# Derek Thompson and Paul Krugman on politics, econ, and AI

An episode of [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1877144831), 2 Jul 2025, 37 min.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/167375850/c8ece70a1150eb56bdc3c17371d81bc8.mp3

Get full access to Paul Krugman at paulkrugman.substack.com/subscribe

## Transcript

[0:00] SPEAKER_02: I wanted to start on the news and BBB.
[0:03] SPEAKER_02: And,
[0:03] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[0:03] SPEAKER_02: it really does seem,
[0:04] SPEAKER_02: and you've written about this,
[0:05] SPEAKER_02: I've written about it,
[0:06] like the GOP is ready to cut Medicaid by several hundred
[0:09] billion dollars up to a
[0:10] SPEAKER_02: trillion dollars in the next decade.
[0:11] SPEAKER_02: And this is despite the fact that, A, this is a super popular program.
[0:15] SPEAKER_02: B, it covers more than one-fifth of the country.
[0:18] SPEAKER_02: And C...
[0:20] SPEAKER_02: Major cuts,
[0:21] SPEAKER_02: if they're enacted,
[0:22] SPEAKER_02: are going to be felt,
[0:23] SPEAKER_02: I think,
[0:23] SPEAKER_02: especially among conservative areas,
[0:25] SPEAKER_02: many of which are working class and even poor.
[0:28] SPEAKER_02: So I wonder how you see the economic and political fallout if the bill,
[0:35] SPEAKER_02: as it seems to exist now,
[0:38] is the thing that's signed on the president's desk and executed
[0:41] over the next three
[0:42] SPEAKER_02: years.
[0:42] Yeah,
[0:42] the execution is actually going to be a really interesting
[0:45] question.
[0:45] I'm going to be talking with some other people about that in
[0:49] the near future.
[0:49] SPEAKER_00: In fact,
[0:50] SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be talking to John Gruber,
[0:53] SPEAKER_00: who might be feeling terrible,
[0:56] SPEAKER_00: sort of the inventor of Obamacare later.
[0:59] SPEAKER_00: But the...
[1:02] SPEAKER_00: Look, this is, first of all, an incredible hardship.
[1:06] SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is 40% of births are covered by Medicaid in America.
[1:11] SPEAKER_00: So this is just incredible hardship.
[1:14] And the way it's being done,
[1:16] which is not explicit cuts,
[1:18] but instead throwing up...
[1:21] paperwork throwing up basically an obstacle course of
[1:24] administrative barriers means
[1:27] that exactly the people who probably need this most are going
[1:30] to be the least able
[1:31] SPEAKER_00: to navigate the system.
[1:32] SPEAKER_00: So now whether it's economic impact,
[1:37] SPEAKER_00: the thing about people with low incomes is they don't have much money.
[1:41] SPEAKER_00: And so the impact on the economy directly is not that large.
[1:44] SPEAKER_00: Although if we go down, you know, 10, well, 10,
[1:50] go ahead a few decades medicaid is one of those programs that
[1:53] really does more than
[1:55] pay for itself just because children who have adequate health
[1:59] care when their
[2:00] children become more productive adults so this is actually a
[2:04] you know it's it's a
[2:05] SPEAKER_00: lose lose on almost every um every dimension and it's just the the sheer
[2:12] mind-boggling cruelty of it just gets you i mean i um at some
[2:16] level horrible as it
[2:17] SPEAKER_00: is i understand that um
[2:20] SPEAKER_00: that letting children starve in Africa is not a big U.S.
[2:24] SPEAKER_00: political issue,
[2:25] but letting children fail to get necessary health care in
[2:31] eastern Kentucky,
[2:32] SPEAKER_00: you would think would be a much bigger deal.
[2:35] SPEAKER_02: Mike, I couldn't agree more.
[2:36] SPEAKER_02: And I think it's really,
[2:37] SPEAKER_02: really well put that,
[2:38] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[2:39] SPEAKER_02: while I was really just aghast at the level of
[2:46] The lack of humanity at some people's inconsideration of what
[2:50] we were doing to
[2:50] SPEAKER_02: people in Africa.
[2:51] SPEAKER_02: I mean,
[2:51] there was just a Lancet study that came out suggesting that
[2:54] vaccines that America's
[2:55] invested in have saved more than 90 million lives over the last
[2:59] three decades.
[3:00] And as a result,
[3:01] if you continue that extrapolation forward and take into
[3:04] account the fact that
[3:05] SPEAKER_02: RFK Jr.
[3:06] SPEAKER_02: wants to retrieve or pull back American-supported vaccines,
[3:09] SPEAKER_02: you should expect another 9 million deaths.
[3:12] I'm incredibly aghast by that level of inhumanity as it affects
[3:17] other countries,
[3:17] but at least you could begin to explain it rationally through
[3:20] the lens of,
[3:21] SPEAKER_02: oh,
[3:21] SPEAKER_02: well,
[3:21] SPEAKER_02: they're nationalists.
[3:23] SPEAKER_02: They just really care
[3:24] SPEAKER_02: about America so damn much.
[3:26] And so they want to reserve their care and the money for the
[3:29] poor here in America.
[3:30] SPEAKER_02: And what do they do three weeks later?
[3:32] SPEAKER_02: But not just extend.
[3:34] SPEAKER_02: And if you could talk to this, I'd love some extrapolation.
[3:38] SPEAKER_02: They're not just extending the Trump era corporate income tax cuts.
[3:42] SPEAKER_02: They're adding on top of that tax cut extension.
[3:46] SPEAKER_02: a series of tax cuts for S-Corps,
[3:49] SPEAKER_02: for individual proprietors,
[3:51] for used car salesmen of America that are already making a
[3:56] million dollars a year,
[3:57] SPEAKER_02: paying a relatively low average tax rate.
[3:59] SPEAKER_02: And now they're going to get another tax cut because I guess they're
[4:02] SPEAKER_02: disproportionately likely to be Republicans.
[4:04] SPEAKER_02: And the way to pay for that,
[4:05] SPEAKER_02: the way to score it,
[4:07] is to go into discretionary spending and to go into medical
[4:10] spending and say,
[4:10] SPEAKER_02: well,
[4:11] We can't take it away from Social Security because they'll
[4:13] scream too loudly.
[4:14] We can't take it away from defense because we care too much
[4:17] about cracking down on
[4:18] SPEAKER_02: all these things with immigration ice.
[4:19] I guess we'll take it away from poor people and we'll cut
[4:21] Medicaid by $1 trillion,
[4:23] SPEAKER_02: as you said,
[4:23] by throwing up all of these regulatory barriers and creating a
[4:27] sort of paperwork
[4:28] SPEAKER_02: obstacle trail for people to get the health care that they need.
[4:31] SPEAKER_02: I mean,
[4:33] if the effect that we see in a few years doesn't cash out in
[4:37] something as clear as
[4:39] SPEAKER_02: reduced GDP,
[4:40] SPEAKER_02: and I take your point there,
[4:42] How do you think we will feel this law in American life three
[4:46] years from now?
[4:48] SPEAKER_00: We are going to be a very different country.
[4:50] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[4:52] SPEAKER_00: in some ways,
[4:54] we're going to go back to what we were before the Affordable
[4:57] Care Act and all of
[4:58] SPEAKER_00: that,
[4:58] SPEAKER_00: but maybe worse.
[5:00] SPEAKER_00: You know, the normal rich countries...
[5:05] SPEAKER_00: at least, you know, provide basic health care for everybody.
[5:09] And the United States has always been an outlier in not doing
[5:14] that to the same,
[5:15] SPEAKER_00: but,
[5:15] but we got sort of two thirds of the way towards being a normal
[5:21] place that took
[5:22] SPEAKER_00: care of its own citizens.
[5:24] SPEAKER_00: And now we're reversing essentially all of it,
[5:26] SPEAKER_00: just all at once within,
[5:28] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[5:28] SPEAKER_00: within a little over a year,
[5:31] SPEAKER_00: all of that stuff is going to go away.
[5:33] SPEAKER_00: And, um,
[5:35] I mean,
[5:37] I think people are going to feel it in ways that are not,
[5:43] they don't realize.
[5:44] It's going to be not just a lot of people are not going to be
[5:47] able to get their
[5:49] SPEAKER_00: health care paid for.
[5:50] SPEAKER_00: There's going to be a lot of hospitals closing.
[5:52] SPEAKER_00: So there'll be people who have insurance of some kind,
[5:56] SPEAKER_00: but the nearest treatment is two hours drive away.
[6:01] SPEAKER_00: There's going to be a lot of people.
[6:03] We're seeing a big reduction in both a reduction in the
[6:08] subsidies for the exchange policy.
[6:10] SPEAKER_00: So there's really jargon.
[6:13] SPEAKER_00: I know what an S-Corp is, and you know what an S-Corp is.
[6:16] SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure that everyone else does,
[6:17] but an S-Corp is a largely fictitious business that is a way
[6:23] for affluent people
[6:24] SPEAKER_00: to,
[6:26] SPEAKER_00: not necessarily fraudulently,
[6:28] SPEAKER_00: but there are some,
[6:29] SPEAKER_00: there are tax and
[6:30] SPEAKER_00: and other advantages to having some of your income flow through.
[6:33] SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of,
[6:35] SPEAKER_00: but these are things that are,
[6:36] SPEAKER_00: again,
[6:37] SPEAKER_00: only matter to the top few percent of the population.
[6:40] SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, the thing about the Obamacare exchanges,
[6:47] SPEAKER_00: is that they really mean that for,
[6:50] we've now had many years in which you did not need to worry
[6:55] that if you had a
[6:55] SPEAKER_00: pre-existing medical condition,
[6:57] SPEAKER_00: you couldn't get influence.
[6:59] SPEAKER_00: You didn't feel,
[7:01] SPEAKER_00: I'm old enough,
[7:02] SPEAKER_00: you're not,
[7:02] but I'm old enough to really remember the days when a number of
[7:06] people I knew felt
[7:08] SPEAKER_00: trapped in their jobs.
[7:10] SPEAKER_00: because they had employers who offered health benefits,
[7:15] SPEAKER_00: and they had preexisting medical conditions,
[7:17] SPEAKER_00: and they knew that if they left,
[7:20] SPEAKER_00: they probably couldn't get health insurance.
[7:21] SPEAKER_00: They couldn't start a business on their own.
[7:23] They couldn't move to another employer that was a startup that
[7:26] didn't have
[7:28] SPEAKER_00: extensive health plans.
[7:30] SPEAKER_00: So all of that stuff is going to come back,
[7:33] and people's lives are going to be degraded in a lot of ways
[7:36] that people really
[7:39] SPEAKER_00: don't understand.
[7:40] I think basically probably I'd be surprised if half of the
[7:45] public has a good idea
[7:47] SPEAKER_00: of what's actually about to happen.
[7:50] I want to use that point to draw a bridge between the BBB and
[7:56] your writing about
[7:58] SPEAKER_02: oligarchy,
[7:58] SPEAKER_02: autocracy,
[7:59] SPEAKER_02: and Elon Musk.
[7:59] So when I think about the argument that Donald Trump represents
[8:04] a new kind of
[8:05] SPEAKER_02: Republican,
[8:05] I think surely one irony of that argument is that if you
[8:10] consider the following
[8:10] SPEAKER_02: sentence,
[8:12] the Republican president today is trying to cut taxes on
[8:16] corporations and rich
[8:17] SPEAKER_02: individuals and
[8:18] SPEAKER_02: pay for it by reducing services to low-income Americans,
[8:22] while at the same time raising defense spending and rolling
[8:27] back the energy policy
[8:28] SPEAKER_02: of his Democratic predecessor,
[8:31] SPEAKER_02: including stomping out progress we've made on solar power,
[8:35] SPEAKER_02: period,
[8:35] SPEAKER_02: or semicolon,
[8:36] That clause could serve just as well to describe Ronald Reagan
[8:41] in 1981 as Donald Trump in 2025.
[8:43] SPEAKER_02: So there's some ways in which the kind of corporatist,
[8:47] SPEAKER_02: libertarian aspect of the Republican Party has not died away.
[8:52] SPEAKER_02: It remains very alive in this piece of legislation.
[8:56] SPEAKER_02: But Trump isn't just Reagan 2.0.
[8:59] SPEAKER_02: He layers on top of this another feature, which is that Reagan was not...
[9:05] going after individual business leaders and threatening to
[9:09] deport them or trying to
[9:10] extort them for $16 million if they ran a media advertisement
[9:15] or a media clip that
[9:17] SPEAKER_02: he didn't like.
[9:18] SPEAKER_02: And so he combines,
[9:19] SPEAKER_02: on the one hand,
[9:20] the worst of old-fashioned capital R republicanism and this
[9:24] newfangled kind of
[9:26] autocratic instinct that i find quite scary and quite
[9:30] threatening and you wrote
[9:32] about that today so maybe talk about the degree to which we're
[9:35] talking about the
[9:35] SPEAKER_02: kind of um political phenomenon you see donald trump being simultaneous
[9:41] simultaneous like reagan 2.0 into something we have not seen in
[9:44] a long long time
[9:45] well we haven't seen in this country but if you uh uh you know
[9:50] if you were going to
[9:50] SPEAKER_00: talk about um
[9:53] SPEAKER_00: Vladimir Putin, it's not, you know, all of that stuff would apply.
[9:59] And so it is this,
[10:00] yeah,
[10:01] I mean,
[10:02] one of the things that,
[10:03] this is something really quite new.
[10:04] SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've certainly had plutocratic governance before.
[10:09] SPEAKER_00: In a lot of ways, Reagan was pushing in that direction.
[10:11] Republicans are always trying to cut taxes on the rich and rip
[10:15] up the social safety net.
[10:17] We had a gilded age in which the robber barons bought a lot of
[10:20] politicians.
[10:21] But we never had a powerful movement led from the White House
[10:28] that was basically anti-democracy.
[10:30] SPEAKER_00: It was basically anti-rule of law.
[10:32] So this is really American oligarchy in a way that we've never
[10:36] seen before.
[10:38] SPEAKER_00: And, I mean, I'm terrified.
[10:42] SPEAKER_00: I mean, I...
[10:45] I think there's a really serious chance that three or four
[10:50] years from now,
[10:51] SPEAKER_00: this country will be unrecognizable,
[10:52] not simply in the fact that a lot of people can't get health
[10:59] care and can't put
[11:00] SPEAKER_00: food on the table,
[11:01] SPEAKER_00: but in the fact that democracy is gone for all practical purposes,
[11:05] SPEAKER_00: whatever it might say on paper.
[11:07] SPEAKER_02: The concept of oligarchy is interesting to me because on the one hand,
[11:09] SPEAKER_02: I understand exactly what you're saying.
[11:11] I think there's clearly plutocracy-related elements of the
[11:17] Trump administration and
[11:19] SPEAKER_02: oligarchic instincts.
[11:20] SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, this is someone who is attacking Putin.
[11:24] SPEAKER_02: the richest person in America because he disagrees with him,
[11:27] SPEAKER_02: threatening the largest media companies with 10,
[11:31] SPEAKER_02: 20,
[11:35] saying things that are
[11:35] SPEAKER_02: mean.
[11:36] 30 million dollar extortionary bribes in order to stop them
[11:36] SPEAKER_02: And so there's some ways in which I'm trying to work this out for myself,
[11:39] SPEAKER_02: so I don't have like a thesis that I'm pressing on you.
[11:41] SPEAKER_02: But there's some ways in which this president is classically oligarchic.
[11:46] SPEAKER_02: But there's other ways in which,
[11:48] SPEAKER_02: like Putin,
[11:48] SPEAKER_02: I think you described this in your piece today,
[11:50] SPEAKER_02: like Putin is
[11:52] He combines this,
[11:53] on the one hand,
[11:53] this entreaty of rich business people.
[11:56] SPEAKER_02: Come in.
[11:57] SPEAKER_02: I'll take care of you.
[11:58] SPEAKER_02: I'll cut your taxes.
[11:59] SPEAKER_02: I'll be on your side.
[12:00] SPEAKER_02: I'll get you more money.
[12:01] And at the same time,
[12:02] there's like this medium long-term plan of,
[12:04] no,
[12:04] I don't need you at all.
[12:06] SPEAKER_02: When I want to raise tariffs and you don't want them, I don't care.
[12:09] SPEAKER_02: When I decide that you said something wrong,
[12:11] SPEAKER_02: I might threaten to deport you or find your company or try to find,
[12:14] SPEAKER_02: get sick,
[12:15] SPEAKER_02: the DOJ or the FTC in your company in order to punish you.
[12:18] SPEAKER_02: And so it's not pure oligarchy.
[12:21] SPEAKER_02: In a way,
[12:22] it's like the autocracy is like the shell that contains some
[12:26] elements that are,
[12:27] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[12:28] SPEAKER_02: Reagan-ish oligarchic,
[12:29] SPEAKER_02: but it really is autocratic first and foremost,
[12:31] SPEAKER_02: I think,
[12:32] SPEAKER_02: before it's oligarchic.
[12:33] SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
[12:33] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[12:33] SPEAKER_00: what we learned from Putin is,
[12:36] and I don't know if Trump learned it from Putin or it just
[12:39] comes instinctively to
[12:40] SPEAKER_00: him,
[12:41] SPEAKER_00: is that essentially the oligarchs are chops.
[12:45] Promise them low taxes,
[12:47] promise them opportunity for lots of monopoly profits.
[12:50] SPEAKER_00: They'll back you.
[12:52] SPEAKER_00: And then you turn around and say, oh, by the way,
[12:57] SPEAKER_00: I own you, not the other way around.
[12:59] SPEAKER_00: And this is quite classic.
[13:02] I mean,
[13:03] I try to avoid my 1930s analogies,
[13:06] but we don't have to reach far back to that.
[13:09] SPEAKER_00: There's a fair bit of that.
[13:10] I mean,
[13:13] Orban in Hungary,
[13:14] although actually Orban is a lot more restrained.
[13:18] SPEAKER_00: on this kind of stuff than Trump is.
[13:20] SPEAKER_00: And so this is how, yeah, this is how democracies die.
[13:27] SPEAKER_00: And it's the,
[13:30] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[13:30] wasn't it Lenin said something about the capitalists will sell
[13:35] us the rope with
[13:35] SPEAKER_00: which we will hang them?
[13:37] Well,
[13:38] in this case,
[13:38] it's actually not the leftist revolution,
[13:42] but the rightist revolution.
[13:43] SPEAKER_00: And basically that's how it's playing out.
[13:45] SPEAKER_02: When you say you're afraid of democracy dying,
[13:48] SPEAKER_02: Are you afraid there's not going to be a midterm in 26?
[13:51] SPEAKER_02: There's not going to be a free and fair election in 28?
[13:54] SPEAKER_02: How does that sear sort of materialize for you concretely?
[13:58] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[13:59] SPEAKER_00: There will be something we call a midterm.
[14:04] SPEAKER_00: There will be a midterm in 2026.
[14:06] SPEAKER_00: There will be something.
[14:09] SPEAKER_00: There will be elections held.
[14:12] SPEAKER_00: But a couple of things.
[14:15] SPEAKER_00: One is how much...
[14:19] SPEAKER_00: Intimidation,
[14:20] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[14:22] will there be masked people who claim to be from ICE outside
[14:27] the polling places?
[14:29] SPEAKER_00: How much is that, you know, in Democratic-leaning districts?
[14:33] SPEAKER_00: Do you really want to rule that out as a possibility?
[14:37] And somebody,
[14:38] some old quote says that democracy is not in the voting,
[14:41] it's in the counting.
[14:43] SPEAKER_00: And,
[14:43] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[14:44] SPEAKER_00: all the stuff that Trump,
[14:45] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[14:45] SPEAKER_00: as we'll be saying with Trump,
[14:46] SPEAKER_00: every accusation is actually a confession.
[14:50] The chance that there actually will be rigged vote counts has
[14:54] got to be high.
[14:56] SPEAKER_00: But I think just in general,
[14:57] and I don't want to be fatalistic about this because it's not
[15:02] that easy to pull
[15:03] SPEAKER_00: off.
[15:04] SPEAKER_00: Among other things, the U.S.
[15:05] SPEAKER_00: is still a federalist system, fairly decentralized.
[15:09] SPEAKER_00: I think it's a lot harder to...
[15:13] suppress the election nationwide than it would be if we were a
[15:18] less federalist country.
[15:20] SPEAKER_00: But the chance that this will not be a free and fair election,
[15:24] SPEAKER_00: and certainly that media coverage will be distorted by fear,
[15:32] SPEAKER_00: which is certainly that's the way things work in places like Hungary,
[15:37] SPEAKER_00: which is
[15:40] SPEAKER_00: And essentially, Orban critical media has been driven out.
[15:44] SPEAKER_00: Now, it's funny because we were always talking about soft autocracy.
[15:48] SPEAKER_00: In Hungary,
[15:49] it's not that you fear that government goons are going to burst
[15:52] into your coffee
[15:53] SPEAKER_00: shop and arrest you.
[15:54] SPEAKER_00: It's all this other subtler stuff.
[15:56] SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that in Trump's America,
[15:58] SPEAKER_00: actually,
[15:59] SPEAKER_00: you do fear that government goons are going to burst in and arrest you.
[16:02] SPEAKER_00: But it still is the other stuff.
[16:04] SPEAKER_00: that could really distort what comes next.
[16:06] SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't think that's a given.
[16:08] SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot more popular resistance already than,
[16:13] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[16:13] my fear had been at this point we would already have a populist
[16:17] that would more or
[16:17] SPEAKER_00: less resigned to one party rule,
[16:20] SPEAKER_00: and we do not have that at all.
[16:22] SPEAKER_00: So it's not,
[16:24] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[16:27] SPEAKER_00: we still have a pretty good chance of getting out of this,
[16:29] SPEAKER_00: but it's scary.
[16:32] SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
[16:32] I when I look at the midterms and Republicans likely success in
[16:38] holding power in
[16:39] SPEAKER_02: Congress and Senate,
[16:40] one thing that I look at is soft measures of consumer approval
[16:44] for the economy.
[16:45] There was just a report today that found that not only has
[16:48] consumer approval for
[16:49] SPEAKER_02: the economy dropped significantly among Democrats.
[16:51] And don't even look at it for Republicans because right now the
[16:54] ideological split
[16:55] is so crazy that when you ask people who say they're
[16:57] Republicans or say they're
[16:58] SPEAKER_02: Democrats,
[16:58] SPEAKER_02: how is the economy?
[16:59] SPEAKER_02: They're basically just telling you who's in the White House.
[17:01] SPEAKER_02: What the important line to pay attention to, I think, is independence.
[17:04] And the independence appraisal of the economy dropped by nine
[17:08] points from month to month.
[17:10] SPEAKER_02: And it's interesting because when I look at the economy right now,
[17:13] SPEAKER_02: If you just look at sort of BEA,
[17:14] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[17:15] SPEAKER_02: GDP data,
[17:16] SPEAKER_02: or you look at BLS data from inflation or overall unemployment rate,
[17:20] SPEAKER_02: those measures aren't obviously flashing red.
[17:23] SPEAKER_02: But then you look just under the hood at sort of the secondary stuff,
[17:25] SPEAKER_02: the business surveys,
[17:27] SPEAKER_02: the manufacturing surveys,
[17:28] SPEAKER_02: stuff from the Fed Beige book.
[17:30] And it really is starting to look like the economy is weakening
[17:34] at a level that
[17:35] SPEAKER_02: would indicate a recession at some point in the next 12 months.
[17:38] SPEAKER_02: I wonder,
[17:39] SPEAKER_02: because you understand how to read this huge mural better than I do,
[17:44] what are you seeing in the data right now that tells us about
[17:47] the state of the
[17:47] SPEAKER_02: economy?
[17:48] SPEAKER_00: By the way,
[17:48] SPEAKER_00: one thing I want to say,
[17:49] I actually work in a genuinely interdisciplinary center at CUNY
[17:58] and the Stone
[17:58] SPEAKER_00: Center.
[17:59] SPEAKER_00: So I actually talked to political scientists,
[18:01] SPEAKER_00: and one of the things that they tell me is that,
[18:04] SPEAKER_00: to a first approximation,
[18:05] SPEAKER_00: there are no independents.
[18:07] Everyone who says they're independent is actually just a
[18:09] Republican or a Democrat
[18:11] SPEAKER_00: who,
[18:11] SPEAKER_00: for whatever reason,
[18:12] SPEAKER_00: doesn't want to admit it.
[18:13] SPEAKER_00: So I'm not sure that that's a particularly helpful measure.
[18:17] SPEAKER_02: It tells us...
[18:19] SPEAKER_02: So there's only three categories you can click into, right?
[18:22] SPEAKER_02: If you're responding to the University of Michigan Consumer Survey.
[18:24] SPEAKER_02: And so I'm just letting listeners know.
[18:26] SPEAKER_02: And so my thinking is,
[18:28] SPEAKER_02: if you self-idea as a Democrat,
[18:29] SPEAKER_02: you're probably going to hate Trump's economy no matter what.
[18:32] If you self-idea as a Republican,
[18:33] you're probably going to love Trump's economy no matter what.
[18:35] So like the best proxy that we can get from there is that third
[18:38] category of folks who are like,
[18:40] I'm a de facto never Republican or never Democrat,
[18:42] but I call myself an independent.
[18:44] SPEAKER_02: And maybe tracing that line,
[18:46] SPEAKER_02: you can get something like a better approximation of,
[18:48] SPEAKER_02: like,
[18:48] SPEAKER_02: the median voter.
[18:49] SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm trying to say.
[18:52] SPEAKER_00: I'm actually... I think that the...
[18:56] I think business surveys are in many ways more revealing
[19:00] because there's less of a
[19:03] SPEAKER_00: sense of political identification there.
[19:06] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[19:06] SPEAKER_00: obviously,
[19:06] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[19:08] the small business surveys are always much more positive under
[19:12] Republicans because
[19:13] SPEAKER_00: small business people are basically a lot of the MAGA base.
[19:17] SPEAKER_00: But—
[19:19] SPEAKER_00: But they are really—I mean,
[19:20] SPEAKER_00: if you really want to have some fun,
[19:23] SPEAKER_00: just read the comments from the Dallas Fed surveys.
[19:27] SPEAKER_00: Correct.
[19:28] SPEAKER_00: People are just hysterical over disruptions, tariffs.
[19:32] I can't make any plans because I don't know what policy is
[19:35] going to be next week.
[19:37] So there is a tremendous level of unease,
[19:41] and it ain't going to get better,
[19:43] I don't think.
[19:44] SPEAKER_00: It's, you know—
[19:47] We just had our first Trump trade deal with Vietnam,
[19:52] where we have basically...
[20:00] SPEAKER_00: We got almost nothing.
[20:01] SPEAKER_00: They got almost nothing.
[20:03] SPEAKER_00: They're now facing a 20% tariff when before they didn't.
[20:06] SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, all of this stuff is pie in the sky, imaginary.
[20:13] SPEAKER_00: And I do believe that people are feeling it.
[20:15] SPEAKER_00: Elliot Morris had this nice thing where if you ask people,
[20:23] SPEAKER_00: would you change your vote if the election was held again today?
[20:26] SPEAKER_00: And nobody, everybody says, no, no.
[20:29] But if you ask the question in a different way that doesn't
[20:31] force them to admit
[20:32] SPEAKER_00: that they were wrong,
[20:34] SPEAKER_00: Harris would have won easily.
[20:36] SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
[20:37] SPEAKER_02: We should say more about that.
[20:38] SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure I entirely understand the second part of that observation.
[20:40] He asked people sort of who would you vote for without asking
[20:48] who did you vote for?
[20:50] And it was really clear that a lot of people are really
[20:55] regretting their choice but
[20:56] SPEAKER_00: not prepared to admit that.
[20:58] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[20:59] SPEAKER_00: if we come out of this at the other end,
[21:02] there will be only 35% of Americans who will admit that they
[21:06] ever voted for Trump,
[21:07] SPEAKER_00: right?
[21:08] SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
[21:09] SPEAKER_00: But,
[21:09] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[21:10] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[21:10] SPEAKER_00: people are really—and by the way,
[21:12] what's also interesting is that the issues that were supposed
[21:15] to be things that
[21:17] SPEAKER_00: people don't care about,
[21:19] SPEAKER_00: like deportations,
[21:20] SPEAKER_00: and Trump's approval has crashed on those things.
[21:24] SPEAKER_00: It turns out that actually,
[21:26] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[21:26] SPEAKER_00: most Americans,
[21:27] once they get to see what it really means to live under this
[21:30] kind of regime,
[21:31] SPEAKER_00: become—
[21:36] SPEAKER_00: are a lot more decent than the cynics would have to be.
[21:41] SPEAKER_00: Now, whether that's enough to save us, I don't know.
[21:43] But there's a lot to be said for there being some underlying
[21:48] base of decency in the
[21:50] SPEAKER_00: American electorate.
[21:51] This is one of the things I find most interesting about Donald
[21:54] Trump is that he's
[21:54] SPEAKER_02: simultaneously one of the most powerful politicians in modern history.
[21:59] And also one of his superpowers seems to be the ability to
[22:04] compel the American
[22:05] SPEAKER_02: electorate to believe Trump.
[22:08] SPEAKER_02: or wants the exact opposite of what he's doing.
[22:11] SPEAKER_02: So you saw that immigration,
[22:12] SPEAKER_02: the popularity of immigration,
[22:14] SPEAKER_02: rose to an all-time high during his first term.
[22:16] Americans were more liberal on the issue of should America have
[22:19] more immigration?
[22:20] SPEAKER_02: Is immigration good for America?
[22:21] More liberal on that question than any period in American
[22:24] history in the middle of
[22:26] SPEAKER_02: Donald Trump's first term.
[22:27] An analog to that that I just saw recently is that if you ask
[22:31] Americans about their
[22:32] SPEAKER_02: attitudes toward free trade and you decompose it by ideology,
[22:37] SPEAKER_02: so most conservative,
[22:38] SPEAKER_02: conservative,
[22:39] SPEAKER_02: middle,
[22:40] SPEAKER_02: liberal,
[22:40] SPEAKER_02: and very liberal,
[22:41] the folks right now in America who say that they are most
[22:45] pro-free trade are those
[22:47] SPEAKER_02: who self-identify as very liberal.
[22:50] SPEAKER_02: That is an unbelievable reversal of,
[22:52] SPEAKER_02: say,
[22:52] SPEAKER_02: the free trade regimes or the free trade debates of the 1990s.
[22:55] And it speaks to this idea that as powerful and as scary and as
[23:00] wannabe autocratic
[23:02] SPEAKER_02: as Donald Trump is,
[23:03] SPEAKER_02: one of his superpowers,
[23:05] SPEAKER_02: if you can call it that,
[23:06] SPEAKER_02: is this ability to drive public opinion in the opposite direction.
[23:10] SPEAKER_02: He does he knows how he's he's decent at winning elections.
[23:14] SPEAKER_02: He does not know how to govern as a popular president.
[23:17] SPEAKER_02: His instincts are horrendous.
[23:19] SPEAKER_02: And in this administration in particular,
[23:21] I think he surrounded himself with people whose instincts are
[23:24] 10 times worse.
[23:26] SPEAKER_02: So this is not like hope.
[23:27] SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying obviously we'll win the midterms.
[23:29] SPEAKER_02: Obviously, Democrats will win in 2028.
[23:30] SPEAKER_02: But it's an observation that.
[23:34] SPEAKER_02: that many of the terrible things that he's doing right now,
[23:37] SPEAKER_02: to your point,
[23:38] SPEAKER_02: seem to be regarded as terrible by the electorate.
[23:41] SPEAKER_02: I do wish that there were a way to make the Medicaid cuts break through.
[23:46] I've seen some polling suggests a lot of Americans just don't
[23:48] know what's in the
[23:49] SPEAKER_02: BBB,
[23:51] SPEAKER_02: and it's been difficult maybe to make it a media event.
[23:56] SPEAKER_02: But that's the one place where I'm concerned that Trump's...
[24:02] SPEAKER_02: unbelievably unpopular choices as president haven't,
[24:06] SPEAKER_02: in this case,
[24:07] SPEAKER_02: saved us from,
[24:08] SPEAKER_02: I think,
[24:08] SPEAKER_02: what looks like the inevitable passage of this bill?
[24:12] SPEAKER_00: Well, the...
[24:15] SPEAKER_00: And part of the trick on Medicaid is that they've just lied.
[24:18] SPEAKER_00: We're not cutting Medicaid.
[24:19] We're just going to get all those freeloaders who refuse to
[24:23] work off the program.
[24:24] SPEAKER_00: And so there are no explicit cuts in Medicaid.
[24:29] SPEAKER_00: It's just, well, we're going to impose all of these stuff.
[24:32] impossible paperwork requirements,
[24:34] which will mean that people can't actually get it.
[24:37] SPEAKER_00: Now, that will work.
[24:38] SPEAKER_00: That might work for a while until it actually starts to hit.
[24:41] SPEAKER_00: But the thing,
[24:42] SPEAKER_00: specifically on Medicaid,
[24:43] is one of the things we've learned from the polling and surveys
[24:47] is that Medicaid is
[24:48] SPEAKER_00: now just part of the landscape.
[24:52] SPEAKER_00: Almost everybody knows somebody who is on or has relied on Medicaid.
[24:59] SPEAKER_00: And when
[25:00] people who were counting on Medicaid find that it's an
[25:04] impossible application process.
[25:06] SPEAKER_00: And
[25:08] SPEAKER_00: It won't be possible to hide that.
[25:10] SPEAKER_00: Everybody will hear about it.
[25:11] SPEAKER_00: So you can fake your budget numbers.
[25:15] SPEAKER_00: You can fake what your policy is until it actually hits.
[25:20] SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like the opposite of Obamacare, right?
[25:24] Obamacare was unpopular and scare stories and so on until it
[25:29] actually went into effect.
[25:30] And then after a few years of it being out there,
[25:33] people were saying,
[25:34] oh,
[25:34] gee,
[25:34] I can get—
[25:36] SPEAKER_00: I've got arthritis and I'm still able to get health insurance, you know.
[25:39] SPEAKER_00: And so this will hit,
[25:44] SPEAKER_00: but there is a long question about,
[25:47] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[25:48] SPEAKER_00: in some ways we're in a race between reality and repression.
[25:53] SPEAKER_00: And who's going to win first that race?
[25:56] Well,
[25:56] speaking of reality,
[25:57] I definitely want to ask you about AI in just a second.
[25:58] SPEAKER_02: But here's just a thought that popped in my mind,
[26:01] SPEAKER_02: and I don't want people to interpret this as a prediction.
[26:04] SPEAKER_02: It's just a question.
[26:05] Do you think it's possible that Republicans pass this law but
[26:11] don't enforce the
[26:14] paperwork requirements for Medicaid in a way that ultimately
[26:17] means that they get
[26:18] SPEAKER_02: their tax cuts,
[26:19] SPEAKER_02: they get the sugar rush,
[26:21] SPEAKER_02: but a lot of the more painful and,
[26:24] SPEAKER_02: let's be honest,
[26:24] SPEAKER_02: you've already said it,
[26:26] SPEAKER_02: inevitably politically unpopular cuts to programs won't actually happen,
[26:32] which means the ultimate result of the bill will just be to
[26:35] give away a bunch of
[26:36] SPEAKER_02: tax cuts to the rich and jack up deficits in the next few years.
[26:41] SPEAKER_02: Is that outside of the realm of possibility?
[26:43] I think that the way the law is written,
[26:46] they can't avoid imposing the requirements.
[26:50] SPEAKER_00: But here's the question I've been asking,
[26:52] SPEAKER_00: which is suppose that some well-meaning major donors fund large nonprofit
[26:59] SPEAKER_00: organizations that act as navigators.
[27:02] SPEAKER_00: to help people get through the paperwork requirements.
[27:06] SPEAKER_00: Um,
[27:06] SPEAKER_00: that's,
[27:07] SPEAKER_00: uh,
[27:08] SPEAKER_00: first of all,
[27:08] SPEAKER_00: can that be,
[27:09] SPEAKER_00: I'm,
[27:09] SPEAKER_00: I'm actually going to be talking to some real experts on this,
[27:11] SPEAKER_00: but that certainly sounds like a,
[27:12] SPEAKER_00: a real possibility.
[27:15] SPEAKER_00: Um,
[27:15] SPEAKER_00: and are Trump and his people going to try to,
[27:20] SPEAKER_00: will they try to bring lawsuits to try to stop people,
[27:23] SPEAKER_00: stop,
[27:24] SPEAKER_00: uh,
[27:25] SPEAKER_00: uh,
[27:26] SPEAKER_00: um,
[27:26] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[27:27] SPEAKER_00: uh,
[27:28] SPEAKER_00: the,
[27:28] SPEAKER_00: um,
[27:29] SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
[27:31] Jeff Bezos' ex from funding organizations that help people
[27:36] navigate the Medicaid
[27:37] SPEAKER_00: maze,
[27:38] SPEAKER_00: or will they simply allow it to happen?
[27:40] SPEAKER_00: And so that's one possibility is that the fake,
[27:44] SPEAKER_00: it's more complicated than what you just said,
[27:46] but still that the fake non-cuts to Medicaid turn out to actual
[27:53] non-cuts to
[27:53] SPEAKER_00: Medicaid because there's an end run.
[27:56] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[27:58] What I feel confident about,
[27:59] I don't feel confident that the cuts won't actually happen.
[28:01] What I feel confident about is that the implementation stage of
[28:04] cutting $1 trillion
[28:06] from a medical program that provides insurance for one fifth of
[28:10] Americans is going
[28:12] SPEAKER_02: to be messy,
[28:12] SPEAKER_02: messy,
[28:13] SPEAKER_02: messy.
[28:14] SPEAKER_02: And I don't know how to exactly predict how it's going to work out,
[28:17] SPEAKER_02: but I think it's going to be a mess.
[28:18] SPEAKER_02: And I think some things will happen that surprise us and even offend us.
[28:23] Like,
[28:23] as you were just talking,
[28:24] I was thinking maybe the most Trump thing was
[28:26] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[28:41] In order to cajole other countries and counterparties to give
[28:44] him things that he
[28:45] SPEAKER_02: wants,
[28:45] he uses the threat of the Medicaid bureaucratic sludge in order
[28:50] to create some
[28:50] SPEAKER_02: opportunity for his family and the Republican Party.
[28:53] SPEAKER_02: Dark thoughts.
[28:53] SPEAKER_02: I have nothing behind it.
[28:54] SPEAKER_02: There's no reporting to back that up.
[28:56] SPEAKER_02: But it's in keeping with the MO that we've seen over the last few months.
[29:00] SPEAKER_00: Well, I actually don't.
[29:01] SPEAKER_00: The tariff thing is actually a good model for why I don't believe it.
[29:07] SPEAKER_00: Because,
[29:07] SPEAKER_00: in fact,
[29:08] he's not using the tariffs to get countries to give us stuff
[29:11] because they can't.
[29:12] SPEAKER_00: He wants the Europeans to drop the high tariffs they're imposing on U.S.
[29:16] SPEAKER_00: goods, except they don't.
[29:17] SPEAKER_00: We have almost free access to the European market.
[29:21] SPEAKER_00: So there is no deal with Europe.
[29:23] SPEAKER_00: There is no deal with Japan.
[29:25] because they have nothing to give us because they're already
[29:27] doing what he's
[29:28] SPEAKER_00: demanding that they do.
[29:30] But no,
[29:30] there is,
[29:30] I mean,
[29:31] I actually think that we should also put a pretty high weight
[29:34] on
[29:35] SPEAKER_00: just plain everything breaking down.
[29:38] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[29:39] SPEAKER_00: just,
[29:40] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[29:42] SPEAKER_00: you had this sense about Trump does not know how to govern in order to,
[29:46] SPEAKER_00: I think we might want to just stop right there.
[29:50] SPEAKER_00: Particularly,
[29:51] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[29:52] SPEAKER_00: one thing that,
[29:53] I think this is one of the lessons from Elon Musk and Doge and
[29:57] all of that.
[29:58] SPEAKER_00: Look, we've been starving.
[30:01] SPEAKER_00: government administration in this country for decades now,
[30:05] which has a peculiar effect that our government actually runs
[30:09] on scotch tape and
[30:12] SPEAKER_00: paper clips,
[30:13] SPEAKER_00: right?
[30:14] SPEAKER_00: It's ancient hardware,
[30:17] SPEAKER_00: even more ancient software,
[30:19] SPEAKER_00: a lot of institutional memory for people who know how,
[30:23] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[30:24] SPEAKER_00: when...
[30:26] SPEAKER_00: when we had to expand unemployment benefits during COVID,
[30:29] there was a desperate call from the state of New Jersey for
[30:33] people who still knew
[30:34] SPEAKER_00: how to program in COBOL,
[30:36] SPEAKER_00: right?
[30:38] And trying to do all of this stuff with an administrative state
[30:43] that was already
[30:45] SPEAKER_00: creaking and has been devastated by DOGE,
[30:50] SPEAKER_00: just lots of stuff's not going to work.
[30:51] SPEAKER_00: So it's not just that there are going to be administrative hurdles.
[30:54] SPEAKER_00: It'll be that you'll cross all the administrative hurdles,
[31:01] SPEAKER_00: but the program,
[31:03] SPEAKER_00: the computers won't recognize it.
[31:05] SPEAKER_00: So this is going to be an unholy mess with a lot of suffering,
[31:10] SPEAKER_00: and I do think people will get angry.
[31:14] SPEAKER_02: I do too.
[31:15] SPEAKER_02: And it's weird to feel optimistic is clearly the wrong word.
[31:19] It's weird to feel like you're searching for the silver lining
[31:21] of anger against
[31:22] this administration in a way that cashes out and victories the
[31:25] Democratic Party in
[31:26] SPEAKER_02: 26 and 28.
[31:27] SPEAKER_02: But I do think that a bill like this that's so flagrantly cruel.
[31:32] SPEAKER_02: and so fragrantly anti-populist given what appeared to be the mandate the
[31:37] SPEAKER_02: Republican parties had coming into office.
[31:38] This was an affordability election in which more working class
[31:42] Americans voted for
[31:43] SPEAKER_02: the Republican ticket.
[31:45] SPEAKER_02: And what are they going to do?
[31:46] They're raising prices on the middle and lower classes with
[31:48] higher tariffs.
[31:49] SPEAKER_02: They're taking away their health care.
[31:51] SPEAKER_02: They're withholding spending on education.
[31:52] SPEAKER_02: And we just saw that today.
[31:53] SPEAKER_02: It is once again, just like we saw in the first term,
[31:57] campaigning on populism and governing with plutocracy um i want
[32:01] to make sure that
[32:01] before we have about five minutes left um i want to ask you
[32:05] about ai um and maybe
[32:06] i'll set you up this way dario amade the ceo of anthropic
[32:10] predicted in an interview
[32:11] with axios that he thinks a significant chunk up to 50 percent
[32:16] of entry-level
[32:17] white-collar work is going to disappear because of generative
[32:22] ai your thoughts um
[32:26] SPEAKER_00: The fundamental thought is I have no idea.
[32:30] My efforts on this have led me to the conclusion that the way
[32:34] to have a firm view
[32:36] SPEAKER_00: on AI is to decide what you want to believe,
[32:39] SPEAKER_00: and then you can find an alleged expert who will tell you that.
[32:42] SPEAKER_00: That's good.
[32:44] SPEAKER_00: I found that's true as well.
[32:46] SPEAKER_00: It's quite possible that a lot of entry-level white-collar jobs...
[32:52] SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, technologies have displaced a lot of people in the past.
[32:57] But that there will be other kinds of jobs is also the lesson
[33:01] of the past.
[33:02] SPEAKER_00: That, you know, the fears of mass unemployment due to automation.
[33:06] I mean,
[33:09] certainly go back to Kurt Vonnegut's player piano in 1952 and
[33:15] arguably well before that.
[33:17] SPEAKER_00: So...
[33:19] But the jury is still very much out on,
[33:22] you know,
[33:23] how much,
[33:25] how useful is this stuff?
[33:27] SPEAKER_00: And actually,
[33:27] another thing that I've been seeing people raise is even when
[33:30] it's useful,
[33:31] SPEAKER_00: is it something that you can monetize?
[33:34] SPEAKER_00: Not clear that there's an actual profit center here.
[33:38] So we have a lot of companies that are pouring tons and tons of
[33:41] money into AI.
[33:43] SPEAKER_00: And it's not clear,
[33:44] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[33:45] SPEAKER_00: there may be,
[33:47] SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
[33:47] SPEAKER_00: is NVIDIA going to be the Pets.com of our generation?
[33:52] SPEAKER_00: Your generation.
[33:54] SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
[33:55] SPEAKER_00: Do you use it?
[33:58] SPEAKER_00: I actually either use,
[34:02] SPEAKER_00: there are some AI-free search engines that you can use,
[34:05] SPEAKER_00: or if you're using Google,
[34:07] SPEAKER_00: if you start your query with minus AI,
[34:10] SPEAKER_00: it kills the AI,
[34:12] SPEAKER_00: which I do.
[34:12] Because anything I'm searching is almost certainly something
[34:17] where I have a better idea about.
[34:19] SPEAKER_00: of what's relevant and trustworthy than the model does.
[34:24] SPEAKER_00: So,
[34:26] SPEAKER_00: yeah,
[34:28] SPEAKER_00: there's a whole lot of stuff that I just don't,
[34:30] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[34:32] SPEAKER_00: when people ask me about how,
[34:33] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[34:34] SPEAKER_00: how do you use Facebook?
[34:35] SPEAKER_00: The answer is I have never used Facebook.
[34:36] SPEAKER_00: That sort of thing.
[34:37] SPEAKER_00: I just not, but so far I'm not using AI at all.
[34:40] SPEAKER_00: The one place, I'm sorry, Amazon book reviews.
[34:45] the ai summary of of the intelligent reviews actually is useful
[34:48] so i suppose there
[34:49] must be places so you oh the the ai summary at the top of the
[34:54] amazon book reviews
[34:55] that essentially says people thought this book was intelligent
[34:59] but also too long
[35:00] and they appreciated the section on 15th century military
[35:02] history i say yeah um
[35:06] SPEAKER_02: In the last 120 seconds,
[35:07] do you want to share with us your current obsession with 16th
[35:10] and 17th century
[35:12] SPEAKER_02: European military history?
[35:13] Just give us a taste of what's slew us thing through your mind
[35:16] when it comes to
[35:17] SPEAKER_02: this particular obsession.
[35:18] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[35:18] SPEAKER_00: I read a lot of history.
[35:21] SPEAKER_00: I don't know if people can see it.
[35:22] SPEAKER_00: I'm wearing a Beards of Gettysburg t-shirt.
[35:26] So a lot of history and a lot of military history because,
[35:28] well,
[35:28] I'm a guy.
[35:30] SPEAKER_00: But I had this long talk.
[35:34] SPEAKER_00: I did on my own substack.
[35:35] SPEAKER_00: I did an interview with Ada Palmer.
[35:38] SPEAKER_00: who's a interesting man,
[35:40] SPEAKER_00: but her day job is as a historian of Renaissance Italy,
[35:45] SPEAKER_00: and we talked a lot about it.
[35:46] SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that struck me,
[35:49] SPEAKER_00: didn't really manage to bring it up in our conversation,
[35:51] SPEAKER_00: but if you look at what went on during that period,
[35:55] SPEAKER_00: who were the great innovators?
[35:56] Who were the people who really figured out how firearms had
[36:01] changed warfare?
[36:03] SPEAKER_00: And the answer is Spain.
[36:06] SPEAKER_00: Spain was the great military innovator of the 15th and 16th centuries.
[36:11] SPEAKER_00: And we think now,
[36:12] we project backwards to their later decadence and refusal to
[36:20] adapt to the modern
[36:21] SPEAKER_00: world.
[36:21] But in fact,
[36:22] if we go back to the Italian wars of the 15th and 16th
[36:26] centuries,
[36:28] It was Spanish flexibility and innovation that really
[36:33] determined the outcome.
[36:34] SPEAKER_00: And that, I think, is important.
[36:37] You want to understand that maybe we see things with way too
[36:43] much hindsight,
[36:44] SPEAKER_00: way too much teleology,
[36:45] SPEAKER_00: and fail to understand who was doing what when.
[36:50] SPEAKER_02: I love that as an answer.
[36:51] SPEAKER_02: Ada Palmer was the host of Ezra and my book tour stop in Chicago.
[36:56] So we had an amazing time talking with her about the
[36:58] Renaissance,
[36:59] Francis Bacon,
[37:00] Spanish Empire.
[37:01] Encourage everybody to check out both her science fiction books
[37:04] and her book,
[37:05] SPEAKER_02: Inventing the Renaissance.
[37:06] SPEAKER_02: They're both really wonderful.
[37:07] SPEAKER_02: Paul, it was lovely to see you.
[37:09] SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much for doing this.
[37:10] SPEAKER_01: Good to see you.
[37:11] SPEAKER_02: Okay.
[37:11] SPEAKER_02: Good to see you.
[37:12] SPEAKER_02: Bye.

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