The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjati.
He is a DC-based political correspondent, host of The Rising with Crystal Ball, and host
of the Realignment Podcast with Marshall Kozlov.
He has interviewed Donald Trump four times and has interviewed a lot of major political
figures and human beings who wield power.
He loves policy and loves history, which makes him a great person to sail through the sometimes
stormy waters of political discourse.
He showed up to this conversation with a gift of the second volume of Ian Kershaw's
biography on Hitler, a two-volume set that is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest,
if not the greatest, most definitive studies of Hitler.
Nothing wins my heart faster on a first meeting or first date than a great book about the
darkest aspects of human nature and human history.
I think I started saying that as a joke, but actually there's probably a lot of truth
to it.
I love it when we skip the small talk and go straight to the in-depth conversation about
the best and worst of human nature.
Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly Grammar Assistant, Aidsleep
Self-Cooling Bed, and Magic Spoon Low Carb Serial.
Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that for better or for worse, I would like to avoid the trap
of surface political bickering of the day.
I do find politics fascinating, but not the talking points produced by the industrial
engagement complex of Red vs. Blue Division.
Instead, I'm fascinated by human beings who seek power and how power changes them.
I don't have a political affiliation, and my ideas, at least I hope so, are defined
more by curiosity and learning in the face of uncertainty and less by the echo chambers
who tell me what I'm supposed to think.
I'm constantly evolving, learning, and doing my best to do so without ego and with empathy.
Please be patient with me.
As far as I'm aware, I do not have any derangement syndromes, nor do I get a medical prescription
of blue, red, white, or black pills.
If I say something, I say it because I'm genuinely thinking and struggling with the ideas.
I have no agenda, just a bit of a hope to add more love to the world.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify,
support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now, here's my conversation with Sagar Unjedi.
There's no better gifts in this world than a book about Hitler.
So thank you so much.
I've gotten a gift when I was, what were you talking about, the watch from Joe Rogan,
and this almost beats it.
So tell me what this particular book on Hitler is.
So this is volume two.
Yes.
So this is Ian Kershaw.
He wrote the famous Two Volume on Hitler.
I'm a big book nerd, and I spend a lot of time reading biographies in particular.
So this one, if you need a one volume, rise and fall of the Third Reich, right?
I think you talked about that, William Shire, because that's like Hitler's rise, Nazi Germany,
the war, et cetera.
But I like bios because it's the good biography of story of the times, right?
And so this one, the first volume, it does exactly that, which is that it doesn't just
tell the story of Hitler.
It's the context of this kid in Austria, and he's got all these dreams, but then actually
pretty courageous in terms of World War I, right, gets pinned to metal on by the Kaiser.
And then what it's like to have to lose World War I and actually like lose this stain and
then the rise within, everybody knows that story, the Beer Hall Putsch and all of that.
This one I like, and the reason I like Kershaw is obviously number one, it's English, which
is actually hard, right, like in order to write that story, who can do both the primary
source material and then translate it for people like us.
But he tells the dynamic story of Hitler so well in the second volume, just the level
of detail.
You've talked about this, Lex.
What was it like inside that room, inside with Chamberlain?
What was it like in terms of who was this magnetic madman who did convince the smartest
people in the world at the time?
And you know, up until 1940, the Soviet gamble, it took tremendous risks, but highly calculated,
thinking, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to pay for this one.
I'm not going to pay for this one.
And it put himself, he had a remarkable ability, not just to put himself in the minds of the
German people, but in terms of his adversaries, like when he was across from Mussolini, how
exactly did Mussolini, the guy who created fascism, becomes second fiddle to Hitler?
I think it's an amazing bio, and yeah, like Ian Kershaw, along with Richard Evans, two
of my favorite authors on the Third Reich.
No question.
Do you think he was born this way, that charisma, whatever that is, or was it something he developed
strategically?
That's like the question you applied to some of the great leaders.
Was he just a madman who had the instinct to be able to control people when in the room
together with them, or is this like he worked at it?
I think he worked at it, but also there is an innate quality.
I'm forgetting his name, his lifelong Rudolph, the one who flew to Berlin in 1940, I forget.
So he helped Hitler write Mein Kampf, and he was slavishly devoted to him in prison.
This is 1925 or something like that.
And so you read that and you're like, well, how does he get this crankwacko to basically
believe he's like the second coming, help him write this book?
I mean, literally, they lived together in the prison cell, and they would wake up every
day and as he was composing Mein Kampf, and because of the beer hall push and all that
had this like absolute ability to gather people around him.
I think his greatest skill was, is he was just a very good politician, truly.
I mean, if you look at his ability in order to read coalitional politics and then convince
exactly the right people in order to follow him, I think I heard you ask this once and
I've thought about it a lot, which is like, who could have stopped Hitler in Germany,
right?
It's always like the ever present question.
And of course, like the whole baby Hitler thing, really the answer is Hindenburg.
Like Hindenburg was the person who could have stopped and had the immense standing within
the German public.
The only real like war hero definitely was personally skeptical of fascism and Nazism.
And didn't like Hitler.
And didn't like him.
And he knew he was full of shit.
He was like, yeah, I think this guy is dangerous.
I think this guy could do a lot of damage to the Republic, but he acceded basically
to Hitler at the time, and I think that he was one of the main people who could have
done something about it.
And also he was able to convince the generals and military.
I mean, that was very interesting.
And to convince Chamberlain and the other political leaders.
That's something I often think about because we're just reading books about these people.
I think about with like Jeffrey Epstein, for example, like evil people, not evil, but people
have done evil things.
Let's not go to the Dan Carlin thing of what is evil.
People that do evil things, I wonder what they are like in a room because I know quite
a lot of intelligent people that were, did not see the evil in Jeffrey Epstein and spent
time with him and were not bothered by it.
In the same sense, Hitler, it seems like he was able to get, just even on a, before he
had power, because people get intoxicated by power and so on, they want to be close
to power, but even before he had power, he was able to convince people.
And it's unclear, like, is there something that's more than words?
It's like the way you, I mean, that people talk, tell stories about like this piercing
look and whatever, all that kind of stuff.
I wonder if that, if that's somehow a part of it, like that has to be the base floor
of any of these charismatic leaders.
You have to be able to, in a room alone, be able to convince anybody of anything.
So I can tell you, from my personal experience, one of the best educated lessons I got was
when I got to meet Trump.
So I interviewed Trump four different times as a journalist, spent like two and a half
hours with him in the Oval Office, not alone, but like me and one person in the press secretary.
And that was it.
So I actually got to observe him.
And as a guy who reads these types of books, right, and you know, you think of Trump, obviously
most people, what they see on television, you know, in articles and more, but being
able to observe it like one on one, I was closer to him than, you know, than I am right
now from you.
That was one of the most educational experiences I got because it's like you just said, the
look, the leaning forward, the way he talks, the way he is a master at taking the question
and answering exactly which party wants.
And then if you try and follow up, he's like, excuse me, you know, like he knows.
And then whenever you're talking, it's not that he's annoyed about getting interrupted.
If he realizes he's been Miranda ring and then you interrupt him, all good.
But if he's driving home a point, which he has to make sure appears in your transcript
or whatever, it's, it's like it really was fascinating for me to look at.
And what was also crazy with Trump is I realized how much he was living in the moment.
So like when I went to the oval, you know, I've read all these biographies and like
I walk in, I'm like, holy shit.
You're like, I'm in the oval office.
Well, you interviewed him in the oval office.
Every time was in the office.
You scared shitless.
Sorry.
I wasn't scared.
I was just, look, it's the oval office.
Right.
I mean, I'm just nerd.
He was like this kid, I'm so, I will admit this here.
Like I printed out on my dad's label maker when I was like seven and I wrote like the
oval office on my bedroom.
So I was like, you know, a huge nerd, like obviously you go maniacal, even from seven.
But so like for this, I mean, it was huge, right?
I'm like this 25 year old kid and like I walk in there and like I see the couch, right?
And I'm like, oh man, like that's a Kissinger.
You know, I'm like, that's where like Kissinger and Nixon got on their knees and you see over
by the door and you're like, are the scuff marks still there from when Eisenhower used
to play it?
You know, this is all running through my mind with Trump.
None of it was there.
None of it, right?
So like even the desk, I got to put my phone on the desk to record and I'm like, this is
the fucking Resolute Esk.
Like I shouldn't put my phone on this thing.
And I'm like HMS Resolute, you know, all that, you know, national, even for him, he doesn't
think about any of it.
It was like amazing to me, like he had this portrait of Andrew Jackson right next to his,
to the, I think from on the fireplace, like right here on the right.
And the most revealing question was when I was like, Mr. President, what are people
going to remember you for in a hundred years?
And he was like, he had, he was like, I don't know, like veteran's choice.
He like has a list in front of him of like, is it accomplishments?
Which is staff.
Good question, by the way.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's what I wanted to know.
And he's like veteran's choice.
And I remember looking at him being like, it's not going to be better.
I'm like, I'm looking at you, Donald Trump, the harbinger of something new.
Yeah.
We still don't know what the hell it is.
And so I realized with these guys and their charisma and more is that they don't think
about themselves the way that we think about them.
And that was actually important to understand because a lot of people like Trump is playing
all this chess.
I'm like, I assure you he's not like he's truly one time I was interviewing him and
he had like a certificate that he had to sign or something on his desk.
He's like, it was like child almost like he got distracted by, he's like, oh, what's
this?
You know, it's just like picking up and I was like, wow, like this, this is the guy.
Like this is what he is.
Well, I wonder if there was a different person because you were recording, then offline
at a bar.
You can tell you, well, here's the thing though, because that's another part of it.
Because that two hours, I would say like half of that was not on the record.
So like whenever he's off the record, he changes completely, right?
I don't want to like go into too much of it or whatever, but like he, I mean, he is so
mindful of when that camera is on and when the mic is hot in terms of the language that
he uses, what he's willing to admit, what he's willing to talk about, how he's willing
to even appear in front of his staff.
I think the most revealing thing Trump ever did was there was this press conference like
right after he lost you, right after the midterm elections of 2018.
And one of the journalists was like, Mr. President, thank you for doing this press conference.
And he looks at him and he goes, it's called earned media.
It's worth billions.
He just like had so much disdain for him because he's like, I'm not doing this for you.
He's like, I'm doing this for me.
So he's really aware of the narratives, I mean, the people have talked about that all
comes from the tabloid media of the, from New York and so on, he's a master of that.
But I've also heard stories of just in private, he's a really, I don't want to overuse the
word charismatic, but just like, he is a really interesting, almost like friendly, like a good
person.
Like, that's what I heard, I haven't heard actually surprising the same thing about Hillary
Clinton.
That I can't tell you anything about.
But like the way they present themselves is perhaps very different than they are as human
beings, one-on-one.
That's something, maybe that's just like a skill thing, maybe the way they present themselves
in public is actually their, I mean, almost their real self and they're just really good
in private one-on-one to go into this mode of just being really intimate in some kind
of human way.
I think that's part of it, because I would notice that with Trump, he's almost like a
tour guide.
It was very like, it's very crazy, right, because you're like, you're in the Oval, I
mean, it's his office.
And he's like, he's like, do you guys want anything?
He's like, you want a Diet Coke, because he drinks like all this Diet Coke.
That's awesome.
That's great.
I apologize.
I love it.
Yeah, he's just like, he's like, you guys want a Diet Coke, right?
And you're sitting there and you're like, the way he's able to like, like the last time
I interviewed him, he wanted to do it outside because he like, he's studied himself from
all angles and he knows exactly how he looks on a camera and with which lighting.
And so we were supposed to interview him on camera in the Oval office, which is actually
rare.
Like you don't usually get that.
And they ended up moving it outside at the last minute and he came out and he's like,
I picked this spot for you.
He's like, great lighting.
I was like, you are your own lighting director in the present, right?
It's great.
It's so funny.
But it's like you said, he's very charismatic and friendly.
I mean, you wouldn't, I mean, look, this is what I mean in terms of the dynamism of these
people that gets lost.
And I think even he knows that, like, I don't think he would want that side of him, that
I, you know, that you've seen those off the record moments and more in order to come out
because he's very keen about how exactly he presents to the public.
It's like, you know, even his presidential portrait, everybody usually smiles and he
refused to smile.
He was like, I want to look like Winston Churchill, you know?
Like even he knew that.
Do you think he believes that he, what he kind of implies that he is one of, if not
the greatest presidents in American history?
Like people kind of laugh at this, but there's quite, I mean, there's quite a lot of people
first of all that make the argument that he's the greatest president in history.
Like I've heard this argument being made.
And I mean, I don't know what the, first of all, I don't care.
Like you can't make an argument that anyone is the greatest.
That's just, that's just, I come from a school of like being humble and modest and so on.
It's like, even Michael, you can't have that conversation, okay?
So I like that he's humble enough to say like Abraham Lincoln and whatever, like, he says
maybe Lincoln.
Remember that.
Maybe.
Maybe Lincoln.
Do you think he actually believes that or is that something he understands will create
news and also perhaps more importantly, piss off a large number of people?
Is he almost like a musician masterfully playing the emotions of the public or does he, or
and does he believe when he looks in the mirror, I'm one of the greatest men in history?
Combination of all three.
I do think he believes it.
And for the reason why is I don't think he knows that much about US history.
I really mean that.
Like, and that's what I meant whenever I was in there and I realized he was just living
in the moment.
I don't think he knew all that much about why.
I mean, this is why he was elected in many ways, right?
So I'm not, I'm not saying this is an orbit.
Like I'm not making a judgment on this.
I'm just saying, I do think in his mind, he does think he was one of the best presidents
in American history, largely because, and I encounter this with a lot of people work
for him, which is that they didn't really know all that much, kind of about what came
before and all that.
And it's not necessarily to hold it against them because for in many ways is what they
were elected to do or elected to be in many ways.
It's an interesting question whether knowing history, being a student of history is a,
is productive or counterproductive.
I tend to assume I really respect people who are deeply like well read in history.
Like presidents that are almost like nerd, history nerds, I admire that.
But maybe that gets in the way of governance.
I don't know.
It's not, it's not, you know, I'm just sort of playing devil's advocate to my own beliefs.
But it's possible that focusing on the moment and the issues and letting history, it's like
first principles thinking, forget the lessons of the past and just focus on common sense
reasoning through the problems of today.
Yeah, it's really hard question.
In terms of the modern era, I mean, Obama was a student of history.
Like he used to have presidential biographers and people over in, I mean, famously, like
Robert A. Caro, one of my favorite presidential biographers, he was invited to have dinner
with Obama and Obama would like pepper some of his, it was interesting because he'd try
and justify some of the things he didn't do by being like, well, if you look at what
they had to do and what I have to deal with, mine's much harder.
So in that way, I was a little pissed off because I'd be like, no, that actually like
you're comparing apples to oranges and all that.
But if you look at Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt in particular, this was, I mean, a voracious
reader, not of just American history, all history.
He wrote.
I think I was just such a badass.
Jesus.
Incredible.
The only, the only president who willed himself to greatness, that's like the amazing thing
about him.
He wasn't tested by a crisis, right?
Like it wasn't, not, he didn't have a civil war, he didn't have a world war too.
He didn't have to found the country literally, or like, you know, didn't have to stave off
that, or he didn't buy, you know, Louisiana purchase, like all that.
He literally came into a pretty, you know, static country and he could have just governed,
you know, with, I mean, he was the person who came before him was assassinated, like
he easily could have coasted, but he literally willed the country into something more.
And that is, that's always why I've focused a lot on him too, because I'm like, that,
in many ways, I wouldn't say it's easy to be great during crisis.
I mean, like, look at Trump, right?
But there, it can bring out the best within you, but it's a, it's a whole other level
to bring out the best within yourself just for the sake of doing it.
And that's, I think, is really interesting.
Speeches were amazing.
I'm also a sucker for great speeches, because I, I tend to see the role of the president
as in part like, inspirer in chief, sort of to be able to, I mean, that's what great
leaders do, like CEOs or companies and so on, establish a vision, a clear vision and
like, like hit that hard.
But the way you establish a vision isn't just like, not to dig at Joe Biden, but like, like
sleepy, boring statements.
You have to sell those statements and you have to, you know, you have to do it in the
way where everybody's paying attention.
Everybody's excited.
Yes.
And that, I'll tell you as well as definitely one of them, Obama was, I think, at least
early on, I don't know, was incredible at that.
It does feel that the modern political landscape makes it more difficult to be inspirational
in a sense, because everything becomes bickering and division.
I do want to ask you.
Please.
I'm talking about Trump, so you're now a successful podcaster.
I've talked to Joe about Trump, Joe Rogan, and Joe's not interested in talking to Trump.
It's just fascinating.
I try to dig into like, why?
What would you interview Trump on like realignment, for example, and do you think it's possible
to do a two, three hour conversation with him where you will get at something like human
or you get at something, like we were talking about the facade he puts forward.
Do you think you could get past that?
No, I don't.
I look, I was a White House correspondent.
I observed this man very closely.
I interviewed him.
I think if that mic is hot, he knows what he's doing.
He just, he's done this too long, Lex.
He just knows.
Do you think he's a different human now after the election?
Do you think that?
No, not at all.
I think he's been the same person since 1976.
I really do, like basically 1976.
I studied Trump a lot, and I think he's basically been the core of who he is and elements of
that.
Ever since he built that, you know, the ice rink in Central Park and got that media attention,
that was it.
Yeah.
He's a fascinating study.
I feel there's a hope in me that there would be a podcast, like Joe Rogan, like a long
form podcast where it's something could be, you know, and you're actually a really good
person to do that, where you can have a real conversation that looks back at the election
and reveal something on us, but perhaps he's thinking about running again, and so maybe
he'll never let down that guard.
Yes.
You know, I just love it when there's this switch in people where you start looking back
at your life and wanting to tell stories, like trying to extract wisdom and realizing
you're in this new phase of life where the battles have all been fought.
Now you're this old former warrior, and now you can tell the stories of that time.
It seems like Trump is still at it, like the young warrior he is.
He's not in the mode of telling stories.
You know what I got from Rogan?
He's the only president who didn't age well in office.
It's true, right?
And this is what I mean, because he lives in the moment.
Like the job actually aged Obama, I mean Bush, same thing.
Even Clinton.
Clinton was like fat.
Yeah.
He looked miserable by like 2000 HW, like Reagan, famous, actually, yeah, pretty much everybody
I think about, including John F. Kennedy, who got much sicker while in office.
The job like weighs on you and makes you physically ill.
Trump was, he's the only person who just didn't happen to.
He almost got stronger, and he was one of the most diverse, like the climate, there's
so many people attacking him.
So much hatred, so much love and hatred, and it was just, it was, I mean, it was whatever
it was, it was quite masterful and a fascinating study.
If we stick on Hitler for just a minute, what lessons do you take from that time?
Do you think it's a unique moment in human history, that World War II, I mean, both
Stalin and Hitler, is it something that's just an outlier in all of human history in
terms of the atrocities, or is there lessons to be learned?
You mentioned offline that you're not just a student of the entirety of the history,
but you also are fascinated by just different like policies and stuff.
Like what's the immigration policy?
What's the policy on science?
Well, look, Third Reich in power, let me plug it, by Richard Evans, I think is what it was,
because that actually will tell you, like what was it like to live under the Nazi regime
without the war?
Yeah, that's a hard question in terms of the lessons that we can learn, because there's
a lot and it's actually been over, it's been over indexed almost, everything comes back
to Hitler in conversation.
So I kind of think of it within Mao, Stalin and Hitler as, I don't want to say payments
for, but like the endpoint payment for the sins and the problems of the monarchical system
that evolve within Europe, basically like 1400 and more.
I basically think that 1400, the wars between France, England, the balance of power, eventually
World War I, and then serfdom within Russia, the Russian Revolution, that birthed Stalin,
same thing, the Kaiser and Imperial Germany and this like incredibly crazy system of balance
of power in World War I, and then same thing within China in terms of the warring states
and then the disintegration, the European, how this is how they think of it, which is
the center of humiliation and they had to have something like this.
I think of it, I try to think of it within the context of that.
I don't want to sound like an inevitable list, but I think of it as, I like to think about
systems, especially here in DC, that's where I got into politics, which is that you have
to understand systems of power and the incentives within systems and the disincentives and the
downside risk of what you're creating, because that is what leads and creates the behavior
within that system.
I was just talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday, it's kind of funny like, I read
these, I'm obsessed with these books by Robert Caro, the biographies of Lyndon Johnson, he's
written like 5,000 pages so far and it's still not done, okay, so these are like books I
based my life on and look, these are Washington and the story of the post New Deal era and
forward, not much has changed, like the Senate is still the Senate, so many of the same problems
with the Senate are still there, in some cases, not anymore, but for a while some of the people
who were there with Johnson are actually still, one of them is the president of the United
States, just a joke, and you think about also, same with the media relationship, right, like
there's this media, they may have come and gone, like the people who were in the media
and who were cozy with the administration officials, I mean, they just recreated themselves,
it's like an ecosystem which doesn't change and that's why I'm like, oh, it's not that
was a specific time, that's just DC, like that is DC, because of the way the system
is architected, it's pretty much been that way since like 1908, whenever like, you know,
Teddy Roosevelt was dining with these journalists and he would yell at them and then he would
go over to the society house and like, in many ways, that's now instead of going to Henry
Adams' house, like the people are congregating in Calorama, which is the richest neighborhood
here at somebody else's house, like it's the same thing, so you have to think about the
system and then the incentives within that system about what the outcomes that they're
producing, if you actually want to think about how can I change this from the outside, that's
also why it's very difficult to change, because the system is designed in order to produce
actually pretty specific outcomes that can only be changed in extraordinary times.
Yeah, and sometimes it's hard to predict what kind of outcomes will result from the incentive,
the system that you create, right, in the case, because especially when it's novel kind
of situations, Trump actually created a pretty novel situation, and a lot of the things
that we've seen in the 20th century were very novel systems where people are very optimistic
about the outcomes, right, and then it turned out to not have the results that they predicted.
In terms of like things being unchanged for the past 100 years and so on, can you like
Wikipedia style, or maybe like in a musical form, like I'm only a Bill, describe to me
... I still sing that to my head sometimes, I'm just a Bill, I don't know what the rest
of the song goes, but let's leave that to people's imagination.
How does this whole thing work?
How does the US political system work?
The three branches, how do you think about the system we have now, if you were to try
to describe it?
If aliens showed up and asked you like, they didn't have time, so this is an elevator thing,
like should we destroy you as you plead to avoid destruction, how would you describe
how this thing works?
I would say we come together and we pick the people who make our laws, then we pick the
guy who executes those laws, and they together pick the people who determine whether they
or the president is breaking the law at the most basic level, that's how I would describe
it.
So the people who make the laws are Congress, the executive is charged with executing the
laws as passed by Congress, the branches of government, and the Supreme Court is picked
by the president, confirmed by the Senate, which then decides whether you or other people
are breaking the law in terms of interpretation of that law, that's basically it.
And they decide whether those laws fall within the restrictions and the want of the founders
as expressed by the Constitution of the United States, which is a set of principles that
we came together in 1787, I want to make sure I get this right, 1787, and decided that we
were going to live the rest of our lives barring a revolution and more.
And we've made it 200 and something years in order under that system.
So there's a balance of power that's because you have multiple branches, there's a tension
and a balance to it as designed by those original documents.
Which is the most dysfunctional, the branches, which is your favorite?
In terms of talking about systems and what's the greatest of concern and what is the greatest
source of benefit in your view?
The presidency is my favorite to study, obviously, because it is the one where there's the most
subjective variable change in terms of the personality involved because of so much power
imbued within the executive.
The Senate is actually pretty much the same, one of the things I love about reading about
the Senate and histories of the Senate is you're like, oh yeah, there were always like
assholes in the Senate who were doing their thing and filibustering constantly based upon
this or that.
And then the personalities involved with the Senate haven't mattered as much since pre-Civil
War.
Like pre-Civil War, you had Henry Clay and then Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, who
even in their own way, they represented larger constituencies and they crafted these compromises
up until the outbreak of the Civil War, et cetera.
But post since then, you don't think about the Titans within the Senate.
Most of that is because a lot of the stuff that they had power over has transferred over
to the executive.
So I'm most interested in really in power where it lies.
It's actually pretty throughout American history, much more used to lie with Congress.
Now it's obviously just so imbued within the executive that understanding executive power
is I think the thing I'm probably most interested in here.
Do you think at this point the amount of power that the president has is corrupting to their
ability to lead well?
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
Is there too much power in the presidency?
There definitely is.
And part of the problem, and one of the things I try to make come across to people is if you're
the president, unless you have a hyper intentional view of how something must be different in
government, your view doesn't matter.
So for example, like if you were Trump, let's take Trump even, and even in with a pretty
intentional view, he was like, I'm going to end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, right?
And he came in and he gets these generals in, he's like, I want to end the war in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
Oh, and I want to withdraw these troops from Syria.
And they're like, okay, well, give us like six months.
She's like, okay, and this is the thing about Trump, he doesn't realize that it's bullshit.
So they're like, he's like, six months seems fine, right?
So then six months comes, and he's like, so, and then he'll announce it, he'll be like,
and we're getting out of Syria, it's great.
And then the generals freak out, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't have a plan for
that.
He's like, but you guys told me six months.
He's like, I don't know.
Now we need another six months in order to figure this thing out.
And by that time, now you're midterms.
So now what?
Now you got to run for reelection.
So more what I mean by that is, if you don't have a hyper intentional view about how to
change foreign policy, if you don't have a hyper intentional view about how the department
of commerce should do its job, they are just going to go on autopilot.
So there's, this is part of the problem.
When you asked me about the presidency, it's not the presidency itself, like the president
himself, which has become too powerful.
It's that we have less democratic checks on the people and the systems that are on autopilot.
And I would say that basically since 2008, we have voted every single time to disrupt
that system, except in the case of 2020 with Joe Biden, and there are a lot of different
reasons around why that happened.
And in every single one of those cases, Obama and Trump, they all failed in order to, in
order to radically disrupt that.
And that just shows you how titanic the task is.
And I'm using my language precisely because I don't want to be like deep state, but like
obviously there's deep state.
Deep state I guess has conspiratorial, it tends just to it.
But so what you're saying is the true power currently lies with the autopilot, okay, deep
state.
Well, but see, it's not, this is the thing too, I want to make it clear, because I think
people think conspiratorially that they're all coming together to intentionally do something.
No, no, no, no, no.
They are doing what they know, believe they are right, and don't have real democratic
checks within that.
And so now they have entire generations of cultures within each of these bureaucracies
where they say, this is the way that we do things around here.
And that's the problem, which is that we have a culture of, within many of these agencies
and more, I think the best example for this would be during the Ukraine, you know, gate
with Trump and all that, with the impeachment.
I don't want, I'm not talking about the politics here, but the most revealing thing that happened
was when the whistleblower guy, Alexander Vindman, was like, here you have the president departing
from the policy of the United States.
And I was like, well, let me educate you, Lieutenant Colonel, the president of the United
States makes American foreign policy.
But it was a very revealing comment, because he and all the people within national security
bureaucracy do think that they're like, this is the policy of the United States.
We have to do this.
That's where things get screwy.
Well, listen, for me personally, but also from an engineering perspective, I just talked
to Jim Keller, it's just, this is the kind of bullshit that we all hate when you're
trying to innovate and design new products.
So that's what First Principles Thinking requires, is we don't give a shit what was
done before.
The point is, what is the best way to do it?
And it seems like the current government, government in general, probably, bureaucracies
in general, are just really good at being lazy about never having those conversations
and just, it becomes this momentum thing that nobody has the difficult conversations.
It's become a game within a certain set of constraints, and they never kind of do revolutionary
tasks.
But you did say that the presidency has power, but you're saying that more power than the
others, but that power has to be coupled with like focused intentionality, like you have
to keep hammering the thing.
If you want it done, it has to be done.
I mean, and you got to, you got to, this is the other part too, which is that it's not
just that you have to get it done, you have to pick the hundred people who you can trust
to pick 10 people each to actually do what you want.
One of the most revealing quotes is from a guy named Tommy Corcoran.
He was the top aide to FDR, this I'm getting from the Carol books too.
And he said, what is a government?
It's not just one guy, or even 10 guys, hell, it's a thousand guys.
And what FDR did is he masterfully picked the right people to execute his will through
the federal agencies.
Johnson was the same way.
He played these people like a fiddle, he knew exactly who to pick, he knew the system,
and more.
Part of the reason that outsiders who don't have a lot of experience in Washington almost
always fail is they don't know who to pick.
Or they pick people who say one thing to their face, and then when it comes time to carry
out the president's policy in terms of the government, they just don't do it.
And the president's too, think about this, I think some, Rahm Emanuel said this.
He was like, by the time it gets to the president's desk, nobody else can solve it.
It's not easy.
It's not like a yes or no question.
It's every single thing that hits the president's desk is incredibly hard to do.
And Obama actually even said, and this was a very revealing quote about how he thinks
about the presidency, which is, he's like, look, the presidency is like one of those
super tankers.
He's like, I can come in and I can make it two degrees left and two degrees right.
In a hundred years, two degrees left, that's a whole different trajectory.
Same thing on the right.
And he's like, that ultimately is really all you can do.
I quibble and disagree with that in terms of how he could have changed things in 2008.
But there's a lot of truth to that statement.
Okay.
That's really fascinating.
You make me realize that actually both Obama and Trump are probably playing victim here
to the system.
You're making me think that maybe you can correct me that, because I'm thinking of like Elon
Musk, whose major success despite everything is hiring the right people.
And like creating those thousands, that structure of a thousand people.
So maybe a president has power in that if they were exceptionally good at hiring the
right people.
Personnel is policy, man.
That's what it comes down to.
But wouldn't you be able to steer the ship way more than two degrees if you hire the
right people?
So like, it's almost like Obama was not good at hiring the right people.
Well, he hired all the Clinton people.
That's what happened.
What happened with Trump?
He hired all the Bush people.
And then you just sit back and say, oh, president can't.
But that means you're just suck at hiring.
Correct.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I know it's funny.
I'm giving you simultaneously the nationalist case against Trump and the progressive case
against Obama.
Yes.
The progressive people are like, why the fuck are you hiring all these Clinton people in
order to run the government and just recreate?
Like, why are you hiring Larry Summers, who was one of the people who worked at all these
banks and didn't believe the bailouts were going to be big enough, and then to come in
in the worst economic crisis in modern American history.
That was 2008.
And Summers actively lobbied against larger bailouts, which had huge implications for
working class people and pretty much hollowed out America since.
Okay.
From Trump, same thing.
You're like, I'm going to drain the swamp.
And by doing that, I'm going to hire Goldman Sachs' Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and all
these other absolute Bush clowns in order to run my White House.
Well, yeah, no shit.
The only thing that you accomplished in your four years in office is passing a massive
tax cut for the rich and for corporations.
I wonder how that happened.
What role does money play in all of this?
Is money a huge influence in politics, super PACs, all that kind of stuff?
Or is this more just kind of a narrative that we play with?
Because from the outsider's perspective, it seems to have, that seems to be one of the
fundamental problems with modern politics.
So I was just having this conversation, Marshall and I, Marshall Kosloff, my co-host on the
realignment.
And it's funny because if you do enough research, we actually live in the least corrupt age
in American campaign finance.
As in, it's never been more transparent.
It's never been more up to the FEC, yeah, and all of that.
If you go back and read, not even 50 years ago, we're talking about Lyndon B. Johnson
handing people, literally as he came up in his youth, paying people for votes.
The boss of the person who had all the Mexican votes, the person who had, and he was giving
out briefcases.
This is within people's lifetimes who are alive in America, so that doesn't happen anymore.
But I don't like to blame everything on money, although I do think money is obviously a huge
part of the problem.
I actually look at it in terms of distribution, which is that how is money distributed within
our society?
Because I firmly believe that politics, this is going to get complicated, but I think politics
is mostly downstream from culture.
And culture, obviously, I'm using economics because there's obviously a huge interplay
there.
But in terms of the equitable or lack of equitable distribution of money within our politics,
what we're really pissed off about is we're like, our politics only seems to work for
the people who have money.
I think that's largely true.
I think that the reason why things worked differently in the past is because our economy
was structured in different ways.
And there's a reason that our politics today are very analogous to the last Gilded Age
because we had very similar levels of economic distribution and cultural problems too at
the same time.
I don't want to erase that because I actually think that's what's driving all of our
politics right now.
So that's interesting.
So in that sense, the representative of government is doing a pretty good job of representing
the state of culture and the people and so on.
Yeah.
Can I ask you, in terms of the deep state and conspiracy theories, there's a lot of
talk about, again, from an outsider's perspective, if I were just looking at Twitter, it seems
that at least 90% of people in government are pedophiles.
90, 90 to 95%, I'm not sure what that number is.
If I were to just look at Twitter, honestly, or YouTube, I would think most of the world
is a pedophile.
I would almost feel like...
Right.
And if you don't fully believe that, you're a pedophile.
I would start to wonder, like, wait, am I a pedophile too?
I'm either a communist or a pedophile, or both, I guess.
Yeah, that's going to be clipped out.
Thank you, internet.
I look forward to your emails.
But is there any kind of shadow conspiracy theories that give you a pause?
Or sort of a flipside, the response to a lot of conspiracy theories is like, no, the reason
this happened is because it's a combination of just incompetence.
So where do you land on some of these conspiracy theories?
I think most conspiracy theories are wrong.
Some are true, and those are spectacularly true.
And if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And we don't know which ones.
I don't know which ones.
That's the problem.
I think, oh, well, I mean, look, man, I listened to your podcast.
I think I was a huge non-believer in UFOs, and now I've probably never believed more
in UFOs.
Like, I believe in UFOs.
I'm very comfortable being like, not only do I believe in UFOs, I think we're probably
being visited by an alien civilization.
Like, if you asked me that three years ago, I would be like, you're out of your fucking
mind.
Like, what are you talking about?
Well, listen to David Fravor.
Yeah.
That's all I have to say.
That's it.
Well, I have the sense that the government has information that hasn't revealed, but
it's not like I don't think they're holding, there's like a green guy sitting there in
a room.
Right, exactly.
They just, they have seen things they don't know what to do with, so it's like, they're
confused.
They're afraid of revealing that they don't know.
That's what I think it is.
They don't know.
Right.
They don't know.
They don't know.
Yeah.
And then in the process, there's a lot of fears tied up in that first looking incompetent
in the public eye, nobody wants to be looked at way.
And the other is like, in revealing it, even though they don't know, maybe China will figure
it out.
Exactly.
So like, we don't want China to figure it out first.
And so that, all those kinds of things result in basically secrecy then that damages the
trust in institutions on one of the most fascinating aspects, like one of the most fascinating mysteries
of humankind of, is there life, intelligent life out there in the universe?
So that's one of them.
But there's other ones, like for me, when I first came across actually, Alex Jones was
a 9-11.
Yeah.
I remember like, cause I was, I was in Chicago, I was thinking like, oh shit, are they gonna
hit Chicago too?
That's what everybody was thinking.
Yeah.
Everybody was thinking like, what does this mean?
What scale?
What, I mean, trying to interpret it.
And I remember like looking for information, desperately like, what, what happened?
And I remember not being satisfied with the quality of reporting and figuring out like
rigorous like, here's exactly what happened.
And so people like Alex Jones stepped up and others that said like, there's some shady
shit going on and it sure is how it looked like there's shady shit going on.
So like, and I still stand behind the fact that it seems like there's not, there's not
enough, like it wasn't a good job of being honest and transparent and all those kinds
of things.
Cause it would implicate the Saudis.
Let's be honest.
See, that's, that's my conspiracy theories.
I'm like, yeah, I think they covered up a lot of stuff because they wanted to cover
up for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Like, and then, I mean, that is a, that was a conspiracy theory not that long ago.
I think it's true.
I mean, I think it's a hundred percent true.
Yeah.
So those kinds of conspiracy theories are interesting.
I mean, there's other ones for me personally that touched, so the institution that means
a lot to me is the MIT and, you know, Jeffrey Epstein.
I want to hear a lot.
I want to hear about that.
I talk about Epstein a lot.
So I'm like, oh, you do.
Yeah.
And, and he, I was going to say in terms of conspiracy theory, that one changed my outlook
because I was like, I was like, whoa, like, you have this dude who convinced some of the
successful people on earth that he was like some money manager and it looks like it was
totally fake.
Like Leon Black.
I mean, this is one of the richest men on Wall Street, $9 billion net worth.
Why has he given him over a hundred million dollars between 2015 and 2019?
What's going on here?
Lex Wexner, same thing.
So yeah, I want to hear because you know people who met him and the only person I know who
met him was Eric Weinstein.
I've heard his, right.
Oh boy.
So I, listen, I'm still in and Eric is fascinating and like Eric is full on saying that he was
a Mossad or whatever.
Yeah.
There's a front for something, something much, much bigger.
And there's whatever his name, Robert Maxwell, all the, all those stories, like you could
dig deeper and deeper that Jeff is just like the tip of the iceberg.
I just think he's an exceptionally charismatic, listen, this isn't speaking from confidence
or like deep understanding of the situation, but for my speaking with people, he just seems
like at least from the side of his influence and interaction with researchers, he just
seems like somebody that was exceptionally charismatic and actually took interest.
He was unable to speak about interesting scientific things, but he took interest in them.
So he knew how to stroke the egos of a lot of powerful people like, well, like in, in
different kinds of ways.
I suppose I don't know about this because I don't have like, if a really, okay, this
is, this is weird to say, but I have an ability, okay, I think women are beautiful.
I like women, but like, if, if like a supermodel came to me or something, like, like I am able
to reason.
It seems like some people are not able to think.
I think clearly when there's like an attractive woman in the room.
And I think that was one of the tools he used to manipulate people.
Interesting.
I don't know.
Listen, it's like the pedophile thing.
Right.
I don't know how many people are complete sex addicts, but like it seems like, like looking
out into the world, like there's a, well, like the me too movement have revealed that
there's a lot of like weird, like, uh, creepy people out there.
I don't know, but I think it was just one of the many tools that he used to convince
people and manipulate people, but not in some like, um, evil way, but more just really
good at the art of conversation and just winning people over on the side.
And then by building through that process, building a network of other really powerful
people and not explicitly, but implicitly having done shady shit with powerful people,
like building up a kind of implied power of like, like we did some shady shit together.
So we're not like, you're going to help me out on this extra thing I need to do now.
And that builds and builds and builds to where you're able to actually control, like have
quite a lot of power without explicitly having like a strategy meeting.
And I think a single person or yeah, I think a single person can do that, can start that
ball rolling.
And over time, it becomes a group thing, like, I don't know if, uh, Jillian Maxwell was involved
or others.
And yeah, over time, it becomes almost like a really powerful organization that wasn't,
that's not a front for something much deeper and bigger, but it's almost like, maybe it's
because I love cellular automata, man.
A system that starts out as a simple thing with simple rules can create incredible complexity.
Yes.
And so I just think that, uh, we're now looking in retrospect, it looks like an incredibly
complex system that's operating in, but like, that's just because it's, you know, there
could have been a lot of other Jeffrey Epstein's in, in my perspective, that the simple thing
just was successful and it builds and builds and builds and builds.
And then there's, uh, creepy shit that like a lot of aspects of the system helped it get
bigger and bigger and more powerful and so on.
So the final result is, I mean, listen, I have a pretty optimistic, I have, uh, I tend
to see the good in people.
And so it's been heartbreaking to me in general, just to see, you know, people I look up to
not have the level of integrity I thought they would, or like the strength of character,
all those kinds of things.
And it seems like you should be able to, to see the bullshit that is Jeffrey Epstein,
like when you meet him, uh, we're not talking about like Eric Weinstein, like one or two
or three or five interactions, but like there's people that had like, like years of relationship
with him.
Yeah.
And I don't know.
I, I'm not sure.
Even after he was convicted.
Yeah.
There's, there's stories.
I mean, I don't need to sort of, uh, I honestly believe, okay, here's the open question I have.
I don't know how many creepy sexual people are out there.
Like, I don't know if there's like, like the people I know, the faculty and so on, I don't
know if they have like a kink that I'm just not aware of that was being leveraged because
to me it seems like if, if, if people aren't, if not everybody's the pedophile, then it's
just the art of conversation.
That is just like the art of just like manipulating people by making them feel good about like
the exciting stuff they're doing.
Listen, man, academics are people, people talk about money.
I don't think academics care about money as much as people think what they care about
is like somebody, they, they, they want to be, uh, it's the same thing that Instagram
models post in their butt pictures is they want to be loved.
They want attention.
My parents are professors.
Yeah.
I get it.
Yeah.
They, they, and Jeff Epstein, like the money is another way to show attention.
Right.
It's a proxy.
It's, it, mind work matters and, and, and he for some of, he did that for some of the
weirdest, most brilliant people, I don't want to sort of drop names, but everybody knows
them.
It's like people that are the most interesting academics is the one he cared about.
Yeah.
Like people are thinking about the most difficult questions of an, in all of science and all
of engineering.
So those people are, were kind of outcasts in academia a little bit because they're doing
the weird shit.
They were the weirdos and he cared about the weirdos and he gave them money and that,
uh, you know, I, that's, I don't know if there's something more nefarious than that.
Uh, I, I hope not, but maybe I'm surprised and in fact, half the population of the world
is pedophiles.
No, I, I think it's what you were talking about, which is that it's the, it's the implication
after the initial, right?
Like you do some shady things together or you do something that you want out of the
public eye and you're a public person and look, we probably even experienced this to
a limited extent, right?
You're like, ah, you know, like I don't want to, I don't know, I almost lost my temper,
you know, one time whenever a car hit me and I'm like, I can't freak out in public anymore.
Like that, you know, like what if somebody takes a photo or something?
And so I think that there's an extent to that times a billion, literally when you have a
billion dollars or more and you take that all together and you stack it up on itself.
I saw a story about like Bill Clinton, like Bill Clinton was with Epstein or with Ghislaine
Maxwell in a private air terminal or something and she had one of their like sex, you know,
one of those girls who was underage had her dressed up in a literal like pilot uniform
and she was underage in order to, you know, and she was just being disguised for being
older and she was a masseuse, right?
Because that was one of the, uh, guises which they got in order to sexually traffic these
women and she was like, Bill was like complaining about his neck and she's like, give Bill
Clinton a massage, right?
So now there's a photo of an underage girl giving a massage to the former president of
the United States.
I don't think he knew, right?
But like, that looks bad.
And so this is kind of what we're getting at, which is that you're setting it all up
and creating those preconditions or like Prince Andrew.
Do I think Prince Andrew knew that Virginia Gouffre was underage?
I don't know.
Probably knew she was pretty young, which I think is, you know, skeevy enough where you're
a fucking prince, you probably know better.
But I don't think he knew she was underage.
Or maybe he did.
And if he did, then he's even more of a piece of shit than I thought.
But when we, when we look at these things, the stuff I'm more interested in is like what
you were talking about.
I'm like, Bill Gates, how do you get the richest man in the world in your house?
Like under what?
And Gates is like, he was talking about financing and all this.
I'm like, you don't have access to money or bankers?
Like you're the richest man in the world.
Like you can call Goldman Sachs anytime you want on a hotline.
Like why do you need, that's where, that's where I start again to get more conspiratorial
because I'm like, Bill, dude, you can, you have the gold credit, right?
Like you don't need Epstein to create some complicated financing structure or Leon Black.
Like what is 2015, 2009?
I mean, this is very recent stuff or, and this is the part that really got me is I read
the department, I think it's called the department of financial service report around Deutsche
Bank with Epstein.
They knew he was a criminal, they solicited his business, explicitly knew that his business
meant access to other high net worth individuals, just consistently doled money out from his
account for hush payments to women in Europe and prostitution rings.
They knew all of this within the bank.
It was elevated multiple times.
Here was the other one.
One of Epstein's associates was like, Hey, how much money can we take out before we hit
the automatic sensor before you have to tell the IRS?
And that question by their own standards is supposed to result in a notification to the
feds and they never did it.
And he was withdrawing like $2 million of cash in five years for tips to, I'm like,
okay, something's going on here.
You see what I'm saying?
There's a lot of signs that make you think that there's a bigger thing at play than just
the man, that there is some, it does look like a larger organization is using this front.
Right?
Again, I don't know.
I truly don't know.
And I'm not willing to use the certainty, which I think a lot of people online are to
say like, it was 100%.
Yeah.
The certainty is always the problem because that's probably why I hesitate to touch conspiracy
theories is because I'm allergic to certainty in all forms, in politics, any kind of discourse.
And people are so sure in both directions, actually, it's kind of hilarious.
Either they're sure that the conspiracy theory, particularly whatever the conspiracy theories
is false, like they almost dismiss it like, like they don't even want to talk about it.
It's like the people, like the way they dismiss that the earth is flat.
The scientists are like, they don't even want to hear what the flat earthers are saying.
They don't have zero patience for it, which is like, maybe in that case, is deserved.
But everything else, you really have empathy.
Consider the fact, you have, okay, this is weird to say, but I feel like you have to
consider that the earth might be flat for like one minute, like you have to be empathetic.
You have to be open-minded.
I don't see a lot of that through our cultural taste makers and more.
And that's, that really is what concerns me the most because it's just another manifestation
of all of our problems is that we have this completely bifurcating economy, bifurcating
culture literally in terms of, we have the middle of the country and then we have the
coast.
And in terms of the population, it's almost 50-50 and with, you know, increasing megacities
and urban culture, like urban monoculture of LA, New York and Chicago and DC and Boston
and Austin relative to how an entire other group of Americans live their lives, or even
the people within them who aren't rich and upwardly mobile, how they live their lives
is just completely separating.
And all of our language and communication in mass media and more is to the top.
And then everybody else is forgotten.
Do you think when you go, when you dig to the core, there is a big, there's a big gap
between left and right.
Is there, is that division that, that's perceived currently real or are most people like center-left
and center-right?
It's so interesting because that's such a loaded term, center-left.
What does that mean?
Like, do you, I think the way you're thinking of it is, I'm not like a, well, even this,
like I'm not a radical socialist, but I'm, I'm marginally left on cultural issues and
economic issues.
This is how we've traditionally understood things.
And then when, when in popular discourse, like center-right, like what does it mean
to be center-right?
Like, I am marginally right on social, on concern, on social issues and marginally right
on economic issues.
But that's just not, Paul, like if you look at survey data, for example, like, the, the
stimulus checks, people who are against stimulus checks are conservative, right?
Well, 80% of the population is for a stimulus check.
So that means a sizable number of Republicans are for stimulus checks.
Same thing happens on like a wealth tax.
The same thing happens on, okay, Florida voted for Trump 3.1%, more than Barack Obama 2008.
The same day passes a $15 minimum wage at 67%.
So what's going on?
So that's why I-
What is going on?
Well, that's my entire career, right?
But it seems like, so that's, that's fascinating.
Yeah.
The conversation is different than the policies.
Well, it's different than reality.
That's what I would say, which is that the way we have to understand American politics
today, it didn't always used to be this way, is it's almost entirely along basic, I would
say the main divider is, because even when you talk about class, this misses it in terms
of socioeconomics, it's around culture, which is that it's basically, if you went to a four-year
degree granting institution, you are part of one culture.
If you didn't, you're part of another.
I don't want to erase the 20% or whatever of people who did go to a college degree,
who were Republicans or vice versa, et cetera, but I'm saying on average in terms of the
median way that you feel, we're basically bifurcating along those lines.
And because people get upset, be like, oh, well, you know, there are rich people who
voted for Trump.
And I'm like, yeah, but you know who they are?
They're like plumbers or something.
Like they're people who make $100,000 a year, but they didn't go to a four-year college
degree and they might live in a place which is not an urban metro area.
And then at the same time, you have like a Vox writer who makes like 30 grand, but they
have a lot more cultural power than like the plumber.
So you have to think about where exactly that line is.
And I think in general, that's the way that we're trending.
So that's why when I say like, what's going on?
Are we divided?
Yeah.
Like, but it's not left and right.
I mean, like, and that's why I hate these labels.
So it's more, it's more just red and blue like teams, they're arbitrary teams.
So how arbitrary are these teams?
I guess it's another completely arbitrary.
So when you kind of imply that there's, I don't know if you're sort of in post analyzing
the patterns, because it seems like there's a network effects of like, you just pick the
team red or blue.
And it might have to do with college.
You might have to do all of those things.
But like, it seems like it's more about just the people around you.
So less than whether you went to college or not.
I mean, it's almost like seems like it's almost like a weird network effects that are hard.
There's certain strong patterns that you're identifying, but I don't know.
It's sad to think that it might be just teams that have nothing to do with what you actually
believe.
Well, it is like, I look, I mean, I don't want to believe that.
But the data points me to this, which especially 2020, I'm one of the people chief among them.
I will own up to it here.
I was totally wrong about why Trump was elected in 2016.
I believed and based a lot of my public commentary belief on this.
Trump was elected because of a rejection of Hillary Clinton neoliberalism on the back
of a pro worker message, which was anti immigration, it was its pillar, but alongside of it was
a rejection of free trade with China and generally of the political correctness and globalism,
which has been come in through the uniparty and same thing here with the military industrial
complex and endless war.
He rejected all of that.
Wait, what's wrong with that prediction?
It's wrong, man.
And the reason I know this is that it sounds right, I honestly wish it was true, but here's
the truth.
Trump actually governed largely as a neoliberal Republican who was meaner online and who departed
from orthodoxy in some very important ways.
Don't get me wrong.
I will always support the trade war with China.
I will always support not expanding the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
I will support him moving the Overton window on a million different things and revealing
once and for all that GOP voters don't care about economic orthodoxy necessarily.
But here's what they do care about.
Trump got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, despite not delivering largely, largely
for all the Trump people out there on that agenda.
He wasn't more pro union, but he won more union votes.
He wasn't necessarily more pro worker, but he actually won more votes in Ohio than he
did in 2016.
And he won more Hispanic votes than despite being all the immigration rhetoric, et cetera.
Here's why.
It's about the culture, which is that the culture war is so hot that negative partisanship
is at such high levels.
All of the vote is geared upon what the other guy might do in office.
And there's a poll actually just came out by Echelon Insights, Crystal and I were talking
about it on Rising.
The number one concern amongst Democratic voters is Trump voters.
Number one concern, not issues like Trump voters.
And number two is white supremacy, which is basically code for Trump voters.
And it is the same rule for the other side.
Well, so on the right, the number one concern is illegal immigration.
And number, I think, three or four, whatever is Antifa, which is code for...
That's nice.
At least on the right, there's a policy kind of thing.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
I saw Ben Shapiro was talking about this.
But the reason why I would functionally say it's the same is because, I mean, you can
believe whether it's true or not.
I think it actually largely is true, but a lot of GOP voters feel like a lot of illegal
immigration is code for people who are coming in, who are going to be legalized and are
going to go vote Democrat.
I can just explain it from their point of view.
So what does that actually mean, each other?
Which is that the number one concern is the other person.
So negative partisanship has never been higher.
And I think people who had my thesis in terms of why Trump was elected in 2016, you have
to grapple with this.
Like, how did he win 10 million more votes?
He came 44,000 votes away from winning the presidency across three states.
Like, none of our popular discourse reflects that very stark reality.
And I think so much of it is people really hate liberals.
Like they just really hate them.
And I was driving through rural Nevada before the election, and I was like, literally in
the middle of nowhere.
And there was this massive sign this guy had out in front of his house and just said,
Trump, colon, fuck your feelings.
And I was like, that's it.
That is why people voted for Trump.
And I don't want to denigrate it because they truly feel they have no cultural power in
America except to raise the middle finger to the elite class by pressing the button
for Trump.
I get that.
That's actually a totally rational way to vote.
It's not the way I wish we did vote, but like, you know, that's not my place to say.
So this is interesting.
If you could just psychoanalyze, again, I'm probably naive about this, but I'm really
bothered by the hatred of liberals.
It's a amorphous monster that's mocked.
It's like the Shapiro liberal tears.
And I'm also really bothered by probably more of my colleagues and friends, the hatred
of Trump, the Trump and white supremacists.
So apparently there's 70 million white supremacists, 75 million, sorry, there's millions of white
supremacists.
And apparently whatever liberal is, I mean, you know, literally liberal has become equivalent
to white supremacists in the power of negativity it arouses.
I don't even know what those, I mean, honestly, I just don't, they've become swears essentially.
Is that, I mean, how do we get out of this?
Because that's why I just don't even say anything about politics online because it's like, really,
you can't, here's what happens.
Anything you say that's like thoughtful, like, hmm, I wonder like immigration, something.
I wonder, like, why, you know, we have these many, we allow these many immigrants in or
like some version of that, like thinking through these difficult policies and so on, they immediately
tried to find like a single word in something you say, they can put you in a bin of liberal
or white supremacists and hammer you to death by saying you're one of the two.
And then everybody just piles on happily that we finally nailed this white supremacist or
liberal.
And that, is this some kind of weird, like, feature of online communication that we've
just stumbled upon?
Is there a way or is it possible to argue that this is like a feature, not a bug?
Like this is a good thing?
Yeah, well, look, I just think it's a reflection of who we are.
People like to blame social media, I think we're just incredibly divided right now.
I think we've been divided like this for the last 20 years, and I think that the reason
I focus almost 99% of my public commentary on economics is because you asked an important
question at the top.
How do we fix this?
What did I say about the stimulus checks?
Stimulus checks have 80% approval rating.
So that's the type of thing.
If I was Joe Biden and I wanted to actually heal this country, that's the very first thing
I would have done when I came into office.
Same thing on when you look at anything that's going to increase wages.
I said on the show, I was like, look, I think Joe Biden will have an 80% approval rating
if he does two things.
If he gives every American a $2,000 stimulus check and gives everybody who wants a vaccine
a vaccine.
That's it.
It's pretty simple.
Because here's the thing.
I don't really like Greg Abbott that much.
We have very different politics.
I'm from Texas.
But my parents got vaccinated really quickly.
That means something to me.
I'm like, listen, I don't really care about a lot of the other stuff.
He got my family vaccinated.
But that, well, I will forever remember that.
And that's how we will remember the checks.
This is a part of a reason why Trump almost won the election and why if the Republicans
had been smart enough to give him another round of checks, 100% would have won, which
is that people were like, look, I don't really like Trump, but I got a check with his name
on it.
And that meant something to me and my family.
I'm not saying for all the libertarians out there that you should go and endlessly spend
money and buy votes.
What I am saying is lean into the majoritarian positions without adding your culture war
bullshit on top of it.
So for example, what's the number one concern that AOC says after the first round of checks
got out?
Oh, the checks didn't go to illegal immigrants.
I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind?
This is the most popular policy America has probably done in 50 years, since Medicare
and you're inserting, you're ruining it.
And then on the right is the same thing, which is that they'll be like, these checks are
going to low level, blah, blah, people who are lazy and don't work, I'm like, oh, you're
just playing a caricature of what you are.
If you lean into those issues and you got to do it clean, this is what everybody hates
about DC, which is that Biden right now is doing the $1,400 checks, but he's looping
it in with his COVID relief bill and all that.
That's his prerogative.
That's the Democrats prerogative.
They won the election.
That's fine.
But I'll tell you what I would have done if I was him.
I would have come in and I would have said there's five United States senators who are
on the record, Republicans, who said they'll vote for a $2,000 check.
And I would put that on the floor of the United States Senate on the first day possible.
And I would have passed it and I would have forced those Republican senators to live up
to that, vote for this bill, come to the Oval Office for assigning so that the very first
thing of my presidency was to say, I'm giving you all this relief check, this long national
nightmare is over, take this money, do with it what you need.
We've all suffered together.
The thing about Biden is he has a portrait of FDR in the Oval, which kind of bothers
me because he thinks of himself as an FDR like figure.
But you have to understand the majesty of FDR.
We're talking about a person who passed a piece of legislation five days after he became
president and he passed 15 transformative pieces of legislation in the first 100 days.
We're on day like 34, 35, and nothing is passed.
The reconciliation bill will eventually become law, but it'll become law with no Republican
votes.
And again, that's fine.
But it's not fulfilling that legacy and the urgency of the action.
And the mandate, which I believe that history has handed, it handed it to Trump and he fucked
it up, right?
He totally screwed it up.
He could have remade America and made us into the greatest country ever coming out on the
other side of this.
He decided not to do that.
I think Biden was again handed that like a scepter almost.
It's like, all you have to do, all America wants is for you to raise it up high.
But he's keeping it within the realm of traditional politics.
I think it's a huge mistake.
Why?
So everything he's saying makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
It's like, again, if the alien showed up, it's like the obvious thing to do is like, what's
the popular thing, like 80% of Americans support this, do that clean.
Also do it with grace where you're able to bring people together.
Not like in a political way, but like obvious common sense way, like just people, the Republicans
and Democrats is bringing them together on a policy and like bold, just hammer it without
the dirt, without the mess, whatever, try to compromise.
Just yell, have a good Twitter account, like loud, very clear, we're going to give a $2,000
stimulus check, anyone who wants a vaccine, gets a vaccine at scale, let's make America
great again by manufacturing, like we are manufacturing most of the world's vaccine
because we're bad motherfuckers and without maybe with more eloquence than that and just
do that.
Why haven't we seen that for many, for several presidencies?
Because of coalitional politics and they owe something to somebody else.
For example, Biden has got a lot of the Democratic constituency has to satisfy within this bill,
so there's going to be a lot of shit that goes in there, state and local aid, all of
a sudden, again, I'm not even saying this is bad, but he's like, his theory is, and
this isn't wrong, is like, we're going to take the really popular stuff and use it as
cover for the more downwardly less popular.
And so the Dems could face the accusation, the people who are on this side, this is their
pushback to me.
They're like, why would we give away the most popular thing in the bill, and then we would
never be able to pass state and local aid, right?
Why would we do that?
And the Republicans do the same thing, right?
Like Mitch McConnell, because he's a fucking idiot, decided to say, we're going to pair
these $2,000 stimulus checks with like section 230 repeal and was like, oh, it's obviously
dead, right?
Like it's not going to happen together.
That's largely why I believe Trump lost the election and why those races down in Georgia
went the way that they did.
Obviously, Trump had something to do with it, but the reason why is they have longstanding
things that they've wanted to get done.
And in the words of Rahm Emanuel, never let a good crisis go to waste and try and get
as much as you possibly can done within a single bill.
My counter would be this, things have worked this way for too long, which is that the reconciliation
bill is almost certainly going to be the only large signature legislative accomplishment
of the Biden presidency.
That's just how American politics works.
Maybe he gets one more, maybe one, he gets a second reconciliation bill, then you're
running for midterms, it's over.
I believe that by trying to change the paradigm of our politics, leaning into exactly what
I'm talking here, you could possibly transcend that to a new one.
And I'm not naive.
I think people respond to political pressures, and the way that we found this out was David
Perdue, who was just a total corporate dollar general, CEO guy.
He was against the original $1,200 stimulus checks.
But then Trump came out, who's the single most popular figure in the Republican Party.
He's like, I want $2,000 stimulus checks.
And all of a sudden, Perdue running in Georgia is like, yeah, I'm with President Trump.
I want a $2,000 stimulus check.
That was, if you're an astute observer of politics, to say, you can see there that you
can force people to do the right thing because it's the popular thing.
And that if it's clean, if you don't give them any other excuse, they have to do it.
So this is what we've been gaslit into our culture war framework of politics.
And the reason it feels so broken and awful is because it is, but there is a way out.
It's just that nobody wants to be, it's a game of chicken, right?
Because maybe it is true.
Maybe we would never be able to get your other Democratic priorities or Republican priorities.
But I think that the country understands that this is fucking terrible and would be willing
to support somebody who does it differently.
There's just a lot of disincentives to not stay without, there's just a lot of incentives
to not stray from the traditional path.
Yeah, is it also possible that the A students are not participating?
Like we drove all of the superstars away from politics.
So like you just had this argument before.
I mean, everything you're saying sort of rings true.
Like this is the obvious thing to do as a student of history.
You can always like tell, like if you look at great people in history, this is what
the great leaders in history, this is what they did.
It's like clean, bold action.
Sometimes facing crisis, but we're facing a crisis.
No, we're in a crisis, exactly.
So why don't we, why don't we see those leaders step up?
That's, I mean, you say that's kind of like, it makes sense.
There's a lot of different interests to play.
You don't want to risk too many things so on and so forth.
But that's what like, that sounds like the C students.
I don't think it's that, I think it's that the pipeline of politician creation is just
totally broken from beginning to end.
So it's not that A students don't want to be politicians.
It's basically the way that our current primary system is constructed is what is the greatest
threat to you as a member of Congress?
It's not losing your reelection.
It's losing your primary, right?
So that means, especially in a safe district, you're most concerned about being hit if you're
a Republican from the right and if you're a Democrat from the left for not being a good
enough one.
That's actually what stops people, more heterodox people in particular from winning primaries
because the people who vote in our primaries are the party faithful.
That's how you get the production, the production.
It's important to understand the production pipeline, which is that, all right, I'm from
Texas, so that's what I know best.
So it's like, if you think in Texas, if you're a more heterodox like state legislature or
something who works with the left on this and does that, you're going to get your ass
beat in a Republican primary because they're going to be like, he worked with the left
to do this, blah, blah, take it out of context and you're screwed.
And then that means you never ascend up the next level of the ladder and then so on and
so forth all the way.
But I do think Trump changed everything.
This is why I have some hope, which is that he showed me that all the people I listened
to were totally wrong about politics.
And that's the most valuable lesson you could ever teach me, which was, I was like, wait,
I don't have to listen to these people because they don't know anything, actually.
That's powerful, man.
I'm like, he did it.
That's exceptionally powerful.
This guy.
Even if he didn't do anything with it.
It doesn't matter.
Right.
He showed that it's possible.
Exactly.
But that means a lot.
You're absolutely right.
There's young people right now that kind of look, turn around and like, huh.
You're like, wait, I don't have to comb my hair a certain way and go to law school and
be an asshole who everybody knows is an asshole and then get elected to state legislature.
I mean, look, who's the number one person in the New York City primary right now?
Andrew Yang.
He's polling higher than everybody else in the race.
Look, maybe the polls are totally fucked and maybe he'll lose because of ranked choice
voting and all of that.
But I consider Andrew, I mean, I know him a little bit and I've followed his candidacy
from the very beginning.
I consider him an inspiration.
He's the new generation of politics.
If I see who's going to be president 20 years from now, it's going to be, I'm not saying
it's going to be Andrew Yang.
I think it's going to be somebody like Andrew Yang outside the political system who talks
in a totally different way.
It's completely one of my favorite things that he said on the debate stage, he's like,
look at us.
We're all wearing makeup.
It's crazy.
He brought that, that he brought that and he's writing like, yeah, why are they all
wearing makeup?
He probably arguably hasn't gone far enough almost, but he showed that it's possible.
And then you see other like AOC is a good example of somebody, at least in my opinion,
is doing the same kind of thing, but going too far in like, well, I don't know, she's
doing the Trump thing, but on the other side.
So I don't know.
What's too far?
Who knows?
Don't take an normative judgment of it.
I will tell you the future of politics.
Appreciate the art of it.
No, I do.
Look, I don't, I'm not a big AOC fan, but she's a genius, media genius, once in a generation
talent.
The way that she uses social media, Instagram, and everybody on the right is like trying to
copy her.
Like Matt Gaetz is like, I want to be the conservative AOC.
I'm like, it's just not going to happen.
You just don't have it.
Like what she has, it's like, it's electric.
And Trump had that.
Like I've been to a Trump rally, like to cover as a journalist is nothing like it in America.
And Yang is similar.
It's the same way where you're like, there is something going on here, which is just,
like I've been to an Obama rally, I've been to a Clinton rally, I've been to several normal
politics.
Yeah, that's fine.
With Trump and with Yang, it was, it's another world.
Yeah.
It's another world.
There's probably thousands of people listening right now, but we're just like doing a slow
clap.
Yes.
I know.
I know.
Yang gang forever.
Okay.
But yeah, I mean, my worst fear, I prefer Andrew Yang kind of free improvisational idea, exchange
all that versus AOC, who I think no matter what she stands for is a drama machine, creates
dramas just like Trump does.
I would say my worst fear would be in 2024, is the AOC old enough?
It'd be AOC versus Trump.
I don't think she's old enough.
I think you'd have to be, I think she's 30, so she needs five more years.
So probably not.
Yeah.
Okay.
But that kind of, that's or Trump Jr.
Well, AOC probably wouldn't win a Democratic primary.
So I mean, look, Joe Biden is, you know, they pretty much showed that.
That's exactly what you're saying.
Yes.
This process grooms you over time.
You see the same thing in academia actually, which is very interesting, is the process
of getting tenure.
There's this, it's like you're being taught without explicitly being taught to behave in
the way that everybody's behaved before.
I've heard this, it was funny.
I've had a few conversations that were deeply disappointing, which are, which involved statements
like, this is what's good for your career.
This kind of conversation, almost like mentor-to-mentee conversation, where it's, you know, it's like,
there's a grooming process in the same way, I guess you're saying the primary process does
the same kind of thing.
So I mean, that's what people have talked about with Andrew Yang, he was being suppressed
by a bunch of different forces, the mainstream media, you know, just the democratic, just
that whole process didn't like the honesty that he was showing, right?
For now, but here's my question to you.
People got to see, look, Jordan Peterson is one of the most famous people in America,
right?
Like you have a massive podcast, you're more famous than half, 99% of the people at MIT.
So like, from that perspective, everything has changed.
And somewhere out there, there's a student who's taking notice.
And I've noticed that with my own career, everybody thought I was crazy for doing this
show with Crystal.
The Hill.
They're like, what are you doing?
You're a White House correspondent.
You've got a job forever.
The other job offer I had was being a White House correspondent.
And people thought I was nuts for not just sticking there and, you know, aging out within
Washington, pining for appearances on Fox News and CNN and MSNBC.
But I hated it.
I just hated doing it.
And I did not want to be a company man, like a Washington man, who's one of those guys
who like brags to his friends about how many times he's been on Fox or whatever, mostly
because I just have a rebellious streak and I hate being at the subject of other people.
I created something new, which a lot of people watch to get their news.
And I noticed that younger people who are almost all my audience, they don't really
look up to any of the people and traditional, right?
They don't, they don't go and they're not coming up and being like, how do I be like
Jim Acosta?
You know, they're like, they're like, hey, how did you do what you do?
And the way you did it is by bucking the system.
So I think that we are at a total split point.
And look, there will always be a path for people, because like, I don't want people
to over-learn this lesson.
I have people who are like, I'm not going to go to college and I'm like, well, just
wait.
Yeah.
Like, I'm just starting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like stop.
Just like, just hold on a second.
But there will always be a path for the institutional that will always be there for you.
But now there's something else.
And now there's another game in town, and that's more appealing to millions and millions
and millions and millions of people who feel unserved by the corporate media, CNN, and
these people, possibly who feel unserved in the, you know, the faculty.
Like if you are an up and comer who wants to teach as many young people as possible,
I think you should be on YouTube, right?
Like look at the Khan Academy guy.
That guy created a huge business.
So I just think we can be cynical and like upset about what that system is, but we should
also have hope.
Like I have a lot of hope for what can be in the future.
Yeah.
There's a guy, people should check us up.
My story is a little bit different because I basically stepped aside with the dream of
being an entrepreneur earlier in the pipeline than like a legitimate like senior faculty
would.
Like somebody, people should check out Andrew Huberman from Stanford, who's in your scientist,
who's as world-class as it gets in terms of like 10-year faculty, just a really world-class
researcher.
And now he's doing YouTube.
Yeah.
I see him on Instagram.
Yeah.
And he's great.
So he switched.
So he not just does Instagram, he now has a podcast and he's doing, he's changing the
nature of like, I believe that Andrew might be the future of Stanford.
And for a lot, it's funny, like he's basically, Joe Rogan is an inspiration to Andrew and
to me as well.
And those ripple effects and Andrew is an inspiration probably just like you're saying to these
young like 25-year-olds who are soon to become faculty if we're just talking about academia.
And the same is probably happening with government is, funny enough, Trump probably is inspiring
a huge number of people who are saying, wait a minute.
I don't have to play by the rules.
Exactly.
And I have to, I can think outside the box here and you're right.
And the institutions we're seeing are just probably lagging behind.
So the optimistic view is the future is going to be full of exciting new ideas.
So Andrew Young is just kind of the beginning of this whole thing.
He's typically iceberg.
And I hope that iceberg doesn't, it's not this influencer.
One of the things that really bothers me, I've gotten a chance, I should be careful
here.
I love everybody.
But these people who talk about how to make your first million or how to succeed.
And they're so, I mean, yeah, that makes me a little bit cynical about, I'm worried
that the people that win the game of politics will be ones that want to win the game of
politics.
They are.
They are, man.
Like we mentioned AOC is, I hope they optimize for the 80% populist thing, right?
Like they optimize for that badass thing that history will remember you as the great man
or woman that did this thing versus how do I maximize engagement today and keep growing
those numbers?
The influencers are so, I'm so allergic to this man.
They keep saying how many followers they have on the different accounts.
And it's like, I don't think they understand.
Maybe I don't understand.
I don't really care.
I think it has destructive psychological effects.
One, like thinking about the number, like getting excited.
Your number went from 100 to 101 and being like, and today went out to 105.
Whoa, that's a big jump.
That may be like thinking in this way, like, I wonder what I did.
I'll do that again.
In this way, one, it creates anxiety on those psychological effects, whatever.
The more important thing is it prevents you from truly thinking boldly in the long arc
of history and creatively, thinking outside the box, doing huge actions.
And I actually, my optimism is in the sense that that kind of action will beat out all
the influencers.
Well, I don't know, Lex, this is where my cynicism comes in.
So there's a guy, Madison Cothorn, the youngest member of Congress.
And he, I don't want to say got caught, but there was like an email where he was like,
my staff is only oriented around comms.
Like he was basically saying, he got basically caught saying like, my staff is only centered
on communications.
And that's the right play.
If you do want to get the benefits of our current electoral, political, and engagement
system, which is that, what's the best way to be known within the right as a, as a right
wing politician?
It's to be a culture warrior, go on Ben Shapiro's podcast, be one of the people on Fox News,
go on Sean Hannity's show, go on Tucker's show, and all of that, because you become
a mini celebrity within that world.
Left unsaid is that that world is increasingly shrinking portion of the American population.
They barely, they can't even win a popular vote election, let alone barely win an eke
out an electoral college victory in 2016.
Well, but the incentives are all aligned within that.
And it's the same thing really on the left, but you're right, which is that ultimately,
look, this is, this is why geniuses are geniuses because they buck the short term incentives.
They focus on the longterm, they bet big, and they usually fail.
But then when they get big, they, they succeed spectacularly.
The people I know who have done this the best are like a lot of the crypto folks that I've
spoken to, like some of the stuff they say, I'm like, I don't know if that's gonna happen.
But look, they're like billionaires, right?
Yeah.
And you're like, so they were right.
So it's, the way I've heard it expressed is you can be wrong a lot, but when you're
right, you're get right big.
And I mean, I've seen this thing on Muskerear.
I mean, he took spectacular risk, like spectacular risk and just double down, double down, double
down, double down, double down.
And you can kind of tell to him, I mean, you know better than I do, but like from my observation,
I don't think the money matters as, right?
I just, like when I see him, I'm like, I don't, it's, nobody works as hard as you do and builds
the way that you build if it's just about the money.
It's just, it just doesn't happen.
Like nobody wills SpaceX into existence just for the money.
Like it's not worth it, frankly, right?
Like he probably destroyed years of his life and like mental sanity.
Money or attention or fame, none of that.
Yeah.
It's not the primary, primary.
Well, that's what's so appealing to me, to me in particular about him, just like in
how he built.
Like I read a biography of him and just like the way that he constructed his life and like
is able to hyper focus and meeting after meeting and drill down and also hire all of the right
people who execute each one of his tasks discreetly to his perfection is amazing.
Like that's actually the mark of a good leader.
But I mean, if you think about his career, the reason he's a renegade is because probably
he was told to like put it in an index fund or whatever, like whenever he made is like
29 million.
And from PayPal, I don't know how much he made.
And then just go along that one.
He's like, no.
So he, you know, he succeeds spectacularly.
So you have to have somebody who's willing to come in and buck that system.
So for, for, for now, I think our politics are generally frozen.
I think that that model is going to be most generally appealing to the mean person.
But somebody will come along and we'll change everything.
Yeah, I'm just surprised there's not more of them.
Yeah.
On that topic, it's now 20, what is it, 21?
Yes.
Let's, let's make some predictions he can be wrong about.
Good.
What major political people are you thinking will run in 2024, including Trump, Jr., senior
or Ivanka, I don't know, any Trump, Trump.
And who do you think wins?
I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024.
And I think he will run against someone with the last name Trump.
I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump, Jr.
But I think one of those people will probably be the GOP nominee in 2024.
Who was it?
Some prominent political figure, was it Romney, somebody like that said that Trump will win
the primary if he runs again?
Of course.
That's not even a question.
Trump is the single most popular figure in the Republican Party by orders of magnitude.
Still.
Oh, I mean, probably more, honestly.
There was a, actually, I can tell you, because I saw the data, which is that pre-January 6th,
it was like 54% of Republicans wanted him to run again.
Then it went down eight points after January 6th, two days later.
And then after impeachment, it went right back up to 54%.
So the exact same number is in February, a post-impeachment vote, as it was after November.
Now look, yeah, again, surveys, bullshit, et cetera.
But that's all the data we have, that's what I can point to.
If Trump runs, he will be the nominee and he will be the 2024 nominee.
I just don't know if he wants to, it really depends.
Do you think he wins after the Trump vaccine heals all of us?
Do you think Trump wins?
It depends on how popular culture functions over the next four years.
And I can tell you that they are, because I don't think Biden has that much to do with
it, because again, Trump is not a manifestation of an affirmative policy action.
It is a defensive, bulwark wall against cultural liberalism.
So it's like, this is why it doesn't matter what Biden does.
If there are more riots, if there is a more sense of persecution amongst people who are
more lean towards conservative or like, hey, I don't know about that, that's crazy, then
he very well could win.
Okay, let's say Joe Biden doesn't run and they put up like Kamala Harris, I think he
would beat her.
I don't think there's a question, that Trump would beat Kamala Harris in 2024.
And you don't think anybody else, I don't know how the process works.
You don't think anybody else on the Democratic side can take the...
Well, how could you run against the sitting vice president?
It's like if Joe Biden has a 98% approval rating in the Democratic Party, if he says
she is my heir, I think enough people will listen to him in a competitive primary or
a non-competitive primary.
And then there's all these things about how primary systems themselves are rigged.
The DNC could make it known that they'll blacklist anybody who does try in primary Kamala Harris.
And look, I mean, progressives aren't necessarily all that popular amongst actual Democrats.
We found that out during the election.
There's an entire constituency which loves Joe Biden and Joe Biden level politics.
And so if he tells them to vote for Kamala, I think she would probably get it.
But again, there's a lot of game theory obviously happening.
But see, I think you're talking about everything you're saying is correct about mediocre candidates.
It feels like if there's somebody like a really strong, I don't want to use this term incorrectly,
but populist, somebody that speaks to the 80% that is able to provide bold, eloquently
described solutions that are popular, I think that breaks through all of this nonsense.
How do they break through the primary system?
Because the problem is, the primary system is not populism.
It's primary.
So it's like...
But you don't think they can tweet their way to...
Well, you have to be willing to win a GOP primary.
You basically have to be at...
Whoever wins the GOP primary, in my opinion, will be the person most hated by the left.
One of the things that people forget is, you know who came in second to Trump?
Ted Cruz.
And the reason why is because Ted Cruz was the second most hated guy by liberals in America.
But second to Trump, they have nothing in policy in common.
But don't you think this brilliantly described system of hate being the main mechanism of our electoral choices?
Don't you think that just has to do with mediocre candidates?
Like, it's basically the field of candidates, including Trump, including everybody, was just like...
Didn't make anyone feel great.
It's like, really?
This is what we have to choose from?
Maybe a Mark Cuban.
Or like, Mark Cuban is a Democrat.
Or it would have to be somebody like that.
Somebody who...
Because here's the thing about Trump.
It's not just that it was Trump.
He was so fucking famous.
Like, people don't realize he was so famous.
Like, even when I first met Trump, I met a couple of other presidents.
But when I met Trump, even I felt like kind of starstruck.
Because I was like, yo, this is the guy from The Apprentice.
I'm like, this is the dude.
Like, this is the guy from The Apprentice.
Because I'm like, my dad and I used to sit and watch The Apprentice when I was in high school.
And then one of the guys was from College Station where I grew up and were like, oh my God, like, that guy's on The Apprentice.
Like, it was a phenomenon.
There's like that level, it's kind of like when I met Joe Rogan, I'm like, holy shit, that's Joe Rogan.
I don't feel that way when I meet Mitt Romney or Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley.
And I met all of them.
But there's a lot of celebrities, right?
Do you think there's some celebrities you're not even thinking about that could step in?
The Rock?
You have to be...
So, I was about to say, I think the Rock could do it.
But does he want to do it?
I mean, it's terrible.
Like, it's terrible gig.
It's very hard to do.
I don't know if The Rock necessarily has like the formed policy agenda.
Because then, here's the other problem.
What if we set ourselves up for a system where like, these people keep winning, but like with Trump,
they have no idea how to run a government.
It's actually really hard, right?
And you have to have the know-how and the trust to find the right people.
This is where the genius element comes in, is you have to understand that front,
and you have to understand how to execute discrete tasks.
Like, this is the FDR.
This is why it's so hard.
Like, FDR, Lincoln, TR, they were who they were and they live in history
and their name rings like for a reason.
And yeah, I mean, one of the most depressing lessons I got from 2020 is at almost,
it seems like in my opinion, that we over-learned the lesson of our success and not of our failures.
For example, like, we have this narrative in our head that we always have the right person
at the right time during crisis.
And in some cases, it was true.
We didn't deserve Lincoln.
We didn't deserve FDR.
We didn't deserve.
We didn't deserve a lot of presidents at times of crisis.
But then you're like, okay, George W. Bush, 9-11, that was terrible.
Reconstruction, Andrew Johnson, awful, right?
Like, we had several periods in our history where the crisis was there, they were called,
and they did not show up.
And I really, it hadn't happened in my lifetime except for 9-11, and even then,
you could kind of see that as an opportunity for somebody like Obama to come in and fix
it, but then he didn't do it, and then Trump didn't do it.
And you realize, I feel like our politics are most analogous to the 1910s, in terms
of the Gilded Age, in terms of that, remember that long period of presidents between Lincoln
and Teddy Roosevelt?
We were like, wait, who was president, or even TR was an exception, where you're like,
Calvin Coolidge, who's like, silent cow.
So we're living through that.
Grover Cleveland, that's kind of how, if I think of us within history, I feel like
we're in one of those times, we're just waiting.
It feels really important to us right now, and this is the most important moment in history,
but it might be the most...
It could just be a blip, right?
A 20, 30-year blip.
When you think about who was president between 1890 and 1888 and 1910, nobody really thinks
about that period of America, but that was an entire lifetime for people.
How did they feel about the country that they were in?
That's hilarious.
That's how I kind of think about where we are right now.
It's funny to think, I mean, I don't want to minimize it, but we haven't really gone
through a World War II-style crisis.
So say that there is a crisis in several decades of that level, existential risks to a large
portion of the world, then what we'll be remembered is World War II, maybe a little bit about Vietnam,
and then whatever that crisis is.
And this whole period that we see as dramatic, even coronavirus, even 9-11, because you can
look at how many people died and all those kinds of things, all the drama around the
war on terror and all those kinds of things, maybe Obama will be remembered for being the
first African-American president.
But then that's fascinating to think about, oh man, even Trump will be like, oh, okay,
cool.
He would be that guy.
Yeah.
Maybe he'll be remembered as the first celebrity, I mean, Reagan was already a governor, right?
Yeah.
So like the first apolitical celebrity that was, so maybe if there's more celebrities
in the future, they'll say that Trump was the first person to pave the way for celebrities
to win.
Oh man.
Yeah.
And yeah, I still hold that this era will probably be remembered.
People say I talk about Elon way too much, but the reality is there's not many people
that are doing the kind of things he's doing is why I talk about it is, I think this era,
it's not necessarily Elon and SpaceX, but this era will be remembered by the new, like
of the space exploration of the commercial, of companies getting into space exploration
of space travel and perhaps artificial intelligence around social media, all those kinds of things.
This might be remembered for that.
But all the political bickering, all that nonsense, that might be very well forgotten.
One way to think about it is that the internet is so young.
I think about it, so Jeff Jarvis, he's a media scholar, I respect.
He's not the only person to say this, but many others have, which is that, look, this
is kind of like the printing press.
There was a whole 30 years war because of the printing press.
It took a long time for shit to sort out.
I think that's where we're at with the internet.
At a certain level, it disrupts everything, and that's a good thing.
It can be very tumultuous.
I never felt like I was living through history until coronavirus.
Until we were all locked down, I was like, I'm living through history.
There's this very overused cliche in DC where every comms staffer wants you to think that
what their boss just did is history.
I've always been like, this isn't history.
This is some stupid fucking bill, whatever.
That was the first time I was like, this is history, this right here.
Well, I was hoping, a tragedy aside, that this, I wish the primaries happened during
coronavirus so that we, because then we can see, okay, here's a bunch of people facing
crisis and it's an opportunity for leaders to step up.
I still believe the optimistic view is the game theory of influencers will always be
defeated by actual great leaders.
Maybe the great leaders are rare, but I think they're sufficiently out there that they will
step up especially in the moments of crisis.
Coronavirus is obviously a crisis where mass manufacture of tests, all kinds of infrastructure
building that you could have done in 2020, there's so many possibilities for just like
bold action and none of that, even just forget actually doing the action, advocating for
it.
Just saying like this, we need to do this and none of that.
Like the speeches that Biden made, I don't even remember a single speech that Biden made
because there's zero bold, I mean, their strategy was to be quiet and let Donald Trump polarize
the electorate, polarize the electorate and hope that results in them winning because
of the high unemployment numbers and all those kinds of things, as opposed to like, let's
go big, let's go with a big speech that, yeah, it's a lost opportunity in some sense.
So we talked a bunch about politics, but one of the other interesting things that you're
involved with is, or involved with defining the future of is journalism, I suppose, you
can think of podcasts as a kind of journalism, but also just writing in general, just whatever
the hell the future of this thing looks like is up to be defined by people like you.
So what do you think is broken about journalism and what do you think is the future of journalism?
I think the future of journalism looks much more like what we when I are doing here right
now and journalism is going to be downstream from a culture that can be a good and a bad
thing depending on how you look at it.
We are going to look at our media.
Our media is going to look much more like it did pre mass media.
And the way that I mean that is that back in the 18, in the 1800s in particular, especially
after the invention of the telegraph when information itself was known.
So for example, like you and I don't need to let's say you and I are competing journalists.
You and I are no longer competing, quote unquote, to tell the public X event happened.
All journalism today is largely explaining why did X happen?
And part of the problem with that is that that means that it's all up for partisan interpretation.
Now you can say that that's a bad thing.
I think it's a great thing because the highest level of literacy and news viewership in America
was during the time of yellow journalism was during the time of partisan journalism.
Not a surprise.
People like to read the news from people that they agree with.
You could say that's bad echo chambers, etc.
That's the downside of it.
The upside is more people are more educated, more people are interested in the news.
So I think the proliferation of mass media, I mean, sorry, of this format, of long form,
of not just long form.
Dude, I do updates on Instagram, which are five minutes.
You consider it like Instagram, almost even Twitter.
Of course, Twitter.
Twitter is where I get my news from.
I don't read the paper.
I have literally Twitter is my news aggregator.
It's called my wire, where I find out about hard events like the president has departed
the White House.
Not only that, I don't know about you, but I also looked at Twitter to the exact thing
you're saying, which is the response to the news.
The thoughtful sounds ridiculous, but you can be pretty thoughtful in a single tweet.
If you follow the right people, you can get that.
And so that is the future of media, which is that the future of media is it will be
much smaller amounts, it's much larger amounts of people, which are famous to smaller groups.
So Walter Cronkite's never going to happen again, at least in our, in probably within
our lifetimes where everybody in America know who's this guy is that, that age is over.
I think that's a good thing because now people are going to get the news from the people
that they trust.
Yes, some of it will be opinionated.
I'm going to pay my, my program, I'm Crystal and I are like, we are this, she's coming
from this like view, I'm coming from this view.
That's our bias when we talk about information and we're going to talk about the information
that we think is important and it has garnered a large audience.
I think that's very much where the future is going to be.
And the reason why I think that's a good thing is because people will be engaged more within
it, rather than the current system where news is highly concentrated, highly consolidated,
has group think, has the same elite production pipeline problem of everybody knows journalists
all come from the same socioeconomic background and they all party together here in DC or
in New York or in LA or wherever and they're part of the same monoculture and that affects
what they, that affects what they report.
This will cause a total dispersion of all of that.
The, the, the battle of our age is going to be the guild versus the non-guild.
So like what we see right now with the New York times and clubhouse, this is a very,
very, very, very, very intentional thing that is happening, which is that the times talking
about unfettered conversations, that's happening on clubhouse for people who aren't aware.
This is important because they need to be the fetters of conversation.
They need to be the interagent.
That's where they get their power.
They get their power from convincing Facebook that they are the ones who can fact check
stuff.
They are the ones who can tell you whether something is right or wrong.
That battle over unimpeded conversation and the explosion of a format that you and I are
doing really well in and then this more consolidated one, which holds cultural power and elite
power and more importantly money, right over you and I, that's the battle that we're all
going to play out.
Do you think unfettered conversations have a chance to win this battle?
Yes, I do in the long run.
In the long run, the internet is simply too powerful, but here's the mistake everybody
makes.
The New York Times will never lose.
It will just become one of us.
You think so?
They already are.
They are the largest.
The daily?
The daily.
Look at the daily.
Not even that.
Think about it not in podcasting.
The Times is not a mass media product.
It is a subscription product for upper middle class, largely white liberals who live the
same circumstances across the United States and in Europe.
There's nothing wrong with that, but here's the thing.
You can't be the paper of record when you're actually the paper of upper middle class,
white America.
Your job is to report on the news from that angle and deliver them the product that they
want.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Their stock price is higher than ever.
They're making 10 times more money than they did 10 years ago, but it comes at the cost
of not having a mass application audience.
I think people in our space are always like, the New York Times is going to be destroyed.
No, it's actually even better.
They will just become one of us.
They already are.
Their subscription platform.
Well, yes, in terms of the actual mechanism, but New York Times is still, and I don't think
I'm speaking about a particular sector, I think it, as a brand, it does have the level
of credibility assigned to it still.
There's politicization of it, but there's a credibility.
It has much more credibility than, forgive me, than I think you and I have in terms of
your podcast.
People are not going to be like, they're going to cite the New York Times versus what you
said on the podcast for an opinion.
I wonder in the sense of battles, whether unfettered conversations, whether Joe Rogan,
whether your podcast can become the, have the same level of legitimacy or the flipside,
New York Times loses legitimacy to be at the same level of, in terms of how we talk about
it.
It's a long battle, right?
It's going to take a long time.
And I'm saying this is where I think the end state is going.
And look at what the Times is doing.
They're leaning into podcasting for a reason, but not just podcasting as in NPR level, like
here's what's happening.
Michael Barbaro is a fucking celebrity, right?
The guy who does the daily.
That guy's famous amongst these people because they're like, oh my God, I love Michael.
I love the way he does this stuff.
Again, that's fine.
More people are listening to the news.
I think that's a good thing.
And then who else do they hire?
Ezra Klein from Vox, a Kara Swisher also from Vox who does Pivot, which is an amazing podcast.
Or Jane Costa, same thing.
It's personalities who are becoming bundled together within this brand, right?
Okay.
Maybe I'm just a hater because I loved podcasting from the beginning.
I loved Green Day before they were cool, man, but I am bothered by it.
Why doesn't Kara Swisher, she's done successfully?
I think, no, she was always a part of some kind of institution.
I'm not sure.
But she started her own thing, I think.
It would.
Recode, right.
Yeah.
Recode.
I don't know if that's her own thing.
Yeah.
So she was very successful there.
Why the hell did she join the New York Times with the new podcast?
Why is Michael Barbaro not do his own thing?
Because he gets paid and because he wants the elite cachet that you just referenced within
his social circle in New York, which is that I think the biggest mistake that some of the
venture people make is if we give everybody the tools that those people are all going
to leave to like go sub-stack and go independent, within their social circle, sacrificing some
money from being independent is worth it to be a part of the New York Times.
That's sad to me because it propagates old thinking, like it propagates old institutions.
And you could say that New York Times is going to evolve quickly and so on, but I would
love it if there was a mechanism for rebuilding New York Times in terms of public legitimacy.
And I suppose that's a wishful thinking because it takes time to build trust in institutions
and it takes time to build new institutions.
My main thing I would say is public legitimacy as a concept is not going to be there in mass
media anymore.
Because of the Balkanization of audiences, I mean, think about it, right?
This is like lesion, the classic stuff around 1,000 true fans, or no, sorry, like 100 true
fans even now.
Like you can make a living on the internet just talking to 100 people.
If as long as they're all high frequency traders, some of the highest paid people on sub-stack,
they don't have that many subs.
It's just that they're Wall Street guys, right?
So people pay a lot of money, again, that's great.
So what you will have is an increasing Balkanization of the internet of audiences and of niches.
People will become increasingly famous within us.
You will become astoundingly famous.
I'm sure you've noticed this with your fan base.
I just certainly have with mine, like 99% of people have no idea who I am, but when
somebody meets, they're like, oh my God, I watch your show every day, right?
Like it's the only thing I watch for news, right?
Like instead of casually famous, if that makes sense, they're like, oh yeah, it's like Alec
Baldwin, you know?
Like, oh shit, that's Alec Baldwin, but you're not like, oh shit, I love you Alec Baldwin.
This is a Ben Smith of the New York Times, actually, he wrote this column, he's like,
the future is everybody will be famous, but only to a small group of people.
And I think that is true, but again, I don't decry it, I think it's great, because I think
that the more that that happens, the more engaged people will be, and it empowers different
voices to be able to come in, and then possibly, I wouldn't say destroy, but compete against.
I mean, look at Joe.
Joe is more powerful than CNN and MSNBC and Fox all put together.
That gives me like immense inspiration, like he created the space for me to succeed, and
I told him that when I met him, I was like, dude, like I listened to his podcast when
I was like, young, and I remember like when I got to meet him and all that, and I told
him this on this pod, I was like, I didn't know people were millions, were willing to
listen to a guy talk about chimps for three straight hours, including me.
I didn't know that I could be one of those people.
Yeah, me too.
I learned something about myself before the show.
And so by creating that space, I'd be like, wait, there's a hunger here.
Like he showed us all the way, and none of us will ever again be as famous as Rogan,
because he was the first, and that's fine, because he created the umbrella ecosystem
for us all to thrive.
That is where I see like a great amount of hope within that story.
Yeah, and the cool thing he also supports that ecosystem.
He's such a...
He's so generous.
One of the things he paved the way on for me is to show that you can just be honest,
publicly honest, and not jealous of other people's success, but instead of be supportive
and all those kinds of things, just like loving towards others.
He's been an inspiration.
I mean, to the comics community, I think there are a bunch of...
Before that, I think there were all a bunch of competitive haters towards each other.
Yeah, and now he's like just injected love.
Yeah.
They're still...
Many are still resistant, but they're like, they can't help it because he's such a huge
voice.
He forces them to be loving towards each other.
And the same...
I tried to...
One of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast was to try to...
I wanted to be like a do what Joe Rogan did, but for the scientific community, like my
little circle of scientific community of like, let's support each other.
Yeah.
Well, like Avi Lo, I would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you.
I mean, I assume you put him in touch with Joe, you went on Joe's show, I had him on
my show.
Like, millions of people would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you.
Just by the way, in terms of deep state and shadow government, Avi Lo has to do with aliens.
You better believe Joe.
Dude, the last thing I sent to him was the American Airlines audio.
Did you see that?
The pilots who were...
Oh my God, dude, this is amazing.
So like...
I'm getting excited.
This American Airlines flight crew was over New Mexico, this happened five or six days
ago.
And the guy comes and goes, hey, do you have any targets up here?
A large cylindrical object just flew over me.
Okay.
So this happens.
So this happens.
Yes.
So a guy, or like a radio catcher, records this and posts it online.
American Airlines confirms that this is authentic audio.
And they go, all further questions should be referred to the FBI.
So then, okay, American Airlines just confirms it's a legitimate transmission, FBI.
Then the FAA comes out and says, we were tracking no objects in the vicinity of this plane at
the time of the transmission.
So the only plausible explanation that online sleuths have been able to say is maybe he
saw a Learjet, which was using like open source data, FAA rules that out.
So what was it?
He saw a large cylindrical object while he was mid-flight, American Airlines flight.
You can go online, listen to the audio yourself.
This is a 100% no shit transmission confirmed by American Airlines of a commercial pilot
over New Mexico, seeing a quote unquote, large cylindrical object in the air.
Like I said, when we first started talking, I've never believed in, I've never believed
more in UFOs and aliens.
Yeah.
This is awesome.
Yeah.
I just wish both American Airlines, FBI and government would be more transparent.
Like there would be voices and it sounds ridiculous, but the kind of transparency that you see,
maybe not Joe Rogan, he's like overly transparent, he's just a comic really, but just a, I don't
know, like a podcast from the FBI, just like being honest, like excited, confused.
I'm sure they're being overly cautious about the release information.
I'm sure there's a lot of information that would inspire the public, that would inspire
trust in institutions that will not damage national security.
Like it seems to me obvious and the reason they're not sharing it is because of the momentum
of bureaucracy of caution and so on, but there's probably so much cool information that the
government has.
The way I almost, I wouldn't say it confirmed it's real, but Trump didn't declassify it.
Like you know that if there was ever president that actually wanted to get to the bottom
of it, it was him.
Yeah.
I mean, he didn't declassify it man and people begged him to.
I know for a fact, because I pushed to try and make this happen, that some people did
speak to him about it and he was like, no, I'm not going to do it.
He might be afraid.
That's what I mean though.
They were probably all telling him though, sorry, you can't do this, you know, all this.
And I get that.
And there's this legislation written in COVID that like they have six months to release
him.
Is that real?
What is that?
It's a bunch of bullshit.
I think it's bullshit.
I think it's bullshit.
There's so many different levels of classification that people need to understand.
I mean, look, I read John Podesta, he was the chief of staff to Bill Clinton.
He's a big UFO guy.
He tried.
Like him and Clinton tried to get some of this information and they could not get any
of it.
And we're talking about the president and the White House chief of staff.
Well, there's a whole bureaucracy built just like you're saying with intent.
You have to be like, that has to be your focus because there's a whole bureaucracy built
around secrecy for probably for a good reason.
So to get through to the information, there's a whole like paperwork process, all that kind
of stuff.
You can't just walk in and get the, unless again, with intention, that becomes your
thing.
Exactly.
Let's revolutionize this thing.
And then you get only so many things that it's, it's sad that the, the bureaucracy has
gotten so bulky.
But I think the hopeful messages from earlier in our conversation, it seems like a single
person can't fix it.
But if you hire the right team, it feels like you can.
Can't fix everything.
I don't want to, I don't want to give people unrealistic explanations.
You can fix a lot, especially in crisis.
You can remake America.
Yeah.
And the reason I know that is cause it's already happened twice FDR or in modern history, FDR
and JFK, sorry, FDR and JFK assassination, LBJ to hyper competent men who understood
government, who understood personnel and coincidentally were friends.
I love this.
I don't think actually people understand this.
FDR met Johnson three days after he won this Congress, his election to Congress, special
election.
He was only 29 years old and he left that meeting and called somebody and said, this
young man is going to be president of the United States someday.
Like even then, like what was within him to understand and to recognize that.
And sometimes Johnson as a young member of Congress would come and have breakfast with
FDR, like just to the great political minds of the 20th century, just sitting there talking.
Like I would give anything to know what that was happening.
I hope they were real with each other.
And there was like a genuine human connection, right?
That seems to be the- Well, Johnson wasn't a genuine guy.
There wasn't.
Well, I need to read those thousands of pages.
I've been way too focused on Hitler.
I was going to say, one of my goals in coming to this is I was like, I got to get Lex into
two things because I knew he'll love it.
I know he'll love LBJ as it takes the time to read the books.
Really?
100%.
Of all the presidents?
I didn't say you'll love him, but you'll love the books about him because the books
are a story of America, the story of politics, the story of power.
This is the guy who wrote The Power Broker.
These books are up there with Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon in
terms of how power works.
Study of power.
Exactly.
No, that's why Carol wrote the books.
And that's why the books are not really about LBJ.
They're about power in Washington and about the consolidation of power post New Deal,
the consolidation then, or they're using the levers of power like Johnson knew in order
to change the House of Representatives, the Senate of the United States, and ultimately
the presidency of the United States, which ended in failure and disaster with Vietnam.
Don't get me wrong, but he's overlooked for so many of the incredible things that he
did with civil rights.
Nobody else could have done it.
No one else could have gotten it done.
And the second thing is, we got to get you into World War I.
We got to get you more into World War I because I think that's a rabbit hole, which I know
you're a Dan Carlin fan.
So blueprint for Armageddon, guaranteed.
But there's fewer evil people there.
Yes, but that's what actually, there's a banality of that evil, of the Kaiser and of
the Austro-Hungarians and of, see, I like World War I more because it was unresolved.
It's one of those periods I was talking to you about, like, sometimes you're called and
you fail.
Like, that's what happened.
I mean, 50 million people were killed in the most horrific way.
Like, people literally drowned in the mud, like an entire generation.
One stat I love is that, you know, Britain didn't need a draft till 1916.
Like they went two years of throwing people into barbed wire voluntarily.
And because people loved their country and they loved the king and they thought they
were going against the Kaiser, it's just like that conflict to me, I just can't read enough
about it.
Also, just like births, Russian Revolution, you know, Hitler.
You can't talk about World War II without World War I, right?
And I'm obsessed with the conflict.
I've read way too many books about it.
For this reason is it's unresolved and like the roots of so much of even our current problems
are happened in Versailles, right?
Like Vietnam is because of the Treaty of Versailles.
Many ways the Middle Eastern problems and the division of the states there, the Treaty
of Versailles in terms of the penalties against Germany, but also the fallout from those wars
on the French and the German populate or the French and the British populations and their
reluctance for war in 1939 or 1938, when Neville Chamberlain goes, right?
Like that's one of the things people don't understand is the actual appetite of the British
public at that time.
They didn't want to go to war, only Churchill, he was the only one in the, you know, in the
gathering storm, right?
Like being like, hey, this is really bad.
And all of that.
And then even in the United States, our streak of isolationism, which swept, I mean, things
were, because of that conflict, we were convinced as a country that we wanted nothing to do
with Europe and its problems.
And in many ways that contributed to the proliferation of Hitler and more.
So like I'm obsessed with World War I for this reason, which is that it's just like
the root, it's like the culmination of the monarchies, then the fall, and then just all
the shit spills out from there for like a hundred years.
So World War I is like the most important shift in human history versus World War II
was like a consequence of that.
Yeah.
So I have a degree in security studies from Georgetown.
And one of the things is that we would focus a lot on that is like war, but also like the
complexity around war.
And it's funny, we never spent that much time on World War II because there's actually quite
of a clean war.
It's a very atypical war.
As in the war object, which we learned from World War I is we must inflict suffering on
the German people and invade the borders of Germany and destroy Hitler.
Like the center of gravity is the Nazi regime and Hitler.
So it had a very basic begin and end.
Begin, liberate France, invade Germany, destroy Hitler, reoccupy, rebuild.
World War I, what are you fighting for?
Like are you, I mean, nobody even knew.
You can go to the German general staff, they're like, even in 1917, they're like the war was
worth it because now we have Luxembourg.
I'm like, really?
Like you killed two million of your citizens for fucking Luxembourg and like half of Belgium,
which is now like a pond.
And same thing, the French are like, well, the French more so they're defending their
borders, but like, what are the British fighting for?
Why did hundreds of thousands of British people die in order to preserve the balance
of power in Europe and prevent the Kaiser from having a port on the English Channel?
Like really?
That's why?
That's more what wars are.
They become these like atypical, they become these protracted conflicts with a necessary
diplomatic resolution that's not clean.
It's very dirty.
It usually leads in the outbreak of another war and another war and another war and a
slow burn of ethnic conflict, which bubbles up.
So that's why I look at that one even because it's more typical of warfare and how it works.
Exactly.
It's kind of interesting.
I want to make you realize that World War II is one of the rare wars where you can make
a strong case for it's a fight of good versus evil.
Just war theory, obviously, like, yeah, they're literally slaughtering Jews, like, you know,
we have to kill them.
And there's one person doing it, I mean, there's one person at the core, there's, it's, yeah,
that's fascinating.
And it's short and there's a clear aggression.
It's interesting that Dan Carlin has been avoiding Hitler as well.
Yeah.
Probably for this reason.
Probably for this reason.
Yeah.
I mean, but it's complicated too because there's a pressure that guy has his demons.
I love Dan so much.
So this is the, I don't know if you feel this pressure, but as a creative, he feels the
pressure of being maybe not necessarily correct, but maybe correct in the sense that his understanding,
he gets to the bottom of why something happened, of what really happened, get to the bottom
of it before he can say something publicly about it.
And he is tortured by that burden.
I know, you know, he takes so much shit from the historical community for no reason.
I think he's the greatest popularizer, quote unquote, of history.
And I wish more people in history understood it that way.
He was an inspiration to me.
I mean, I do some videos sometimes on my Instagram now where I'll like, I'll do like
a book tour.
I'll be like, here's my bookshelf of these presidents and like, here's what I learned
from this book and this book and this, and that was very much like a, a skill I learned
from him of being like, as, you know, as a historian writes, you know, you know, look,
I just love the way he talks.
He's like, in the mud.
I mean, you know, he'll be like, quote unquote, he inspires me, man, he really does to like
learn more.
And I've read, I bought a lot of books because of Dan Carlin, he'll be, you know, because
of this guy, because of that guy, in terms of, you know, another thing he does, which
nobody else, and I'm probably guilty of this, he focuses on the actual people involved.
Like he would tell the story of actual British soldiers in World War one.
And I probably, and maybe you're guilty of this too, we over focus on what was happening
in the German general staff, what was happening in the British general staff, and he doesn't
make that mistake.
That's why he tells real history.
Yeah.
And, and make, it gives it a feeling.
The result is that there's a feeling, you get the feeling of what it was like to be
there.
Exactly.
You're becoming, quickly becoming more and more popular, speaking about political issues
in part.
Do you feel a burden, like almost like the prison of your prior convictions of having
to being popular with a certain kind of audience, and thereby unable to really think outside
the box?
I had, I've really struggled with this.
I came up in right wing media.
I came up a much more doctrinaire, conservative in my professional life.
I wasn't always conservative.
We can get to that later, if you want.
And I did feel an immense pressure after Jan, after the election, by people to say, wanted
me to say the election was stolen.
And I knew that I had a sizable part of my audience, but well, here's the benefit.
Most people know me from Rising, which is with Crystal and me.
That is inherently a left-right program, so it's a large audience.
So I felt comfortable, and I knew that I could still be fine in terms of my numbers, whatever,
because many people knew me who were on the left.
And if my listeners abandoned me, so be it.
I had the luxury of able to take that choice, but I still felt an immense amount of pressure
to say the election was stolen, to give credence to a lot of the stuff that Trump was doing,
to downplay January 6th, to downplay many of the Republican senators, or justify many
of the Republican senators, some of whom I know, who objected to the electoral college
certification and who stoked some of the flames that have eaten the Republican base.
And I just wouldn't do it.
And that was hard, man.
I feel more politically homeless right now than I ever have.
But I have realized in the last couple of months, that's the best thing that ever happened
to me.
It's freedom.
It's true freedom.
I say exactly what I think, and it's not that I wasn't doing that before.
It's maybe I would avoid certain topics, or I would think about things more from a team
perspective of like, am I making sure that, I'm not saying I didn't fight it, and I still
I criticized the right plenty and Trump plenty before the election and more.
It's more just like, I no longer feel as if I even have the illusion of a stake within
the game.
I'm like, I only look at myself as an outside observer, and I will only call it as I see
it truly.
And I was aspiring to that before, but I had to have, in a way, Trump stopped the steel
thing.
It took my shackles off 100%, because I was like, no, this is bullshit, and I'm going
to say it's bullshit.
And I think it's bad, and I think it's bad for the Republican Party.
And if people in the Republican Party don't agree with me on that, that's fine.
I'm just not going to be necessarily associated with you anymore.
This is probably one of the first political, political-related conversations we've had
I mean, unless you count Michael Malis, who-
He was great.
He's the funny guy.
He's not so much political as he is like, burning down, man.
He leans too far in anarchy for me.
Yeah, I think he's-
There's a place for that.
It's almost- Well, first of all, he's working on a new book, which I really appreciate.
He's working on a big book for a while, which is White Pill.
He's also working on this short little thing, which is like anarchist handbook or something
like that.
Yeah.
It's like Anarchy for Idiots or something like that, which I think it's really-
Yeah.
Well, me being an idiot and being curious about anarchy seems useful, so I like those kinds
of books.
That's Russian heritage, man.
Yeah.
They're Anarchist 101.
Yeah.
I find those kinds of things a useful thought experiment because that's why it's frustrating
to me when people talk about communism, socialism, or even capitalism, where they can't enjoy
the thought experiment of like, why did communism fail and maybe ask the question of like, is
it possible to make communism succeed or are there good ideas in communism?
I enjoy the thought experiment, the discourse of it, the reasoning and devil's advocate
and all that.
People seem to not have patience for that.
They're like, communism bad, red.
I was obsessed with the question and still am.
I will never quench my thirst for Russian history.
I love that period of 1890 to 1925.
It's so fucking crazy, like the autocracy embodied in Tsar Alexander.
Then you get this weird fail son, Nicholas, who is kind of a good guy, but also terrible,
and also Russian autocracy itself is terrible.
Then I just became obsessed with the question of why did the Bolshevik revolution succeed?
People in Russia didn't necessarily want Bolshevism.
People suffered a lot under Bolshevism, and it led to Stalinism.
How did Vladimir Lenin do it, and I became obsessed with that question, and it's still,
I find it so interesting, which is that series of accidents of history, incredible boldness
by Lenin, incredible real politic, smart, unpopular decisions made by Trotsky and Stalin,
and just the arrogance of the Tsars and of the Russian autocracy.
But at the same time, there's all these cultural implications of this, in terms of how it became
hollowed out, post-Catherine the Great, and all that.
I was obsessed with autocracy because Russia was an actual autocracy, and actually, and
it was there.
They didn't even remove serfdom to the Civil War in America.
That's crazy, and nobody really talks about it.
I was like, was Bolshevism a natural reaction to the excesses of Tsarism?
There is a convenient explanation where that is true, but there were also a series of decisions
made by Lenin and Stalin to kill many of the people in the center left and marginalize
them, and also not to associate with the more, quote unquote, amenable communists in order
to make sure that their pure strain of Bolshevism was the only thing.
The reason I like that is because it comes back to a point I made earlier, it's all about
intentionality, which is that you actually can will something into existence, even if
people don't want it.
That was the craziest thing.
Nobody wanted this, but it still ruled for half a century or more, actually, almost 75
years.
That's fascinating to think that there could have been a history of the Soviet Union that
was dramatically different than Leninism, Stalinism, that was completely different.
Almost would be the American story.
Yeah, easily.
I mean, there is a world where, and I don't have all the characters, there's like Kerensky
and then there was like whoever Lenin's number two, Stalin's chief rival, and even, I mean,
look, even the Soviet Union led by Trotsky, that's a whole other world, right?
Like literally a whole other world.
And yeah, it's just, I don't know, I find it so interesting.
I will never not be fascinated by Russia.
I always will.
It's funny that I get to talk to you because it's like, I read this book, I forget what
it's called, it won, I think it won a Paul's Prize, and it was like the story of, I tried
to understand Russia post-crimea because I came up amongst people who are much more
like neoconservative and they were like, fuck Russia, Russia is bad, and I was like, okay,
what do these people think?
And we have this narrative of like the fall of the Soviet Union, and then I read this
book from the perspective of Russians who lived through the fall, and they were like,
I was like, this is terrible.
Like actually the introduction of capitalism was awful, and like the rise of all these
crazy oligarchs, that's why Putin came to power, to restore order to the oligarchy.
And he still talks to this day.
Do you guys, I mean, that's always the threat of like, do you want to return to the 90s?
Right.
Do you want to return?
To Yeltsin.
Yeah.
But the thing is in the West, we have this like our own propaganda of like, no, Yeltsin
was great.
That was the golden age.
What could have been with Russia?
And I was like, well, what do actual Russians think?
And so that, yeah, I'll always be fascinated by it.
And then just like to understand the idea of feeling encircled by NATO and all of that,
you have to understand like Russian defense theory all the way of going back to the Tsars
has always been defense in depth in terms of having Estonia, Lithuania and more as like
protection of the heartland.
I'm not justifying in this, so NATO shills like, please don't come after me.
But look, Estonians like NATO, they want to be in NATO, so I don't want to minimize that.
I'm more just saying like, I understand him and Russia much better having done that.
And we are very incapable in America.
I think this is probably because my parents are immigrants, I've traveled a lot of putting
yourself in the mind of people who aren't Western and haven't lived a history, especially
our lives of America's fucking awesome, we're the number one country in the world.
Like, we're literally better than you.
Like in many ways.
And they can't empathize with people who have suffered so much.
And I just, yeah, it's just so interesting to me.
What about if we could talk for just a brief moment about the human of Putin and power?
You are clearly fascinated by power.
Do you think power changed Putin?
Do you think power changes leaders, if you look at the great leaders in history, whether
it's LBJ, FDR, do you think power really changes people?
Like is there a truth to that kind of old proverb?
It reveals.
I think that's what it does.
It reveals.
So Putin was a much more deft politician, much more amenable to the West.
If you think back, you know, to 2001 and more right when he came, because he was still,
because at that time, his biggest problem was intra-Russian politics, right?
Like it was all consolidating power within the oligarchy.
Once he did that by around like 2007, there's that famous time when he spoke out against
the West at the Munich security conference, I forget when it was.
And that's when everybody in the audience was like, whoa, and he was talking about like
NATO encirclement and like we will not be beaten back by the West.
Very shortly afterwards, like the Georgia invasion happens.
And that was like a big wake-up call of like we will not be pushed around anymore.
I mean, he said before publicly, like the worst thing that ever happened was the fall
or what did he say?
It was like the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, right?
Yeah.
Of course, people in the West were like, what?
I'm like, I get it.
Right.
Like they were a superpower.
Now their population is declining like it's like a petro state.
It sucks.
Like I understand.
I understand like how somebody could feel about that.
I think it revealed his character, which is that he, I think he thinks of himself probably
as he always has since 2001 as like this benevolent, almost as a benevolent dictator.
He's like, without me, the whole system would collapse.
I'm the only guy keeping all these people in check.
Most Russians probably do support Putin because they feel like they support some form of functional
government.
Stability.
Like against that, which has a long history within Russia too.
So I don't know if it changed him.
I think it just revealed him because it's not like he, I mean, he has a, you know, Navalny
has put that like billion dollar palace and all that.
I don't know.
Sometimes I feel like Putin does that for show.
He doesn't seem like somebody who indulges in all that stuff or maybe we just don't
see it.
Like I don't know.
Well, I don't.
It's very difficult for me to understand.
Thanks to Klopov, a lot of, I've gotten to learn a lot about the Navalny folks and it's
been very educational.
Made me ask a lot of important questions about what, you know, question a lot of my assumptions
about what I do and don't know.
But I'll just say that I do believe, you know, there's a lot of the Navalny folks say that
Putin is incompetent and is a bad executive, like is bad at basically running government.
But to me, why do Russians not think that?
Right?
Is it?
Well, they probably say propaganda.
They would say the press.
Yeah.
They would say the control.
There is a strong either control or pressure on the press, but I think there is a legitimate
support and love of Putin in Russia that is not grounded in just misinformation and propaganda.
There's legitimacy there.
Mostly I try to remain apolitical and actually genuinely remain apolitical.
I'm legitimately not interested in the politics of Russia of today.
I feel I have some responsibility and I'll take that responsibility on as I need to.
But my fascination as it is perhaps with you in part is in the historical figure of Putin.
I know he's currently president, but I'm almost looking like as if I was a kid in 30 years
from now reading about him, studying the human being, the games of power that are played
that got him to gain power, to maintain power, what that says about his human nature, the
nature of the bureaucracy that's around him, the nature of Russia, the people, all those
kinds of things as opposed to the politics and the manipulation and the corruption and
the control of the media that results in misinformation.
Those are the bickering of the day, just like we were saying, what will actually be remembered
about this moment in history?
Totally.
He's a transformational figure in Russian history, really, like the bridge between the
fall of the Soviet Union and the chaos of Yeltsin.
That will be how he's remembered.
The only question is what comes next and what he wants to come next.
I'm always fat.
I'm like, he's getting up.
How old is he?
60 something?
Yeah, 60.
I think he would be 80.
With the change of the constitution, he cannot be president until 2034, I think it is.
So he would be like 80-something and he would be in power for over 30 years, which is longer
than Stalin.
But he still seems to be...
He seems fit.
Yeah, I think he's going to be around for a long time.
But this is a fascinating question that you ask, which is like, what does he want?
I don't know.
Yeah, that's the question.
This is where I think, given all of his behavior and more, I don't know if it's about money.
I don't know if it's about enriching himself.
Obviously, he did, to the tune of billions and billions and billions of dollars.
But I think he probably...
He says close to like an actual Russian nationalist, like at the top, who really does believe in
Russia as its rightful superpower, everything he does seems to stem from that opposition
to NATO, intro to Syria, like wanting to play a large role in affairs, deeply distrustful
and yet coveting of the European powers.
I could describe every czar in those same language, like every czar falls into the exact
same category.
Yeah.
And it makes me wonder, looking at some of the biggest leaders in human history, to ask
the question of what was the motivation?
What was the motivation for even just the revolutionaries like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin?
What was the motivation?
Because it sure as hell seems like the motivation was at least in part the driven by the idea,
by ideas, not self-interest of like power.
For Lenin, it was, I think he was a true believer and an actual narcissist who thought he was
the only one who could do it.
Stalin, I do think, just wanted power and realized, well, I don't know, look, he wrote
very passionately when he was young.
He really believed in communism.
In the beginning he did.
I'm always fascinated as I'm like, around 1920, what happened, right?
Post-revolution, you crushed the whites, now it's all about consolidation.
That's where the games really began and I'm like, I don't think that was about communism.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe it became a useful propaganda tool, but it still seemed like he believed
in it, whether it was, of course, this is the question.
This is the problem with conspiracy theories for me and this is legitimate criticism towards
me about conspiracy theories, which is just because you're not like this, doesn't mean
others aren't like this.
I can't believe that somebody be like deeply two-faced.
I've met them.
You're welcome to Washington.
I think that I would be able to detect.
I don't think so, because people are good.
My question is-
I've seen it.
There's difference, there's two-faced, there's different levels of two-faced.
What I mean is to be killing people and it's like House of Cards style and still present
a front like you're not killing people.
I don't know if, I guess it's possible, but I just don't see that at scale.
There's a lot of people like that and I don't, I have trouble imagining some, that's such
a compelling narrative that people like to say, that's the conspiratorial mindset.
I think that skepticism was really powerful and important to have because it's true, a
lot of powerful people abuse their power, but saying that about, I feel like people
over-assume that.
I see that with use of steroids often in sports.
People seem to make that claim about everybody who's successful.
I want to be very, I don't know, something about me wants to be cautious because I want
to give people a chance.
Being purely cynical isn't helpful.
People say this about me.
He's always saying this to do this.
Yeah.
But at the same time, being naively optimistic about everything is also kind of, people are
going to fuck you over and more importantly, that doesn't bother me.
More importantly, you're not going to be able to reason about how to create systems that
are going to be a robust corruption to malevolent parties.
In order to create, you have to have a healthy balance of both, I suppose, especially if
you want to actually engineer things that work in this world that has evil in it.
I can't believe there's a book of Hitler on the desk.
You've mentioned a lot of books throughout this conversation.
I wonder, and this makes me really curious to explore in a lot of depth the kind of books
that you're interested in.
I think you mentioned in your show that you provide recommendations.
Yes, I do.
In the form of a spoken word, can you be on what we've already recommended, mention books,
whether it is historical, nonfiction, or whether it's more like philosophical or even fiction
that had a big impact on your life.
Is there a few that you can mention?
Sure.
I already talked about the Johnson books, so I'll leave that alone.
Robert A. Carrow, he's still alive, thank God.
He's finishing the last book.
I hope he makes it.
So those Johnson books, second.
Can I ask you a question about those books?
Yes.
What the hell do you fit into so many pages?
Everything, man.
Let me tell you this.
So I'll just give you an anecdote.
This is why I love these books.
The beginning, the first book is about Lyndon Johnson, his life to when he gets elected
to Congress.
The book begins with a history of Texas and its weather patterns, and then of his great-great-grandfather
moving to Texas.
Then the story of that, about a hundred or so pages in, you get to Lyndon Johnson.
That's how you do it.
Okay, it's like a Tolstoy style retelling.
This is the thing.
It's not a biography.
It's a story of the times.
That's a great biography.
So another one, this isn't part of my list, so don't, too, is Grant Ron Chernau.
Ron Chernau's grant.
It's a thousand pages.
And the reason I tell everybody to read it is it's not just the story of Grant, it is
the story of pre-Civil War America, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, all
told in the life of one person who was involved in all three.
Most people don't know anything about the Mexican-American War.
It's fascinating.
Most people don't know anything about Reconstruction.
Now more so because people are talking, it's a hot topic now.
I've been reading about it for years.
That is another thing people need to learn a lot more about.
In terms of non-history books, the book that probably had the most impact on me, which
is also historical nonfiction, is I am obsessed with Antarctic exploration.
And it all began with a book called Shackleton's Incredible Journey, which is the collection
of diaries of everybody who was on Shackleton's Journey.
For those who don't know, Shackleton was the last explorer of the heroic age of Antarctic
exploration.
He led a ship called the Endurance, which froze in the ice off the coast of Antarctica
in 1914, and they didn't have radios over the last exploration, the last one without
the age of radio, and he happens to freeze in the ice.
And then the ship collapses after a year frozen in the ice, and this man leads his entire
crew from that ship onto the ice with a team of dogs, survives out on the ice for another
year with three little lifeboats, and is able to get all of his men, every single one of
them alive, to an island hundreds of miles away called Elephant Island.
And when they got there, he had to leave everybody behind except for six people.
And him and two other guys, I'm forgetting their names, navigated by the stars 800 miles
through the Drake Passage with seas of hundreds of feet to Prince George, I think it's called
Prince George's Island.
And then when they got to Prince George's Island, they landed on the wrong side, and
they had to hike from one side to the other to go and meet the whalers.
And every single one of those things was supposed to be impossible.
Nobody was ever supposed to hike that island.
It wasn't done again until the 1980s with professional equipment.
He did it after two years of starvation.
Nobody was ever supposed to make it from Elephant Island to Prince George.
The guy, they had to hold him steady, his legs, so that he could chart the stars.
And if they miss this island, they're into open sea, they're dead.
And then before that, how do you survive for a year on the ice, on seals?
And before that, he kept his crew from depression frozen one year in the ice.
It's just an amazing story.
And it made me obsessed with Antarctic exploration, so I've read like 15 books on it.
What the hell is it about the human spirit that enables it?
That's the thing about Antarctica is it brings it out of you.
For example, I read another one recently called Mawson's Will, Douglas Mawson.
He was an Australian.
He was on one of the first Robert Frost expeditions he leads, an expedition down to the South.
Him and a partner, they're leading exploration, it's 1908, something like that.
They're going around Antarctica with dog teams.
And one of the, what happens is they keep going over these snow bridges where there's
a crevice, but it's covered in snow.
And so one of the lead driver, the dogs go over and they plummet.
And that sled takes with it, so the guy survives.
But that sled takes all their food, half the dogs, their stove, the camping tent, the tent
specifically designed for the snow, everything.
And they're hundreds of miles away from base camp.
He and this guy have to make it back there in time before the ship comes to come get
them on an agreed upon date.
And he makes it.
But the guy he was with, he dies.
And it's a crazy story.
First of all, they have to eat the dogs, a really creepy part of Antarctic exploration
is everyone ends up eating dogs at different points.
And part of the theory, which is so crazy is that the guy he was with was dying because
they were eating dog liver.
And dog liver has a lot of vitamin E, which if you eat too much of it can give you like
a poisoning.
And so Mosson, by trying to help his friend was giving him more of all the things that
kills you.
I know is dog liver.
And so his friend ends up dying, have a horrific heart attack, all of that Mosson crawls back
hundreds of miles away, makes it back to base camp hours after the ship leaves.
And two guys, or a couple of guys stayed behind for him, and he basically has to recuperate
for like six months before he can even walk again.
But it's like you were saying about the human spirit, it's like Antarctica brings that out
of people or Amundsen, the guy who made it to the South Pole, Robert Amundsen.
Oh my God, like this guy trained his whole life in the ice from Norway.
To make it to the South Pole.
And he beat Robert Frost, the British guy with all this money and all these, I could
go on this forever.
I'm obsessed with it.
Well, first of all, I'm going to take this part of the podcast, I'm going to set it to
music.
I'm going to listen to it because I've been whining and bitching about running 48 miles
with Goggins this next weekend.
And this is going to be so easy.
I'm just going to listen to this over and over in my head.
Elon's obsessed with Shackleton.
He talks about him all the time.
He uses...
I was going to ask you about that.
He uses an example of...
That is an example of what Mars' colonization would be like.
He's right.
No, Antarctica is as close to...
You can simulate that.
Antarctica is as close to what you could simulate what it would get.
That Nat Geo series on Mars, I'm not sure if you watched it, it's incredible.
Elon's actually in it.
And it's like they get there, everything goes wrong.
He dies, it's horrible, they can't find any water, it's not working.
So what is it?
Is it like simulating the experience of what it'd be like to colonize?
So it's like a docuseries where the fictionalized part is the astronauts on Mars, but then they're
interviewing people like Elon Musk and others who were the ones who paved the way to get
to Mars.
So it's a really interesting concept.
I think it's on Netflix.
And yeah, I agree with him 100%, which is that the first guys to make...
For example, Robert Frost, who went to Antarctica, the British explorer who was beaten to the
South Pole three weeks by Robert Amundsen, he died on the way back.
And the reason why is because he wasn't well-prepared, he was arrogant, he didn't have the proper
amounts of supplies, his team had terrible morale, Antarctica is a brutal place.
If you fuck up one time, you die.
And this is what you read a lot about, which is the reason why such heroic characters like
Shackleton Shine is a lot of people died.
There were some people who got frozen in the eye.
I mean, man, this again also came to the North Exploration.
So I read a lot about the exploration of the North Pole.
And same thing, these un-extraordinary men take people out into the ice and get frozen
out there for years and shit goes so bad.
They end up eating each other.
They all die.
There's the famous, I'm forgetting his name, the Franklin Expedition, where they went
searching for them for like 20 years.
And they eventually came across a group of Inuit who were like, oh yeah, we saw some
weird white men here like 15 years ago.
And they find their bones and there's like saw marks which show that they were eating
each other.
So history remembers the ones who didn't eat each other?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, we remember the ones who made it, but there are...
And that would be the story of Mars as well.
That will be the story of Mars.
But nevertheless, that's the interesting thing about Antarctica.
Nevertheless, something about human nature drives us to explore it.
And that seems to be like, a lot of people have this kind of, to me, frustrating conversations
like, well, Earth is great, man.
Why do we need to colonize Mars?
You just don't get it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
It's the same people that say like, why are you running, like why are you running a marathon?
What are you running from, man?
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's pushing the limits of the human mind of the, of what's possible.
It's torch Mallory because it's there.
Yeah.
Simple.
And that somehow, actually the result of that, if you want to be pragmatic about it,
there's something about pushing that limit that has side effects that you don't expect
that will create a better world back home for the people, not necessarily on Earth, but
like, just in general, it raises the quality of life for everybody.
Even though the initial endeavor doesn't make any sense, the very fact of pushing the limits
of what's possible then has side effects of benefiting everybody.
And it's difficult to predict ahead of time of what those benefits will be.
Say with colonizing Mars, it's unclear what the benefits will be for Earth or in general,
with struggling.
What did we get from the moon?
What did we get from Apollo, right, technically, and there were a lot of socialists at the
time making this argument.
They're like, all this money going, you know what, we went to the fucking moon in 1969.
That was amazing.
The greatest feat in human history, period.
What did we learn from it?
We learned about interstellar or interplanetary travel.
We learned that we could do something off of a device less powerful than the computer
in my pocket.
The amount of potential locked within my pocket and your pocket, if you were to define my
policies in one way, it's a quest for national greatness.
There is no greatness without fulfilling the ultimate calling of the human spirit, which
is more.
It's not enough.
And why should it be?
It wasn't enough.
Our ancestors could have been content to sit, well, actually, many of them were, were content
to sit and say, these berries will be here for a long time and they got eaten and they
died.
And it's the ones who got out and went to the next place and the next place and went
across the Siberian land bridge and went across more and just did extraordinary things.
The craziest ones, we are their offspring and we fail them if we don't go into space.
That's how I would put it.
You should run for president.
I'm just pro-space, man.
I love space.
No, you're pro-doing difficult things and pushing, exploring the world in all of its
forms.
I hope that kind of spirit permeates politics too.
That same kind of- It can.
It can.
Well, it can.
And I hope so.
I don't know if you want to stay on it, but I think that was book number one or two.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Is there- Well, this one is second.
This actually is a corollary to that, which is sapiens.
And I know that's a very normal, normie answer.
Yeah.
One of the best-selling books.
I think there's a reason for that.
You've all known Harari, okay, look, yes, he didn't do any new research.
I get that.
All he did was aggregate.
I'm sure he's very controversial in the scientific community, but guess what?
He wrote a great book.
It's a very easy to read, general explanation of the rise of human history.
And it helps challenge a lot of preconceptions.
Are we special?
Are we an accident?
Are we more like a parasite?
Are we not?
What is there a destiny to all of us?
I don't know.
You know, if anything, it's like what I just described, which is more, move, move out.
The evolution of money.
Like, I know he gets a lot of hate, but I think that he writes it so clearly and well
that for your average person to be able to read that, you will come away with a more
clear understanding of the human race than before.
And I think that that's why it's worth it.
I agree with you 100%.
I'm ashamed to, I usually don't bring up sapiens because it's like-
Yeah, it's like, everybody's uncle has read it, but that's a good thing.
It's one of the, I think you'll be remembered as one of the great books of this particular
era.
Yeah, because it's so clearly, it's like the selfish gene with doc is, I mean, it just
aggregates so many ideas together and puts language to it that makes it very useful to
talk about.
So it is one of the great books.
100%.
Another one is definitely Born to Run for the same reason by Christopher McDougal, which
is that-
I'm just gonna listen to this whole podcast next week.
You have to.
You should.
Because it, you are inheriting our most basic skill, which is running and reimagining human
history or reimagining like what we were as opposed to what we are is very useful because
it helps you understand how to tap into primal aspects of your brain, which just drive you.
And the reason I love McDougal's writing is because I love anybody who writes like this,
Malcolm Gladwell.
Who else?
Michael Lewis, people who find characters to tell a bigger story.
Michael Lewis finds characters to tell us the story of the financial crisis.
Malcolm Gladwell writes, finds characters to tell us the story of learning new skills
and outliers and whatever his latest book is, forget what it's called.
But McDougal tells the vignettes and a tiny story of a single person in the history of
running and like how it's baked into your DNA.
And I think there was just something very useful to that for me for being like, I don't
need to go to the gym or like, I'm not saying you should still go to the gym.
I'll be clear.
I'm saying like, in order to fulfill like who you are, you can actually tap into something
that's the most basic.
I don't know if I'm sure you've listened to the David Cho episode with Joe Rogan.
Oh, where he's the animal with the baboon when he goes, and there's something to that
man.
Where it's just like, they are living the way that we were supposed to.
But I don't want to put a normative judgment on it.
They're living the way that we used to.
There's something very fun.
It feels more honest somehow to our true nature.
There's a guy I follow on Instagram, I've come from Paul Saladino, CarnivoreMD.
He just went over there to the Hadza to live with them.
And I was watching his stuff just like, I was like, man, there's something in me that
wants to go.
I'm like, I want to do that.
I wouldn't be very good at it, but I want to.
I'm so glad that somebody who thinks deeply about politics is so fascinated with exploration
and with the very basic nature, like human nature, nature of our existence.
I love that.
There's something in you.
And still you're stuck in DC.
For now.
For now.
The thing of which, you are from Texas, what do you make of the future of Texas politically,
culturally, economically?
I am in part moving, well, I'm moving to Austin, but I'm also doing the Eric Weinstein advice,
which is like, dude, you're not married, you don't have kids.
There's no such thing as moving.
What are you moving?
You're like your three suits and some shirts and underwear.
What exactly is the move and tail?
So I have nothing.
So I'm basically, it's very just remain mobile, but there's a promise.
There's a hope to Austin outside of just like friendships.
I have no, it's a very different culture that Joe Rogan is creating.
I'm mostly interested in what the next Silicon Valley will be, what the next hub of technological
innovation and there's a promise, maybe a dream for Austin being that next place that
doesn't have the baggage of some of the political things, maybe some of the sort of things
that hold back the beauty of, that makes capitalism, that makes innovation so powerful, which is
like meritocracy, which is excellence.
Diversity is exceptionally important, but not, it should not be the only priority.
It has to be something that coexists with a like insatiable drive towards excellence.
And it seems like Texas is a nice place, like having Austin, which is like a kind of this
weird, I hope it stays weird, man.
I love weird people.
I don't know about that, but we can get into it.
But it's, there's this hope is it remains this weird place of brilliant innovation
amidst a state that's like more conservative.
So like there's a nice balance of everything.
What are your thoughts about the future of Texas?
I think it's so fascinating to me because I never thought I would want to move back,
but now I'm beginning to be convinced.
So you hear that Joe, I'm going to stick to this clip.
I am, I'm being honest, and many Texas will hate me for this.
Texas was not a place that was kind to me, quote unquote.
And this is because of my own parent.
Like I was raised in College Station, Texas, which is a town of 50,000.
It's a university town.
It exists only for the university.
So it was a very, I did not get the full Texas experience is purely speaking from a College
Station experience, but growing up first, you know, first generation, or I forget what
it is, whatever, I'm the first American, I was born and raised in College Station.
My parents are from India being raised in a town where the dominant culture was predominantly
like white evangelical Christian was hard, like he was just difficult.
And I think of it there in the beginning, I would say like ages like zero to like eight,
it was like cultural ignorance as in like they just don't know how to interact with you.
And there was a level of always there was like the evangelical kind of antipathy towards
like you being not Christian, you know, my parents are Hindu, like that's how I was raised.
And so like there was that, but 9-Eleven was very difficult, like 9-Eleven happened when
I was in third or fourth grade.
And that changed everything, man.
Like, I mean, our temple had to like print out t-shirts.
And I'm not saying this is a sob story to be clear, I've still actually largely for my
adult life identified on the political right.
So don't take this as some like, you know, race manifesto.
I'm just telling it like this is what happened, which is that like we had, it was just hard
to be proud, frankly, and to have some of the fallout from 9-Eleven and during Iraq.
And the reason I am political is because I realized in myself, I have a strong rebellious
nature against systems and structures of power.
And the first people I ever rebelled against were all the people telling me to shut up
and not question the Iraq war.
So the reason I am in politics is because I hated George W. Bush with the passion and
I hated the war.
And I was so, again, my entire background is largely in national security for this reason,
which is I was obsessed with the idea of like, how do we get people who are not going to
get us into these quagmire situations in positions of power?
That's how I became fascinated by power in the first place was all a question of how
do this happen?
Like how did this catastrophe happen?
I realized it's not as bad as like, you know, previous conflicts, but this one was mine.
And to see how it changed our domestic politics forever.
And so that was my rebellion.
But it's funny because I identified as a left on the left when I was growing up up until
I was 18.
I had also a funny two-year stint.
This is where everything kind of changed for me when I was 16, actually, I moved to Qatar,
to Doha, Qatar, because my dad was a dean or associate dean of Texas A&M University
at Doha.
And so my last two years of high school were at this, I went from this small town in Texas
and I love my parents because they could recognize that I had within me that I was not a small
town kid.
So they took me out of this country every chance they got.
I traveled everywhere and constantly let me go.
And so I was, I went from school and college station to like this ritzy private school,
American school.
Best thing that ever happened to me because first of all, it got me out of college station.
And at that time I had this annoying streak of, I wouldn't call it being anti-America,
but you don't appreciate America.
Let me tell everybody out there listening, leave for a while.
You will miss it so much.
You do not know what it is like to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it.
And I was going to high school with these guys in the Qatari royal family and all I
wanted to do was speak out how they were pieces of shit for the way that they treated Indian
citizens in that country who are basically used as slave labor.
And I could not say one word because I knew I would be deported and I only knew my dad
would lose his job and my mom would lose her job and we would be forced out of the country.
You don't know what it's like to live like that.
Or to be in a society where like, you know, you have like a high school girlfriend or
something and you can't even touch in public or you're lectured for public decency.
Like, listen, I've lived under Gulf monarchy now and I have, that turned me into the most
pro-America guy ever.
Like I came back so like America like, I still am because of that experience, living abroad.
Like that will do it to you.
Live in a non-democracy.
You have, even in Europe, I would say you guys aren't living as free as we are here.
It's awesome.
And I love it.
You're probably another human being than the one who left Texas.
So I mean, have you actually considered moving to Texas and broadly just outside of your
own story?
What do you think is the future of Texas?
What is the future of Austin?
There's so much transformation seemingly happening now related to Silicon Valley, right?
To California.
That's the best part to me, which is that since I left, it's changed dramatically, which
is that it used to be like this conservative state where the main money to be made was
oil.
And everybody knew that.
Petro, it was a Petro state, Houston, all of that.
Austin was always weird, but it was more of a music town and a university town.
It was not a tech town.
But in the 10 years or so since I left, I have begun to realize I'm like, well, the
Texas I grew up in is over.
It is not a deep red state in any sense of the term.
The number one U-Haul route in the country pre-pandemic already was San Francisco to
Austin.
So you have this massive influx of people from California and New York.
And the state, the composition of it is changed dramatically.
The intra-composition and the outro, yeah.
So the intra-composition, it's become way more urban from when I grew up.
When I grew up, Texas was a much more rural state.
Its politics were much more static.
It looked much more like Rick Perry, like that.
He was a very accurate representation of who we were.
Now I don't think that that's the case.
Texas is now a dynamic economy, not just 100% reliant on oil because of its kind of like,
I would call it like regulatory arbitrage relative to California and New York, offers
a large incentive to people who are more, I wouldn't say culturally liberal, but they're
not necessarily like culturally conservative, like the people who I grew up with.
That's changed the whole state's politics.
Beto came two points away from beating Ted Cruz.
Now I'm not saying the state's going to go blue.
I think the Republican Party will just change and we'll have to readjust.
But the re-urbanization of Texas has made it, I'll put it in this way, much more attractive
to me than the place that I grew up.
And then from my perspective, well, first of all, I love some of the cowboy things that
Texas stands for.
But for more practically, from my perspective, the injection of the tech innovation that's
moving to Texas has made it very exciting to me.
It seems like outside of all that, maybe you can speak to the weird in Austin.
It seems like I know that Joe Rogan is a rich, almost mainstream at this point, but he's
also attracting a lot of weirdos and so is Elon.
And a lot of those weirdos are my friends and they're like Michael Malus, those weirdos.
And it's like, I have a hope for Austin that all kinds of different flavors of weirdos
will get injected.
It's possible.
I actually think the most significant thing that happened were Tesla moving there.
The reason why is, I love Joe, obviously, but he can only attract X amount of people.
Elon actually employs thousands of people.
And then you will also Oracle.
Oracle's decision to move to Austin is just as important because those two men, Larry
was Ellison and Elon, they actually employ tens of thousands of people collectively.
That can change the nature of the city.
So you combine that with Joe bringing this entire new entertainment complex with the
bodies of people who will appreciate said entertainment complex, spend money on the
entertainment.
Exactly.
You just remade the entire city.
And that's why I'm fascinated.
Obviously, there's network effects, which is now that all those people are down there,
I mean, if I were Elon Musk, I would donate a shit ton of money to the University of Texas
and I would turn it into my Stanford for Silicon Valley.
Let's introduce some competition and let UT Austin hire the best software developers,
engineers, professors and more and turn Texas into a true like Austin revolving door hub
where people come to UT Austin to get an internship at Tesla and then become an executive there
and then create their own company in their own garage in Austin, which is the next Facebook,
Twitter.
That's how it happens.
This is why I'm much more skeptical of Miami.
There's a whole like tech Miami crew.
I'm like, yeah, like there's no university, it's very organic.
Look, I think Miami is awesome.
I just like, I don't know if the same building blocks are there and also no multi-billion
dollar companies which employ thousands of people are coming there.
That's the ingredient.
It's not just Joe Rogan.
It's not just even Elon Musk if he's still operated in California.
It's all the people he employs.
I think that is where, I think Texas is going to dramatically change within the next 10
years.
Alternative to, it's already become a more urbanized state that's moved away from oil
and gas in terms of like its emphasis, not necessarily in terms of his real economics
and 10 years from now, I don't think it will be necessarily the name prop like of the town.
The only question to me is how that manifests politically because it's very possible though,
because a lot of these workers themselves are California culturally liberal.
You could see a Gavin Newsom type person getting elected governor of Texas or like the mayor
of Austin.
I mean, look, mayor of Austin is already a Democrat, right?
Like, I mean, Joe has his own problems with Austin.
It's funny, I remember him leaving LA and I'm like, we've been to Austin.
You're like, it ain't, you know, it's not everything it's cracked up to be, you know,
necessarily.
But no matter what, you know, a new place allows the possibility for new ideas, even
if they're somehow left leaning and all those kinds of things.
I do think the only two things missing from Austin and Texas are two dudes in a suit that
sometimes have a podcast, talk a bunch of nonsense and a mic.
So let's bring the best suit game to Texas.
I hope you do make it to Texas at some point.
Thanks so much for talking to me.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with SaGar on Jetty and thank you to our sponsors,
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr. about the idea
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He said, never forget that what Hitler did in Germany was legal.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.