So what will the Trump administration do in the event that the stock market starts going down. Well, the first thing that will happen is everything that they criticized previous administrations for doing, both Fed and Treasury, you’ll see them doing them because in a crisis, you do all sorts of things that you’d rather not do in terms of buying assets or lending to certain parts of the economy. Second, though, I worry about the government is directly inserting itself into the sector in advance. They’re buying equity stakes in these companies, or getting things that are almost like the equivalent of an equity stake, where they get a fraction of all of Nvidia’s export revenue. And that, in some sense, says to me they are more willing to do things for individual companies than you’ve seen in the past. Now, Bush and Obama basically bailed out the auto industry. The theory at the time was in the middle of a severe economic crisis — I think ex-post, they were largely justified in bailing that industry out. And much of the money that went into it, but not all of it was repaid. Here, in 2000, we didn’t do that. Global Crossing went bankrupt. No one in the government tried to do anything about the firm Global Crossing, which was a firm building a lot of the fiber optic cable and switching networks and stuff like that. My guess is, that 2000 approach would be the right one here. I could see this administration wanting to be much more interventionist, especially for its favored companies, and getting involved with them directly in a way that gets in the way of what capitalism and bubbles bursting are supposed to accomplish. Well, so, and this is a theory that I’ve been kicking around for a little while. It’s based in part on what you describe the Trump administration’s eagerness to be in partnerships and take ownership stakes and so on. But it’s also based on the extent to which the vision of the A.I. future is deeply entangled with issues of national security. When you do exercises and thought experiments about accelerated A.I. timelines, including people we’ve had on the show, they tend to very quickly turn into arguments about the new cold war with China. And I feel like when you put those pieces together, plus the fact that the Trump administration has made such a bet on A.I., all of that makes me feel like from the point of view of the administration, maybe these companies are already too big to fail. So, absolutely, I think you do need to inject national security into this conversation in a way that you didn’t really need to in the bursting of the 2000 bubble or the housing bubble. And there are things that are economically costly that you want to do for national security reasons. In fact, just in normal times, for example, I would subsidize chip companies to make more advanced microchips in the United States, not because I think it’s a great source of jobs in the United States, not because I think we’re good at making the microchips, just because it terrifies me that almost all of our advanced microchips come today from Taiwan. So there’s all sorts of costs, economic costs you want to pay for national security.
