remember when I was in college reading like all these old economic books and you're like, oh, that
makes any sense. It's not practical. Communism is not practical, but you think as a twenty year old that it is. But he went one step further and decided that he was going to build this website on the dark web using bitcoin that was going to prove that if you legalize drugs, you could create a marketplace where the people who sold good drugs were the ones who got the most business. The ones who sold bad drugs to kill people would go out of business. If you legalized all drugs,
that all the violence that surrounds it would disappear. And the irony is the website proved that there's at least six that we know of overdoses of kids super al drugs on there who didn't understand the power of these fent and all and things like that, which is obviously one hundred times stronger than anything that existed pre then.
And then Ross, when the site started to kind of face this challenge where it was growing and growing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and profits and so on, believed that he was having some people killed that were going to stand in his way, and so that altruism and idealism turned into a typical form of ego and hubris that eventually led to his downfall.
Jesus, So I'm hoping you could talk to us about there are we so we have that pardon that he's probably not going to serve in the administration, But there are other people who you've written books about who are going to serve in the administration or whatever. It seems like tech bros have been given carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they want, with the exception of Avey, who is now out. So talk us through what's happening right now with Doge and the surrounding in Sanday.
So what's really interesting is when you think about Donald Trump, you have to think about two different Donald Trump's, and you have to think about Trump forty five and Trump forty seven. So Trump forty five understood media and social media and the power of it, and but felt like he had been slighted by it, even though he admitted the first interview he ever did after he you know, won as forty five, he said that he wouldn't be
there if it wasn't for Twitter. But he still felt that social media, Facebook, all these of the platforms, Twitter, someone had shadow band people who were supporters of his or or he you know, or even himself.
And mad at the Internet.
Yeah, it was this whole conspiracy that like the Internet was after him, and some of some that turned out to be true. Turned out Twitter was doing some kind of are anti free speech stuff. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. But what ends up happening is key as forty five kind of goes to war with
the tech bros. Zuck is brought before Congress largely by Republicans, saying with Jack Dorsey and Cheryl sam all these people, and then he ends up of course, you know, January sixth happens, and everyone is shocked and they say, oh my god, we can never let this guy back on
social media again. He's banned on Facebook and everything. And then something changes where he has this realization that if he is a friend to Silicon Valley, they will be a friend to him, and they will be they will financially help him, they will help him with their supporters and so on. And in that time period you're during forty six.
It's called quid pro quo, it's.
Called kid properly. In that time period during forty six, the Biden administration was not friendly to tech. They you know, they did not embrace them. And at the same time, all of these tech became super famous because they got podcasts, and they got put on the cover of magazines, and they got their own you know, and they got bigger followings.
And so what's happened is these two worlds have collided and they have become bad fellows, and they all love each other and they think they're going to live happily ever after. We can guarantee that will not be the case.
So tell me why you can guarantee that that will not be the case, because it certainly seems like I mean, we already have you know, Doge had two heads. Now it has won the reporting I've read about that fallout, and we're just at the very early days because it happened two days ago. But so far, the fallout seems to imply that, you know, Elon gets what Elon wants. I've heard from people in Trump World that he loves Elon and that Elon is like a Sunday. I mean, whatever,
Just explain this to me. I don't want to say anything nice about anyone.
That's really funny. I don't want to see nice about anyone. That's the title of this episode, by the way, that's.
It's gonna on my tombstone. Continue.
The reason I don't think that it is going to be everlasting is because these are people with big egos, and they are the biggest egos that seek power and so on. My guess is that Elon wants the most power imaginable and that Trump has it. But at the same time Trump wants the most power imaginable and Elon has it, and so they somehow have to kind of figure out how how to dance together when they both
want to be the lead dancer. You know, I think that you've got all these other personalities that are falling behind Elon and Lockstep from Silicon Valley, like the Mark and Driesen's and the David Sachs and Tamals and those guys that were once investors that are now famous stars in the world of ros And I think that you know, with Elon, you can you can see the power he has, you know. So one example is Sam Altman, who runs open Ai, is one of the few people who have
ever fucked over Elon. He pushed him out of open Ai even though Elon and him started together, which is probably not a good idea because now Elon is essentially like shadow running the government, especially when it comes to tech decisions and that means that Sam is not going to have the opportunities that other people are, and Elon is spiteful and doesn't forget, and the result is that I would not be betting on open AI right now
because Elon is intentionally trying to sabotage and bet against it. And it's in success. And you saw that yesterday. Trump said, you know someone that reporter asked Trump if.
Yeah, I was just thinking about that.
Ye go on. Yeah. He said, you know, do you believe that, like, is there a rift between you and Elon? Because Elon said something negative about this fun that you're doing? And Trump goes, no, there's one guy that Elon hates in there, and I totally get it. We all hate people, you know, And.
So no, it was like I get a petty grievance more than yes.
Yes.
If there's anyone on planet Earth to get a petty grievance, it is our friend, Donald Trump. What I think is going to happen, though, is we are going because the Trump administration is giving car blaunched to the tech industry. We're going to see if you think we saw a lot of change in the last in the last four years, it's going to be times one hundred because with AI
and all these different things, I have a hope. And maybe this is just me being idealistic, but I have a hope that as much as it's insane as Elon is, I do think he is fully aware of the dangers of AI, and I think it's a good thing that he is in the circle of Trump and in government to ensure that things don't wile he's been out of control. That being said, I don't know what he would do to stop.
It, right. That doesn't make me feel great. One of the things I'm struck by is I know some people in this world and I'm wondering. One of the things I keep asking them is like, does Elon still believe in climate change?
Oh?
My god.
I don't know how to answer that because I don't know the answer.
Because that was his motivating force, right, I mean, that's how he got all that government money.
Yeah, but you never know what his motivating forces, right, It's an ever changing, evolving, nebulous thing. And I think that he clearly understood the effects of gas, cars and so on. Here's where it's not even if his ideals have changed for me, It's it's that I don't necessarily buy that that was always the drive pun intended.
Hmmm.
Interesting.
You know when you are creating there's all this research out there creating new cars, especially with massive lithium ion batteries, is incredibly bad for the environment.
Right.
You can't just throw these lithium ion batteries when they die in the trash. We saw this as a recent fire in California where people have been copying and their eyes have been faciity and because there was a battery fire in this in the small town here, and and I think that, you know, when you look at the impacts of climate change because of flying and space travel and so on and so forth, like those massive rockets, they're not doing great things for the environment, you know.
And so now I don't know if the drive was always about Climb. I think he definitely has been one of the most impactful people in the car industry in fifty years. And climate is better. I can tell you living in la when I first moved here, I remember flying in and you would see this basin filled with
smog and it was disgusting. The AQI was constantly around two hundred and now it's not it's around forty and that's largely because we've had innovations with gas cars, but also because everyone here is driving an electric car and so. But I don't think that was the drive. I don't believe that.
Was the drive.
Elon Headstone Novov, what do you think his goal is?
I think there's two things going on here. I wrote a story from Veli Fair about what's going on with.
Elon and where we both were where we were.
Yes.
One of the things that I was told by people is that this may all seem like it's him against big government and him wanting to make sure his taxes are lower and this, that and the other, but really it's just personal. And it's personal on two levels. And the first is that when COVID happened, and he chose not to believe in COVID because it was going to affect his business, there was no other reason. Right, He had huge falling outs with lots of people that he
was very close with. Sam Harris has told me stories about their debates about it and so on. And when the government said you cannot have people in your plant working because of COVID, he was irate at the same time, right, and he was like that's the government overreach. This is
the United States. They shouldn't tell people again, going back to Ross Olbrick, they shouldn't tell people what they shouldn't and can and cannot put in their bodies, and they shouldn't tell people who cannot and can work in their businesses. And that was the first thing that really set him off, that started this evolutionary change from like this, you know,
environmentalist leftist to being more centrist. And then his daughter transitioned and publicly attacked him, and of all the people that Elon can attack, it's pretty much anyone except for his children. He can't really do that on Twitter without really looking like a monster. And he believed that it was the liberal Los Angeles private school system that had turned her, and I think that was it, that was the breaking point. And so I think for him, all
of this is about those grievances. Those is just the response to the fact that his company got shut down during COVID and people couldn't go to work there and you couldn't make cars and make money and continue his dream of being the biggest car maker in the world and so on and so forth. And I think that his response, his craziness where he's like attacks everyone on social media and someone is a response to what happened
with his daughter. And it's that simple. It's this prescriptive movie script where the guy that wasn't hugged enough as a kid ends up becoming the supervillain.
Oh great, thank you Nick Belton.
Thank you.
No, Jesse Cannon Smiley.
Mister Trump has a mandate.
I know that's a controversial thing to say because everybody says he didn't win Mutch, but I think he had to a mandate. It's to get egg prices down.
But yeah, and you're going to be shocked to hear that egg places are not.
God I can't believe it.
And that's because of a thing called the avian flu. Luckily Trump has paused all of the activities happening at the National Institute for Health, so we're really fucked. Basically, eggs are really expensive because they're having to kill all the chickens and throw out all the eggs because of the bird flu. And again, this was Biden world, So I think there's plenty of blame to go around here, but I would like to blame everyone involved for what's
going on with the bird flu. And that's where we are.
Great stuff.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.