Move Fast and Break the World: Jonathan Taplin on Trump as an Interregnum

00:00 - Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States.

00:36 - Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. It's late afternoon Pacific time, Tuesday the 9th of March. I'm going to put this out the morning of the 10th. Who knows what will happen overnight? If the world is destroyed, none of you will be watching; we'll probably have other things on our mind. Anyway, for the moment the headlines are dominated by the consequences of the American-Israeli war in Iran and Lebanon. The New York Times is leading with 700,000 people fleeing Israeli strikes in Lebanon. A deleted tweet from a Trump person in the administration sent oil markets on another roller coaster. Meanwhile, soaring fuel prices are not only casting a long shadow across the US economy, according to the Financial Times, but across the global economy. In other words, to borrow a term from Mark Zuckerberg: "Move fast and not just break things, but break the world," it seems. Once broke domestic stuff, now it's the world. And what a good opportunity to talk to the author of Move Fast and Break Things, my old friend John Taplin, Los Angeles-based author of the best-selling book, frequent guest on the show, and the author of a terrifying—to borrow a word—new piece in Rolling Stone: "The Terrifying New Era of American Imperialism." John, as always, is joining us from Los Angeles. John, you and I have spoken endlessly about this; we’ve both written a number of books on Silicon Valley, this whole "move fast and break things" catastrophe. How much of that needs to be incorporated into what is now happening in the Middle East—the Iranian-Lebanese misadventure, assassination of foreign leaders, and the rest of the catastrophe?

02:44 - John Taplin: Well, I think a lot of it has to be calculated. I mean, let's take a simple thing: AI is being used to select targets in Iran. Now, obviously AI is only as good as the information you put into it, but clearly the AI assumed that the school with 175 kids who were killed a few days ago was a military base. And it had been a military base up until about eight years ago. And so somebody had some old intelligence that was fed into Palantir's targeting system and, lo and behold, a lot of kids were killed. So that's just one aspect of it. Obviously, as I wrote about in the Rolling Stone piece, you know, there is this new what I call digital military-industrial complex which is led by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, a guy named Palmer Luckey—who is a real piece of work—Marc Andreessen. And of course, one of the things Elon Musk taught these guys was that the economy may go up and down and all sorts of cycles of venture capital and everything, but if you're on the government contract list, you never get cut back. It doesn't matter if we're in a recession or not, you're still going to get your payments, your contract payments from the government, which Elon, you know, uses to lift cargo into space for the US. But needless to say, Andreessen, Thiel, and Luckey are most interested in providing all the drones for the new kind of warfare. And, you know, we're still pretty far behind in that kind of thing. We—the point was that we're shooting down Shahed drones from Iran, which cost about $30,000 a piece, with about a million-dollar missile. So the cost-benefit analysis is not very good on our side.

05:07 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, the—what you and I both were in startups—the ROI doesn't quite work. Let's stand back. One of the things I liked about the piece, John, as always with your work, is it's full of interesting ideas that no one else is thinking. You stand back a bit and you actually go back to Oliver Cromwell, of all people. I was surprised to read about Cromwell in a John Taplin essay. You're suggesting that America has entered into a kind of Cromwellian moment, what you call an interregnum? Cromwell, of course, was literally the interregnum figure between two monarchs in England. Why Oliver Cromwell as a military dictator? Is that what Trump is becoming? I think Cromwell would be turning in his grave if he was compared with Trump.

06:05 - John Taplin: No, I—you know, Winston Churchill said that Cromwell was a bane upon the history of Great Britain. Look, Cromwell came in, first thing he did was cut off the head of Charles I, the king who he had ousted. And then basically he ruled for about eight years. He went into Ireland and killed maybe a million Catholics.

06:33 - Andrew Keen: That was his Lebanon, in other words.

06:35 - John Taplin: He was a Protestant evangelist. You know, he believed he was God's chosen figure. And he basically eliminated as many Catholics as he could in Ireland. And he ruled with an iron hand. And the interesting thing was that when he got sick at the end of his life, he tried to push his son—kind of like Don Junior—to become—he had assumed the title of Lord Protector of the British Empire. And he tried to appoint his son as his successor. And as soon as he died, the Parliament rose up and threw the son out of the country. And eventually it was so bad that, you know, he had been buried in Westminster Abbey and they dug his grave up, and they cut his head off and stuck it on a pike outside of Parliament just as a warning that we don't want dictators anymore. But the point I'm trying to make is that it was this interregnum, i.e., Gramsci's famous phrase: "The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear."

07:54 - Andrew Keen: And yeah, and that's a phrase now that's almost become a cliché. Is the morbid symptom then Trump?

08:02 - John Taplin: It's not a cliché in the following sense: if you see Trump as like Cromwell, then this is not the beginning of a new movement of MAGA, that MAGA will go on forever and ever. This is the end of something. And the point I make is that Trump's theory is, you know, "Make America Great Again"—in other words, we need to go backwards to the '50s where white men ruled the world and all those pesky liberals and gays and women and immigrants didn't give us any trouble. And that's an unrealistic notion. We are not going back to the '50s, no matter what Trump thinks. We're going forward. And so this is not the beginning of a new right-wing, you know, revanche fascist era; this is the end of something. But the problem is we can't get to the new world because the new world is too filled with problems, such as AI targeting rockets to go in places where there are school children.

09:22 - Andrew Keen: So there's a lot to unravel here, John. Let's try and separate some of this stuff. I do want to get to the Silicon Valley conversation as well. Before we get to all of that, you begin your essay with reference to Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, or Eisenhower's warning about a military-industrial complex. This new military-industrial complex, which I think you call the digital industrial or Silicon Valley industrial complex—is it different from the one that Eisenhower warned about at the end of his presidency in the '50s?

10:01 - John Taplin: No, it's actually—it's actually more dangerous than the one that Eisenhower warned about. Because when Eisenhower was talking, there were probably 40 or 50 major military contractors in the world. And today there are five. And of course, you know, obviously the Silicon Valley guys are trying to push their way into the core and replace Lockheed Martin and the others that are—Northrop—that dominate the military-industrial contracts today. But the point is that there are much fewer of them, but even more importantly, the amount of money that exists in Silicon Valley to support candidates—and obviously if Musk was willing to spend $300 million to get Trump elected, he will probably be willing to continue to spend that kind of money to keep the corruption, the pump flowing to him, so that SpaceX and, you know, all of his companies continue to get a lot of those government contracts. And obviously Thiel, Bezos, and the others who are in the space race want to do the same thing, you know? And so it's not as if Eisenhower was maybe—maybe he was too optimistic. I mean, the point is that he said this could happen, and what I'm saying is it's already happened.

11:51 - Andrew Keen: Yes, it's happened. And in your essay—I mean, it's a short essay, it's more of a polemic, it's not a long paper—but you advise us to, quote-unquote, "follow the money." There's one chart which is called "The Last Supper and the Collapse of Capital Investment." You have a chart showing the shares of EBITDA for the top five prime defense contractors. This is a very interesting chart. Could you leave that up for a second and explain it?

12:26 - John Taplin: Okay, so for people just listening, because we do have a large podcast audience too, you need to go and have a look at the chart on—in—on the Rolling Stone piece that John wrote.

12:43 - John Taplin: Okay, but I'll just explain what this means. What happened during the Bill Clinton administration was an evening that was known as the Last Supper, in which William Perry and Les Aspin, who was the—Aspin was the Secretary of Defense and William Perry was his deputy, got all of the contractors, the big prime defense contractors together in a room and basically said, "Look, the Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union is not an enemy anymore, we don't have the money to support 25 military-industrial complex contractors. So you guys have all got to merge or die." Literally. And so it shrunk from 25 to 5 within two years. So what this chart shows is that once you went down from 25 that were competing a lot, and in that pre-Last Supper period, military contractors were spending a huge amount of money on research and development so that they could compete in this very competitive market. And once it was down to five, and each had their little niche that they fill, that amount of money on R&D just went down, down, down, down, down, and most of their profits went to paying off shareholders and paying off executives. In other words, they just became funnels for money to Wall Street. So the point that I'm trying to make is that, like many of the things you and I talk about, when you have consolidation, you get lots of problems and you have people able to, you know, like your local cable company, charge whatever they want and get away with it.

15:00 - Andrew Keen: So it's—it's not just your argument, my argument, it's Tim Wu's argument, many others about this—I don't know what you want to call it—monopoly capitalism which extends from Silicon Valley to the defense industry, obviously to media and many other sectors of the economy.

15:20 - John Taplin: Right. That "monopoly capitalism" is the right word.

15:23 - Andrew Keen: But it's extended to the defense industry. Why should that concern us perhaps as much as, or if not even more than, other sectors?

15:35 - John Taplin: Okay, so let's take our tax dollars. We all pay our money into the federal government, and the federal government has two accounts. One is called non-discretionary, and that's Social Security and Medicare. And the other is called discretionary. And that's everything else: defense, education, health, roads, you know, whatever. And today, almost two-thirds of the discretionary money flows into the national security state. 59% of it goes to the Defense Department and another 6.5% flows to the Homeland Security Department, which has gotten a gigantic amount of money this year. So that should concern everybody. Because all that money is not going to education, that is not going to rebuild the bridges that are falling, to help make college more affordable, all of the things that as a kind of vigorous society we would want, we don't have the money for.

16:59 - Andrew Keen: And ironically, the reverse seems to be true in China, even if China invests significantly in military. You make the note in this—you’re not the first or the last person to make this—that American investment in military dwarfs the Chinese. What are the numbers, John? Is it—you put the Chinese, the Western Europeans, the Russians together, and still America is larger than all of them put together?

17:34 - John Taplin: Right. So the United States spends more money than all the next 10 countries combined. Combined. So China has a budget of about maybe 250 billion, military budget; ours is a trillion. And, you know, France and UK and Russia and all those others combined don't equal what we spend.

18:10 - Andrew Keen: Again, this should be known; it's terrifying, although not everyone knows it. You make the argument—I'm not a great fan of the idea of American fascism—but in the Rolling Stone piece, I'm quoting you, say, "American fascism, to the extent that it exists, is more than a slur. It expresses itself less in black shirts than in the quiet normalization of permanent imperial management." And I'm not sure whether that's fascism or whether the word makes any difference one way or the other, but this quiet normalization of permanent imperial management is certainly Exhibit A in this latest catastrophe in the Middle East, isn't it?

19:04 - John Taplin: Yeah, but look, Hitler called it Lebensraum, which was this notion that we need to constantly expand our territory to give us purpose. And Mussolini had the same belief, that the reason you have the ability to go conquer, you know, if you're Mussolini, go conquer Ethiopia or something, is it gives you sense of purpose. And other people have said, well, you know, these are—I think this is a calculation that Trump made, that maybe if he started a war, he would get this kind of rally-round-the-flag basis. Now, I think he's all of a sudden realizing that this is not happening, and so we're going to probably have Taco Tuesday. And those of you who don't know what Taco Tuesday is, Taco stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out."

20:15 - Andrew Keen: And that's tomorrow? Taco Tuesday March 10th, is it, or just every Tuesday?

20:20 - John Taplin: No, it's—it just happens once a month or once a week.

20:26 - Andrew Keen: Once a week.

20:27 - John Taplin: So, I mean, obviously he's—he's setting the table to be able to say, "Okay, we won, we're done, we finished, we bombed Tehran; it looks like Gaza, it's rubble, we can go home now." You know, maybe we didn't get—I didn't get to choose who the leader of Iran was to begin with. That was one of his greatest fantasy times. That one I thought, "Oh boy, he's really gone off the deep end this time" when he said he's going to choose who the leader of Iran was. And I think he just thought of—gee, that Venezuela thing was so easy, we can do it anywhere.

21:14 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean, as you say, it's—and I'm not sure if Churchill said it, if he didn't he should—"Declare victory and move on." One thing that hasn't really—I'm still astonished by it; I mean, it's hard not to be astonished by most of the stuff happening these days—is the assassination of Khamenei and basically the entire government of Iran, which as everybody should know at least by now, is a large country, 90 million inhabitants. It seems as if of all the shocking things, that's the one that has least shocked people. But I'm still astonished and shocked with it. What do you make of that, John? Just this self-evident and self-congratulatory assassination of an entire government of a sovereign country?

22:15 - John Taplin: Well, I—you know, obviously it's the kind of thing that the founders of our republic would have been horrified.

22:25 - Andrew Keen: To put it mildly.

22:26 - John Taplin: And to say that this—you know, up until Trump, this has never really happened before. I mean, we did try and do a little CIA coup in Guatemala in the '50s, but it was all kind of hush-hush and, you know, nobody knows who actually pulled the trigger. But this—this is brand new.

23:01 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean, your old friend Bobby Kennedy tried to assassinate Fidel Castro without a great deal of success.

23:09 - John Taplin: And now he's—now he's threatening to assassinate the son.

23:13 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, and so that is astonishing too. So I'm sure most of our audience are equally astonished and disgusted and all the rest of it. I wonder whether there's any good news here, John. You've written off Silicon Valley, but you sent out an email a few days ago about Anthropic and Dario Amodei's willingness to stand up to the administration. The latest news, although it seems to change by the hour, is that the Anthropic—Anthropic is now suing the Trump administration over supply chain risk label. Should we write off all of Silicon Valley? You and I and many others are no great fans of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen, but is the Amodei resistance, if that's what it is, is it—does it offer some hope?

24:19 - John Taplin: Well, one would have hoped that there would have been a lot more resistance. You know, I mean, and you know, the most craven thing of all is Sam Altman, who—

24:32 - Andrew Keen: Which doesn't surprise you, does it?

24:34 - Andrew Keen: Shouldn't surprise anyone.

24:36 - John Taplin: Who publicly supported Anthropic on a Tuesday when this was first announced, and was at the very same time going behind his back and announcing to Pete Hegseth that, "Well, I'll do, I'll supply all you need and I'm not going to object to using my AI for, you know, killer robots. I'm not going to object to using my AI for mass surveillance." And, you know, so he signs the deal on a Friday, and essentially throws Dario under the bus.

25:27 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, it's another meaning of Taco Tuesday. I mean, it's Sam Altman stealing the boyfriend or the girlfriend behind the friend's back. It's classic Sam Altman.

25:38 - Andrew Keen: But where was anybody else speaking up about this?

25:41 - Andrew Keen: Well, there are a lot of people—I mean, a lot of people I know at least—are encouraged with Amodei. I mean, one of the things that was encouraging is after this all broke a few days ago, Anthropic or Claude went down because they had so many new subscribers. So clearly there are—it's having an impact on some people.

26:05 - John Taplin: Yeah, no, obviously Claude is at the top of the iPhone store, and ChatGPT has fallen a lot. But on the other hand, they're trying to kill Anthropic, Trump and Hegseth. They're trying to execute them, as one of the former guys from the Trump administration said. And because if they kill—if they say no government business or any business that does business with the government can use Anthropic's tools, that's essentially a death sentence.

26:56 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, but this is a $500 billion private company. You can't just kill it.

27:03 - John Taplin: Well, I mean, how many of those contracts—you know, the thing that made Anthropic so fast-growing was it was the enterprise solution. ChatGPT may have been the consumer play, but Anthropic and Claude went right at the enterprise. Okay, we're going to build you a coding tool. We're going to build you a tool for your law office. We're going to build—so if everybody who does business in some way with the federal government is not allowed to use Claude, that—that $500 million business is going to dissolve.

27:54 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, but the problem also, at least problem from the government's point of view, is that drags in the subcontractors too, and Anthropic's subcontractors includes everyone in Silicon Valley, including the large companies like Google.

28:11 - John Taplin: I agree. And look, it's not going to pass muster with the courts. There's no way in the world that he's going to get away with this. But it's a big hassle for Anthropic. They're going to have to go through months and months of uncertainty while, you know, they go through this.

28:34 - Andrew Keen: So John, you're a veteran of the '60s, you lived through it as much as anyone, you've written books about it. Let's end on a degree, if not of optimism, of cautious hope. You note a vision for change. Clearly this Trump—this latest Trump war, this insanity, is deeply unpopular even amongst his own supporters. We have an upcoming midterms in which it's likely that the Republicans are going to get decimated, which I think explains why there's more and more clear criticism—I don't know if you heard Tillis on the weekend show—incredibly critical of Stephen Miller. What's the hope that we are on the brink, if not of a new '60s, of some sort of movement against what's happening?

29:43 - John Taplin: Well, look, it does seem to me there's only two outcomes of what happens in November. One outcome is that the Democrats run the table and we emerge in January with a Democratic House of Representatives and perhaps a Democratic Senate. Now, Trump rules a lot through executive order, so they're still going to have to deal with that. But the other outcome is that in late October Trump creates some emergency that he either says, "I've got to put troops in the polling stations," or "I have to call off the election," and he declares the Insurrection Act and some act of, you know, just desperation to avoid an election defeat. And that's—you know, if I—I would have thought that's an insane idea, but nothing is insane with Trump.

31:02 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, no, I think it's quite likely. But I also think it's quite likely if he does that the military will say no, and much of the Republican Party will say no. That's my sense of what will happen.

31:17 - John Taplin: I would hope so. But have we seen them stand up to Trump yet?

31:23 - Andrew Keen: Well, as I said, I don't know if you saw the Tillis interview over the weekend, but to me the—

31:28 - John Taplin: Yeah, but Tillis is one guy who's headed out the door. He's not even running for re-election, so he has the freedom to speak his mind.

31:39 - Andrew Keen: But also the military—I mean, there may be some people in the military who glorify in all this coverage and all this investment, but there's got to be a number of other very senior people in the military who are deeply disturbed by all this, don't you think?

31:58 - John Taplin: I'm sure there are. But that doesn't mean that he can't find a general who will stand up and lead people into Los Angeles to put some, you know, National Guard troops in front of every polling station. I—look, I—I've stopped trying to guess how crazy this president can be. It's just not possible.

32:32 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean, you can't exaggerate; you could come up with a satire and then the next day or the next week it's—it's real. John, you're a media veteran too, you used to run the Annenberg Center, you're very well connected in media. You've had media companies, startups. What do you make also of the Ellison play? You always talk about Thiel and Bezos and Andreessen, blah, blah, these are the bad guys, but what about this new Ellison play? Is he the new Murdoch? What do you make of him?

33:14 - John Taplin: I think he's—would like to be the new Murdoch. But is he? Could he be?

33:20 - John Taplin: I mean, look, he's—he's building something that is so levered up, to use a Wall Street term—in other words, there's $79 billion of debt in this combined Paramount, CBS, Warner Brothers, CNN, TikTok conglomerate that he's building.

33:51 - Andrew Keen: House of cards, perhaps?

33:53 - John Taplin: That's what I suggest. I mean, the one of the smartest investment analysts I know says, "Look, if Sarandos, the head of Netflix, is patient, he will be able to buy the whole thing for couch change in a couple of years when it goes down the tubes." These people don't know what they've done, and of course Netflix being in the game forced them to pay way more than they should have for Warner Brothers Discovery. I mean, what is the discovery part of Warner Brothers Discovery? I mean, there are 13 Discovery channels. They have a value of zero. They're worthless. Does anybody still watch the Discovery channel on TV anymore? I mean, the whole cable TV business in terms of cable TV networks are gone. I had dinner the other day with Tom Freston, who used to run MTV Networks. He said—he said, "I was so lucky to get out and that Sumner Redstone fired me just in time that I could leave with my reputation intact and now—" he said, "I couldn't run those businesses. They're just leaky ships." And so, you know, I—I don't know. I think it's a pretty scary situation coming up. But I do think that the one thing that Trump does control is the media—the mainstream media dialogue. And that's—so let's just say the Democrats do run the table and win and then they start calling hearings next spring. You know, the Trumpies, Pete Hegseth can go up and tell lie after lie in front of the Senate with full confidence that CBS News and CNN and Fox and X and TikTok will all have his back and tell people that he's telling the truth.

36:31 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, I have to admit I—I don't agree. I think Hegseth—by this time next year, Hegseth won't be around. But we shall see. Finally, John, I can't let you go, you’re my—my LA guy. Looking forward to the Oscars? What movie should win on Sunday?

36:51 - John Taplin: I would like, you know, One Ball After Another to win. I think it would be an insult to Trump and—and it would say that there's still somewhat of a counter-culture in Hollywood. And—that would be good. I mean, Sinners could win too, and that's not exactly a movie that Trump would love either. But, you know, the point is that as long as Hollywood can still continue to make dissenting movies, it's a good thing.

37:37 - Andrew Keen: Yeah, and they're both elegant, smart, profound critiques. I don't think anyone would be unhappy if either Sinners or One Thing After Another won. Well, the counter-culture still lives, John, while you're around. Congratulations on the new piece; no doubt there will be more insanity this year. We'll get you back on the show. Keep well and keep resisting. Thank you so much.

38:11 - John Taplin: Thanks, pal. I appreciate it.

38:15 - Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.