Episode 224: Corporate Self-Regulation and the Fine Art of ‘Preempting’ Public Outrage
Citations Needed | July 16, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Facebook’s Zuckerberg backs online political ad regulations forwarded by Sen. Amy Klobuchar,” reported the Associated Press in 2018. “CEO Sam Bankman-Fried says crypto needs to embrace regulation,” announced Business Insider in 2021. “AI leaders: Please regulate us,” read an Axios headline in 2023.
Adam: In recent years, major US companies, especially tech, crypto, and so-called AI, have given new life to a longstanding corporate PR strategy, that of self-regulation. It’s a common tactic. After a scandal, say, revelations about pollution, rampant scams, or large-scale invasions of privacy, corporations rebrand as repentant and disciplined, ready to pay their debt to society and embrace the public good. No need for oppressive and overly burdensome regulation, they insist. We can handle it ourselves.
Nima: This, of course, is not their real intention. Historically, this corporate voluntarism has generated little more than a few cosmetic reforms, if that, and allowed the continuation of business as usual in every industry, from the slave trade to oil to tobacco to crypto, save for the occasional sacrificial lamb. So why, and how, do media keep assuring their audiences that, This time, it’s different? That, this time, corporate America has learned its lesson and now can be trusted to regulate itself?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll examine the centuries-old damage-control strategy of industry self-regulation, looking at how corporate claims of self-policing, aided by the news media, buy time and goodwill while concealing an agenda of weakening pre-existing regulations, manipulating new laws to the benefit of the private sector, or often preventing regulation altogether.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Timi Iwayemi, assistant director of the Revolving Door Project. His analysis has appeared in outlets such as the American Prospect, the Intercept, the Nation, the New Republic, and Washington Monthly.
[Begin clip]
Timi Iwayemi: In this current environment of shareholder maximization, you know, with limited union representation and worker protections, this naked pursuit of profit has become more evident than ever, and it follows that, you know, with profit as your North Star, most corporations have recognized the federal government’s ability to either facilitate or obstruct this pursuit. And naturally, the loci of corporate power in our society, you know, ranging from Wall Street to crypto to Big Tech to Big Pharma to Big Oil to Big whatever you name it, have identified the capture of the federal government’s bureaucracy, capture of the federal government’s processes as critical to advancing their interests.
[End clip]
Adam: So yeah, this is obviously a very big topic, so we’re obviously not going to be able to cover every industry historically that has done this. We’re kind of capturing, we think, some of the more egregious examples, some of the more high-profile, some of the more high-leverage examples of this tactic, the idea of putting your finger to the wind and seeing that the public is vaguely turning on you, either in polling or in sort of broad media sentiment, and getting ahead of it and saying, Guys, we understand there’s a problem, or to kind of abstract it out to this broader trend, like, Oh, you know, technology hasn’t caught up, or there’s externalities we didn’t foresee. Or in the case of, say, quote, unquote, AI, there’s this kind of fictional regulation around like Terminator two stuff, versus the everyday horrible things they do, which we’ve talked about on the show. And because it’s so common and so ubiquitous, we’re not going to be able to cover every industry. So we’re highlighting what we think are some of the worst examples.
Nima: There are also examples outside of the private sector, when it comes to government and especially the intelligence and military infrastructure of the United States and its allies. We are not going to cover this in depth, but it bears mentioning here that there is an accusation-to-investigation-to-regulation-to-exoneration pipeline that is frequently engaged in when it comes to accusations of war crimes, accusations of torture, of police abuse, of other such things.
For instance, in the mid ’90s, reporter Gary Webb, for the San Jose Mercury News, published a three-part series connecting the dots between the CIA and the crack trade in the United States used to then fund Contras in Nicaragua fighting the Sandinista government. It was a CIA anti-communist operation. And in the wake of these reports and the publicity that it got, making this connection between the CIA and crack in African American communities in the United States, inspector general of the CIA Frederick P. Hitz was reported as saying that he would conduct a full investigation into this, noting, as quoted in the Associated Press on October 24, 1996, quote, “While some may choose not to believe findings that do not correspond with their preconceptions, we will present the unvarnished truth as we find it.” End quote.
Routinely, at the end of the investigation, we hear things from, say, the US government about putting more safeguards in place to make sure that people aren’t tortured as badly and aren’t disappeared with no habeas corpus, or that police departments are now going to require that police wear body cams, or Israel is going to make sure that the rules of engagement for its war-criminal soldiers are much more closely adhered to. Those kinds of self-regulatory decisions, made after an organization investigates itself, is routine.
Adam: Yeah. So this tactic is not unique to corporations, but we are focusing on corporations for this episode, but obviously the military, police departments, the Israelis, always sort of claim they’re going to do some, I guess I don’t even bother doing that anymore. But it’s a tactic of military-police PR to sort of say, We’re going to institute reforms to get ahead of things. So this is not unique to the corporate private sector, but that’s the focus that we’re going to be dealing with today.
And we’re going to start by talking about one of the, if not the first, examples of industry self-regulation that emerged in the 1780s, that of the British slave trade. There was an effort gaining steam in the 1780s prior to the Napoleonic Wars, which was kind of put on ice for 20 years or so, to abolish slavery in the British colonies, either gradually or at once. And the pro-slavery trade group, the West India Committee, which, incidentally, is still around as a charity organization, supposedly. You can look it up. And if you go to their About history page, they have a very like, Well, we started off with a little bit dicey origins. They were a pro-slavery lobbying group.
Nima: [Laughs] They’ve self-regulated themselves, Adam.
Adam: They understood this, and they got ahead of the movement by claiming that they were actually going to institute reforms into slavery. As Adam Hochschild noted in his 2005 book Bury the Chains, this West India Committee wanted to get ahead of the abolitionist tide. That was a moral outrage that was stirring at the time. And as he wrote, quote,
Not feeling under much pressure, Parliament merely passed some vague resolutions about such matters as encouraging marriage and religious instruction for slaves and ending the whipping of women. Responsibility for turning these suggestions into law was left in the hands of Caribbean island legislatures, which of course did nothing. The West India Committee promptly drafted its own lofty-sounding code of similar recommendations–an early instance of something familiar today, when an industry tries to fend off government regulation by proclaiming that it can regulate itself. Planters ignored these guidelines as well.
So what were those guidelines that the West India Committee put forth? As Hochschild wrote for Mother Jones around the time of his book publishing, quote,
When…there were moves in Parliament to try to regulate the treatment of slaves, the planters hastily drew up a lofty-sounding code of conduct of their own and insisted no government interference was necessary.
As a side note, this included limiting the number of enslaved people that could be carried on a ship at once. Hochschild would go on to say, quote,
They considered other P.R. techniques as well. “The vulgar are influenced by names and titles,” suggested one pro-slavery writer in 1789. “Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave-trade.”
Unquote. So their strategy was, instead of abolishing slavery, they said, No, no, we’re going to reform it. And their reforms were giving religious instruction to enslaved people, promoting marriage of enslaved people, and limiting the number of enslaved people you could put on a ship at once, and changing the name from slave to ‘assistant planters,’ which I think has to be the all-time, this is kind of the origin of all public relations here. We’re going to change the name to ‘assistant planters.’
Nima: Right. And therefore limit the public outcry. Because, I mean, who could be against assistant planters?
Adam: Yeah, you’re not going to, what are you campaigning for? We’re going to abolish the assistant planters. I mean, that doesn’t sort of have the same ring.
Nima: Yeah. Yeah. What, you don’t like ‘assistant planters?’ Why don’t you come down here and do it? So the assistant planter suggestion, incidentally, came from an April 1789 issue of the British publication The Gentleman’s Magazine, which could not be more fitting for something as appalling like that.
But let’s move ahead now to the middle of the 20th century. In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published the influential book Silent Spring, which detailed the ecological and public-health dangers of chemicals like insecticides, herbicides, and most infamously, pesticides like DDT. Shortly after the book’s publication, chemical and agricultural trade publications, as well as major outlets like Time Magazine and US News and World Report, published gendered polemics against Carson, dismissing her as an amateur and a woman too prone to sentimentality and hysterics to be taken seriously as a scientist. The following two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, then, saw multiple large scale industrial disasters attributable directly to chemical companies, just as Carson warned. Among the tragedies were the revelations of toxic-waste leaks in Love Canal near Niagara Falls, and a toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India, which immediately killed over 2,000 people.
By this point, public trust in the chemical industry was at a historic low. A 1989 survey commissioned by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, or CMA, a lobbyist group representing some 90% of industrial chemical producers, found that respondents viewed the industry as less environmentally responsible than both the nuclear and petroleum industries, and that only tobacco was considered worse. A separate 1990 survey found that 72% of respondents supported additional government regulation of chemical companies.
So, in an attempt to rehabilitate itself, and to limit or prevent new regulations that were popularly called for, the CMA opted not for another smear campaign as it did with Rachel Carson, but for some feel-good PR this time. The lobby group launched an initiative called Responsible Care, which CMA described in a widely circulated print ad as a series of, quote, “guiding principles” to quote, “improve our performance in health, safety, and protecting the environment,” end quote. The principles were intentionally abstract. Here are two examples, quote, “to recognize and respond to community concerns about chemicals in our operations,” and, quote, “to operate our plants and facilities in a manner that protects the environment and the health and safety of our employees and the public,” end quote.
Adam: Now, who would ensure that this happened? It wasn’t clear. As environmentalists noted at the time, Responsible Care didn’t specify its accounting methods, nor did it include an external auditing process to prevent companies from just lying about their actions and progress. Another example revealed one of the industry’s main goals, to effectively write its own laws, or prevent laws from being written at all. It read, quote, “to participate with government and others in creating responsible laws, regulations and standards to safeguard the community, workplace and environment,” unquote. As part of CMA’s advertising campaign, they produced a number of commercials touting its commitments. Here’s a clip from one that aired around 1995. Let’s listen to that now.
Nima: It has a lovely vibes intro. Here we go.
[Begin clip]
Voiceover: What if somebody invented a way to change some of our toxic chemical waste into something useful? Like energy? Now there’s less chemical waste and more energy. It’s not the whole answer, but it’s a start. The 180 members and partners of the Chemical Manufacturers Association. Working for change.
In a single year, 93% of our toxic chemical waste was treated, converted to energy, or recycled. What about the other 7%? We’re working on it. The 180 members and partners of the Chemical Manufacturers Association. Working for change.
[End clip]
Nima: Right at the end, before you see the logo for the CMA, you see the branding for Responsible Care, to make sure that everyone knows that this is a campaign that is about caring for the health of your communities.
Adam: Yeah. But that 93% number is just made up. It’s not a real number. No one even knows where it came from. Responsible Care didn’t have, of course, impact at all, at least in terms of public safety and environmental protections. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and University of South Carolina found, quote, “no empirical evidence that Responsible Care or any other self‐regulation programs reduced accidents,” unquote. They added that, between 1988 and 2001, companies participating in Responsible Care “[did] not reduce their pollution relative to statistically equivalent non-Responsible Care participants,” unquote.
As we noted in Episode 204: The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift (Part I) — How Corporate America Offset Liability onto the Public, whereby which corporations offset liability onto the consumer, by shifting the focus away from regulating themselves onto discrete moral failings of millions of individuals, the plastics industry pushed this idea that you can recycle plastics, which on scale, consumer plastics are actually not recyclable because it costs more to recycle them than it does to just dispose of them. So it’s total horseshit that never caught up. A May 2025 article in The Guardian noted that, for decades, plastics producers pushed what’s called ‘advanced recycling’ to get ahead of the plastics waste crisis, despite knowing it was not technically or economically feasible. A new report that came out in May from the Center for Climate and Integrity, CCI, a fossil-fuel accountability group, notes that advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, that the rollout of these technologies, quote, “has been plagued by problems and is not effective.”
Now, after some bad press about plastic recycling that began emerging in 2018, 2019, especially several in the New York Times, the plastics industry put a whole PR effort into promoting this idea that plastics was, in fact, cost-efficient and was feasible, and that they had made huge technological improvements. Because, again, this is something they’ve been pushing since the 1970s, this idea of plastic recycling, and even though independent scientists have repeatedly said that it doesn’t work, it’s not feasible, and that 5% of plastics actually get recycled, they kept wanting to push this, so they ran a bunch of TV spots indicating that this was new and sexy and exciting and feasible technology.
Nima: Yeah, so, for instance, there was an ad put out by Chevron Phillips Chemical in 2020. It’s a, like, two-and-a-half minute spot, but it starts like this.
[Begin clip]
Voiceover: These items may look ordinary, but hidden inside their composition is a story about how human ingenuity made our lives better, and how that same ingenuity is about to help our planet. Plastic has a profound influence on our everyday life. In countless ways, it makes how we live possible. But unmanaged plastic waste is not acceptable and must be addressed. We all have to stop thinking of plastic as disposable, not just because this attitude is bad for the environment, but because plastic is simply too valuable to throw away. Today’s recycling options allow us to repurpose and reuse plastic, but not without limitations. Advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, changes everything.
[End clip]
Nima: Incidentally, the visuals in the animated short here that accompany the scolding of the disposability of plastics is visualized through littering, right? So again, an individual action. There is nothing in there about corporate waste. There is nothing in there about plastics waste at scale. It is all, like, a personal failing of someone throwing a plastic water bottle on the ground in a dog park.
Adam: Yeah, and so if you want to learn more about that, go listen to Episode 204 from this time last year. But we’ll move on to tobacco, which obviously really needed to get ahead of regulation, because all they do is kill people. They make you look cool. To be fair, they also do that, but they will kill you.
Nima: So around the same time as these other PR efforts by the plastics and chemical industries, the tobacco industry was demonstrating how self-regulatory efforts could not only serve as PR, but also weaken the laws the industry was supposed to abide by. In the 1980s and ’90s, tobacco lobbyists advanced less-stringent laws banning smoking at various indoor establishments. In 1994, for example, Philip Morris promoted and funded a California state initiative that would, quote-unquote, “ban” smoking in indoor workplaces and indoor public places, but with enough exceptions to render this ban purely nominal, and would overturn a significantly stronger state law and about 300 stronger local ordinances.
That same year, 1994 a Philip Morris employee wrote in a document revealed in litigation, quote, “We are dead serious about achieving preemption in all 50 states,” end quote. Now by “preemption,” the employee meant passing a federal- or state-level law that would make it illegal for lower levels of government to enact stronger laws. This would thus prevent regulation that wasn’t on the industry’s own terms.
More recently, the tobacco industry has begun to apply the same strategy to a new cause, raising the legal smoking and vaping age from 18 to 21, via what are known as Tobacco 21 laws. As of May 2019, major companies like Altria, which was formerly known as Philip Morris; Reynolds American, the parent company of Camel, American Spirits and other cigarette brands; and the vape manufacturer Juul Labs, had rallied around the cause with a good deal of success. By that point, in 2019, a total of 19 states had either passed or were considering the Tobacco 21 legislation. Now, the virtues of raising the legal smoking age are self-evident, as the change would theoretically discourage youth tobacco consumption at a higher rate. This is why organizations like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association have historically endorsed the move. But in what will come as no surprise, the tobacco industry had an ulterior motive.
Adam: Now, according to a 2019 investigation by Public Integrity, by authors Liz Essley Whyte and Dianna M. Náñez, the tobacco industry in recent years has promoted weakened forms of, quote, “model bills,” which are regulations proposed by public health and anti-smoking advocates, in order to create more corporate carve-outs. As Whyte and Náñez wrote, quote,
Some of the new Tobacco 21 laws backed by smoking and vaping companies leave in place weak enforcement measures, add exemptions for certain groups such as military members or block localities from adopting stricter rules.
Unquote. The reporters went on to write, quote,
In Arizona, Republican state Sen. Heather Carter this year introduced Tobacco 21 legislation similar to the health groups’ model bill, but it failed to get a hearing. Juul and Altria instead threw their support behind an alternative bill that would raise the tobacco age to 21 but would also invalidate — or “pre-empt” — some stricter local laws on smoking and vaping, such as bans on tobacco advertisements near schools or on park benches.
Unquote. And so again, the playbook here is, This is going to happen with or without us, so we have to get ahead of it, get the good PR, looking like we care, and then when the devil in the details, at the eleventh hour, we can sort of tweak it to our liking and create the most watered-down bill possible.
Nima: And of course, as we have noted, to subvert any future local laws that are stricter than these model bills, so that individual communities at the local level cannot decide to add its own regulation, because as part of the, kind of more senior regulation, they would not be allowed to do that. So basically, it’s saying, you know, Well, yes, we’re going to raise the age, or yes, there are these certain regulations that don’t ultimately negatively affect the corporations’ bottom lines, but if you want to do anything more than that, you are now legally barred from doing so.
But now let’s move from the IRL to the URL, right? The real life to the digital scene. The tech industry is one of the most prevalent industries that has tried to set the parameters for its own regulations, right? So tech, crypto, AI, they are doing this all the time, starting around 2016, 2017, amid scandals like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica enabled data harvesting, Big Tech, and of course, Russiagate, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants came under a slightly greater degree of scrutiny from Congress and media alike, with tech leaders appearing before Senate committee hearings. In response, companies began to make public statements in favor of certain regulations.
In 2018, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg avowed his support of the Honest Ads Act, a bare-minimum bill co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar that would require online platforms to publish disclosures of political ads as TV and radio do, and to maintain a public record of advertisers that had spent more than $500 during the previous year. Zuckerberg’s endorsement of the bill earned him a number of flattering headlines, including these. From 2018 in CNN, quote, “This is the regulation Mark Zuckerberg wants for Facebook.” In April 2018, from the Associated Press, quote, “Facebook’s Zuckerberg backs online political ad regulations forwarded by Sen. Amy Klobuchar.” The same month, April, 2018, Axios wrote, quote, “Facebook says it supports Honest Ads Act, cracks down on issue ads.” And the same day, April 6, 2018 from The Hill, quote, “Zuckerberg announces support for regulating political ads on social media,” end quote.
Adam: Now, notably, the legislation asked basically nothing of Facebook or other tech companies, save some small improvements over transparency that pose no real challenge to its ad-targeting methods. At the time, Zuckerberg told Wired that Facebook supported the Honest Ads Act, adding, quote,
We’re building full ad transparency tools; even though it doesn’t necessarily seem like that specific bill is going to pass, we’re going to go implement most of it anyway.
Unquote. In endorsing a bill that was apparently unlikely to advance, Facebook could cultivate the goodwill of appearing to self-regulate, while also being able to set the parameters of its own regulation. But it’s also important to ask why the bill, which was once expected to coast through Congress at a time of heightened anti-Russia sentiment, was unlikely to pass. The answer: Facebook had been lobbying against it. According to QZ magazine, quote,
Facebook’s argument to Congress behind the scenes has been that they are “voluntarily complying” with most of what the Honest Ads Act asks, so why pass a law, said one Congressional staffer working on the bill. Facebook also doesn’t want to be responsible for maintaining the publicly accessible repository of political advertising, including funding information, that the act demands, the staffer said.
Facebook spent nearly $3.1 million lobbying Congress and other US federal government agencies in the last quarter of 2017, on issues including the Honest Ads Act according to its latest federal disclosure form.
Unquote. And in 2019, in efforts to stave off privacy regulation, Facebook introduced a suite of ostensible privacy controls that would have, quote, “allowed,” unquote users to, as Max Moran wrote at the time in Counterpunch, quote,
sift laboriously through every website which sends data back to Facebook (nearly a third of the web) and request one by one that these websites not use any of their obvious or subtle tools to send information to Menlo Park.
Unquote, which is where Facebook is headquartered. So even if users completed that process, they’d still be unable to fully bar Facebook from surveilling their browser activity, leaving the company’s business model entirely intact. Facebook thereby placed the onus on users to activate what few protections they did have, and banked on the high probability that most people wouldn’t do that.
Eventually the fervor died out, and basically none of those regulations currently exist. So it works. They got ahead of it. Owned the PR cycle. Outrage dwindled down. They mumbled they were going to do such and such, and then just never did it. And then now no one cares anymore. So it’s kind of the perfect playbook. There’s a sort of uprising of outrage, right? Public sentiment, media kind of maybe piles on a little bit. Then they come out and say, Oh, no, we’re going to get ahead of it. Don’t worry about the bill. We’ll take care of it ourselves. But of course, without the bill, they’ll just not do it, or half-do it, or do it for six months and then get rid of it, which is exactly what they did. So that was the playbook, pretty much down to the T, of self-regulation PR.
Nima: We also saw this when it comes to the tech subset industry of cryptocurrency. And many crypto executives followed Zuckerberg’s lead on this. So in the year-and-a-half or so before his December 2022 arrest for fraud and money laundering and the implosion of his tech company FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried began to call for a vague, minimal form of cryptocurrency regulation himself, even claiming to make it his–what else? — top priority.
At the time, Senator Elizabeth Warren and then-SEC head Gary Gensler, were calling for the slightest of cryptocurrency regulations, meaning low-level, basic oversight of crypto companies to, among other things, reduce the likelihood of scams. Important regulation, and truly the floor when it comes to regulating this industry. In August of 2021, Business Insider published portions of an interview with bankman Fried. Here is an excerpt from the Insider piece. Quote,
Bankman-Fried told Insider that he’s taking regulation “extremely seriously” and that it’s his biggest focus, especially in the wake of the global regulatory crackdown on Binance, an exchange that offers similar derivative products to FTX.
“I just wish that the industry were, as a whole, doing a more conscientious job of interfacing with regulators,” he said, adding that players in the crypto space need to be “responsible and show that they don’t need to have overly paternalistic regulations.”
End quote. So right there, he says that the industry’s own sense of responsibility, showing, demonstrating that it cares, that it is going to be responsible, that it’s going to take care of itself, will then ward off, as he says, overly paternalistic regulations, and that’s what he said in public. What did Bankman-Fried say behind closed doors? Well, in a Twitter DM interview published by Vox, Bankman-Fried dismissed his statements about regulations as, quote, “just PR,” end quote. Of course, Vox only published this after the collapse of FTX and arrest of Bankman-Fried, because Bankman-Fried had been a leading funder of Vox’s Effective Altruism vertical, Future Perfect via his, quote, “philanthropic family foundation,” end quote, Building a Stronger Future. Now, we actually discussed this a bit in Episode 196: Benevolent Billionaire Despotism and US Media’s Softball Treatment of ‘Effective Altruism.’ So go check that episode out.
Adam: Now, by at that point, Vox had to do damage control, criticizing Bankman-Fried when it was safe and they were no longer able to take his money because he was being sent off, most likely, to federal prison, which he was, and distancing the publication from FTX’s tainted image. But back to Bankman-Fried’s faux-self-regulatory vision. A key component was the bipartisan Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, or the DCCPA, which he publicly endorsed. The DCCPA would transfer crypto regulation from a more stringent and robust regulatory body, the SEC, to the much more laissez-faire Commodity Futures and Trade Commission, the CFTC. We’ll get to this in greater depth with our guest, but suffice to say that for now, in endorsing legislation that would weaken pre-existing regulatory systems, Bankman-Fried was taking a page out of the tobacco, chemical, slavery industry playbook of, Don’t worry, guys, no need to pass this onerous regulation. I’m going to support this much weaker version for both the PR and to crowd out an alternative. Because obviously, once the week legislation passes, you don’t need to pass a stronger legislation, because the sort of scratch has been itched.
Now this framework is being, of course, used by so-called AI, more recently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the leading AI company in Silicon Valley, in the United States. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Altman has appeared before Congress, but Altman has been a bit savvier than Zuckerberg, ingratiating himself with policymakers in advance of his hearing and branding himself as aware and transparent about the harms of AI. For more on Altman’s disingenuous warnings about AI, see Episodes 183 and 217. We’re building up quite an encyclopedia of bullshit.
At his first hearing in May of 2023, Altman also came prepared with a list of unintrusive regulatory suggestions, all of course, on his own terms. One of Altman’s main suggestions from the May 2023 hearing was to form an agency that, quote, “issues licenses for the development of large-scale AI models, safety regulations and tests that AI models must pass before being released to the public,” unquote, according to the New York Times. Altman didn’t go into detail, but he did receive a request from one senator to handpick at least some of the agency’s members, granting a good deal of control to Altman.
Nima: That’s right. We like your suggestions for self-regulation. Can you also pick the cops that are going to enforce those laws? Thank you very much.
Adam: During the hearing, the New York Times reported that Altman quote, “said that users should have the option to exclude their data from being used to train AI services,” unquote. The Times later added that Altman, quote, “supported proposals by lawmakers,” unquote, including Connecticut Senator Blumenthal’s, quote, “idea of consumer risk labels on AI tools that would be akin to nutrition labels for food,” unquote. That these ideas wouldn’t so much burden the company, but rather the user, didn’t seem to be a problem for the New York Times.
Indeed, media have largely ignored Altman’s self-serving aims and instead of positioned him as a beacon of responsibility and ethics. On the eve of his congressional testimony, in May of 2023, one particularly gross CNN hagiography said Altman was a, quote, “brilliant thinker,” unquote, admired, via quotes from sources for his, quote, “humility,” unquote, and quote-unquote “thoughtfulness.” And the Washington Post featured glowing commentary from the aforementioned Senator Blumenthal, who commended Altman for his, quote, “willingness to participate and commit to specific action,” unquote.
Nima: Now, Altman, it seems, never really wanted regulations in the first place. Shocker, I know. Historically, he’s dismissed even the slightest regulatory frameworks created without his own input. An early draft of the European Union legislation currently known as the AI Act would have required companies like OpenAI to disclose copyrighted material used to train their systems, but Altman deemed the stipulation a form of, quote, “over-regulating,” end quote, and in response, threatened to cease open AI operations in Europe altogether if the act passed.
Around the same time, OpenAI spearheaded an open letter that was eventually signed by more than 1,000 AI experts, researchers, funders, corporate leaders that called for, you know, LLM, giant learning models to slow down, to take a pause for six months. Let’s do this voluntarily, so that we can assess both the capabilities, opportunities, and dangers of systems such as ChatGPT. This letter was signed by Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, for example, and said this, quote,
Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.
End quote. Now the letter goes on, but to note, this is saying that the industry should slow itself down, that it should be aware of the positives and the negatives, of the benefits and the costs, that may come with its continued drive to produce more powerful AI systems. This is quintessentially about self-regulation. What they are doing in this open letter is ensuring that no government or third-party regulation will come in and interfere with the, quote-unquote, “innovation” of the AI industry, because they are taking it upon themselves to be so thoughtful and critical and measured in their approach.
Now, two years after this charm offensive, as countless media outlets called it, Sam Altman is publicly dismissing Congress’s own regulatory proposals, minimal as they may be. At a May 2025 hearing, Altman objected to the notion of needing government approval to see certain AI software, especially the, quote-unquote, “powerful” releases that Altman and company had for years been warning about. And when asked about more limited proposals to have the National Institute of Standards and Technology set AI standards, Altman replied this way, quote, “I don’t think we need it. It can be helpful,” and later advocating for, quote, “sensible regulation that does not slow us down,” using the tried-and-true defense of beating China. The AI war with China is going to be the all-powerful decimator of any regulation. If you slow us down, well, you know, who will rise? Evil China.
Adam: Yeah, with the election of Trump, and then JD Vance went to this AI conference in Europe where he basically said, We don’t believe in regulation anymore. And of course, the AI, quote-unquote, “AI” industry dumped millions of dollars into electing Trump. They’ve basically given up any pretense of regulation, which is why they don’t talk about it anymore. It’s why they don’t they don’t ask for self-regulation, because it’s not necessary to preempt something that’s not going to happen for at least another four years.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’ll be joined by Timi Iwayemi, assistant director at the Revolving Door Project. His analysis has appeared in outlets such as the American Prospect, the intercept the Nation, the New Republic, and Washington Monthly. Timi will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Timi Iwayemi. Thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed, Timi.
Timi Iwayemi: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on.
Adam: You’ve covered the scam industry of self-regulation for some time, whether it’s traditional banking or crypto or other industries, and there’s a recurring theme we’re talking about in this episode, which is that of preemption. So calls for oversight, transparency, policing, taxing, typically after some major scandal or the bottom falls out of a market and the government has to bail out industries, or some iteration thereof, industries say, Well, wait, we’re going to regulate ourselves. They kind of have an epiphany. They have a sort of Road to Damascus moment, where they realize that they’ve sinned, but don’t worry, they’re on it, right? Which, again, is not a remedy for people who get caught shoplifting or get caught drunk driving, like, you can’t say, I’m going to self-police myself and pay a fine, right? This is something reserved only for corporate America. And over time, this system becomes, as you know, kind of a joke. It becomes degraded. It becomes weakened over time, to the extent that it even had any purchase to begin with. Talk about this kind of broader, we argue, very PR-driven dynamic of industries kind of soothing public and lawmaker outrage by saying, No, no, no, we’re going to do this ourselves, because we’re the best suited to do it, and we want to work with you and launder through this public-private rhetoric.
Timi Iwayemi: I think that most, if not all, corporations operate with the singular pursuit of profit. I think it could be the case that there are other considerations, other factors, that factor into their profit maximization equation. But ultimately, the main goal is to make as much money as possible, and in this current environment of shareholder maximization, you know, with limited union representation and worker protections, this naked pursuit of profit has become more evident than ever. And it follows that, you know, with profit as your North Star, most corporations have recognized the federal government’s ability to either facilitate or obstruct this pursuit.
And naturally, the loci of corporate power in our society, you know, ranging from Wall Street to crypto to Big Tech to Big Pharma to Big Oil to Big whatever you name it, have identified the capture of the federal government’s bureaucracy, capture of the federal government’s processes as critical to advancing their interests, with little regard for the public and you know, corporate America is deeply familiar with the alphabet soup of government agencies that has the rights to enforce the law and potentially crack down on corporate exploitation.
But at the same time, I think they’re deeply familiar, they know that each of these agencies, be it the SEC or the FTC or the FDIC, whichever one you name, whichever of this acronyms you pull out of this alphabet soup, could sell out the public interest. You know, they’re always looking for a way to find the agency, find the agency official, find the lawmaker that is eager, willing to sell out the public interest.
Adam: So let’s talk about the spectrum real quick. So there’s a spectrum, right? There’s kind of the fully privatized industry self-regulation, which we’re talking a lot about, but then there’s kind of a public partnership stew you write about, especially, I know in banking, this is very common. And then there’s ostensibly fully public regulation, but that is, and I say this while looking directly at the camera, a revolving door, which is very common.
[Laughter]
Talk, if you could, about that spectrum and how the kind of corporate capture and public relations consumes that spectrum. Obviously, the sort of pure corporate self-regulation is kind of the most cartoonishly pointless.
Timi Iwayemi: Yeah. I mean, I think you know, just like tying both questions together, the obvious smart play for most corporations is to wage their battle against the public interest in the shadows. So that’s in the halls of Congress and the halls of the executive branch agencies, while they pour millions of dollars to maintain a clean brand to the people. So you know, you’re waging warfare secretly and with this revolving door, you know, there’s this pernicious, there’s an underlying threat with the revolving door. And it’s like, if you enforce the law robustly, that codes as being hostile to corporations.
Nima: Right.
Timi Iwayemi: And if you are hostile to corporations, that means you’re limiting your post-government career options. So I think that’s one way the revolving door is working. So you’re like, Okay, I mean, we’re obviously advocating for not necessarily lifelong, but for long-term, enriching public service. But I mean, it’s just impossible to guarantee that everyone is going to work in government forever, and some people are going to live and some people, when they leave, they’re going to want to cash out inevitably. And you know, if you want to cash out, you don’t want to be too strict on your potential cash-out landing spots.
Nima: [Chuckles] Right.
Timi Iwayemi: So, I mean, there’s that underlying threat, which I think, right now, crypto has made it. I think just as this is the norm in Silicon Valley, they don’t appreciate subtleties. The threat is no longer on the line, like, it’s naked. It’s obvious. They’re saying, like, I think it was the Coinbase guy, Brian Armstrong, who said every SEC official there cracked down, or, you know, participated in any of the crypto lawsuits, should just know their careers are finished.
Nima: Right. The kind of overt threat, right. So since you mentioned crypto, Timi, I actually want to dig in a little more to this particular, quote-unquote, “industry.” You said that this is kind of pernicious across whatever industry you’re really thinking about. But when it comes to crypto, there’s almost a unique smugness, a unique smarminess to this. And you’ve actually noted this in an article headlined, quote, “Don’t Fall for FTX’s Final Con,” end quote, which you published in the New Republic, and co-wrote with Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, who we’ve had on the show before. And in that piece, you kind of note that there’s no industry right now doing more to kind of stay ahead of this inevitable public discontent, always making excuses, trying to PR their way out of every new outrage, than crypto, which itself is an intrinsically parasitic industry that is flooding Washington with obscene amounts of cash right now.
Adam: And bribing the current president in the open.
Nima: And literally bribing, yes, openly bribing the current president. [Laughs]
Adam: We are in a post-shame society.
Nima: Yeah, exactly.
Adam: A purely speculative financial instrument that skirts all securities laws.
Nima: There are no more, you know, cigar-smoke-filled back rooms. It just, like, literally happens out in the open. But, Timi, if you could talk about crypto, kind of you know, capital-C Crypto, in terms of the industry and why this self-policing pitch, right, Don’t get the regulators involved. We’ll police ourselves. We’ll let the markets determine. We’ll figure it out. Why that mode of operating is especially unconvincing in the context of this particular industry, which, as you have also written about elsewhere, doesn’t appear to have any underlying social value beyond speculation and aiding illegal activity. It really is just this scheme and this scam. Talk to us a bit about crypto.
Timi Iwayemi: Yeah. I mean, the president can’t say no to a deal, so I think it was easy to get him on board there. But thinking of crypto, I’m thinking of that piece, there’s some dark humor to it. I think we had written that piece right after Sam Bankman-Fried was exposed as just a fraud, which I think we’re one of the earliest people to state that clearly, to state that it’s obvious that this is a naked game to capture DC. And I think this, crypto’s complete capture of our politics, I don’t know if there’s a precedent for it. I mean, I know you know, corporations are always going to Washington with huge checks in tow to get people on the agenda. But even like pharma, there’s a product at the end, there’s a drug, there’s something tangible. Airlines, there’s something tangible.
[Laughter]
These are real products people are using every day that are important, that, you know, if you’re a politician, you may have some stuff to weigh. That, Okay, there’s some value to this. Maybe, let me think about my approach. But what really is the value of crypto? How many people are really using crypto? It’s just, you know, the realization of this continuous financialization of our lives that just is ridiculous. But I mean, going back to it, that piece was, I won’t call it a victory lap, because–
Nima: Because we’re all losers here.
Timi Iwayemi: [Laughs] I won’t call it a victory lap, but it was kind of a victory lap, because Bankman-Fried served as this avatar of crypto’s desire to shape Washington in its image. So, I mean, his fall was an obvious reason to celebrate and maybe, you know, you celebrate the small wins, but they also served as a forewarning that the industry’s campaign to reshape our politics was far from over, even if the chief proselytizer has been outed as a fraudster, that’s just par for the course for corporate activity, and a new person is going to, you know, stand up, but maybe they’ll no longer be a person that will be the representation of this, you know, it’s going to be multiple trade associations. There’s going to be multiple lobbyists that are going to push this message.
And I guess the humor is that now we’re talking and the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which is not aptly named, but it’s for the stablecoin, you know, for payment stablecoins. And I guess they’ve created this permission scheme. We’ll call it regulation, but, you know, it’s permission scheme for stablecoins to just profit. Stablecoin is, you know, a crypto that is backed by fiat currency. So if it’s backed by dollars, then you could exchange one stable coin for $1. So a good example of a stablecoin is Tether. So Tether company has a basket of reserves, and with this basket of reserves, is able to defend this peg. The one tether is $1. And the main reason here is that the industry needed a way to trade. They needed this intermediary value to trade different coins, and most banks didn’t want to provide this resource to them, so you couldn’t use dollars. So you’ve created this dollar flow system through stablecoins to make it possible.
Adam: So it’s, it means, forgive me, but if I know we’re getting into the weeds here. But if the whole value proposition of crypto is that it’s somehow, again, it’s unclear what the value proposition of it even is, as we’ve discussed on the show before, other than just to be used for either illegal activity or pure, raw sort of legal securities. It’s speculative. And of course, you have hyping up, and I guess there’s some regulations around it, but I guess the Trump administration says even those, we’re not even going to enforce. So it’s just kind of, whoever’s left at the end is left with their dicks in their hands while everyone else gets rich. It’s a Ponzi, I mean, I would say maybe it’s not a traditional Ponzi scheme, but it has elements of a Ponzi scheme, right?
Timi Iwayemi: Yeah, most definitely. You have, like, the pump and dumps. There’s like, classic crypto tell that, you know, you push out this particular token, you do all the advertising around the token. So, you know, people buy it, and then, you know, the value goes up, then you dump it. That’s a classic crypto tell. Another one is wash trading, where you’re on both sides of the trade, you’re buying and selling to, you know, artificially prop up the value of the coin. So, you know, people think there’s actual volume. There’s actual trading volume going on. There’s just so many gimmicks that they’ve brought to bear, and they claim is some complex financial innovation, but, I mean, there’s an easy way to make money.
Nima: Yeah, I mean, there’s this idea, right, that, as you said, that this is, it’s so complex and innovative. Do you feel like those kinds of labels, kind of marketing crypto as such, has helped them avoid what would be otherwise, kind of normal regulatory processes, because they kind of get to hide behind, Well, no one is really in the position to be able to even regulate us?, because we’re so new that, who are even the experts on the regulatory side, if they do that, they’ll just kind of ruin this thing because they don’t know what they’re doing. Is that what you kind of see like, is that the argument behind, Hey, we’ll police ourselves. You can’t really slow us down with your red tape?
Timi Iwayemi: Yeah, I think that is one part of the argument. I think, you know, it’s that we’ve created this novel, innovative technology, and the laws on the books are not capable of adequately regulating without essentially trampling their goals. But I would say crypto’s success is money more so than the sheen of their public-relations campaign. It’s like, you know, money is speech in Washington, and they bought off everybody they need to buy off. I think that’s been much more important than their claims of so-called novelty. I think when they initially touched down in Washington and they were trying to secure regulatory relief, which, in their view, it wasn’t necessarily that they would regulate themselves, it was more so that they would platform the CFTC to Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the SEC, which is just, I mean, that’s a much weaker financial regulator than the SEC, and it doesn’t have an investor protection mandate, amongst other things which we won’t get into this more technical stuff, but that was their vision, and they weren’t necessarily successful with that vision. I don’t think they were able to get the number of votes. And so they realized that what they’re going to do is they’re just going to get involved in numerous congressional races. They’re going to pump so much money. I think in the last cycle, there was well over $200 million that came from the crypto industry. I mean, that is an insane amount of money. So they said, Okay, we couldn’t convince you with our bogus claims of innovation, so we’re just going to buy you off.
Nima: Ah. Right.
Timi Iwayemi: There’s no need to waste time writing all the screeds about, Oh, look at this fancy stuff. I mean, because nobody really, not enough people used it for that to really take off. And beyond the donations to the campaigns, there were the threats to people who were like, Okay, we’re not going to vote for this. Like, Okay, we’re going to primary you. You don’t want to vote for this. I mean, that’s politics, I guess, but that’s politics with a big check. And I think they rounded it off with what we’re just discussing, about the revolving door. You know, they’re like, Okay, all the CFTC people should come and work on that trade association. So, you know, we can propose all this to the CFTC. We’ll also propose this to the legislators who have oversight of the CFTC. You know, they really wanted to go through the Agricultural Committee because the CFTC kind of grew out of being responsible for regulating agricultural futures like corn and wheat and the like, so. And that’s another funny thing about Washington. So you know, if you’re going through certain committees, you know they know that, Oh, if we have oversight for this industry, then we’re going to get the donations from this industry, because they know we’re going to be responsible. So some politicians will happily take that responsibility, but I think that was their program of, okay, we’re going to buy everybody we need to buy off. If we can’t buy you off, we’re going to threaten you.
Adam: So, I want to abstract this question out away from crypto. I know Nima asked it in the context of crypto, but I do want to ask you about the broader argument that’s made, and it’s made a lot by these Abundance people, that liberal busybodies that are getting in the way of innovation and progress and keeping up with China, kind of name your buzz phrase. And the argument they make is that the reason why they have to self-regulate, and this is something we talked about a lot at the top of the show, is that they possess a kind of a cult knowledge, esoteric knowledge, that the regulators sort of don’t understand, and to sort of understand it is to already be captured, by definition, right? Because you had to have either worked in the industry or, rather than some egghead in law school. So talk, if you could, about the ways in which both real and imagined esoteric knowledge makes capture almost inevitable, and also serves as a good line, or a good public-relations line, for why industries have to regulate themselves, or at the very least have tremendous control over the nominally independent bodies that regulate them.
Timi Iwayemi: Yeah, you know, it’s just a deceptive way to say you’re an elitist for the most part, and I think, is the consequences, natural consequence of a society that considers the attainment of wealth, of significant wealth, as the apogee of achievement, like, these are the people who should be responsible for us that you know, not the pesky person that is attending any local meetings, not your everyday person. Who should be responsible is the person who has figured out this way to be wealthy. And it doesn’t matter whatever the way was. It doesn’t matter if you did it through breaking the law. Doesn’t matter if you did it through exploiting people. All that matters is that, you know, there was some wealth creation to this, and that means that you are significantly wiser. You’re significantly brighter than the regular person. And it’s a trap to believe that, but at the same time, it’s just, you know, you’re just laundering the views of the wealthy people in the society that’s already so unequal. So it’s obviously going to be unpopular if you know, you actually clearly explain to people what they’re trying to do.
I think a good example is how they may try to, you know, distance themselves, but how easily the Abundance people were able to align with Elon Musk on stuff like, what was it? The BEAD project, the broadband project, where they’re like, Oh, just let the broadband companies, just let those companies be responsible for this, they know what’s best, instead of letting the pesky government regulators get in the way of doing anything. Well, meanwhile, you know, you look into it more closely, you figure out that, Oh, okay, the companies don’t want any actual regulation that they feel may affect their profits. They don’t want any regulation they feel may affect their bottom line.
And then I guess the last thing I’ll say is it kind of limits experience to only having done this work. I don’t feel like that is true. I don’t feel like people aren’t able to deeply interact with policy ideas around a certain industry if they haven’t worked in the industry. I mean, I think that’s just a stealthy way to advance continuous revolving in and out of government. I think there are many ways to achieve expertise. I think also that we can continue to elevate and rely on non-partisan civil servants who have spent a significant amount of time in government, who have learned the ins and outs of regulation, and who can also be, you know, promoted to more significant positions, instead of only, you know, thinking that, Okay, this is a political position. Let me get this ally I have who donated so-and-so to my campaign, and their significant donation correlates with their significant knowledge of this industry, and they’re the only person who’ll be able to achieve set goals. So I just think is a, you know, is a stealthy way to–
Nima: To actually have, like, a regulatory system that is effective, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Nima: I mean, so in addition to what you’ve just been mentioning, what do you see as the means of establishing a really meaningful, credible regulatory system when we know that we are operating under a system, both public and private, that is incredibly corrupt, that has rampant inequality built into it, when campaign finance obviously makes all the more corruption possible and continues the system again, of, per the name of your own organization, of just an endless revolving door, right, in and out of industry into regulation? How do you see there being a means of creating a more robust, meaningful, powerful regulatory system? Is it even possible?
Timi Iwayemi: It’s definitely possible that there could always be edge cases. I think it’s very important to acknowledge when people go against the grain, when people don’t take the shape of, you know, the normal Washington insider who doesn’t believe in the ambition of being an aggressive regulator. We need to acknowledge when people come to Washington and when people have a clear agenda to enforce the law, and when they’re able to achieve some of what they intend to achieve. I think if those people are continuously elevated, as, I don’t want to say stars, but if they, you know, if they’re respected, and you know, if they’re acknowledged for doing good work while in office, then maybe that could be convincing to other people to replicate what has been done before. I mean, that would not be a way to change the whole system. I don’t think that is this silver bullet, but that is one step in the right direction.
I think also it has to go at the top, like, if you’re getting, whoever’s new president, may have to have this, would need to be convinced in the value of having actual independent regulators. In seeing that, the public would appreciate that value. I think we have the parties, the Democratic Party is consistently unable to hit Trump successfully on corruption, because the Democratic Party is corrupt as well. I mean, it’s not like maybe they’ll say the party is corrupt as well, but members of the party are corrupt as well. There’s a more accurate–
Nima: You can say the party’s corrupt as well on this show.
Timi Iwayemi: [Laughs] Members of the party are corrupt as well. So, you know, the accusations of corruption, even when true, they tend to fall flat because, you know, people don’t believe you’re going to do any differently. Like I said earlier, the stablecoin, the GENIUS Act that passed through the Senate, I think the vote count was 68–30. There’s 18 Democrats they got to sign on to that. How many, we’re talking like, a few months after Trump launched his own stablecoin, and you’re like, Oh, he’s teaming up with crypto firms. He’s so corrupt. But you’re like, Okay, we think this is, this is a regulatory regime we’re going to sign on to. It makes no sense.
I think there’s brilliant reporting from The Lever. I think it’s Freddy Brewster and Luke Goldstein. I think they got access to Signal chat, as is the way all news breaks today. But they got access to a Signal chat of crypto Democratic strategists who acknowledge that, Oh, we know this shit is so corrupt. We’re still going to do it, though. I think the recommendation was to suggest a couple amendments that would stop the president from issuing his own coin, but they knew the amendments were never going to pass. So if that’s what you’re going to do, people aren’t going to take you seriously, that you’re a real anti-corruption party, and I feel like that needs to take hold in the party, that idea of anti-corruption has to, like, take hold with the party. And maybe that may come with purging some people, and then that could flow down to who is appointed to certain positions.
Adam: I think people listening to this would say, when you have such increased inequality, you have so much cash to be made in the private sector, obviously, you have like WestExec, which basically was a government in waiting during the last Trump administration that had huge contracts with Saudi Arabia and Raytheon and like, and how most of it’s not even disclosed, right? This is sort of just what they have to disclose in their government forms, and we sort of learn about it later.
People listening would say, like, Okay, well, that’s the difference between working some, you know, very not sexy think-tank job making $100,000 a year, although, because think tanks are also influence laundromats, but, like, some lefty sort of organization, right? The sort of goody-goody-two-shoe people who take the job seriously, right? Versus someone who kind of wades into the water, of like, Well, you know, people gotta work, and, you know, we can regulate, but still, you know, and then you sort of, it’s like everyone who worked at the Obama administration went to go work for McDonald’s or Amazon, right? There’s kind of a wink-wink element. Look at you. You’re a young guy, smart guy. What the fuck are you doing doing this? You obviously understand the internal workings of it. So, like, is it really just come down to ideology, sort of not wanting, sort of believing that government shouldn’t be so venal? This is all a way of me saying that Crypto.com, if you’re out there and you need sponsorships–
[Laughter]
Talk about that dynamic, because I do think it’s not a bunch of discrete moral failings, it’s institutional. And the reality is that on an institutional level, you know, you get out of law school $100,000 in debt, not to make excuses, you grow accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Seems like this is a structural issue, not about the moral failings of individuals.
Timi Iwayemi: It is a structural issue, for sure. And you know, I mean, I personally, I think maybe the organization, but I’m speaking in personal capacity, won’t be as critical of someone who got out of law school and has been at some corporation for a few years before they go into government. I mean, for the most part, they’re probably a nobody, so there are going to be cases like that. And you know, maybe your short, three-year stint at McKinsey, post-law school may not have completely warped your brain and changed your ideology. [Laughs]
And, you know, there are some cases of, I guess a good example could be Rohit Chopra, who was at CFPB. And, you know, I think Chopra before, I don’t know when, but he definitely did have some private-sector experience. I don’t think that necessarily stopped him from taking his job seriously and from actually fulfilling his mandate to the public. So there are definitely edge cases of people rising above and you can’t just cleanly always say whoever worked for so-and-so corporation is going to do this, but that private-sector experience is typically a red flag, and that can inform your analysis of what you expect the person to do.
So low-level people recently out of school, they’re not going to get as much smoke, as much, you know, fire, as someone who’s joining the administration from WestExec, who was just maybe even getting paid to do nothing. If you were working at WestExec, you were potentially just getting paid, as, you know, a retainer with the expectation that you’re going to end up in the Biden administration in a couple years, I think. So, you know, there’s a different analysis you put there. So, yeah, I agree with you. That’s definitely a structural issue that people are going to run into that, Okay, not everyone is going to be able to work in government, because we have government jobs that are severely underfunded. We have government agencies that are severely underfunded, and we have a Congress that is unlikely to actually robustly fund this agency. So I don’t know if there’s capacity to take all the people we need to be there and with DOGE, and with all the shit we’ve seen with DOGE, it’s going to be a serious, it’s going to be real serious effort to rebuild the civil service.
Nima: Well, I think the good news here is that there are people like you and organizations like the Revolving Door Project that are on the case and have been and, you know, are some of the only folks that are actually pointing out the hypocrisy and the harm that comes from it. So we loved having you on. We love having your colleagues on. It’s really always illuminating just pointing out these incredibly kind of dark ways that our system operates. So we’ve been speaking with Timi Iwayemi, assistant director at the Revolving Door Project. His analysis has appeared in outlets such as the American Prospect, The Intercept, The Nation, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, and Common Dreams. Timi, thank you again so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Timi Iwayemi: Thank you. Thank you again for having me.
[Music]
Adam: Yeah, I mean, look, the whole thing is, you always want to keep things as close to home as possible. Nobody wants outsiders telling them what to do. You need a limited hangout, right? This is my thing. I’ll control it. We don’t need to involve anyone else. You know, I got caught stealing or caught extorting money from my company. Hey, let’s just keep it internal.
Nima: Or poisoning all the water, or–
Adam: Well, whatever, I’m saying, like, personally, if there was an effort to rein in podcasting, clearly I would want to be on the commission to regulate podcasts. I mean, nobody wants some outside, genuinely adversarial force to, like, tell them what to do. So, you know, as a playbook, it makes sense, because you can kind of see which way the wind’s going, and then you get ahead of it. And again, this was something intuitively understood by the slavery lobby in the 1770s and 1780s, that you want to get ahead of things. You want to get ahead of criticism. You want to take the, and of course, again, with something we’ve covered with police reform. It’s not unique to corporations. You want to get ahead of and water down and weaken what appears to be inevitable reform or inevitable change in the status quo and regulation. Yeah.
Nima: Exactly. And this also has a bit of the same formula as the current Abundance agenda pushed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and now the kind of mainstream Democratic Party political machine, this idea of, Regulation and oversight is really stifling. Not that it’s not important, but really, I think what needs to happen is we need to unleash innovation. We need to build. We need to make sure that big business and tech can build the future that we all want, unconstrained by red tape or regulation. And so therefore there’s this anti-regulation push, anti-red-tape push, all under the guise of, Hey, trust us, we think this will work out, which we already know usually does not work out when big business regulates itself, when we see AI or crypto or plastics or big chemical companies say, Yes, we understand there may have been some problems, some bad apples. Let us do an investigation. We’ll tell you what’s up. In the meantime, do not pass any laws that would actually negatively affect our bottom line.
Adam: Well, a lot of it’s just buying line. And the whole, like, ‘unleash innovation’ thing is so funny. I mean, it’s funny with AI because that’s 90% slop. But, like, crypto is 100% by definition slop, crypto has absolutely zero social value. It provides no social utility whatsoever. You know, AI is 90%, like, shrimp Jesus and plagiarism and cheating and spam. But like, okay, it helps do, like, protein combinations and research. Okay, there’s sort of actual things it does that you can say, Okay, well, that maybe benefits society. Or gets rid of some horrible, tedious white-collar labor. Crypto, like, does absolutely nothing. The idea that we would not just outlaw it all together, rather than, have some, Oh, you need to unleash the innovation for what, providing currency for people doing criminal activities and/or ripping people off and/or stealing money from Grandma? I mean that, I think that’s the funniest, looking at propaganda from crypto–
Nima: That’s freedom, Adam.
Adam: That’s why their ads were always super vague, like, there was that one with Matt Damon and, like, going to Mars. It’s like, what does crypto have to do with going to Mars? Just, I don’t know. It’s like, in the future, I guess? Something had to appear, like it was going to be–
Nima: [Chuckles] It’s space capitalism.
Adam: Yeah, some positive human development. It’s like, no, it’s a Ponzi scheme, and it’s for people to do illegal activity. And then eventually, when the bottom comes out, the last guy holding the bag will be screwed, and hopefully that’s the dumbest, least powerful person on Earth.
Nima: Well, right? And so this kind of all loops back around to the, Hey, don’t actually police us in any way. Don’t actually investigate us in any official capacity. We will take care of this ourselves. Trust us, it’s on the up and up. Just don’t tell us what to do. We will tell you what we will do. And so, yeah, we see this across so many industries. It continues, and I think it has been sort of repackaged, rebranded in a certain kind of way, with now the Abundance agenda. But I mean, this is the, truly, the bread and butter of big business. And somehow, shockingly, we are still subject to it. And the media does so much laundering for big business that we will definitely continue to see this in the press.
But that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
