TRANSCRIPT: Big Tech and Trump 2.0: Nicholas Thompson on AI, Media, and Policy
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and as Donald Trump returns to the White House, we are taking a look at his relationship with an industry that has a unique role in the economy, politics, and media: Big Tech.
Trump has had a contentious, unpredictable relationship with the tech industry. But in 2025, Silicon Valley is recalibrating. A parade of technology leaders have met with the incoming president at Mar-a-Lago, optimistic that Trump 2.0 will be good for business. And since Trump's first term, the tech landscape has shifted dramatically: AI is booming. Elon Musk turned Twitter into "X." TikTok exploded in popularity and now faces an impending ban. Meta and Google are grappling with antitrust battles. So what does the technology industry stand to gain and lose from another Trump presidency? And how will the dynamics differ from his first administration when Trump's love/hate relationship with social media revolutionized political communication and ignited fierce debates over regulation and free speech?
To help unpack all of this, I'm joined by someone who understands the intersection of tech, politics, and media better than almost anyone: Nick Thompson, former Editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and current CEO of the Atlantic. Let's get to it.
Nick Thompson, great to have you back on GZERO World.
Nick Thompson:
Delighted to be here, Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
So much to discuss in the world of technology and media and politics, and I guess the most interesting thing in the immediate sense has been watching so many big technology players find different ways to try to say, "We are aligned with this new group." What's been most surprising to you?
Nick Thompson:
The most surprising was the complete about-face from Meta, and you knew that Zuckerberg was heading in that direction. You knew that they would tack towards Trump. You did not know that their head of public policy would turn over. You did not know they would get rid of all of their fact-checkers. You did not know they would rewrite their entire policy handbook and that they would do it at a snap.
Ian Bremmer:
How much of this do you think is actually Zuckerberg is much more comfortable in an environment where they don't have to be responsible for fact-checking and would much rather just it's cheaper for him, right? Less political problems for him. No?
Nick Thompson:
I don't know if it's cheaper for him, because you have to look. The reason they started doing it was to try to lessen the political problems, right? If you do it, you end up having less bad stuff on your platform. Bad stuff on your platform causes problems.
Ian Bremmer:
Causes legal problems.
Nick Thompson:
Causes legal problems, causes political problems. I also don't know if it's cheaper because they make their money from advertising. You create a more toxic platform, advertisers like that less. So I don't actually know if he's making money or if it aligns with what's easier for him.
Ian Bremmer:
Interesting. Do you think he has a true north on this issue, or is it just, "I need to be aligned with whatever way the political winds are blowing"?
Nick Thompson:
I do think his true north is shifting in the Trump direction. He does seem to be moving politically in a more Trumpian anti-woke direction. But I think it's mostly about the winds. Think if Trump were not president, you would not be seeing that. I don't know that. I just think that.
Ian Bremmer:
So Trump's about to actually take office, though he's been frankly acting as president for several weeks now. Where do you think technology policy is substantively likely to be noticeably different in this administration?
Nick Thompson:
A couple areas. Number one, mergers and acquisitions, right? So the Biden administration was extremely tough on mergers and acquisitions. Lina Khan, FTC. You'll see a huge change there.
Ian Bremmer:
JD Vance notwithstanding, who liked her. Doesn't matter.
Nick Thompson:
JD Vance notwithstanding. That position will be outweighed. Secondly, cryptocurrency regulation. You'll see massive, massive loosening of crypto regulations. You're already seeing price of coins go up. The question is whether that bubble bursts, whether there's problems there, but you will see at least in the short run change there. You'll probably see the same or similar policies on AI and China. I don't think you'll see a major break there. And then the big question will be how much the policy shifts towards specifically favoring and Elon versus what's good for the American tech industry in general.
Ian Bremmer:
What does it mean, broadly speaking for the social media environment for a broader shift in the lines of where X is today? Assuming this continues, how do you think it affects society? That we are going to have a very different set of norms being followed by the businesses that are driving how we communicate with each other?
Nick Thompson:
I think that the social media platforms in general are shifting to the right. The balance between toxicity and safety. Toxicity aligned with positive things like free speech shifting in that direction. You are seeing a shift. I think it matters less than one might think for two reasons. Most importantly, social media is less important than it was five years ago. It's bifurcated, it's dispersed, conversations happen across platforms. Probably the most interesting conversations that most people have are now in group chats. They're no longer on big public platforms. And secondly, there's going to be some counter movement in other directions, for example, Blue Sky. And so you have a whole bunch of people shifting onto Blue Sky. And what's happening is as communities split, there will be less and less one town square where people discuss issues of consequence.
Ian Bremmer:
Is it good or bad that we lose a town square? I think about the days of network television when American citizens felt like they got their information in a town square. We all had a conversation. I get that group chats can be much less toxic, they'll be much more engaged. On the other hand, they will be much more fragmented, they'll be more atomized, people will not be as connected to their fellow people.
Nick Thompson:
It's true. My ideal world, as you know, would be one where there was a social media platform optimized for your curiosity engagement to reach people with different opinions, and such a town square would be amazing. You'd have great political discourse. The worst scenario, of course, is a completely toxic town square where everybody's forced to be there. So if you were to ask me to choose between every single person is on a toxic version of Twitter, X, versus completely dispersed social media, I would choose dispersed. In an ideal X ... and maybe Musk will get there. Maybe there will be a way to make X feel welcoming to people. Maybe there'll be ways to re-optimize the algorithm. It does not seem to be going in that direction. You can imagine the kind of town square where I would like American political discourse to happen. But given what's happened to the social platforms, I'm fine with it totally dispersed.
Ian Bremmer:
I have to say, I find that the idea of Community Notes, whether on X or on Meta, generally speaking, if you had people that were known to be actual people engaging to do some fact-checking, that seems to me a place where citizen media is actually potentially useful. Crowdsourcing does get you to better information, generally speaking. You can guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. You should be able to get to what is BS on a given post. But it doesn't seem to be playing out that way.
Nick Thompson:
Well, so yes. Crowdsourcing is wonderful. Wikipedia is the best example, right? It's amazing. Community Notes works pretty well, but it doesn't work as well as it could and there's some structural issues with it. One, it's slow. Twitter moves really quickly, Community Notes is slow. So an erroneous tweet can circulate halfway around the world before-
Ian Bremmer:
Before Community Notes gets its pants on. Oh, I like that analogy. Little Churchill. There you go.
Nick Thompson:
Secondly, Community Notes depends upon there being ... like your example of a jelly bean. You need to have everybody be independent of each other, right? You need to have people coming from diverse political views in order to have good Community Notes. The problem with Twitter is that as the ideology of the average user shifts, you're going to get more biased Community Notes and you won't get as good Community Notes. You have slow, biased Community Notes. You will still have good ones. I look at AI News, right? Because it's really the best source for AI papers, conversations. Community Notes, not that there are many in AI, are much better because it's not the same ideology on politics. You have a real problem.
My view on Community Notes, it should be a supplement. The core thing is the algorithm. It's all this stuff upstream of that, right? This is the problem with what Facebook has done. They've said, "Oh, we can get rid of the fact-checkers, we can get rid of all these rules and we'll have Community Notes. It'll be great." The problem is it's a very small number of posts get Community Notes, it happens too slowly, and you need to have diverse opinions for it to work. So it's a good thing. It's not enough.
Ian Bremmer:
So we go from social media, where everyone is engaging in a broad platform and talking to people from all over the world, maybe not so much China. Then we move to group chats, where people are having much more specific conversations with people that they're connected to and certain interests, engaging with them more. Seems like we are quickly moving though to AI, where we're going to engage a lot more with chatbots that are programmed to know everything about our data on our smartphone and talks with us just the way we want to be talked to. If we're moving towards customization, society isn't doing it. Is that the ultimate atomization that we are unavoidably heading towards?
Nick Thompson:
I don't think we're unavoidably headed towards that. It is the dystopian future. It's the dystopian future where you no longer know if you're talking to a person or you're talking to a bot, where the bot knows more about you than you know about yourself. And where the bot which does not love you but does want your money actually knows how to communicate in such a way that you feel love, give money, and the bot gets what it wants. That's the worst future. Do we have to move towards that? Absolutely not.
Ian Bremmer:
It's not just about you don't know if it's a person. You can know that the bot is a bot and still ... I mean, we've seen all of these programs where people very willingly are engaging in relationships for therapy, for friendship, for deeper or intimate relationships, all of this stuff knowingly with a bot. And yet, it's proving very, very engaging, immediately, and starting to devote more time of these people than anything else is.
Nick Thompson:
It's terrifying. Okay, so the scariest thing that happened in social media in the last two weeks, it wasn't Facebook saying, "We're going to get rid of the fact-checking and we're going to get rid of the algorithm," or Musk doing whatever the hell he's doing on X. The scariest thing was that Facebook appeared to be running some kind of a test where they created fake characters for social media who would interact with you. And so they shut down the test, who knows what's going to happen, but it was really as though they were testing Westworld, and suddenly you will have a social media platform where you have all these really beautiful people who are very engaged with you, liking your posts and sending you comments, and you can imagine that being super engaging. And so you can imagine this incredible dystopian future. Right now it's bad enough. Our kids are spending all their time on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, whatever. We all know the studies and the effects. Imagine that they're just in this world populated by billions, trillions of perfectly designed characters who are perfectly engaged and have the simulation of being human. That's the AI dystopia.
Ian Bremmer:
Especially because once you've done that, what kind of engagement are you going to get from regular, normal, not so perfect-looking, not so smart and oriented towards you people?
Nick Thompson:
Right. Why would you post on Blue Sky where there're just a few humans and you have 1000 followers when you can post on Facebook's new Westworld and you'll get a million likes and engagements and all these wonderful comments? That's gross.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. So you said that you don't think that this is where we're inevitably heading. How do we stop it from happening?
Nick Thompson:
How do we stop that from happening? So one of the-
Ian Bremmer:
Because I could see why the companies would be perfectly comfortable with that outcome from a profit perspective.
Nick Thompson:
Right. If you assume they're only maximizing for revenue, that is a world where they make a lot of revenue. Now, there's a lot of political blowback on the way. You may lose customers as you get there. There may be people inside the companies who don't like ethically doing it. But you can imagine a world where Facebook does build this Westworld-like social media platform and does make a lot of money from it. How do you not get there? I do think there needs to be, one, a regulation or norm that I really push for that is very clear identification in every situation where you are talking to a bot that you could assume is a human. If you are talking to a voice that you might think is human and it's actually a bot, it should declare itself. I think that is a very important first step to it. I do think we're going to need to enforce all the major companies to do that. I think that is a-
Ian Bremmer:
Because that's very business negative, right?
Nick Thompson:
It's very business negative.
Ian Bremmer:
You immediately have all of these people that you think are followers of yours that aren't actually followers of yours. They're actually bots.
Nick Thompson:
Right. So the inverse of that is you need personhood credentials. So you need bot identification and then you need some kind of system so that you can verify that somebody is a person, and they're all-
Ian Bremmer:
Even if you get there, and I understand why that would be valuable, why do you think that that stops this from happening?
Nick Thompson:
I don't know how to stop this from happening. All I know how to do is to propose a few things that will slow it down and maybe help us figure out our values before it does happen.
Ian Bremmer:
So it may not be inevitable, but you feel like that is the path we are presently on?
Nick Thompson:
I worry. I don't know if it's the path that we're presently on. It's too hard to know. It is a path that we could plausibly be on. There are so many paths, who knows what path we're on with AI? My general concern with AI, and I'm generally an AI optimist. I love it. I use it all the time. I think it's going to be great for most of the stuff I work on. My concern with AI is less we all get turned into paper clips and more AI becomes this infinitely engaging thing where it does to us 1000X what Instagram did to us, which is it just sucks us into these worlds of infinite entertainment that don't matter to actual human-human connection.
Ian Bremmer:
The way I think of it, which is aligned with that, is I'm not worried that human beings are about to create superhuman intelligence with AI that replaces us, but I am concerned that very effective AI can make us more like computers.
Nick Thompson:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
And that's already happening with not very effective bots and not very effective deep-fakes, that we will engage. If that's the way that they want to engage them, we'll engage that way. And then you lose a lot when you're not engaging the way you're supposed to engage as a human being.
Nick Thompson:
Absolutely.
Ian Bremmer:
So are there nudges, right? I mean, some of these problems can be fixed with nudges where you don't need to necessarily legislate. You need to just create incentives for people that help them recognize that this is really bad for you longterm.
Nick Thompson:
And you create economic incentives. You can put a tax on AI agents. You can figure out ways to disincentivize companies from doing this kind of thing. I don't know exactly. I haven't seen any government that has really put forward the tax on the fake accounts thing, but it's doable.
Ian Bremmer:
So who right now is getting AI closer to right? You probably would've said the Europeans getting out of the box. Do you still think that? Because they don't have any of the companies.
Nick Thompson:
They don't have any of the companies and you look at where AI innovation is happening and you look at the number of people, you look at patents, you look at startups, you look at even the number of people using high-end AI chips, it's not happening in Europe.
Ian Bremmer:
At all.
Nick Thompson:
It's happening in California, right? Now, is it getting AI right? Who knows? But that's where the innovation's happening. And it's happening because low regulatory burdens, lots of immigration, venture capital community. There are a lot of things that make the United States the hub of AI. And China. Remarkable, right? Look at DeepSeek. Look at the recent innovations in large language models in China. It's developing pretty similar to the way that you and I wrote about six or seven years ago, where these are the two places where it's happening.
Ian Bremmer:
These are also the two places that are really not talking about how to engage with each other on that. There was a very, very nascent start of that conversation in the past year that probably won't continue with the incoming administration. Do you think an AI arms race between the Americans and the Chinese is right now likely?
Nick Thompson:
It is likely and it's unfortunate. So right at the end of Biden's term, here we are at the very end of it, they've released this 175 pages of regulations on AI. And I haven't had time to fully digest whether the regulatory burden outweighs the benefits, but what I do know is this: the entire brainpower of the Biden administration, to the extent it was thinking about AI, was not thinking about existential risk, was not thinking about how to limit bots, was not thinking about how it would change the economy of the US and how to help the transition. It was focused on how to prevent AI from getting to China.
Ian Bremmer:
How to contain China.
Nick Thompson:
Optimizing on totally the wrong vector. Now, should we optimize to contain China? Sure. Are there downstream benefits of that? Yes. If I were choosing, if I were Joe Biden and I were choosing which of these big AI questions, you can only choose one and you're going to write a regulatory framework to optimize for that, would I choose fighting China? I would not do that.
Ian Bremmer:
What would you pick?
Nick Thompson:
I would pick on helping the US economy prepare for the turmoil that's going to come as AI starts to change major industries. How do you upscale? How do you educate? How do you prepare? How do you integrate? What can the US government do on that front? I might even choose how to limit the existential risks. There are lots of things. I might choose how to make sure there's a competitive market. I just would not choose blocking China as my number one priority.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. The politics of course moves in a very different direction from that, because it's by far the most aligned between Democrats and Republicans.
Nick Thompson:
Everybody agrees, the Republicans and Democrats. And so it is possible that the Biden administration sat there and said, "Really, we should do all these other things, but the one thing that we'll be able to do at the end that will stick through the Trump administration is trying to block access to AI chips to Chinese companies." Maybe that's how they came to that conclusion.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, we are seeing more companies talk about replacements of large numbers of workers using AI use cases that are now being developed. The fact that that was immediately the first thing that you turned on, what you would like to see a US President and administration focus on, is that because this is becoming more immediate, more real for you?
Nick Thompson:
I do actually think that there are some specific things that the US government can do in the short term and should do. I think figuring out copyright law, for example with AI. There are a bunch of smart things that would be good in the short term and also good in the longterm by helping align incentives properly. As for economic turmoil caused by AI, we have seen very little, right?
Ian Bremmer:
So far almost none, yeah.
Nick Thompson:
Less than I would have expected two years ago. We are almost at the point of have we crossed AGI? Have we not crossed AGI? Probably not. But the amount of progress we've had in two years has been 10X what I would've expected, and the amount of change has been 1/10th. My assumption is that the change will continue to come slowly because organizations are slow to adapt, the technology is highly imperfect for lots of different reasons, but that big change will come and that we should be prepared. And maybe we have a little more time to prepare for it than I would've said two years ago, and let's use that time well.
Ian Bremmer:
Where's the early stage chaos, early stage lots of disruption that you think we're going to need to manage a lot more effectively? Where are you starting to see those green shoots, if you will?
Nick Thompson:
Actually, I'm going to go upstream one step. So one of the things that we see in media is we see a huge decline in the number of people searching for something in Google and then coming to our sites. And that's a problem for us. Fewer readers. We're fine, we're compensating for it. We're doing more subscribers this week at the Atlantic than almost any other week because we got really good at paid marketing. We figured out these other things and we're able to survive with extremely few users from Google. But it means that this whole economy that has been built on search engines sending people to your site is going to change dramatically. Because the search engines are just going to answer the questions. "Where do I buy the best headphones?" Instead of a series of links and everybody's competing and Best Buy is competing and Wired is competing, Google will just answer that, right? Or ChatGPT will answer it, or Perplexity will answer it. And so suddenly you're going to see a huge shift in the economy.
Now, will it be net good for consumers? Maybe. Maybe those answers will be better. Certainly they'll be simpler. Certainly there'll be less friction. But suddenly you'll start to see a lot of businesses saying, "Wait a second, we used to get 1000 people a month from Google. Now we're getting 500. Now we're getting 100." So I think you're going to see a number of businesses having to pivot very quickly.
As for specific jobs that get taken away-
Ian Bremmer:
Well, frankly, upstream is interesting. Because if you're changing the nature of an entire industry, then that's a lot of jobs. That's a lot of people that if those were recommendations you were getting and now you're not, well, who's paying that money to you? The answer is nobody. Well, where are you going to find that money? You're going to have to fire some people. That's what we're looking at. That's a perfectly legitimate answer to that question.
Nick Thompson:
And so my view is that there are going to be many, many things like that, that maybe upstream there's going to be a huge change. Net, maybe there's more jobs, maybe there's more work, maybe there's more wealth, but then there are transition costs, right?
Ian Bremmer:
They're different, yeah.
Nick Thompson:
And you have to get people from A to B to C.
Ian Bremmer:
Do you feel like your industry, the media industry, is grappling at all effectively? I'm less thinking about what you're doing at the Atlantic and more how the big players out there, the New York Times and the CNNs and the rest that have real scale. I mean, they're going to be facing massive disruption from AI too. This content is changing so much, so quickly, how people get it, how it's created, how it's distributed. What do you think that means for the media industry?
Nick Thompson:
It means a lot of different things, and there are a lot of different areas where you can grapple. One of the areas where we were very slow and we're now doing better is figuring out how there can be a fair exchange of value. Because remember, all of this wealth was created on the content that we in the media and other places made, and we let all the AI companies scrape our sites. And figuring out how there could be a fair exchange of value, it took a while, but now there's combinations of lawsuits, new companies, new stuff going on. We're starting to grapple and understand that.
The next question is how AI is going to change the whole distribution of content, like what I was just talking about with Google. I don't think we've done a great job of that. As an industry in general, I don't think we have reckoned with the fact both that search will change and that we will all have an infinite number of competitors that can create products quite similar to ours at an extremely low cost basis. Whether they're serious journalistic entities that are trying to compete with us or whether they're just Macedonian slop farms, who knows? But I don't think we've fully grappled with that.
Then the next question is how can AI improve the work we do? How do we use the tools to write better stories? We're starting to experiment with that. And then to me, the most interesting question is how do you pivot your companies to make yourself maximally resilient in the age of AI? How do you figure out the things that you can do that are harder to compete with? So I'll talk here about the Atlantic. So AI right now, and for quite a while, it's very bad with facts. So if you can lean into fact-checking as part of your brand, as something you really talk about, that's pretty important.
Ian Bremmer:
But that won't be true for law.
Nick Thompson:
Who knows?
Ian Bremmer:
Probably not.
Nick Thompson:
Well, at least for a little while.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah.
Nick Thompson:
AI can't write with style. That one might not be solvable. It is entirely possible. If you look at the various things that high quality journalists do, and you look at where the gap between the best journalists and AI is, style is actually probably number one. AI has a very hard time, at least in my view. Deep reporting, particularly human to human reporting, and then breaking news, being on top of information. You take those things, those are the things that give you more protection, that allow you to compete better with the AI of the future. Is that enough? I don't know. But every media company needs to be looking at what it does, looking at its DNA, and making sure it can optimize the vectors where it is most resilient.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. I think that there's going to be such a gap between the faceless journalism where it doesn't matter. You don't need to know who the byline is as long as it's the New York Times. You're just like, "Well, that's trusted. It's fine." I think it's much more going to be about creating relationships with people because of what you said at the beginning, which is the breakdown from this big global square to group chats and engagement that are individual. Journalism is going to have to be much more connected to people, and that's a challenging thing for big media organizations to do.
Nick Thompson:
Right. And we're pretty good at, "We'll get you in our newsletter. We'll get you signed up to our app." We know how to form that kind of direct relationship, but there's a different kind of direct relationship that you're talking about that we haven't figured out yet.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. Which you are very good at personally.
Nick Thompson:
I try.
Ian Bremmer:
No, you are. People know a lot about you. You play guitar and you run marathons and you're up in the farm and you've got kids and dogs and you love basketball, and you're talking to people about all of that and also about what you're learning in technology. It's human. They have a connection with you. I mean, that is the thing that it seems to me is going to most outlast anything that AI can do unless we've entirely subverted society.
Nick Thompson:
Well, I'm very curious about this. So I do these daily videos on tech, right? How long until there is somebody who's fully simulated on LinkedIn doing videos like that which are better than mine, because they can synthesize more information more quickly and they don't say, "Um." And it probably won't be that long until you can create the person. The question is whether anybody will watch. Part of the reason they watch is they trust and know me and I've been doing it for a long time. I don't know the answer to that question.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, that's an interesting question. One is whether there's a mass market for it because you know there'll be a bespoke market for it, but that's not what you want to accomplish for society.
Nick Thompson:
Right.
Ian Bremmer:
And that's an interesting challenge.
Nick Thompson:
Yeah.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. Okay, so we haven't talked about Elon. Before we close we should do that because he is the big shiny object taking up all the space. He's going to be in the White House. He's by far the most powerful advisor to Trump. He's becoming the military industrial complex in the United States in some degree. And of course, he also owns a piece of the public square, and he's saying, "We are the media," and he doesn't mean you and me when he says that. So what do you think are the most important implications of the Elonification of the technology/public square space?
Nick Thompson:
I think one of the most amazing things about his purchase of Twitter/X is that he has lost a huge percentage of the value. If you were to sell X as an independent entity, it's worth a fraction, right? Look at the advertising. And yet he's completely won. The amount of value he has created for his other companies, for his own personal brand, the data he's taken to change his AI is just extraordinary. I don't think anybody would've predicted it. And so the way to look at his public square is that it's not really a public square that he's designed as a public square. It's a public square that he has designed to further his other interests, which are so much more important. So that's how you have to look at X. It's a tool for him to gain influence for whatever he wants to do in German politics, and whatever he wants to do in German politics ties back in some ways to his own personal beliefs, but also possibly to his business interests at SpaceX, Tesla and everywhere else. He's an extremely complicated person to follow. The most interesting thing to watch will be what the European Union does to him. I mean, he's not popular there and they're not-
Ian Bremmer:
They're taking a breath, as you know. They're saying, "We need to reconsider this, because actually regulating him or penalizing him has broader implications directly for our relationship with the new president."
Nick Thompson:
I know.
Ian Bremmer:
They're saying that directly.
Nick Thompson:
It's an extremely complicated game theory because they would like him to stop, but they also don't want to upset Trump. So Musk has a very complicated balance where he has to maintain his alliance with Trump. Obviously it's going to be an uneasy alliance, because they both want to be the alpha, but they both get so much from each other. They're also both highly erratic, so who knows what could blow it up? And they're going to be trying to balance their interests, and Europe is going to be trying to figure out, "Well, if we do this to Elon, what do we get from Trump?" It's going to be extremely complicated.
Ian Bremmer:
Is America stronger overall because of Elon's role in the administration?
Nick Thompson:
Is America stronger? There are ways that it's beneficial. Elon certainly cares deeply about some of the most important issues, like he cares a ton about climate change. He cares a ton about space exploration. He cares a ton about innovation. And so having a voice who is as smart as Elon is as close to the president when there aren't that many advisors ... And so Trump's new AI advisor, Sriram Krishnan, very good guy. We are very lucky in the Trump administration to have someone like that as an AI advisor. Would that have happened-
Ian Bremmer:
Without Elon? No.
Nick Thompson:
Without Elon? Almost certainly not. So you get a lot of benefits. Now, on the other hand, you get the chaos that comes with him. You get the geopolitics that come with him. You're going to get some distortion. Are we going to regulate OpenAI and Anthropic and the other AI companies the right way, or are we going to regulate them in the way that is most advantageous to Grok? Right? I don't know. We might end up with really inefficient regulations because they're all skewed towards Musk companies. So even within just the tech perspective, you could get a real biasing because of Musk's closeness to Trump.
So there's positives and there are negatives. I do think in general, Trump's technology policy will probably be better for America because of Musk than it would be without him. But Musk will also create so much additional chaos ... and maybe a negative number times a negative number is a positive. Maybe a chaos magnet times a chaos magnet makes—
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, I was completely with you in your answer until that last one small bit. I'm like, "No, negative times negative geopolitically ends up just breaking stuff that you don't want to have break."
Nick Thompson:
I mean, that's what I worry about.
Ian Bremmer:
But the rest of it is very balanced, and I think it's useful to hear from you on this and many other issues. Nick Thompson.
Nick Thompson:
Ian Bremmer, it's always a pleasure to chat with you.
Ian Bremmer:
Thanks, man.
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars, otherwise don't do it. On Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.
