The existential dread has a strong pull, especially since Trump has made a lot of Americans worse people, but we've had other bad, immoral, and creepy presidents who've sullied the office. Meanwhile, Vance is basically the invisible man while Elon lives in Trump's bedroom, and Andreessen is loading up a pile of BS to justify his vote. Plus, a Tim v Tom Christmas playlist. Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller. show notes: Tom's audiobook version of "The Death of Expertise" Tim's Christmas playlist John Ganz book Tom and Tim referenced
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Hey everybody, it's Tim. During this podcast, me and Tom Nichols discuss speculation that Congressman Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, was going to be named the FEMA director in the Trump administration since we taped... Moskowitz tweeted that he is not going to be interested in that job and that he'll be running for reelection as a Democrat in Florida, something that I commend him for.
I want to leave that exchange, though, in the podcast, because I do think it speaks to some real fundamental questions about how this. Democrats and how the handful of anti-Trump Republicans that exist, how they should deal with this administration and kind of the ethics of that and the strategic thinking around, you know, how to engage with the Trump administration.
So we're going to keep that in there because I think the conversation is informative around that question. But the good news is Moskowitz is not going anywhere. The Democrats are not going to lose a seat in the House of Representatives. All right. Up next, our friend Tom Nichols. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I've been having fun in the green room.
But before we get to the guest, we're in the final stretch between Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever you're celebrating this year. Trump is going to be president again, so we're saying Merry Christmas again. So if you want to be a Bulwark member and you haven't yet, you can go to thebulwark.com slash subscribe. That can be a Christmas present to yourself or to a loved one. Come on, join.
We need to be together because out there in the rest of the world, it's scary and dark and bad. And so, you know, we might as well be dealing with that, processing it. You know my favorite word, processing all that together over this holiday season. Go to theblork.com slash subscribe. Today, of course, my guest is Professor Emeritus of the Naval War College. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic.
He's the author of The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. His books include The Death of Expertise. Dropping on Christmas Eve is an audiobook rendition read by Tom himself. It is Tom Nichols. He just blew his nose in the green room. I don't know if that's happening on the audiobook, too, if people are just getting old man sounds. And what do you do? Do you freelance?
Do you do the Trump thing where you read the words on the page and then you vamp a little bit or what? Yeah, I stop every other paragraph and I go, so true, so true. So true. Great point, Tom. That is a good point, Tom. All right, Tom Nichols, I hear you're in Europe. You're in Europe, Prague, Brussels. What's the view from our European allies?
Oh, you know, I purposely went there with intending to avoid the news, which I did. I just tuned into the to the Beeb to keep up on the serious stuff. And it was a very nice break. It was a reminder of how self-absorbed American politics has become that, you know, you turn on BBC World and
you find out a lot about basically that the entire geopolitical order of the Middle East is being reorganized rather than, you know, what Pete Hegseth's tattoos mean.
You know, there's news in Romania. You know, there's coups in South Korea. There's stuff happening out there.
There's stuff happening out there, exactly. But I went to Europe because my wife and I decided that after the election, win, lose, or draw, no matter how it came out, we planned like six months ago that after just living through all this politics that we were going to pull chocks.
And so we started in London and we went through Paris and Brussels and ended up walking the cobblestone streets of Prague. And it was very nice. But it was interesting because I went in 2017 after the election, and people would say, oh, you're an American. What's going on with that new president? This time people were like, yeah, whatever. I ran into a few British tourists.
They're like, well, interesting, mate. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, whatever. The few times that politics came up when I was with groups, I ran into some Americans and ran into other people overseas. And, you know, I just found myself and them with that sort of same vibe we all have over here of like, I don't know, you can't even sum it up in a word.
It's more like, yeah, you know, this sort of this kind of sigh of exhaustion of like, Jesus Christ, here we go again.
You know, let's just defeat kind of right. It's like this acceptance. Like this is I guess this is just who you Yankees are.
The first time you could write it off and say, most of us aren't like this. Most of us wouldn't want this guy in our house talking to our kids. But look, he won 49.8% of the vote or whatever it was. He won – As I said in 2016, he won fair and square. Doesn't matter whether you like him or not. He's the duly elected president, you know, 47th president.
And you can't write that off as an accident anymore. You have to say this is, you know, this is what American voters wanted. And before I get angry mail from Democrats who say, well, it's not what we wanted. Well, you know, you didn't show up. So by default, you were either OK with it or it didn't bother you enough to show up in the numbers that you did in 2020.
So, you know, it is kind of who we are that either we actively wanted this or it didn't really bother us enough to be, you know, arsed enough to kind of go vote. So, yeah, there was that sense. I think I don't think it's defeat, though, Tim. I think it's exotic. I think you got it right with it's just like acceptance, like whatever, you know.
Well, last time we talked, it was two days after the election. I went and I was really listening to it in the shower this morning. I like to have Tom Nichols in my ear in the shower. And that's evocative. Thank you. And we were pretty defeated in that conversation and resigned. And I'm just curious, like, you've never had a vacation since then.
Since then, we've had Matt Gaetz nominated and then withdrawn as attorney general, Pete Agseth, Tulsi, RFK. All this has happened. The folding of the oligarchs, you know, to Donald Trump, the acquiescence. I'm just wondering how you assess the state of affairs right now versus how you did. on election night?
I am both more and I'm going to give you one of those Weasley answers. I'm more optimistic, Tim, but I'm less optimistic too.
Okay.
In what ways? I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't expect his cabinet nominations to sound like the setup for a cold open at Saturday Night Live. Like you can see them sitting around the writers room. It's like, okay, okay. All right. So Pete Hegseth comes in, right? Because he's the Secretary of Defense now, right? And Tulsi Gabbard is the DNI, okay?
And you're like saying, okay, nobody, even Donald Trump, nobody would do this. So in that sense, I'm like just – astonished that how quickly we've normalized saying things like defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, as if that's like a thing you would say outside of a parody. On the other hand, I really want to caution people against this
And preemptive despair and nihilism, you know, I mean, it seems like a lot of the folks who once, you know, were running around being resistance liberals and Trump opponents and, you know, even I suppose I think are never Trump OGs or, you know, always held firm. eight years ago and now. But look, the guy is not a supernatural being.
I mean, the fact that Matt Gaetz got turfed so fast should tell you something. And that the thing going on in the Senate right now, I keep hearing these stories about, oh, Joni Ernst is getting to yes, and they're going to warm to these nominees. Look, I worked in the Senate. Right now, these senators realize there is nothing in it for them right now.
To keep going out there and slamming their head into a brick wall and getting hate mail and death threats from MAGA World. That doesn't mean anything for what could happen in the next month or after confirmation hearings. You know, I guess what I'm saying, Tim, is in a way, I thought it would be. Bad in a very dark way, like there would be all these nominees like, OK, I'll give an example.
One nominee that I think flew right under the radar who is really dangerous because I think he does know what he's doing. He's thought about stuff is Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like we're all sitting here saying, oh, you know, you know, again, what does it mean when Pete Hague said, you know. Took his shirt off. No, Russ Vout is the guy.
If I'm going to worry about anybody, I worry about the guys who know what they're doing, who have made plain their intentions, you know, in numerous writing and speeches. So I expected more guys like that. not this kind of, you know, clown bus of, you know, stuff that is just, but that's bad too.
And I don't get off my soapbox, but I don't want to minimize that because one thing that occurred to me, I was trying not to think about politics in Europe. I was going to Christmas markets and I was trying, I had mulled wine for the first time in my life and it's bad. Yeah. So I'm just going to say that.
Yeah.
I think it didn't taste, it didn't taste good. But I kept watching this news from Syria and saying this is a momentous event. earth moving, you know, geo strategic change. And I'm trying to imagine if this had happened and somebody walks into brief secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth and DNI Tulsi Gabbard and, you know, attorney general Pam Bondi. Well, the DNI is on the side of the deposed.
Well, exactly. You know that I kept thinking that it's like, it's like, okay, how do you go in and tell, uh, how do you walk into ODNI, you know, and, and there's Tulsi Gabbard saying, um, madam director, uh, You're not going to like this because I got good news. I got bad news. No, I'm lying. There's no good news. So, you know, I'm worried.
But I think there were a lot of strategic mistakes in this tranche of nominees. And one last thing. These are the nominees right now. Remember that everybody that Trump appoints, even after they're confirmed, they're
is gone you know fired by tweet at some point down the line yeah they're on a one-day contract i've been listening to that answer i want to get a little heavier with you for a second because there's this micro to despair not to despair question of should we hope that trump can be stopped and that his nominees can be stopped and are there things that we can do to minimize the damage and to win in the midterms and can the democrats win again in the future
And I think both of us are on the side of like, yes, like things can be done. This is bad, but we must not descend in denialism. We must maintain, you know, the, the knowledge that we can fight, that we can recover. So I agree with you on that. I do wonder about this though, is that some of the people who are despairing, is it related to your Europe trip?
And that the thing that they're despairing is that even if, He does fail, even if he does bumble, which we all expect. And even if the Democrats do win in the midterms, and even if the Democrats do win in 2028, like something fundamentally has now been broken that is unfixable. And that is what is underlying people's nihilism, right?
That like the things that they cared about, the things that they thought that America was, it has been revealed that it is not those things and that it's not worth caring about these, you know, whatever it is, the traditions, the norms, the, you know, the majesty of American democracy, like that we've gone behind the curtain and the wizard is not there and it's Donald Trump, you know?
That's beneath all these things that we have venerated. And that is what is leading people to despair, actually. And that, you know, well, maybe we can win some battles in the micro. In the macro, this thing is permanently fucked.
It is hard to feel the same way about the country. These days, at least for me, patriotism is an act of will. I still love this country. I love what it stands for. I love the values on which it's based. And I think most, I still believe that most of the people in this nation
believe in the founding principles of America, at least in some core gut way of constitutional, not the legal sense, but that constitutional guarantee of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. So before I descend too far into the darkness, I'll just say that.
But with that said, yeah, there's something, there is a, when Jimmy Carter loses to Ronald Reagan, I mean, that was my first election, right? You know, you had gripey college kids and I was living in Boston at the time, you know, liberals walking around Boston, oh, this is terrible and America's screwed. But, you know, you didn't have this sense of like existential doom, even among the far left.
I mean, Nixon wins a landslide in 72, right? and you don't get this existential doom, and in fact, he's gone two years later. This time, I think the problem is, and you can tell that we both spent some time talking to Jonathan Last, who is the king of this kind of gloom.
JBL, he's the prince of darkness when it comes to this, to say that if Donald Trump were impeached or removed from office three days after he gets in, you still have to live with the fact that that in any, you know, many settings, you can look around the room and say, at least, you know, if you live in a blue state, at least three or four people.
And if you live in a red state, seven or eight people think that everything Donald Trump said was basically okay. And that's hard. That's a hard thing to grasp. I was with some friends here where I live. And one of them said, well, you're not, you don't judge people based on how they voted, do you? And I said, I I said, I don't want to, but it's hard. And I know you and I have brought this here.
I use the David Duke analogy. I said, replace Donald Trump with David Duke. Say, I'm a good family man and I love my country, but I voted for David Duke. I'm sorry, but you reach moral conclusions about people when they do stuff like that.
I definitely have some neighbors that voted for David Dick saying that I'm in Louisiana. So that's an absolute comparison for me.
That they just really didn't tune in or pay attention to any of this stuff. Or they tuned out years ago. But yeah, I share that kind of existential dread that can the country. When I was a kid, and now I'm going to do the old man thing. When I was a kid, every classroom in the 60s, you know, we had a calendar. And the calendar always had a picture of all the presidents.
And you just felt like that was like this. I mean, at the time, you didn't know that Warren Harding was a womanizing doofus. You didn't know Andrew Jackson was a genocidal maniac. Now Trump's on that picture twice. Oh, my God.
Twice.
And I can remember when Nixon resigned, and I was just coming out of that kind of grade school, and I was like, wow, there's a guy on here who got forced from office. And now it's like, yeah, maybe just don't put up those calendars anymore.
Just let that go. We're going down a rabbit hole. I didn't mean to go. We're going to get to the news, I promise. People who tune into this daily podcast for the news, we'll get there. This is what...
you know woke tim would say this is what the woke folks would say about this which is that poster was always bullshit and chris rock did kind of a bit on saturday night live this weekend about how like oh donald trump is going to you know the dignity of the office will be sullied an office held by multiple rapists and people who people who put their hand on the bible while their slaves like was pregnant with their baby you know and it's like
There's something to be said for that, right? Is it like, is actually, is it just like our naivete? Here's woke Tim. Is it our white privilege naivete that has just been, that has just been cracked? And like, we believed some stupid myths and it's time for us just to be a little more hard headed. Is that possible?
Look, part of what helps society keep its guardrails is the old expression. Hypocrisy is the tribute. Vice pays the virtue. Yeah. Right. To say, yes. You know, look, when people talk about somebody was doing a piece, they said the same office held by, you know, Lincoln or Reagan or I can't remember what it was. And Jack Kennedy.
And I'm like, Jack Kennedy did things in the White House that are really bad. Would make you blush. Yeah. Exactly. But there was at least a sense that the president had to say things and behave in a way that preserved a certain amount of the social order in public.
And what Trump does, I mean, in a way, I imagine that the Trump White House is probably far less creepy than a lot of things that happened in the Kennedy White House, but far more destructive to the country. Because there is no inspiration there to be better. There is no ask not what your country can do for you. You know, there is none of that. It's Trump. It's crudeness and vulgarity.
And it's all kind of put out there as a virtue in itself. Yeah.
Some myth-making is good, is what you're saying. Of course it is. Calling us to our higher selves and building up the best parts of the country rather than obsessing over all the flaws, rather than reveling in the flaws and saying that the flaws are the good parts. That is a negative change.
You know, I was joking. I was joking about Andrew Jackson a minute ago, you know, being being the kind of Northeast elitist that I am. And I'm not a big fan of Jackson. But on the other hand, I'm like, I look at him on a 20. I kind of get it, you know, that we create a myth around Andrew Jackson of, you know, the populist, the Democrat, old hickory, old. Yeah. You know, man of the people.
But because it does inspire us to at least try to be the better people that we are when we are in public and dealing with each other in the civic space. And, you know, when you look back at presidential debates, for example, you know, where you said these are reasonable human beings, we disagree.
And like John McCain said, you know, he's a good family man with whom I have very profound disagreements. Right. And now it's all become this reality show kind of, you know, what's that squid game kind of, you know, nonsense. And it just I think it just makes us into worse people. And I think now we have to wrap up the darkness, Tim. But going back to your point about.
You know, how do you kind of process how many people voted this way? I think eight years of the age of Trump has made a lot of Americans into worse people. I mean, genuinely corroded their characters. Look, you and I even... You see it on the internet. I mean, I find myself writing about politics in a way that when I was, I mean, remember, I came to writing out of 30, 35 years of academia, right?
You know, I tried to do these very measured things about foreign policy and national security. And now I find myself saying, you know, I'm writing about all this lunacy going on and it affects all of us. It has brought all of us down closer to Trump's level. And I'm sorry to see that. And I wish there were a little more hypocrisy in American public life, to be honest with you.
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And, you know, one way to make those daydreams something practical and useful is to just start learning a new language just in case you decide to pull the plug. And Babbel is a great way to do that, because if you end up just going on a vacation, which I plan on doing at minimum next summer, or, you know. Things get really serious and you decide it's time to become an expat.
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But maybe we can get out of the deep well of darkness into a shallower pond. There was a news item yesterday that didn't get a ton of attention. I'm interested in your reaction to it because I had a pretty strong reaction to it. Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic congressman who I've had on this podcast, I think is a good congressman who is a very tough guy.
In the oversight hearings and the bullshit oversight hearings that James Comer was doing, Moskowitz, I think, was the most savvy and kind of pushing back and exposing how BS these investigations into Biden were. He was the director of, I forget what they called in Florida, but emergency management, essentially, that might be the right title in Florida.
And he's friends with Matt Gaetz, which maybe raises a red flag. And I'm assuming that is what is underlining this. But he's been floated as the head of FEMA under Trump. And so you have these competing questions in a situation like this. It's a Democratic congressman that is in a swing. It's a Dem district, but it's a swingish district.
So if you were to leave that to run FEMA, on the one hand, it's like, okay, this is an important role. And it's nice to have somebody that knows what they're fucking doing in this role, you know, if the big one comes or when the big one comes, you know, as far as earthquakes or hurricanes, whatever, the next four years. On the other hand, the Republicans have a very narrow House majority.
If he leaves, DeSantis could keep that seat open for a while, give Mike Johnson some more breathing room. They could have a special election where a Republican takes that seat. That's very possible. It's not a safe seat. And the Machiavellian view of this, that the Democrats are going to play hardball, is it's insane for the Democrats to give up a seat in Congress to go do this.
And we shouldn't assume that Donald Trump will pick Trump. a weekend talk show host to head FEMA. So like we should live in a world where you'd assume that the other party would pick somebody else that knows what they're doing when it comes to emergency management. And if not, let them, you know, wallow in their own incompetence. I'm curious where Tom Nichols falls on that question.
You sent me the email this morning because I had missed this piece of news. And you said all it said in your email was, hey, Tom, topics, you know, Jared Moskowitz and FEMA. And I'm like, what is there? Does Trump said he's going to use FEMA to arrest Jared Moskowitz? What does that mean?
And so, of course, you know, being the conscientious podcast guest that I am, I went and looked it up and I went. Again, is this happening?
First of all, the first thing I thought of is what Democrat who cares about his party, what member of either party, let's not make it about Democrats, what member of either party would leave when their party is close to pretty much a tie in the House and endanger that? But also, then I thought, what do you gain from this? Because And again, there's no comment from Moskowitz, right?
At this point, this is all speculation. But assuming that you take a job like this and you say, well, look, rather, to quote Mr. Burns, rather than allowing them to wallow in their own crapulence, you decide to say, look, I'm going to pitch in and help out because it's a really important thing. And if there's a disaster, somebody, you know, respond.
I mean, but that was what every establishment Republican who went to work for Trump in 2016 thought. It did not work. And the other thing is that if you've never worked for a politician, dear listeners, you can't just work part of the street. You can't just say, well, I'm going to be the appointed FEMA head, but I'm going to totally dissent from the president on all these other important issues.
No, once you're an appointee, you are on the team. You are part of the administration. You're part of the team. You defend the president's positions and And if you don't, if you can't, then you have to get out. I mean, I worked for a senator.
I didn't call my, you know, write stuff and give interviews and say, you know, I think the senator's great senator, but boy, his position on this farm bill is just nuts. You know, if you work for the guy, you work for the guy. I understood that idea in 2016 or 2017. I don't understand it in 2024, how anybody can think that they are going to do that and somehow, you know, end up unscathed.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
To me, this is the fundamental truism of Trump, right? Which is that the people who get involved because they think that they are going to be able to clean him up
are only made dirty by him right like he doesn't get clean they just get dirty like that's what happened like that is that's it like that's happened every single time there's like no counter exception and that i'll be allowed to do my job and do good things for america and my you know innate merit and talent will see me through and i won't get caught up in all this other horrible
shit that goes on in washington no to join this administration and really to join almost any administration but especially this one you are going to get caught up in it and especially in an organization that is at the center of so many crazy pants bonkers conspiracy theories Climate.
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's not like you become Deborah Birx. Yes. You become Deborah Birx. You go and you become Deborah Birx, who by all accounts is a serious person that just got totally sullied and her reputation ruined. Well, you know, while she tried to nudge Donald Trump to do better.
I think that's a really good analogy, Tim. I think she's a good example of that. you know, I tried to defend Berks during the pandemic by saying, look, she's, you know, an appointee, she's an ambassador, she's a career military officer that telling the commander in chief that he's all hosed up doesn't come naturally to a lot of, you know, former military folks. It's not, not part of that culture.
You know, what do you expect her to do? Just walk out and resign in the middle of pandemic and all that stuff. But, but with all that said, you know, hey, you She's a big girl, grown woman, a colonel in the army. I mean, you know, an ambassador, a doctor. At some point you say, yeah, maybe I do walk out there and say this is too hosed up. But as you say, the lesson is out there.
This time there cannot be any doubt about what happens to you if you become part of the Trump administration.
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We've been spending a lot of time on these tech oligarchs because I think, frankly, it's a related to Trump story. But just even distinct from Trump, it is, I think, the biggest story of the next four years. What is happening with these tech oligarchs as they try to centralize power and control over all of our lives?
I've been talking about this a little bit with Ann Applebaum on Friday and with others. But there was one little anecdote that I missed that was in the Atlantic Daily newsletter that I want to get your reaction to. It was first reported by Brian Schwartz and Dana Mattioli over at the Wall Street Journal.
The day before Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago, Mark Zuckerberg stood hand over heart as they played a rendition of the national anthem sung by January 6th prisoners. Yeah. That's where we're at. That's where we're at.
Zuck, who in 2017 was doing this apology tour where he went around the country listening to people and trying to understand where he had gone wrong and how Trump had taken over the country. And I'm trying to be an earnest... You know, I'm this earnest business leader who cares about you. No, no, no, no. This time I'm going to fly down to Mar-a-Lago. I'm going to suckle on Trump's toes.
I'm going to put my hand over my heart as people that stormed the Capitol sing a rendition of the national anthem.
Really didn't need the thing about the toes, Tim. I mean, I have a lot of theories about the kind of tech oligarchs that came up in the 90s, which I think were a very dark time in American history. I shouldn't plug other people's books, I guess, because you've got to get out there and get my audio book. But I've been reading the John Gantz book about the 80s, which I think are the 90s.
It's been on my list. It's actually very good. And I think, you know, even where I disagree with it, it's easy to have reasonable but interesting disagreements with it. But the 90s to me were this time where, you know, guys that were not, shall we say, the most socially adept human beings, nonetheless kind of walked into this internet casino and came out gazillionaires. They invented something.
And, you know, God bless them, right? If you invent a browser or an app or whatever it is and you get rich off it, that's the American dream. I think that's wonderful. Somehow, though, as those guys progressed into middle age, two things were true. One is that they became convinced, as rich people often do become convinced, that great wealth means that they have great insights about everything.
And also that they still carried those kind of weird insecurities and resentments, you know, from being nerds or whatever they were back then. I mean, you look at Zuckerberg, you look at Musk, you look at, you know, who else do you want to pick? There's this kind of strange, almost outsider status that they can't seem to get over.
I mean, Musk and Trump, such a natural pairing to me of two guys that no matter how successful they get, are always trying to like figure out where the cool kids are.
Have you seen Zuck's new outfit? He's got he's had a little makeover. Good, actually. But, you know, I mean, it speaks to the insecurities you're talking about.
There was a lot of stuff in the social network that that was fictionalized. But, you know, there were I mean, there was an essential truth that, you know, this was kind of like, how did this guy become famous? Well, sort of hanging out and. feeling sort of socially excluded and creating this thing, and it makes you super rich. It doesn't make you super smart.
When I have interacted with some of these guys, David Sachs comes to mind. Nothing makes them angrier than telling them, look, this is not something you know about. No, you don't really understand the Ukraine war. I'm sure you invented a very good app that does a thing on my phone, and I'm glad you got rich from it, but that doesn't mean you have a clue about geopolitics in Central Europe.
They just get furious about that because, again, it's that sense of like, no, I matter. I'm important. I have big things to say about important stuff. So it's not surprising that when finally Trump says, hey, all the gates are down. Experts don't matter. All that matters is that you come and, you know, kiss my ring and you can talk to me about any kind of important stuff. That's catnip.
That weds this notion of that great wealth should imply great influence. As opposed to people saying, hey, you know, I'm a really rich guy, but this isn't my bailiwick, you know.
The other example of this is Mark Andreessen. And I'm kind of obsessed with him right now because everybody's focused on Musk because he's so public about everything. And Zuckerberg because he's so famous. And Bezos. And, you know, Zuckerberg and Bezos have bent the knee. And Musk is, you know, the most powerful person. oligarch in the history of the country.
I mean, like certainly in the post-World War II era. I mean, if you go back to the robber baron era, there's a good analogy of somebody. I'm going to take issue with that.
Okay, no, go ahead.
Let's take issue with that. I'm not sure. I want to wait to get to Andrew's. Go ahead. Let's talk about Musk.
He is certainly the most visible figure He has a lot of influence over a president-elect at the moment, but of course, as is always the case, whoever the last guy in the room is always has a lot of influence with Trump. He certainly seems to spend more time with Trump than – who's the guy I'm trying to think of? He's supposed to be really close to Trump. Vance, J.D. Vance. Oh, the vice president.
The invisible man, right? I mean, if you were from Mars, you would think that Elon Musk was Trump's vice president at this point. But, you know, all kidding aside, when I think of really influential oligarchs, I think of the guys we never talk about, right? The guys that for years, I mean, you know, if you talked about like the guys from these Wall Street firms, a guy like, you
Or somebody like that, who these people were part of this permanent elite that even when they were in their law offices in New York, they were running things in Washington. So I don't want us to fall too far down that hole about how powerful Musk is.
It's a fair caveat. Maybe powerful is the wrong word. I guess I'd say this. He's the country's biggest government contractor. And he also lives in the president-elect's bedroom, apparently, at his house. And so maybe powerful, but his influence, at least in this very moment, is not akin to anything that we've seen in a long time.
And so I think that he deserves a lot of attention and sacks, as you mentioned, because of his podcast gets a lot of attention.
Now he's like the crypto czar or whatever, you know, while, while we're on the subject, I mean, and Joe Rogan, who has a huge, huge amount of influence, you know, for a guy that used to eat bugs. I mean, it was, I mean, it's just, yeah. And I mean, I'm kind of interested in where Tucker is.
He's been, that's one of those things where, you know, while, while Musk is capering and cavorting, I'm kind of wondering where Tucker is. Well,
learn more once the foreign policy starts to come into focus in the next administration. But I mean, he was very influential in choosing the VP. So here's the thing about Andreessen, though. is he's almost as rich as all these other guys, right? He runs the most powerful, I think, I keep throwing that around, but one of the most influential, one of the top VC firms in the Valley.
He's on the board of Facebook. And he's very interested in AI and crypto. And I look at these two issues and like, what do these guys want, right? As I think you point out, a lot of them want attention. A lot of them are boys who were not popular in high school and have now got all this power and think they know everything and want attention. That's definitely part of it.
But they also are businessmen. They also want something financially. And Musk has a ton of interest. But the two main issues are AI and crypto and TikTok, which we've seen now Trump started to back off of. They were not happy with the regulatory regime around these products and these verticals.
And Andreessen, who has been going down to Mar-a-Lago, has apparently been interviewing people that are going to be regulating companies that he invests in. He explained to Barry Weiss why he ended up going all in for Trump. And it was around AI. And I want to listen to this.
Meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying and we came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.
What did you hear in those meetings?
AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't start, don't do AI startups, like don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point.
They basically said, AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're going to basically wrap them in a, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition. We're going to control them. And we're going to dictate what they do.
And then I said, well, I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because like the math for, you know, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere.
And, you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. Wow. Wow. And I said, I've just learned two very important things.
Wow. Okay. So there are two points here to tell your reaction to. One is he reveals that this is what he cares about. He doesn't want AI to be regulated in any way. And I think that is important in telling. Two, this conversation is obviously a lie, though. I'm sure he's unhappy with the Biden administration's policies towards AI.
But the notion that somebody in the Biden administration told them not to do AI startups and that they were going to classify big portions of AI like it was nukes. It was the Cold War. This doesn't feel like a real conversation, but what are your thoughts? Two thoughts.
One is that I thought when he said, I'm paraphrasing, I thought that word was doing a lot of work. Yeah, like I'm making this up, actually. I'm paraphrasing. Oh, okay. I'd like to know. I mean, I can't say that his account is accurate or not, but I'll just say that when he said, I'm paraphrasing, I said, sure sounds like a lot of paraphrasing going on there.
Usually as an interviewer, I'm learning how to be an interviewer. I'm relatively new to this. But if somebody tells you a story and your reaction to that is, wow, that seems crazy. Generally, maybe, I don't know, you follow up and try to get a little more. Who was this person that told you that? Was it Joe Biden himself? Was it Tony Blinken? Who was like, we're going to classify?
And is that how Cold War classification worked?
That was my second reaction as a bona fide Cold War expert. That is not what happened during the Cold War. I'm sure he thinks that that's what happened. No, entire parts of physics did not go dark during the Cold War. Work that was done with physics on things related to nuclear weapons became classified. One of the funniest moments, funniest, one of the
coolest moments of the cold war was when a when a doctoral student i want to say princeton basically wrote his thesis on how to make a nuclear bomb and the fbi showed up and the guy was like listen these things have been around for like 35 years or not they're not hard to figure out you know by the time i was finishing my teaching career i would tell students remember this is a technology that came out when you know like before people had tvs and airplanes still had propellers
So this notion that, oh, yes, well, they just classified. I don't think he knew what he was talking about there. My gut sense of that, you and I kind of talked about this a little this morning, is that I can't believe that anybody's entire position on who should be president rested on one conversation about AI. But maybe that's how he does things.
But it also struck me that that sounded very much, again, like somebody went down and said, I have many smart things to say about AI. And some government people said, well, we don't agree with all that. And he said, OK, screw you. Yeah. Screw you. And you know who will listen to me? The other moron. Right. The guy who doesn't understand a word of any of this and doesn't care.
He'll treat me because when you said they're looking for attention, the word I replaced in my head was respect.
Yeah, the respect that he deserves. The president should call me and should ask me about my expertise on anything that is all related to the technology sphere because I'm so successful. Or even unrelated. Or even unrelated.
Or even unrelated. I mean, I think, again, all these guys have this sense that I am fantastically wealthy, and somehow that hasn't bought me the respect that I crave in all of these areas. And the one place where I can really get it is in the place where expertise and knowledge just don't matter, which is going to be the Trump administration. We're going to have much more where this came from.
These are the guys to be monitoring right now. I can't believe I'm going to quote Bernie Sanders here, but wasn't it Sanders who said something this weekend about never have so few people had so much money and so much influence concentrated in such a small circle.
You know, I am not a big fan of Bernie Sanders, and he said a few things that I think are kind of kooky, but that was a pretty good summation.
I mean, that is a really... He's right about that, and it's important for the impact on all of our lives, for impact on policy, and for the Democrats' political layout, I think.
And for a movement that thinks of itself as populist, which is always, you know, that's never going to be not funny to say, well, we're the populist movement, which is why we're guided by a handful of oligarchs and billionaires, you know, doing things behind closed doors.
Yeah, it goes against the ethos of what the contrarian Rogan bros like. And eventually these nerds are going to bite off more than they can chew, I think. If there's somebody you haven't bought a Christmas gift for here on December 17th, it might be because you're a procrastinator or it might be because they're kind of hard to shop for.
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This deal is exclusive to listeners, so get yours now in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions apply. You mentioned the Assad defenestration, the overthrow of Assad and how you saw that from Europe. I do need to mention, I had referenced, I forget if it was with Bill or with Anne, the video of Clarissa Ward. And there was a man who was released by rebels from a Damascus jail.
And we talked about that and just how amazing that scene was. It turns out that that was a whiff and that the person that was imprisoned was not actually imprisoned. He was a intelligence officer for Assad that had tricked CNN. So Chris Ward's an amazing journalist, but CNN had to correct this kind of embarrassingly. Since I mentioned it on the pod the other day, I wanted to also mention that.
But regardless of that specific incident, these images of people being released from these prisons are moving, the real ones. And so I'm curious if you have just any other big picture thoughts on what's happening there.
Well, first, let me say about the Claris Award thing. I think people are just too hard on journalists on the ground in places like that. In the middle of a total shitstorm, you're going to make a mistake now and then.
But you should, instead of saying, aha, gotcha, as I think too many people wanted to do, because that's the new game with journalists for new, for 10 years or so, you should say, wow, it's really great that somebody had the stones to actually be there and
in places that you would be you'd be standing outside the embassy screaming to get you out in the middle of that so i you know i i give all the credit in the world to those folks and if they have the occasional stubbing of their toe that's that's just the way it's it happens and good for them for being there but people should understand how epical this is i mean this is the assad family has been in charge of syria since i was a boy a long time indeed
Well, you know, we've had our old man jokes. An epoch is correct. Yes. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
More onions on my belt, as was the style at the time.
As was the style at the time, exactly. The idea now that this regime has collapsed, the Iranians are in a tough spot, the Russians have been flushed out of their one major geopolitical toehold outside of Eurasia, which is amazing.
By the way, for the Russians, one thing that I think some of the better reports have focused on, but that has been glossed over in all of the jubilation, Putin for years made his name by saying, if you're a friend of mine, you don't go down. I don't let that happen. My friends don't get pushed out of power. And this time, this happens like in, you know, 72 hours. And Putin's like, well...
What are you going to do? You know, I'm busy. That stinks. That's a big black market. Unfortunately, and I'm going to bring this back to American politics. Unfortunately, instead of being able to, you know, really hold on the pressure and keep pushing back the Russian position in Ukraine and, you know, in other parts of the world, he's going to get a respite now, which is really unfortunate.
But I'm glad it happened before Trump came into office.
It is really unfortunate. All right. I feel an obligation to mention because we have all these school shootings happen so often that it's like, what do you even say anymore? There's not much to say. There's not much to talk about it. But there was a student and a teacher killed at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday by a 15-year-old girl.
A second grader called in the shooting, which tells you something about American life. The one thing I do want to mention about this, we don't need to go round and round on all the views around guns and just how irresponsible everyone has been on this issue over the course of decades now. But this young girl wrote about some Turkish neo-Nazis that she was reading online.
I
I'm sorry to be like a flip about this because it is just another horrific tragedy. And these people have died. But I don't know, man. I mean, like that is really dystopian. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that before we can end people on a higher note. But I thought it was worth mentioning.
Well, here is my darkest thought. It is my Christmas wish that something alleviates it. When I wrote books about expertise and the decline of democracy in America, I focused pretty heavily on narcissism. What I regret is that I didn't talk more about something that I'm coming to realize is really destroying the country, and that is the epidemic of loneliness.
And the problem where that intersects with the Internet is when you are lonely and isolated, the Internet is this wonderland, this carnival, this theme park that you can just wander through. You know, the days where a kid got radicalized by reading Catcher in the Rye or, you know, I don't know, you know, pick your, you know, the
anarchist cookbook or whatever it was at least had to go to a bookstore had to walk through a library had to do something as opposed to just sitting in the dark alone isolated in your room and saying i'm a teenager i'm troubled i have issues oh look turkish nazis something that you probably you know 30 years ago if you lived in wisconsin you were not going to be really
you know aware of able to encounter and so that one thing that we know from research about extremist groups is that they are reaching out across boundaries to feel like they're bigger than they are to say i mean the way i always put it is every town has one guy who thinks that aliens are stealing our water right problem is if you have a thousand towns and the one guy in each town reaches others well there's a thousand of us now we're we're a union we're a movement
No, you're just the one guy in every town who is, you know, committed to these kind of bonkers ideas. And the Internet has really I was such an Internet optimist. I mean, I was the guy when I was in my late 20s, I was a young professor at Dartmouth. I was the guy that showed other people how to use like Netscape.
Speaking of Andreessen, you know, I was like, I was this person on social media, you know, in my 20s, like teaching people how to get on to fucking MySpace and Twitter and stuff.
Showing these 50, 60 year old professors that were my senior colleagues saying, hey, you know, there's this thing and it's called a browser and it's cool. But I've come to realize that it's, you know, it's basically the Internet is a giant bad neighborhood that you can wander around in if you don't if you just have too much time on your hands and it'll just lead you into trouble.
Well, love your kids. What's the answer to anybody listening? It's going to be counterintuitive to say, stop listening to podcasts and go outside and go to a movie with a friend.
No, it's not. That's not counterintuitive. That's fine. I agree with that. And people should go do that. And, you know, you should get involved with other young people. You know, one of the most fulfilling things that I had done was done various mentorship programs. And frankly, I fell down on that a little bit during 2024. But, you know, going to work with kids, doing homework with them.
It's fulfilling for you. It's good for them. Teens need to have encounters with other humans that are constructive and that are filled with demonstrations that people care about them. And I do think that makes a difference and people should look into that. That'd be a good New Year's resolution for everybody in 2025. Let's end with, I have to dunk on you. You're so proud of yourself.
You posted on the blue sky. You skied a Christmas playlist. And I got to tell you. I have put together over two decades. I've curated the ultimate Christmas playlist, the best playlist that exists on planet Earth. We'll put it in the show notes. We'll compare it to your sad limp playlist.
I have gone through all of the renditions of Joy to the World and just pulled out the best ones of everything, of O Come All Ye Faithful. We have everything from Nat King Cole to
all the way up to suffion stevens we have random songs that just mention christmas in the middle that aren't christmas songs it's everything it includes no crap no fucking no paul mccartney wonderful christmas time bullshit all right it's only bangers all right and so i put that together i want you to be able to do things that are fulfilling for you in your life so i'm happy that you're kind of just starting one of your own but i just i want to kind of set a higher bar for you
My Christmas Spotify list. OK, first of all, I'm going to apologize for wonderful Christmas time. Somebody asked me why it's in there. I said, I don't know. I had fond memories of my freshman year in college when it came out. And so I put it there because even though I put it in my list, I turn it off when it's on the radio because I can't help it.
I think somebody had a great line about that, which was Paul set out to write a Christmas song, and instead he decided to experiment with every sound a synthesizer could make, which I think is true. On the other hand, I tried specifically to make it a combination of kind of 70s and 80s pop linked to schlock. So, of course, Andy Williams is in there. Of course he is.
You don't have a Christmas list without Andy Williams. And if you and I are going to disagree about this, I'm not sure we can be friends. Okay.
I don't have any Andy Williams, so this will be a challenge. Oh, my God. Look at mine. I will peruse your Andy Williams, and we'll take it from there.
You are familiar with a recording artist named Andy Williams, right? You know he existed and was the voice of Christmas for most of the 1960s and 70s.
I mean, the fact that that person exists, yes. Like, what does he look like? Oh, my God. Any fun facts about him?
I don't have. This is why generational conflict exists at all. But I also had stuff in there. I tried to put in things that were not people that didn't think of, you know, as cheery Christmas stuff like Circle of Steel by Gordon Lightfoot, which is a wonderful song. Yes, I included Do They Know It's Christmas? Because actually.
I kind of like that song in part because Sir Bob hated it after he wrote it. And I've always enjoyed... I'm Greek Orthodox. And one of the things that always makes me laugh about that song is he wrote it about Ethiopia and the famine in Ethiopia. Apparently, Sir Bob didn't realize the major religion in Ethiopia is Orthodox Christianity. So yes, in fact, they did know it was Christmas. Yeah.
you know, but I have this cool 12 inch and you and I fooled around with it in the green room. I have this cool 12 inch that I bought, which again, why do, why do I like it? Because I have fond memories of buying this in a Boston record store. And the other side is this long outro where they finally finish. And then Bob Geldof says it's now like, you know, 6am on November 25th, 1984.
And everybody on the record comes in to say, Merry Christmas. You know, hi, I'm Sarah from Banana Rama. Happy Christmas. Um, The guys from big country, they're all Scottish. One of them says, we're here to wish you Merry Christmas. Feed the people. Stay alive. It's just this great 80s kind of time.
And then, of course, at the end of it all, Paul McCartney calls in because, of course, he wouldn't be on the record. But David Bowie shows up in this very quiet recording. And he's like, you know, the scary David Bowie voice about how people are starving. It's just this great kind of 80s Times capsule. So give me my nostalgic moments.
But other than that, there's stuff on there that I will absolutely defend, including if you don't like the Waitress's Christmas rapping. Oh, a great song.
Why don't we end on an agreement? All right, there we are. That's at the top of my list. The Waitress's Christmas Wrapping is so wonderful. That will wrap up the show. We'll take it out with the Waitress's Christmas Wrapping. And Jason, if you can throw in just David Bowie wishing everyone a Christmas 1984, that would be nice as well. And Tom Nichols, we can say Merry Christmas again.
So Merry Christmas to you. Thank God. I will see you in the new year. As Freddie Mercury would say, thank God it's Christmas. Thank God it's Christmas. That's Tom Nichols. We'll see him in 2025. We'll be back here tomorrow with a serious discussion and a serious guest, as is needed in these serious times. We'll see you all then. Peace.
This is David Bowie. It's Christmas 1984. And there are more starving folk on our planet than ever before. Please give a thought for them this season and do whatever you can, however small, to help them live. Have a peaceful New Year.
I just need to catch my breath. Down the pitcher, frozen landscape, chilled this room for 24 days. Evergreen, sparkling snow, get this winter over with. Flashback to springtime, saw him again. Would have been good to go for lunch. Couldn't agree, we were both free. We tried, we said we'd keep in touch. Didn't, of course, till summertime. Out to the beach, to his boat, could I join him?
No, this time it was me. Sunburn in the third degree. Now the calendar's just one page, of course I am excited.
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
Lights are going up. Snow is falling down. There's a feeling of goodwill around town. It could only mean one thing. McRib is here. People throwing parties, ugly sweaters everywhere. Stockings hung up by the chimney with care. It could only
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