From Signalgate to wild tariff swings

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

NICK THOMPSON: Well, now I know what it feels like to be driving 90 miles an hour in one direction, and then put it 90 miles an hour in reverse all of a sudden on the highway, right? It’s like Trump did that, and then he started crashing, and so now he’s turned the car around, and he’s now driving back forward with the tariff delay.

There’s been a lot of long-term damage that’s been done. Our relationship with Canada will never be the same. Our relationship with the European Union will never be the same, right? We’re just entering a system of a moment of a lot of uncertainty.

It’s like China’s now more likely to invade Taiwan. Yes, absolutely. Right now, if China invades Taiwan, what the hell happens after that? Well, what does that do to global supply chains? What does it do to the international cause of democracy? There’s just a lot of really important things that suddenly are at play, and that you can’t really have faith in that you could ever since 1945.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. In the midst of plummeting stock prices and the global economy in crisis, Donald Trump is apparently walking back some of his tariffs causing whiplash through much of the business world. I wanted to talk to Nick about the potential impact of the tariff turmoil, plus about the Signalgate scandal, which The Atlantic was right at the heart of. We also talk about what Musk’s deal to merge X with his AI company means for the future of your tweets and more. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. Nick, welcome back to the show.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Bob. Delighted to be here again. Always a pleasure to chat with you.

Copy LinkTrump’s unpredictable retreat on tariffs

SAFIAN: It’s been crazy for the last week with President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs declaring war on the global economy, and then today, what a turnabout.

THOMPSON: It’s very hard to fathom. I did not predict a complete retreat on tariffs, but can’t say I’m against the decision.

SAFIAN: Is it because Elon Musk complained or Republican officials, or is it just like wild stock market losses? I haven’t gotten the sense from Trump that he is a re-thinker based on feedback very much, but—

THOMPSON: Well, I think in the first term, he did, and so the hypothesis was that in the first term, when people would push back, he would change his views, or he would seem to be spiraling out. Then the hypothesis was this term, he doesn’t have those forces around him, but maybe he does, or maybe he saw electoral defeat. I mean, he clearly knew these things would be unpopular. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have timed his announcement for right after those Florida elections and the Wisconsin judicial election. So, he knew this was going to be bad. Maybe he just didn’t know how bad it was going to be.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I mean, it is exactly what he said he was going to do during the campaign, but the market didn’t seem to believe he was going to do it, at least until it happened, right?

THOMPSON: I know. Until it happened.

Copy LinkHow Signalgate impacted The Atlantic’s business

SAFIAN: I want to dig in more into the tariffs and what it means for business, but first, I have to ask you about what, prior to Liberation Day, was one of the biggest news stories of the year. The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, included in a group chat on Signal by U.S. National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz; other leaders, including the secretary of defense, are there. Sensitive military plans are discussed. When did this first come to you? Are you consulted in advance by the editorial team on how to approach coverage, or do you read about it once it breaks the rest of us?

THOMPSON: I’m not consulted. I don’t know what they’re going to publish today. I don’t know what the next cover of The Atlantic is. For a story like this, I certainly knew that something important was going to be published, because there’s a lot that you have to do as an organization when something like this happens — you have to make sure your comms officials and others are ready to go. So, I knew that something was going to happen, but I read it maybe right about when everybody else did. In fact, I believe one of the first five people to read the story was my 11-year-old son, because I was with him. So, right before it went live on the site, we got to read the story.

Even after I read it, I didn’t realize the impact it would have. When we published the second story, and we published the chat transcripts, I was on an airplane when that went live. The second I read that, I knew that was going to be massive because of the texture, the color, and because the administration had spent the previous day saying that what was in the chats was not classified, and that The Atlantic was mischaracterizing it. So, it was very clear that that was incorrect, and that meant the story was going to go wild.

SAFIAN: Is it hard for you when it’s hot news? I mean, your background is as an editor. You’re a journalist. I know that there’s this separation between the editorial team that works for you and the business that you run, but do you want to get in it when it happens?

THOMPSON: Oh, of course. I mean, I love that. I love the adrenaline of being in a news organization. These are of my favorite years of my life where running and being in news organizations, but the rules require that I respect the lines between church and state, and for good reason.

SAFIAN: So, this story breaks. There’s a lot of attention that’s paid to The Atlantic, to your brand — to the story, but also to your brand. So, do you look at it and say like, “Oh, this is good for The Atlantic’s business?” Are there things that you do to take advantage of it?

THOMPSON: Yes, 100%. So, that’s actually where the business side gets very involved. So for one, once you start seeing the administration critiquing The Atlantic, well then we have to respond, right? Communications reports to business. In some way, it’s my team. It’s like a small bit of it. It’s my job on social media. So, you probably saw my feeds. I was pushing back every time they said something false. I’m not on the editorial side, but I can certainly say, “This is false. Here are the actual facts.” Every time they say we’re failing and going out of business, it is a good reminder to point out that we have more subscribers than we’ve ever had. We’re profitable, and we’re growing like kudzu. We’re doing fantastically. So, that’s part of the role.

Then there’s also this role where you have a moment like this, and you have to do everything you can. So, I used to run audience development teams at the New Yorker and Wired, and so I was quickly looking at the story and had some suggestions. The most important thing by far was activating a strategy on the consumer marketing side. So, this gets interesting, where we realized that there are two ways you can subscribe to The Atlantic. You can subscribe. You can just say, “I subscribe,” or you can say, “I want a trial subscription. That’ll let me bypass the paywall for a month, and then I’ll choose in a month.” Naturally, the folks who join with the same-day start, that’s wonderful, because you have no risk that they’ll leave in a month.

Not only that, weirdly, for reasons that are a little complicated to understand, even over a multi-year period at each interval, people who’ve signed up for a same-day start tend to be more loyal. There’s something about the act of signing up for trial subscription that seems to plant the seed of disloyalty. So, we recognized in some early testing on the story that there was an affinity for people to sign up on same-day starts. So, we changed the messaging, and we changed the way we were presented. We changed the offer options, and it turned out that a large percentage of the people who subscribed came in through same-day starts. Wonky stuff, doesn’t like—

SAFIAN: But you downgraded essentially the offer that doesn’t have as much lifetime value for you, because people were hungry enough for your content at that point.

THOMPSON: Correct. Right, and the general principle and what we all agreed on the business side is that, at a moment like this, the value of the decisions you make go up by, I don’t know, 2X, 3X, 4X, right? So, you want to pay special attention to whatever choices you’re making about the offer and all this. So, it’s not quite the adrenaline you get in the newsroom. It’s not one of those moments where you’re, “Okay, now, figure out this story. We’re going to figure out this, and this person said this. Wait, this person’s saying that.” It’s a different kind of adrenaline, but you are making highly consequential decisions that will affect your business in the long run, because you know it’s going to be a good day.

You know more people are going to subscribe. You know you’re going to have more readers. But if you do everything right, and you set up your paid marketing campaign as efficiently as possible, well, maybe instead of getting a boost of 160%, you get a boost of 170%, and that actually really matters.

Copy LinkBalancing business and political perceptions

SAFIAN: I know there’s the story that obviously brought a lot of attention, but the general environment since Trump took office again has been a high degree of turmoil. Is that turmoil good for your business? I mean, your audience more eager to be part of it.

THOMPSON: Our business is subscriptions, and clearly, more people people really respect our brand. They care a lot about trust. They like fact-check journalism. We stand for all those things, and subscriptions are up substantially. Advertising is more complicated, because advertisers don’t want to be around political tension. So, there’s some headwinds, right? Our advertising numbers are terrific. They’re up above target, but we’re not crashing our advertising numbers the way we were not long ago. Then the more interesting thing is if you look at the media ecosystem from 2016 to 2020, there’s a real business risk. I haven’t never done the analysis, but if you were to do a regression analysis of how much publications leaned into being resistance publications and their long-term economic prospects, I think there’s probably a negative correlation.

I think that there’s some deleterious things that happen to your publication if you become a resistance publication, and it affects your brand. It affects your readership. It affects the way social media algorithms work. It tunes your audience in a way that probably isn’t helpful. Now, that’s not a risk for The Atlantic, because we are so at our core or founding statements as we are of no party or clique. We would never become a resistance publication, and it’s so counter to the way Jeff Goldberg and the editorial team see the world. They would 100% have published that story about Joe Biden. If Donald Trump does something that they think is amazing, they’ll write a story that says he’s amazing.

But as a general media executive perspective, I do think that there’s a temptation. There was a temptation in the first Trump administration. I think there is in the second Trump administration to eat the sugar of anti-Trump coverage, and it’s not healthy in the long run.

SAFIAN: It’s interesting too because a lot of brands, they get positioned or pigeonholed as being either part of the resistance or part of MAGA, sort of one side or the other. I saw some report saying that Trump’s biggest gripe was that Waltz had your editor’s number on his phone. I could see from an editorial point of view, that’s like a badge of honor like, “Yeah, we’re in there.” From a business point of view, is your relationship with the administration, does it get more complicated about who you can reach and what your reputation’s going to be?

THOMPSON: Well, I don’t think there’s a huge problem for journalists reaching people in the Trump administration. You read Jonathan Lemire’s piece every day. He’s always like, “I talked to five people on the inside of this decision, all of whom requested anonymity, right?” They’re clearly talking to us. It’s no surprise that Goldberg was in Waltz’s phone. Our reporters talk to lots of people in Washington, because people in Washington care what is written about them in places that people read. So, they may denounce us and say, “It’s a horror, The Atlantic,” but God knows they’re all reading it.

From a business perspective, there are risks. There are ways the federal government could retaliate against us on a business side. You can imagine certainly with ABC, CBS. They’ve gone after the owners, and you can imagine an administration going after our owner. We’ve tried to game all this out. We’ve tried to see whether there are points of leverage. I don’t think there are any. I don’t think there are any risks, but who knows, right? The Trump administration has proved very adversarial to anybody it perceives as a critic, and who knows what happens.

SAFIAN: You mentioned advertising dollars earlier. Is that advertising risk higher if you’re seen as hostile to Trump?

THOMPSON: Yeah, I think that’s probably right. I mean, different advertisers have different views. Some don’t care. Our readers, we have almost precisely as many Republican readers as Democratic readers. We are reaching influential and affluent and highly read, highly-educated people across the political spectrum. They’re a cohort that many advertisers want to reach, and so that’s a huge plus. The negative is, of course, it’s less that they… I do think if there was a chance we were viewed as a resistant publication, that would be very bad for advertising. But I think the actual risk is advertisers just — I mean, you know this… You really want to buy a fancy watch when you’re reading a story about bombing Yemen? No. Right?

You’re in a mood to buy a fancy watch when you’re reading a story about some entrepreneur who’s built something cool or something that puts you in a different emotional mood. So, the risk is really if your coverage becomes writing about the chaos, or writing about this, or writing about deportations, writing about El Salvadorian prisons. You want to buy a fancy watch when you’re reading about a prison in El Salvador? No, you do not. So, it’s more of a, “What is the perception of what we cover? How many stories do we put of this kind? How many people read those stories? How do you fit the ads in?” Again, the interesting thing about The Atlantic is that the business choices are all downstream of the editorial choices, right?

Goldberg could come up here and say, “By the way, hey, Nick, we’re actually only going to be covering torture and pillaging for the next two months.” Then I would just have to figure out how to sell ads. I wouldn’t say, “Hey, can you please write some stories about small businesses?” I would sell ads to companies that want to be around torturing and pillaging. I would just figure it out. So, we’re different from publications that work in the other way.

SAFIAN: Your aspiration is not to operate it like Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, and say, “We should cover this.”

THOMPSON: It’s the exact opposite. That’s why I stay out of the editorial decisions. I never want that. When I knew there was something big coming, I just called Goldberg, and I said, “I don’t know what the story is. I don’t want to know what the story is, but I want you to publish it no matter what,” and said, “I’ll stand behind you no matter what it is, and no matter what happens.”

SAFIAN: I wasn’t sure where asking Nick about Signalgate would go, but I love hearing the specifics about how the business responded to the situation. For all business leaders, it’s one thing to be presented with an opportunity. It’s a whole other thing to smartly capitalize on it. So, are there opportunities for businesses to capitalize on Trump’s tariff war? Will big tech stay loyal to the new administration? What is Elon Musk up to with X? We’ll talk about all that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson talked about the media outlet’s role in Signalgate, and how they capitalized on the business opportunities. Now, Nick and I dig into the impact of Trump’s tariff turnaround, big tech’s love-hate relationship with the president, and why Elon Musk’s sale of X to his AI company raises serious privacy concerns. Let’s dive back in.

Copy LinkThe intellectual argument for tariffs

Let’s turn back to those beautiful tariffs as our friend in the White House might put it.

THOMPSON: Yes.

SAFIAN: So, Trump’s theory behind all this, the tariffs will reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing, balance the budget. At least I think that’s his theory because none of the math I’ve seen on it really adds up. Do you have a sense of what the grander plan really is? Does it make sense to you?

THOMPSON: I mean, the argument I would make for it, if I were trying to argue for the tariffs, the most sophisticated defense I can see is we are about to enter an era where AI is the most powerful force in the world. Also, AI business uses are naturally tied to military uses. So, you’re going to need to have the whole AI chain inside of your country. In the United States, we’ve forgotten how to build things, right? We can’t make chips. We can’t all the components that go into a data center, and so actually what we need to do is cut off the rest of the world, and make sure we can relearn the process of screwing the servers together, and designing the chips, and putting them in the fat.

Huge flaws with that, but it is a justifiable intellectual argument for why you would want tariffs. Now, would you want to cross-the-board tariffs? Would you want tariffs designed with this silly formula? Would you want math errors in your tariff formula? Would you want to roll it out? Of course not, right? In general, I’m in favor of free trade. I think it makes the world much more efficient, but I can see some intellectual grounding in the area I care the most about — tech and AI — for this.

Copy LinkTech industry’s cautious stance with Trump

SAFIAN: When the tariffs first came out, there was some opposition voiced by some financial leaders, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. Obviously, the stock market’s going down, but tech leaders were mostly quiet even though their stocks took a huge hit. I mean, is it because they see that benefit, or do you have a sense about why?

THOMPSON: No. Just because they have antitrust cases coming. I mean, they like—

SAFIAN: They’re afraid. They’re afraid.

THOMPSON: They’re afraid. I mean, they’re all hit in different ways. Obviously if you manufacture physical goods, Apple was hit the most, right? You manufacture physical goods, and your phones are assembled in Vietnam, and they’re sent here. You don’t want massive tariffs on Vietnam, but everybody’s hit both because the economy slows down, and if computers become more expensive and phones become more expensive, people buy fewer computers and fewer phones, which means they use Facebook less often. So even if you have an all digital product, it’s still going to be hit.

So, everybody knew they were going to get hit, and most of them didn’t speak out just because they have some sympathy for Trump. That’s an interesting story about why, but I think mostly because they have really big issues they’re facing, particularly antitrust investigations. They know that Trump makes decision based on whether he sees people as loyal, and so they’re scared.

Copy LinkCompanies & institutions standing up for core values

SAFIAN: I mean, there is, I don’t know, a lack in some ways of institutions banding together to be a counterweight in some ways to some of the things the administration wants to do. You see it in higher education. Columbia University settles, but other schools are not sure what to do. Is there a role that institutions, universities, businesses should be playing? We should be looking them to play and balancing out the checks and balances in the system, or is that just not realistic?

THOMPSON: No, they should. I mean, my view, and this came up in our conversations about the Signal story and also about how you cover the administration. Every institution has fundamental and core values, and if the administration comes after those fundamental and core values, you should stand up to it. So, I would think with the law firm, if you have a sense that Trump does not have respect for the rule of law, you would perhaps want to not cave to his illegal orders. If you’re a university, you could have fundamental principles too. So, you shouldn’t obviously, like organizations, you don’t want to get into resistance politics. Half of your employees at every company are Republicans.

Trump was elected, fairly elected President of the United States. So, you have to be very careful if you lead one of these organizations, but I do think that this is most clear with the law firms. When Trump proposes something that every lawyer I’ve talked to believes is illegal, and some of the law firms, Paul, Weiss and Skadden, have caved, and others like Jenner have stood up. I do think there’s a reason, and I can understand why the lawyers at Jenner stood up and said, “No, we’re going to sue you back.” I do know why I think that the people who work at Jenner are proud of that choice, and many of the people who work at Skadden and Paul, Weiss are ashamed.

SAFIAN: But for other businesses, it sounds like you’re encouraging them to think about what your core values are, and stand up for the things that do matter to you and that matter to your business.

THOMPSON: Right, and you just stand up for your principles, and you act as though the rule of law is still there, and that there’s certain core values, and you always hold true to them. If you don’t hold true to those core values, then what the hell are you doing?

SAFIAN: It just feels like there’s a thread of self-censorship that is happening sometimes for individuals, sometimes among leaders, sometimes among institutions, because they are fearful about what the repercussions might be.

THOMPSON: Totally.

SAFIAN: Part of that’s by design, right?

THOMPSON: I mean, that’s the point. I mean, that is the playbook. If you make your opponents fear you, then they will, as the saying goes, obey in advance. Back to the initial thing with the tech leaders, to what degree is it that, and to what degree is it they actually support his policies and support the changes he’s bringing? I can’t get in their heads, but I have a pretty strong suspicion that they probably like him and agree with him more than you think, and more than most people think, and certainly more than they did in 2016 to 2020, because they were frustrated with Biden. They really hated the Biden FTC.

They don’t like all the employee actions against them. Maybe they’re frustrated with all the DEI requirements that Trump is going at. Probably quietly, a lot of these tech executives and so on were happy with that. What they don’t like is total economic chaos. They don’t like the economy being sunk. They don’t like a lot of what they’re seeing now. They don’t like abandonment of the rule of law. So, they may have gone along at the beginning partly because they were afraid of him, and partly because they sided with him, and that mix is shifting over time.

Copy LinkThe privacy concerns behind X’s sale to xAI

SAFIAN: I wanted to ask you while we hear about X, the former Twitter platform, struggled with ad revenue, apparently had a resurgence since Elon Musk’s alignment with Trump, lots of political policy now unfolding on X in real time. Then there’s the sale of X to xAI, which is Musk’s tech platform, and another twist. Where do you see X right now? How much of a power center is it? How much of a business center? I know you’ve talked about this a little bit before, but how real are the privacy concerns around linking it to xAI?

THOMPSON: On X as a business, I still think it’s a bad business, and Musk has… The value of X is massively less. Ad revenue is down. People don’t want to advertise there. Like I said before, people don’t want to advertise next to toxic content. You get rid of the moderators. You bring back people who’ve been banned. You do all these things. It makes advertisers hate the place. They’ve tried some strong arm tactics. I’m sure you saw that amazing story in the Wall Street Journal where basically ex-lawyers call up two big advertising companies, and say, “Hey, you want to merge?” You’re going to have some problems with the U.S. government unless you buy some ads on X, right? It’s like mafioso stuff.

So, whether it’s through that or whether it’s through the increased attention, maybe there’s been a slight pickup in ads, but X is full of bots. It’s full of toxic content. It’s a terrible place for ads, right? It’s a bad business, and Musk has destroyed a lot of the business value. That said, unquestionably, from Musk’s economic perspective, it was a good purchase, because he doesn’t really care whether it’s worth 40 billion or 20 billion. Think of the power. He rigged the algorithm to make himself the most influential voice there, and then used it, right? He now has the power to threaten anybody, and say, “Hey, will I tune the X algorithm against you if you disobey?” He has this massive power with this platform that he’s got.

It’s less power than he would have if it still felt like a town square, and there was more ideological diversity on it. But in any case, he lost a lot of money but gained a lot of power. So, I think he probably has net-net benefited. On the xAI question, this was a problem before xAI acquired X, but my guess is that they’ve snarfed up everything that you’ve ever put on that platform, including your direct messages. If you have location information turned into your tweets, which would be insane, and you should have turned that off a decade ago. If not, you should turn it off immediately. They’ve taken all of that. I’ve deleted lots of my tweets, largely because I don’t want to be easy to train a system to sound like me.

I don’t really like my stuff being used to train AI algorithms without compensation. But if you are worried about the AI that Musk is building, you should delete all of your tweets and your account. They probably still will be able to train on it, but it will be at least a little harder, and you should certainly go and delete all your DMs, because it’s really creepy to think of a model training on that. So, there’s a huge privacy concerns, and the concerns are worse than that. So, let’s say I go on, and I screenshot a piece from The Atlantic. Well, that screenshot is going to be engorged and put into X’s training set, even though of course they didn’t license it from The Atlantic.

So, I think that eventually whenever we’re able to dig in and see whatever they’ve trained on, which of course they’re going to keep secret as long as possible, there will be, I think, lots of revelations. So, who knows where the law will be at that point? But if you are concerned about privacy, you should be concerned about this.

SAFIAN: You personally, though, are interacting with X, but doing it in a different way than you used to.

THOMPSON: Yeah, I do. I use it less. I think it’s important to be there. I want to understand the world. Of the various platforms, it is by far the most toxic. It is the one where it is the meanest. I still post because I think it’s important. You see a lot of AI papers and a lot of AI conversation there. If you want to know what the right is talking about, it’s useful to be there. Then you want to know what the left is interested in, you can go on Threads and Bluesky.

Copy LinkThe two big global forces: Trump & AI

SAFIAN: In the conversations I’ve been having, I feel like there are these two threads of disruption that are rolling through our world. One is Trump and how he’s trying to change the economy and the way America works and America’s place in the world, and then there’s AI, which is changing everything. Does that feel right to you that those two things are one of the big threads that are hitting us?

THOMPSON: Totally. Those are the two biggest threads. What’s scary about it is there are going to be societal-level choices about how you regulate AI, how you prepare an economy for AI that are going to need to be made in the next four years, and Trump does have smart people. Sriram Krishnan, who’s advising him, is very smart. Michael Kratsios, who’s advising him, the OSTP, extremely smart, like Elon for all of his ups and downs, obviously an extremely smart person who understands. I mean, Elon may be out at this point, but the second-tier people who are advising Trump on AI, you may not disagree with them where their policies are, but they’re not fools, right?

It seems like the tariff policy is based on a bunch of mathematical errors and silliness all the way through. I feel reasonably good about the folks that Trump has around him on AI, and certainly he has Marc Andreessen, right? Disagree with Marc on lots of stuff, but the guy is clearly brilliant and helping out Trump. You’d rather he’s there than some other people. However, what will happen is that there will be huge choices that have to be made on AI in the next four years. You wish it was a more stable administration as a whole, and you wish that you could trust it, or I wish that one could trust it to make decisions on policy based on what is best for America in the longterm.

It’s not clear three months in that that’s the direction they’re going in as opposed to decisions based on other factors.

SAFIAN: Based on what’s best for whoever is having that conversation with Trump.

THOMPSON: What’s best for Trump’s ego at that particular moment? What’s best for the financial interests of Trump and his closest supporters? You look at our crypto policy. Is our crypto policy actually designed to really maximize the amount of blockchain in crypto innovation in America, or is it a way to enrich a bunch of donors? It seems more like it’s a way to enrich a bunch of donors. Maybe somebody could make a good counter argument to me on the other side, but what percentage of it is grift? What percent of it is pro innovation? I don’t think it’s 50/50.

So, you would like to really believe that policies like our crypto policy or AI regulatory policy will be decided based on what a bunch of smart, thoughtful people who we elected as a country have decided is in the best interest of all of America as opposed to either made on a whim, made sloppily, or made for the wrong reasons. So, based on the last couple of months, the Trump administration, I think, will have to win back the trust of a lot of people in order for us to have confidence in that.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for America?

SAFIAN: So as a business person, considering all of this economic volatility and uncertainty, what do you feel like is at stake for business leaders right now?

THOMPSON: Oh, everything is at stake. I mean, The Atlantic, it’s funny. The Atlantic, we’re in one of the… As a whole, media has been one of the worst performing industries the last 20 years. We had our lunch eaten by the internet, which totally changed the way advertising works. We were out competed on advertising by Facebook and Google, and we lost our monopolies and distribution, blah, blah, blah. We all know that story, but actually, we’re a business that is somewhat counter-cyclical to economic bad news. People still want to be informed when there’s economic bad news.

So, we’re actually a little bit hedged. So as a business, we’re actually in a better position than if you sell, I don’t know, widgets of some sort, but the most important thing to me is that we built this country. We built an economic world order based on liberal democracy, free trade, alliances, cooperation. That was flawed, but that worked really well for 80 years, right?

SAFIAN: Worked really well for us. I mean, there were no—

THOMPSON: Worked for the United States, right?

SAFIAN: Right, no bigger beneficiary than the United States, right?

THOMPSON: Absolutely. Now, we are dismantling that. Maybe we’ll rebuild it in a way that… Clearly, there are problems, and there are huge problems with income inequality. There’s problems between rural areas versus cities, and white collar workers versus blue collar work. What is so interesting is that actually AI could have this fundamental income inequality and geographic inequality issue. It’s one of the most severe things in this country. AI actually might fix it, because AI is going to be much harder on white collar work than blue collar work. AI actually might end up being a great equalizer for income.

So, it’s possible that through AI, had we kept the global order as it was, we could have actually solved some of the most toxic problems within this country’s economy. But instead, what we seem to be doing in the past three months is dismantling this whole global order that worked so well, and kept the peace, and led to economic prosperity. We’re just entering a system of a moment of a lot of uncertainty. Is like China now more likely to invade Taiwan? Yes, absolutely. Right now, if China invades Taiwan, what the hell happens after that? Well, what does that do to global supply chains? Okay, what does it do to the international cause of democracy?

There’s just a lot of really important things that suddenly are at play, and that you can’t really have faith in that you could ever since 1945.

SAFIAN: How do you prepare or position yourself in that, or can you not prepare? Is what you do you try to make a system where you can react as fast as you can, but you can’t really prepare? Because we don’t know what this future world and system is going to look like.

THOMPSON: Well, I mean, the funny thing is because Trump is so mercurial, maybe he will like, “Just put them in the car.” A friend of mine wrote, and he’s like, “Well, now, I know what it feels like to be driving 90 miles an hour in one direction, and then put it 90 miles an hour in reverse all of a sudden on the highway.” It’s like Trump did that, and then he started crashing, and so now he’s turned the car around, and he is now driving back forward with the tariff delay. There’s been a lot of long-term damage that’s been done. Our relationship with Canada will never be the same. Our relationship with the European Union will never be the same, and the role that we can play in Ukraine will never be the same, right?

There are lots of things that cannot be repaired, but whether they get massively worse, or whether they get a little bit better, that’s still at stake too. I mean, my hope would be that the Trump administration — fine, go ahead and try to save government money, but be a little more careful about it. Go ahead. There’s all kinds of stuff that they can be doing fine, but do not break the international economic system.

SAFIAN: It’s a really unsettling moment. I don’t know. The conversations that I’m having with business people and other leaders, there’s hope that things maybe will retreat, but not a lot of confidence about what will happen.

THOMPSON: I know. No one had any idea Trump was going to have tariffs this much. If they had, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did. I mean, we had really smart people with a lot of information who did not know what was going to happen just last week. We have no idea what Trump will do next. He’s clearly completely unconstrained, but that’s both a risk and an opportunity because he may undo some of the bad things, and he may do some good things. But, there are ways through these thickets, and one has to be hopeful that on some of these problems, Trump will find his way through, or he’ll find his way back out.

SAFIAN: Well, thank you again for doing this. I really appreciate it.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Bob. Love going on and talking about all this stuff. Have a good one.

SAFIAN: So many interesting points in my conversation with Nick, fascinating, unsettling, intriguing. I always appreciate how directly Nick calls it as he sees it, and also that he acknowledges what he might be wrong about. I keep coming back to Nick’s point that it’s important for business leaders to stay true to their values, and speak up for what’s right. He’s not a fan of the idea of “resistance organizations” that carries a presumption that you critique the administration on everything. But when we identify what’s meaningful for ourselves, for our businesses and brands, leaders should be undeterred in voicing that perspective. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.