WIRED Roundup: Is Silicon Valley Losing Its Influence on D.C?

0:00Zoë Schlanger:Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to tell you about the new Wired subscription program. If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much for supporting us. If you haven't signed up yet, this is a great time to do so. You'll have access to newsletters with exclusive analysis from Wired reporters and access to livestream AMAs where you can ask your most pressing questions. Head over to Wired.com to learn more.

0:30Zoë Schlanger:Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's Director of Business and Industry, Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. And later, we'll dive into our main segment on how the influence of Silicon Valley is shifting in D.C. and why Republicans think tech leaders should follow the example of Peter Thiel. I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake LaHutt.

0:55Jake Lahut:Hey Zoe, great to be with you. First time.

1:00Zoë Schlanger:Jake, you and I were both watching Trump's speech yesterday. This was kind of a keynote speech that he gave an event that was hosted by the All In podcast. And he was talking about AI regulation. This came after he had already put out an AI action plan, which was this really long document that outlined 90 plus policies focusing on three main goals. accelerating AI innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading international diplomacy and security. So I guess just to start, can I get your kind of high-level take on the speech? Because I don't watch Trump a ton, and every time I do, I'm really struck by his just vibe is so fascinating and so funny to me.

1:48Jake Lahut:Oh, absolutely. So to give the listeners a little bit of background on where I come from, I have been to more Trump rallies than I can count in person, that is covering them in a professional capacity. And the weird thing about seeing Trump speak is you can really get a feel for one, like how much he just wants to be there. And this was definitely a case of like, he didn't seem like he really wanted to be doing this speech. There's this difference in the cadence and tone of his voice, where even if you're not watching it, where you can see him looking at the teleprompter and then looking away to riff, He has this like very rote cadence when he's reading on the prompter.

2:26Jake Lahut:So I would say this was like a pretty middle of the road Trump phoning it in type speech.

2:31Zoë Schlanger:Yeah, I had a one on one at the beginning of the speech. And the person I was supposed to talk to was like, wait, should we cancel it? Should we push it back? I was like, it's Trump. I feel pretty confident that he's not going to start talking about AI until like 30 minutes in. But he really was talking about rolling back any level of regulation that we already have and definitely not imposing new regulations on AI companies, really trying to move away roadblocks so they can like go innovate as quickly as possible. He framed it as an all-out race and he talked a lot about woke AI. So maybe let's get into that a little bit because this is like a sticking point for him.

3:09Jake Lahut:Yeah, and I still don't really know what he means by woke AI. I mean, we did see at the outset of some of these models, I guess going back to like 2022, 23, I remember Google's had those like weird renditions of the founding fathers where like there were like very few, if any, white ones. Maybe he's talking about that. But I'm also wondering, like, is he talking about like going like full grok with what we're going to be supporting? And then the other thing that I like just on a very high level that I found interesting was he's basically saying China doesn't play by the rules. And if they're not going to play by the rules and we want to beat China, then we can't play by any rules either.

3:47Jake Lahut:and he kind of extends that to saying, like, we shouldn't even be paying publishers or anyone whose work is trained on it. He had this example of like, well, you read a book and you learn something from the book, but that doesn't mean anybody should get paid. And I was like, okay. And also like, I've worked at like at least three publications now where my work has trained these models and I have not seen a dime. So yeah, I was a little stupefied, to be honest, hearing that part.

4:12Zoë Schlanger:Yeah, the newsroom was definitely like, our Slack was absolutely blowing up when he was like redefining fair use in real time. Everyone was losing their minds. So speaking of the current administration, our next story deals with its role in a critical field, which is cancer research. Our colleagues Elisa Muell and Anthony Lidgate analyzed how the Trump administration has erased hundreds of millions of dollars that were supposed to be used and were being used for cancer research. Specifically, the administration has paused an estimated$1.5 billion in funding to the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, which is the largest funder of cancer research in the world.

4:51Zoë Schlanger:And they've also effectively halted clinical trials of new drugs and laid off thousands of employees at the FDA and NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And get this, Trump officials have reportedly maintained a list of flagged keywords that they believe should trigger program reviews. In the NIH grants terminated so far, the 50 most common flag keywords were things like, you might expect, unfortunately, trans, expression, diverse, and women.

5:19Jake Lahut:On the one hand, not surprised, but also this is the kind of thing that I do wonder how much it ends up penetrating into, you know, the actual news diets of folks who are not following this really closely. And when you look at the pie chart that we have in this story, just the sheer amount of this that's coming from Harvard is really quite staggering. And that's the weird part of this that's very different from Trump 1.0 is it's like AI scraping meets his personal vendettas and we get these really, you know, strange results.

5:52Zoë Schlanger:Yeah, it's really interesting because I feel like there are things that I've thought about this with Elon Musk specifically a lot. It's like he has thrived in environments where his actions and he's, you know, an impulsive risk-taking person have a pretty quick consequence. Like he can see feedback really quick. If he does something and it doesn't work, he can then pivot. But when you're in government, you don't get to see the impact of what you're doing for kind of a while. And so if cancer research grinds to a halt because of what the Trump administration is choosing not to fund or what Elon Musk's Doge team decided to, you know, slash contracts for or funding for, like, we won't actually feel the impact of that for years.

6:39Zoë Schlanger:But the impact will be pretty devastating, you can imagine. Yeah.

6:43Jake Lahut:And even like the longer term, second, third order effects of this, I mean, the brain drain aspect, I think, is going to be a very big story of this administration where, you know, think about if you're an undergrad who's looking at, you know, master's, Ph.D. type research. Like, where are you going to go? Are you going to try to, you know, pivot your talents and go to the European Union? Are you going to just get a consulting job or try to go on Wall Street? Like, I think that these are really difficult conversations that a lot of these researchers probably never thought they would have in what I would imagine for a lot of them is a very demanding but fulfilling field to try to like literally cure cancer.

7:23Jake Lahut:Totally.

7:24Zoë Schlanger:Okay. I need to shift us to a new topic because I'm already feeling quite depressed. This one is about outer space. So my first question for you is, how do you feel about outer space, Jake? And would you go if you had the chance? Normally, I would say, no, thank you. I'm not interested. But I don't know. After this, maybe, yeah, take me to Mars.

7:42Jake Lahut:You know, weirdly, I would probably be more comfortable going to outer space than doing like deep ocean exploration. That could be a recency bias with the ocean gate thing. No, I was super into the, not just the Apollo missions, but Gemini and Mercury as a kid. I had a little beanbag chair in my house where I would like pretend it was like the capsule that was like re-entering the atmosphere. I can picture this perfectly. Yeah, so huge Al Shepard, John Glenn fan. I love all that stuff. But I am also a rather large person, and I think the fitting into the vessel would be difficult.

8:19Zoë Schlanger:Totally fair. I can't 100 % guarantee you would see this if you did find a vessel that could take you, but Wired contributor Jorge Garay reported that a team of astronomers from Yale and Copenhagen recently discovered two galaxies colliding with each other. They have called it the Infinity Galaxy. And this finding is pretty exciting because it could be the first direct evidence of how really old supermassive black holes were formed.

8:49Jake Lahut:Yeah, this is some like interstellar type stuff, but it really does look like that sideways eight formation. And I found this pretty mind blowing, especially in our vertical video treatment of it. If you want to check this out on Instagram reels, it's rather mesmerizing, I got to say.

9:05Zoë Schlanger:So the prominent theory of how they form is when stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity. But with very old supermassive black holes, there wouldn't have been enough time for the stars to get to that point. So this infinity galaxy supports another theory that they were able to form from dense clumps of matter. So no star busting needed.

9:27Jake Lahut:You know, at least for now, we are still discovering new things about science in the United States of America. And maybe that'll continue. Maybe it won't.

9:35Zoë Schlanger:Well, if not, AI apparently is going to step in and do everything for us.

9:39Jake Lahut:Doge can't go out there and catch up to the James Webb telescope, at least. No one's catching that bad boy anytime soon.

9:45Zoë Schlanger:Okay, so our next story takes us back to Earth and honestly back to the Silicon Valley elite of it all. Our colleague, Joel Kalili, reported that crypto firms are finally getting more access to banking. This is actually critically important and kind of covers both of our areas of reporting, Jake, because debanking was a core reason that a lot of the Andreessen types in the world really soured on the Biden administration and went all in on Trump. So now we're kind of seeing the fruits of that decision play out because under the crypto-friendly Trump administration, a number of U.S. fintech firms are competing to offer bank accounts to these crypto firms.

10:29Zoë Schlanger:But they still do need to follow the ground rules set by the partner bank involved. So there's no fully escaping the traditional banking system. But curious on your take care, given how critical this was to the last election.

10:41Jake Lahut:Oh, yeah. I mean, if you've ever had the pleasure of hearing Don Jr. talk about this, he gets real worked up about the debanking. And, you know, this is from my sourcing perspective. I remember being at the Republican convention last summer in Milwaukee. And I remember like the second day there, I'm bumping into some people I recognize. And like every time I'm like, hey, like, what are you doing here? Like, you're not on the Trump 2024 campaign. And maybe they were on it in 2016 or 2020. It's like, no, dude, I'm here with crypto. Like, yeah, check out this party later. Like every time. And I'm like, did all of you guys like when did all of you end up working for these crypto companies?

11:14Jake Lahut:But you got to think of the in the context of after January 6th, if you were a Trump, you know, former White House official or you were on those campaigns, your cash out options by usual D.C. swamp standards were very different. So like you weren't going to be going to K Street and doing lobbying in the traditional sense. You know, you weren't going to be getting those cush jobs on some Wall Street legislative affairs team or whatever. So for a lot of them, like this was kind of the only game in town. And that's where I find this development really interesting is like, could this end up affecting that Republican talent cash out pipeline in some weird way?

11:50Jake Lahut:And I remain like completely perplexed about the next phase that Congress is going to try to set up some sort of like, you know, market securities framework for these cryptocurrencies. But right now they've basically given them the stable coin win.

12:07Zoë Schlanger:Exactly. OK, one more before we go to break. Yesterday, we published a story about the former Doge offices at the General Services Administration in Washington, D.C. We had gotten a little tip that they were left a bit of a mess when Doge started to vacate said offices. Near the space where Doge previously operated, there were stacks of mattresses that still had sheets on them. There were box springs. And then there was like a whole corner of baby toys. A lot.

12:44Jake Lahut:Yeah. A lot.

12:45Zoë Schlanger:We ended up publishing this story on kind of the scene, And we basically just like published a bunch of photos of what we saw.

12:52Jake Lahut:Well, Zoe, I think you're selling yourself short because your writing and narrative description of this scene was just something to behold. And I really think you got to read it online because the pictures are rather stunning. And I guess I would call this dude bro Chernobyl or something like that, where it was just like, whoa, this is the aftermath of something real serious going on here.

13:14Zoë Schlanger:I wish I'd had that line. Coming up after the break, we dive into Jake's inside scoop on how the influence of Silicon Valley has been slowly but surely shifting in D.C. Stay with us.

13:33Zoë Schlanger:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

13:39Jake Lahut:Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

13:58Zoë Schlanger:Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

14:12Zoë Schlanger:Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake Lahut, who recently reported on the alliance between the Republican Party and Silicon Valley and how it's still going strong, but it's actively changing. Jake, this has been a long, long year so far, but it wasn't that long ago that Elon Musk was Trump's right hand and tech leaders like Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos were attending the presidential inauguration. So what the heck has changed?

14:43Jake Lahut:Well, I think both sides of the equation here are starting to figure each other out a little more. But based on the Republican strategists and people around Trump world I talked to, I think that at the moment they feel as if they have the better end of the deal here where they got all this money that helped them rise to power. And they don't feel necessarily too exploited by the tech community. But also there are a lot of lessons learned from Elon's crash out. And the main one, a strategist put this pretty succinctly where he has this old axiom of the podiums are for the principals, the principals being the candidate, your lawmaker.

15:23Jake Lahut:And Elon really needed to stay off the podium. And because he publicly attached himself to this thing so much, especially with that Wisconsin Supreme Court race where he was out there campaigning for it, and that kind of gave the Trump White House and Republicans more broadly a classic like A-B case study of like, OK, clearly he was a drag on the party brand here. And some of these strategists think that that's going to also hurt the Republicans to some degree in the midterms, kind of no matter what they do. So that's where it gets interesting with folks like Peter Thiel and I think the evolving thinking of keep it behind the scenes and more importantly, don't put all of your bets in terms of donations on a couple candidates or kind of in this VC mindset on safe seats.