Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Bullworld Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got a double header.

Speaker 2 I called in Alex Kantrowitz, a tech reporter, to try to educate me on what in the hell is going on with DeepSeek, the Chinese AI advancement that Mark Andreessen called a Sputnik moment for the country.

Speaker 2 So I wanted to figure out what the hell is going on with that. So he'll be up in segment two.
But first, I get to turn the mic around on somebody you might know. You might have heard of it.

Speaker 2 He wrote about in his book that he's, he's kind of a big deal. He's kind of a minor celebrity that gets noticed in the airports now.
His name's Chris Hayes.

Speaker 2 He's on MSNBC and he's got a new book out, The Sirens Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. How you doing, man?

Speaker 3 I'm great, man. How are you?

Speaker 2 I'm doing well. You're dealing with the gaze of strangers? Okay.

Speaker 3 I'm dealing with the gaze of strangers. I'm pretty used to it by now, but it'll mess you up a little bit in the beginning.
Actually, the press tour is weird.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't, I think when I was younger, I liked it more. I don't love being the object of press.

Speaker 3 You know, partly because there's like a control issue. Yeah, right.
Like, when it's your show, you control it.

Speaker 3 Whereas with it's other people, they're controlling it, which is the reason that a lot of powerful people don't like journalism. Like, fundamentally,

Speaker 3 you don't have, if you're a powerful person, you're used to people like deferring to you and being very differential and having control over them. And like, that's just not the way journalism works.

Speaker 3 It's like, it's interesting that you can see all this rage by all these powerful people about against journalism.

Speaker 3 Fundamentally, it's because the power dynamics of journalism are intentionally not in the hands of the most powerful people.

Speaker 2 They like attention and control.

Speaker 2 They like to be lavished, praise, praise to be lavished. That's exactly right.
It's exactly right. It's exactly the manner in which they wish for it to be lavished on them.
Okay.

Speaker 2 You have some interesting insights about things that I dealt with in therapy, about the difference between attention and recognition.

Speaker 2 So we're going to do deep thinking, but unfortunately, we have to do news too. There's some news last night.

Speaker 2 The Office of Management and Budget, this seems where all the problems are going to be coming from in the next administration, put out a memo ending all grant making.

Speaker 2 They put a stop work order on all grants. This includes USAID and others.

Speaker 2 Among the potentially the things affected by this is the program that helps women, infants, and children that need food, the WIC program. Thoughts?

Speaker 3 There's a few different tracks in which they're operating on, but one of them is, and we started to see this last week with like people finding out that they're like National Institutes of Health grant panels were being canceled,

Speaker 3 clinical trials being canceled, like, oh, or skin cancer drug.

Speaker 2 They are

Speaker 3 trying to break the whole thing

Speaker 3 because they want to refashion it such that the entirety of the federal government is an object tool of the one person who occupies the presidency and nothing else. There are a bunch of statutory

Speaker 3 requirements in place that

Speaker 3 are geared towards the presidency serving the public interest. And

Speaker 3 they want to turn it into a 19th century urban machine with nuclear weapons. Like that's the goal here.

Speaker 2 I was going back even further than that. I was thinking like spoil system.
Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 I mean, yes, the spoil system is an example.

Speaker 3 But now the other thing about this OMB thing that's nuts to me is it's also, as with a bunch of other stuff we could talk about, it's, I think, flatly illegal.

Speaker 3 They have this theory, which they have said

Speaker 3 that despite the fact that the founders were very clear about who has the power of the purse and put that in Article 1.

Speaker 2 to Congress. And who was that that has the power of the purse? Is that the Trump family organization? That's Barron.
Barron has...

Speaker 3 Yeah, the founders gave Baron the power of the purse.

Speaker 2 All right, good. Thanks for clearing that up.
Some listeners might not be coming up.

Speaker 3 Madison Federalist 45. He says, there shall be a tall son and he

Speaker 3 shall, no, they're very clear about the power of the purse. It's like we all learned this, you know, day one of constitutional structure.

Speaker 3 They're the appropriators. All of this stuff has been appropriated duly by Congress and passed.
Their position is the president has ultimate veto over every cent that gets spent.

Speaker 3 It's ludicrous, but that's what their contention is.

Speaker 2 And I think they'll probably have some friendly courts as to that effect. And we've seen some of this.
It's interesting.

Speaker 3 The first time around, there was a lot more wink and nod, like cutesiness. For instance,

Speaker 3 the Muslim ban.

Speaker 3 It was always the case that a...

Speaker 3 ban based on religion was flatly unconstitutional. So when it came time to do a Muslim ban, they had this sort of like plausible fig leaf and they like threw in North Korea.

Speaker 3 I remember they like threw in North Korea and Venezuela, I think, because it's like, oh, it's not a Muslim ban. It's like these countries that we have some reason to be fearful of.

Speaker 3 This time around, they are doing things flatly constitutional legal in a flatly unconstitutional legal manner with no fig leaf. They are firing the IGs.
They are firing career people to DOJ.

Speaker 3 That's illegal. They can't do it.
They are stopping grants. They're freezing cancer research because they think courts will say it's fine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's interesting. I guess maybe I should have had your wife on for this question, but it's

Speaker 2 in some ways kind of the inverse of the other conservative, like big legal win actually during the Biden years, which was the Chevron case, right?

Speaker 2 Which was like essentially they were arguing that the agencies didn't have carp launch to interpret ambiguous laws, right?

Speaker 2 Like they didn't want the EPA going rogue and doing things that they didn't, that weren't specifically prescribed by Congress.

Speaker 2 But they're saying that you, the EPA can stop doing things that were specifically prescribed by Congress.

Speaker 3 Yes, because their position, the way these two things are sort of different sides of the same coin, is that the only person with any power is the president and everything flows from him.

Speaker 3 And therefore, any part of the administrative state or the executive that doesn't do exactly what his whims are moment to moment is illegitimate.

Speaker 2 That takes us to the other news item that I wanted to cover.

Speaker 2 The acting attorney general moved on Monday to fire several Justice Department officials who worked on the federal criminal investigations into Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, again, the acting attorney general wrote that he did not believe they, quote, could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president.

Speaker 2 Is that the job of career Justice Department officials to faithfully implement the president's agenda? That seems like a change in their scope.

Speaker 3 That's a change. Again, I mean, what they've done in the Department of Justice, as my favorite dog on the internet, South Paw said, would be a scandal, an administration-consuming scandal.

Speaker 3 Like, there's a bunch of stuff they've done already.

Speaker 3 For instance, dropping cases hasn't happened in the post-Watergate era that active cases just get dropped on day one, the way that they've dropped cases against Jan 6 folks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for example, the Hunter Biden case was not

Speaker 2 dropped.

Speaker 3 Not only was it not dropped, they like, they got a little special little universe to keep going

Speaker 3 they gave it a bonus unit yeah they gave it a bonus unit um so right that's a great comparison the conception of the department of justice as basically

Speaker 3 serving the president specifically and personally as opposed to serving the nation the constitution

Speaker 3 which is clearly what they view as totally new and the firing of career department of justice officials which again who have statutory legal civil servant protection, which makes it illegal to fire them in this manner?

Speaker 2 Just full stop.

Speaker 3 Like, do you want

Speaker 2 your

Speaker 3 meat inspection and the people running nuclear safety and the frontline prosecutors to be people who were in Donald Trump's truth social replies or were hanging around him at Mar-a-Lago, and that's the reason they got the job?

Speaker 3 Or do you want people who know how to inspect meat, preserve preserve nuclear safety, prosecute cases? Like they are, like when I said a machine politics with nuclear weapons, this is

Speaker 2 purge

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 3 merit-based hiring. This is, can I say one more thing? Can I get to do one riff here?

Speaker 2 Please. Dude, just go.

Speaker 3 Literally, the way that we conceive of the civil service protections that happen.

Speaker 3 starting in the late 19th century under the Hayes administration and continue that turned the federal government from a spoil system machine to what we have now

Speaker 3 is a merit system. The incredible thing is what they are doing is they are attacking the merit system.

Speaker 3 The merit system is what we have that protects the civil servant because what replaces that is funkies, lackeys of the president, like political apparatchiks.

Speaker 3 So what they are doing is destroying the merit system.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the prime example of this is, have you paid attention on the show to the gentleman that's been put in place as the acting district attorney for D.C.?

Speaker 3 Yeah, oh, yeah, nice guy, Eagle Ed,

Speaker 2 Eagle Ed Martin. Yep, I mean, this is again, it's hard to keep track of all these people that are being hired.
Like, this is a preposterous choice to be the attorney, the district attorney.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's like a stop-the-steel guy who represented a bunch of Jansen folks and was like, before that, was like Phyllis Schlafly's butt boy.

Speaker 2 I mean, he was not, this is not like that's your characterization. Yeah, it was

Speaker 2 mine. I wasn't putting it onto you.

Speaker 2 But, like, this is not, you know, this is not somebody that like has a bunch of experience, you know, prosecuting or is a constitutional expert. No, he hasn't.

Speaker 2 I mean, like, you know, you have people such as that. Like, you can say what you want about Neil Gorsuch.

Speaker 2 You know, you might not like his politics, but like he's thought seriously about the Constitution and the laws.

Speaker 3 Yes, he is plausibly credentialed to be a Supreme Court justice. I mean, look at Pete Hegseth.
I mean, to me, the Hegseth thing was really the test for the entire Republican Party because

Speaker 3 Pete Hegseth, forget the fact that there's an extremely serious accusation of sexual assault that he denies that he paid a woman to settle.

Speaker 2 $50,000.

Speaker 3 Forget the fact that there are other accusations of essentially misconduct, hostile workplace environment. Forget the fact that he like appears to,

Speaker 3 by the accounts of multiple people, including his ex-sister-in-law in a signed affidavit, have a genuine and wrenching, frankly, drinking problem.

Speaker 2 Put all that aside, okay?

Speaker 3 Let's say none of that is true. And the guy was totally outstanding.
He ran two little nonprofits and ran them into the ground.

Speaker 3 And he's a weekend cable news host who is now going to run the most powerful military in the history of human civilization. Is that bad? It is a

Speaker 6 ludicrous.

Speaker 3 His resume, I assume you've done some hiring before.

Speaker 2 His resume comes in the door, it gets a half a second look and is put in the pile to not interview he is a absolutely ludicrous pick and the idea that republicans

Speaker 3 who presumably genuinely do in their hearts care about for instance american military strength dominance and protection of the american people some of them i mean they they don't though that's the thing if you voted for hegseth you don't like fundamentally the hegseth both is a test because if you voted for him you genuinely do not care about that and the prosecutors and this is why no that's true about the Hexa thing, but I think it's interesting, right?

Speaker 2 Like you would presume, we don't know, like among these dozen of prosecutors that have been removed are people that like did a good job prosecuting criminals and like moved up through the government.

Speaker 3 Dude, these are people that their resumes are like, they're all like public, they're like public corruption people.

Speaker 2 Right. So, you know, again, you would think that if you did genuinely care about

Speaker 2 holding criminals to account in law and order, then like you could at least have gone through the resume pile of these people and said, okay, well, we'll keep a couple of you. Yeah.
All right.

Speaker 2 The very first night we were together on the night Donald Trump, the great and good American people bestowed upon him a second presidency. You were coming off the set.

Speaker 2 I was going on for the late night shift. I don't know why I agreed to that.
And we were chatting for a second.

Speaker 3 Is that election night?

Speaker 2 Election night, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. That's right.
I did see you in the handoff.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I was very.

Speaker 2 The only thing I was thinking about is don't be on one of those like YouTube reels. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That was my only obligation that night.

Speaker 4 It was challenging.

Speaker 2 But during our brief handoff exchange, I was like, what do you think? You just said on the set, and we just followed up on it.

Speaker 2 That, like, the interesting thing about this, there's a lot of bad, but like, the interesting thing is, like, at that moment, like, we didn't really know, right?

Speaker 2 Like, might he just have decided that he got his get out of jail for free card.

Speaker 2 He, he won, he's just going to golf and like the government will just do whatever it does, and he won't really care, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And, like, he'll just like want to hang out with rich people and want people to call him sir and stuff. Yeah.
Or like, you know, the other side of the spectrum is,

Speaker 2 you know, start immediately moving to like create an urbanist state like here in America. Right.
And it could be anywhere in between those things.

Speaker 2 I'm wondering now, like two and a half months later, what, where you assess our trajectory is on that spectrum.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's the worst case scenario.

Speaker 2 I mean, the worst? I mean,

Speaker 3 trending towards the worst.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think it's, it's definitely more towards a frontal assault on the constitutional order to be remade in the form form of a personalist Donald Trump authoritarian state.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Okay, good. Well, between you and JVL's newsletter yesterday, his triad newsletter was talking about how we shouldn't limit our imaginations, that we might be on a path towards Putinism.

Speaker 2 I'm summarizing it. It was very long, but it was like kind of talking about how Putin wasn't Putin in 1998 and like you didn't really know.
I mean, I thought that was a little much even for me.

Speaker 2 And I've got about the darkest sunglasses on that you could have. I don't know.
I guess my one caveat to that is like, in some ways, it's just horrifying, right?

Speaker 2 That like you have the four richest people in the world, essentially, like hanging out around Donald Trump. On like the other hand, wouldn't I rather that than like Corey Lewandowski?

Speaker 2 You know, and might there be some sort of check?

Speaker 2 Like the fact that these like noxious people that we're about to get into next, the Mark Andreessens of the world and the Zucks, like isn't the fact that they're calling him like a little bit of a check or no no for you?

Speaker 3 I don't think that figures one way or the other because I think that's it's so transactional. Yeah, I don't think they have much power to check him, or I don't even know how much desire they do.

Speaker 2 I think they want to get out what they get out.

Speaker 3 So much of that has to do with this very specific thing around tech and AI and like the end of the rainbow, basically.

Speaker 3 When I say trending towards worst case, I think it's important to distinguish between what they're going to try to do and whether they'll succeed.

Speaker 3 But I think that the first week, to me, the pardon of everyone from Jan 6 was such an indicator that

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 3 whole hog is kind of be the way to go. I mean, the order they signed, that he signed yesterday, in which he kicked all trans folks out of the military, calling them dishonorable and liars.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't have it in front of me, but there was some statement.

Speaker 2 It just kind of got lost in the shuffle a little bit, but there was like a sentence in there that was like, any man that's pretending to be a woman doesn't have the whatever, integrity. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's dishonorable and a liar. It's also a flatly, I think, unconstitutional order because it orders the military to discriminate, which is a violation of the U.S.
Constitution and equal protection.

Speaker 2 You know, again. They're going to be keeping the courts busy.

Speaker 3 That's my high take. So I'm not saying they're going to be successful, but I think in terms of like what their ambitions are.
And I'm saying they here because I do think to your point.

Speaker 2 Vote, Miller. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Like Donald Trump didn't write that OMB order. Does Donald Trump care whether they freeze funding or not?

Speaker 3 Like that's a project that is in his orbit that animates his hatreds, but is not, he doesn't have ideological projects like that.

Speaker 3 Like, that's an ideological crusade by people who have sold him on it because they hate the same people.

Speaker 2 That's a good observation. And I mean, look, I go back to the secret video about the Russ Vote that the, I forget the organization did.
So I'll shout it out in the show notes. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I'll shout them out in the show notes. But like.
He gave away the game all right there. I mean, like, the guy, I guess you got to hand it to him.
Do you have to hand it to ISIS?

Speaker 2 I guess you got to hand it to Resvote. Like he was like, I've spent the last four years basically writing all these executive orders that we've seen in the last week.
It's essentially what he said.

Speaker 2 Like they were prepared. They knew

Speaker 2 where the weak spots and the soft spots were where they could challenge the courts. In some cases, they don't really care if there's weak spot or soft spot.
But

Speaker 2 it has been just

Speaker 2 an organized and regimented effort to tear down anything in the government that they don't think serves them, which is basically everything.

Speaker 3 You know, there was this cable that the German ambassador U.S. sent back to Germany.
Did you see this?

Speaker 3 It was reported of like, and there was just something sort of chilling about it because like it's, you know, we've, we've read the American cables that are going back to DC in 31, 32, 33 from American ambassadors.

Speaker 3 So here's a German ambassador basically saying he's going to try to undo and remake the constitutional order. This is the cable that he sends back to Berlin.
And I think that

Speaker 3 that's the project here.

Speaker 3 Again, I don't think Donald Trump could articulate in those terms, but the constitution, a new constitutional order that is around essentially a kind of personalist cult of personality around the president as the only figure with any authority in the constitutional order.

Speaker 2 Well, that's exciting. All right.
Things are going great. Things are good.
You're good. Life's good.
But look, can I just say

Speaker 3 I don't think if people are listening to this and like getting bummed out,

Speaker 3 I think public opinion matters a tremendous amount. I think like calling up representatives matters a huge amount.
Going to their offices, like calling your senator.

Speaker 3 No Democrat should vote for Russ vote. And if you're in a state that has a Republican senator, you should call them up too.
Like

Speaker 3 public opinion still does matter and still should matter for some of these people. And right now, there's this kind of, it's this weird period, I feel like, between

Speaker 3 the lightning and the thunder where

Speaker 3 people haven't gotten their kind of wits about them and they're trying this kind kind of blitzkrieg to mow everyone down.

Speaker 3 But public backlash isn't going to go away. I truly believe that.
It's a question of whether it gets organized, formalized, and wielded in enough time to stop some of this damage.

Speaker 2 That kind of backs me into the book. So we'll do the politics part of the book first and then we'll kind of end with the phones and the social element of it.
Because,

Speaker 2 you know, you talk about how we're in the attention age and the way that Trump has leveraged that, right?

Speaker 2 And the way that, in some ways, that the Democrats, I think particularly at the presidential level, have not quite figured out how to leverage it in the same way.

Speaker 2 And just in this specific example, first, you know, my colleague Sam Stein, your pal, wrote this this morning. He writes, the two parties running at different speeds.

Speaker 2 Senate Democrats are holding a press conference today to condemn the pardoning of January 6ers.

Speaker 2 That was a week ago. Unclear if there is anything today to go after the OMB power play to take over all federal grant money.
And like, there is something to that, right?

Speaker 2 Like, you could imagine this being a moment where

Speaker 2 either a single Democratic figure or, you know, sort of a democratic organization or some, you know, leader on the hill like seized this moment to grab a bunch of attention for themselves.

Speaker 2 And that hasn't really happened. I, you know, you can shout at random people.
Chris Murphy's been out there. AOC has been talking.

Speaker 2 But like that hasn't really happened anywhere kind of near the scale of how like Trump would have done it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, the argument I make in the book is that, you know, we live in the attention age.
Attention is the defining and most important important resource of the age.

Speaker 3 And that in the public realm and in politics, Donald Trump has kind of intuited that more than any other figure.

Speaker 3 And the key insight there is that it's better to get lots of attention, dominate attention, even if a lot of it's negative, than to choose to not get attention so that you don't get people.

Speaker 2 outraged at you, right?

Speaker 3 This trade-off is the key.

Speaker 2 And again, the trade-off has drawbacks.

Speaker 3 Like Donald Trump has had been upside down and underwater in favorability most of his political career. He barely pulled out this hat-trick the first time he got elected.

Speaker 3 He lost the second time after being the incumbent, which is fairly rare.

Speaker 3 You know, he won this time, but it's not like this foolproof magical quality that means he's like, you know, rolling up 1964, 1984, 1972, you know, FDR kind of margins.

Speaker 3 It's narrow, but it's effective. And I think.
Democrats operate in

Speaker 3 this fear of attention because that might be negative. They operate in a universe in which attention is very mediated.

Speaker 3 It's amazing how much Democratic politicians like worry about what the Washington Post editorial board will say. Like they genuinely do.

Speaker 2 No, and even back to me, I'm laughing, but just to be honest, just, I'm just, this is how quickly things have moved in eight years. I was running communications for Jeb Bush eight years ago.

Speaker 2 We cared if we got fact-checked. Yeah.
If we got a negative fact-check, we cared. Jeb cared.
The campaign cared. We did not want to be fact-checked.

Speaker 2 Like, that seems seems so, in some ways, kind of nice and earnest and cute, but also like absurd.

Speaker 3 Well, there's two things there that I think is also important.

Speaker 3 You can't talk about this distinction between the two parties without talking about this, which is like, I care a lot if I get something wrong on my show because it's important to me to tell the truth and be correct.

Speaker 3 Like independent of the attentional universe, like as a human being who has an ethical commitment to the work that I do.

Speaker 3 So part of you caring about getting fact-checked was like, you guys didn't want to be wrong about stuff, right?

Speaker 2 We wanted to have a modicum of integrity, like within the bounds of within the bounds of campaign discourse, within the bounds of campaign discourse.

Speaker 3 And I think part of what we see here, too, is that like

Speaker 3 the other uncomfortable truth here is that this attentional environment, which I describe as like a Hobbesian war of all against all, selects for sociopaths. It, it, you know, it,

Speaker 3 you can't,

Speaker 3 you can't fake it. This is really the key thing.
The reason Trump can pull this off is because he is so broken at such a deep level. This is the only way he can operate as a person.

Speaker 3 But if you try to pretend to be that broken,

Speaker 3 you get the DeSantis campaign.

Speaker 2 You get DeSantis. That was exactly what was in my head before you said that.

Speaker 3 You can't pretend to be that shameless or be that broken. Like, this is really a deeper problem, right?

Speaker 3 Because it's like, I don't want politicians that have that brokenness in them as the thing that's selected for here.

Speaker 3 There are people who do seem to have a gift for the attention age that are not coming from that.

Speaker 3 I think AOC is really the best example of someone who doesn't seem to me like a sociopath and has a real intuitive feel for attention. And part of what she does is a great example.

Speaker 3 When she does those Instagram lives, like I'm talking to you as a former comm staffer. Like right now, I'm talking to you just to pull back the curtain.
My PR people are on this podcast. okay?

Speaker 2 What's up, Natalie?

Speaker 3 Because they're like, they want, they're nervous. I'm going to say something, right? I mean, they trust me, but like, that's part of their job, okay?

Speaker 3 Like, when she does an Instagram live,

Speaker 3 that's scary for staff.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 For comm staff, it's scary for her to do an Instagram live, but it's also no risk, no reward.

Speaker 2 There is an authentic way to get attention. It doesn't have to be, you don't have to be a total sociopath.
It does help to be a shameless sociopath. That is Trump's superpower.

Speaker 2 But I hate to pick on Gretchen Whitner, but it just, it happened yesterday, and I was watching her on CBS this morning.

Speaker 2 And my buddy Peter Hamby at Puck wrote about this and he writes, this interview wasn't bad or embarrassing. It was just rote, cautious, and forgettable.

Speaker 2 I want to play one clip from it, just to give people an example of what we're talking about.

Speaker 7 I think this is the story of Michigan, right? We're a very diverse state. We are a state that tends to go back and forth and likes some balance in our politics.

Speaker 7 And I've won twice with big margins within two years of Donald Trump also carrying Michigan. And so, as I said in my recent address, I'm not out looking for fights.

Speaker 7 I'm always looking to collaborate first. I won't back down from an important one, that's for sure.

Speaker 7 But I got a job to do, and we're going to stay focused on moving forward and trying to find common ground where we can.

Speaker 2 What's the lesson in that split-ticket situation for you as governor now?

Speaker 7 I think it's to keep listening to the people, and that's part of what I talk about in my book that we've just made for young adults. These are lessons that you can use at any age, right?

Speaker 7 Learning how to listen is a superpower that not enough people tap into.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's nice.

Speaker 3 That's all nice. That's fine.
That's fine.

Speaker 2 But Donald Trump is like tearing apart the government right now. And you are plausibly supposed to be one of the people running against him in 2028.

Speaker 2 Like he is shutting down all grants for any organization. He's firing people.
It's a night of the long knives. And you're like, you know, we got to find some common ground right now.

Speaker 3 You could say all that and be like, what I will fight is like taking cop beaters and putting them out on the street to menace our members of law enforcement.

Speaker 3 What I will fight is freezing all cancer funding in this country and scientific research.

Speaker 3 Like you could do that whole thing and then wield some sort of attack, but they're all, everyone's flat-footed. Everyone's second-guessing themselves.

Speaker 3 But again, here's where this is an important thing. And again, I write about this at some length in the book that's about the politics of this.

Speaker 3 It's not like that caution hasn't also paid off for Democrats. So like one of the most cautious gubernatorial campaigns that I've ever seen was the Arizona Katie Hobbs.

Speaker 3 I wanted to be a chit of the bunch.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Katie Hobbs runs for governor in Arizona against Carrie Lake, who's like the ultimate attention age figure. She was a news broadcaster.
She says outrageous things.

Speaker 3 Hobbs was just like low profile, kept it tight, disciplined, didn't court a lot of attention. And she won that race.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 Republicans have lost a lot of races with Trump-like figures who have ended up on the wrong side of this negative attention trade.

Speaker 3 So again, it's not so clear-cut that it's just the case that if you're a troll, you have power. It takes a special kind of person to pull it off.

Speaker 2 I do think, though, that presidential races and governor's races, we kind of like lump all this stuff together. No,

Speaker 3 president is just totally different.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a different in 1992. It was so, you know, I said this about Jeb always like, he was very much like his father.
Like his father in 1992 was in a good shape to run a presidential race.

Speaker 2 It was a very different world, right? I don't think H.W. Bush would have been president if he was running in 2016.
He would have been like Mitt Romney, probably.

Speaker 2 It would have been that sort of race, right?

Speaker 2 It's just, it's a different time and you can beat Tony Evers and be a good governor of Wisconsin who is cautious and whatever, but like the type of attention on a presidential race. Roy Cooper.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Roy Cooper.

Speaker 2 People don't talk about their governors, right? Like you're on the local, like really governor's races are not all that different from 1992. They're a little different, but not all that different.

Speaker 2 Like presidential races now are all consuming. They're like celebrity figures.
You're talking about them on the Nelk Boys and on Sports Fog, right? Like and fitness influencers.

Speaker 2 Everybody's talking about it. You know what I mean? It's different.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I agree. And I think partly that is,

Speaker 3 I don't know how much that's a Trumpian transformation, though, too. I mean, I think partly it is.

Speaker 2 Obama participated in that?

Speaker 3 Obama was an enormous cultural figure. I mean, he's the most famous person in the country and the biggest star in the world.
That was the attack ad from John McCain.

Speaker 3 That was a very funny attack ad. People forget this.
It was like, he's the biggest star in the world. And it was like, the attack ad was like, this guy is so popular.
People love him so much.

Speaker 2 It was like, I'm not sure this works for you. He's such a famous fancy boy.
Like, Justin Bieber. He's a famous fancy boy.

Speaker 3 He's a fancy lad.

Speaker 3 But yeah, I think the other thing that I think is worth thinking about here. in the context of like attention as resource and how it functions in politics is

Speaker 3 the less public attention there is on a political race, the more it could function in the old way. Right.
So, you know, state rep races are still a lot of knocking on doors and talking to people.

Speaker 3 And I think what you're saying is, yes, it's probably, there's still a lot of that at the gubernatory level.

Speaker 3 But once you get to the presidential level, raising a lot of money and running a bunch of ads and door knocking campaign, which the Harris campaign, to be clear, did very well and pretty effectively.

Speaker 3 Like something I always tell people about the Harris campaign is look at the margins of that race in New York, New Jersey, and California.

Speaker 3 The campaign was actually pretty darn effective because the environment sucked.

Speaker 3 Like they did much better in the swing states where they were running a focused campaign than in the states where there was zero campaign. The states of zero campaign, those numbers are nuts, right?

Speaker 3 Like that's why he won the popular vote. And yet it wasn't enough to overcome the overall attentional environment, which is the thing that Trump dominated.
Right.

Speaker 2 It's NBA versus high school basketball. You can improve on the margins in the NBA if you have good bounce passes and dribbling and fundamentals.
Right. Yeah.
But at the end of the day,

Speaker 2 you need top-level talent to switch.

Speaker 2 The other thing, I'm just curious your take on this. I think that the Democrats are missing on the attention thing that maybe is not related to sociopathy.

Speaker 2 So I'm trying to kind of encourage good behavior. There's a little unpredictability.

Speaker 2 Like you can get attention right now by being unpredictable. And that, I kind of know what every Democrat's going to say before they even.

Speaker 2 And you're an interviewer, right? So you know this. Like, you could probably do the interviews in your sleep half the time.

Speaker 3 One of the examples of someone who is unpredictable is John Fetterman.

Speaker 2 Man, we are really.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, it's because it's obvious.

Speaker 2 It's maybe a problem if two white pod boys think that it's so much the same. Maybe the Dem should exag away from everything that we're suggesting right now.
But go ahead.

Speaker 3 Don't just listen to the white pod boys.

Speaker 2 It's actually

Speaker 2 pretty good advice.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying this to praise Federman's politics because he said some things that I like truly, really actually like upset me in some of the stuff that he's talked about Gaza, particularly just from like a human empathetic level, not independent of like his politics of who he supports.

Speaker 3 But yeah, he definitely is pretty good at getting attention in his own strange way.

Speaker 3 He is definitely not predictable, like

Speaker 3 to the point where like when he voted against Hegseth, I was like, okay, good.

Speaker 2 But you, you talk about the book is how, and, and you compare it to in cable news, right? Like, you got to grab people's attention and then hold it. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 And, and, like, being unpredictable is kind of part of holding attention. I mean, I just, I hear from people anecdotally.
I hear from listeners.

Speaker 2 They're like, you have a politician on, and sometimes, like, I fast forward halfway through because I like, I know what they're going to say. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And so it's kind of my job to try to make it unpredictable, but like, they could participate in that a little bit, you know? Yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker 3 And again, I think that's just because when they're in that interview, they're not thinking about how do I keep people's attention. They're thinking about how do I not screw up and make news.

Speaker 3 I mean, yeah,

Speaker 3 that's the key part of the orientation here.

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Speaker 2 All right, let's talk about the sociocultural part of the book.

Speaker 2 I guess, what is just the broad thesis about putting the politics aside about how we are kind of managing our attention in this, you know, in the box of screams age?

Speaker 3 The broad thesis is that we live in an age, you know, if the defining resource of the industrial age was fossil fuels.

Speaker 3 And if you look at 1961 of the top 10 companies by, you know, assets, it was like oil companies and then like DuPont and General Motors, right? Physical production. And

Speaker 3 if you look now, it's attention companies and that's Google and it's Meta. It's to a certain extent, Microsoft.

Speaker 3 It's definitely Apple, which of course inaugurated the attention age with the birth of the iPhone in 2007. It's the guys on stage next to Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 And there's a few important things I think to say here.

Speaker 3 One is it's already intuitive that we have this like break between the old industrial economy and the new digital like information economy, but we really tend to think of it as an information economy in which the important stuff is information.

Speaker 3 Information is what's powerful. Information, what's important.
People talk about like data is the new oil.

Speaker 3 And I think that just fundamentally misapprehends the world we live in because information is infinite.

Speaker 2 It's generative and it's replicable.

Speaker 3 Like think about your own personal data, which people talk about all the time.

Speaker 3 It's like, if your personal data, Tim Miller, is in the hands of 10 companies or 100 companies, it does not change your life one iota. Maybe it changes a little bit the ads you get.

Speaker 3 If your attention is somewhere else in a given moment, that actually does change your life. Like from moment to moment, if your attention is being taken as opposed to your data.

Speaker 3 And so Herb Simon, who's this brilliant political scientist economist in the 1970s, he just writes this paper about how you design an organization for an information-rich world.

Speaker 3 And what he says is, information actually consumes something, and what it consumes is attention.

Speaker 3 And if you think of it that way, if you think the more information there is, the more asks there are on our attention, but attention is finite, you come to see that the information age is necessarily actually the attention age, and the resource that's being used and consumed and pulled on is our attention.

Speaker 2 So there's kind of two sides of this that you get into.

Speaker 2 Like, one is how we manage, you know, in this age, dealing with like all of the different attention stimuli and, you know, how, you know, how we channel our attention for good.

Speaker 2 And then the flip side of the coin, which is the democratization of getting attention, right?

Speaker 2 And so let's just like talk about the first part first a little bit and like whether, you know, I think you had one line in there that you're, the book was an attempt to find some peace on this front.

Speaker 2 Did you find any for people?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think I did.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think the important foundational insight here is that the way attention works as a necessary evolutionary inheritance is that our attention can be compelled without us willing it to be so.

Speaker 3 Like if a siren is going off in an ambulance down the street, if you're in a party and someone drops a glass, if you're on a flight and a baby's crying, your attention goes to it before you get to weigh in consciously or not.

Speaker 3 And this aspect of attention is a really key one because it's at war with the conscious self.

Speaker 3 And when you create competitive attention markets, they are going to drive towards that compelled attention, right?

Speaker 3 And that's what we have.

Speaker 3 So we're constantly struggling to reassert our own volition over where we put our mind because part of what we've inherited is the faculty for our mind to be pulled away from us.

Speaker 3 And one of the key insights and aspects of the world we live in now,

Speaker 3 there's an incredible bit of literature on the cocktail party effect,

Speaker 3 which is if you're in a room and you hear your name in another conversation, it will wrench you out. It will penetrate your consciousness and your attention will go to it.

Speaker 3 And no other stimuli works in the same way. And we've got, you know, a psychological literature on this.

Speaker 3 And that's because we also have inherited this desire and need for social attention. This is what's been so commercialized in the attention age.

Speaker 3 From From the moment we come crying into the world, we necessarily depend on other human attention.

Speaker 3 And because that inheritance is so deep, we now have a situation in which social attention from others can be experienced at scale in a way it never has before in the history of humankind.

Speaker 3 Getting social attention from strangers used to be something that like a tiny fraction of a sliver of people, you know, movie stars or politicians, now like any

Speaker 3 Or extremely hot people.

Speaker 3 Now, any teenager with a phone can experience this. Everyone can.
And in fact, you see it like Elon Musk and a lot of people get driven insane by this in real time as you watch.

Speaker 2 You wrote this Elon thing. I'd write this down.
He wrote in 2022 that, where is it? Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks.

Speaker 2 Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization. He wrote that in 2022.

Speaker 2 How'd that go?

Speaker 3 Lasted about half a day. So I think that's, you're mucking with the stuff in us that's pretty deep about who we are and how we view ourselves.

Speaker 3 And you're putting it in the hands of corporations that are engineered to try to do this at scale.

Speaker 3 And I think the closest analog we have is basically, and I write about this at some length in the book, the industrial food system, right?

Speaker 3 Like we have biological inheritances where we like sweet things and we like fat and we like salt.

Speaker 3 And if you're going to try try to sell food to a billion people or two billion people, you get Coca-Cola and you get McDonald's, right?

Speaker 3 And so our relationship to food is this same kind of weird war between like the self that's like, I want to eat healthier, I want this and the kind of desiring biology beneath.

Speaker 3 That dynamic has now been replicated inside our minds.

Speaker 3 in the attention age, where this sort of very parallel set of things are happening constantly, moment to moment, determining where we've come to rest our thoughts.

Speaker 2 On kind of the receiving of attention side of this, I was intrigued by the point about babies, right?

Speaker 2 That we get attention immediately, that in other animals, like, you know, babies don't need attention quite as much, you know?

Speaker 3 Have you ever watched, by the way, have you ever watched like a litter of pigs nursing?

Speaker 2 I don't think I have. You watch a lot of weird shit.
I did notice in the book.

Speaker 2 You also were like, I've once watched

Speaker 2 carpet being cleaned for hours.

Speaker 3 Not once. Not once.
I love carpet cleaning videos. They're so soothing.

Speaker 2 You watch it while you do other stuff or just you is just you and your mind looking at carpet cleaning videos.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like in bed or like

Speaker 3 sitting on the couch. That's something.
To the point about if you watch Piglet's nurse, it's really wild.

Speaker 3 The mom just lays there and then they just like fight each other in the most like ferocious way. And you actually get to see like what it means to be a runt, which is that you don't get.

Speaker 3 to nurse and then you like waste away and die basically but like the difference between how humans like deal with this, this part of life and how the mammal world deals with it is pretty wild.

Speaker 2 All right. So, then, this leads to the more grown-up problems, which is the thing that really resonated with me, which is

Speaker 2 an attention recognition paradox. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you write about how a lot of the people that are ruining our society right now have been unable to navigate the attention recognition paradox, but I think it's something that all of us deal with.

Speaker 2 So, to talk about that a little bit, yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, I use this argument by this Russian emigrate philosopher named Alexander Kuhyev,

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 3 working off of Hegel, he makes, I think, this very profound point that like the constitutive feature of being human, the fundamental human desire is recognition, which is to like be seen and recognized as human by other humans.

Speaker 3 That's the stuff of relationships. It's what we seek and desire in the world of love, friendship, even like good relationships with coworkers.

Speaker 3 you're not seen as a means to an end. You're not seen as like

Speaker 3 the fullness of your consciousness is like grappled with. And what social media presents is like this synthetically adjacent thing, which is social attention.

Speaker 3 Social attention is not recognition, but it feels close enough that what you do is you go out into the world of social media seeking recognition and getting back attention, which just kind of gives you like a little bit of a taste, but doesn't ever make you full.

Speaker 3 Because the thing that can make you full are mutual relationships. This is the other key thing about social attention.

Speaker 3 Other things that we want socially in life are fundamentally like bilateral, right?

Speaker 3 They're like a romantic relationship or a relationship of parenting, like you have a relationship with the person and they have a relationship with you. That's how it works.

Speaker 3 Social attention is separated. You could put social attention on Brad Pitt.
You don't have a relationship with him, right? People could put social attention on you on the internet.

Speaker 2 They don't have a relationship with you.

Speaker 3 And when you break apart that kind of covalent bond, you sort of end up spinning off

Speaker 2 into some very weird world

Speaker 3 where it's very easy to get a kind of lost, a kind of vertigo sensation.

Speaker 2 Oh my God. Do you feel that? I feel it in a big way.
No, this was what I did.

Speaker 2 I literally had to do, I was doing therapy about because I was like, you write at length in the book about famous people reading their comments and you admitted to the fact that you once searched Chris, not once, but at one time in your life before you dealt with us, you would search Chris's.

Speaker 2 It was like name searching.

Speaker 2 Read mean people people attack you and it was like why is this like why do I care why you know why is this you know something that people who are successful like shouldn't they feel fulfilled and one of the things that I was you know shout out to my therapist was like that is related to this attention recognition paradox is like

Speaker 2 I was getting attention

Speaker 2 but I did not necessarily feel good about what I was providing to the world if that makes sense right and that like you can resolve this somewhat and you still have the human nature of wanting to be liked, but like you can resolve it somewhat if you do the internal work to feel good about yourself and you build up relationships with people that value what you're actually doing.

Speaker 2 And that that is much healthier than the low-calorie, you know, retweet attention.

Speaker 2 And obviously, it's not quite as, you know, like the barriers are not walls here that you kind of can flow back and forth a little bit between

Speaker 3 all the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but there was something to that for sure. And I definitely, it resonated for sure.

Speaker 3 I think another part of it, too, is just that I learned this lesson a little early on.

Speaker 3 I would say when I first started writing, like, I remember I first write a piece for the Chicago Reader, which was the, you know, weekly alternative paper in Chicago.

Speaker 3 And I, I remember, like, going to get it. It would come out on Thursday afternoon.

Speaker 3 It would be like in these piles in like bar vestibules and going, seeing my name there and like feeling that, whatever that little thing about, you know, my personality, I felt good about that.

Speaker 3 And then it was like, that was kind of it. Like, this is sort of pre-internet.

Speaker 3 It just was out there in the world. And one of the things that I realized was that like,

Speaker 3 if I didn't actually like doing the work itself, that whatever little dopamine hit from that micro instant of seeing my name was not going to be enough.

Speaker 3 That that's the other thing is that you have to just be satisfied with like the actual making of the thing you're making.

Speaker 3 as a thing that you want to do and feel proud of and feels worthwhile and is satisfying to you.

Speaker 2 Because if the value of it is what stranger's social attention gets put on it, it's never, ever, ever going to feel good enough, yes, and then it's particularly exacerbated in my case when I was putting out things that I actually didn't think were good for the world.

Speaker 2 So, like, that's the other side of the same spectrum, you know, that's where it gets even uglier.

Speaker 2 Uh, all right, last thing: in case Donald Trump shuts down MSNBC, you know, which he's threatening to do, the free speech president, and you have to become a pop psychologist full-time.

Speaker 2 Do you have any other pop psychology advice for not for minor celebrities, but for humans out there trying to navigate the attention age?

Speaker 3 Yes. One small concrete thing to do is to spend 20 minutes with your thoughts every day.
Meaning some 20-minute period.

Speaker 2 Just me and my thoughts? Just you and your thoughts. Just not the TV, not other people.

Speaker 3 No podcasts, no, no phone. Like maybe that's a commute, maybe that's a drive.
For me, it's a walk every day without listening to anything.

Speaker 3 We have gotten out of the habit of living with our own thoughts, but that's who you got to live with the rest of your life.

Speaker 3 And so, if you're constantly seeking diversion, so you don't have to do that, you're gonna, you're gonna have a harder and harder time when you do have to be alone with your own thoughts.

Speaker 2 Just me and me. Just

Speaker 2 watching cleaning carpets while I have my own thoughts, does that count? Or no, nothing. No other questions.

Speaker 3 No, nothing. Zero.
Yeah. No, no, no, not even carpet cleaning videos.
All right.

Speaker 2 Boy, that's going to be tough. But I'll do my best.
Chris Hayes, thanks so much. He also has a podcast.
I don't know if I mentioned in the beginning, why is this happening? It's mostly great,

Speaker 2 it's like mostly great, like seven out of ten.

Speaker 2 I'm like, these are awesome, mostly great, thank you, yeah, and then like two or three, they're like, that's fine, yeah, which is pretty, I think that's a pretty good podcast rate.

Speaker 2 If I was doing seven out of ten great podcasts, I'd feel really good about it. I'm like, why is this happening?

Speaker 2 People haven't listened to it, and the uh, the book again, The Sirens Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Thanks, Helmy.
We'll see you on your show. You bet.

Speaker 2 Up next, Alex Cantrowitz.

Speaker 2 Ah,

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Speaker 2 All right, we are back. He's host of the Big Technology podcast, and he writes Big Technology on Substack.
I'm a subscriber. And he formerly covered Silicon Valley for BuzzFeed.
It's Alex Kantrowitz.

Speaker 2 What's up, man?

Speaker 4 Hey, Tim, great to see you.

Speaker 2 Good to see you, too. Yeah, I texted you yesterday because I'm not like as deep in the tech world as I used to be.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm monitoring your newsletter when I can, but there's other news I've kind of pay attention to, unfortunately. I don't know if you've noticed a lot happening in Washington.

Speaker 2 And so the DeepSeek thing really kind of blindsided me. It was this new AI application.
I guess you're going to explain it in a second.

Speaker 2 I guess Chinese hedge fund pushed out, but it had massive market implications. It's going to have massive, I think, geopolitical implications.

Speaker 2 So I was like, I got to get smart on this and understand what's happening. So I was hoping you could educate me.
How does that sound?

Speaker 4 It sounds great. Yeah.
And it's pretty astonishing.

Speaker 4 I definitely spent a good part of Friday and then through the weekend just reading as much as I could about this because it is one of those moments in tech where you see happen and you don't really believe it's real until you get confirmation.

Speaker 4 We do have confirmation that this is real. So basically what this team in China has done is they have made an architectural breakthrough.
And I'm going to try to explain this in plain English

Speaker 4 in the development of AI models.

Speaker 4 So, basically, the way that Silicon Valley has been approaching the development of AI models to date has been you put about as much money as possible into building these things by building massive data centers and throwing as much data as you possibly can into the process, and then you get better results.

Speaker 4 And that's proved true every time. And the architectural advancement that's been made in China is they have been able to build a model that's as good with much less money.

Speaker 4 And this is the most important thing that costs about three to five percent of what it costs the other models to run.

Speaker 4 So, let's say you're spending a dollar to run an algorithm or some sort of a process with OpenAI.

Speaker 4 You can spend five cents to do it with this Chinese model, bringing down the cost of using things like their chatbot, but also building any application on top of the model.

Speaker 4 And that's really what's gotten Silicon Valley and Wall Street in a bit of a frenzy right now.

Speaker 2 3%.

Speaker 2 That seems a lot cheaper.

Speaker 4 Way cheaper.

Speaker 2 The question is, is that like, how is that possible? And I saw, there's a lot of conversation I saw online, and you can immediately get into conspiracy land, right?

Speaker 2 Which is like, are the Chinese, are they lying about this? Like, was it actually that much more expensive? Or, you know, were they using like chips, like American chips?

Speaker 2 It's like, what is at this point, like, the consensus on how and why they managed to create a model that's so much cheaper?

Speaker 4 So, first of all, it's so funny because all of the worries about AI was that it was too expensive, right? People were seeing the fact that you have to spend these billions of dollars.

Speaker 4 Like, OpenAI last year raised the biggest funding round in history at $6.6 billion. And the big complaint was, well, this AI technology is too expensive to use.

Speaker 4 They're losing billions just to run it and train it every year. And so, therefore, the industry is going to fall apart.
Now, everyone's worried because it's too cheap, which I think is just so funny.

Speaker 4 But basically, look, this is the way that the AI industry was always running. Open AI's stated goal was to make intelligence that's too cheap to meter.

Speaker 4 Basically, the idea was we want to be able to provide this stuff at a cost that is so inexpensive that you'll be able to do whatever your heart's desire is to build with AI.

Speaker 4 And, you know, really what these Chinese engineers have done is they have used some new techniques that have largely been like thanks to some of the constraints that they've had.

Speaker 4 So, they haven't been able to use the state-of-the-art NVIDIA chips, which means this process that we're doing over here in the United States of just making the servers bigger and making, you know, adding more data has not been available to them.

Speaker 4 So, they've had to introduce some tricks to make the models more efficient.

Speaker 4 And I could get into all the technical details if you want, but basically, the way to think about this is they have used the constraints to build a much more efficient model than anybody else has through some different techniques that have just been starting to roll out in the Western models, things called reasoning, reinforcement, learning.

Speaker 4 And they've just basically speedrun the entire industry and found a way to offer this effectively same or better model than a lot of the cutting edge that we have today at a cheaper cost.

Speaker 2 Have you played with it? So like the deep seek?

Speaker 2 Is it just ChatGPT? Compare and contrast it to ChatGPT for me.

Speaker 4 So I have played played with it. The real innovation here has been the DeepSeek R1 model.
And by the way, no AI company knows how to name anything.

Speaker 2 It's horrible.

Speaker 2 It's like if you wanted to name something that was in a thriller movie about a computer that takes over the universe, it feels like

Speaker 2 it's all aimed at that.

Speaker 2 It's all these sci-fi nerds naming shit.

Speaker 4 They should have some screenwriters on in-house because the naming is disastrous. But here, basically, what it does is it's reasoning.
So you can go to DeepSeek right now and use the model.

Speaker 4 And the thing about this is it will share its chain of thought.

Speaker 4 So, you'll actually see the model be able to reason through, trying to figure out what your question is, and then give you the best possible answer.

Speaker 4 And the nice thing about reasoning is the AI does a lot of the thinking on its end.

Speaker 4 So, there used to be this whole idea, like, oh, prompt engineer is going to be a new job in the world because you'll have to figure out exactly how to prompt AI models to be able to to use them.

Speaker 4 And what these reasoning models do is they basically take a lot of that work out of the equation because they figure out what you want.

Speaker 4 But, Tim, I think it's important to talk about like the ways to use this thing because, yes, there is the chatbot that DeepSeek has set up that you can go and log in with your Google account and see all this happen.

Speaker 4 But the important thing is they have actually open sourced this model. So, if you are an AI developer, you can download the architecture and then run it for yourself.

Speaker 4 So, you can use DeepSeek without actually having to be on the DeepSeek proprietary website.

Speaker 4 And that opens up a range of possibilities because whereas DeepSeek might be censoring some things, like you can't really ask who the president of Taiwan is on their website, you can go to Perplexity right now.

Speaker 4 and use the DeepSeek model that they've downloaded and removed a lot of the censorship from, and it will give you the right answers.

Speaker 4 So that to me is like the real core thing here, which is that you can not only use their chatbot, you can not only use their technology, but American firms and firms worldwide today are downloading this model.

Speaker 4 They're running it as efficiently as the folks in China, and they're able to customize it and build on top of it in a way that might go against the values that the DeepSeek team has, but it doesn't matter because it's open source and available to everyone.

Speaker 2 Holy shit. So like, yeah, so this gets to the kind of CCP of it all.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, I guess it's hard for me to ask you to, you know, divine the motivations of the people that are behind this new technology, but like

Speaker 2 that does seem strange, right?

Speaker 2 Like, I guess, like, the natural concerns that would pop up for people in the political or national security space is: oh man, like people are going to start using this model.

Speaker 2 You know, the same kind of data concerns that people have about TikTok might be relevant here.

Speaker 2 The same concerns about, you know, who knows how they could jigger the algorithm, you know, in various ways that might be pernicious. But if it's open source and people can build build on it

Speaker 2 off of their platform, then a lot of those like security and other related concerns don't seem to be as stark. But then you kind of wonder, then, well, shouldn't the CCP be

Speaker 2 have some feelings about that?

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. And I think you're nailing the core point here, Tim, which is that, you know, I've had people replying to me, have fun using the app that's going to send all your data to the CCP.

Speaker 4 And it's actually, that's only a tiny part of it, right? The fact that anybody can download this innovation and use it on their own is actually the really interesting thing.

Speaker 4 And you're already seeing it in production in perplexity.

Speaker 4 You're going to see American startups and startups worldwide start to download it and use it maybe instead of other open source models like Meta Lama until they catch up.

Speaker 4 So it can be used outside of DeepSeek servers. And that's why I think this is going to have staying power.
If it was just proprietary to DeepSeek, we'd be having a completely different conversation.

Speaker 4 But now we're talking about the technology because the technology can really be used outside of the auspices of

Speaker 4 a Chinese firm. But yeah, why do they want to do it? We don't fully know yet.
It could be that they just like discovery, right?

Speaker 4 That would be sort of like the most naive, and it's a possible explanation. They're a hedge fund, right? So could they have

Speaker 4 basically set their sights on creating something that's this efficient and shorted NVIDIA, right? NVIDIA was down 16% yesterday. It's bounced back a little bit as of this recording.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's another possibility.

Speaker 4 And the third possibility that I can think of is that this was something that the Chinese government basically directed resources to, and we're only seeing the tip of the spear in terms of what was needed to develop the model.

Speaker 4 There was definitely a lot more money spent than the few hundred million that we know, or the couple million that we know was spent for the last iteration.

Speaker 4 And maybe that's a way to sort of assert China's supremacy on AI and undercut the American AI initiative.

Speaker 4 But here, here, the bottom line here, I want to put this pretty clearly, is that this was coming. This was going to happen, whether it was going to come from an American firm or a Chinese firm.

Speaker 4 And what DeepSeek proved was that you can do this with inferior chips and you can do this with a smaller team and you can do this much more efficiently.

Speaker 4 And I think, you know, that was going to happen one way or the other.

Speaker 4 So like the grand like conspiracy theory thinking of like, you know, this is a Trojan horse that China has thrown into the United States to destroy our industry doesn't really hold water to me.

Speaker 4 It's what everybody in the U.S. was aiming toward.

Speaker 2 Why didn't they do it? Why weren't they able to do it? There is a little bit of,

Speaker 2 you got to kind of laugh a little bit at our masters of the universe who, you know, spent the last week suckling up to Donald Trump, the reality TV show, and going to inaugural balls and talking to him about how we need the government to be supportive of these AI endeavors.

Speaker 2 You have this big announcement that Sam Altman put out about all the money that we're going to be investing in this.

Speaker 2 And then like two days after that, a Chinese hedge fund is like, well, actually, we've already lapped you.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, isn't it amazing that Stargate and DeepSeek R1 come out like basically at the same time? And it was, I mean, I wrote about this in my newsletter last week.

Speaker 4 It was just like, wow, like these two, these two things seem like they're barreling towards each other and something has to give. So, okay, so why didn't the U.S.
firms develop this?

Speaker 4 A couple of reasons. First of all, it could just be a natural resource curse.
Honestly, without the constraints, they didn't have to think about this way.

Speaker 4 Now, their models become much more efficient over time, and that makes a big difference because they've been, again, heading this direction. It just hasn't been an imperative toward them.

Speaker 4 So, they've been making the models more efficient, but it hasn't been the only way they can do things. And so, therefore, they haven't been forced to innovate this way.

Speaker 4 I think if they had similar constraints as the DeepSeek team did, they probably would have come up with it. So, that's one.

Speaker 4 But the other side of it, and I think this is what they would all tell you, is that they still believe that scaling up, like Elon Musk is putting together a million GPU data center.

Speaker 4 Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to build a data center that's like the size of half of Manhattan.

Speaker 4 We already know that Altman's been out there with Trump talking about, you know, this $500 billion initiative, which might be like, you know, a fifth of the size in the end, but it's still big.

Speaker 4 And I think there's still a lot of belief in Silicon Valley that

Speaker 4 Bigger is still better and you can build better models if you throw all these resources toward it.

Speaker 4 And the most optimistic case is that they will take the innovations that they're seeing with DeepSeek, and then they will use that efficiency to make even more use out of the architecture that they have.

Speaker 4 Let's put that in

Speaker 4 layman's term, the chips that they have, right?

Speaker 4 And build something that's even more intelligent than what we have today and start to solve some of the next order problems that they're looking at, building chatbots with memory, building chatbots that really understand you, that can go out in the world and take action for you.

Speaker 4 And then eventually, maybe some that can, you know, help lead to scientific discovery, which is something they always talk about. Like we, they've been limited by

Speaker 4 the hardware.

Speaker 2 All right. Yeah, we'll see about that.
I saw Andreessen, you know, tweeted yesterday, this is a Sputnik moment. And, you know, as you mentioned, the big tech stocks had a pretty rough day yesterday.

Speaker 2 Like, what is the sense of, you know, among your sources, people you talk to in that world? Is there like panic? Are they excited about the opportunity? I don't know.

Speaker 2 What's the vibe, Check, in Silicon Valley?

Speaker 4 Yeah, people are mostly excited outside of, let's say, NVIDIA shareholders. The entire AI industry has been figuring out how to build better things with less resources.

Speaker 4 And this is going to give them a chance to do that.

Speaker 4 It will give them the chance basically to be able to build AI without having to rely on nuclear power plants or these massive, massive data centers as much as they needed to, like in a dream scenario.

Speaker 4 So I think everybody's pretty stoked about that. They might still end up using all the power in the world to build the next iteration, but at least this iteration we know can be built with less.

Speaker 4 And Mark Andreessen is such an interesting case. You always have to look a little bit deeper into what he's saying to try to find his true motivations.

Speaker 4 And I think one of the interesting things is he thought about participating in the OpenAI $6.6 billion round last year. and ultimately didn't.

Speaker 4 And, you know, might have seen something like this coming around because for him, and I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, it's what you can build with the technology that's going to create the most value and not like the models that underlie that thing.

Speaker 4 Like this is basically going to take the cost of intelligence, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, down by an order of magnitude. And now the rubber is going to meet the road.

Speaker 4 We're going to see like what applications can be built, what programs can be built, what type of experiences can be built in a much more efficient way, in a way that, you know, maybe the expense of building these things might have been holding back the companies previously.

Speaker 4 So for anyone that's interested in building, you know,

Speaker 4 time to build is Mark Andreessen's thing. It's a pretty exciting moment.

Speaker 2 That maybe should have been a little bit of a, I don't know, a moment also to reflect on failures to build. Well, he doesn't do that.
He doesn't do that. That's not a popular word.
No therapy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he was up. Did you see he was on Lex Friedman and he was talking about like Andrew Uberman's protocols of like, you know, you got to put your phone away before bed.

Speaker 4 And he's like, the most masculine thing you can do is stare at your phone for three hours before bed and fall asleep. Like, Mark Andreessen's got some problems, put it that way.

Speaker 2 The definitions of masculinity among these fellows are pretty interesting, though. I don't know.
Mark Zuckerberg's new haircut isn't as bad as some people think, I don't think.

Speaker 2 Some of the crypto folks, even some of my listeners who are pro-crypto, aren't really loving my

Speaker 2 anti-crypto pivot of late. But

Speaker 2 I don't know. I was looking at the Coinbase traffic over the weekend, and it was like 20% of the trades were on that coin that's named after the co-founder's cat.
I'm blanking on the name right now.

Speaker 2 About 5% were on the Trump coin, which is a totally worthless scam and a rug poll being run by the president of the United States.

Speaker 2 We've got a bunch of people around him now who I think are motivated to ensure that the government is not staffed with people who are going to investigate this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 Given what happened with FTX,

Speaker 2 I just, I don't know. I mean, obviously, people are going to make money on this in the short term, you know, not regulating crypto.
And we're having kind of a crypto moment.

Speaker 2 But there's some red sirens blaring for me. I don't know.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. Those red sirens are blaring where I am as well.

Speaker 4 I think that like one of the interesting things about the blockchain innovation was that it was supposed to enable like a new web built on top of decentralized protocols.

Speaker 4 And what have we gotten instead? There's a speculation machine. We haven't seen anything built on top of this.
So therefore, all these coins are just entirely speculation-oriented.

Speaker 4 There are rug pulls waiting to happen. I think Bitcoin obviously is different.
It's got some staying power. There's a floor for Bitcoin.
And people have made a lot of money on it.

Speaker 4 But is crypto good for anything else? I haven't seen it yet.

Speaker 2 No. Yeah, I don't know.
Some of the folks that pro-crypto folks were mad at my Coinbase attack. They're like, well, yeah, it's just

Speaker 2 one day. It was just one weekend day.

Speaker 2 And hey,

Speaker 2 there are other businesses that have, you know, that platforms that have things on them that aren't valuable? I was like, really?

Speaker 2 Are there other businesses where like a third to two-thirds of the traffic on a given day there are basically scams and Ponzi schemes with no value?

Speaker 2 I actually don't know that there are a lot of other businesses like that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but what crypto really needs is a deep-seek moment. Honestly, technology is inefficient.
It needs to be made orders of magnitude more efficient to make any sense outside of speculation.

Speaker 4 And maybe if and when that happens,

Speaker 4 then we'll be able to see some real promise there. But until then, I don't really believe it's much more than speculation.

Speaker 4 Maybe Bitcoin is a store of value in some way, but the rest, I'm not getting on board the Trump and Melania coin right now. Sorry.

Speaker 2 I don't understand. I guess maybe there's some of this.
Again, you're more in this world than me.

Speaker 2 Why aren't big advocates for Bitcoin more mad at Trump?

Speaker 2 I would imagine a world like, again, back to Andreessen, right? Like, somebody that does think that there will be really powerful, amazing use cases for this.

Speaker 2 Like, it is a credibility destroyer to have the incoming now president of the United States launch something that is a completely worthless, obvious scam. Right?

Speaker 2 I mean, wouldn't they want something, you know, like a structure, a superstructure that is going to make things, you know, more credible?

Speaker 4 Tim, it's such an interesting point because the Bitcoin folks, they're the maximalists, right?

Speaker 4 They think that there should be no crypto outside of Bitcoin and all the attention should be in Bitcoin and everything else is a distraction.

Speaker 4 However, I would say the one variable here is they're getting rich and they are making so much money.

Speaker 3 Why be mad when you're getting rich? Exactly.

Speaker 4 And you're right. If they start to raise a fuss over what Trump is doing and he says, you know what, let's put somebody in the SEC that's going to actually put some rules in.

Speaker 4 then Bitcoin 150,000 or Bitcoin 1 million looks less likely than it might in their eyes right now.

Speaker 2 So well, good thing there are no morality tales or no kind of historical lessons about

Speaker 2 the issues that might be associated with just ignoring like fundamental problems as you get wealthier and wealthier. That never comes back to vibration.

Speaker 4 I guess we don't do that anymore, Tim.

Speaker 2 All right, last thing. This is all just kind of developing.
So I don't think you're going to have any deep reporting on this or anything, but just I'm interested on your kind of top line thought.

Speaker 2 There's been a pause put on all grants and research. We just talked about that with Chris Hayes for a little bit from the feds.

Speaker 2 And like the first thing people start talking about with relation to that is like medical research and a lot of stuff that there are a lot of folks who are sympathetic to that, maybe not particularly folks in the Trump coalition.

Speaker 2 But there is also a lot of grant making that supports the tech world.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I know that David Sachs might not like to admit that, but there is a lot of federal funding that's kind of underlying a lot of this research. I do wonder what your thoughts are on that.

Speaker 2 Like if there's a pause on that, whether there'll be any backlash or pushback

Speaker 2 within the tech world or anything that those folks might be concerned about.

Speaker 4 I kind of look back at the tariffs from the first Trump administration. And as you saw, like there was trade wars and tariffs, but Tim Cook pays a visit to the White House.

Speaker 4 And next thing you know, Apple products can be made in China without any duties on them or any additional duties.

Speaker 4 And I think what you're alluding to is really interesting because there might be some pauses that hurt the tech industry.

Speaker 4 And I think we're going to see over and over again that the tech industry cozying up to Trump is going to pay off for them.

Speaker 4 And maybe for this precise reason, where a blanket pause in funding certain things

Speaker 4 might go on for a day or a week.

Speaker 4 But once David Sachs gets Trump's ear or Elon or any number of tech executives that are now close to the White House, that funding might be restored.

Speaker 4 And I think that we're just going to see this story play out in various iterations over the course of the next four years.

Speaker 2 Maybe, maybe only over the course of the next year or two until they lose this battle internally with Stephen Miller and Russ Vogt and the Bannon Wing. But that will be something for us to monitor.

Speaker 2 Man, thank you so much for your reporting on this, educating me. And hopefully, we can do this again soon.

Speaker 2 For folks that want more on the tech world, again, Alex Cantwood's podcast, Big Technology, a Substack, Big Technology. We'll be back tomorrow, as always, with another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

Speaker 2 We'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 2 It needs,

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Speaker 2 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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