Are Techno Optimism and Populism Incompatible?

Key Takeaways

Thank you all for being here. You ready to get going? I'm coming right after you. No, Josh, let's slow down. Yeah. All right. This is too fast. Uh, as we look at I thought Bloomberg was supposed to move fast. We're moving. We're moving fast. Already written articles in the last month uh quoting uh Rohead and Steve. So, I feel like I'm up to speed. And now I want to get you guys up to speed too. Uh looking ahead to this new Trump era. Uh I wanted to start off by asking you both uh about an idea that was written up in the Atlantic yesterday that I think has big implications for what tech and antitrust policy uh might look like in the years ahead. Uh the article suggested there's been a fusion uh on the right between MAGA nationalists like Steve and big tech barons like Elon Musk, Peter Teal uh and Mark Andre uh all in opposition to this uh spectre of wokeness that people on the right are so worked up about. But the article goes on to suggest that big tech is actually the one in the driver's seat and that folks like Steve are, and I'm quoting the article here, political sucker fish riding a whale. Uh my question for you, Steve, is this true? Are you in the MAGA crowd beholden to big tech? Or does Elon Musk's humiliation in Wisconsin last night begin to weaken his political standing and his influence on policy in the Trump presidency? Are you assuming that someone spends $20 million and goes where a cheese head on a stage and bounces around is humiliated? Um, okay. The fusion, the whole fusion crap is pushed by the tech oligarchs. You know why? They fear populism. They fear economic nationalism. If we have, we're in a co we admit we're in a coalition. It is a coalition, but there's a much higher probability that we will have fusion with certain of the ideas of Ro roit and particularly Lena Khan and others that have fought uh you know monopolies have fought oligarchs for years and I think that's where the fusion is going to come the um one of the biggest scourges in our country are these oligarchs the lords of easy money on Wall Street the corporatist and particularly the apartheid state of Silicon Valley and it's a huge problem and yes we're in an un very uneasy coalition, but it is a coalition. They were some of them quite central to our victory in November and they were also central to our let's say there's a huge defeat last night uh on the uh in the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. So my question then is if is that you agree with that? Yeah, I think so. I think if you look at the first Trump term, you know, at at the Federal Trade Commission, for example, every single time you really saw the Republicans on the FTC speaking from a different HIMYM book than Trump. They were pro-Chinese manufacturing. They were pro- big tech. They were pro- big pharma. And then you saw others who were really trying to fight against a lot of that money. And now we think Silicon Valley used to be lots and lots of little tech. And is it going to stay that way or is it just going to be owned by these six dudes? And Zuckerberg can, you know, wear whatever chains he want. But I think at the end of the day, if they control this whole system, there's big trouble for our country. You're not going to burrow out. you're not going to start going to UFC fights and uh no the fusion no the fusionism is pushed by we're in a coalition the fusionism they want us to be subservient to their interest in teto feudalism and we're not going to do that the power we still have here and the difference in in the first term we've now evolved this party to be truly a workingclass and middle class party and the Democrats have kind of lost that or lost focus on it they become the credential class and we need to drive this point home that's what we're building a bigger coalition. And I think if we do our job and somehow we can keep them together in an uneasy coalition, although I don't know if that's possible, we can build a uh we can redefine politics like in 1932. We're at that inflection point that is upon us to do it. And things like last night obviously are a big setback. Looking ahead at the policy landscape though, if Elon and the Six Bros are uh representing big tech, who who if anyone is standing up for little tech in the in the Trump administration? I think you've got a lot of people. I mean, I think you've got we've got our new one of our new FTC uh commissioners are here. Mark's here. Uh you got our viceroy. Where's Mike Davis? The fire breather Mike Dav uh Mike Davis is a fire breather for the unpopular side. If you look in the Justice Department, right, tomorrow I'm going to be over there at Justice with Omid and others. Gail Slater. I mean, we have Look, I think Lena Khan is one of the most important political figures in this country. And I think if she had been listened to more by Democrats, they would have actually been more competitive against us in November of 2024. But I think you have a lot of people that I would call neorobycians that actually see the danger of concentration of massive concentration of personal wealth and power uh to government power. And look, let's be blunt. That was all caused by the Democrat and most progressive elements of the Democratic party, the bailouts on Wall Street in 2008, which which were unacceptable, and the kind of Fouian bargain given to the big six dudes to essentially say you're going to have monopolistic power. Um, but you we'll make a deal with you. You have to be at the cutting edge of that because we're a hedgeimon. You have to be have the commanding heights of technology. Tik Tok shows you they've blown it in social media. And quite frankly, Deep Seek, whether it's a Chinese SCOP or if it's real, shows you that their method, right, which they threw climate change overboard, all that overboard for this mass power of uh of AI is wrong. And now what do they want? They want a bailout. They want a $500 billion Mercury program or Marshall Plan, however they call it. And they want us to turn the national labs over to them. Absolutely. Right. So these guys, they have an unsatiable appetite for money and power and it's got to be stopped. And they want to hand over a playbook that is really Europe's playbook from the 40s about trying to have a a click of corporate royalty that we're supposed to help the entire time. And I thought America built all of this because we made sure there was little companies challenging these big guys and running them out of business when they're doing something better. So I think this is the jump ball right now. We see it in a few different places, but if they hollow out and defund some of these enforcers, they're not going to be able to go. But let me ask you about that because you you are taking Are we taking this over? Are you going to get some more into this? No. No. I I want to spice this up a little bit cuz you you sound like you're half asleep. Um Ru, you you you were recently on the receiving end of the Trump Musk policy approach and so I'm imagining your view of of of Trump's approach is a little less rosy when it comes to big tech than maybe Steve's is. You told me at the time for a Bloomberg post I wrote, quote, "Defunding the police that watch over Wall Street and big tech will cost consumers billions of dollars." What's the case you'd make to folks like Steve and Republicans on the right for why a robust enforcement uh regime is necessary? Well, look, Steve mentioned the bailouts. I think this a lot of what our discourse is today, whether we know it or not, comes from the financial crisis. Amen. And the big giveaways to those who are already powerful. In what planet can you mismanage your business so badly and go on the other side and become bigger and more powerful? That's exactly what happened in 2008. So I really think look it is really it is a jump ball in so many places. When Musk and the whoever took over the CFPB, the one of the first people they fired were the tech people, the ones who were doing the investigations of big tech companies creating currency. They were the ones who were trying to make sure there was open tech so that small companies could challenge big banks. So, we're going to see a fight on both sides, I think, but I don't know how it's going to turn out if they keep getting rid of the watchd dogs and just expect these agencies to be lap dogs. Okay. So, I want to dig in a little bit more uh on this idea of of a struggle between big tech and little tech uh how it might play out in the Trump years. And I want to provoke you both a bit um by offering some historical context. Richard Nixon famously wanted his Justice Department to threaten investigations of the major t TV networks in order to obtain friendlier coverage. Perhaps a precursor uh to Trump's later threats against big tech. On the Nixon tapes, we hear him saying uh a DOJ investigation quote gives us one hell of a club, a sort of damocles, uh Nixon called it, to coersse favorable coverage. Steve, is that Trump's real aim here? just a friendlier Facebook and a defanged Washington Post or are there real populist instincts um that that might lean against the power of some of the big tech companies? I think look, it's obviously, you know, something that's being worked out through the Trump administration. Like I said, we're a coalition. There's definitely voices on big tech. They have every lobbyist in this town, every law firm in this town. Let's say it's a rigged system. System is totally rigged. If you want to go up against big tech now, I'm going to tell you how tough. Would you talk to him personally about this? Here here's what I think is Here's one of the things I think is important is our going after the big law firms. We're we're trying to go after the machinery that has this system set up to go after the big law firms. I think we have to go after the big investment banks, the big hedge funds, the money center banks. You have to go after all of them and and basically, you know, play smashmouth because they play play smashmouth with you. This system is run by money and power. It's run by oligarchic centers in both Wall Street, the corporatist and Silicon Valley. And we're just not going to change it overnight. And there is a struggle. I mean, you have I would submit to you that and if you read the the front two pages of the remedy section in the Google case and see where our justice department's coming out, it kind of stuns me of how antirust the people we've put in. I mean, people know I'm a a big admire of Alina Khan. I don't think we've made that big a shift. I would love to have her back. I think she'd be terrific, but it's we're just a difference in degree, not so much in kind of what we put in place today. And I think you're going to see tough antitrust action taking place. That's why I think Wall Street's not enamored. They didn't see the big wave of M&A and M&A fees coming. So, this is all but it's always going to be a struggle. It's who's going to be able to have muscle politically. In in Florida six, we were down three points. Uh I think up to two weeks ago when our show got involved, Breitbart got involved. We got our grassroots volunteers out. You know, Scott Jennings on CNN makes a very important point about as we've reshaped this party to be more workingass and in and middle class. We also are dependent upon low propensity voters, low propensity, low information. It's not they're not degreed or not dumb by low information. They're just not interested in politics, right? These people basically come up for Trump. We have to have a massive grassroots effort every time to get them out. Scott's absolutely correct and this is one of the reasons we won in Florida six has got it out. So the power we have to what they called them sucker fish. Yeah. We have to deliver you know mass amounts of grassroots right who are basically entrepreneurs right the little guy the little shopkeepers the the the workers. We have to deliver that and we have to deliver it consistently. But I think you're starting to see that that that we could we did win shouldn't be lost. We did win overwhelmingly the voter ID in in Wisconsin last night. Although we lost we lost I think we got blown out. I mean since I've known you, you've been really outspoken. You just mentioned it now about the power of money in politics. And I'm interested in how that applies to tech and antitrust policy. What is there evidence you can point me to that Trump is serious about pursuing a crackdown he's talked about in the past and won't be bought off by inauguration look at the FTC Listen it's a Melania documentary we're in an imperial capital that the populist nationalist movement did not create okay this is an empire exactly what the revolutionary generation and the framers and the founders of our nation warned us against we evolved into if the if the revolutionary ary generation of framers came back to say they'd spit on the floor with how we've allowed this country to evolve. And so this our movement is relatively young and having political power. But look at look at our justice department. Look at the look at some of the commissioners we're putting on there. These people are almost as big a fire breathers as Roit and Lena Khan. That's what I think is so shocking. Is is the personnel the real focus that you see personnel's policy in this town, right? Particularly working. go back and read, look at what we're doing at Google, both in the courts in Northern Virginia and in DC. Read, you should definitely want to read the summary that um um the folks wrote. It's quite powerful and I think it shows you the the beginning of a framework of what I would call a populist nationalist idea about antirust and about the about taking on taking on taking on these oligarchs. Let me ask you, like people don't think of you as this necessarily, but you were actually in a in a manner of speaking a two-time Trump official because you served in the Trump FTC and you had and you had a long and glorious what was it like 7-day run as director of CF 13? Oh, that's that's more than a scaramucci. So you look, but you in in all seriousness, you've had, it seems to me, a variety of experiences with with Trump and his policy impulses when it comes to antirust and other things. I remember uh you were at FTC uh when they first went after Facebook. Uh you did some some cracking down on companies that had abused uh the Made in America label, I remember that Republicans were against, but I believe Trump spoke out in favor of that. Um so you've you've seen all sides of the man. I mean, how how serious do you think he is about pursuing an agenda that would really police big tech and and and stand up for little tech companies, a lot of whom don't think they really have a voice? Well, I'm not I'm not his therapist or psychoanalyst, but I guess I'd say this. When you actually look at the people, the people that were put on the Federal Trade Commission in 2018, most of them were voting with big pharma, big tech, those guys. Over time, you saw some shifts. We ended up voting out the Facebook complaint, two Democrats, one Republican against two very pro monopoly Republicans. So, we'll see how it plays out. There are some warning signs. I have no idea why they would fire Well, I was going to say the two federal trade commissioners when you fire the Democrats from the Well, it's also like why fire them? They're the ones who are also on board with going after some of this concentrated power, standing up for little companies, for little pharmacists, for little grocerers, and the list goes on and on. I don't know what that was about, but I think this is now the question. Are we going to see a repeat of 2018 or is Steve going to be right that there's going to be some big change? See, I think that's an evolution of our party. I think we're getting more populist and more nationalist. Look at 16 we we came out of nowhere to win. We've had it in those four years that interregnum President Trump and you see the relationships he built and who who he's put in. People should understand I am banned on every platform. I'm banned in perpetuity on Facebook, on YouTube. Yeah. Twitter, um Spotify, I can go through every I'm banned. The show is the number one or number two podcast in the country essentially. You know, if you look at Pod Save America, we're generally in back of them. I'm banned everywhere. I was debanked after January after we uh after President Trump went back to Mara Lago. All my banks fired me. All my law firms fired me. I had bigname law firms all fired me. All my credit cards were cancelled. I went to federal prison. Right? I've seen the power of the state. And you know what I say to them? Go [ __ ] yourself. Right? We're going because you have to otherwise they're out to crush you. Don't think I'm any different than any of you guys. you raise your head up against the apparatus and they're going to do the exact same thing to you. This is why I think there's much more commonality. The potential fusion I think we do have is much deeper behind the scenes and much deeper as we get back to actually what is populist, what is economic nationalism, how do you defend the little guy, how you defend the entrepreneur, how do we get back to our entrepreneurial roots as a country, right? And it's a struggle and we're not going to agree on everything culturally. We're not going to agree on everything politically, but when I look at the battlefield, I feel pretty good. I feel that there's a natural reaction to to the Facebooks and and to the Silicon Valley crowd and to the Wall Street crowd. So, I think there's I think there's uh I think there's a great future for populism, how we define it, and economic nationalism. Let's let's broaden the aperture a little bit beyond the US. Steve, you've been quite active in supporting populist right-wing causes, uh not just here, but across the globe and in Europe. Uh Trump has too uh supporting uh populist politicians. In December when he nominated Gail Slater, he said, quote, "Big tech has run wild for years, stifling competition uh in our most innovative sector." I think he posted that on True Social. Given that Europe is grappling with many of the same policy issues in regard to big tech, do you support and should Trump support the EU's efforts to crack down uh on big players like Apple and Google in an effort to open up markets overseas? I do agree with trying to trying to uh stop these people anywhere we can because I think they got too much power. I would like to see instead of you know you have 75 electric vehicle companies but you have one search company right we should have a 100 search companies we should have you know Facebook we should have 100 alternatives it the only thing that holds me back about the Europeans is that there's no more corrupt system than the EU and what they do right these are still the it's still the monarchists it's still the aristocracy right that most of our families you know many generations ago came away from this is why so detest uh the established order in Europe and I'm a big supporter of kind of these right-wing populist nationalists which each one's different right and each one's got its own characteristics as it should in these countries but we have a long fight over there look it shouldn't be lost anybody they try to put Trump in prison for 300 years Balssonaro's on trial for his life they're going to find him guilty in the show trial they put him in a prison he's going to be assassinated or they're going to attempt to assassinate him and and Le Pin he's up by 20 points in the poll and they're putting Le Pin now has a four-year prison sentence and can't run for reelection. And that that may all be worked out, but that is what this kind of judicial what I call insurrection uh is is coming against the populist right and we have to just power through it. I don't think we should outsource anything to Europe. But I will say this, when they've been doing all their committees after their laws, the people who are actually going and using that process to challenge big gatekeepers from squaltching them out are a lot of a little American companies because they want access to that market too. So I don't know, but we that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our own work here. We should not allow, you know, Facebook's Libra currency scheme to come back again. We should not have these new types of dollars that big tech companies control and can wall everyone out of. We should be passing laws and doing work here in Washington, in every single state. And there are so many issues where I think there's a lot of agreement. child and teen privacy and exploitation of them, counterfeit goods and labeling. I mean, the list goes on and on. And the big tech companies have fought every single step of the way, and we should fight against that. All right. It's Liberation Day. I'm sure you all have have have heard. Um, I' I'd love to get a preview from Steve, but what I really want to uh ask you about is can the US and Europe effectively regulate tech companies at the same time that they're waging a trade war? Or will Trump wind up inadvertently helping big tech in an effort to jam the EU? Um, I I think they're I think they're kind of two separate things. I think today, and I think in the Rose Garden at 4:00, we're going to find out. I'm not so sure a decision's been made. I I mean, I'm for reciprocity and I realize there's some legal issues with that because I want to expose to the world how we've been taken advantage of by the political class in the United States, the globalists in on Wall Street with these uh with these trade relationships with people that we pay for their defense that have hosed hosed us for decade after decade after decade and that all rolls down to the little guy. So, I'm for reciprocity and tough reciprocity. I don't think that may happen. I think there may be some tiered of 20% some tiered system which will be fine and they'll use uh the emergency measures to implement that but I think we have to uh think about and focus on bringing high value added manufacturing jobs back here to the United States and not assembly jobs. You know the guys at Ford [ __ ] and moan all the time, well we manufacture all this and we're going to lose a billion dollars. No, you don't. You assemble. We need to bring high value added manufacturing jobs back here to the United States of America. People say we're we're manufacturing more than ever and there's four there's 400,000 unpaid. No, we assemble. We need to manufacture here. We need to rebuild the greatness of our industrial base and we can do it. At the same time, we have to break up tech and uh and and and give more access to capital entrepreneurs. We can do all that. This is none of this. The Republicans when I first got into the politics here with Andrew Breitbart 12, 14 years ago, this kind of Austrian school of economics and all this, it was like they thought it was part it was a natural property. They they thought this was was like the second law of thermodynamics. It's not. It's all human agency. We've proven this in this populist movement and getting people engaged and involved. The little guy who's engaged and involved now in politics. So we can do this and we can build a system that's closer to the American plan that Alexander Hamilton and and the great founders of our country set up in the 19th century that we can recreate here and become a economic superpower again a true economic superpower based upon people not that what in the last 6 months the top 1% have accreted another $4.5 trillion dollars of wealth to themselves more than gone to the bottom 50%. We have a capitalist system or quoteunquote capitalist system with no capitalist. And that's what we have to change. And we can change. All of this can be done. Don't think we have to take down the system. And to do that, you have to be relentless. You have to be prepared to be banned, to be debanked, to be uh shut out, and to go to prison. If you're not prepared to do that, you're not to prepared to take on the system and win. We're getting back to the question of Europe. Is is Trump willing to let the EU crack down on American companies like Google, like Apple, or will he dig his heels and and want to retaliate? I I I Well, I don't think it's going to be retaliation against that. I think it's going to be retaliation against uh manufacturing and the German car companies and all that. You don't think that you don't think that bleeds over into tech policy to a degree, but I don't think we'll see. Also, the big big ticket item is on China. Yeah. So we'll right now you have a lot of the largest tech giants saying you need to listen to us and favor us to compete with China. I think if anyone gets distracted by that argument, we are in trouble. But here here's the here's the horrible thing of that argument. Their failure in being given the Fouian pact of allowing them to become oligarchs. They failed in they failed in social media. Clearly, they're not as good and they failed in AI. They want a bailout at least$500 billion dollars and the national labs would be turned over them. They also put the gun to your head and say, "Hey, you can't regulate us now because you need national champions because the Chinese Communist Party has a fleet around Taiwan. That's a struggle we're going to have to go through and we can't we cannot agree to that. We can't agree to a bailout. We can't agree to turning the national labs over to them, the weapons labs for AI. And we certainly can't genulect as as you're so rightly pointing out about the the issue with the Chinese Communist Party. Uh Roit, Democrats have been sponded uh by the results of the November election. Uh um with with the exception of uh last night's victory in Wisconsin. It's it's been a pretty rough ride. Uh yeah, a number of folks I talked to do see glimmers uh of hope on the antitrust front uh with the nomination of Gail Slater. other folks we've talked about. Um, what are your thought? I see you've talked a lot about this idea of a populist cross party alliance. How what are your thoughts on that? How realistic do you think it is as you look ahead at the landscape over the next couple of years and uh, you know, as as somebody who's worked under Trump, who's who's clashed with Elon, uh, who thinks a lot about the policy issues at the heart of all this, are you hopeful? Are you are you despondent? Well, how should people think about this? I mean, look, I I'm happy that some of them are using the policy ideas developed by Lena Khan and others who really came and started and lit a match on all of this. And if that is leading others to change good, I just want to go back to I still think it comes down to you saw anger across the board after the Wall Street bailouts, Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, the whole thing. Most people yesterday in Congress, every single Republican except nine of them voted to like raise overdraft fees for people. There is maybe going to be agreement on certain places, but right now those big oligarchs and big corporate royalty are still calling the shots in Washington. Do you disagree with that? No. They own this city. If you try to go after them legally, you can't get a law firm because they hire the law firms. They have all the lobbyists. They have tremendous power in Capitol Hill. That's why our movement is in its very early stages. And with President Trump at the top of the ticket, we can win national elections. As it proved last night, since we have low propensity voters, we built those low propensity voters. I'm the first to admit we have a tough time otherwise. And we have to build an apparatus that can do that. But it's going to come from I think it was one in only one in the Senate. Josh Holly, I think, is the only person that voted only Republican. So, we have a ton of work to do. I'm not sure so many of the elected officials in the House or the Senate are populist economic nationalists. There still were still run in a neoliberal neocon uh mentality. But I think I believe and you look at Stler, you look at yourself, Leo Khan, I believe since I would posit the Democratic party in the official apparatus of it abandoned you guys who had some great ideas. great ideas that we as populist nationalists are getting a whole team to hopefully implement at least some of them that there's much more that fusion to me is more important than the fusion with the big tech bros but we have to deal with political reality as we have it right now but our our party is only going to become more workingass and more middle class and I think that'll tend to the future our time is ticking down um uh but Trump also got rid of populists like uh Roit so Roit you Steve's talked a lot about the the positive idea of an alliance, but just as a last question, what's the worst case scenario for you? What do you what do you stay up at night worrying about? Uh, note that we only have 90 seconds. Well, to me, I I'm actually I'm not crying and despondent. All of us are working on how we figure out how to reclaim power and to actually make sure that this economy is working. And I think that we'll see if anyone in this administration will do it. I'm going to be watching on big mergers like Capital One Discover. I'm going to be watching, like Steve is saying, the Google case, Facebook case. There's some places where I'm going to be watching really closely to see um but I really hope that this is the the status quo is so broken and just we need to move and turn the page. You know, Jade Sherman said yesterday because I've been a huge proponent of this tax extension of the taxes that given where we are with cuts that have to be made are just not going to be made. Given the financial situation of having to refinance all this debt and the and what it's the burden is putting on working-class middle-ass people that I don't see any scenario that we can extend the tax cuts for the upper bracket. It can't happen. And Jay Sherman went around yesterday and I love Jake Sherman. I think he's fantastic. He said he couldn't find one representative in the Republic side. They they laughed at the idea. They laughed at the idea. Chip Roy came on War Room this morning and absolutely agreed with me and says behind the scenes there a lot of people. The litmus test for me early on besides all the great work the guys at Justice Department are doing on on Google and other things like that and the FTC is this tax situation. If the wealthy are not prepared to help us get control of spending, particularly defense spending, and actually align defense spending with our hemispheric defense that President Trump has laid out, the defense budget has to be cut. And I say this as a guy that spent eight years as a naval officer. My daughter went to West Point. I'm not a dove. The defense budget's out of control. It has to be cut right before you touch anything else. And we have to raise taxes. We cannot cut extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. their taxes have to increase. All right, on that note, let's wrap it up. Thank you both. Thank you guys for listening.