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Episode: Peter Thiel on Trump, Elon, and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites
Author: The Free Press
Duration: 01:56:11
Episode Shownotes
On Tuesday night, president-elect Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new initiative in the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.” Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed
in the White House—Dogecoin is a memecoin—more importantly, what the announcement solidifies is the triumph of the counter-elite. A bunch of oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. And they are about to reshape not just the government but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine. And there was one person I wanted to discuss it with. He is the vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel. People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms. He’s been called the most successful tech investor in the world. A political kingmaker. The bogeyman of the left. The center of gravity in Silicon Valley. There’s the “Thielverse,” “Thielbucks,” and “Thielists.” To say he has an obsessive cult following would be an understatement. If you listened to my last conversation with Thiel a year and a half ago on Honestly, you’ll remember that Peter was the first guy in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016. That year, he gave a memorable speech at the RNC, and many in his orbit thought it was simply a step too far. He lost business at Y Combinator, the start-up incubator where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel’s endorsement of Trump “one of the most dangerous things” he had ever seen. Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics—at least publicly. He didn’t donate to Trump’s 2024 campaign. There was no big RNC speech this year. But the bigger change is a cultural one. He’s no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump. On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but, in this conversation at least, still seems to venerate the way that the Ivy Leagues are an indicator of intelligence. But perhaps that’s the secret to his success: He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own. And why wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel’s investments—in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few—have paid off big time. His most recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected as senator and then on the Trump ticket as vice president—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be. Today: Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; and why the Trump 2.0 team will be better than last time, with antiestablishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. We talk about the border, trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what we might face in a dreaded World War III. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary
In this episode, Peter Thiel discusses the emergence of a counter-elite in the political landscape, particularly regarding the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, led by figures like Elon Musk. He addresses the paradox of his libertarian yet nationalist viewpoints, while analyzing the collapse of liberalism and the Democratic Party's inability to engage a broader voter base. Thiel critiques the current political system's rigidity and the decline of individuality among progressives, expressing concerns about identity politics. He also emphasizes the need for nuanced discussions regarding foreign policy, tariffs, and immigration's economic impact, while reflecting on the future of the Republican Party and its ideological shifts.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Peter Thiel on Trump, Elon, and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_07
Today's episode is sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
00:00:05 Speaker_07
FIRE believes that a culture of free speech and open dialogue is the bedrock of a free society, essential for scientific progress, artistic expression, justice, and democracy.
00:00:18 Speaker_07
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00:00:47 Speaker_02
— President-elect Donald Trump announcing the appointments of additional members of his administration today. Tonight, Trump announcing that a Department of Government Efficiency will be led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:01:02 Speaker_07
— On Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, will head a new department in the Trump administration.
00:01:15 Speaker_07
They're calling it the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
00:01:20 Speaker_03
Dogecoin is surging, as you might know, following the president-elect's victory, getting an extra boost following some headlines around Elon Musk.
00:01:27 Speaker_06
We saw Dogecoin surge as much as 20% on Tuesday night, right after Donald Trump formally announced the Department of Government Efficiency, which he called DOGE, in a hat tip to the dog-themed meme coin.
00:01:38 Speaker_07
Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed in the White House. Dogecoin is a meme coin, and if you don't understand what I just said, fear not. I'm sure Nelly will cover it in TGIF tomorrow.
00:01:49 Speaker_07
But what the announcement solidifies, if Trump's win hadn't already, is the triumph of the counter-elite.
00:01:55 Speaker_07
In other words, a bunch of oddball outsiders pulled together, got behind Trump, and ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood. And the oddballs won.
00:02:12 Speaker_07
And they're about to reshape not just the government, but also American culture in ways I don't think we can fully imagine. How they did that and why is a question that I've been thinking about pretty much nonstop since last Tuesday.
00:02:29 Speaker_07
And there was one person, more than any other, that I wanted to discuss it with. And that is the vanguard of those anti-establishment counter-elites, Peter Thiel. People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms.
00:02:45 Speaker_07
He's been called the most successful tech investor in the world and also a political kingmaker. Others call him the boogeyman of the left.
00:02:54 Speaker_07
But he is the center of gravity, at least in a certain part of Silicon Valley, and he's created a kind of world around him. There's the Tealverse, Tealbucks, and Tealists. To say he's an obsessive cult following would be an understatement.
00:03:10 Speaker_07
If you listened to my last conversation with Teal a year and a half ago on this show, you'll remember that Peter was the first person in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016.
00:03:22 Speaker_04
I'm Peter Thiel. I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
00:03:40 Speaker_07
That year, he gave a memorable speech at the RNC.
00:03:45 Speaker_04
Of course, every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
00:04:01 Speaker_07
a speech that many in his orbit thought was a step too far. He lost business at the startup incubator Y Combinator, where he was a partner.
00:04:10 Speaker_07
Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel's endorsement of Trump one of the most dangerous things he had ever seen.
00:04:22 Speaker_07
Jason Calacanis, one of the hosts of the All In podcast, wrote at the time, There is no compromise on this issue, Calacanis wrote. It's not a difference of political opinion. It's about what kind of human being you want to be.
00:04:42 Speaker_07
Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics, at least publicly. He didn't donate to Trump's campaign this time around, and there was no big RNC speech. But the bigger change, I'd argue, is a cultural one.
00:04:59 Speaker_07
Teal is no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump.
00:05:03 Speaker_07
There's Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen, David Sachs, Sean Maguire, and, of course, Elon Musk, among many other tech titans, some of whom used to support the Democrats who have joined the Trump train.
00:05:16 Speaker_07
On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions, or at least paradoxes. He's a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists.
00:05:26 Speaker_07
He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump's White House wants to break up big tech. He's a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and also the culture wars.
00:05:39 Speaker_07
He pays people to drop out of college, but also, in this conversation at least, he seems to venerate the Ivy League. But perhaps that is the secret to his success. Peter Thiel's beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own.
00:05:56 Speaker_07
And why wouldn't you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir, which was used to find Osama bin Laden,
00:06:08 Speaker_07
to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel's investments in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few, have paid off big time. His most recent bet, helping his mentee J.D.
00:06:22 Speaker_07
Vance get elected Senator of Ohio and then Vice President of the United States, seems to have also paid off. I guess the next four years will determine just how high Thiel's profit margin will be.
00:06:36 Speaker_07
Today, Peter Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump, why he thinks Kamala, and liberalism more broadly, lost the election.
00:06:47 Speaker_07
He explains why he thinks Trump 2.0 will be better than the last time, with anti-establishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. He said this just before Matt Gaetz was announced as attorney general.
00:06:58 Speaker_07
We talk about the southern border, tariffs and trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism on the right, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what a dreaded World War III might look like.
00:07:18 Speaker_07
This is a conversation you will not want to miss. Stay with us.
00:07:37 Speaker_00
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00:07:43 Speaker_10
I'm Raymond Huff. I run Russell's Convenience in Denver, Colorado. I've ran this business for more than 30 years, but keeping it going is a challenge. One of the biggest reasons I've found is the credit card swipe fees we're forced to pay.
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That's because the credit card companies fix prices. It goes against the free market that made our economy great. The Credit Card Competition Act would ensure we have basic competition. It's one of the few things in Washington that both sides agree on.
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Please ask your member of Congress to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Small businesses and my customers need it now.
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Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. MerchantsPaymentsCoalition.com.
00:08:36 Speaker_07
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00:08:52 Speaker_07
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00:09:44 Speaker_07
Peter Thiel, welcome to Honestly.
00:09:47 Speaker_05
Thanks for having me, Barry.
00:09:47 Speaker_07
Thanks for making the time. We last spoke, I don't know if you remember this, we were in Miami. It was May of 2023. And the world was a very different place. Joe Biden was the president and he was the presumptive Democratic nominee.
00:10:00 Speaker_07
There was a Republican primary underway. You were supporting Ron DeSantis, but you weren't being very loud about it. And Trump was sort of on the outs with a lot of people. The amount that has changed over the past year and a half is profound.
00:10:14 Speaker_07
Six months after our conversation, October 7th happened, and it felt like the world sort of shifted on its axis. Then Trump won the GOP nomination. In July, Biden dropped out of the race. Kamala was coronated.
00:10:28 Speaker_07
Of course, Trump survived this wild assassination attempt near my hometown in Butler, Pennsylvania.
00:10:35 Speaker_07
And then last week was the election, and Trump not only won the White House, he won the popular vote, and now it looks like the Republicans are poised to control all three branches of government.
00:10:45 Speaker_07
I think it's an understatement to say that we're living in a changed world.
00:10:50 Speaker_07
I think, and the reason that I wanted to sit down with you today is that you saw so many of those changes coming, and you can make an argument that you maybe saw them even too early.
00:10:59 Speaker_07
So I want to start with kind of a broad question, which is, how are you feeling about this political moment that we're in?
00:11:06 Speaker_05
I wouldn't say I'm ecstatic, but I am relieved. I think I would be incredibly depressed if the election had gone the other way. And, you know, it's probably a little bit asymmetric.
00:11:14 Speaker_05
I would have been less happy than I would be unhappy had it gone the other way. You know, I never actually supported DeSantis. I did meet with him a couple of times, maybe toyed with the idea a little bit.
00:11:25 Speaker_05
DeSantis felt promising in early 2021 when he was sort of the courageous COVID governor. And by early 2023, It felt like he was a little bit too locked in on these culture wars.
00:11:39 Speaker_05
And I didn't believe that that was, you know, they're important, but they're not the most important thing. And so it already felt very, very off in early 2023 to me.
00:11:49 Speaker_07
Were you surprised by what happened on Tuesday night? Because someone credited you for predicting it. You said it was going to kind of be a blowout in one direction or the other.
00:11:56 Speaker_05
I didn't think it was going to be that close and I suppose I didn't think that Harris was going to win by a big margin. So if you combine those two things, it's a way of saying that I thought it was going to be a solid win for Trump.
00:12:06 Speaker_05
I mean he was way behind in the polls in 2016 and 2020 and both of those were extremely close and if you just believe the polls hadn't been fully adjusted.
00:12:19 Speaker_05
And they hadn't fully corrected whatever mistake they were making in the polling from four or eight years ago. And the polls were even. That suggested it was going to be a very, very solid win.
00:12:28 Speaker_05
And then on some level, I think it was just a collapse of liberalism.
00:12:33 Speaker_07
Say more. Of liberalism or of the Democratic Party?
00:12:37 Speaker_05
Of liberalism, the Democratic Party. I think it's too narrow to blame it on a somewhat senile Biden and a somewhat goofy Kamala. It was sort of just a much broader collapse. It feels like a much more decisive election.
00:12:51 Speaker_05
In a way, you can say in 2016, Trump beat the Republicans, the Bush Republicans. And he sort of maybe lucked out or snuck by Hillary and she didn't take him seriously at all. You can't say that about 2024.
00:13:05 Speaker_05
Everyone knew it was going to be the Midwest states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. The Democrats gave it their all. They, you know, spent two or three times as much money as Trump spent the last, you know, three, four months.
00:13:19 Speaker_05
And it just didn't work. The institutions tried to prosecute him, prosecute him criminally. They tried to take him off the ballot. They tried to stop him in every way possible. And so unlike 2016, this time it was Trump against the Democrats.
00:13:35 Speaker_05
The Democrats gave it their all, and it just collapsed. I think one other dimension of it that's so many different observations one can make.
00:13:43 Speaker_05
But one other dimension of it that I find striking is that if we talked about this in 2016, it would be, you know, the Republicans are this party of white voters and old voters, and they're going to die.
00:13:54 Speaker_05
And eventually they'll be replaced by younger and more diverse Democrats.
00:13:59 Speaker_07
This was the whole demographics is destiny argument.
00:14:02 Speaker_05
And so for Trump to be able – eight years is actually a long time and there are, you know, a lot of Republican voters from 2016 who are not alive anymore.
00:14:11 Speaker_05
And so for Trump to be able to win in 2024 and by a much more significant margin, at least in the popular vote than in 2016, it means you had to change the minds of millions of people.
00:14:24 Speaker_05
And you had to do something that, if you believe that demographics, destiny, or identity politics means that people cannot listen to reason, and it's all subject to these sub-rational factors like your race, or your gender, or your sexual orientation, or something like this, then nobody would ever be able to change their mind.
00:14:42 Speaker_05
You exploded the lie of identity politics. That, you know, your identity matters more than the argument or the case. And Trump made an argument. JD Mance made an argument. They made a strong case. And I think there was no argument on the Democratic side.
00:15:00 Speaker_05
It was free of substance, free of ideas. You know, people say that Harris struggled in saying how she was different from Biden, how she was substantively different from Biden. But that's too narrow way of putting it.
00:15:13 Speaker_05
She had nothing to say of substance on anything.
00:15:16 Speaker_07
I want to pick up on the idea of the Democratic Party, maybe even liberalism, collapsed. There's so many striking visuals of this campaign.
00:15:23 Speaker_07
But I think one of them is when you look at the murderer's row of celebrities that were lined up behind the Democratic ticket, whether it's It's literally everyone. It's Oprah. It's Beyonce. It's you name a Hollywood celebrity.
00:15:37 Speaker_07
And on the other side, yes, you had a few sort of dissidents from the elite like Elon Musk, but you had, you know, podcasters. You had my pillow guy.
00:15:48 Speaker_07
You had not anyone that people would maybe choose if they were thinking about who to seek endorsements from, this sort of Curry's popular favor. What does that say about like where the culture is?
00:16:01 Speaker_05
Well, I mean, look, these things are always very overdetermined, but I would say it tells us that celebrity isn't what it used to be. And celebrity used to have a certain mystique and it has been somewhat deconstructed.
00:16:14 Speaker_05
And we think of a lot of the Hollywood celebrities, a lot of the, you know, music celebrities as just these left-wing ditto heads. And, you know, they may be smart people. They're not allowed to articulate smart things.
00:16:28 Speaker_05
They're not allowed to be individuals. And one of the striking thing is, I don't think there is room for individual thought left on the left. And it's certainly not in Hollywood. And I think, you know, Hollywood in the 1990s, it was liberal.
00:16:44 Speaker_05
But, you know, behind closed doors, you could say very transgressive things. And you realize it was this liberal show you were putting on. And then there are parts of it you believed and parts of it that you could question.
00:16:55 Speaker_05
I don't think people are able to have conversations even in small groups at dinners behind closed doors in a liberal context. People are not allowed to think for themselves. Same thing for university professors.
00:17:07 Speaker_05
I know when I was at Stanford in the 80s, early 90s, it was overwhelmingly liberal, but you had a lot of thoughtful liberals that were still such a thing as an eccentric university professor. And that's a species that's basically gone extinct.
00:17:22 Speaker_05
And then we can go down the list of institutions. You know, there were elder statesman type figures, people who've been in the government for a long time and were very thoughtful and had a good nuanced perspective.
00:17:34 Speaker_05
And there were all these ways this was more true on the left, on the democratic side, on the liberal side, than the Republican side.
00:17:41 Speaker_05
The progressives thought of themselves as more elite and the smarter people, but there's just no individuality left whatsoever. And then, you know, the story of people like Elon or Tulsi Gabbard or RFK Jr.
00:17:56 Speaker_05
is at some point this sort of straitjacket where you're just joining the Borg is not what you signed up when you started as liberals. You know, I've known Elon since 2000 and, you know, he was never doctrinaire, but for the first 20 years.
00:18:12 Speaker_05
You know, he was left of center. Tesla was a clean energy electric vehicle company. The Republicans were these people who didn't believe in climate change.
00:18:22 Speaker_05
And so it was sort of naturally much more comfortable in sort of deep blue democratic California. At some point, Elon shifted, and it's overdetermined why he shifted or why you shifted or some of these other people did.
00:18:38 Speaker_07
I didn't shift, Peter.
00:18:39 Speaker_05
Everyone else just moved. But everyone feels that way, of course. But I know these things are overdetermined, but I keep thinking part of it is just This sort of straitjacket is not what you all signed up for.
00:18:51 Speaker_05
This intellectual straitjacket where you're not allowed to have ideas, even if you agree with 80%, it's never enough. You have to be 100%. One of the other metaphors I've used is that the left, the Democratic Party, it's like the empire.
00:19:06 Speaker_05
They're all imperial stormtroopers. And, you know, we're the ragtag rebel alliance and it's a uncomfortably diverse, heterogeneous group. And you have, you know, I don't know, a teenage Chewbacca and a Princess Leia type character.
00:19:22 Speaker_05
And then we have, you know, we have a autistic C-3PO policy wonk person and it's a ragtag rebel alliance against the empire.
00:19:32 Speaker_07
I thought a lot about, I don't know if you were into the Hunger Games in the same way you were into Star Wars, but like a lot of, to me, like the people that I know that were reliable Democrats and liberals who either sat out this election or voted Trump for the first time.
00:19:47 Speaker_07
did not do it because they liked Donald Trump. Most of them find him abhorrent. They did it because they wanted to give a middle finger to the Capitol, like in the Hunger Games analogy, because they felt all of the things you're describing.
00:20:00 Speaker_07
And I think one of the things I'm thinking about in the aftermath of the election is will the Democrats double down on all of the narratives and the myths that have landed them in this place.
00:20:13 Speaker_07
You can watch it right now on MSNBC, where they're still talking about, they're somehow finding a way to look at Black voters going to the right, Latino men especially going to the right. And somehow it's still a story of misogyny and white supremacy.
00:20:27 Speaker_07
Or are they going to sort of spend their time in the wilderness regrouping? in much of the way the Democrats did after Carter's loss. And then, of course, you have like Al Frum and James Carville, et cetera, building the Clinton machine.
00:20:39 Speaker_05
Yeah, although that took 12 years. It did. It took a long time. I don't know, but I worry that the sort of skill for introspection, reflection, thought has just really, really atrophied.
00:20:52 Speaker_07
And there's- But isn't losing a very good lesson in-
00:20:56 Speaker_05
It should be, but somehow the Democrat, it's a long history, but the Clintons in the 90s, it was triangulation, which was maybe a little bit nihilistic, moderate compromise seeking, but behind closed doors, I think you had very smart people in the Clinton administration who had debates and were able to articulate things.
00:21:18 Speaker_05
Then you got to some centrist consensus view. There was a big shift with Obama in 2008. And in a way, you could say there were only two people in the Obama administration, two individuals, him and her. And everybody else was just an NPC.
00:21:35 Speaker_05
You were just going with the Borg. And you very quickly figured out what the consensus was. And then it was rigidly enforced. And it had a certain power. But then there were all these ways It went very wrong.
00:21:51 Speaker_05
And then the Obama legacy was that you got Hillary Clinton in 2016, probably Biden was their best candidate in 2020, was almost blocked by Obama.
00:22:01 Speaker_05
And then in 24, you ended up with Harris, who was sort of pushed by Obama and both his VP and then for president this last summer.
00:22:09 Speaker_07
For my mom, who I know listens to this show, an NPC is a non-player character. It's sort of like a zombie.
00:22:15 Speaker_05
Like a zombie, yeah.
00:22:16 Speaker_07
In retrospect, like when historians look back on this moment, I think in 2020, many people, even those who supported Trump, could tell themselves a story that his presidency was some kind of anomaly.
00:22:29 Speaker_07
Now, I think, with this overwhelming victory, historians are going to be telling themselves a very different story.
00:22:36 Speaker_05
Well, 2020 was the fluke.
00:22:37 Speaker_07
Right.
00:22:37 Speaker_05
Explain that.
00:22:39 Speaker_05
This is what seemed important to me about the 2024 election because I think the Hollywood movie term is red conning retroactive continuity and it's like you have a popular character who dies in an avalanche but people want it back and we somehow find a way for him to survive and.
00:22:54 Speaker_05
make it back, and then you come up with a way to make it retroactively continuous. So we have to tell a story of what happened the last eight years.
00:23:03 Speaker_05
And if Harris had won, the story would have been 2016 was a fluke, we can ignore it, and liberalism's basically fine, and we can go back to the sort of somewhat brain-dead but comfortable Obama consensus.
00:23:20 Speaker_05
And it seems to me that the straightforward, retroactively continuous story is that 2020 was the fluke. And it was one last time for this ancien regime with a ancien president, Biden, to dotter over the finish line one last time.
00:23:39 Speaker_05
But it was not a sign of health at all. You're able to put it together through all these paradoxes. Maybe one of the crazy paradoxes of the diversity politics is that one of the lessons of the last three elections for Democrats is,
00:23:57 Speaker_05
maybe they can only elect old straight white men. And the logic of it would be that if you go with a diverse person, you always have to go with a specific category.
00:24:08 Speaker_05
Let's say Kamala Harris is a black woman, but maybe that doesn't mean that much from myself as a gay guy, or maybe it's alienating to Latinos or something like this. And so as soon as you concretize,
00:24:22 Speaker_05
this abstract idea of a diverse person into a specific person, you lose way more people than you get. I mean, I don't know, it's maybe 7% of our population are black women.
00:24:33 Speaker_05
And so, yeah, maybe Harris helps with 7%, but then isn't the logic of identity politics that it should hurt you with the other 93%? If you say, you should vote for candidate X because candidate X shares your trait,
00:24:48 Speaker_07
But I think one of the interesting things about this election, unlike the Hillary Clinton election, which was all about sort of girl boss lean in, female empowerment, Kamala Harris almost didn't talk about it.
00:25:00 Speaker_05
No, it obviously didn't work anymore. Yeah, I think the last time the identity politics worked for real was probably the 2008 election with Obama. And it worked because in 2008, we were still in a pre-internet world.
00:25:15 Speaker_05
And a pre-internet world meant you could tell one message to one group of people and a different message to a different group of people.
00:25:22 Speaker_05
And so for black voters, Obama could say he was a black person and they should vote for him because he was black like them. And to white voters, Obama could say he was a post-racial person and they should vote for him because he was post-racial.
00:25:35 Speaker_05
By the time you get to 2016, It doesn't actually work. Yeah, Hillary can't tell women to vote for her because she's a woman and men to vote for her because she's a post-gender person or something like that.
00:25:49 Speaker_05
And, you know, the sort of micro-targeting Mark Penn political strategy from the 90s was way past its sell-by date in 2016. So, yes, somehow
00:25:58 Speaker_07
Although I will say both presidential candidates, interestingly in this election, had one message for Arab Muslim voters, certainly in parts of Michigan, and a very different message for Jewish voters in the same state.
00:26:11 Speaker_07
So I'm just wondering if the rule always holds.
00:26:14 Speaker_05
That one is complicated, I suppose, and we can analyze in a lot of ways, but I suppose it's evidence of just the total collapse of the Democratic Party if you lose ground among both Jews and Muslims. Like, how do you do that?
00:26:29 Speaker_05
And I can come up with all sorts of ways to explain it, but let's just say as a fact, it sort of suggests to you that, wow, if you can't even gain with one of those groups at the expense of the other, this whole identity politics thing has gone super haywire.
00:26:45 Speaker_05
But yeah, Kamala didn't know how to talk about it. in the right way and maybe there is no good way to do it. But I don't think this is a conversation they can have on the Democratic side because Biden was the compromise.
00:26:57 Speaker_05
He was the old straight white male and the promise was he's going to be the last one we'll ever have. We need him this one time to get through in 2020. So somehow they knew that this was the most electable person in 2020.
00:27:10 Speaker_05
And then of course, we'll get a more diverse person after Biden, but then anybody post Biden is worse than Biden. And then it's only when the senility really, really catches up that we have to do something.
00:27:22 Speaker_05
And then somehow the consensus shifted very quickly to, we don't have time for a primary. Therefore, we have to go with Kamala Harris.
00:27:30 Speaker_05
Therefore, we have to have this wishful thinking that she's the most wonderful candidate ever, even though that's not something we believed for the three and a half years before.
00:27:38 Speaker_05
And then, you know, it works for a few weeks, but then unravels pretty badly, as we all saw.
00:27:43 Speaker_07
I guess I'm curious if you think the X factor in this election was Trump or Kamala's weakness.
00:27:49 Speaker_07
In other words, if Trump had been running against, let's say, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or someone like a Wes Moore or perhaps even a Gavin Newsom, would it still have been a blowout?
00:28:01 Speaker_05
It's always hard to do these counterfactuals, but my intuition is that it was a broader failing of the Democratic Party. It was not just Biden's fault. It was not just Harris's fault. I think all these people are not that impressive.
00:28:15 Speaker_05
If we go with elite credentialing, J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School. If President Trump were here, he would tell you he went to Penn. It's an Ivy League school. Yes, he would. You can't be a dummy. They only take the smartest of the smart people there.
00:28:30 Speaker_05
Only the best. And he would tell you that. And you know, I don't know, in the 90s, Bill Clinton was Yale Law, Rhodes Scholar. Obama was Harvard Law. Hillary Clinton was Yale Law. They had impressive elite credentials. And there was a collapse with Biden.
00:28:49 Speaker_05
Biden said he was a transitional candidate. I think in retrospect, we can say it was a transition from smart to dumb or elite to non-elite. And it was the University of Delaware, and then Kamala is Howard, UC Hastings, law school,
00:29:06 Speaker_05
even dumber, even more mediocre, and there is nothing elite left. And I think Gavin Newsom was University of Santa Clara, not a very elite place at all.
00:29:15 Speaker_05
Shapiro was a little bit smarter, but it's like Georgetown Law School, which is still a lot less elite than... But this is hilarious because you're someone who does not believe
00:29:27 Speaker_07
in the fact that these places should still hold the prestige that they do. You think that they're corrupt and rotten. So square the paradox that's coming through here.
00:29:35 Speaker_05
I can believe they're corrupt and rotten. And that they still select for very smart people? And find it amazing that the Democrats no longer believe in them and that they've come around to my point of view that there's
00:29:46 Speaker_05
Or maybe that they are so rotten that they are no longer good places to learn how to defend liberalism. Maybe there are good places for training conservatives.
00:29:55 Speaker_05
If you go to Yale Law School, if you're one of five people in the class of 170 who's still conservative at the end, you'll be pretty good at understanding what's wrong with liberalism.
00:30:06 Speaker_05
You'll have thought about it a lot, and you'll be a more thoughtful person. And so it will actually train you well to be a conservative. And we're right to value the small number of conservatives who come out of that gauntlet as quite talented people.
00:30:17 Speaker_05
But if you're a liberal and you graduate from any of these places, I don't think you would do a better job defending liberalism. I don't know who the smartest young liberals are. Pete Buttigieg, if you try to make him
00:30:30 Speaker_05
Square the circle and defend, you know, the incredible deficits the inflation You know the out-of-control border, you know all the substantive policy that were wrong It would be more embarrassing than Harris because we expect Buddha Jake to be smart and it would just show How incoherent it is, you know, if it's word salad coming out of Harris, maybe we can blame it on Harris If you had someone really smart, it would be more embarrassing so maybe maybe the liberals were correct to say that they could no longer pick someone from an elite school because it would
00:31:00 Speaker_05
It was sort of blow up all of liberalism whereas now we can still pretend that it was you know Just the fault of Biden or Harris, although I think it was much broader than that I think the whole thing is how you go bankrupt gradually then suddenly and At some point it's just past the sell-by date and it's over and you know, it's somehow I don't know the 20th century lasted
00:31:23 Speaker_05
It went on in this zombie way for like another 20 years, the 2000s and 2010s, and somehow 20th century is actually over.
00:31:33 Speaker_05
And this sort of New Deal liberalism, political correct leftism, this whole constellation of the progressive cult that is the university. You know, these things have finally unraveled.
00:31:47 Speaker_05
And there are people like me who are in some ways oppositional to this or fighting this for a long time. And it's often felt like, man, this stuff never changes. You know, I started the Teal Fellowship to encourage kids to drop out of college in 2010.
00:32:02 Speaker_05
I remember 2019, nine years later, I was at this event at MIT and the university president was talking. It was all these bromides. It was like it was 2005. And it's, man, we're never going to make progress.
00:32:14 Speaker_05
These institutions, you know, they're unreformable, but they don't need to reform. And five years later, you know, the collapse has been pretty big. I don't see how it recovers. They will figure something out, but it's not obvious how they will.
00:32:27 Speaker_07
I mean, something I've been thinking about a lot since Tuesday night is, like, does Peter Thiel feel vindicated in this moment? Sure, but I think there are— I mean, is that an embarrassing thing to answer yes to? Well, it's— You must feel vindicated.
00:32:42 Speaker_07
I mean, here's how I was thinking about it. In 2016, you were the boogeyman, okay? I'm sure you were called that in a million articles, but that's what it was.
00:32:53 Speaker_07
And you were sort of alone as the, maybe the way I think about you is like the vanguard of the counter elite.
00:33:00 Speaker_07
You made history, you were at the RNC, you were the first gay man to ever speak at the RNC, and it didn't lead to a cascade of other people, let's say, standing with you. And this election, you have Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk.
00:33:16 Speaker_07
I want to talk in a little bit about what created that shift. But you were ahead, arguably, by eight years. In my view, there's no way you couldn't feel vindicated.
00:33:25 Speaker_05
Well, I think the fantasy I had in 2016 was something like there were all these deep substantive problems that I think exist in our society. I think our society is too stagnant. We're not making enough progress.
00:33:40 Speaker_05
There's a way the intergenerational compact has broken down and the younger generations finding it much harder to get their footing. And yeah, there's sort of all these ways that our society is no longer progressing The economy is not doing as well.
00:33:54 Speaker_05
All sorts of different variations of this problem of stagnation or even outright decline that I had been talking about for a while. And I think my fantasy in 2016 was that Trump was a way for us to force a conversation about the stagnation.
00:34:13 Speaker_05
You know, make America great again was the most pessimistic slogan.
00:34:17 Speaker_05
That any presidential candidates certainly any Republican candidate had had in a hundred years Because maybe you're gonna make it great again, but you're gonna start by saying we are no longer a great country And that's what the slogan meant and I felt it was a powerful political way of articulating this problem of stagnation and
00:34:38 Speaker_05
You know, what do you do about it? Hard to say. First step is you talk about it. First, how do we make our country great? Don't know.
00:34:45 Speaker_05
But probably first step is not as great as we think we are, and then maybe we can become great again if we level set and admit where we are. And so that was sort of my fantasy.
00:34:56 Speaker_05
And then I don't think the country was remotely ready for this, and certainly not the democratic part of the country. I don't know if the Democrats are ready for it. I think the country as a whole is.
00:35:06 Speaker_05
There is sort of some admission that, man, there was a lot of stuff that Trump was right about. There's a lot of stuff where things sure feel like they're on the wrong track. I think that's where we are in a very, very different place.
00:35:18 Speaker_07
Let's talk a little bit about the shift that happened in Silicon Valley, okay? Because I think what happened is what's called a preference cascade.
00:35:26 Speaker_07
You probably know that term better than me, but it's essentially when several people, maybe a group of people, around the same time realize they're not the only one. And in fact, you know, maybe they represent, if not a majority, a powerful minority.
00:35:42 Speaker_07
And I remember it very clearly because it was the day our son was born. Our son was born. And a few hours later, Trump got shot at in Butler.
00:35:49 Speaker_07
And I watched as people who had sort of all of the aesthetics had been indicating to me that they were Trump supporters.
00:35:56 Speaker_07
But all of a sudden, with the picture of Trump and all of them retweeting it, it became, oh, my God, like abundantly clear as one after the other sort of started to basically endorse him. with this picture.
00:36:08 Speaker_07
Explain that phenomenon to me because like me, I'm sure you know lots of people who have sort of like one politics on Signal or WhatsApp and another politics in public.
00:36:19 Speaker_07
And I felt like over the course of basically from July to the election, the gap between those things sort of radically narrowed. What happened?
00:36:28 Speaker_05
It's probably something like what you described. There was some degree to which it was safer for people to speak out when other people were speaking out.
00:36:37 Speaker_05
You know you're lying and you know that everybody's lying and you know that everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody's lying. At some point, it becomes pretty unstable and it can just all of a sudden shift pretty fast.
00:36:52 Speaker_07
Was Elon the critical ingredient? Did he give people cover?
00:36:55 Speaker_05
I think Elon was incredibly important to it. I think there were a lot of pieces that had built up in Silicon Valley.
00:37:03 Speaker_05
There was always a way where for many years, people had been doubling down on the wokeness, the political correctness, you know, inside these companies. And then it's always an ambiguous thing.
00:37:15 Speaker_05
If something is not working, let's say wokeness isn't really working, it's not making your employees happier and more productive and more constructive, and it's instead deranging it.
00:37:26 Speaker_05
But the ambiguity is, does that mean you need to have more wokeness or do you need to cut it out altogether? And for a number of years, the intuition was, well, we just have to do a little bit more.
00:37:39 Speaker_05
We have to try a little bit harder and do a little bit more. And then there's some point where it just got exhausted. And certainly a lot of the top tech founders and CEOs Felt comfortable telling me this behind closed doors.
00:37:54 Speaker_05
Maybe they're just telling me things that I want to hear But I tend to think they're telling me what they really think and so I was yeah was very aware of this Incredible disconnect and it was in Silicon Valley.
00:38:03 Speaker_05
I think it was a lot of it was experienced as corporate governance as you know, how ridiculous it's gotten to manage these ideologically deranged millennial employees.
00:38:16 Speaker_05
And, you know, I'll try not to name names, but, you know, one of the bigger companies that was in San Francisco, people in 2017, the founders told me they weren't sure they could take any more money from me because I supported Trump and it was sort of difficult to explain to their
00:38:31 Speaker_05
But it was about a 12-month period. By 2019, they hadn't shifted to being pro-Trump, but they really appreciated my courage.
00:38:39 Speaker_05
And they organized their company where they had the hiring goals were to shift employees away from San Francisco Bay Area as fast as possible.
00:38:49 Speaker_05
So we have X percent of people working in San Francisco, and we want to reduce that percentage as quickly as possible for a company as big as we are.
00:39:00 Speaker_05
And then, you know, if we build our employee workforce in any place other than San Francisco, it'll be less woke and less crazy and more productive.
00:39:08 Speaker_05
And, and so this was the kind of just very prosaic conversation you had about how to manage a company. And then, and then at some point we got the preference cascade that was, was 2024. But yeah, obviously Elon gave people. a great deal of cover.
00:39:24 Speaker_05
It certainly seemed incredibly dangerous to me what he did, incredibly courageous. You know, what would have happened to him if Trump would have lost?
00:39:32 Speaker_05
And then certainly it was, well, maybe all of the rest of us can be a little bit more courageous than we otherwise were going to be. But he gave cover to everybody.
00:39:41 Speaker_07
One of the things that was being said on both sides before the election by Oprah and Elon, and they sounded different saying it, but it was the same message, was that if their candidate didn't win, this was going to be the last American election.
00:39:55 Speaker_07
I thought that was totally nuts. But maybe you don't. Or maybe you hear it differently.
00:40:02 Speaker_05
I didn't. want to believe Elon when he said this. I texted him a few weeks before the election and told him, you know, I hadn't believed you when you said this at first, but I think it's because psychologically I don't want to believe that.
00:40:19 Speaker_05
I don't want to believe that the country is so far gone that you have to leave the country or something.
00:40:25 Speaker_05
But the sense in which I felt that he was correct was that if Trump, with much better substance, much better on so many things, could not win in 2024 against the machine, the machine would always win.
00:40:41 Speaker_05
And if the machine always wins, you no longer have a democracy. You certainly no longer have a democratic process within the Democratic Party. We always debate the election shenanigans in November of 2020.
00:40:52 Speaker_05
The far more extraordinary thing was March of 2020, where Biden comes in fourth place, fifth place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and then somehow gets rammed through South Carolina. All the other candidates drop off.
00:41:04 Speaker_05
So this is the extremely non-democratic primary in the Democratic Party in 2020. And then an even less democratic process by which Biden was replaced with Harris.
00:41:15 Speaker_05
And if the machine could defeat Trump, I thought it was reasonable that it would gain even more power and somehow be unbeatable. And, you know, the country would become California, become a one party state.
00:41:28 Speaker_05
And it would be far worse than California because the constraint on California is people can leave California. It's much harder to leave the U.S.
00:41:35 Speaker_07
When you say the machine, explain what you mean by that.
00:41:39 Speaker_05
Well, it's sort of a question of what is actually going on in the Democratic Party or in this progressive cult that is the left. And again, maybe a cult is too kind a word because, you know, a cult normally has a cult leader.
00:41:52 Speaker_05
There's at least one person who's thinking inside a cult, cult leader. And it is, again, it's a,
00:41:59 Speaker_05
Machine because there are no individuals and it's like, you know It's like you are just a small cog in the machine and you're destined to become an ever smaller cog in this ever Bigger machine and that's kind of the vibe of it and ideas don't matter
00:42:15 Speaker_05
debates don't matter, speech doesn't matter. It's just some kind of fast consensus formation process. We get to an answer and then we rigorously enforce it.
00:42:27 Speaker_05
It's always too extreme to describe like the communist party or something like this, but it is this extremely regimented process that's, you know, somehow not very democratic, not very thoughtful, not very Republican, you know, not very American.
00:42:42 Speaker_07
One of the things that interested me about your role in this election cycle is, you know, when you look back at 2016, you were all in, right?
00:42:51 Speaker_07
You gave, you know, tens of millions of dollars between Trump and then I think 16 Republican candidates, including
00:43:00 Speaker_07
Senator now VP elect JD Vance who will get to but you sat this presidential election cycle out and you were at the Aspen Ideas Festival Not a place that I expect to see you and you said this if you hold a gun to my head I'll vote for Trump, but I'm not gonna give any money to his super PAC Why?
00:43:17 Speaker_05
Well, what I – Aspen Ideas Festival, it's a 75% liberal audience.
00:43:22 Speaker_07
So even in front of – It's way big – way more than 75%.
00:43:25 Speaker_05
If you take me literally and you held a gun to my head in front of a liberal audience and I would say I'm still voting for Trump, even if you hold a gun to my head in front of this very liberal audience, you better believe that I'm very, very pro-Trump.
00:43:38 Speaker_05
I also said that I didn't think the money would make that much of a difference, and it turned out really not to. Trump was insanely outspent, and it didn't matter.
00:43:48 Speaker_07
I think what I mean is like, you're all in in 2016, and then it feels like you sort of retreated. Other people stepped into the breach, but you retreated.
00:43:56 Speaker_07
And if I see a pattern to your life and the bets you make, you're often very early and very ahead. And so I guess I wonder what that pulling back indicates.
00:44:08 Speaker_05
I articulated in various contexts why I thought Trump's going to win, why he should win. You know, what I went on to discuss at the Aspen Diaz Festival, probably the thing I said that was the most scandalous was just descriptively, he's going to win.
00:44:22 Speaker_05
He's going to win by a big margin. Because for that audience, you know, it's always Hegelian. The actual is the ideal. And so if you say that Trump's going to win, That's the way of saying Trump should win and he deserves to win.
00:44:37 Speaker_05
And so the most scandalous thing I could have told those people was not, I'm going to work really hard for Trump and it may or may not succeed.
00:44:45 Speaker_05
The most scandalous thing I could tell them was Trump is on the winning side of history and he's going to crush it whether I help him or not. So that was the most shocking thing. And there were like audible gasps when I said that to that audience.
00:44:57 Speaker_07
You said in one interview in 2023 that the Trump administration was crazier and more dangerous than you expected. What do you mean by that?
00:45:06 Speaker_05
It felt very unstable. It felt dangerous for the people who got involved. You know, there were all sorts of people who got prosecuted. People went to jail. They probably did things that were wrong. They were also subject to crazy double standards.
00:45:20 Speaker_05
And so there were aspects of it that felt like, you know, a circular firing squad. There were all sorts of things where it felt like there was a lot of uncompensated volatility for the people that got involved at the time.
00:45:32 Speaker_05
I still have some worries that I'm certainly will be much improved this time. I still worry it will not be improved by enough. One of the paradoxes of our elections is the elections are always relativistic exercises. It's basically two candidates.
00:45:47 Speaker_05
Which one do you like more or which one do you hate less? And then once the elections over we have just one president and then that person gets put on this pedestal and they are always Found to fall way short of that standard.
00:46:03 Speaker_05
So elections are relativistic After the elections, it's absolute and so I have a worry in the back of my head That there are elements of that that will repeat that, you know on a relative basis trump was greatly to be referred to harris You know on an absolute basis.
00:46:21 Speaker_05
There are all these ways I expect him to fall short You know, in some ways the problems are extremely difficult. They are harder than they were eight years ago. The border issue is out of control.
00:46:31 Speaker_05
So, you know, maybe you need to actually deport people instead of just building a wall. And that's a far more violent, far more drastic thing to do. And the foreign policy situation is, you know, there's a crisis.
00:46:47 Speaker_05
Russia, Ukraine, the Iran problem's far worse than it was eight years ago, the China-Taiwan thing. There's sort of all these ways that it feels like the world is sleepwalking to Armageddon. I think Trump is better than Harris.
00:46:59 Speaker_05
Is he good enough to stop us from Armageddon? I hope so. Not 100% sure that he's good enough.
00:47:05 Speaker_07
One of the, I think, very proper fears of those that oppose Trump was the fact that in the first administration, he had a lot of people around him who, perhaps some on the right would view them as swamp creatures, but perhaps other people, me included, would view them as public servants that were trying to sort of keep this thing on the rails.
00:47:27 Speaker_07
many of whom, you know, were burned or fired on Twitter or suffered, as you said, you know, reputational damage, things like that. And the idea is, like, he's burned through the A list, the B list, the C list, and who's left. Do you share that fear?
00:47:40 Speaker_07
Do you think that's well-founded?
00:47:42 Speaker_05
Not at all.
00:47:43 Speaker_07
Really?
00:47:43 Speaker_05
Okay. I don't know. I think they'll have a much stronger bench this time. I think a lot of the, let's say establishmentarian swamp creature people they ended up with were not that good. You know, I don't know.
00:47:57 Speaker_05
You and I, I don't want to pick on too many individually, but someone like general Mattis at defense as the defense secretary, how,
00:48:06 Speaker_05
bad your people skills have to be that you fall for the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos fraud and you're on the board of her company.
00:48:15 Speaker_07
Well, George Shultz fell for that too, to be fair.
00:48:17 Speaker_05
I don't think you consider him a... He was a lot older. You know, I expect a general, in the probably ways they're too regimented, I expect them to have good skills at judging people and leading people.
00:48:30 Speaker_05
And there aren't that many frauds in Silicon Valley that you fall for the biggest one in the last decade. I mean, maybe FTX.
00:48:40 Speaker_07
I just don't know if that's the fair litmus. I mean, Rupert Murdoch fell for it, too.
00:48:43 Speaker_05
He invested in it. He was not on the board. But I think there were sort of all these ways. I don't think these people were that good. And they were not good at rethinking some of the priorities. And there are ways
00:48:59 Speaker_05
that Trump does not have, you know, a overarching ideological agenda. It's not Reaganite. It's not a programmatic agenda. But there is a direction that the neocon interventionism went wrong.
00:49:14 Speaker_05
We need to rethink the failures of especially the Bush Republican era. There's a sense that the globalization project has gone very haywire. Again, it's not clear what you do instead, and there's a part of globalization in theory.
00:49:28 Speaker_05
It was a good thing, a borderless world, a world in which there are no boundaries to trade, the movement of goods, immigration, the movement of people, capital, the movement of finance.
00:49:39 Speaker_05
the power of banks and ideas, free flow of information, the internet. So this was globalization in theory. And then in practice, so much of it somehow got hijacked by corrupt actors that are adversarial to the US.
00:49:55 Speaker_05
The WTO is a free trade organization that by 2001 was hijacked by communist China. And then there is some way the stuff needed to be rethought. And again, Trump, I don't think had a,
00:50:08 Speaker_05
great ideology on this, but directionally I believe he was correct that we needed to somehow rethink these things. And the place where the swamp preachers were very unhelpful is they didn't want to rethink things.
00:50:20 Speaker_05
And I do think this is where the second Trump administration will be in a different place.
00:50:25 Speaker_07
Trump's almost 80 years old. He's not going to change his character and who he is.
00:50:28 Speaker_07
And if you're someone, let's say, who has a great life, maybe you're in Silicon Valley, maybe you're looking and thinking, wait, wow, maybe I could make a big difference in this administration, and you just see the way that he churns through people, what's going to make you overcome this theoretical person to decide to move to Washington, DC and give it a shot?
00:50:52 Speaker_07
I just don't see that aspect of it changing.
00:50:54 Speaker_05
I don't think Trump is going to change his views that strongly, but again, I don't think he's that- I mean his character, not his views, his character. But I think he was right to fire. They were wrong to hire a lot of the people they hired.
00:51:05 Speaker_05
They were right to fire a lot of them because they were not remotely aligned with the administration. There's some way to do it and there's some way not to do it.
00:51:14 Speaker_05
Again, I don't want to pick on too many individuals, but Bolton as national security advisor, he was picked because he agreed with Trump on one thing. which was that Iran was a problem. And he disagreed with Trump on everything else. China?
00:51:29 Speaker_05
I think Bolton didn't have a terribly well-formed set of views on China, and it was not a priority. So he probably disagreed with it as a priority, if nothing else. And then, yeah, maybe Trump should have known this and should not have hired Bolton.
00:51:43 Speaker_05
or Bolton should have been aware of it and should have been able to figure out a way to work within the rough direction that had been set by Trump. And it just blew up.
00:51:54 Speaker_05
So yeah, my hope is there will be way fewer firings and they'll do a better job the first time around.
00:52:00 Speaker_07
In 2016, you had a hand in suggesting candidates for Trump's administration. Vanity Fair, which I'm sure you don't read, called you the shadow president. Who's in that role this time?
00:52:12 Speaker_07
Some people, you know, see Elon Musk camped out at Mar-a-Lago and saying it's him. Other people are watching as potential appointees like Bridge Colby are making their way to pilgrimage in Tucker Carlson's house in Maine.
00:52:25 Speaker_07
Is it him that's calling the shots? Who are the people that are most influential in Trump's year right now?
00:52:30 Speaker_05
I think President Trump is calling the shots and he's probably thought about it a lot more than he did when he came in in 2016.
00:52:40 Speaker_05
I'm not sure he'll get everything right, but I think he is going to be much more focused on bringing in people that are roughly in sync with the program. I'm hopeful it'll be off to a much better start.
00:52:52 Speaker_05
But I think at the end of the day, the buck stops with Trump. And this is a way where it is very different from Biden or whatever the last four years we just had were.
00:53:07 Speaker_07
After the break, we get into the border, foreign policy, the student debt crisis, and much more. Stay with us. Hey, Honestly listeners, I want to let you know about an amazing podcast called Unpacking Israeli History.
00:53:32 Speaker_07
If you read the headlines about what's going on in Israel, you're only getting a very tiny slice of a very long story. Shorn of depth and historical context, so much coverage of Israel can't even get the most basic facts straight.
00:53:46 Speaker_07
One of the things we try and do here on Honestly, and at the Free Press more generally, is to go deeper into the most important topics of the day as we try and get to the truth.
00:53:55 Speaker_07
And that's the mission of Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Dr. Noam Weissman. It offers listeners a journey through the events in Israel's past and its present.
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00:54:16 Speaker_07
The show delves deeply into the nuances and complexities of Israeli history and how it relates to the present, examining tough questions like, is Zionism a colonialist project? Is Israel an apartheid state? And are the settlements an obstacle to peace?
00:54:32 Speaker_07
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00:54:43 Speaker_07
It's November, the leaves are changing, fall jackets are being busted out, and my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, is around the corner. Fall is the greatest, but it can also be emotionally intense. For starters, you may have heard there's an election.
00:54:55 Speaker_07
It's also getting darker earlier and colder, and did I mention Thanksgiving? November is a great time to talk to someone about your goals, or learning how to be more grateful, or perhaps navigating family dynamics ahead of the holidays.
00:55:07 Speaker_07
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00:55:37 Speaker_07
I want to talk about some of Trump's policies. He campaigned on a few policies that seem very inconceivable to me. One of them is this 20% tariff on all goods from other countries and a 60% tariff on goods from China.
00:55:50 Speaker_07
Should we take him seriously but not literally there? Is that going to happen? And if so, what does that look like?
00:55:56 Speaker_05
Well, I don't know, Barry. There's so many levels one can go through this. There are— Well, maybe let's start with this.
00:56:02 Speaker_07
Are those tariffs a good idea, in your view?
00:56:05 Speaker_05
I think directionally they are a good idea. In practice, you probably want to be more nuanced in, you know, there's some things you want to tariff, some things you want to be more careful about.
00:56:15 Speaker_05
But, you know, there's a way free trade theory from the classical economics, the 19th century works, and it's countries trade with each other, but it assumed.
00:56:25 Speaker_05
was that you had comparable labor standards, comparable regulations, you had free flow of capital. So if you make money, you can invest it.
00:56:36 Speaker_05
And then the free trade theory, it implied that things would be near equilibrium, that you wouldn't have countries with chronic trade surpluses or chronic trade deficits.
00:56:48 Speaker_05
If you have a chronic trade deficit as the United States has, it tells you that there's something incredibly off in the dynamics. There's a political way to think about this too, which is there is a way that – I'll use free trade and scare quotes.
00:57:09 Speaker_05
There is a way that free trade, as it currently operates, benefits certain parts of the US and hurts other parts. We have a very strong dollar. In some ways, it helps Silicon Valley.
00:57:21 Speaker_05
In some ways, it helps Wall Street and the financial system because the trade deficit, the current account deficit, gets recycled into the US.
00:57:30 Speaker_05
So if you have a multi-hundred billion dollar trade deficit and China ends up with hundreds of billions of dollars, that it doesn't want to spend on US goods or services, its only choice at the end of the day is to invest that money in the US.
00:57:43 Speaker_05
The money gets invested through the banking system, and the banks make money. So in a way, you can think of the Wall Street banks are long the trade deficit. The bigger the deficit, the more money they make.
00:57:55 Speaker_05
And when the deficits go down, the banks blow up.
00:57:59 Speaker_05
something similar happened between 2006 and 2009 2006 we had an 800 billion dollar current account deficit and Basically, you had to have 800 billion dollars of fake financial products that Wall Street had to sell where it's like a triple-a rated subprime mortgage bond that some clueless bank in Denmark buys up from the US and at some point
00:58:20 Speaker_05
Okay, we don't really want to buy these bonds and maybe we don't want to sell goods to the U.S. because there's nothing we can do with the dollars.
00:58:27 Speaker_05
The trade deficit, current account deficit collapsed and then we had the 2008 global financial crisis, which again was at the time centered on the U.S. banks. So there's sort of a way. Maybe these deficits are good, but the sectoral effect in the U.S.
00:58:42 Speaker_05
is that it really helps certain parts of the U.S. economy at the expense of others. One of the sectors that's hurt the most are these swing states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.
00:58:55 Speaker_05
They were in the business of manufacturing, of building goods that in some sense had to be competitive in this global market, and politically,
00:59:05 Speaker_05
you know, one way to analyze the elections in 2016 was that Trump in 2016 said, we're going to do something about this rust belt problem in the Midwest. And they failed to do much in the next four years.
00:59:20 Speaker_05
And then those states reverted to the Democrats. And then four years later, in a way the Biden people did even less. And so Trump's been given another chance to do something. So if you say, what Trump needs to do or what J.D.
00:59:34 Speaker_05
Vance needs to do to get elected president in 2028 is to fix the Rust Belt problem in the Midwest.
00:59:42 Speaker_05
And maybe the tariffs are bad in some aggregate sense, but just for the Republicans to politically win, you have to do something for those parts of the country.
00:59:50 Speaker_05
But other theory on this is there's a game theory to it as well where if you have counterparts that are engaged in extremely unfair trade, maybe you have to threaten tariffs as a way to get them to open up.
01:00:04 Speaker_05
If you're always saying, we're never going to do anything. you will end up with a very subpar free trade world.
01:00:11 Speaker_05
So this is – even if in theory we believe in free trade, I never want free trade treaties negotiated by people who are ideological free traders because they will always think they don't need to negotiate anything. There are so many other points.
01:00:25 Speaker_05
Let me make one last point on this. If you did 60% across the board tariffs on China, it probably would be very, very bad for Chinese companies and China.
01:00:40 Speaker_05
It would only be mildly bad for US consumers because an awful lot of stuff would get shifted away from China. Because trade is not, we always model it as between two countries.
01:00:52 Speaker_05
And I think there's a lot of stuff that doesn't get shifted back to the U.S. I don't believe that's what happens. So, you know, the iPhone, you can't build those economically in the U.S. So it doesn't get shifted from China to the U.S.
01:01:03 Speaker_05
If you put 60% tariffs on iPhones, and it costs twice as much to make them in the U.S., then they just cost more. But what I think will happen is you shift the iPhones to Vietnam or India or places like that.
01:01:17 Speaker_05
And maybe our trade deficit doesn't go down, but we at least aren't helping our geopolitical rival. Vietnam is an evil communist country, but it's not bent on world domination. If you shift manufacturing from China, to Vietnam. That hurts China.
01:01:34 Speaker_05
It is maybe mildly negative for American consumers. It's really good for Vietnam. But in this geopolitical calculus, that seems very much in the American interest.
01:01:45 Speaker_07
Trump has promised not just to close the border, which I think everyone can now acknowledge after the election has become extremely chaotic and dangerous, but he's promised to deport something like 11 million people.
01:01:59 Speaker_07
Do you think that's actually going to happen?
01:02:01 Speaker_05
I don't think they're literally going to do that. And then at the same time, there is some big way these things need to be rethought a lot. And like trade, there's a theory of immigration where it somehow grows the GDP, it's grown the economy.
01:02:19 Speaker_05
And I always think one of the differences in immigration debates between Europe and the US is
01:02:25 Speaker_05
In Europe, immigration is mainly a cultural issue, and you end up with a lot of immigrants who maybe don't share European cultural values, and then Europe's societies are bad at culturally assimilating these people, and there sort of are a set of cultural challenges with immigration.
01:02:47 Speaker_05
The U.S. is still pretty good at assimilating people culturally, even with a lot of the ways our public schools and other institutions aren't working as well as they used to.
01:02:57 Speaker_05
But I think the challenges with immigration are more of an economic nature in the U.S., and that even though there are ways that immigrants can grow the pie, it also has these effects of creating incredible skews, incredible winner-loser dynamics in the U.S.
01:03:16 Speaker_05
And I go through all these different variations of it. I myself am an immigrant. I was born in Germany. We immigrated to the US in 1968, sort of the craziest year ever.
01:03:26 Speaker_05
People thought my parents were out of their mind to leave Germany and come to the US the 1968, the year the country was self-destructing. And I'm very fortunate they did.
01:03:36 Speaker_05
And so I can't be sort of a categorical anti-immigrant person, or at least it would be sort of weird pulling the ladder up behind me type of dynamic.
01:03:46 Speaker_05
But at the same time, I think one should somehow be able to talk about all the ways that it creates these incredible economic skews and distortions.
01:03:56 Speaker_05
And I know I'll just go down one particular vertical that I think is pretty important, which is Henry George. is this late 19th century economist who's considered quasi-socialist in the late 19th century.
01:04:11 Speaker_05
He's considered semi-libertarian in the early 21st century, which maybe tells you something about how our society changed. But the basic Georgist obsession was real estate, and it was if you weren't really careful,
01:04:23 Speaker_05
you would get runaway real estate prices. And the people who owned the real estate would make all the gains in a society, because there's something extremely inelastic about real estate, especially if you have strict zoning laws or things like this.
01:04:39 Speaker_05
The dynamic ends up being you add 10% to the population in a city, and maybe the house prices go up 50%. And maybe people's salaries go up, but they don't go up by 50%.
01:04:52 Speaker_05
And so the GDP grows, but it's a giant windfall to the boomer homeowners and to the landlords. And it's a massive hit to the lower middle class and to young people who can never get on the housing ladder.
01:05:07 Speaker_05
And there's sort of a way I model what's happened in the US, in Britain, Canada, a lot of the Anglosphere countries is a Georgist real estate catastrophe.
01:05:20 Speaker_05
where basically, and you know, there's sort of ways I can describe this in Los Angeles where we live, you know, all sorts of places where, you know, the real estate prices, the rents have gone up more and more.
01:05:30 Speaker_05
If we talk about the inflation problem, it was inflation and immigration. You know, there's a way you could talk about inflation in terms of, you know, the prices of eggs or groceries.
01:05:40 Speaker_05
You know, that's not that big a cost item, even for lower middle class people. The really big cost item is the rent. And I think in some ways, Trump and JD Vance did manage to shift the conversation a little bit to this real estate problem.
01:05:56 Speaker_05
And again, I don't want to blame it all on immigration, but if you just add more people to the mix and you're not allowed to build,
01:06:05 Speaker_05
new houses because of zoning laws or it's too expensive or it's too regulated and restricted, then the prices go up a lot.
01:06:11 Speaker_05
And it's this incredible wealth transfer from the young and the lower middle class to the upper middle class and the landlords and the old. And there are reasons you might not want to do that. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to do it.
01:06:25 Speaker_05
So that's sort of a very There's no invidious distinctions involved. This is just sort of a basic econ one point we can't even make, you know?
01:06:35 Speaker_07
I think most Americans, though, when they're thinking about the border and immigration, are thinking about particular stories that were you know, I think rightly made a big deal in this campaign.
01:06:46 Speaker_07
They're thinking about criminals and drug cartels and sex trafficking, things like that. They are not thinking, I don't think we should deport the Mexican grandmother living in West Hollywood or whatever. And is that what we're going to see?
01:07:02 Speaker_05
Well, I would say that the incredibly open border has put an incredible stress on the social fabric in a lot of ways. And yeah, there's definitely the fentanyl crisis. There are the narco drug gangs.
01:07:18 Speaker_05
There are all these crazy extreme stories that shouldn't happen at all. But then I think there's also a general version where
01:07:25 Speaker_05
I don't even know what the numbers are, but you have a Los Angeles public high school system, which you have to teach in 30 different languages or something like that, and in which the public schools aren't working.
01:07:36 Speaker_05
And then the amount people have to spend on rent in these places is so much higher than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago as a percent of income. And that's a stress on immigrants. It's a stress on the people they're competing with directly.
01:07:51 Speaker_05
This is a sense in which if you say that lower middle class Mexican immigrants are competing with lower middle class Mexican people in LA, then as an economic matter,
01:08:03 Speaker_05
Those are the people who should be the most anti it if we go with identity politics They say well, you know, we want more Mexicans, but if if you actually think of it in econ one terms No, maybe you don't want more people competing for your two-bedroom apartment and driving up the rent even more or even more people
01:08:21 Speaker_05
crowding in and paying money to the landlord. If you're a Bangladeshi Uber driver in New York City, do you want a lot more Bangladeshis?
01:08:30 Speaker_05
This is always the point I make about cloning, where we can have all sorts of ethical debates about cloning, but the econ one intuition is if we came along with 100 clones of Barry Weiss with competing talk shows,
01:08:44 Speaker_05
You might say, well, I can't debate the ethics of this, but we should be talking about the economics. And you would be right to say, I'm kind of nervous about the economics of that.
01:08:55 Speaker_07
Ban cloning.
01:08:56 Speaker_05
I'm just saying we should at least be able to talk about the economics.
01:08:59 Speaker_07
Let's talk about education, an issue you care a lot about. Trump has promised to get rid of the Department of Education, saying it's unnecessary and effective and a tool of the woke culture wars.
01:09:09 Speaker_07
And he's also threatened to cut funding for higher education. And I guess I want to ask you a first principles question, which is, should taxpayer dollars go to support private universities like Harvard?
01:09:21 Speaker_07
And do you think that getting rid of the Department of Education would be a good thing?
01:09:25 Speaker_05
Yes, it would be a good thing. I think you have to pick the battles of what you can do and where you can change things. There are a lot of indirect ways you can shift things. The NIH gives research grants. A lot of those go to university scientists.
01:09:40 Speaker_05
And then there is a overhead budget, which is typically something like 40%. If you get a million dollar grant, maybe 40% of that, or like 66% overcharge, gets charged by the university in overhead.
01:09:54 Speaker_05
I believe that number can be arbitrarily reset, and you can reset that as a much, much lower number.
01:10:00 Speaker_05
And so a nuanced argument would be, I want more money to go to the scientists, and I want less money to go to the woke administration and diversity, and what we know is this bloated diversity machine overhead.
01:10:15 Speaker_05
We won't defund the universities simply, but we're going to change the overhead expensing. I believe that number can be unilaterally zeroed out by executive order or changed by executive order.
01:10:29 Speaker_05
I think the Department of Education is one of these weird departments where very little can be done and very little changed. But there are things like that that can be done that are quite dramatic.
01:10:40 Speaker_05
There's obviously a student debt crisis that's completely out of control. It was $300 billion in student debt in 2000. It's now approaching $2 trillion. And there's sort of a way that it's crept up on people that is sort of subtle.
01:10:57 Speaker_05
I was looking at this the other day. So if you look at it by cohort, if you graduated from college in 1997, 12 years later, 2009, you paid off most of your student debt.
01:11:09 Speaker_05
It took you a long time, so probably the student debt meant you were slower to start a family, to buy a house.
01:11:14 Speaker_05
It sort of probably in some ways had this deleterious effect on your career, but there was some way that you took on all this debt and you could gradually get out of the hole.
01:11:24 Speaker_05
And then gradually the debt grew faster than the value of the college degree grew economically. And by 2009, the graduates of 2009 are the first cohort
01:11:37 Speaker_05
where the median student with debt in 2009, when you look at them 12 years later in 2021, the debt's higher, which means that you can't even keep up with the interest payments on the student debt.
01:11:50 Speaker_05
It's so big and the value of your college degree for the most part is so low. You get an English PhD, you end up as a barista at Starbucks or something like this.
01:12:00 Speaker_05
And, you know, there are obviously some exceptions, like computer science, but most degrees had so little value, the debt was so big, but then it takes 12 years to realize that it's not working like it used to.
01:12:11 Speaker_05
Because for a long time, the colleges can just say, well, it eventually pays off, it takes a while. And maybe that's true, but if it's no longer true, man, are you in a deep hole by the time you realize it. So there's something that's very off with it.
01:12:25 Speaker_05
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the the Biden policy that maybe on some level, you need to just forgive the student debt because people will never be able to pay it off and we need to have some realistic level setting.
01:12:39 Speaker_05
I don't think they should be bailed out by the taxpayers. And I think, you know, some of it has to be hit to the bondholders, the debt, and some of it has to be hit to the colleges.
01:12:50 Speaker_05
And if the colleges were even partially liable for all these unpaid debts, most of them would be out of business. So there are sort of a number of these things that they're coming to a head regardless.
01:13:01 Speaker_05
I don't think Trump needs to particularly do anything. It's an exponentially growing student debt problem. It's an exponentially growing debt problem generally.
01:13:10 Speaker_05
You know, we had for many years you could kick the can down the road, but eventually end up with a pile of cans and no road. And that's sort of where we are with the student debt thing. And this was a very strange 2024 election where
01:13:23 Speaker_05
There were all these big issues that I think were not being discussed.
01:13:28 Speaker_05
So one other, this is what I speculate was one of the really big issues, even bigger than just the student debt problem, is maybe the bankruptcy of a number of blue states and blue cities, Illinois, Chicago, probably the tri-state area, New York City, maybe even San Francisco, maybe Los Angeles.
01:13:51 Speaker_05
And what we did in 2020 was we used COVID as a cover to bail all these places out. Then in 2021, they spent even more money in this runaway Biden spending. And part of it was a way to bail out all these failed blue cities and blue states.
01:14:08 Speaker_05
And we should not be throwing good money after bad. And Trump doesn't need to do something heroic like shutting down the Department of Education or getting Congress to reduce appropriations.
01:14:21 Speaker_05
All he has to do for the blue cities and blue states to blow up is sit on his hands and do nothing.
01:14:28 Speaker_05
There was a 1970s history in the Ford administration where New York City almost went broke, and Ford sat on his hands, and it was the most popular thing. Ford was down 30 points. He came back to almost winning reelection in 1976.
01:14:43 Speaker_05
It was very popular not to bail out New York City, because people know we don't want to throw good money after bad. If you look at the possibilities of changing the system,
01:14:55 Speaker_05
There's a way the inertia seems so high that if we have to get rid of the Department of Education, I don't think that will ever happen. And then I think the Democrats have nothing to worry about because Trump won't really do anything.
01:15:07 Speaker_05
But if actually for the system to continue, you need to get crazy new spending approved. And all that Trump has to do is not approve the new spending.
01:15:16 Speaker_05
That's where I think you're going to be able to force radical change in California, in New York, in Illinois, where these places have to reform themselves or go bankrupt.
01:15:27 Speaker_07
I want to talk a little bit about J.D. Vance, whose name has come up a few times. You gave $15 million to help him get elected in the 2022 midterms. And I think you introduced Trump to J.D. Vance in 2021 at Mar-a-Lago. Now, at this time, J.D.
01:15:42 Speaker_07
Vance was singing a very different tune. He had called Trump reprehensible. He had talked about him as being America's Hitler. Obviously, we've come a long way in those three years. And I guess I want to ask, what did you see in him that made you bet
01:15:55 Speaker_05
Well, you know, I first met him in 2011, met a group of people at Yale Law School and did a small lunch with the Federalist Society group there. And, you know, he worked for one of my venture funds and we became friends over the years.
01:16:09 Speaker_05
And he was a very thoughtful person who thought very deeply about a lot of these issues. And I'm probably always a sucker for smart, thoughtful people.
01:16:20 Speaker_07
But in 2011, when you meet a young J.D. Vance, were you thinking future president of the United States?
01:16:25 Speaker_05
I don't know. No, I don't think. But he made a great first impression. And then we sort of worked together for a number of years. And I got to know him better over time. I do think there are probably all these different ways that J.D.
01:16:38 Speaker_05
would do a better job articulating his shift since 2016. You know, I don't think he was saying things like that in 2018 or 2019. I think it was more sort of in the 2016, around the time when he wrote the Hillbilly Elegy book.
01:16:55 Speaker_05
And he was sort of, in some ways, became the way to explain Trump to liberals, liberal elites. And there was sort of a part of that that I think felt very good to JD. And then there was some part
01:17:12 Speaker_05
where at some point he felt like they weren't really interested in anything he had to say. And maybe it was just sort of like a prop where, you know, if we bought his book, we understand, we don't need to read it.
01:17:26 Speaker_05
We don't need to actually think about anything in it. But if we bought his book, we've understood this as well as we need to. And so I think the personal, Version on the jd van story was on some level in 2016.
01:17:40 Speaker_05
He believed there was a way to convince liberals To figure out, you know a way to solve some of these deep problems immigration economics You know the crisis of the midwest And then at some point he thought they weren't really interested in solving them at all and that maybe trump's somewhat more adversarial approach Was actually more correct than he first thought
01:18:06 Speaker_07
One of the shifts that we're seeing inside the Republican Party is not just on sort of doctrinaire free trade, but is on foreign policy.
01:18:15 Speaker_07
And there's a shift, I would say, from the neocon worldview that typified the Bush years to something that I don't think is quite isolationist, but is different, right?
01:18:25 Speaker_07
You have someone like JD Vance saying, I got to be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine. And I wonder how you're making sense of that shift, because
01:18:36 Speaker_07
at the All In Summit a few months ago, and you referenced it already in this conversation, you said, we're sleepwalking into Armageddon.
01:18:42 Speaker_07
And from my perspective, when I hear different versions of America's trying to do too much, America should not be the world's policeman, America needs to kind of pull back from the world, focus inward, my visceral reaction is, well, then someone's going to fill that vacuum.
01:19:00 Speaker_07
And it worries me. And I don't think that makes me some kind of neocon warmonger to be concerned about that.
01:19:06 Speaker_07
And I worry that there's a kind of caricature of a debate happening right now where anyone that feels concerned about the decline of American power or defensive of American muscularity gets easily dunked on because it's not the cool thing right now to say on the right.
01:19:26 Speaker_07
And so I would love for you to make sense of where you think the right is shifting and how you think this administration is going to conduct foreign policy.
01:19:37 Speaker_05
Well, I do think probably a lot of these things are more subtle and more nuanced. And it's probably best to always talk about particular countries and particular situations. I don't exactly know what you're supposed to do about the Ukraine right now.
01:19:56 Speaker_05
I'm not sure that the Trump administration has a strongly set policy on that at all. There's definitely a historical thing where one could say that the relentless NATO expansion might not have been a good idea.
01:20:11 Speaker_05
And there were ways that, I don't know, we don't want the Russians to have troops in Cuba or Mexico. And maybe if NATO has troops in the Ukraine, should we have thought a little bit about how far we pushed that envelope?
01:20:26 Speaker_05
And then at the same time, there's a part of it where we are where we are in 2024. And you probably can't simply retreat from the Ukraine without it just becoming a route.
01:20:39 Speaker_05
And I don't think Trump, President Trump wants a repeat of what happened with Biden in Afghanistan. You know, I think in the Middle East context, I always think that you could say there's an isolationist approach.
01:20:54 Speaker_05
There is an idealistic, almost utopian neocon approach as was articulated by Bush 43 in a second inaugural address in 2005, which was, I mean, it was just going to transform the whole world in a way that was
01:21:09 Speaker_05
fantastical and just you could tell was not going to end the way it was advertised. And then there's again sort of this in-between messy dealing with the reality of the Middle East approach.
01:21:20 Speaker_05
And I don't think the US and Israel are perfectly in sync, but I do think that if we simply deferred to Israel, And on things related to the Middle East, we'd have a far saner policy. We'd have a far more realistic policy.
01:21:41 Speaker_05
And the Israel, you know, in a way the neocons were pro-Israel. The Israelis didn't trust the neocons because Israel's a small country. It needs to be realistic. And the neocons were these crazy idealists. And so the Israeli view, it's complicated.
01:21:59 Speaker_05
The way I would summarize the Israeli view is, what do you think about Syria? There are no good rebels. Everybody in Syria is bad. We don't like Assad. We don't like the ISIS people. Maybe you can be somewhat involved.
01:22:11 Speaker_05
You don't want to be that involved in Syria. You know, the Saudis, yeah, it's a feudal monarchy. It's better than the alternatives. And the problem, the one problem, is Iran.
01:22:22 Speaker_05
Because, you know, if they get nuclear weapons, you know, it changes the playing field in the whole region.
01:22:28 Speaker_05
And so when I first met Netanyahu in January 2009, one month before he came back as prime minister, the only thing he wanted to talk about was Iran.
01:22:37 Speaker_05
And that's the sense in which I think the Trump foreign policy with the Middle East will be pretty closely in sync with Israel, where you'll at least be focused on the same problem, the same question.
01:22:51 Speaker_05
And the reason we don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons, maybe it's a crazy theocracy and it will use them. But even if Iran doesn't use them, just having them will somehow change the whole playing field.
01:23:03 Speaker_05
And I think one of the international things a president was supposed to do post-1945 was stop nuclear proliferation. Because if too many countries get nuclear weapons, that's one of the ways we sleepwalk to Armageddon.
01:23:16 Speaker_05
Because eventually something, if you have 100 countries with nuclear weapons, I don't think that's a stable game theory equilibrium of the world.
01:23:23 Speaker_05
And one of the lessons I take of the mid-20th century was every time a country got a nuclear weapon, we got a regional war. The Soviet Union gets the bomb in 1949. The Korean War starts in 1950, because when the Soviet Union backs
01:23:39 Speaker_05
North korea, we can't bomb russia and then they can back north korea with impunity and we get a massive massive regional war and that's in a way the price for Being asleep at the switch and letting the soviets get the bomb 1964 communist china gets the bomb vietnam war explodes in 1965 And again, china can back north vietnam with impunity.
01:24:03 Speaker_05
We can't Reciprocate and the way I understand why would an iranian nuclear bomb? via catastrophe, because the degree to which Iran can support this, you know, plethora of bad actors, the Houthis, the Hamas people and Hezbollah and
01:24:21 Speaker_05
And on and on throughout the Middle East, you could not retaliate against Iran. If they're a nuclear power, you can't retaliate against Iran. And then the degree to which they will support all the whole Middle East will explode.
01:24:33 Speaker_05
And so we don't have to go to the crazy theocracy that said they'd use the bomb and would use it. I think it's just the nature of it. And I think there's a way that Israel understood this and there's a way the neocons lost the forest for the trees.
01:24:48 Speaker_05
You know, there were ways the Israelis and the Saudis probably had misgivings about the Iraq war because, you know, Iraq was the country that's blocking Iran. And if you weaken Iraq, aren't you strengthening Iran in the end?
01:25:02 Speaker_05
In some sense, that's what happened over 20 years.
01:25:06 Speaker_07
Trump over the past 48 hours has made a number of appointments on this score. It looks like Marco Rubio is going to be the secretary of state. Michael Walls is going to be a national security adviser. Elise Stefanik is going to the U.N.
01:25:18 Speaker_07
That's a pretty hawkish group.
01:25:22 Speaker_05
I think they're all pretty hawkish on China.
01:25:24 Speaker_05
And, and I think that is probably the other place where, you know, I don't want to say things are coming to a head, but where, um, we have to really find a better balance than we've been, than we found in, in the past few decades.
01:25:36 Speaker_05
And, uh, I believe all of them, I wouldn't say that they will prioritize China at the expense of everything else, but I think they will prioritize China more than the Biden administration and, um, more than the Europeans would.
01:25:50 Speaker_07
There's a sort of grotesque thing happening in certain precincts of the right where, I guess the way to describe it would be sort of like a revival of Patrick Buchanan's view of things like World War II that felt pretty settled.
01:26:05 Speaker_07
You know, Hitler's the villain. Churchill saved the West. I'm sure you've noticed some of this. And I wonder where that historical revisionism is coming from and why you think it's so seductive to people in this moment.
01:26:20 Speaker_05
And these things are always difficult to score culturally, but I'm tempted to say that you never want to defend the Nazis and you never want to defend Hitler.
01:26:32 Speaker_05
And it's just, there are probably some fringe people who say they're on the right that do this, but isn't this 90% a left-wing PSYOP of sorts? where it's, you know, first rule of high school debate is whoever, you know, brings up Hitler loses, right.
01:26:52 Speaker_05
And, you know, this was in a way what.
01:26:53 Speaker_07
But a lot of people on the right are bringing up Hitler on their own. You don't see it.
01:26:58 Speaker_05
I don't see people doing it in a positive way or you know, it's, it's.
01:27:03 Speaker_07
Here's how I would put it.
01:27:06 Speaker_05
Let me, let me, let me. Yeah. I want you to give me like the actual quotes where. Okay.
01:27:11 Speaker_07
Let me phrase it another way.
01:27:12 Speaker_05
I don't, and I don't think even Buchanan would do this. I, I challenge you to come up with a, even a Buchanan quote and he wrote a lot over decades where
01:27:22 Speaker_07
Let me phrase it another way. There's a strain on the right right now. To go back to what you said about how Make America Great Again was sort of the ultimate, I've never heard that, that's really insightful, like the ultimate pessimistic slogan.
01:27:36 Speaker_07
I think there is a group on the right that feels so let's be generous, alienated, enraged, frustrated at the direction of the country, that they've given into a kind of nihilistic, we deserve for everything to fail.
01:27:54 Speaker_07
We deserve for everything to burn it down.
01:27:56 Speaker_05
Which is- I don't think that's correct. Okay.
01:28:00 Speaker_05
There's a way that's all that can be is like a negative, self-fulfilling, new age, bad prophecy, where if you're a white supremacist who thinks that the white people are all going to be losers, I don't know if you're correct, but I suspect you personally will do is you will eat a lot of donuts and move into a trailer.
01:28:19 Speaker_05
And so it's a self-fulfilling negative prophecy about what will happen in your life. And so, yes, I don't believe in doing anything like that at all.
01:28:28 Speaker_05
I think there are ways that the US is overstretched, there are ways that, you know, we have to, I'm not sure, prioritize, but there's some kind of constraints, there's some kind of way in which we don't have the money, there's no money left.
01:28:43 Speaker_05
And there is the budget deficits, there are things like this, there are certain types of constraints. the history, the 20th century history.
01:28:53 Speaker_05
And I don't think this is revisionist, but the way I would tell the history of the 20th century is that we had two world wars. And the thing that's extremely confusing about the two world wars is that they teach diametrically opposite lessons.
01:29:09 Speaker_05
And the lesson of world war two is you do not appease dictators. And if you give an inch, they will take a mile and you let,
01:29:17 Speaker_05
You know, Hitler take the Sudetenland and then it was all of Czechoslovakia and then, you know, Austria and it just went on and on and on. But World War I teaches the opposite lesson, which is you don't want to have a network of secret alliances.
01:29:36 Speaker_05
entangling alliances with hair trigger mobilization and escalation schedules where you have this tinderbox in Sarajevo where the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand somehow triggers this four-year conflagration that destroys Europe.
01:29:55 Speaker_05
And that in a way, the place where appeasement came from in the 1930s, in part it was because it felt like there was no money, the Depression, everybody was bankrupt, you couldn't spend money on the military, you couldn't spend money on anything.
01:30:09 Speaker_05
But part of it was, okay, this is the way we course correct for World War I. We're not going to have this hair trigger escalation.
01:30:18 Speaker_05
Difficult paradox is if we're going to avoid World War III, you know, I think you somehow have to learn the lessons of both wars. And so somehow you can't have excessive appeasement, and you also can't go sleepwalking into Armageddon.
01:30:34 Speaker_05
And they're in a way opposite lessons. You know, I won't say that you should be 100% World War I and 0% World War II.
01:30:42 Speaker_05
But my, you know, contrarian intuition where I'd be maybe 60, 70% focused on World War I and 30 or 40% on World War II is I think we always have a recency bias. We're always fighting the last war. And the last world war was World War II.
01:31:00 Speaker_05
And so that's the one we're obsessed with drawing the lessons from. And my contrarian intuition is that if we have a world war, it'll be more like World War I.
01:31:09 Speaker_05
It'll look like what's been happening the last few years, where it's this gradually escalating conflagration, and it'll happen overnight. In World War II, people could see coming for a long time. World War I had this crazy feel.
01:31:22 Speaker_05
You know, the other thing that's more like World War I than World War II is World War I, the pre-World War I world, was one that was incredibly connected through globalization, through trade and finance.
01:31:35 Speaker_05
One of the books that I think is always a super interesting one to read was 1910, Norman Angell wrote this book, The Great Illusion. What was The Great Illusion?
01:31:43 Speaker_05
It was this bestseller, sold books around the world and all the countries that would eventually fight World War I. You know, he ends up getting a Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. What was the thesis?
01:31:53 Speaker_05
The thesis, the great illusion was that there could be a world war and there could not be a world war because everybody would lose. And it would make as much sense according to Norman Angel for the UK to go to war with Germany
01:32:11 Speaker_05
as it would make sense for London to invade the county of Hertfordshire, the adjacent county to London, because the stock market in London would go down more than the value of any property could grab in Hertfordshire.
01:32:26 Speaker_05
In a world that was connected through finance and trade and that felt very global, like it was in 1913, it was obviously insane to have a world war. And then it nevertheless happened. And then I think
01:32:41 Speaker_05
There's a way that the globalization regime was deeply unhealthy, deeply unstable. And I definitely think there are, you know, we don't want to be Chamberlain. You don't want to sort of be doing those mistakes from the 1930s at all.
01:32:56 Speaker_05
I also think it's worth thinking very hard about where was Norman Angel wrong and why did the great illusion turn out not to be a great illusion at all.
01:33:07 Speaker_07
Populism is in vogue right now, and populism is something that always makes me wary, because populism leads to scapegoating, and scapegoating leads to blaming minority groups, and often Jews.
01:33:20 Speaker_07
And I see this sentiment, and you're seeing it playing out on Twitter all the time, people love this phrase, a lot of people on the right, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God.
01:33:31 Speaker_07
I can't think of a wronger thing that has been said. I don't think the voice of the people are the voice of God.
01:33:37 Speaker_05
Yes.
01:33:38 Speaker_07
And I wonder if, you know, you're someone who looks back to history, obviously, how do you contain populist energies and harness them in a productive way without them running roughshod over any number of minority groups?
01:33:55 Speaker_05
Well, let me start in a slightly different way. And this is plagiarizing sort of an idea that Eric Weinstein likes to popularize a lot. But it's this thing called a Russell conjugate, which is two words that are synonyms but are emotional antonyms.
01:34:12 Speaker_05
And so a think and a whistleblower. maybe it's the same thing, but a whistleblower is a good person and a fink is a bad person. So they're emotional antonyms, even though they're kind of the same thing if you think about it.
01:34:27 Speaker_05
And I would submit that a Russell conjugate of sorts is populism and democracy. And democracy is good, populism is bad, and it's democracy when people vote the right way, and it's populism when they vote the wrong way.
01:34:45 Speaker_05
And what that tells us is that there's probably a lot in these concepts that needs to be to be really, really unpacked. And so I share your concerns about populism. I also have concerns about democracy for the exact same reason.
01:35:05 Speaker_05
If everyone just gets to vote on everything, That's just rampant majoritarianism.
01:35:11 Speaker_05
And there obviously are all sorts of ways that minority rights get oppressed, or the libertarian version is that wealthy people probably just have their property voted away from them, so you don't respect property rights. Minorities get trampled on.
01:35:26 Speaker_05
So there are all sorts of ways in which we're not supposed to have rampant majoritarianism. And then the kinds of checks on that
01:35:35 Speaker_05
You know, it was republicanism supposed to be a check on democracy where you don't – the people don't vote on things directly. They vote on them indirectly and you elect representatives.
01:35:45 Speaker_05
And then the constitution is supposed to be a check on republicanism where even the legislature can't just do whatever it wants and it has to still be compatible with the constitution.
01:35:55 Speaker_05
And then that's kind of the intuition I would have about our society. Now, I do wonder if this is not that accurate as a description of the United States. You know, I don't think we are too populist or too democratic because
01:36:12 Speaker_05
You know, yeah, maybe there's a mob of voters, but they don't really get to do all that much on a day-to-day basis. And the problem, you know, I would say is maybe more that we're less of a constitutional republic than we used to be.
01:36:26 Speaker_05
And it hasn't shifted from the constitutional republic to this mob of voters, but it's shifted from the constitutional republic. to this sort of unelected technocratic bureaucracy, you know, the deep state, things like that.
01:36:41 Speaker_05
And maybe that's what you need to have in a technologically advanced society where you need experts, you need a central intelligence agency, you need to have secrets, secrets about nuclear weapons, secrets about other things.
01:36:54 Speaker_05
And so there are all kinds of ways that an advanced technological society by its very nature is far less populist or democratic than the US was even in its 18th century conception.
01:37:10 Speaker_07
One of the things I've been thinking about since Tuesday, but really over the past few years, is this sort of intramural fight between the elites, what you've called the Borg or the NPCs or the Blob, the group think that controls so many of our institutions and the Democratic Party, and then what you've described as the rebel alliance.
01:37:32 Speaker_07
There's a debate, I think, happening inside the rebel alliance between people who are maybe on the more radical fringe of it, who say, we don't need institutions, really. We don't need gatekeepers.
01:37:42 Speaker_07
Or there's something about gatekeeping in and of itself that's corrupting. And I think you can see this. I'll use this specific example. Part of this whole, like, make America healthy again, Maha movement, RFK phenomenon, I think is very healthy.
01:37:58 Speaker_07
And it's about a skepticism of big pharma and a skepticism, you know, an idea that, you know, why should we go along with the fact that there's chemicals in all of our food?
01:38:06 Speaker_07
Why shouldn't we be skeptical of the fact that 35% or something crazy like that of American kids have prediabetes? These crazy health outcomes, so let's be skeptical. But then it can tip just so fast into, Vaccines cause autism territory.
01:38:22 Speaker_07
And I guess I wonder how you think about the fine line between skepticism of maybe an elite whose gatekeeping has been too strident or too zealous or too narrow and falling into a rabbit hole or falling maybe off the map where you're in a place where there's sort of no gatekeeping and no institutional authority at all.
01:38:49 Speaker_07
Does that make sense?
01:38:50 Speaker_05
Yeah, these are not, man, you always ask really easy questions, Barry.
01:38:54 Speaker_07
I've just been thinking about this one so much because I've watched as, I've watched the understandable emotional arc where people who were told, you're a conspiracy theorist, only to have their conspiracy, let's say, about the origins of COVID be proven right, but by that time they've already fallen off into the deep end where they're trafficking and all kinds of things that seem truly crazy.
01:39:17 Speaker_05
Yeah, well, there are all these different types of institutions.
01:39:19 Speaker_05
You can do this with intelligence agencies or with, I don't know, environmental institutions or – but let me articulate maybe one kind of institution where you can ask this question about is science as an institution.
01:39:35 Speaker_05
The way I always think of the history of science was that it started as a two-front war against both excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism.
01:39:48 Speaker_05
And so if you are over in the 17th and 18th century, a scientist was a heterodox thinker who didn't believe in, let's say, the decayed Aristotelian scholasticism of the Catholic church.
01:40:03 Speaker_05
and you were maybe you were empirical and there were these dogmas that you were open to questioning, but you also couldn't be extremely skeptical.
01:40:12 Speaker_05
So if you can't trust your senses, and if I don't believe you're sitting there, extreme skepticism was also incompatible with science. So extreme dogmatism was incompatible, extreme skepticism is incompatible.
01:40:25 Speaker_05
And the problem is, yeah, it's easy to be against one, But if you're always just against dogmatism, then maybe you're too skeptical of everything. And if you're always against skepticism, maybe you're too dogmatic.
01:40:41 Speaker_05
And so, there's this very complicated balance where we need to be both anti-dogmatic and anti-skeptical.
01:40:50 Speaker_05
And probably my feel for it would be that in the 17th and 18th century, you know, it was probably more anti-dogmatic than anti-skeptical, but it was, you know, some of both. But if we fast forward to 2024 and you asked scientists,
01:41:08 Speaker_05
you know, where is science too dogmatic? And where are people too skeptical? Where are people being too dogmatic?
01:41:17 Speaker_05
And I think there are a whole long list of things where they say there are climate change skeptics, there are vaccine skeptics, there are Darwin skeptics, there are, you know, there are all these people who are too skeptical and the skepticism is undercutting science.
01:41:36 Speaker_05
were on war of skeptics of all sorts. And then if you asked the scientists, where are the scientists too dogmatic? I don't think they could tell you a single thing where science is too dogmatic.
01:41:52 Speaker_05
And doesn't that tell you that we have completely lost the sense of balance? And what has become science, I'll use square quotes around science, is something that is more dogmatic than the Catholic Church was in the 17th century.
01:42:08 Speaker_05
And that at the margins, yeah, we, you know, you can't go all out skepticism and there's, you know, obviously there's a slippery slope to nihilism and, you know, that doesn't work. But directionally, that's where we have to course correct.
01:42:21 Speaker_05
And then you have to go through, you know, all these specific issues and think about it. I don't particularly think that vaccines lead to autism.
01:42:31 Speaker_05
If they did, I don't think our science is capable of figuring it out, because the results would get suppressed, because it would undercut the lobby for vaccinations. And there obviously are a lot of good vaccines too.
01:42:43 Speaker_05
And if there was some truth to it, that would undercut it, and I'm pretty sure That question isn't being investigated. You know, there has been a dramatic increase in autism in recent decades. We don't have particularly good explanations for it.
01:42:59 Speaker_05
Surely it's something we should be thinking about more. Yeah, so again, I don't think vaccines lead to autism. I do think it's the sort of question that it would be healthy if we were allowed to ask a little bit more than we are.
01:43:12 Speaker_05
And of course, you know, we just went through this crazy exercise with the COVID epidemic where, you know, we somehow cut off skepticism so prematurely, so many times, where not only was the skepticism healthy, but the skeptics were right.
01:43:30 Speaker_05
You know, so there were people who were skeptical of the eating the bat from the food market. And no, it was, you needed to be, you know, you needed not to be, so dogmatic about the eating bats theory.
01:43:44 Speaker_07
And somehow the eating bats theory was the politically correct theory, which is kind of unbelievable.
01:43:49 Speaker_05
Maybe it's disgusting to eat a bat. What sort of a society is it where people are starving so much they need to eat bats, you know?
01:43:54 Speaker_07
But I think the fear is if you go down the, hey, maybe vaccines cause autism place, you can wind up very, very quickly in a place where polio is back and measles are back because you see what I mean.
01:44:08 Speaker_05
Yes.
01:44:09 Speaker_07
How do you know when you've gone too far in the skeptical direction?
01:44:11 Speaker_05
Well, there's a point where you go too far, but at the same time, my feel for it is that directionally the science establishment is way too far on the dogmatic side, way too little on the skeptical side.
01:44:26 Speaker_05
Maybe like we take climate change as an issue, you know, Maybe there's some part of it that I believe is true, but there are a lot of parts that are open for debate.
01:44:38 Speaker_05
Maybe methane is a bigger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, in which case it's cows flatulating in the Amazon are worse than cars running on oil. And then you have all sorts of layers of things that can't be discussed.
01:44:54 Speaker_05
So my intuition is these institutions have gotten very, very unhealthy.
01:44:58 Speaker_05
There's always a culture wars riff I have on this where those of us on the conservative side who are critics of the universities often focus on the humanities as the part that's most corrupt and it's most transparently corrupt.
01:45:13 Speaker_05
The sciences are more esoteric.
01:45:16 Speaker_05
And, you know, if, you know, the cancer researchers haven't made any progress in curing cancer in 50 years, or the string theorists made even less progress in physics, but these things are so esoteric, isn't that a hint that maybe the sciences are even more corrupt?
01:45:31 Speaker_05
You know the government analogy I always use is you know, which is the most messed up agency in the government Is it the post office the DMV or the NSA the National Security Agency?
01:45:44 Speaker_05
and I would submit it's obviously the NSA because you can go to the DMV and the post office and you can see that people are sitting around loafing all day and not doing much work and it's obviously corrupt and non-functioning and It's so transparently corrupt that it's maybe not that bad and the NSA we have no clue what they're doing
01:46:02 Speaker_05
And then my political intuition is that that's a clue that it's probably more corrupt, more mismanaged than the post office or the DMV. You know, the Harvard versus Stanford tale of the two university presidents that were fired – I went to Stanford.
01:46:17 Speaker_05
It was Claudine Gay at Harvard. the diversity woman who plagiarized all these things and everybody could see that there was a lot that was ridiculous and was transparent that she deserved to be fired.
01:46:30 Speaker_05
Same year, Mark Tessier-Levine, the neuro white male neuroscientist, who as far as I can tell
01:46:38 Speaker_05
All of his research was- Multi-decade fraud, stole tens of millions of dollars, but it's this complicated question of, are you going to go through all these papers and show that the photos were doctored in a certain way?
01:46:53 Speaker_05
And I'm not saying the sciences are necessarily worse than the humanities, but they both failed.
01:47:00 Speaker_07
It's just harder to see, you're saying.
01:47:02 Speaker_05
And then my intuition is that that has to be a really important part of the story of what's gone wrong with the universities, with our society. And there's probably some part where we haven't asked enough questions, we haven't been skeptical enough.
01:47:17 Speaker_05
And this is, I don't know, I'm not sure RFK or Joe Rogan or any of these people are correct about everything, but it's so much fresher, so much healthier than this incredible echo chamber that is the consensus mainstream media, or that is the groupthink of peer-reviewed science.
01:47:39 Speaker_07
Even if that skepticism and the freshness is coming as it is right now with a lot of, there's a lot of ugliness that's attendant to that flinging open of the gates. Let's just put it that way.
01:47:53 Speaker_05
Yeah, although I want to say maybe we're exposing the ugliness that is unfortunately part of these things not quite working as well as they're supposed to. And that maybe these institutions have been really, really broken for a while and we need to
01:48:11 Speaker_05
We need to somehow find a way to have this conversation.
01:48:14 Speaker_07
Let's imagine 100 years from now and someone's looking back at the story of the late 20th century and then of course the 21st century that I think you would argue sort of started late.
01:48:24 Speaker_07
If we boiled it all down, is it really just all the story of the technological revolution of the Internet that has fundamentally changed our politics, the tone of it, the language of it, that it led to Trump's rise, that it has brought the collapse of so many of our institutions?
01:48:43 Speaker_07
Is that the headline story that you think is going to be written?
01:48:47 Speaker_05
I'm always a little bit hesitant to make it completely about tech because in a way that's the, you know, when you say the tech is omnipotent, omniscient, you know, if it's not omni benevolent, it's omni malevolent and it's sort of turn it into the Judeo-Christian God or something like that.
01:49:06 Speaker_05
And then, you know, it's always my Girardian cut is if you make something into God, you are making it into a scapegoat for all the problems too. And so that's, that's sort of where I'm always, That's where I'm instinctively hesitant to do this.
01:49:20 Speaker_05
But with that qualification, yes, I think it's an incredibly important change. I think there are ways the internet made things transparent that were not transparent. And there are a lot of things that do not work as well when they're made transparent.
01:49:36 Speaker_05
Markets become more efficient as they're made more transparent. And then scapegoating probably works less well if it's transparent.
01:49:43 Speaker_05
You know, if we think that, you know, we have a psychosocial problem and we need to pretend someone's a witch to solve it, it's probably, we're going to be less motivated witch hunters and it will not have the kind of cathartic effect it might've still had in some, you know, medieval society.
01:49:58 Speaker_05
And the question is always, is politics like markets or is it like scapegoating? And the internet, in some ways, you know, has deconstructed, exposed the politicians. There's a way Trump was the first internet president.
01:50:13 Speaker_05
And this was a thought I had already in 2016. Man, all the other people, they didn't realize how fake they looked. They don't realize how incredibly fake they are. And yeah, you can do this fakeness in this pre-internet world.
01:50:28 Speaker_05
Even television was, you know, a deconstructive medium, which was hard for them to master. But the internet was, it really exposed the fakeness. And then there is a part of it that feels lossy because these institutions don't work as well anymore.
01:50:42 Speaker_05
And I don't, you know, I don't think we can do without them and we haven't quite figured out how to get through to the other side. But I also, I also have this, this is the,
01:50:50 Speaker_05
a place where I have a, I don't know, historicist or even progressive view, I don't think you can go back. And we can't, you know, you can't un-invent the internet. And so we have to find a way through it.
01:51:03 Speaker_05
But yeah, I think it changed things in very, very big ways. And certainly when you focus on the economics and the incredible wealth creation, but I think it was also this thing that was, you know, socially and culturally significant.
01:51:19 Speaker_05
There's always a science fiction riff I have on it, and I'm never quite sure this is completely correct, but I think in a way, you know, there are all these science fiction books that are written, and there are books where they anticipate things sort of like the internet, where you have like, you can go on your computer and you can read books on it.
01:51:36 Speaker_05
But this sort of small packet modality of information was like 140 characters on Twitter. and the ways in which this would radically change the nature of society, I don't think it was anticipated by any science fiction novel to speak of.
01:51:53 Speaker_05
And so maybe the internet was the biggest invention that was not anticipated. by any science fiction writer at all.
01:52:03 Speaker_05
And what I submit that might tell you is that it represented sort of a change in the nature of human consciousness or the structure of a society that's more radical than we think because it was not anticipated by anybody.
01:52:18 Speaker_07
But your famous line, of course, is, you know, we were promised flying cars and all we got is 140 characters. But maybe what you're saying is the 140 characters are more revolutionary.
01:52:28 Speaker_05
They are revolutionary on a social, cultural level. I always question how much they added to GDP, how much they add to economic growth. You know, there's a way as human beings we're, I always think we're material, we're embedded in an atomic world.
01:52:45 Speaker_05
And so if you have a shiny surface on your iPhone and the screen you're addicted to and you don't notice you're in a subway in New York that's falling apart and you're in a decrepit apartment with lots of rats in it, you know, this world of bits is not really a substitute for the world of atoms.
01:53:02 Speaker_05
And so there's a way in which I still stick with that concern.
01:53:07 Speaker_05
I would like us to be making progress on all these other fronts, but I don't want to minimize the way in which the Internet was significant politically and culturally, even if it didn't make the millennials much wealthier than the boomers.
01:53:25 Speaker_07
I don't know if I would say I predicted this moment, but we're definitely, definitely early.
01:53:30 Speaker_07
And given how right you are and the bets that you make, I think people would love to know, you know, what are the, maybe the books or the essays that you read that you think best either predicted this moment or explain the moment that we're living in?
01:53:44 Speaker_05
I'm so bad at that.
01:53:45 Speaker_07
I'll tell you mine. I think Martin Guri's book, The Revolt of the Public, was extraordinary. Trump's not mentioned in the book. It came out before the whole Trump phenomenon. He focuses on the Arab Spring and really just the way that the
01:54:04 Speaker_07
the tension between the center and the periphery, or maybe what Neil Ferguson would call it, the tower and the square, and the way that the center, the square, sort of seized power. That's the book I'm recommending a lot to people right now.
01:54:17 Speaker_05
Maybe I'll give a negative answer. The one that somehow- Kinterian as always. The one that somehow, I think got it completely wrong, but I still don't know what it means, is the Fukuyama book, The End of History.
01:54:31 Speaker_05
history was supposed to end in this sort of social democratic liberalism, you know, and it's sort of unclear and this seemed very correct in the 1990s.
01:54:41 Speaker_05
And then, you know, obviously 9-11 sort of suggested that things can move in a somewhat retrograde direction. And then, you know, and then of course the rise of China.
01:54:52 Speaker_05
It didn't seem exactly liberal, but people had hopes that as China became wealthier, it would become more Western and more liberal. And then I always say, Xi comes to power in 2012, but 2017 is when he's made president for life.
01:55:07 Speaker_05
And in some sense, 2017 is maybe the year that the end of history comes to an end. And then it's very confusing what this means, because we do want to make sense of our history and where it's going. And if it's not over, if it's open.
01:55:23 Speaker_05
You know, I always come back to it's, you know, we can talk about trends and forces, but it does matter what people do. And there's room for human agency, for individual agency, for thought.
01:55:37 Speaker_05
And I think part of what will shape it, I hope, are conversations like the one we had today.
01:55:48 Speaker_07
Thanks for listening. If this is the first time you've heard of Peter Thiel, I imagine you are going to Google him. Do that, and also go back and listen to the first conversation that I had with him.
01:55:59 Speaker_07
Whether you agree with him or not, I can't imagine that you won't think he's a fascinating person. Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do it.
01:56:08 Speaker_07
It's by going to the Free Press' website at thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.
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