Saagar Enjeti: Politics, History, and Power

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjati.

00:00:03.040 | He is a DC-based political correspondent,

00:00:05.800 | host of "The Rising" with Crystal Ball,

00:00:08.200 | and host of the "Realignment" podcast

00:00:10.600 | with Marshall Kozlov.

00:00:12.680 | He has interviewed Donald Trump four times

00:00:16.520 | and has interviewed a lot of major political figures

00:00:19.800 | and human beings who wield power.

00:00:23.160 | He loves policy and loves history,

00:00:25.920 | which makes him a great person to sail

00:00:28.000 | through the sometimes stormy waters of political discourse.

00:00:32.640 | He showed up to this conversation with a gift

00:00:35.400 | of the second volume of Ian Kershaw's biography on Hitler,

00:00:40.160 | a two-volume set that is widely acknowledged

00:00:42.320 | as one of the greatest, if not the greatest,

00:00:45.160 | most definitive studies of Hitler.

00:00:48.280 | Nothing wins my heart faster on a first meeting

00:00:51.360 | or a first date than a great book

00:00:53.840 | about the darkest aspects of human nature and human history.

00:00:57.480 | I think I started saying that as a joke,

00:00:59.320 | but actually there's probably a lot of truth to it.

00:01:01.520 | I love it when we skip the small talk

00:01:03.160 | and go straight to the in-depth conversation

00:01:05.440 | about the best and worst of human nature.

00:01:08.960 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:01:10.760 | Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly Grammar Assistant,

00:01:14.440 | Eight Sleep Self-Cooling Bed,

00:01:16.280 | and Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal.

00:01:19.240 | Click the sponsor links to get a discount

00:01:21.360 | and to support this podcast.

00:01:23.320 | As a side note, let me say that for better or for worse,

00:01:26.560 | I would like to avoid the trap

00:01:27.880 | of surface political bickering of the day.

00:01:30.400 | I do find politics fascinating,

00:01:32.400 | but not the talking points produced

00:01:34.200 | by the industrial engagement complex

00:01:37.080 | of red versus blue division.

00:01:38.840 | Instead, I'm fascinated by human beings who seek power

00:01:42.440 | and how power changes them.

00:01:44.880 | I don't have a political affiliation,

00:01:46.960 | and my ideas, at least I hope so,

00:01:49.080 | are defined more by curiosity

00:01:51.080 | and learning in the face of uncertainty

00:01:53.360 | and less by the echo chambers who tell me

00:01:56.520 | what I'm supposed to think.

00:01:58.440 | I'm constantly evolving, learning,

00:02:00.920 | and doing my best to do so without ego and with empathy.

00:02:04.240 | Please be patient with me.

00:02:05.920 | As far as I'm aware,

00:02:07.000 | I do not have any derangement syndromes,

00:02:09.360 | nor do I get a medical prescription

00:02:11.080 | of blue, red, white, or black pills.

00:02:14.400 | If I say something, I say it because I'm genuinely thinking

00:02:18.200 | and struggling with the ideas.

00:02:21.080 | I have no agenda, just a bit of a hope

00:02:23.800 | to add more love to the world.

00:02:26.680 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

00:02:29.160 | review it on Apple Podcasts, follow us on Spotify,

00:02:32.200 | support it on Patreon,

00:02:33.520 | or connect with me on Twitter @AlexFreedman.

00:02:36.320 | And now, here's my conversation with Sagar Anjati.

00:02:40.080 | There's no better gifts in this world

00:02:44.720 | than a book about Hitler, so thank you so much.

00:02:47.800 | I've gotten a gift when I was,

00:02:49.160 | what were we just talking about?

00:02:50.000 | - Yes, right, right. - Flying the watch

00:02:51.160 | from Joe Rogan, and this almost beats it.

00:02:54.400 | So tell me what this particular book on Hitler is.

00:02:58.800 | So this is volume two.

00:02:59.880 | - Yes, so this is Ian Kershaw.

00:03:02.000 | He wrote the famous two-volume on Hitler.

00:03:04.520 | I'm a big book nerd, and I spend a lot of time

00:03:07.120 | reading biographies in particular.

00:03:09.180 | So this one, if you need a one-volume,

00:03:11.960 | "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," right?

00:03:13.840 | I think you talked about that, William Shire,

00:03:15.520 | because that's like Hitler's rise,

00:03:17.520 | Nazi Germany, the war, et cetera.

00:03:19.320 | But I like bios because it's the,

00:03:22.960 | a good biography is "Story of the Times," right?

00:03:25.320 | And so this one, the first volume, it does exactly that,

00:03:28.400 | which is that it doesn't just tell the story of Hitler.

00:03:30.880 | It's the context of poor, you know, this kid in Austria,

00:03:34.240 | and he's got all these dreams,

00:03:35.360 | but then actually pretty courageous

00:03:37.400 | in terms of World War I, right?

00:03:38.860 | Gets pinned to metal on by the Kaiser,

00:03:40.800 | and then what it's like to lose World War I

00:03:44.120 | and actually lose this stain,

00:03:47.020 | and then the rise within, everybody knows that story,

00:03:49.800 | the Beer Hall Putsch and all that.

00:03:51.560 | This one I like, and the reason I like Kershaw

00:03:53.920 | is obviously, number one, it's English,

00:03:55.680 | which is actually hard, right?

00:03:57.000 | Like in order to write that story,

00:03:58.560 | who can do both the primary source material

00:04:01.040 | and then translate it for people like us,

00:04:03.160 | but he tells the dynamic story of Hitler so well

00:04:08.000 | in this second volume, just like the level of detail.

00:04:10.880 | And you've talked about this, Lex,

00:04:12.200 | like what was it like inside that room,

00:04:14.880 | inside with Chamberlain?

00:04:16.200 | Like what was it like in terms of

00:04:18.520 | who was this like magnetic madman

00:04:21.400 | who did convince the smartest people

00:04:23.600 | in the world at the time?

00:04:24.720 | And you know, up until like 1940,

00:04:27.720 | the Soviet gamble, like was it,

00:04:30.120 | it took tremendous risks, but like highly calculated,

00:04:34.360 | thinking, no, no, no, no, I'm not gonna pay for this one.

00:04:36.520 | I'm not gonna pay for this one.

00:04:37.800 | And it put himself, he had a remarkable ability

00:04:40.560 | not just to put himself in the minds of the German people,

00:04:42.960 | but in terms of his adversaries,

00:04:44.440 | like with when he was across from Mussolini,

00:04:46.640 | calculate, he's like, how exactly did Mussolini,

00:04:48.760 | the guy who created fascism,

00:04:49.800 | becomes like second fiddle to Hitler?

00:04:52.440 | Think it's an amazing bio.

00:04:53.640 | And yeah, like Ian Kershaw, along with Richard Evans,

00:04:57.880 | two of my favorite authors on the Third Reich, no question.

00:05:00.280 | - Do you think he was born this way,

00:05:01.600 | that charisma, whatever that is,

00:05:03.360 | or was it something he developed strategically?

00:05:06.040 | That's like the question you apply

00:05:07.200 | to some of the great leaders.

00:05:09.200 | Was he just a madman who had the instinct

00:05:13.520 | to be able to control people

00:05:14.920 | when in the room together with them,

00:05:16.520 | or is this like he worked at it?

00:05:18.000 | - I think he worked at it.

00:05:19.320 | But also there is an innate quality.

00:05:21.660 | I'm forgetting his name, his lifelong,

00:05:23.920 | Rudolf, the one who flew to Berlin in like 1940.

00:05:28.000 | I forget his name.

00:05:28.840 | Anyway, so he helped Hitler write "Mein Kampf,"

00:05:31.560 | and he was like slavishly devoted to him in prison.

00:05:35.640 | This is 1925 or something like that.

00:05:38.600 | And so you read that and you're like,

00:05:39.920 | well, how does he get this like crank wacko

00:05:43.000 | to basically believe he's like the second coming,

00:05:45.320 | help him write this book?

00:05:46.680 | I mean, literally they lived together in the prison cell

00:05:49.440 | and they would wake up every day.

00:05:50.480 | And as he was composing "Mein Kampf"

00:05:52.440 | and because of the beer hall putsch and all that,

00:05:54.800 | had this like absolute ability to gather people around him.

00:05:59.020 | I think his greatest skill was,

00:06:00.800 | is he was just a very good politician, truly.

00:06:03.120 | I mean, if you look at his ability

00:06:05.080 | in order to read coalitional politics

00:06:07.620 | and then convince exactly the right people

00:06:10.400 | in order to follow him.

00:06:12.080 | I think I heard you ask this once

00:06:13.400 | and I've thought about it a lot,

00:06:14.520 | which is like, who could have stopped Hitler

00:06:16.560 | in Germany, right?

00:06:17.400 | That's always like the ever present question.

00:06:19.080 | Of course, like the whole baby Hitler thing.

00:06:21.200 | Really the answer is Hindenburg.

00:06:22.680 | Like Hindenburg was the person who could have stopped

00:06:25.040 | and had the immense standing within the German public.

00:06:28.000 | The only real like war hero,

00:06:30.880 | definitely was personally skeptical of fascism and Nazism.

00:06:34.760 | - And didn't like Hitler.

00:06:35.800 | - And didn't like him.

00:06:36.800 | And he knew he was full of shit.

00:06:38.280 | He was like, yeah, I think this guy is dangerous.

00:06:40.200 | I think this guy could do a lot of damage to the Republic,

00:06:43.720 | but he acceded basically to Hitler at the time.

00:06:47.000 | And I think that he was one of the main people

00:06:48.800 | who could have done something about it.

00:06:50.200 | - And also he was able to convince the generals,

00:06:53.160 | the military.

00:06:54.000 | I mean, that was very interesting.

00:06:56.640 | And to convince Chamberlain

00:06:58.360 | and just the other political leaders.

00:07:01.560 | That's something I often think about

00:07:04.200 | 'cause we're just reading books about these people.

00:07:06.760 | I think about what like Jeffrey Epstein, for example.

00:07:09.080 | - Oh yeah.

00:07:09.920 | - Like evil people, not evil,

00:07:12.500 | but people have done evil things.

00:07:14.160 | Let's not go to the Dan Carlin thing of what is evil.

00:07:17.700 | People that do evil things,

00:07:21.420 | I wonder what they're like in a room

00:07:23.280 | because I know quite a lot of intelligent people

00:07:25.760 | that did not see the evil in Jeffrey Epstein

00:07:30.760 | and spend time with him and were not bothered by it.

00:07:37.040 | In the same sense, Hitler,

00:07:40.320 | it seems like he was able to get,

00:07:43.040 | just even before he had power,

00:07:45.900 | 'cause people get intoxicated by power and so on,

00:07:48.500 | they wanna be close to power.

00:07:49.660 | But even before he had power,

00:07:51.060 | he was able to convince people.

00:07:52.660 | And it's unclear,

00:07:55.540 | is there something that's more than words?

00:07:58.820 | It's like the way you,

00:08:01.100 | I mean, people talk, tell stories

00:08:02.940 | about this piercing look and whatever,

00:08:05.860 | all that kind of stuff.

00:08:06.740 | I wonder if that's somehow a part of it.

00:08:10.220 | Like that has to be the base floor

00:08:12.600 | of any of these charismatic leaders.

00:08:14.600 | You have to be able to, in a room alone,

00:08:17.820 | be able to convince anybody of anything.

00:08:20.280 | - So I can tell you from my personal experience,

00:08:23.120 | one of the best educated lessons I got

00:08:26.480 | was when I got to meet Trump.

00:08:29.380 | So I interviewed Trump four different times as a journalist,

00:08:32.520 | spent like two and a half hours with him in the Oval Office,

00:08:36.320 | not alone, but like me and one person

00:08:38.820 | and like the press secretary.

00:08:40.000 | And that was it.

00:08:40.840 | So I actually got to observe him.

00:08:42.480 | And as a guy who reads these types of books, right?

00:08:45.320 | And you think of Trump, obviously most people,

00:08:48.360 | what they see on television, in articles and more,

00:08:51.720 | but being able to observe it like one-on-one,

00:08:53.960 | I was closer to him than I am right now from you.

00:08:57.600 | That was one of the most educational experiences I got

00:09:01.520 | because it's like you just said,

00:09:03.160 | the look, the leaning forward, the way he talks,

00:09:07.720 | the way he is a master at taking the question

00:09:11.920 | and answering exactly which part he wants.

00:09:14.040 | And then if you try and follow up, he's like, excuse me.

00:09:16.360 | You know, like he knows.

00:09:18.320 | And then whenever you're talking,

00:09:19.600 | it's not that he's annoyed about getting interrupted.

00:09:22.240 | If he realizes he's been marandering

00:09:24.400 | and then you interrupt him, all good.

00:09:26.040 | But if he's driving home a point,

00:09:28.320 | which he has to make sure appears in your transcript

00:09:31.180 | or whatever, it's like,

00:09:33.320 | it really was fascinating for me to look at.

00:09:36.360 | And what was also crazy with Trump

00:09:39.080 | is I realized how much he was living in the moment.

00:09:41.920 | So like when I went to the Oval,

00:09:44.720 | I've read all these biographies and like I walk in

00:09:46.920 | and I'm like, holy shit.

00:09:48.960 | You're like, I'm in the Oval Office.

00:09:50.840 | - Were you interviewing him in the Oval Office?

00:09:52.320 | - In the Oval, every time, was in the Oval Office.

00:09:53.920 | - You scared shitless?

00:09:54.760 | Sorry to- - Well, I wasn't scared.

00:09:56.640 | I was just, look, it's the Oval Office, right?

00:09:59.360 | I mean, I'm this nerd.

00:10:01.520 | He was like this kid.

00:10:02.600 | I'm so, I will admit this here.

00:10:05.080 | Like I printed out on my dad's label maker

00:10:07.280 | when I was like seven

00:10:08.120 | and I wrote like the Oval Office on my bedroom.

00:10:10.020 | So I was like a huge nerd,

00:10:11.960 | like obviously egomaniacal even from seven.

00:10:14.680 | But so like for this, I mean, it was huge, right?

00:10:16.760 | I'm like this 25 year old kid.

00:10:18.440 | And like, I walk in there and I see the couch, right?

00:10:22.200 | And I'm like, oh man, like that's Kissinger.

00:10:24.360 | Like, you know, I'm like,

00:10:25.260 | that's where like Kissinger and Nixon got on their knees.

00:10:28.280 | And then you see over by the door and you're like,

00:10:29.880 | are the scuff marks still there

00:10:31.240 | from when Eisenhower used to play golf?

00:10:33.080 | You know, this is all running through my mind.

00:10:34.520 | With Trump, none of it was there.

00:10:35.640 | None of it, right?

00:10:36.480 | So like, even the desk,

00:10:38.040 | I put my phone on the desk to record.

00:10:40.480 | And I'm like, this is the fucking Resolute desk.

00:10:43.360 | Like I shouldn't put my phone on this thing.

00:10:46.160 | And I'm like HMS Resolute, you know, all that,

00:10:48.520 | you know, national.

00:10:49.360 | And even for him, he doesn't think about any of it.

00:10:51.640 | It was like amazing to me.

00:10:53.480 | Like he had this portrait of Andrew Jackson

00:10:55.480 | right next to his, to the, I think from on the fireplace,

00:10:58.360 | like right here on the right.

00:10:59.880 | And the most revealing question was when I was like,

00:11:02.520 | Mr. President, what are people gonna remember you

00:11:04.280 | for in a hundred years?

00:11:05.520 | And he was like, he had, he was like, I don't know,

00:11:07.840 | like veterans choice.

00:11:08.960 | He like has a list in front of him of like

00:11:11.760 | his accomplishments, which is staff.

00:11:14.120 | - Good question by the way.

00:11:14.960 | - Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I wanted to know.

00:11:17.080 | And he's like veterans choice.

00:11:18.920 | And I remember looking at him being like,

00:11:20.480 | it's not gonna be veterans.

00:11:21.480 | (both laughing)

00:11:22.320 | You know, I'd be like, I'm like, I'm looking at you,

00:11:24.720 | Donald Trump, the harbinger of something new.

00:11:27.880 | We still don't know what the hell it is.

00:11:29.760 | And so I realized with these guys

00:11:32.480 | and their charisma and more,

00:11:33.960 | is that they don't think about themselves

00:11:35.840 | the way that we think about them.

00:11:37.280 | And that was actually important to understand

00:11:39.000 | 'cause a lot of people are like,

00:11:40.400 | Trump is playing all this chess.

00:11:41.760 | I'm like, I assure you, he's not.

00:11:43.200 | Like he's truly, one time I was interviewing him

00:11:46.360 | and he had like a certificate that he had to sign

00:11:48.400 | or something on his desk.

00:11:49.840 | He's like, it was like child almost.

00:11:51.440 | Like he got distracted by, he's like, oh, what's this?

00:11:53.640 | You know, he's just like picking it up.

00:11:54.800 | And I was like, wow, like this, this is the guy.

00:11:57.720 | Like, this is what he is.

00:11:59.040 | - Well, I wonder if there was a different person

00:12:02.240 | because you were recording than offline at a bar.

00:12:05.880 | - I can tell you.

00:12:06.720 | Well, here's the thing though,

00:12:07.540 | because that's another part of it.

00:12:09.360 | Because that two hours,

00:12:11.320 | I would say like half of that was not on the record.

00:12:13.480 | So like whenever he's off the record,

00:12:15.400 | he changes completely, right?

00:12:18.000 | I don't wanna like go into too much of it or whatever,

00:12:20.580 | but like he, I mean, he is so mindful

00:12:25.580 | of when that camera is on and when the mic is hot

00:12:29.120 | in terms of the language that he uses,

00:12:30.840 | what he's willing to admit,

00:12:32.160 | what he's willing to talk about,

00:12:33.680 | how he's willing to even appear in front of his staff.

00:12:36.740 | I think the most revealing thing Trump ever did

00:12:40.160 | was there was this press conference,

00:12:41.920 | like right after he lost,

00:12:43.600 | right after the midterm elections in 2018.

00:12:46.240 | And one of the journalists was like,

00:12:47.520 | Mr. President, thank you for doing this press conference.

00:12:50.360 | And he looks at him and he goes, it's called earned media.

00:12:52.880 | It's worth billions.

00:12:54.160 | (laughing)

00:12:55.000 | He just like had so much disdain for him

00:12:57.600 | 'cause he's like, I'm not doing this for you.

00:12:59.360 | He's like, I'm doing this for me.

00:13:00.880 | - So he's really aware of the narratives and story.

00:13:03.280 | I mean, people have talked about that all comes

00:13:05.800 | from the tabloid media of the, from New York and so on.

00:13:09.680 | He's a master of that.

00:13:10.880 | But I've also heard stories of just in private,

00:13:14.160 | he's a really, I don't wanna overuse the word charismatic,

00:13:18.180 | but just like, he is a really interesting,

00:13:21.440 | almost like friendly, like a good person.

00:13:25.880 | Like that's what I heard.

00:13:28.080 | I've heard actually surprising the same thing

00:13:29.760 | about Hillary Clinton.

00:13:30.880 | And like--

00:13:33.160 | - That I can't tell you anything about.

00:13:35.040 | - But like the way they present themselves

00:13:37.760 | is perhaps very different than they are as human beings

00:13:41.280 | and one-on-one that that's something,

00:13:43.200 | maybe that's just like a skill thing.

00:13:46.600 | Maybe the way they present themselves in public

00:13:50.720 | is actually their, I mean, almost their real self.

00:13:55.420 | And they're just really good in private, one-on-one

00:13:59.220 | to go into this mode of just being really intimate

00:14:02.800 | in some kind of human way.

00:14:03.960 | - I think that's part of it.

00:14:04.960 | Because I would notice that with Trump,

00:14:06.800 | he's like, it's almost like a tour guide.

00:14:08.800 | It was very like, it's very crazy, right?

00:14:11.240 | 'Cause you're like, you're in the Oval.

00:14:12.440 | I mean, it's his office.

00:14:13.920 | And he's like, do you guys want anything?

00:14:15.720 | He's like, you want a Diet Coke?

00:14:16.920 | 'Cause he drinks like all this Diet Coke.

00:14:19.240 | - That's awesome.

00:14:20.080 | - You know what I mean?

00:14:20.920 | - Great, I'd apologize.

00:14:21.740 | - Yeah, he's just like, you guys want a Diet Coke?

00:14:23.680 | Right, and you're sitting there and you're like,

00:14:26.040 | the way he's able to like,

00:14:28.500 | like the last time I interviewed him,

00:14:30.220 | he wanted to do it outside

00:14:33.220 | because he studied himself from all angles

00:14:36.300 | and he knows exactly how he looks on a camera

00:14:38.500 | and with which lighting.

00:14:39.860 | And so we were supposed to interview him on camera

00:14:42.060 | in the Oval Office, which is actually rare.

00:14:43.980 | Like you don't usually get that.

00:14:45.660 | And they ended up moving it outside at the last minute.

00:14:48.380 | And he came out and he's like, I picked this spot for you.

00:14:50.420 | He's like, great lighting.

00:14:51.860 | I was like, you are your own lighting director

00:14:55.260 | and the president, right?

00:14:56.920 | - It was great.

00:14:57.760 | - It's so funny.

00:14:58.960 | But it's like you said, he's very charismatic and friendly.

00:15:03.960 | I mean, you wouldn't know.

00:15:05.720 | I mean, look, this is what I mean

00:15:07.000 | in terms of the dynamism of these people that gets lost.

00:15:10.720 | And I think even he knows that.

00:15:12.280 | Like, I don't think he would want that side of him

00:15:14.240 | that I see, you know,

00:15:15.080 | that you've seen those off the record moments and more

00:15:18.000 | in order to come out because he's very keen

00:15:20.360 | about how exactly he presents to the public.

00:15:23.400 | It's like, you know, even his presidential portrait,

00:15:25.400 | everybody usually smiles and he refused to smile.

00:15:27.800 | He was like, I want to look like Winston Churchill.

00:15:30.000 | You know, like even he knew that.

00:15:31.400 | - Do you think he believes that he,

00:15:34.440 | what he kind of implies that he is one of,

00:15:38.560 | if not the greatest presidents in American history?

00:15:42.000 | Like people kind of laugh at this, but there's quite,

00:15:44.820 | I mean, there's quite a lot of people, first of all,

00:15:46.420 | that make the argument that he's the greatest president

00:15:49.080 | in history.

00:15:50.400 | Like I've heard this argument being made.

00:15:53.460 | And I mean, I don't know what the, first of all,

00:15:55.740 | I don't care, like you can't make an argument

00:16:00.740 | that anyone is the greatest.

00:16:02.700 | That's just, that's just, I come from a school

00:16:05.620 | of like being humble and modest and so on.

00:16:08.400 | It's like even Michael, you can't have that conversation.

00:16:11.860 | Okay.

00:16:12.700 | So I like that he's humble enough to say like

00:16:16.500 | Abraham Lincoln and whatever, like.

00:16:18.700 | - He says maybe Lincoln.

00:16:19.900 | - Maybe. - Remember that.

00:16:20.740 | He says maybe Lincoln.

00:16:22.100 | (laughing)

00:16:23.420 | - Do you think he actually believes that

00:16:24.900 | or is that something he understands will create news

00:16:29.740 | and also perhaps more importantly,

00:16:32.580 | piss off a large number of people?

00:16:35.600 | Is he almost like a musician masterfully playing

00:16:38.860 | the emotions of the public or does he,

00:16:42.360 | or/and does he believe when he looks in the mirror,

00:16:47.260 | I'm one of the greatest men in history?

00:16:49.900 | Combination of all three.

00:16:51.620 | I do think he believes it.

00:16:52.860 | And for the reason why is I don't think he knows

00:16:54.740 | that much about US history.

00:16:55.940 | I really mean that.

00:16:57.020 | Like, and that's what I meant whenever I was in there

00:16:58.780 | and I realized he was just living in the moment.

00:17:01.220 | I don't think he knew all that much about why.

00:17:03.780 | I mean, this is why he was elected in many ways, right?

00:17:06.380 | So I'm not saying this is a Norbert,

00:17:08.300 | like I'm not making a judgment on this.

00:17:10.640 | I'm just saying, I do think in his mind,

00:17:12.940 | he does think he was one of the best presidents

00:17:15.780 | in American history, largely because,

00:17:17.740 | and I encountered this with a lot of people who work for him

00:17:19.520 | which is that they didn't really know all that much

00:17:21.780 | kind of about what came before and all that.

00:17:25.020 | And it's not necessarily to hold it against them

00:17:27.300 | because for in many ways,

00:17:28.660 | that's what they were elected to do

00:17:30.540 | or elected to be in many ways.

00:17:32.820 | - It's an interesting question whether knowing history,

00:17:35.460 | being a student of history is productive

00:17:39.520 | or counterproductive.

00:17:40.420 | I tend to assume I really respect people

00:17:43.500 | who are deeply like well-read in history,

00:17:46.580 | like presidents that are almost like nerd, history nerds.

00:17:51.260 | I admire that, but maybe that gets in the way.

00:17:55.160 | - Well, it's--

00:17:56.000 | - Of governance, I don't know.

00:17:57.500 | It's not, you know, I'm just sort of playing devil's advocate

00:18:01.120 | to my own beliefs, but it's possible that focusing

00:18:04.920 | on the moment and the issues and letting history,

00:18:07.760 | it's like first principles thinking,

00:18:09.160 | forget the lessons of the past

00:18:12.200 | and just focus on common sense reasoning

00:18:15.360 | through the problems of today.

00:18:16.840 | - Yeah, it's really hard question.

00:18:18.400 | In terms of the modern era,

00:18:19.600 | I mean, Obama was a student of history.

00:18:21.760 | Like he used to have presidential biographers

00:18:25.080 | and people over and I mean, famously,

00:18:27.040 | like Robert A. Carrow,

00:18:28.000 | one of my favorite presidential biographers,

00:18:29.760 | he was invited to have dinner with Obama

00:18:32.320 | and Obama would like pepper some of his,

00:18:35.040 | it was interesting 'cause he'd try and justify

00:18:36.920 | some of the things he didn't do by being like,

00:18:38.800 | well, if you look at what they had to do

00:18:40.640 | and what I have to deal with, mine's much harder.

00:18:43.360 | So in that way, I was a little pissed off

00:18:45.040 | because I'd be like, no, that actually,

00:18:47.240 | like you're comparing apples to oranges and all that.

00:18:50.660 | But if you look at Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt in particular,

00:18:54.720 | this was, I mean, a voracious reader,

00:18:57.560 | not of just American history, all history.

00:18:59.600 | He wrote- - That guy's just

00:19:00.440 | such a bad-ass, Jesus. - Incredible.

00:19:02.240 | The only president who willed himself to greatness,

00:19:07.120 | that's like the amazing thing about him.

00:19:08.440 | He wasn't tested by a crisis, right?

00:19:10.380 | Like it wasn't, nah, he didn't have the Civil War,

00:19:12.680 | he didn't have World War II,

00:19:13.520 | he didn't have to found the country literally,

00:19:15.160 | or like didn't have to stave off that,

00:19:17.760 | or he didn't buy the Louisiana Purchase, like all that.

00:19:20.800 | He literally came into a pretty static country

00:19:25.100 | and he could have just governed with,

00:19:27.840 | I mean, he was the person who came before him

00:19:30.120 | was assassinated, like he easily could have coasted,

00:19:33.660 | but he literally willed the country into something more.

00:19:37.700 | And that's always why I focus a lot on him too,

00:19:40.640 | 'cause I'm like that, in many ways,

00:19:42.600 | I wouldn't say it's easy to be great during crisis,

00:19:44.680 | I mean, like look at Trump, right?

00:19:46.520 | But it can bring out the best within you,

00:19:49.440 | but it's a whole other level

00:19:51.200 | to bring out the best within yourself

00:19:53.200 | just for the sake of doing it.

00:19:54.720 | And that's, I think is really interesting.

00:19:56.440 | - His speeches were amazing.

00:19:58.280 | I'm also a sucker for great speeches

00:20:00.320 | 'cause I tend to see the role of the president

00:20:04.440 | as in part like inspirer and chief,

00:20:08.480 | sort of to be able to, I mean, that's what great leaders do,

00:20:12.200 | like CEOs of companies and so on,

00:20:14.280 | establish a vision, a clear vision,

00:20:17.180 | and like hit that hard.

00:20:19.840 | But the way you establish the vision isn't just like,

00:20:22.480 | not to dig at Joe Biden, but like sleepy, boring statements.

00:20:28.460 | You have to sell those statements

00:20:31.340 | and you have to do it in a way

00:20:34.160 | where everybody's paying attention, everybody's excited.

00:20:37.040 | And that Teddy Roosevelt was definitely one of them.

00:20:40.560 | Obama was, I think, at least early on,

00:20:44.080 | I don't know, was incredible at that.

00:20:47.760 | It does feel that the modern political landscape

00:20:49.920 | makes it more difficult to be inspirational in a sense

00:20:52.880 | 'cause everything becomes bickering and division.

00:20:55.480 | I do wanna ask you- - Please.

00:20:57.760 | - About Trump.

00:20:58.680 | So you're now a successful podcaster.

00:21:03.920 | I've talked to Joe about Trump, Joe Rogan,

00:21:07.840 | and Joe's not interested in talking to Trump,

00:21:11.480 | which is fascinating.

00:21:12.440 | I try to dig into like why.

00:21:14.320 | What would you interview Trump on,

00:21:19.520 | like realignment, for example?

00:21:21.840 | And do you think it's possible to do a two, three hour

00:21:26.440 | conversation with him where you will get at something

00:21:29.960 | like human or you get at something,

00:21:33.200 | like we were talking about the facade he puts forward.

00:21:36.000 | Do you think you could get past that?

00:21:38.000 | - No, I don't.

00:21:39.320 | I look, I was a White House correspondent.

00:21:41.800 | I observed this man very closely.

00:21:45.120 | I interviewed him.

00:21:46.400 | I think if that mic is hot, he knows what he's doing.

00:21:49.440 | He just, he's done this too long, Lex.

00:21:52.120 | He just knows.

00:21:52.960 | - But do you think he's a different human now

00:21:54.640 | after the election?

00:21:56.160 | Do you think that- - Yeah, not at all.

00:21:59.240 | I think he's been the same person since 1976.

00:22:02.840 | I really do.

00:22:03.760 | Like basically 1976.

00:22:06.000 | I studied Trump a lot and I think he's basically been

00:22:09.680 | the core of who he is and elements of that.

00:22:12.840 | Ever since he built that, you know,

00:22:14.760 | the ice rink in Central Park and got that media attention,

00:22:18.680 | that was it.

00:22:19.520 | - Yeah, he's a fascinating study.

00:22:21.040 | Still, I feel there's a hope in me

00:22:24.880 | that there would be a podcast like Joe Rogan,

00:22:28.560 | like a long form podcast where something could be,

00:22:31.600 | you know, and you're actually a really good person

00:22:33.480 | to do that, where you can have a real conversation

00:22:37.880 | that looks back at the election and reveals something honest.

00:22:40.400 | But perhaps he's thinking about running again

00:22:42.880 | and so maybe he'll never let down that guard.

00:22:45.760 | - Yes.

00:22:46.600 | - But like, you know, I just love it when

00:22:48.560 | there's this switch in people where you start

00:22:53.640 | looking back at your life and wanting to tell stories.

00:22:57.880 | Like, you know, trying to extract wisdom

00:23:01.320 | and like realizing you're in this new phase of life

00:23:03.640 | where like the battles have all been fought.

00:23:06.320 | Now you're this old, like former warrior

00:23:10.360 | and now you can tell the stories of that time.

00:23:12.480 | And it seems like Trump is still at it,

00:23:14.720 | like the young warrior he is.

00:23:16.160 | He's not in the mode of telling stories.

00:23:18.400 | - You know what I got from Rogan?

00:23:19.600 | He's the only president who didn't age while in office.

00:23:22.720 | It's true, right?

00:23:23.720 | Like, 'cause, and this is what I mean,

00:23:25.240 | 'cause he lives in the moment.

00:23:26.320 | Like the job actually aged Obama.

00:23:29.920 | I mean, Bush, same thing.

00:23:31.920 | Even Clinton, Clinton was like fat.

00:23:34.160 | He looked miserable by like 2000.

00:23:36.440 | HW, like, I mean, Reagan, famous.

00:23:38.840 | Actually, yeah, pretty much everybody I think about.

00:23:41.440 | Yeah, including John F. Kennedy

00:23:44.120 | who got much sicker while in office.

00:23:45.720 | The job like weighs on you and makes you physically ill.

00:23:49.320 | Trump was, he's the only person who just,

00:23:51.880 | he didn't have to do it.

00:23:53.120 | - He almost gotten stronger

00:23:54.880 | and he was one of the most divisive,

00:23:57.040 | like the climate, there's so many people attacking him.

00:24:00.240 | So much hatred, so much love and hatred.

00:24:03.160 | And it was just, he, it was, I mean, it was,

00:24:05.920 | whatever it was, it was quite masterful

00:24:08.320 | and a fascinating study.

00:24:10.880 | If we stick on Hitler for just a minute,

00:24:15.880 | what lessons do you take from that time?

00:24:20.040 | Do you think it's a unique moment in human history,

00:24:23.440 | that World War II?

00:24:25.880 | I mean, both Stalin and Hitler,

00:24:27.840 | you know, is it something that's just an outlier

00:24:33.880 | in all of human history in terms of the atrocities

00:24:36.480 | or is there lessons to be learned?

00:24:40.840 | You mentioned offline that you're not just a student

00:24:45.320 | of the entirety of the history,

00:24:46.440 | but you're also fascinated by just different

00:24:48.120 | like policies and stuff.

00:24:49.600 | Like what's the immigration policy?

00:24:52.160 | What's the policy on science?

00:24:53.560 | - Well, look, Third Reich in power.

00:24:55.080 | Let me plug it by Richard Evans, I think is what it was.

00:24:58.520 | 'Cause that actually will tell you,

00:25:00.040 | like what was it like to live under the Nazi regime

00:25:03.040 | without the war?

00:25:04.120 | - Yeah.

00:25:05.400 | - Yeah, it's a hard question in terms of the lessons

00:25:08.080 | that we can learn.

00:25:08.920 | 'Cause there's a lot, and it's actually been over,

00:25:11.840 | it's been over indexed almost.

00:25:13.760 | Everything comes back to Hitler in a conversation.

00:25:15.960 | So I kind of think of it within Mao, Stalin and Hitler

00:25:20.960 | as, I don't wanna say payments for,

00:25:24.900 | but like the end point payment for the sins

00:25:29.900 | and the problems of the monarchical system

00:25:34.060 | that evolved within Europe, basically like 1400 and more.

00:25:38.320 | I basically think that 1400, the wars between the state,

00:25:43.160 | wars between France, England, the balance of power,

00:25:45.560 | eventually World War I, and then serfdom within Russia,

00:25:49.440 | the Russian revolution that birthed Stalin,

00:25:52.120 | same thing, the Kaiser and Imperial Germany

00:25:55.080 | and this like incredibly crazy system of balance of power

00:25:58.460 | in World War I.

00:25:59.780 | And then same thing within China

00:26:01.700 | in terms of the warring states

00:26:03.620 | and then the disintegration, the European,

00:26:06.980 | this is how they think of it,

00:26:08.520 | which is like the century of humiliation

00:26:10.460 | and they had to have something like this.

00:26:12.740 | I think of it, I try to think of it

00:26:14.060 | within the context of that.

00:26:15.660 | I don't wanna think of,

00:26:16.900 | I don't wanna sound like an inevitable list,

00:26:19.080 | but I think of it as, I like to think about systems,

00:26:22.920 | especially in here in DC, that's where I got into politics,

00:26:25.160 | which is that you have to understand systems of power

00:26:29.480 | and the incentives within systems and the disincentives,

00:26:33.000 | the downside risk of what you're creating,

00:26:36.840 | because that is what leads and creates the behavior

00:26:41.840 | within that system.

00:26:43.160 | I was just talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday.

00:26:45.880 | It's kind of funny, like I read these,

00:26:47.920 | I'm obsessed with these books by Robert Caro,

00:26:50.900 | the biographies of Lyndon Johnson.

00:26:52.380 | He's written like 5,000 pages so far

00:26:54.220 | and it's still not done.

00:26:55.460 | Okay, so like these are like books I base my life on.

00:26:59.280 | And look, these are Washington

00:27:02.620 | and the story of the post New Deal era and forward.

00:27:05.480 | Not much has changed.

00:27:06.760 | Like the Senate is still the Senate.

00:27:09.000 | So many of the same problems with the Senate

00:27:10.840 | are still there in some cases.

00:27:13.300 | No, not anymore.

00:27:14.460 | But for a while, some of the people

00:27:16.100 | who were there with Johnson are actually still.

00:27:18.800 | One of them is the president of the United States,

00:27:20.460 | just a joke.

00:27:21.540 | And you think about also same

00:27:24.780 | with the media relationship, right?

00:27:26.300 | Like there's this media really,

00:27:27.740 | they may have come and gone.

00:27:29.260 | Like the people who were in the media

00:27:31.780 | and who were cozy with the administration officials.

00:27:34.900 | I mean, they just recreated themselves.

00:27:37.220 | It's like an ecosystem which doesn't change.

00:27:41.020 | And that's why I'm like,

00:27:43.260 | oh, it's not that was a specific time.

00:27:46.180 | That's just DC.

00:27:47.380 | Like that is DC

00:27:49.900 | because of the way the system is architected.

00:27:52.980 | It's pretty much been that way since like 1908,

00:27:55.560 | whenever like Teddy Roosevelt was dining

00:27:58.300 | with these journalists and he would yell at them.

00:27:59.920 | And then he would go over to the society house.

00:28:02.560 | And like in many ways,

00:28:04.120 | that's now instead of going to Henry Adams's house,

00:28:06.580 | like the people are congregating in Calorama,

00:28:10.420 | which is the richest neighborhood here

00:28:12.120 | at somebody else's house.

00:28:13.300 | Like it's the same thing.

00:28:14.900 | So you have to think about the system

00:28:16.540 | and then the incentives within that system

00:28:18.660 | about what the outcomes that they're producing.

00:28:20.540 | If you actually wanna think about

00:28:21.860 | how can I change this from the outside?

00:28:23.760 | That's also why it's very difficult to change

00:28:25.680 | because the system is designed

00:28:27.660 | in order to produce actually pretty specific outcomes

00:28:31.040 | that can only be changed in extraordinary times.

00:28:33.800 | - Yeah, it's sometimes hard to predict

00:28:37.340 | what kind of outcomes will result from the incentive,

00:28:41.280 | the system that you create, right?

00:28:42.980 | In the case, because especially when it's novel

00:28:45.380 | kind of situations.

00:28:46.500 | Trump actually created a pretty novel situation.

00:28:49.300 | And a lot of the things that we've seen

00:28:53.580 | in the 20th century were very novel systems

00:28:56.380 | where people were very optimistic about the outcomes, right?

00:28:59.800 | And then it turned out to not have the results

00:29:02.780 | that they predicted.

00:29:04.060 | In terms of like things being unchanged

00:29:06.580 | for the past 100 years and so on,

00:29:08.480 | can you like Wikipedia style or maybe like in a musical form,

00:29:13.480 | like I'm only a bill, describe to me.

00:29:17.020 | (laughing)

00:29:18.760 | - I still sing that to my head sometimes.

00:29:20.640 | I'm just a bill.

00:29:21.960 | (laughing)

00:29:24.200 | - I don't know what the rest of the song is,

00:29:27.160 | but let's leave that to people's imagination.

00:29:31.400 | How does this whole thing work?

00:29:33.000 | How does the US political system work?

00:29:35.000 | The three branches.

00:29:37.080 | How do you think about the system we have now?

00:29:40.760 | If you were to try to describe,

00:29:42.520 | if aliens showed up and asked you like,

00:29:46.320 | they didn't have time, so this is an elevator thing.

00:29:49.760 | Should we destroy you as you plead to avoid destruction?

00:29:54.760 | Well, how would you describe how this thing works?

00:29:58.680 | - I would say we come together

00:30:00.600 | and we pick the people who make our laws.

00:30:03.740 | Then we pick the guy who executes those laws

00:30:07.900 | and they together pick the people who determine

00:30:11.380 | whether they or the president is breaking the law

00:30:14.900 | at the most basic level.

00:30:16.360 | That's how I would describe it.

00:30:17.860 | The people who make the laws are Congress.

00:30:22.620 | The executive is charged with executing the laws

00:30:27.620 | as passed by Congress, the branches of government.

00:30:30.260 | And the Supreme Court is picked by the president,

00:30:33.140 | confirmed by the Senate, which then decides

00:30:35.780 | whether you or other people are breaking the law

00:30:39.420 | in terms of interpretation of that law.

00:30:42.000 | That's basically it.

00:30:42.840 | Oh, and they decide whether those laws are in,

00:30:47.840 | they fall within the restrictions

00:30:53.980 | and the want of the founders as expressed

00:30:58.860 | by the constitution of the United States,

00:31:00.820 | which is a set of principles that we came together in 1787.

00:31:05.820 | I wanna make sure I get this right.

00:31:08.300 | 1787 and decided that we were gonna live

00:31:11.660 | the rest of our lives barring a revolution and more.

00:31:14.740 | And we've made it 200 and something years

00:31:16.900 | in order on under that system.

00:31:18.660 | - So there's a balance of power

00:31:20.420 | that is because it's multiple branches.

00:31:22.460 | There's a tension and a balance to it

00:31:24.940 | as designed by those original documents.

00:31:26.980 | Which is the most dysfunctional?

00:31:30.420 | Which is the branches?

00:31:31.260 | Which is your favorite?

00:31:32.740 | Like in terms of talking about systems

00:31:34.880 | and like what's the greatest of concern

00:31:37.340 | and what is the greatest source of benefit in your view?

00:31:41.540 | - The presidency, obviously.

00:31:42.780 | Well, the presidency is my favorite to study, obviously,

00:31:46.500 | because it is the one where there's most subject

00:31:49.940 | to variable change in terms of the personality involved

00:31:53.460 | because of so much power imbued within the executive.

00:31:56.860 | The Senate is actually pretty much the same.

00:31:59.460 | (laughs)

00:32:00.660 | One of the things I love about reading about the Senate

00:32:03.820 | and histories of the Senate is you're like,

00:32:05.740 | oh yeah, there were always like assholes in the Senate

00:32:08.740 | who were doing their thing and filibustering constantly

00:32:13.220 | based upon this or that.

00:32:15.320 | And then the personalities involved with the Senate

00:32:18.500 | haven't mattered as much since like pre-Civil War.

00:32:23.500 | Like pre-Civil War you had like Henry Clay

00:32:25.980 | and then Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun,

00:32:29.980 | who even in their own way,

00:32:31.220 | they represented like larger constituencies

00:32:33.180 | and they crafted these like compromises

00:32:35.340 | up until the outbreak of the Civil War, et cetera.

00:32:37.860 | But like post since then,

00:32:39.140 | you don't think about like the Titans within the Senate.

00:32:42.720 | Most of that is because a lot of the stuff

00:32:44.620 | that they had power over

00:32:45.660 | has transferred over to the executive.

00:32:47.720 | So I'm most interested in really in like power,

00:32:51.040 | like where it lies.

00:32:52.020 | It's actually pretty, you know,

00:32:53.720 | throughout American history,

00:32:54.900 | much more used to lie with Congress.

00:32:56.940 | Now it's obviously just so imbued within the executive

00:33:00.440 | that understanding executive power

00:33:02.340 | is I think the thing I'm probably most interested in here.

00:33:04.940 | - Do you think at this point,

00:33:06.340 | the amount of power that the president has is corrupting

00:33:09.340 | to their ability to lead well?

00:33:12.700 | Is this, you know, power corrupts,

00:33:15.140 | absolute power corrupts absolutely.

00:33:17.340 | Are we, is there too much power in the presidency?

00:33:21.500 | - There definitely is.

00:33:22.540 | And part of the problem,

00:33:23.820 | and one of the things I try to make come across to people

00:33:27.740 | is if you're the president,

00:33:29.740 | unless you have a hyper intentional view

00:33:34.020 | of how something must be different in government,

00:33:36.740 | your view doesn't matter.

00:33:37.920 | So for example, like if you were Trump,

00:33:41.140 | let's take Trump even,

00:33:42.100 | and even in with a pretty intentional view,

00:33:43.580 | he was like, I'm gonna end the war in Afghanistan

00:33:46.080 | and Iraq, right?

00:33:47.380 | And he came in and he gets these generals in.

00:33:49.500 | He's like, I wanna end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

00:33:52.420 | Oh, and I wanna withdraw these troops from Syria.

00:33:54.780 | And they're like, okay, well give us like six months.

00:33:57.300 | He's like, okay.

00:33:58.140 | And this is the thing about Trump,

00:33:58.980 | he doesn't realize that it's bullshit.

00:34:00.580 | So they're like, he's like, six months seems fine.

00:34:03.260 | Right, so then six months comes and he's like,

00:34:05.940 | he's like, so, and then he'll announce it.

00:34:07.540 | He'll be like, and we're getting out of Syria, it's great.

00:34:10.140 | And then the generals freak out.

00:34:11.700 | They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:34:12.740 | We don't have a plan for that.

00:34:13.660 | He's like, but you guys told me six months.

00:34:15.100 | He's like, I don't know, now we need another six months

00:34:16.700 | in order to figure this thing out.

00:34:18.340 | And by that time, now you're midterms.

00:34:20.020 | So now what?

00:34:20.860 | You gotta run for re-election.

00:34:22.140 | So more what I mean by that is,

00:34:24.540 | if you don't have a hyper-intentional view

00:34:26.020 | about how to change foreign policy,

00:34:27.540 | if you don't have a hyper-intentional view

00:34:28.980 | about how the Department of Commerce should do its job,

00:34:31.300 | they are just gonna go on autopilot.

00:34:33.160 | So this is part of the problem.

00:34:35.740 | When you asked me about the presidency,

00:34:37.260 | it's not the presidency itself,

00:34:40.080 | like the president himself, which has become too powerful.

00:34:43.100 | It's that we have less democratic checks

00:34:46.620 | on the people and the systems that are on autopilot.

00:34:51.540 | And I would say that basically since 2008,

00:34:55.040 | we have voted every single time to disrupt that system,

00:35:01.840 | except in the case of 2020 with Joe Biden,

00:35:04.300 | and there are a lot of different reasons

00:35:05.420 | around why that happened.

00:35:06.980 | And in every single one of those cases,

00:35:09.260 | Obama and Trump, they all failed

00:35:11.460 | in order to radically disrupt that.

00:35:14.960 | And that just shows you how titanic the task is.

00:35:17.620 | And I'm using my language precisely,

00:35:19.860 | 'cause I don't wanna be like deep state,

00:35:21.380 | but obviously there's a deep state.

00:35:22.980 | - Deep state, I guess, has conspiratorial

00:35:24.460 | - Exactly. - Tensions to it.

00:35:26.100 | But so what you're saying is the true power

00:35:29.340 | currently lies with the autopilot,

00:35:31.500 | - Yeah. - AKA deep state.

00:35:32.740 | - Well, but see, it's not, this is the thing too

00:35:34.940 | I wanna make clear, 'cause I think people

00:35:37.420 | think conspiratorially that they're all coming together

00:35:40.140 | to intentionally do something.

00:35:42.220 | No, no, no, no, no.

00:35:43.260 | They are doing what they know, believe they are right,

00:35:47.480 | and don't have real democratic checks within that.

00:35:50.720 | And so now they have entire generations of cultures

00:35:53.440 | within each of these bureaucracies where they say,

00:35:55.960 | this is the way that we do things around here.

00:35:59.560 | And that's the problem, which is that we have a culture

00:36:03.840 | of within many of these agencies and more.

00:36:06.960 | I think the best example for this

00:36:09.100 | would be during the Ukraine gate with Trump and all that,

00:36:13.940 | with the impeachment.

00:36:14.780 | I don't wanna, I'm not talking about the politics here,

00:36:16.540 | but the most revealing thing that happened

00:36:18.980 | was when the whistleblower guy, Alexander Vindman,

00:36:21.960 | was like, "Here you have the president

00:36:24.220 | "departing from the policy of the United States."

00:36:27.140 | And I was like, "Well, let me educate you, Lieutenant Colonel

00:36:32.140 | "the president of the United States

00:36:34.520 | "makes American foreign policy."

00:36:36.100 | - Yeah. - But it was a very

00:36:37.140 | revealing comment because he and all the people

00:36:41.240 | within national security bureaucracy do think that.

00:36:44.040 | They're like, "This is the policy of the United States.

00:36:46.520 | "We have to do this."

00:36:48.160 | That's where things get screwy.

00:36:49.440 | - Well, listen, for me personally,

00:36:51.060 | but also from an engineering perspective,

00:36:53.200 | I just talked to Jim Keller, it's just,

00:36:55.480 | this is the kind of bullshit that we all hate

00:36:58.000 | in when you're trying to innovate

00:37:00.080 | and design new products. - Right.

00:37:02.360 | - So that's what first principles thinking requires

00:37:05.840 | is like, we don't give a shit what was done before.

00:37:09.080 | The point is, what is the best way to do it?

00:37:11.640 | And it seems like the current government,

00:37:14.960 | government in general, probably,

00:37:16.280 | bureaucracies in general are just really good

00:37:20.440 | at being lazy about never having those conversations.

00:37:23.560 | And just, it becomes this momentum thing

00:37:26.520 | that nobody has the difficult conversations.

00:37:29.080 | It's become a game within a certain set of constraints.

00:37:32.520 | And they never kind of do revolutionary tasks.

00:37:34.880 | - But you did say that the presidency is power,

00:37:37.920 | but you're saying that more power than the others,

00:37:41.500 | but that power has to be coupled

00:37:44.760 | with focused intentionality.

00:37:46.440 | Like, you have to keep hammering the thing.

00:37:48.480 | - If you want it done, it has to be done.

00:37:51.080 | I mean, and you gotta, this is the other part too,

00:37:54.200 | which is that it's not just that you have to get it done,

00:37:57.740 | you have to pick the 100 people who you can trust

00:38:01.760 | to pick 10 people each to actually do what you want.

00:38:06.680 | One of the most revealing quotes

00:38:08.800 | is from a guy named Tommy Corcoran.

00:38:10.640 | He was the top aid to FDR.

00:38:13.000 | This I'm getting from the Cara books too.

00:38:14.880 | And he said, "What is a government?

00:38:17.200 | "It's not just one guy or even 10 guys.

00:38:20.720 | "Hell, it's a thousand guys."

00:38:23.400 | And what FDR did is he masterfully picked the right people

00:38:28.200 | to execute his will through the federal agencies.

00:38:31.080 | Johnson was the same way.

00:38:32.640 | He played these people like a fiddle.

00:38:34.760 | He knew exactly who to pick.

00:38:36.480 | He knew the system and more.

00:38:39.000 | Part of the reason that outsiders

00:38:40.760 | who don't have a lot of experience in Washington

00:38:43.240 | almost always fail is they don't know who to pick

00:38:45.900 | or they pick people who say one thing to their face.

00:38:49.200 | And then when it comes time to carry out

00:38:51.480 | the president's policy in terms of the government,

00:38:54.280 | they just don't do it.

00:38:55.320 | And the president's too, think about this.

00:38:57.240 | I think Rahm Emanuel said this.

00:38:58.880 | He was like, "By the time it gets to the president's desk,

00:39:01.680 | "nobody else can solve it."

00:39:02.920 | It's not easy.

00:39:03.760 | It's not like a yes or no question.

00:39:05.640 | It's every single thing that hits the president's desk

00:39:08.760 | is incredibly hard to do.

00:39:10.780 | And Obama actually even said,

00:39:12.840 | and this was a very revealing quote

00:39:14.040 | about how he thinks about the presidency,

00:39:16.520 | which is he's like,

00:39:17.360 | "Look, the presidency is like one of those super tankers."

00:39:21.960 | He's like, "I can come in

00:39:23.460 | "and I can take it two degrees left and two degrees right.

00:39:27.340 | "In 100 years, two degrees left,

00:39:29.620 | "that's a whole different trajectory.

00:39:31.780 | "Same thing on the right."

00:39:32.920 | And he's like, "That ultimately is really all you can do."

00:39:36.960 | I quibble and disagree with that

00:39:38.760 | in terms of how he could have changed things in 2008,

00:39:41.480 | but there's a lot of truth to that statement.

00:39:43.680 | - Okay, that's really fascinating.

00:39:44.600 | You make me realize that actually both Obama and Trump

00:39:48.760 | are probably playing victim here to the system.

00:39:52.160 | You're making me think that maybe you can correct me

00:39:55.800 | that, 'cause I'm thinking of like Elon Musk,

00:39:59.280 | whose major success, despite everything,

00:40:01.560 | is hiring the right people.

00:40:03.440 | - Exactly.

00:40:04.280 | - And like creating those thousands,

00:40:05.960 | that structure of a thousand people.

00:40:08.540 | So maybe a president has power in that

00:40:11.280 | if they were exceptionally good at hiring the right people.

00:40:13.880 | - Personnel is policy, man.

00:40:15.280 | That's what it comes down to.

00:40:16.640 | - But wouldn't you be able to steer the ship

00:40:18.520 | way more than two degrees if you hire the right people?

00:40:21.340 | So like, it's almost like Obama

00:40:23.160 | was not good at hiring the right people.

00:40:25.240 | He hired all the Clinton people.

00:40:26.920 | That's what happened.

00:40:27.760 | What happened with Trump?

00:40:28.580 | He hired all the Bush people.

00:40:29.520 | Weird. - And then you just sit back

00:40:30.600 | and say, "Oh, president can't,"

00:40:33.800 | but that means you're just suck at hiring.

00:40:36.320 | - Correct.

00:40:37.160 | Yeah, I mean, look, it's funny.

00:40:39.000 | I'm giving you simultaneously

00:40:40.680 | the nationalist case against Trump

00:40:42.880 | and the progressive case against Obama.

00:40:45.120 | The progressive people were like,

00:40:46.180 | "Why the fuck are you hiring all these Clinton people

00:40:48.920 | "in order to run the government and just recreate,

00:40:51.800 | "like why are you hiring Larry Summers,

00:40:53.720 | "who was one of the people who worked at all these banks

00:40:56.240 | "and didn't believe that bailouts were gonna be big enough,

00:40:58.360 | "and then to come in in the worst economic crisis

00:41:01.120 | "in modern American history?"

00:41:02.560 | That was 2008.

00:41:03.720 | And Summers actively lobbied against larger bailouts,

00:41:06.520 | which had huge implications for working class people

00:41:09.960 | and pretty much hollowed out America since.

00:41:12.440 | Okay, from Trump, same thing.

00:41:14.160 | You're like, "I'm gonna drain the swamp.

00:41:15.920 | "And by doing that, I'm gonna hire

00:41:17.840 | "Goldman Sachs' Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin

00:41:22.160 | "and all these other absolute Bush clowns

00:41:25.840 | "in order to run my White House."

00:41:27.700 | Well, yeah, no shit.

00:41:29.340 | The only thing that you accomplished

00:41:31.140 | in your four years in office

00:41:32.760 | is passing a massive tax cut for the rich

00:41:35.840 | and for corporations.

00:41:37.320 | I wonder how that happened.

00:41:38.840 | - What role does money play in all of this?

00:41:41.320 | Is money a huge influence in politics,

00:41:43.640 | super PACs, all that kind of stuff?

00:41:46.480 | Or is this more just kind of a narrative that we play with?

00:41:50.240 | Because from the outsider's perspective,

00:41:52.040 | that seems to be one of the fundamental problems

00:41:55.840 | with modern politics.

00:41:56.840 | - So I was just having this conversation,

00:41:58.520 | Marshall and I, Marshall Kass,

00:41:59.840 | one of my co-hosts on the realignment.

00:42:01.220 | And it's funny because if you do enough research,

00:42:04.560 | we actually live in the least corrupt age

00:42:08.360 | in American campaign finance.

00:42:10.880 | As in, it's never been more transparent.

00:42:13.680 | It's never been more up to the FEC,

00:42:15.480 | yeah, and all of that.

00:42:18.340 | If you go back and read not even 50 years ago,

00:42:20.960 | we're talking about Lyndon B. Johnson handing people,

00:42:23.520 | like literally as he came up in his youth,

00:42:26.600 | paying people for votes,

00:42:28.160 | like the boss of the person who had all the Mexican votes,

00:42:33.160 | like the person who had,

00:42:34.120 | and he was giving out briefcases.

00:42:35.760 | This is it, like within people's lifetimes

00:42:37.580 | who are alive in America.

00:42:38.960 | So that doesn't happen anymore.

00:42:40.480 | But I don't like to blame everything on money,

00:42:44.480 | although I do think money is obviously

00:42:46.280 | a huge part of the problem.

00:42:47.440 | I actually look at it in terms of distribution,

00:42:51.800 | which is that how is money distributed within our society?

00:42:55.400 | 'Cause I firmly believe that politics,

00:42:59.520 | this is gonna get complicated,

00:43:00.760 | but I think politics is mostly downstream from culture.

00:43:04.480 | And culture, obviously I'm using economics

00:43:06.880 | because there's obviously a huge interplay there.

00:43:08.380 | But like in terms of the equitable

00:43:10.880 | or lack of equitable distribution of money

00:43:12.720 | within our politics,

00:43:13.840 | what we're really pissed off about is we're like,

00:43:16.040 | our politics only seems to work

00:43:18.140 | for the people who have money.

00:43:20.120 | I think that's largely true.

00:43:22.000 | I think that the reason why things worked differently

00:43:24.640 | in the past is because our economy was structured

00:43:27.740 | in different ways.

00:43:28.880 | And there's a reason that our politics today

00:43:31.660 | are very analogous to the last Gilded Age,

00:43:34.360 | because we had very similar levels of economic distribution

00:43:39.360 | and cultural problems too at the same time.

00:43:41.160 | I don't wanna erase that,

00:43:42.000 | 'cause I actually think that's what's driving

00:43:43.640 | all of our politics right now.

00:43:45.020 | - So that's interesting.

00:43:45.860 | So seeing as one, so in that sense,

00:43:48.160 | representative government is doing a pretty good job

00:43:50.240 | of representing the state of culture

00:43:52.240 | and the people and so on.

00:43:53.600 | Yeah, can I ask you in terms of the deep state

00:43:58.480 | and conspiracy theories, there's a lot of talk about,

00:44:01.560 | so again, from an outsider's perspective,

00:44:04.440 | if I were just looking at Twitter,

00:44:06.360 | it seems that at least 90% of people in government

00:44:09.440 | are pedophiles.

00:44:10.280 | (laughing)

00:44:11.120 | 90 to 95%, I'm not sure what that number is.

00:44:15.200 | If I were to just look at Twitter, honestly, or YouTube,

00:44:17.960 | I would think most of the world is a pedophile.

00:44:20.640 | I would almost feel like--

00:44:22.060 | - Right, and if you don't fully believe that,

00:44:24.320 | you're a pedophile.

00:44:25.160 | (laughing)

00:44:26.340 | - I would start to wonder, like, wait, am I a pedophile too?

00:44:31.080 | I'm either a communist or a pedophile, or both, I guess.

00:44:34.080 | Yeah, that's gonna be clipped out, thank you, internet.

00:44:37.480 | (laughing)

00:44:39.420 | I look forward to your emails.

00:44:42.180 | - But is there any kind of shadow conspiracy theories

00:44:47.180 | that give you pause?

00:44:50.500 | Or, so the flip side, the response to a lot

00:44:53.620 | of conspiracy theories is like, no, the reason this happened

00:44:57.460 | is because it's a combination of just incompetence.

00:45:01.800 | So where do you land on some of these conspiracy theories?

00:45:06.380 | - I think most conspiracy theories are wrong.

00:45:09.100 | Some are true, and those are spectacularly true.

00:45:12.980 | And, if that makes sense.

00:45:14.620 | - Yeah, and we don't know which ones, though.

00:45:16.780 | - I don't know which ones.

00:45:17.660 | - That's the problem.

00:45:18.620 | - I think, oh, well, I mean, look, man,

00:45:20.320 | I listened to your podcast.

00:45:21.580 | I think I was a huge non-believer in UFOs,

00:45:25.540 | and now I've probably never believed more in UFOs.

00:45:28.300 | Like, I believe in UFOs.

00:45:30.860 | Like, I'm very comfortable being like,

00:45:32.840 | not only do I believe in UFOs,

00:45:34.340 | like, I think we're probably being visited

00:45:35.740 | by an alien civilization.

00:45:37.620 | And if you asked me that three years ago,

00:45:39.540 | I would've been like, you're out of your fucking mind.

00:45:40.980 | Like, what are you talking about?

00:45:42.220 | Well, listen to David Fravor.

00:45:44.020 | That's all I have to say.

00:45:44.900 | That's it.

00:45:45.740 | - I have the sense that the government has information

00:45:49.140 | that hasn't revealed, but it's not like they're,

00:45:52.140 | I don't think they're holding,

00:45:53.740 | there's like a green guy sitting there in a room.

00:45:55.780 | - Exactly.

00:45:56.620 | - They just, they have seen things

00:45:58.100 | they don't know what to do with,

00:45:59.780 | so it's like, they're confused.

00:46:01.460 | - They're afraid of revealing that they don't know.

00:46:04.420 | That's what I think it is.

00:46:05.260 | - They don't know, right.

00:46:06.100 | - It's revealing, yeah, exactly, that they don't know.

00:46:09.100 | And then in the process,

00:46:10.700 | there's a lot of fears tied up in that.

00:46:12.380 | First, looking incompetent in the public eye,

00:46:15.220 | nobody wants to be looked that way.

00:46:17.700 | And the other is like, in revealing it,

00:46:20.360 | even though they don't know,

00:46:22.020 | maybe China will figure it out.

00:46:23.300 | - Exactly.

00:46:24.140 | - So like, we don't want China to figure it out first.

00:46:26.780 | And so that, all those kinds of things

00:46:28.980 | result in basically secrecy,

00:46:30.580 | then that damages the trust in institutions

00:46:33.340 | on one of the most fascinating aspects,

00:46:36.740 | like one of the most fascinating mysteries of humankind

00:46:39.980 | of is there life, intelligent life out there in the universe?

00:46:44.780 | So that's one of them, but there's other ones.

00:46:47.540 | Like for me, when I first came across,

00:46:49.660 | actually, Alex Jones was 9/11.

00:46:53.420 | - Yeah.

00:46:54.260 | - I remember like, 'cause I was in Chicago,

00:46:57.780 | I was thinking like, oh shit,

00:46:59.220 | are they gonna hit Chicago too?

00:47:01.420 | - That's what everybody was thinking.

00:47:02.340 | - Yeah, everybody was thinking like,

00:47:03.900 | what does this mean?

00:47:05.100 | What scale?

00:47:05.940 | What, I mean, trying to interpret it.

00:47:07.660 | And I remember like, looking for information,

00:47:10.340 | desperately, like what happened?

00:47:12.380 | And I remember not being satisfied

00:47:14.420 | with the quality of reporting

00:47:17.140 | and figuring out like, rigorous,

00:47:18.820 | like, here's exactly what happened.

00:47:21.460 | And so people like Alex Jones stepped up

00:47:23.660 | and others that said like,

00:47:25.900 | there's some shady shit going on.

00:47:27.940 | And it sure as hell looked like

00:47:29.620 | there's shady shit going on.

00:47:30.900 | - Yes.

00:47:31.860 | - So like, and I still stand behind the fact

00:47:34.740 | that it seems like there's not enough,

00:47:38.580 | like it wasn't a good job of being honest

00:47:40.580 | and transparent and all those kinds of things.

00:47:42.140 | - 'Cause it would implicate the Saudis, let's be honest.

00:47:43.980 | - Is it?

00:47:44.820 | - That's my conspiracy theories.

00:47:46.220 | I'm like, yeah, I think they covered up a lot of stuff

00:47:48.180 | because they wanted to cover up

00:47:49.540 | for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

00:47:50.820 | Like, I mean, that was a conspiracy theory

00:47:53.500 | not that long ago.

00:47:54.460 | I think it's true.

00:47:55.340 | I mean, I don't think it's 100% true.

00:47:57.180 | - Yeah, so those kinds of conspiracy theories

00:47:59.180 | are interesting.

00:48:00.020 | I mean, there's other ones for me personally

00:48:01.780 | that touched sort of the institution

00:48:04.340 | that means a lot to me is MIT and Jeffrey Epstein.

00:48:09.340 | - I wanna hear a lot more.

00:48:10.660 | I wanna hear about that.

00:48:11.620 | I talk about Epstein a lot.

00:48:12.780 | So I'm like- - Oh, you do?

00:48:13.660 | - Yeah, and he, I was gonna say,

00:48:15.700 | in terms of conspiracy theory,

00:48:16.980 | that one changed my outlook.

00:48:18.780 | 'Cause I was like, whoa, like, you know this dude

00:48:22.420 | who convinced some of the most successful people on earth

00:48:26.620 | that he was like some money manager

00:48:29.100 | and it looks like it was totally fake.

00:48:31.140 | Like Leon Black.

00:48:32.300 | I mean, this is one of the richest men on Wall Street,

00:48:34.300 | $9 billion net worth.

00:48:36.740 | Why is he giving him over $100 million

00:48:40.100 | between 2015 and 2019?

00:48:42.460 | What's going on here?

00:48:43.860 | Lex Wexner, same thing.

00:48:45.340 | So yeah, I wanna hear

00:48:46.300 | because you know people who met him.

00:48:48.540 | And the only person I know who met him was Eric Weinstein.

00:48:50.860 | I've heard his, right?

00:48:52.180 | - Oh boy, so I, listen, I'm still in,

00:48:55.180 | and Eric is fascinating.

00:48:56.620 | And like Eric is full on saying that-

00:48:59.820 | - He was a Mossad or whatever.

00:49:01.700 | - Yeah, there's a front for something,

00:49:04.180 | something much, much bigger.

00:49:05.980 | And there's a, whatever his name, Robert Maxwell,

00:49:09.700 | all those stories.

00:49:12.100 | Like you could dig deeper and deeper

00:49:14.060 | that Jeffrey's just like the tip of the iceberg.

00:49:17.540 | I just think he's an exceptionally charismatic,

00:49:20.660 | listen, this isn't speaking from confidence

00:49:22.780 | or like deep understanding of the situation,

00:49:25.740 | but from my speaking with people,

00:49:28.380 | he just seems like, at least from the side of his influence

00:49:33.380 | and interaction with researchers,

00:49:36.820 | he just seems like somebody

00:49:38.340 | that was exceptionally charismatic

00:49:40.060 | and actually took interest.

00:49:44.780 | He was unable to speak about interesting scientific things,

00:49:49.780 | but he took interest in them.

00:49:51.940 | So he knew how to stroke the egos

00:49:53.940 | of a lot of powerful people like well,

00:49:56.240 | like in different kinds of ways.

00:49:58.500 | I suppose, I don't know about this

00:50:01.220 | because I don't have, like if a really,

00:50:04.180 | okay, this is weird to say,

00:50:06.020 | but I have an ability, okay,

00:50:10.060 | I think women are beautiful, I like women,

00:50:12.740 | but like if like a supermodel came to me or something,

00:50:16.300 | like I'm able to reason.

00:50:19.300 | It seems like some people are not able to think clearly

00:50:22.700 | when there's like an attractive woman in the room.

00:50:25.260 | And I think that was one of the tools

00:50:27.480 | he used to manipulate people.

00:50:29.400 | - Interesting.

00:50:30.300 | - I don't know.

00:50:31.500 | Listen, it's like the pedophile thing.

00:50:33.620 | I don't know how many people are complete sex addicts,

00:50:35.880 | but like it seems like, like looking out into the world,

00:50:39.680 | like there's like the Me Too movement

00:50:41.720 | have revealed that there's a lot of like weird,

00:50:44.680 | like creepy people out there.

00:50:47.240 | I don't know, but I think it was just one of the many tools

00:50:50.520 | that he used to convince people and manipulate people,

00:50:55.520 | but not in some like evil way,

00:51:01.420 | but more just really good at the art of conversation

00:51:07.040 | and just winning people over on the side.

00:51:09.840 | And then by building through that process,

00:51:13.700 | building a network of other really powerful people

00:51:16.120 | and not explicitly, but implicitly having done shady shit

00:51:21.120 | with powerful people, like building up

00:51:26.340 | a kind of implied power of like,

00:51:31.340 | like we did some shady shit together,

00:51:34.700 | so we're not like, you're gonna help me out

00:51:37.740 | on this extra thing I need to do now.

00:51:39.600 | And that builds and builds and builds

00:51:42.000 | to where you're able to actually control,

00:51:44.700 | like have quite a lot of power

00:51:46.460 | without explicitly having like a strategy meeting.

00:51:50.140 | And I think a single person or,

00:51:53.060 | yeah, I think a single person can do that,

00:51:55.940 | can start that ball rolling.

00:51:58.140 | And over time it becomes a group thing.

00:52:00.620 | Like I don't know if Julian Maxwell was involved or others.

00:52:05.220 | And yeah, over time that becomes almost

00:52:08.020 | like a really powerful organization that wasn't,

00:52:11.580 | that's not a front for something much deeper

00:52:14.540 | and bigger, but it's almost like,

00:52:16.580 | maybe it's 'cause I love cellular automata, man.

00:52:19.580 | A system that starts out as a simple thing

00:52:22.140 | with simple rules can create incredible complexity.

00:52:25.380 | And so I just think that we're now looking in retrospect,

00:52:29.540 | it looks like an incredibly complex system

00:52:31.780 | that's operating, but like, that's just because it's,

00:52:34.860 | you know, there could be a lot of other Jeffrey Epstein's

00:52:37.340 | in my perspective that this simple thing

00:52:39.980 | just was successful early on and builds and builds

00:52:43.020 | and builds and builds.

00:52:44.580 | And then there's a creepy shit that like a lot of aspects

00:52:47.820 | of the system helped it get bigger and bigger

00:52:50.940 | and more powerful and so on.

00:52:52.460 | So the final result is, I mean,

00:52:55.940 | listen, I have a pretty optimistic,

00:52:58.780 | I have a, I tend to see the good in people.

00:53:01.980 | And so it's been heartbreaking to me in general,

00:53:04.220 | just to see, you know, people I look up to

00:53:08.540 | not have the level of integrity I thought they would,

00:53:12.020 | or like the strength of character,

00:53:14.060 | all those kinds of things.

00:53:15.340 | And it seems like you should be able to see the bullshit

00:53:20.340 | that is Jeffrey Epstein, like when you meet him.

00:53:22.940 | We're not talking about like Eric Weinstein,

00:53:25.780 | like one or two or three or five interactions,

00:53:28.700 | but like there's people that had like years

00:53:31.820 | of relationship with him.

00:53:33.700 | And I don't know, I'm not sure.

00:53:35.820 | - Even after he was convicted.

00:53:36.900 | - After he was convicted.

00:53:37.740 | - That's the thing, that guy always gets me.

00:53:39.700 | - Yeah, there's stories.

00:53:41.040 | I mean, I don't need to sort of,

00:53:42.700 | I honestly believe,

00:53:46.260 | okay, here's the open question I have.

00:53:52.180 | I don't know how many creepy sexual people

00:53:55.740 | that are out there.

00:53:57.100 | Like, I don't know if there's like,

00:54:00.180 | like the people I know, the faculty and so on,

00:54:03.420 | I don't know if they have like a kink

00:54:05.300 | that I'm just not aware of that was being leveraged.

00:54:08.300 | Because to me, it seems like if people aren't,

00:54:13.000 | if not everybody's a pedophile,

00:54:14.600 | then it's just the art of conversation.

00:54:18.600 | That is just like the art of just like manipulating people

00:54:22.000 | by making them feel good about like the exciting stuff

00:54:25.120 | they're doing.

00:54:25.960 | Listen, man, academics, people talk about money.

00:54:28.560 | I don't think academics care about money

00:54:30.400 | as much as people think.

00:54:31.560 | What they care about is like somebody,

00:54:34.720 | they want to be, it's the same thing

00:54:37.840 | that Instagram models post in their butt pictures,

00:54:41.020 | is they want to be loved.

00:54:42.660 | They want attention.

00:54:43.780 | - My parents are professors.

00:54:44.780 | Yeah, I get it.

00:54:45.620 | (both laughing)

00:54:48.020 | - And Jeffrey Epstein,

00:54:49.540 | the money is another way to show attention.

00:54:52.420 | - Right, it's a proxy.

00:54:54.220 | - Mind work matters.

00:54:55.540 | And he, for some, he did that for some of the weirdest,

00:55:00.540 | most brilliant people.

00:55:02.660 | I don't want to sort of drop names,

00:55:04.620 | but everybody knows them.

00:55:06.180 | It's like people that are the most interesting academics

00:55:09.900 | is the one he cared about.

00:55:11.460 | Like people that are thinking about

00:55:12.940 | the most difficult questions in all of science

00:55:16.060 | and all of engineering.

00:55:16.940 | So those people were kind of outcasts in academia

00:55:21.140 | a little bit because they're doing the weird shit.

00:55:23.220 | They're the weirdos.

00:55:24.500 | And he cared about the weirdos and he gave them money.

00:55:27.040 | And that's, I don't know if there's something

00:55:32.040 | more nefarious than that.

00:55:33.980 | I hope not, but maybe I'm surprised.

00:55:36.620 | And in fact, half the population of the world

00:55:38.660 | is pedophiles.

00:55:39.620 | - No, I think it's what you were talking about,

00:55:41.340 | which is that it's the implication after the initial,

00:55:46.340 | right, like you do some shady things together,

00:55:48.740 | or you do something that you want out of the public eye

00:55:51.220 | and you're a public person.

00:55:52.420 | And look, we probably even experience this

00:55:54.320 | to a limited extent, right?

00:55:55.420 | You're like, ah, you know, like, I don't want to,

00:55:57.580 | I don't know, I almost lost my temper, you know,

00:55:59.340 | one time whenever a car hit me and I'm like,

00:56:00.880 | I can't freak out in public anymore.

00:56:02.420 | I'm like, you know, like what if somebody

00:56:04.060 | takes a photo or something?

00:56:05.340 | And so I think that there's an extent of that

00:56:08.240 | times a billion, literally,

00:56:10.020 | when you have a billion dollars or more.

00:56:12.220 | And you take that all together

00:56:13.380 | and you stack it up on itself.

00:56:15.020 | I saw a story about like Bill Clinton.

00:56:16.860 | Like Bill Clinton was with Epstein or with Ghislaine Maxwell

00:56:20.340 | in a private air terminal or something.

00:56:23.100 | And she had one of their like sex, you know,

00:56:26.460 | one of those girls who was underage,

00:56:28.160 | had her dressed up in a literal like pilot uniform.

00:56:31.120 | And she was underage in order to, you know,

00:56:33.980 | and she was being disguised for being older.

00:56:37.540 | And she was a masseuse, right?

00:56:39.060 | Because that was one of the guises which they got

00:56:41.620 | in order to sexually traffic these women.

00:56:43.420 | And she was like, Bill was like complaining about his neck.

00:56:45.700 | And she's like, give Bill Clinton a massage, right?

00:56:47.740 | So now there's a photo of an underage girl

00:56:49.420 | giving a massage to the former president

00:56:51.360 | of the United States.

00:56:52.740 | I don't think he knew, right?

00:56:54.620 | But like, that looks bad.

00:56:56.680 | And so this is kind of what we're getting at,

00:56:59.060 | which is that you're setting it all up

00:57:01.020 | and creating those preconditions.

00:57:03.000 | Or like Prince Andrew, do I think Prince Andrew knew

00:57:05.480 | that Virginia Gouffre was underage?

00:57:08.800 | I don't know.

00:57:10.060 | He probably knew she was pretty young,

00:57:11.520 | which I think is, you know, skeevy enough

00:57:13.120 | where you're a fucking prince, you probably know better.

00:57:15.880 | But I don't think he knew she was underage.

00:57:18.760 | Or maybe he did.

00:57:19.600 | And if he did, then he's even more of a piece of shit

00:57:21.240 | than I thought.

00:57:22.080 | But when we look at these things,

00:57:25.620 | the stuff I'm more interested in

00:57:26.960 | is like what you were talking about.

00:57:28.400 | I'm like, Bill Gates?

00:57:29.920 | How do you get the richest man in the world in your house?

00:57:33.280 | Like under what, and Gates is like,

00:57:35.600 | he was talking about financing and all this.

00:57:37.200 | I'm like, you don't have access to money or bankers?

00:57:40.300 | Like you're the richest man in the world.

00:57:42.640 | Like you can call Goldman Sachs

00:57:44.280 | anytime you want on a hotline.

00:57:46.340 | Like why do you need, that's where I start again

00:57:49.680 | to get more conspiratorial because I'm like,

00:57:51.740 | Bill, dude, you have the gold credit, right?

00:57:55.040 | Like you don't need Epstein

00:57:56.280 | to create some complicated financing structure.

00:57:59.380 | Or Leon Black, like what is 2015, 2009?

00:58:04.320 | I mean, this is very recent stuff.

00:58:06.040 | Or, and this is the part that really got me

00:58:08.080 | is I read the, I think it's called

00:58:10.520 | the Department of Financial Service report

00:58:12.280 | around Deutsche Bank with Epstein.

00:58:15.600 | They knew he was a criminal.

00:58:16.900 | They solicited his business.

00:58:18.640 | Explicitly knew that his business

00:58:21.320 | meant access to other high net worth individuals.

00:58:23.760 | Consistently doled money out from his account

00:58:27.120 | for hush payments to women in Europe and prostitution rings.

00:58:31.260 | They knew all of this within the bank.

00:58:33.580 | It was elevated multiple times.

00:58:35.580 | Here was the other one.

00:58:36.580 | One of Epstein's associates was like,

00:58:38.260 | hey, how much money can we take out

00:58:40.060 | before we hit the automatic sensor,

00:58:42.580 | before you have to tell the IRS?

00:58:44.780 | And that question by their own standards

00:58:47.980 | is supposed to result in a notification to the feds

00:58:51.380 | and they never did it.

00:58:52.300 | And he was withdrawing like $2 million of cash

00:58:54.940 | in five years for tips.

00:58:57.160 | I'm like, okay, something's going on here.

00:59:00.400 | - Yeah. - You see what I'm saying?

00:59:01.240 | - There's a lot of signs that make you think

00:59:03.800 | that there's a bigger thing at play than just the man.

00:59:08.120 | That there is some, it does look like

00:59:11.640 | a larger organization is using this front, right?

00:59:15.200 | - Again, I don't know.

00:59:16.080 | I truly don't know.

00:59:17.400 | And I'm not willing to use the certainty,

00:59:19.120 | which I think a lot of people online are,

00:59:20.640 | to say like it was 100%.

00:59:22.360 | - The certainty is always the problem.

00:59:24.480 | That's probably why I hesitate to touch conspiracy theories

00:59:28.540 | is 'cause I'm allergic to certainty in all forms.

00:59:31.660 | In politics, any kind of discourse.

00:59:33.420 | And people are so sure, in both directions, actually.

00:59:37.860 | It's kind of hilarious.

00:59:39.080 | Either they're sure that the conspiracy theory,

00:59:43.380 | in particular, whatever the conspiracy theory is, is false.

00:59:45.900 | Like they almost dismiss it like,

00:59:47.800 | like they don't even wanna talk about it.

00:59:50.940 | It's like the people, like the way they dismiss

00:59:53.080 | that the earth is flat.

00:59:54.140 | - Yes.

00:59:54.980 | - Most scientists are like, they don't even want to like

00:59:57.660 | hear what the flat earthers are saying.

01:00:02.380 | They don't have like zero patience for it.

01:00:05.180 | Which is like, maybe in that case, is deserved.

01:00:09.420 | But everything else, you really, like have empathy.

01:00:14.060 | Consider the, you have, okay.

01:00:17.300 | This is weird to say, but I feel like

01:00:20.060 | you have to consider that the earth might be flat

01:00:23.700 | for like one minute.

01:00:26.220 | Like you have to be empathetic.

01:00:27.780 | You have to be open-minded.

01:00:29.460 | - I don't see a lot of that through our cultural

01:00:30.900 | tastemakers and more.

01:00:32.300 | And that really is what concerns me the most.

01:00:35.620 | 'Cause it's just another manifestation of all of our

01:00:37.620 | problems, is that we have this completely

01:00:40.300 | bifurcating economy, bifurcating culture,

01:00:43.580 | literally, in terms of, we have the middle of the country,

01:00:46.900 | and then we have the coast.

01:00:48.020 | And in terms of the population, it's almost 50/50.

01:00:51.260 | And with increasing mega cities and urban culture,

01:00:55.260 | like urban monoculture of LA, New York, and Chicago,

01:00:58.900 | and DC, and Boston, and Austin,

01:01:01.420 | relative to how an entire other group of Americans

01:01:04.700 | live their lives, or even the people within them

01:01:07.440 | who aren't rich and upwardly mobile,

01:01:09.220 | how they live their lives, is just completely separating.

01:01:12.220 | And all of our language and communication

01:01:14.860 | in mass media and more is to the top,

01:01:16.980 | and then everybody else is forgotten.

01:01:18.700 | - Do you think when you dig to the core,

01:01:21.500 | there is a big gap between left and right?

01:01:25.540 | Is that division that's perceived currently real?

01:01:30.060 | Or are most people center left and center right?

01:01:33.460 | - It's so interesting, because that's such a loaded term,

01:01:36.740 | center left.

01:01:37.980 | What does that mean?

01:01:38.980 | To you, I think the way you're thinking of it is,

01:01:42.940 | I'm not like a, well, even this,

01:01:46.420 | I'm not a radical socialist,

01:01:49.260 | but I'm marginally left on cultural issues

01:01:54.260 | and economic issues.

01:01:56.540 | This is how we've traditionally understood things.

01:01:59.140 | And then when in popular discourse, like center right,

01:02:02.060 | like what does it mean to be center right?

01:02:03.320 | Like I am marginally right on social issues

01:02:08.320 | and marginally right on economic issues.

01:02:10.780 | But that's just not politics.

01:02:12.500 | Like if you look at survey data, for example,

01:02:15.180 | like stimulus checks,

01:02:18.180 | people who are against stimulus checks are conservative.

01:02:20.700 | Well, 80% of the population is for a stimulus check.

01:02:23.680 | So that means a sizable number of Republicans

01:02:26.180 | are for stimulus checks.

01:02:27.540 | Same thing happens on like a wealth tax.

01:02:29.900 | The same thing happens on, okay,

01:02:33.100 | Florida voted for Trump 3.1%,

01:02:36.720 | more than Barack Obama 2008.

01:02:39.500 | On the same day, passes a $15 minimum wage at 67%.

01:02:44.060 | So what's going on?

01:02:45.260 | So that's why-

01:02:46.100 | - What is going on?

01:02:47.820 | - Oh, that's my entire career.

01:02:49.700 | - But it seems like, so that's fascinating.

01:02:53.660 | Conversation is different than the policies.

01:02:57.740 | - Well, it's different than reality.

01:02:59.180 | That's what I would say,

01:03:00.020 | which is that the way we have to understand

01:03:02.300 | American politics today,

01:03:04.860 | it didn't always used to be this way,

01:03:06.580 | is it's almost entirely along.

01:03:09.580 | Basic, I would say the main divider is,

01:03:12.780 | 'cause even when you talk about class,

01:03:14.180 | this misses it in terms of socioeconomics,

01:03:16.540 | it's around culture,

01:03:18.740 | which is that it's basically,

01:03:21.040 | if you went to a four-year degree-granting institution,

01:03:24.240 | you are part of one culture.

01:03:25.940 | If you didn't, you're part of another.

01:03:27.940 | I don't wanna erase the 20% or whatever

01:03:30.900 | of people who did go to a college degree

01:03:32.420 | who were Republicans or vice versa, et cetera.

01:03:35.380 | But I'm saying on average,

01:03:37.060 | in terms of the median way that you feel,

01:03:39.880 | we're basically bifurcating along those lines.

01:03:43.040 | And 'cause people get upset, be like,

01:03:44.560 | "Oh, well, there are rich people who voted for Trump."

01:03:47.280 | And I'm like, "Yeah, but you know who they are?

01:03:50.480 | "They're like plumbers or something.

01:03:52.240 | "Like they're people who make $100,000 a year,

01:03:55.040 | "but they didn't go to a four-year college degree,

01:03:57.080 | "and they might live in a place

01:04:00.300 | "which is not an urban metro area."

01:04:02.520 | And then at the same time,

01:04:03.440 | you have like a Vox writer who makes like 30 grand,

01:04:08.040 | but they have a lot more cultural power than like the plumber.

01:04:11.720 | So you have to think about where exactly that line is.

01:04:15.120 | And I think in general, that's the way that we're trending.

01:04:18.480 | So that's why when I say like,

01:04:20.520 | "What's going on?

01:04:21.360 | "Are we divided?"

01:04:22.180 | Yeah, but it's not left and right.

01:04:24.560 | I mean, and that's why I hate these labels.

01:04:26.760 | - So it's more just red and blue, like teams.

01:04:29.360 | They're arbitrary teams.

01:04:30.880 | - Yeah.

01:04:31.720 | - So how arbitrary are these teams, I guess,

01:04:34.000 | is another- - Completely arbitrary.

01:04:35.760 | - So, well, you kind of imply that there's,

01:04:37.840 | I don't know if you're sort of in post analyzing

01:04:40.880 | the patterns, 'cause it seems like there's a network effects

01:04:45.240 | of like, you just picked the team red or blue.

01:04:47.600 | And it might have to do with college.

01:04:50.240 | You might have to do all of those things,

01:04:51.640 | but like, it seems like it's more about

01:04:54.800 | just the people around you.

01:04:58.160 | - Correct.

01:04:59.000 | - So less than whether you went to college or not.

01:05:01.920 | I mean, it's almost like, seems like,

01:05:04.080 | it's almost like a weird- - Yeah, right.

01:05:06.000 | - Like network effects that are hard.

01:05:08.400 | There's certain strong patterns that you're identifying.

01:05:11.600 | But I don't know, it's sad to think

01:05:14.200 | that it might be just teams that have nothing to do

01:05:17.000 | with what you actually believe.

01:05:18.800 | - Well, it is, Lex.

01:05:20.120 | Look, I mean, I don't wanna believe that,

01:05:22.800 | but the data points me to this, which especially 2020.

01:05:25.880 | I'm one of the people, chief among them,

01:05:28.120 | I will own up to it here.

01:05:29.400 | I was totally wrong about why Trump was elected in 2016.

01:05:33.160 | I believed, and I based a lot of my public commentary

01:05:36.400 | belief on this, Trump was elected

01:05:38.800 | because of a rejection of Hillary Clinton neoliberalism

01:05:42.600 | on the back of a pro-worker message,

01:05:46.060 | which was anti-immigration, it was its pillar,

01:05:49.760 | but alongside of it was a rejection of free trade with China

01:05:54.120 | and generally of the political correctness and globalism,

01:05:58.880 | which has been coming through the Uniparty

01:06:02.320 | and same thing here with the military industrial complex

01:06:05.440 | and endless war, he rejected all of that.

01:06:08.640 | - Wait, what's wrong with that prediction?

01:06:10.480 | - I was wrong, man.

01:06:11.360 | And the reason I know this is that-

01:06:12.560 | - Sounds right.

01:06:13.520 | - It sounds right, I honestly wish it was true.

01:06:16.760 | But here's the truth.

01:06:17.800 | Trump actually governed largely as a neoliberal Republican

01:06:22.520 | who was meaner online and who departed from orthodoxy

01:06:26.600 | in some very important ways, don't get me wrong.

01:06:28.600 | I will always support the trade war with China.

01:06:31.400 | I will always support not expanding the wars

01:06:33.920 | in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

01:06:35.600 | I will support him moving the Overton window

01:06:38.320 | on a million different things and revealing once and for all

01:06:41.080 | that GOP voters don't care

01:06:42.800 | about economic orthodoxy necessarily,

01:06:45.660 | but here's what they do care about.

01:06:47.480 | Trump got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016,

01:06:50.980 | despite not delivering largely, largely,

01:06:54.080 | for all the Trump people out there, on that agenda.

01:06:56.760 | He wasn't more pro-union, but he won more union votes.

01:06:59.800 | He wasn't necessarily more pro-worker,

01:07:02.600 | but he actually won more votes in Ohio than he did in 2016.

01:07:07.080 | And he won more Hispanic votes than despite being,

01:07:10.880 | all the immigration agenda, rhetoric, et cetera.

01:07:13.880 | Here's why, it's about the culture,

01:07:16.240 | which is that the culture war is so hot

01:07:19.500 | that negative partisanship is at such high levels.

01:07:22.980 | All of the vote is geared upon

01:07:25.300 | what the other guy might do in office.

01:07:27.000 | And there's a poll actually just came out

01:07:28.480 | by Echelon Insights, Crystal and I were talking about it

01:07:30.800 | on Rising, that number one concern

01:07:33.440 | amongst Democratic voters is Trump voters,

01:07:36.480 | number one concern, not issues like Trump voters.

01:07:41.400 | And number two is white supremacy.

01:07:43.400 | And so like, which is basically code for Trump voters.

01:07:47.080 | - And is the same true for the other side?

01:07:48.960 | - Well, so on the right,

01:07:49.960 | the number one concern is illegal immigration.

01:07:52.400 | And number, I think three or four or whatever is Antifa,

01:07:56.800 | which is code for Democrats.

01:07:58.680 | - At least on the right, it's a policy kind of thing.

01:08:00.880 | - Well, yeah, it's funny,

01:08:02.000 | I saw Ben Shapiro was talking about this,

01:08:03.800 | but the reason why I would functionally say it's the same

01:08:06.720 | is because, I mean, you can believe whether it's true or not

01:08:10.260 | I think it actually largely is true,

01:08:11.400 | but like a lot of GOP voters feel like a lot of,

01:08:14.700 | illegal immigration is code for like people

01:08:16.800 | who are coming in, who are gonna be legalized

01:08:18.520 | and are gonna go vote Democrat.

01:08:19.840 | Like I can just explain it from their point of view.

01:08:22.760 | So like, what does that actually mean, each other?

01:08:26.100 | Like each other, which is that the number one concern

01:08:29.340 | is the other person.

01:08:30.840 | So negative partisanship has never been higher.

01:08:33.560 | And I think people who had my thesis

01:08:36.240 | in terms of why Trump was elected in 2016,

01:08:38.880 | you have to grapple with this.

01:08:39.800 | Like, how did he win 10 million more votes?

01:08:43.080 | He came 44,000 votes away from winning the presidency

01:08:45.640 | across three states.

01:08:46.840 | Like, I don't, none of our popular discourse

01:08:49.400 | reflects that very stark reality.

01:08:51.840 | And I think so much of it is people really hate liberals.

01:08:56.840 | Like they just really hate them.

01:08:59.760 | And I was driving through rural Nevada before the election.

01:09:04.060 | And I was like, literally in the middle of nowhere.

01:09:06.380 | And there was this massive sign this guy had out

01:09:09.780 | in front of his house.

01:09:10.660 | And it just said, Trump colon, fuck your feelings.

01:09:14.380 | And I was like, that's it.

01:09:16.240 | That is why people voted for Trump.

01:09:18.460 | And I don't wanna denigrate it because they truly feel

01:09:21.500 | they have no cultural power in America,

01:09:24.500 | except to raise the middle finger to the elite class

01:09:28.440 | by pressing the button for Trump.

01:09:30.540 | I get that.

01:09:31.380 | That's actually a totally rational way to vote.

01:09:35.020 | It's not the way I wish we did vote,

01:09:37.060 | but like, you know, that's not my place to say.

01:09:40.140 | - So this is interesting.

01:09:41.500 | If you could just psychoanalyze,

01:09:43.260 | I'm again, probably naive about this,

01:09:46.660 | but I'm really bothered by the hatred of liberals.

01:09:51.660 | It's this amorphous monster that's mocked.

01:09:57.580 | It's like the Shapiro liberal tears.

01:10:00.980 | And I'm also really bothered by probably more

01:10:05.980 | of my colleagues and friends, the hatred of Trump.

01:10:09.400 | The Trump and white supremacist.

01:10:15.260 | So apparently there's 70 million white supremacists,

01:10:19.540 | 75 million, sorry.

01:10:21.300 | There's millions of white supremacists.

01:10:25.220 | And apparently whatever liberal is,

01:10:27.580 | I mean, literally liberal has become equivalent

01:10:32.500 | to white supremacist in the power of negativity it arouses.

01:10:36.560 | I don't even know what those, I mean, honestly,

01:10:39.180 | they've become swears essentially.

01:10:41.040 | Is that, I mean, how do we get,

01:10:45.060 | out of this?

01:10:46.180 | Because that's why I just don't even say anything

01:10:49.860 | about politics online.

01:10:50.980 | 'Cause it's like, really?

01:10:53.260 | Like you can't, here's what happens.

01:10:57.860 | Anything you say that's like thoughtful,

01:11:01.100 | like, hmm, I wonder, immigration, something.

01:11:05.260 | I wonder like why, you know, we have these many,

01:11:10.260 | we allow these many immigrants in,

01:11:13.220 | or some version of the, like, thinking through

01:11:16.140 | these difficult policies and so on.

01:11:18.460 | They immediately try to find like a single word

01:11:22.020 | in something you say that can put you in a bin

01:11:24.820 | of liberal or white supremacist,

01:11:28.060 | and then hammer you to death by saying

01:11:30.820 | you're one of the two, and then everybody

01:11:33.240 | just piles on happily that we finally nailed

01:11:36.700 | this white supremacist or liberal.

01:11:39.260 | And that, is this some kind of weird like feature

01:11:43.340 | of online communication that we've just stumbled upon?

01:11:45.940 | Is there a way, or is it possible to argue

01:11:48.700 | that this is like a feature, not a bug?

01:11:51.020 | Like this is a good thing?

01:11:53.340 | - Yeah, well, look, I just think it's a reflection

01:11:55.340 | of who we are.

01:11:56.180 | People like to blame social media.

01:11:57.500 | I think we're just incredibly divided right now.

01:11:59.220 | I think we've been divided like this for the last 20 years.

01:12:02.140 | And I think that, the reason I focus almost 99%

01:12:06.140 | of my public commentary on economics

01:12:08.300 | is because you asked an important question at the top.

01:12:10.900 | How do we fix this?

01:12:12.820 | What did I say about the stimulus checks?

01:12:14.860 | Stimulus checks have 80% approval rating.

01:12:17.020 | So that's the type of thing, if I was Joe Biden

01:12:19.220 | and I wanted to actually heal this country,

01:12:21.100 | that's the very first thing I would have done

01:12:22.540 | when I came into office.

01:12:23.900 | Same thing on when you look at anything

01:12:26.840 | that's gonna increase wages.

01:12:28.980 | I said on the show, I was like, look,

01:12:30.980 | I think Joe Biden will have an 80% approval rating

01:12:33.020 | if he does two things.

01:12:34.220 | If he gives every American a $2,000 stimulus check

01:12:37.660 | and gives everybody who wants a vaccine, a vaccine.

01:12:40.120 | That's it.

01:12:40.960 | It's pretty simple.

01:12:41.780 | 'Cause here's the thing.

01:12:43.660 | I don't really like Greg Abbott that much.

01:12:45.140 | We have like very different politics.

01:12:46.460 | I'm from Texas,

01:12:47.300 | but my parents got vaccinated really quickly.

01:12:50.300 | That means something to me.

01:12:51.660 | I'm like, listen, I don't really care

01:12:54.180 | about a lot of the other stuff.

01:12:55.820 | He got my family vaccinated.

01:12:58.240 | Like that, well, I will forever remember that.

01:13:02.420 | And that's how we will remember the checks.

01:13:04.980 | This is a part of the reason

01:13:06.020 | why Trump almost won the election

01:13:07.940 | and why if the Republicans had been smart enough

01:13:10.420 | to give him another round of checks, 100% would have won,

01:13:14.780 | which is that people were like, look,

01:13:17.140 | I don't really like Trump,

01:13:18.340 | but I got a check with his name on it.

01:13:20.820 | And that meant something to me and my family.

01:13:24.300 | I'm not saying for all the libertarians out there

01:13:26.940 | that you should go and like endlessly spend money

01:13:29.820 | and buy votes.

01:13:31.060 | What I am saying is lean into

01:13:33.940 | the majoritarian positions

01:13:36.540 | without adding your culture war bullshit on top of it.

01:13:40.080 | So for example, what's the number one concern

01:13:42.700 | that AOC says after the first round of checks got out?

01:13:45.380 | Oh, the checks didn't go to illegal immigrants.

01:13:47.500 | I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind?

01:13:49.680 | Like this is the most popular policy

01:13:51.460 | America has probably done in 50 years,

01:13:55.260 | since like Medicare and you're inserting,

01:13:58.420 | you're ruining it.

01:14:00.260 | And then on the right is the same thing,

01:14:02.040 | which is that there'll be like,

01:14:03.580 | these checks are going to like, low level, blah, blah.

01:14:08.020 | People who are lazy and don't work.

01:14:10.040 | I'm like, oh, there you go.

01:14:10.880 | You're just playing a caricature of what you are.

01:14:14.340 | Like if you lean into those issues

01:14:16.380 | and you gotta do it clean,

01:14:17.340 | this is what everybody hates about DC,

01:14:19.640 | which is that Biden right now is doing the $1,400 checks,

01:14:23.280 | but he's looping it in with his COVID relief bill

01:14:26.160 | and all that.

01:14:27.000 | That's his prerogative.

01:14:27.820 | That's the Democrats prerogative.

01:14:28.760 | They won the election, that's fine.

01:14:30.500 | But I'll tell you what I would have done if I was him.

01:14:33.240 | I would have come in and I would have said,

01:14:34.940 | there's five United States senators

01:14:36.360 | who are on the record, Republicans,

01:14:37.900 | who say they'll vote for a $2,000 check.

01:14:39.900 | And I would put that on the floor of the United States Senate

01:14:42.840 | on my first or so, the first day possible.

01:14:46.240 | And I would have passed it.

01:14:47.420 | And I would have forced those Republican senators

01:14:49.660 | to live up to that, vote for this bill,

01:14:52.280 | come to the Oval Office for a signing.

01:14:54.760 | So that the very first thing of my presidency was to say,

01:14:58.840 | I'm giving you all this relief check.

01:15:00.720 | This long national nightmare is over.

01:15:03.060 | Take this money, do with it what you need.

01:15:05.360 | We've all suffered together.

01:15:07.480 | The thing about Biden is he has a portrait of FDR

01:15:10.640 | in the Oval, which kind of bothers me

01:15:13.120 | because he thinks of himself as an FDR-like figure.

01:15:16.060 | But this is, you have to understand the majesty of FDR.

01:15:20.080 | We're talking about a person

01:15:21.320 | who passed a piece of legislation

01:15:23.200 | five days after he became president.

01:15:25.360 | And he passed 15 transformative pieces of legislation

01:15:29.240 | in the first hundred days.

01:15:30.880 | We're on day like 34, 35, and nothing has passed.

01:15:35.480 | The reconciliation bill will eventually become law,

01:15:37.680 | but it will become law with no Republican votes.

01:15:40.120 | And again, that's fine.

01:15:41.440 | But it's not fulfilling that legacy

01:15:44.920 | and the urgency of the action.

01:15:47.240 | And the mandate, which I believe that history has handed,

01:15:50.360 | it handed it to Trump and he fucked it up, right?

01:15:53.000 | He totally screwed it up.

01:15:54.040 | He could have remade America

01:15:55.400 | and made us into the greatest country ever

01:15:57.440 | coming out on the other side of this.

01:15:58.960 | He decided not to do that.

01:16:01.040 | I think Biden was again handed that like a scepter almost.

01:16:04.140 | It's like, all you have to do,

01:16:05.040 | all America wants is for you to raise it up high,

01:16:07.800 | but he's keeping it within the realm of traditional politics.

01:16:10.560 | I think it's a huge mistake.

01:16:11.640 | - Why, so this is, everything you're saying

01:16:13.560 | is perfect sense.

01:16:14.960 | Like take, okay.

01:16:16.320 | It's like, again, if the aliens showed up,

01:16:19.480 | it's like the obvious thing to do is like,

01:16:22.520 | what's the popular thing?

01:16:25.120 | Like 80% of Americans support this.

01:16:28.160 | Like do that clean.

01:16:30.500 | Also do it like with like grace

01:16:36.400 | where you're able to bring people together,

01:16:38.640 | not like in a political way,

01:16:40.760 | but like obvious common sense way.

01:16:44.600 | Like just people, the Republicans and Democrats

01:16:48.600 | is bringing them together on a policy

01:16:50.160 | and like bold, just hammer it

01:16:52.080 | without the dirt, without the mess, whatever,

01:16:54.640 | try to compromise just the yellow

01:16:57.800 | with have a good Twitter account,

01:17:00.000 | like loud, very clear.

01:17:03.280 | We're gonna give a $2,000 stimulus check.

01:17:06.720 | Anyone who wants a vaccine gets a vaccine at scale.

01:17:11.040 | What make America, let's make America great again

01:17:14.960 | by manufacturing.

01:17:16.600 | Like we are manufacturing most of the world's vaccine

01:17:20.320 | because we're bad motherfuckers.

01:17:22.200 | - Yeah.

01:17:23.040 | - And without maybe with more eloquence than that

01:17:26.120 | and just do that.

01:17:27.800 | Why haven't we seen that for many,

01:17:31.040 | for several presidencies?

01:17:32.800 | - 'Cause of coalitional politics

01:17:34.600 | and they owe something to somebody else.

01:17:36.720 | For example, Biden has got a lot

01:17:40.120 | of the democratic constituency has to satisfy

01:17:42.920 | within this bill.

01:17:44.560 | So there's gonna be a lot of shit that goes in there.

01:17:47.080 | State and local aid, all this stuff.

01:17:49.240 | Again, I'm not even saying this is bad,

01:17:50.560 | but he's like, his theory is, and this isn't wrong,

01:17:53.960 | is like, we're gonna take the really popular stuff

01:17:56.600 | and use it as cover for the more downwardly less popular.

01:18:00.440 | And so the Dems could face the accusation,

01:18:03.640 | the people who are on this side,

01:18:05.360 | this is their pushback to me.

01:18:06.280 | They're like, why would we give away

01:18:08.080 | the most popular thing in the bill?

01:18:09.720 | And then we would never be able to pass state and local aid.

01:18:13.240 | Why would we do that?

01:18:14.440 | And then the Republicans do the same thing.

01:18:16.480 | Mitch McConnell, because he's a fucking idiot,

01:18:18.720 | decided to say, we're gonna pair

01:18:20.320 | these $2,000 stimulus checks with like section 230 repeal.

01:18:24.040 | And it was like, oh, it's obviously dead, right?

01:18:26.080 | Like it's not gonna happen together.

01:18:28.240 | That's largely why I believe Trump lost the election

01:18:31.080 | and why those races down in Georgia

01:18:33.240 | went the way that they did.

01:18:34.200 | Obviously Trump had something to do with it.

01:18:36.880 | But the reason why is they have longstanding things

01:18:40.000 | that they've wanted to get done.

01:18:41.200 | And in the words of Rahm Emanuel,

01:18:42.680 | "Never let a good crisis go to waste

01:18:44.760 | and try and get as much as you possibly can done

01:18:47.480 | within a single bill."

01:18:48.960 | My counter would be this.

01:18:51.720 | Things have worked this way for too long,

01:18:53.680 | which is that the reconciliation bill

01:18:55.840 | is almost certainly going to be the only large

01:18:59.240 | signature legislative accomplishment

01:19:02.280 | of the Biden presidency.

01:19:03.720 | That's just how American politics works.

01:19:05.400 | Maybe he gets one more, maybe one.

01:19:07.800 | He gets a second reconciliation bill,

01:19:10.020 | then you're running for midterms, it's over.

01:19:12.900 | I believe that by trying to change the paradigm

01:19:16.200 | of our politics, leaning into exactly what I'm talking here,

01:19:19.880 | you could possibly transcend that to a new one.

01:19:23.400 | And I'm not naive.

01:19:24.720 | I think people respond to political pressures.

01:19:27.240 | And the way that we found this out was David Perdue,

01:19:30.960 | who is just a total corporate,

01:19:33.880 | dollar general CEO guy.

01:19:36.640 | He was against the original $1,200 stimulus checks.

01:19:40.300 | But then Trump came out,

01:19:41.520 | who's the single most popular figure

01:19:42.760 | in the Republican party.

01:19:43.760 | He's like, "I want $2,000 stimulus checks."

01:19:45.400 | And all of a sudden, Perdue running in Georgia is like,

01:19:49.260 | "Yeah, I'm with president Trump.

01:19:51.040 | "I want a $2,000 stimulus check."

01:19:53.540 | That was, if you're an astute observer of politics to say,

01:19:57.000 | you can see there that you can force people

01:19:59.280 | to do the right thing because it's the popular thing.

01:20:02.320 | And that if it's clean,

01:20:04.280 | if you don't give them any other excuse,

01:20:06.200 | they have to do it.

01:20:07.760 | So this is what we've been gaslit

01:20:10.320 | into our culture war framework of politics.

01:20:13.240 | And the reason it feels so broken and awful

01:20:17.360 | is because it is, but there is a way out.

01:20:20.600 | It's just that nobody wants to be,

01:20:22.520 | it's a game of chicken, right?

01:20:23.760 | Because maybe it is true.

01:20:24.820 | Maybe we would never be able to get

01:20:26.540 | your other Democratic priorities or Republican priorities.

01:20:29.360 | But I think that the country understands

01:20:31.480 | that this is fucking terrible

01:20:33.520 | and would be willing to support somebody

01:20:35.860 | who does it differently.

01:20:37.120 | There's just a lot of disincentives to not stay without,

01:20:40.880 | there's a lot of incentives to not stray

01:20:43.680 | from the traditional path.

01:20:44.880 | - Yeah, is it also possible that the A students

01:20:49.560 | are not participating?

01:20:51.360 | Like we drove all of the superstars away from politics.

01:20:56.280 | So like you just had-

01:20:57.120 | - I've heard this argument before.

01:20:58.680 | - I mean, everything you're saying sort of rings true.

01:21:03.680 | Like this is the obvious thing to do.

01:21:08.400 | As a student of history, you can almost like tell,

01:21:10.840 | like if you look at great people in history,

01:21:14.360 | this is what great leaders in history, this is what they did.

01:21:17.160 | It's like clean, bold action.

01:21:22.000 | Sometimes facing crisis, but we're facing a crisis right now.

01:21:24.920 | - No, we're in a crisis.

01:21:25.760 | - We've been, exactly.

01:21:27.460 | So why don't we see those leaders step up?

01:21:32.460 | I mean, you say that it's kind of like, it makes sense.

01:21:36.660 | There's a lot of different interests at play.

01:21:39.240 | You don't wanna risk too many things, so on and so forth.

01:21:41.840 | But that's what like, that sounds like the C students.

01:21:46.000 | - I don't think it's that.

01:21:47.440 | I think it's that the pipeline of politician creation

01:21:51.220 | is just totally broken from beginning to end.

01:21:54.280 | So it's not that A students don't wanna be politicians.

01:21:59.280 | It's basically the way that our current primary system

01:22:02.660 | is constructed is what is the greatest threat

01:22:05.320 | to you as a member of Congress.

01:22:07.140 | It's not losing your reelection.

01:22:10.420 | It's losing your primary, right?

01:22:13.360 | So that means, especially in a safe district,

01:22:16.200 | you're most concerned about being hit

01:22:18.240 | if you're a Republican from the right,

01:22:19.800 | and if you're a Democrat from the left

01:22:21.400 | for not being a good enough one.

01:22:22.880 | That's actually what stops people,

01:22:25.600 | heterodox people in particular, from winning primaries

01:22:28.620 | because the people who vote in our primaries

01:22:30.800 | are the party faithful.

01:22:32.280 | That's how you get the production.

01:22:34.560 | The production, it's important to understand

01:22:36.040 | the production pipeline, which is that,

01:22:38.680 | all right, I'm from Texas, so that's what I know best.

01:22:40.720 | So it's like, if you think in Texas,

01:22:43.040 | if you're a more heterodox like state legislature

01:22:46.120 | or something who's real works with the left on this

01:22:48.640 | and does that, you're gonna get your ass beat

01:22:51.240 | in a Republican primary because they're gonna be like,

01:22:53.400 | he worked with the left to do this, blah, blah, blah,

01:22:56.800 | take it out of context and you're screwed.

01:22:58.880 | And then that means you never ascend up

01:23:01.720 | the next level of the ladder.

01:23:03.320 | And then so on and so forth all the way.

01:23:05.640 | But I do think Trump changed everything.

01:23:08.280 | This is why I have some hope,

01:23:09.900 | which is that he showed me that all the people I listened to

01:23:14.900 | were totally wrong about politics.

01:23:16.840 | And that's the most valuable lesson you could ever teach me,

01:23:18.960 | which was, I was like, wait,

01:23:20.800 | I don't have to listen to these people.

01:23:22.560 | I'm like, they don't know anything, actually.

01:23:24.560 | - Yeah, that's- - That's powerful, man.

01:23:26.080 | I'm like, he did it.

01:23:27.040 | - That's exceptionally powerful.

01:23:28.080 | - This guy.

01:23:28.920 | - Even if he didn't do anything with it.

01:23:32.480 | - It doesn't matter, right.

01:23:33.560 | - He showed that it's possible.

01:23:35.200 | - Exactly.

01:23:36.040 | - And that means a lot.

01:23:39.640 | You're absolutely right.

01:23:40.640 | There's young people right now

01:23:42.120 | that kind of look, turn around and like, huh.

01:23:44.880 | - You're like, wait, I don't have to comb my hair

01:23:46.840 | a certain way and go to law school and be an asshole,

01:23:50.560 | who everybody knows is an asshole,

01:23:52.440 | and then get elected to state legislature.

01:23:55.120 | I mean, look, who's the number one person

01:23:57.800 | in the New York City primary right now?

01:24:01.160 | Andrew Yang, he's polling higher

01:24:03.600 | than everybody else in the race.

01:24:05.680 | Look, maybe the polls are totally fucked

01:24:07.360 | and maybe he'll lose because of ranked choice voting

01:24:09.480 | and all of that, but I consider Andrew,

01:24:11.400 | I mean, I know him a little bit

01:24:12.440 | and I've followed his candidacy from the very beginning.

01:24:15.160 | I consider him an inspiration.

01:24:16.720 | He's the new generation of politics.

01:24:19.720 | Like if I see who's gonna be president 20 years from now,

01:24:22.960 | it's gonna be, I'm not saying it's gonna be Andrew Yang.

01:24:25.040 | I think it's gonna be somebody like Andrew Yang,

01:24:27.280 | outside the political system,

01:24:28.800 | who talks in a totally different way, right?

01:24:31.760 | Just a completely, one of my favorite things

01:24:34.320 | that he said on the debate stage, he's like,

01:24:35.760 | "Look at us, we're all wearing makeup."

01:24:37.960 | It's crazy, you know what I'm saying?

01:24:38.800 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:24:39.640 | - And he like brought that, that he brought that,

01:24:42.200 | and he's right, like, "Yeah, why are,

01:24:43.760 | "they're all wearing makeup."

01:24:44.600 | - He probably, arguably hasn't gone far enough almost,

01:24:47.400 | because, but he showed that it's possible.

01:24:50.080 | And then you see other, like AOC's a good example

01:24:53.320 | of somebody, at least in my opinion,

01:24:55.460 | is doing the same kind of thing,

01:24:56.480 | but going too far in like, well, I don't know,

01:25:00.440 | she's doing the Trump thing, but on the other side.

01:25:02.280 | So I don't know, what's too far, who knows?

01:25:04.320 | - Don't take a normative judgment of it.

01:25:06.040 | I will tell you the future of politics looks like this.

01:25:07.520 | - Appreciate the art of it.

01:25:08.680 | - Right, no, I do.

01:25:09.520 | Look, I don't, I'm not a big AOC fan,

01:25:12.080 | but she's a genius, media genius,

01:25:14.200 | once in a generation talent.

01:25:16.040 | The way that she uses social media, Instagram,

01:25:19.680 | and everybody on the right is like trying to copy her.

01:25:21.680 | Like Matt Gaetz is like, "I wanna be the conservative AOC."

01:25:24.320 | I'm like, "It's just not gonna happen, dude."

01:25:25.640 | Like, you just don't have it.

01:25:27.200 | Like what she has, it's like, it's electric.

01:25:29.920 | And Trump had that.

01:25:31.960 | Like I've been to a Trump rally,

01:25:33.640 | like to cover as a journalist, it's nothing like it.

01:25:36.780 | And Yang is similar.

01:25:39.080 | It's the same way where you're like,

01:25:40.400 | "There is something going on here,"

01:25:43.080 | which is just, like I've been to an Obama rally,

01:25:45.760 | I've been to a Clinton rally,

01:25:47.400 | I've been to several normal politics.

01:25:50.560 | Yeah, it's fine, you know?

01:25:53.280 | With Trump and with Yang, it's another world.

01:25:55.960 | - Yeah. - It's another world.

01:25:57.000 | - Yang gang. - Yes.

01:25:58.360 | - There's probably thousands of people listening right now

01:26:00.240 | who are just like doing a slow clap.

01:26:03.080 | Yes. - I know, I know.

01:26:05.120 | - Yang gang forever.

01:26:06.880 | Okay, but yeah, I mean, my worst fear,

01:26:10.400 | I prefer Andrew Yang kind of free improvisational idea,

01:26:15.400 | exchange, all that versus AOC,

01:26:21.640 | who I think no matter what she stands for

01:26:25.440 | is a drama machine, creates dramas just like Trump does.

01:26:29.420 | I would say my worst fear would be in 2024,

01:26:33.240 | is AOC old enough?

01:26:34.520 | It'd be AOC versus Trump.

01:26:36.320 | - I don't think she's old enough.

01:26:37.420 | I think you'd have to be, I think she's 30.

01:26:39.640 | So she needs five more years, so probably not.

01:26:41.880 | Yeah. - Okay.

01:26:42.720 | But that kind of, that's, or Trump Jr.

01:26:45.440 | - Well, AOC probably wouldn't win a Democratic primary.

01:26:47.620 | So I mean, look, Joe Biden has, you know,

01:26:49.700 | they pretty much showed that.

01:26:51.000 | - That's exactly what you're saying.

01:26:52.320 | This process grooms you over time.

01:26:55.800 | You see the same thing in academia, actually,

01:26:57.880 | which is very interesting, is the process of getting tenure.

01:27:02.520 | There's this, it's like you're being taught

01:27:06.080 | without explicitly being taught to behave

01:27:11.760 | in the way that everybody's behaved before.

01:27:14.480 | I've heard this, it was funny,

01:27:15.640 | I've had a few conversations

01:27:17.800 | that were deeply disappointing,

01:27:20.680 | which involved statements like,

01:27:25.000 | "This is what's good for your career."

01:27:27.400 | - Yes.

01:27:28.240 | - This kind of, almost like mentor to mentee conversation,

01:27:33.240 | where it's, you know, it's like,

01:27:35.240 | there's a grooming process in the same way,

01:27:36.720 | I guess you're saying the primary process

01:27:39.080 | does the same kind of thing.

01:27:40.080 | So, I mean, that's what people have talked about

01:27:42.360 | with Andrew Yang, it was, he was being suppressed

01:27:45.580 | by a bunch of different forces, the mainstream media,

01:27:47.820 | and all, just the democratic,

01:27:49.900 | just that whole process didn't like the honesty

01:27:54.360 | that he was showing, right?

01:27:55.200 | - For now, but here's my question to you.

01:27:57.380 | People gotta see, look, Jordan Peterson

01:27:59.700 | is one of the most famous people in America, right?

01:28:01.700 | Like, you have a massive podcast,

01:28:03.700 | you're more famous than half the, 99% of the people at MIT.

01:28:07.220 | So, like, from that perspective, everything has changed.

01:28:10.700 | And somewhere out there,

01:28:12.380 | there's a student who's taking notice.

01:28:14.340 | And I've noticed that with my own career,

01:28:16.100 | everybody thought I was crazy

01:28:17.300 | for doing this show with Crystal, "The Hill."

01:28:19.060 | They thought I was nuts.

01:28:19.900 | They're like, "What are you doing?

01:28:21.100 | You're a White House correspondent.

01:28:22.540 | You've got a job forever."

01:28:24.480 | The other job offer I had

01:28:25.660 | was being a White House correspondent.

01:28:27.320 | And people thought I was nuts for not just sticking there

01:28:30.960 | and, you know, aging out within Washington,

01:28:34.140 | pining for appearances on Fox News and CNN and MSNBC,

01:28:39.140 | but I hated it.

01:28:40.260 | I just hated doing it.

01:28:41.380 | And I did not wanna be a company man,

01:28:43.300 | like a Washington man, who's one of those guys

01:28:45.500 | who, like, brags to his friends

01:28:47.100 | about how many times he's been on Fox or whatever,

01:28:49.460 | mostly because I just have a rebellious streak

01:28:51.820 | and I hate being at the subject of other people.

01:28:55.300 | I created something new,

01:28:56.340 | which a lot of people watch to get their news.

01:28:58.420 | And I noticed that younger people

01:29:00.900 | who are almost all my audience,

01:29:02.820 | they don't really look up to any of the people

01:29:05.060 | in traditional, right?

01:29:06.140 | They don't go, they're not coming up and being like,

01:29:08.960 | "How do I be like Jim Acosta?"

01:29:10.860 | You know, they're like,

01:29:12.220 | "Hey, how did you do what you do?

01:29:13.780 | And the way you did it is by bucking the system."

01:29:16.460 | So I think that we are at a total split point.

01:29:20.300 | And look, there will always be a path for people,

01:29:23.620 | 'cause I don't want people to over-learn this lesson.

01:29:26.180 | I have people who are like, "I'm not gonna go to college."

01:29:27.780 | And I'm like, "Well, just wait."

01:29:29.340 | - Yeah, like, I'm like, just--

01:29:30.620 | - I was starting to apologize.

01:29:31.460 | - Yeah, like, stop.

01:29:32.340 | Just like, just hold on a second.

01:29:34.820 | - But there will always be a path for the institutional

01:29:37.620 | that will always be there for you.

01:29:39.220 | But now there's something else.

01:29:40.900 | Now there's another game in town.

01:29:42.340 | And that's more appealing to millions and millions

01:29:45.060 | and millions and millions of people

01:29:46.920 | who feel unserved by the corporate media,

01:29:50.020 | CNN, and these people, possibly who feel unserved

01:29:54.580 | in the, you know, the faculty.

01:29:55.960 | Like, if you are an up-and-comer

01:29:58.980 | who wants to teach as many young people as possible,

01:30:02.620 | I think you should be on YouTube, right?

01:30:04.540 | Like, look at the Khan Academy guy.

01:30:05.900 | That guy created a huge business.

01:30:07.900 | So I just think we can be cynical

01:30:10.460 | and like upset about what that system is,

01:30:12.600 | but we should also have hope.

01:30:13.960 | Like, I have a lot of hope for what can be in the future.

01:30:16.940 | - Yeah, there's a guy people should check out.

01:30:18.860 | So my story is a little bit different

01:30:20.540 | because I basically stepped aside

01:30:24.060 | with the dream of being an entrepreneur

01:30:28.340 | earlier in the pipeline

01:30:30.300 | than like a legitimate, like, senior faculty would.

01:30:34.340 | There's an example of somebody

01:30:35.620 | that people should check out, Andrew Huberman,

01:30:37.760 | from Stanford, who's a neuroscientist,

01:30:40.180 | who is as world-class as it gets

01:30:42.500 | in terms of like 10-year faculty,

01:30:45.340 | just a really world-class researcher.

01:30:48.320 | And now he's doing YouTube.

01:30:50.140 | - Yeah, I see him on Instagram, yeah.

01:30:52.300 | - So he switched, so he not just does Instagram,

01:30:54.700 | he now has a podcast,

01:30:56.660 | and he's doing, he's changing the nature of like,

01:31:00.440 | I believe that Andrew might be the future of Stanford.

01:31:04.760 | And for a lot, it's funny,

01:31:07.300 | like he's basically Joe Rogan is an inspiration to Andrew,

01:31:10.520 | and to me as well.

01:31:13.060 | And those ripple effects,

01:31:14.480 | and Andrew is an inspiration probably,

01:31:16.300 | just like you're saying,

01:31:17.140 | to these young, like 25-year-olds

01:31:20.460 | who are soon to become faculty,

01:31:22.020 | if we're just talking about academia.

01:31:23.800 | And the same is probably happening with government.

01:31:26.700 | Is, funny enough, Trump probably is inspiring

01:31:31.540 | a huge number of people who are saying,

01:31:33.620 | "Wait a minute, I don't have to play by the rules."

01:31:35.620 | - Exactly.

01:31:36.460 | - "I can think outside the box here."

01:31:39.580 | And you're right, and the institutions we're seeing

01:31:42.460 | are just probably lagging behind.

01:31:44.580 | So the optimistic view is the future

01:31:48.100 | is going to be full of exciting new ideas.

01:31:50.220 | So Andrew Yang is just kind of the beginning

01:31:52.140 | of this whole thing. - He's tip of the iceberg.

01:31:54.540 | - And I hope that iceberg doesn't,

01:31:56.420 | it's not this influencer.

01:31:57.740 | One of the things that really bothers me.

01:32:00.460 | - Yeah.

01:32:01.300 | - I've gotten a chance, I should be careful here,

01:32:03.580 | I don't wanna, I love everybody,

01:32:05.660 | but these people who talk about how to make

01:32:10.300 | your first million or how to succeed,

01:32:13.220 | and they're so, I mean, yeah,

01:32:16.540 | that makes me a little bit cynical about,

01:32:21.100 | I'm worried that the people that win the game of politics

01:32:25.460 | will be ones that want to win the game of politics.

01:32:29.820 | - They already are, man.

01:32:31.140 | - And like we mentioned, AOC,

01:32:33.740 | I hope they optimize for the 80% populist thing, right?

01:32:38.740 | Like they optimize for that bad-ass thing

01:32:42.380 | that history will remember you as the great man or woman

01:32:45.140 | that did this thing versus how do I maximize engagement

01:32:49.500 | today and keep growing those numbers?

01:32:51.740 | The influencers are so, I'm so allergic to this, man.

01:32:55.640 | They keep saying how many followers they have

01:32:58.460 | on the different accounts, and it's like,

01:33:01.900 | I don't think they understand, maybe I don't understand,

01:33:05.740 | I don't really care.

01:33:06.780 | I think it has destructive psychological effects,

01:33:12.340 | one, like thinking about the number,

01:33:15.580 | like getting excited your number went from 100 to 101,

01:33:19.820 | and being like, and today it went out to 105.

01:33:23.420 | Whoa, that's a big jump.

01:33:24.620 | That may be, like thinking this way,

01:33:26.220 | like I wonder what I did, I'll do that again.

01:33:28.860 | In this way, one, it creates anxiety

01:33:31.660 | and those psychological effects, whatever.

01:33:34.100 | The more important thing is it prevents you

01:33:37.060 | from truly thinking boldly in the long arc of history

01:33:42.060 | and creatively, thinking outside the box,

01:33:45.980 | doing huge actions.

01:33:48.060 | And I actually, my optimism is in the sense

01:33:50.580 | that that kind of action will beat out all the influencers.

01:33:54.400 | - Well, I don't know, Lex.

01:33:55.980 | (Lex laughs)

01:33:56.820 | This is where my cynicism comes in.

01:33:58.180 | So there's a guy, Madison Cawthorn,

01:34:00.540 | the youngest member of Congress,

01:34:02.820 | and he, I don't wanna say got caught,

01:34:05.820 | but there was like an email where he was like,

01:34:08.060 | "My staff is only oriented around comms."

01:34:11.700 | Like he was basically saying, he got basically caught saying

01:34:14.100 | like, "My staff is only centered on communications."

01:34:19.100 | And that's the right play.

01:34:21.260 | If you do want to get the benefits

01:34:23.860 | of our current electoral, political, and engagement system,

01:34:26.760 | which is that, what's the best way to be known

01:34:29.300 | within the right as a right-wing politician?

01:34:32.200 | It's to be a culture warrior, go on Ben Shapiro's podcast,

01:34:36.720 | be one of the people on Fox News, go on Sean Hannity's show,

01:34:40.380 | go on Tucker's show, and all of that,

01:34:42.660 | because you become a mini celebrity within that world.

01:34:47.020 | Left unsaid is that that world is increasingly shrinking,

01:34:50.380 | portion of the American population,

01:34:52.100 | and they barely, they can't even win a popular vote election,

01:34:56.060 | let alone barely win, eke out

01:34:58.120 | an electoral college victory in 2016.

01:35:01.680 | Well, but the incentives are all aligned within that.

01:35:04.640 | And it's the same thing really on the left,

01:35:06.880 | but you're right, which is that,

01:35:08.740 | and look, this is why geniuses are geniuses,

01:35:11.560 | because they buck the short-term incentives,

01:35:15.200 | they focus on the long-term, they bet big,

01:35:18.420 | and they usually fail, but then when they get big,

01:35:21.060 | they succeed spectacularly.

01:35:24.680 | The people I know who have done this the best

01:35:27.440 | are a lot of the crypto folks that I've spoken to.

01:35:31.600 | Some of the stuff they say, I'm like,

01:35:32.760 | "I don't know if that's gonna happen,

01:35:34.240 | "but look, they're like billionaires."

01:35:35.920 | Right? - Yeah.

01:35:36.760 | - And you're like, "So they were right."

01:35:38.560 | So the way I've heard it expressed is,

01:35:41.640 | you can be wrong a lot, but when you're right,

01:35:44.160 | you get right big.

01:35:45.680 | And I mean, I've seen this in Elon Musk's career,

01:35:47.680 | I mean, he took spectacular risk, like spectacular risk,

01:35:52.720 | and just doubled down, doubled down, doubled down,

01:35:55.000 | doubled down, doubled down.

01:35:56.120 | And you can kind of tell to him,

01:35:57.780 | I mean, you know him better than I do,

01:35:59.060 | but from my observation, I don't think the money matters.

01:36:02.520 | - No. - Right?

01:36:03.360 | I just, when I see him, I'm like,

01:36:05.520 | I don't, it's, nobody works as hard as you do

01:36:08.760 | and builds the way that you build

01:36:10.940 | if it's just about the money.

01:36:12.280 | It just doesn't happen.

01:36:14.080 | Nobody wills SpaceX into existence just for the money.

01:36:18.480 | It's not worth it, frankly, right?

01:36:20.000 | He probably destroyed years of his life

01:36:21.820 | in mental sanity.

01:36:23.440 | - Money or attention or fame, none of that.

01:36:25.280 | - Yeah. - It's not the primary

01:36:26.680 | priority. - Well, that's what's

01:36:27.520 | so appealing to me, to me in particular, about him,

01:36:30.280 | just like in how he built, like I read a biography of him

01:36:32.640 | and just the way that he constructed his life

01:36:34.920 | and is able to hyper-focus in meeting after meeting

01:36:37.740 | and drill down and also hire all the right people

01:36:40.500 | who execute each one of his tasks discreetly

01:36:43.340 | to his perfection is amazing.

01:36:45.720 | That's actually the mark of a good leader.

01:36:48.540 | But I mean, if you think about his career,

01:36:50.680 | the reason he's a renegade is 'cause probably he was told

01:36:53.220 | to put it in an index fund or whatever,

01:36:55.420 | like whenever he made his 29 million,

01:36:57.460 | and from PayPal, I don't know how much he made,

01:36:59.540 | and then just go along that road, and he's like, no.

01:37:01.360 | So he succeeds spectacularly.

01:37:04.020 | So you have to have somebody who's willing to come in

01:37:07.260 | and buck that system.

01:37:08.240 | So for now, I think our politics are generally frozen.

01:37:12.080 | I think that that model is gonna be most generally appealing

01:37:16.860 | to the mean person.

01:37:18.820 | But somebody will come along and will change everything.

01:37:20.720 | - Yeah, I'm just surprised there's not more of them.

01:37:22.720 | - Yeah.

01:37:23.560 | - On that topic, it's now, what is it, 21?

01:37:28.040 | - Yes.

01:37:29.300 | - Let's make some predictions that you can be wrong about.

01:37:31.560 | - Good.

01:37:32.400 | (both laughing)

01:37:33.960 | - What major political people are you thinking

01:37:37.760 | will run in 2024, including Trump Jr., Sr., or Ivanka?

01:37:42.760 | I don't know.

01:37:45.040 | (both laughing)

01:37:46.240 | Any Trump.

01:37:47.200 | Trump.

01:37:48.520 | - Yeah.

01:37:50.000 | And who do you think wins?

01:37:52.400 | - I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024,

01:37:56.120 | and I think he will run against someone

01:37:57.720 | with the last name Trump.

01:37:59.640 | I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump Jr.,

01:38:03.840 | but I think one of those people

01:38:05.560 | will probably be the GOP nominee in 2024.

01:38:08.280 | - Who is it, some prominent political figure,

01:38:10.680 | was it Romney, somebody like that,

01:38:12.200 | said that Trump will win the primary if he runs again?

01:38:15.160 | - Of course, that's not even a question.

01:38:16.720 | Trump is the single most popular figure

01:38:19.060 | in the Republican Party by orders of magnitude.

01:38:22.960 | Oh, I mean, probably more, honestly.

01:38:25.320 | There was a, actually, I can tell you

01:38:26.740 | 'cause I saw the data, which is that pre-January 6th,

01:38:30.280 | it was like 54% of Republicans wanted him to run again.

01:38:33.740 | Then it went down eight points after January 6th,

01:38:37.340 | two days later, and then after impeachment,

01:38:39.580 | it went right back up to 54%.

01:38:42.440 | So the exact same number is in February

01:38:46.960 | at post-impeachment vote as it was after November.

01:38:50.020 | Now, look, yeah, again, surveys, bullshit, et cetera,

01:38:52.620 | but that's all the data we have,

01:38:54.100 | that's what I can point you to.

01:38:55.500 | If Trump runs, he will be the nominee,

01:38:57.900 | and he will be the 2024 nominee.

01:39:00.940 | I just don't know if he wants to.

01:39:02.820 | It really depends.

01:39:04.140 | - Do you think he wins?

01:39:05.620 | After the Trump vaccine heals all of us,

01:39:09.100 | do you think Trump wins?

01:39:10.260 | - It depends on how popular culture functions

01:39:12.480 | over the next four years.

01:39:13.520 | And I can tell you that they are,

01:39:15.240 | 'cause I don't think Biden has that much to do with it

01:39:17.080 | because, again, Trump is not a manifestation

01:39:20.880 | of an affirmative policy action.

01:39:22.920 | It is a defensive bulwark wall

01:39:26.600 | against cultural liberalism at its best.

01:39:29.760 | So it's like, this is why it doesn't matter what Biden does.

01:39:33.360 | If there are more riots,

01:39:35.160 | if there is a more sense of persecution

01:39:38.880 | amongst people who are more lean towards conservative

01:39:43.020 | or like, "Hey, I don't know about that, that's crazy,"

01:39:45.800 | then he very well could win.

01:39:48.340 | Let's, okay, let's say Joe Biden doesn't run

01:39:50.100 | and they put up Kamala Harris,

01:39:51.340 | I think he would beat her.

01:39:52.740 | And I don't think there's a question

01:39:54.700 | that Trump would beat Kamala Harris in 2024.

01:39:56.940 | - And you don't think anybody else,

01:39:59.500 | I don't know how the process works,

01:40:01.180 | you don't think anybody else on the Democratic side

01:40:03.180 | can take the-

01:40:04.740 | - Well, how could you run against the sitting vice president?

01:40:07.740 | It's like, if Joe Biden has a 98% approval rating

01:40:11.400 | in the Democratic Party, if he says, "She is my heir,"

01:40:14.720 | I think enough people will listen to him

01:40:16.400 | in a competitive primary or a non-competitive primary.

01:40:19.260 | And then there's all these things

01:40:20.280 | about how primary systems themselves are rigged,

01:40:23.160 | the DNC could make it known that they'll blacklist anybody

01:40:26.580 | who does try and primary Kamala Harris.

01:40:29.820 | And look, I mean, progressives aren't necessarily

01:40:32.560 | all that popular amongst actual Democrats.

01:40:35.000 | Like we found that out during the election.

01:40:37.800 | There's an entire constituency which loves Joe Biden

01:40:40.660 | and Joe Biden level politics.

01:40:42.320 | And so if he tells them to vote for Kamala,

01:40:44.680 | I think she would probably get it.

01:40:47.180 | But again, there's a lot of game theory obviously happening.

01:40:50.000 | - But see, I think you're talking about

01:40:52.200 | everything you're saying is correct

01:40:54.080 | about mediocre candidates.

01:40:55.960 | It feels like if there's somebody like a really strong,

01:40:59.600 | I don't wanna use this term incorrectly, but populist,

01:41:02.360 | somebody that speaks to the 80%

01:41:05.360 | that's is able to provide bold,

01:41:10.360 | eloquently described solutions that are popular.

01:41:15.040 | I think that breaks through all of this nonsense.

01:41:17.160 | - How?

01:41:18.000 | How do they break through the primary system?

01:41:19.520 | 'Cause the problem is the primary system is not populism.

01:41:22.520 | It's primary.

01:41:24.020 | So it's like--

01:41:24.860 | - But you don't think they can tweet their way to--

01:41:27.720 | - Well, you have to be willing to win a GOP primary.

01:41:30.720 | You basically have to be at,

01:41:32.760 | whoever wins the GOP primary, in my opinion,

01:41:35.440 | will be the person most hated by the left.

01:41:37.660 | One of the people, things that people forget,

01:41:39.800 | is you know who came in second to Trump?

01:41:41.920 | Ted Cruz.

01:41:42.960 | And the reason why is 'cause Ted Cruz

01:41:44.960 | was the second most hated guy by liberals in America,

01:41:48.720 | second to Trump.

01:41:49.900 | They have nothing in policy in common.

01:41:51.560 | - But don't you think this kind of

01:41:53.680 | brilliantly described system of hate

01:41:56.240 | being the main mechanism of our electoral choices,

01:42:01.240 | don't you think that just has to do with mediocre candidates?

01:42:05.240 | Basically, the field of candidates, including Trump,

01:42:11.240 | including everybody, was just like,

01:42:13.680 | didn't make anyone feel great.

01:42:16.680 | It's like, really?

01:42:17.680 | This is what we have to choose from?

01:42:19.680 | - Maybe a Mark Cuban.

01:42:22.120 | Or like, Mark Cuban is a Democrat.

01:42:26.080 | Or it would have to be somebody like that.

01:42:29.160 | Somebody who, 'cause here's the thing about Trump.

01:42:30.960 | It's not just that it was Trump.

01:42:32.400 | He was so fucking famous.

01:42:34.480 | People don't realize.

01:42:35.320 | He was so famous.

01:42:37.040 | Even when I first met Trump,

01:42:39.900 | I met a couple of other presidents,

01:42:41.760 | but when I met Trump, even I felt kinda starstruck.

01:42:44.560 | 'Cause I was like, yo, this is the guy from The Apprentice.

01:42:47.760 | I'm like, this is the dude.

01:42:49.480 | - From The Apprentice?

01:42:50.320 | - Yeah, 'cause I'm like, my dad and I

01:42:52.560 | used to sit and watch The Apprentice

01:42:54.520 | when I was in high school.

01:42:55.440 | And then one of the guys was from College Station

01:42:57.520 | where I grew up and we're like,

01:42:58.520 | oh my God, that guy's on The Apprentice.

01:43:01.120 | It was a phenomenon.

01:43:02.280 | There's like that level.

01:43:03.120 | It's kinda like when I met Joe Rogan.

01:43:04.280 | I'm like, holy shit, that's Joe Rogan.

01:43:06.760 | I don't feel that way when I meet Mitt Romney

01:43:08.640 | or Tom Cotton or Josh Hall.

01:43:10.000 | And I met all of them.

01:43:10.840 | - But there's a lot of celebrities, right?

01:43:12.480 | Do you think there's some celebrities

01:43:13.560 | we're not even thinking about that could step in?

01:43:15.520 | The Rock?

01:43:16.360 | - It'd have to be, so I was about to say,

01:43:18.240 | I think The Rock could do it.

01:43:19.480 | But does he wanna do it?

01:43:20.880 | I mean, it's terrible.

01:43:21.920 | Like, it's a terrible gig.

01:43:23.760 | It's very hard to do.

01:43:25.440 | I don't know if The Rock necessarily

01:43:27.120 | has like the formed policy agenda.

01:43:29.680 | 'Cause then here's the other problem.

01:43:31.080 | What if we set ourselves up for a system

01:43:32.920 | where like these people keep winning,

01:43:34.320 | but like with Trump,

01:43:35.160 | they have no idea how to run a government.

01:43:37.040 | It's actually really hard, right?

01:43:38.600 | And you have to have the know-how and the trust

01:43:41.040 | to find the right people.

01:43:42.880 | This is where the genius element comes in

01:43:46.160 | is you have to understand that front

01:43:48.540 | and you have to understand how to execute discrete tasks.

01:43:52.000 | Like this is the FDR.

01:43:54.440 | This is why it's so hard.

01:43:55.720 | Like FDR, Lincoln, TR, they were who they were

01:43:59.960 | and they live in history and their name rings

01:44:02.380 | like for a reason.

01:44:04.220 | And yeah, I mean, one of the most depressing lessons

01:44:07.040 | I got from 2020 is at almost,

01:44:09.720 | it seems like in my opinion,

01:44:11.920 | that we over learn the lesson of our success

01:44:15.240 | and not of our failures.

01:44:16.560 | For example, like we have this narrative in our head

01:44:19.560 | that we always have the right person

01:44:21.880 | at the right time during crisis.

01:44:23.920 | And in some cases it was true.

01:44:25.640 | We didn't deserve Lincoln.

01:44:26.960 | We didn't deserve FDR.

01:44:28.540 | We didn't deserve a lot of presidents at times of crisis.

01:44:33.400 | But then you're like, okay, George W. Bush, 9/11,

01:44:36.840 | that was terrible.

01:44:38.480 | Reconstruction, Andrew Johnson, awful, right?

01:44:41.840 | Like we had several periods in our history

01:44:44.520 | where the crisis was there,

01:44:46.600 | they were called and they did not show up.

01:44:50.160 | And I really, it hadn't happened in my lifetime

01:44:54.080 | except for 9/11.

01:44:55.680 | And even then you could kind of see that as an opportunity

01:44:58.800 | for somebody like Obama to come in and fix it.

01:45:01.360 | But then he didn't do it.

01:45:02.760 | And then Trump didn't do it.

01:45:04.560 | And you realize, I feel like our politics are most analogous

01:45:09.320 | to like the 1910s, like all in terms of the Gilded Age,

01:45:14.000 | in terms of that.

01:45:15.200 | Remember there's that long period of presidents

01:45:17.600 | between like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt,

01:45:22.400 | we were like, wait, like who was president?

01:45:25.040 | Or even TR was like an exception where you'll have like

01:45:28.240 | Calvin Coolidge, who like, Silent Cow.

01:45:30.960 | - So we're living through that.

01:45:31.800 | - Grover Cleveland.

01:45:33.120 | That's kind of how, if I think of us within history,

01:45:36.640 | I feel like we're in one of those times.

01:45:38.860 | We're just waiting.

01:45:39.700 | - It feels really important to us right now.

01:45:41.640 | Like this is the most important moment in history,

01:45:43.640 | but it might be-

01:45:44.480 | - It could just be a blip, right?

01:45:45.840 | 20, 30 year blip.

01:45:46.880 | Like when you think about who was president

01:45:48.840 | between 1890 and 19 before, I mean, yeah.

01:45:52.240 | Between like 1888 and 1910.

01:45:56.740 | Like nobody really thinks about that period of America,

01:45:58.880 | but like that was an entire lifetime for people, right?

01:46:01.600 | Like what did they, how did they feel

01:46:03.640 | about the country that they were in?

01:46:04.960 | - That's hilarious.

01:46:05.800 | - That's how I kind of think about where we are right now.

01:46:07.400 | - It's funny to think, I mean, I don't want to minimize it,

01:46:09.440 | but like we haven't really gone through

01:46:12.040 | a World War II style crisis.

01:46:13.960 | So like say that there is a crisis

01:46:17.560 | in like several decades of that level, right?

01:46:21.440 | Existential risks to a large portion of the world.

01:46:25.060 | Then what will be remembered is World War II,

01:46:29.920 | maybe a little bit about Vietnam

01:46:31.640 | and then whatever that crisis is.

01:46:34.120 | And this whole period that we see as dramatic,

01:46:36.000 | even coronavirus.

01:46:37.320 | - Even 9/11.

01:46:38.160 | - Even 9/11.

01:46:39.240 | It's like, 'cause you can look at how many people died

01:46:42.680 | and all those kinds of things.

01:46:43.700 | All the drama around the war on terror

01:46:45.880 | and all those kinds of things.

01:46:47.760 | Maybe Obama will be remembered

01:46:49.640 | for being the first African-American president.

01:46:52.400 | But then like, that's, yeah,

01:46:54.880 | that's fascinating to think about.

01:46:56.320 | Oh man, even Trump will be like, oh, okay, cool.

01:47:00.640 | - He was that guy.

01:47:01.480 | - Yeah, maybe he'll be remembered as the first celebrity.

01:47:05.840 | I mean, Reagan was already a governor, right?

01:47:10.720 | - Yeah, he was.

01:47:11.740 | - So like the first apolitical celebrity that was able,

01:47:14.940 | so maybe if there's more celebrities in the future,

01:47:18.020 | they'll say that Trump was the first person

01:47:19.740 | to pave the way for celebrities to win.

01:47:23.140 | Oh man, yeah.

01:47:24.860 | And yeah, I still hold that this era

01:47:29.020 | will probably be remembered.

01:47:30.560 | People say I talk about Elon way too much,

01:47:34.500 | but the reality is like, there's not many people

01:47:37.900 | that are doing the kind of things he's doing

01:47:39.620 | is why I talk about it.

01:47:41.240 | I think this era, it's not necessarily Elon and SpaceX,

01:47:44.780 | but this era will be remembered by the new,

01:47:48.080 | like of the space exploration,

01:47:51.560 | of the commercial, of companies getting

01:47:54.280 | into space exploration, of space travel,

01:47:57.320 | and perhaps like artificial intelligence

01:48:01.760 | around social media, all those kinds of things.

01:48:04.160 | This might be remembered for that.

01:48:06.160 | But all the political bickering, all that nonsense,

01:48:08.760 | that might be very well forgotten.

01:48:11.140 | - One way to think about it is that the internet is so young.

01:48:16.140 | I think about it.

01:48:17.060 | - That's right.

01:48:17.900 | - So Jeff Jarvis, he's a media scholar I respect.

01:48:20.900 | He's not the only person to say this,

01:48:22.160 | but many others have, which is that,

01:48:23.540 | look, this is kind of like the printing press.

01:48:25.800 | There was a whole 30 years war

01:48:27.680 | because of the printing press.

01:48:29.320 | It took a long time for shit to sort out.

01:48:31.780 | I think that's where we're at with the internet.

01:48:33.220 | Like at a certain level, it disrupts everything.

01:48:36.340 | And that's a good thing.

01:48:37.380 | It can be very tumultuous.

01:48:38.880 | I never felt like I was living through history

01:48:41.880 | until coronavirus.

01:48:43.060 | Like, you know, like until we were all locked down,

01:48:45.140 | I was like, I'm living through history.

01:48:46.980 | Like this, there's this very overused cliche in DC

01:48:50.400 | where every comm staffer wants you to think

01:48:52.320 | that what their boss just did is history.

01:48:54.420 | And I've always been like, this isn't history.

01:48:56.020 | This is some like stupid fucking bill, you know, whatever.

01:48:58.340 | But like, that was the first time I was like,

01:49:00.240 | this is history, like this right here.

01:49:03.140 | - Well, I was hoping, tragedy aside,

01:49:06.820 | that this, I wish the primaries happened during coronavirus

01:49:10.820 | so that we, because like, then we can see the,

01:49:13.980 | so, okay, here's a bunch of people facing crisis

01:49:17.460 | and it's an opportunity for a leader to step up.

01:49:20.120 | Like, I still believe the optimistic view is

01:49:23.220 | the game theory of like influencers

01:49:27.500 | will always be defeated by actual great leaders.

01:49:31.340 | So like, maybe the great leaders are rare,

01:49:34.180 | but I think they're sufficiently out there

01:49:36.780 | that they will step up, especially in moments of crisis.

01:49:39.860 | And coronavirus is obviously a crisis.

01:49:43.140 | We're like, you know, mass manufacture of tests,

01:49:46.920 | all kinds of infrastructure building

01:49:50.700 | that you could have done in 2020.

01:49:52.500 | There's so many possibilities for just like bold action.

01:49:56.140 | - It makes you sad.

01:49:57.140 | - None of that, even just,

01:50:00.700 | forget actually doing the action, advocating for it.

01:50:04.820 | Just saying like, this, we need to do this.

01:50:07.780 | And none of that, like the speeches that Biden made,

01:50:11.660 | I don't even remember a single speech that Biden made

01:50:14.780 | because there's zero bold.

01:50:16.340 | I mean, their strategy was to be quiet

01:50:18.420 | and let Donald Trump-

01:50:21.500 | - Polarize the electorate.

01:50:23.020 | - Polarize the electorate and hope that results

01:50:25.460 | in them winning because of the high unemployment numbers

01:50:30.460 | and all those kinds of things,

01:50:31.960 | as opposed to like, let's go big,

01:50:34.620 | let's go with a big speech.

01:50:36.220 | Yeah, it's a lost opportunity in some sense.

01:50:42.740 | So we talked a bunch about politics,

01:50:44.300 | but one of the other interesting things

01:50:45.980 | is that you're involved with is,

01:50:48.420 | or involved with defining the future of is journalism.

01:50:53.200 | I suppose you can think of podcasts

01:50:54.980 | as a kind of journalism, but also just writing in general,

01:50:58.820 | just whatever the hell the future of this thing looks like

01:51:02.780 | is up to be defined by people like you.

01:51:05.460 | So what do you think is broken about journalism?

01:51:09.140 | And what do you think is the future of journalism?

01:51:11.780 | - I think the future of journalism looks much more

01:51:13.980 | like what we, you and I are doing here right now.

01:51:17.160 | And journalism is gonna be downstream from a culture

01:51:20.800 | that can be a good and a bad thing,

01:51:22.220 | depending on how you look at it.

01:51:23.960 | We are gonna look at our media.

01:51:26.140 | Our media is gonna look much more like it did

01:51:29.420 | pre-mass media.

01:51:31.260 | And the way that I mean that is that back in the 18,

01:51:35.500 | in the 1800s in particular,

01:51:38.060 | especially after the invention of the telegraph,

01:51:40.220 | when information itself was known.

01:51:43.140 | So for example, like you and I don't need to,

01:51:46.020 | let's say you and I are competing journalists.

01:51:47.820 | You and I are no longer competing, quote unquote,

01:51:50.820 | to tell the public X event happened.

01:51:54.140 | All journalism today is largely explaining

01:51:58.860 | why did X happen?

01:52:01.340 | And part of the problem with that is that,

01:52:04.460 | that means that it's all up for partisan interpretation.

01:52:08.100 | Now you can say that that's a bad thing.

01:52:09.840 | I think it's a great thing,

01:52:11.100 | because the highest level of literacy

01:52:13.700 | and news viewership in America

01:52:17.060 | was during the time of yellow journalism,

01:52:19.780 | was during the time of partisan journalism.

01:52:22.140 | Not a surprise.

01:52:23.020 | People like to read the news from people

01:52:25.820 | that they agree with.

01:52:26.840 | You could say that's bad, echo chambers, et cetera.

01:52:29.960 | That's the downside of it.

01:52:31.240 | The upside is more people are more educated.

01:52:33.480 | More people are interested in the news.

01:52:36.560 | So I think the proliferation of mass media,

01:52:40.040 | I mean, sorry, of this format, of-

01:52:42.440 | - Long form. - Eshing,

01:52:43.760 | of not just long form.

01:52:45.960 | Dude, I do updates on Instagram, which are five minutes.

01:52:48.840 | - Oh, you consider like Instagram?

01:52:50.480 | - Yeah, oh yeah. - Almost even Twitter.

01:52:51.980 | - Oh, of course Twitter.

01:52:53.120 | Twitter is where I get my news from.

01:52:54.560 | I don't read the paper.

01:52:55.460 | I have literally, Twitter is my news aggregator.

01:52:57.680 | It's called my wire, where I find out about hard events.

01:53:01.200 | Like the president has departed the White House.

01:53:03.320 | - But not only that, I don't know about you,

01:53:04.860 | but I also looked at Twitter,

01:53:06.720 | to the exact thing you're saying,

01:53:07.920 | which is the response to the news.

01:53:09.640 | Like the thoughtful, sounds ridiculous,

01:53:13.000 | but you can be pretty thoughtful in a single tweet.

01:53:15.080 | - If you follow the right people, you can get that.

01:53:18.520 | And so that is the future of media,

01:53:21.040 | which is that the future of media

01:53:22.880 | is it will be much smaller amount,

01:53:26.140 | or it's much larger amounts of people,

01:53:27.500 | which are famous to smaller groups.

01:53:29.540 | So Walter Cronkite's never gonna happen again,

01:53:32.180 | at least in our, and probably within our lifetimes,

01:53:34.300 | where everybody in America know who's this guy is.

01:53:37.660 | That age is over.

01:53:39.180 | I think that's a good thing,

01:53:40.420 | because now people are gonna get the news

01:53:42.940 | from the people that they trust.

01:53:44.780 | Yes, some of it will be opinionated.

01:53:46.460 | I'm gonna, my program, I'm,

01:53:49.060 | Crystal and I are like, we are,

01:53:51.220 | this, she's coming from this like view.

01:53:53.760 | I'm coming from this view.

01:53:55.140 | That's our bias when we talk about information,

01:53:57.640 | and we're gonna talk about the information

01:53:59.180 | that we think is important.

01:54:00.820 | And it has garnered a large audience.

01:54:02.740 | I think that's very much where the future is gonna be.

01:54:06.200 | And the reason why I think that's a good thing

01:54:08.720 | is because people will be engaged more within it,

01:54:13.200 | rather than the current system,

01:54:14.760 | where news is highly concentrated, highly consolidated,

01:54:17.920 | has groupthink, has the same

01:54:20.820 | elite production pipeline problem of,

01:54:23.680 | everybody knows journalists all come

01:54:25.280 | from the same socioeconomic background,

01:54:27.280 | and they all party together here in DC,

01:54:29.300 | or in New York, or in LA, or wherever,

01:54:31.840 | and they're part of the same monoculture,

01:54:33.800 | and that affects what they,

01:54:35.640 | that affects what they report.

01:54:37.120 | This will cause a total dispersion of all of that.

01:54:40.520 | The battle of our age is gonna be the guild

01:54:44.640 | versus the non-guild.

01:54:46.200 | So like, what we see right now

01:54:48.160 | with the New York Times and Clubhouse,

01:54:50.680 | this is a very, very, very, very, very intentional

01:54:54.640 | thing that is happening,

01:54:55.840 | which is that the Times,

01:54:57.720 | talking about unfettered conversations,

01:55:00.360 | that's happening on Clubhouse for people who aren't aware.

01:55:03.160 | This is important because they need

01:55:06.320 | to be the fetters of conversation.

01:55:08.920 | They need to be the interagent.

01:55:11.640 | That's where they get their power.

01:55:12.800 | They get their power from convincing Facebook

01:55:15.540 | that they are the ones who can fact-check stuff.

01:55:18.520 | They are the ones who can tell you

01:55:20.780 | whether something is right or wrong.

01:55:23.240 | That battle over unimpeded conversation

01:55:27.160 | and the explosion of a format

01:55:28.680 | that you and I are doing really well in,

01:55:30.440 | and then this more consolidated one,

01:55:32.720 | which holds cultural power and elite power,

01:55:35.320 | and more importantly, money, right, over you and I,

01:55:38.320 | that's the battle that we're all gonna play out.

01:55:39.960 | - Do you think unfettered conversations

01:55:41.840 | have a chance to win this battle?

01:55:43.680 | - Yes, I do, in the long run.

01:55:45.400 | In the long run, the internet is simply too powerful.

01:55:48.500 | But here's the mistake everybody makes.

01:55:50.760 | The New York Times will never lose.

01:55:52.240 | It will just become one of us.

01:55:53.780 | See-- - You think so?

01:55:54.880 | - They already are.

01:55:55.720 | They are the largest-- - The Daily?

01:55:57.100 | - The Daily, look at The Daily.

01:55:58.820 | Not even that, think about it not in podcasting.

01:56:01.240 | The Times is not a mass media product.

01:56:04.760 | It is a subscription product for upper-middle class,

01:56:08.480 | largely white liberals who live the same circumstances

01:56:12.840 | across the United States and in Europe.

01:56:15.440 | There's nothing wrong with that, but here's the thing.

01:56:17.920 | You can't be the paper of record

01:56:19.680 | when you're actually the paper

01:56:21.600 | of upper-middle class white America.

01:56:23.560 | Your job is to report on the news from that angle

01:56:27.040 | and deliver them the product that they want.

01:56:29.080 | There's nothing wrong with that.

01:56:30.580 | Their stock price is higher than ever.

01:56:32.600 | They're making 10 times more money

01:56:34.120 | than they did 10 years ago,

01:56:36.160 | but it comes at the cost

01:56:38.600 | of not having a mass application audience.

01:56:41.560 | So when people, I think people in our space

01:56:44.240 | are always like, "The New York Times is gonna be destroyed."

01:56:46.320 | No, it's actually even better.

01:56:48.680 | They will just become one of us.

01:56:50.600 | They already are.

01:56:51.520 | They're a subscription platform.

01:56:53.120 | - Well, yes, in terms of the actual mechanism,

01:56:54.920 | but New York Times is still,

01:56:58.060 | and I don't think I'm speaking about a particular sector.

01:57:00.440 | I think it, as a brand,

01:57:03.840 | it does have the level of credibility assigned to it still.

01:57:08.720 | There's politicization of it.

01:57:10.640 | - Totally.

01:57:11.480 | - But there's a credibility.

01:57:14.000 | It has much more credibility than,

01:57:16.560 | forgive me, than I think you and I have.

01:57:18.840 | - No, you're right.

01:57:20.120 | - In terms of your podcast,

01:57:22.800 | people are not going to be like,

01:57:24.400 | they're gonna cite the New York Times

01:57:27.840 | versus what you said on the podcast for an opinion.

01:57:32.840 | I wonder, in the sense of battles,

01:57:35.360 | whether on federal conversations,

01:57:36.960 | whether Joe Rogan, whether your podcast

01:57:39.320 | can become the, have the same level of legitimacy

01:57:43.840 | or the flip side, New York Times loses legitimacy

01:57:47.800 | to be at the same level of,

01:57:50.920 | in terms of how we talk about it.

01:57:52.680 | - It's gonna be long.

01:57:53.520 | It's a long battle, right?

01:57:54.520 | It's gonna take a long time.

01:57:55.920 | And I'm saying, this is where I think the end state is going

01:57:58.280 | and look at what the Times is doing.

01:57:59.560 | They're leaning into podcasting for a reason,

01:58:02.000 | but not just podcasting as in NPR level,

01:58:06.200 | like here's what's happening.

01:58:07.760 | Michael Barbaro is a fucking celebrity, right?

01:58:10.320 | The guy who does the Daily.

01:58:11.760 | That guy's famous amongst these people

01:58:14.920 | 'cause they're like, oh my God, I love Michael.

01:58:16.880 | Like I love the way he does this stuff.

01:58:18.240 | Again, that's fine.

01:58:19.400 | More people are listening to the news.

01:58:20.720 | I think that's a good thing.

01:58:22.200 | And then who else do they hire?

01:58:23.720 | Ezra Klein from Vox, Kara Swisher, also from Vox,

01:58:27.560 | who does Pivot, which is an amazing podcast.

01:58:30.400 | Or Jane Koston, same thing.

01:58:32.680 | It's personalities who are becoming bundled together

01:58:36.320 | within this brand, right?

01:58:38.240 | - Here's, okay, maybe I'm just a hater.

01:58:40.960 | (Lex laughing)

01:58:42.800 | 'Cause I loved podcasting from the beginning.

01:58:45.280 | I loved Green Day before they were cool, man.

01:58:48.440 | But I'm bothered by it.

01:58:50.620 | Like why doesn't Kara Swisher, she's done successfully,

01:58:53.440 | I think in her own, no, she was always a part

01:58:55.620 | of some kind of institution, I'm not sure.

01:58:57.560 | - But she started her own thing, I think.

01:59:00.000 | - It would, anyway. - Recode, right, yeah.

01:59:01.920 | - Recode, I don't know if that's her own thing.

01:59:03.520 | Yeah, yeah, so she was very successful there.

01:59:06.200 | Why the hell did she join the New York Times

01:59:08.760 | with the new podcast?

01:59:09.920 | Why is Michael Barbaro not do his own thing?

01:59:13.120 | - 'Cause he gets paid, and because he has,

01:59:14.920 | he wants the elite cachet that you just referenced

01:59:17.820 | within his social circle in New York,

01:59:19.900 | which is that I think the biggest mistake

01:59:21.960 | that some of the venture people make is

01:59:23.880 | if we give everybody the tools that those people

01:59:26.640 | are all gonna leave to go sub-stack and go independent,

01:59:29.680 | within their social circle,

01:59:31.440 | sacrificing some money from being independent is worth it

01:59:35.600 | to be a part of the New York Times.

01:59:38.080 | - That's sad to me because it propagates old thinking.

01:59:43.080 | It propagates old institutions,

01:59:46.400 | and you could say that New York Times

01:59:47.800 | is going to evolve quickly and so on,

01:59:49.680 | but I would love it if there was a mechanism

01:59:54.200 | for reestablishing, for building new New York Times

01:59:57.360 | in terms of public legitimacy,

01:59:59.960 | and I suppose that's wishful thinking

02:00:02.320 | 'cause it takes time to build trust in institutions,

02:00:06.320 | and it takes time to build new institutions.

02:00:08.400 | - My main thing I would say is public legitimacy

02:00:10.520 | as a concept is not gonna be there in mass media anymore.

02:00:13.180 | Because of the balkanization of audiences,

02:00:15.920 | I mean, think about it, right?

02:00:16.880 | Like this is like "Legion," you know,

02:00:19.520 | the classic stuff around 1,000 true fans,

02:00:21.920 | or no, sorry, like 100 true fans even now.

02:00:24.520 | Like you can make a living on the internet

02:00:26.000 | just talking to 100 people.

02:00:27.600 | If as long as they're all high-frequency traders,

02:00:29.400 | some of the highest paid people on Substack,

02:00:32.480 | they don't have that many subs.

02:00:34.240 | It's just that they're Wall Street guys, right?

02:00:36.080 | So people pay a lot of money.

02:00:37.160 | Again, that's great.

02:00:38.640 | So what you will have is an increasing balkanization

02:00:42.040 | of the internet, of audiences and of niches.

02:00:46.120 | People will become increasingly famous within this.

02:00:48.680 | You will become astoundingly famous.

02:00:51.040 | I'm sure you've noticed this for your fan base.

02:00:52.480 | I just certainly have with mine.

02:00:53.400 | Like 99% of people have no idea who I am,

02:00:56.040 | but when somebody meets, they're like,

02:00:57.040 | "Oh my God, I watch your show every day."

02:01:00.920 | Right, like it's the only thing I watch for news, right?

02:01:04.140 | Like instead of casually famous,

02:01:06.440 | if that makes sense, be like,

02:01:07.280 | "Oh yeah, that's like Alec Baldwin," you know?

02:01:09.280 | Like, "Oh shit, that's Alec Baldwin."

02:01:10.680 | But you're not like, "Oh shit, I love you, Alec Baldwin."

02:01:14.280 | This is a Ben Smith of the New York Times, actually.

02:01:17.200 | He wrote this column.

02:01:18.040 | He's like, "The future is everybody will be famous,

02:01:20.160 | but only to a small group of people."

02:01:22.720 | And I think that is true.

02:01:24.160 | But again, I don't decry it.

02:01:26.120 | I think it's great because I think that the more

02:01:28.440 | that that happens, the more engaged people will be,

02:01:31.000 | and it empowers different voices to be able to come in

02:01:34.560 | and then possibly, I wouldn't say destroy,

02:01:36.500 | but compete against.

02:01:37.960 | I mean, look at Joe.

02:01:39.200 | Joe is more powerful than CNN and MSNBC

02:01:43.280 | and Fox all put together.

02:01:45.120 | That gives me like immense inspiration.

02:01:47.560 | Like he created the space for me to succeed.

02:01:50.040 | And I told him that when I met him.

02:01:51.200 | I was like, "Dude, like I listened to his podcast

02:01:54.280 | when I was like young."

02:01:55.480 | And like, I remember like when I got to meet him

02:01:58.020 | and all that, and I told him this on this pod,

02:02:00.260 | I was like, "I didn't know people were millions

02:02:02.840 | were willing to listen to a guy talk about chimps

02:02:05.400 | for three straight hours, including me."

02:02:08.080 | I didn't know that I could be one of those people.

02:02:09.800 | - Yeah, me too.

02:02:10.640 | I learned something about myself before the show, yeah.

02:02:12.760 | - And so by creating that space, I'd be like,

02:02:15.280 | "Wait, there's a hunger here."

02:02:17.460 | Like he showed us all the way.

02:02:20.240 | And none of us will ever again be as famous as Rogan

02:02:22.400 | 'cause he was the first.

02:02:23.560 | And that's fine because he created the umbrella ecosystem

02:02:27.480 | for us all to thrive.

02:02:29.120 | That is where I see like a great amount of hope

02:02:32.400 | within that story.

02:02:33.440 | - Yeah, and the cool thing,

02:02:34.280 | he also supports that ecosystem.

02:02:35.880 | He's such a-- - He's so generous.

02:02:38.160 | - One of the things he paved the way on for me

02:02:40.960 | is to show that you can just be honest, publicly honest.

02:02:45.960 | And not jealous of other people's success,

02:02:51.320 | but instead of be supportive and all those kinds of things,

02:02:54.600 | just like loving towards others.

02:02:56.120 | He's been an inspiration.

02:02:57.320 | I mean, to the comics community,

02:03:01.240 | I think there are a bunch of, before that,

02:03:04.480 | I think there were all a bunch of competitive haters

02:03:06.920 | towards each other. - They were, yeah.

02:03:07.880 | And now he's like just injected love.

02:03:10.320 | - Yeah. - You know?

02:03:11.200 | - They're like, they're still,

02:03:12.040 | like many are still resistant,

02:03:13.600 | but they're like, they can't help it

02:03:15.080 | 'cause he's such a huge voice.

02:03:17.120 | He like forces them to be like loving towards each other.

02:03:20.160 | And the same, I try to,

02:03:22.440 | one of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast

02:03:25.320 | was to try to, I wanted to be like,

02:03:28.680 | do what Joe Rogan did, but for the scientific community,

02:03:33.960 | like my little circle of scientific community

02:03:36.040 | of like, let's support each other.

02:03:38.600 | - Yeah, well, like Avi Loeb,

02:03:40.400 | I would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you.

02:03:42.920 | I mean, I assume you put him in touch with Joe.

02:03:44.920 | He went on Joe's show.

02:03:45.760 | I had him on my show.

02:03:47.000 | Like millions of people would have no idea who he was

02:03:49.560 | if it wasn't for you.

02:03:50.400 | - Just by the way, in terms of deep state

02:03:51.920 | and shadow government, Avi Loeb has to do with aliens.

02:03:54.760 | You better believe Joe.

02:03:56.760 | - Dude, the last thing I sent to him

02:03:58.400 | was the American Airlines audio.

02:04:00.480 | Did you see that?

02:04:02.120 | The pilots who were, oh my God, dude, this is amazing.

02:04:04.960 | So like, I'm like getting excited.

02:04:07.280 | This American Airlines flight crew was over New Mexico,

02:04:10.440 | this happened five or six days ago.

02:04:12.240 | And the guy comes and he goes,

02:04:14.360 | hey, do you have any targets up here?

02:04:16.320 | A large cylindrical object just flew over me.

02:04:20.560 | - Oh no. - Okay, so this happens.

02:04:21.880 | So this happens. - Yes.

02:04:23.200 | - Then a guy or like a radio catcher

02:04:26.560 | records this and posts it online.

02:04:29.080 | American Airlines confirms that this is authentic audio.

02:04:33.440 | And they go, all further questions

02:04:35.440 | should be referred to the FBI.

02:04:37.120 | So then, okay, American Airlines just confirmed

02:04:39.760 | it's a legitimate transmission, FBI.

02:04:42.440 | Then the FAA comes out and says,

02:04:45.760 | we were tracking no objects in the vicinity of this plane

02:04:50.760 | at the time of the transmission.

02:04:52.480 | So the only plausible explanation

02:04:54.600 | that online sleuths have been able to say

02:04:56.120 | is maybe he saw a Learjet,

02:04:58.840 | which was using like open source data.

02:05:02.200 | FAA rules that out.

02:05:03.960 | So what was it?

02:05:05.280 | He saw a large cylindrical object

02:05:07.360 | while he was mid-flight, American Airlines.

02:05:09.680 | But you can go online, listen to the audio yourself.

02:05:12.960 | This is a 100% no shit transmission,

02:05:15.680 | confirmed by American Airlines of a commercial pilot

02:05:19.840 | over New Mexico, seeing a quote unquote,

02:05:23.200 | large cylindrical object in the air.

02:05:26.040 | Like I said, when we first started talking,

02:05:28.200 | I've never believed more in UFOs than aliens.

02:05:31.160 | - Yeah, this is awesome.

02:05:33.160 | - Yeah. (laughs)

02:05:34.000 | - I just wish both American Airlines, FBI,

02:05:37.520 | and government would be more transparent.

02:05:40.000 | Like there would be voices.

02:05:42.080 | I know it sounds ridiculous,

02:05:43.280 | but the kind of transparency that you see,

02:05:45.280 | maybe not Joe Rogan, he's like overly transparent,

02:05:48.920 | he's just a comic really.

02:05:49.960 | But just, I don't know, like a podcast from the FBI.

02:05:54.080 | (laughs)

02:05:55.080 | Just like being honest, like excited, confused.

02:05:58.960 | I'm sure they're being overly cautious

02:06:03.120 | about their release information.

02:06:04.520 | I'm sure there's a lot of information

02:06:05.960 | that would inspire the public,

02:06:07.560 | that would inspire trust in institutions

02:06:09.480 | that will not damage national security.

02:06:12.320 | Like it seems to me obvious.

02:06:14.240 | And the reason they're not sharing it

02:06:15.480 | is because of this momentum of bureaucracy,

02:06:17.800 | of caution, and so on.

02:06:19.400 | But there's probably so much cool information

02:06:21.560 | that the government has.

02:06:22.720 | - The way I almost, I wouldn't say it confirmed it's real,

02:06:26.600 | but Trump didn't declassify it.

02:06:28.960 | Like you know that if there was ever a president

02:06:31.320 | that actually wanted to get to the bottom of it,

02:06:32.760 | it was him.

02:06:33.600 | - Yeah.

02:06:34.800 | - I mean, he didn't declassify it, man.

02:06:37.120 | And people begged him to.

02:06:38.400 | I know for a fact, 'cause I pushed

02:06:40.680 | to try and make this happen,

02:06:41.960 | that some people did speak to him about it.

02:06:44.320 | And he was like, "No, I'm not gonna do it."

02:06:46.440 | So.

02:06:47.280 | - He might be afraid.

02:06:48.560 | - That's what I mean though.

02:06:49.720 | They were probably all telling him,

02:06:50.560 | "Sir, you can't do this, all this."

02:06:52.480 | Like, wow.

02:06:53.320 | And I get that.

02:06:54.160 | And there's this legislation written as COVID

02:06:56.400 | that like they have six months to release it.

02:06:58.640 | - Is that real?

02:06:59.480 | What is that?

02:07:00.300 | Is that a bunch of bullshit?

02:07:01.140 | - I think it's bullshit.

02:07:01.960 | I think it's bullshit.

02:07:02.800 | There's so many different levels of classification

02:07:04.280 | that people need to understand.

02:07:05.840 | I mean, look, I read John Podesta.

02:07:07.960 | He was the chief of staff to Bill Clinton.

02:07:10.360 | He's a big UFO guy.

02:07:11.560 | He tried, like him and Clinton tried

02:07:14.840 | to get some of this information

02:07:15.920 | and they could not get any of it.

02:07:17.880 | And we're talking about the president

02:07:19.680 | and the White House chief of staff.

02:07:21.340 | - Well, there's a whole bureaucracy built

02:07:22.800 | just like you're saying with intent.

02:07:24.640 | You have to be like, that has to be your focus

02:07:27.080 | because there's a whole bureaucracy built around secrecy

02:07:29.840 | for probably for a good reason.

02:07:31.160 | So to get through to the information,

02:07:33.720 | there's a whole like paperwork process,

02:07:35.440 | all that kind of stuff.

02:07:36.280 | You can't just walk in and get the,

02:07:37.880 | unless again, with intention, that becomes your thing.

02:07:40.920 | - Exactly.

02:07:41.760 | - Like let's revolutionize this thing.

02:07:44.000 | And then you get only so many things.

02:07:46.000 | It's sad that the bureaucracy has gotten so bulky.

02:07:50.840 | But I think the hopeful message is

02:07:53.080 | from earlier in our conversation,

02:07:54.440 | it seems like a single person can't fix it.

02:07:57.800 | But if you hire the right team, it feels like you can.

02:08:02.000 | - Can't fix everything.

02:08:03.040 | I don't wanna give people unrealistic expectations.

02:08:05.580 | You can fix a lot, especially in crisis,

02:08:08.000 | you can remake America.

02:08:09.240 | - Yeah.

02:08:10.080 | - And all of that is 'cause it's already happened twice.

02:08:12.600 | FDR, or in modern history, FDR and JFK.

02:08:17.160 | But sorry, FDR and JFK's assassination, LBJ.

02:08:20.920 | Two hyper-competent men who understood government,

02:08:25.500 | who understood personnel,

02:08:27.160 | and coincidentally were friends.

02:08:28.480 | I love this.

02:08:29.300 | I don't think actually people understand this.

02:08:31.040 | FDR met Johnson three days after he won

02:08:35.720 | his election to Congress, special election.

02:08:38.600 | He was only 29 years old.

02:08:40.320 | And he left that meeting and called somebody and said,

02:08:44.200 | "This young man is gonna be president

02:08:45.640 | of the United States someday."

02:08:46.960 | Like, even then, what was within him

02:08:50.120 | to understand and to recognize that?

02:08:52.000 | And sometimes Johnson, as a young member of Congress,

02:08:54.400 | would come and have breakfast with FDR.

02:08:56.320 | Like, just two of the great political minds

02:08:58.820 | of the 20th century just sitting there talking.

02:09:01.360 | Like, I would give anything

02:09:03.000 | to know what was happening.

02:09:04.760 | - I hope they were real with each other.

02:09:06.360 | And there was like a genuine human connection, right?

02:09:08.520 | That seems to be-

02:09:10.000 | - Well, Johnson wasn't a genuine guy.

02:09:11.400 | So we're almost certainly not.

02:09:13.560 | - Well, I need to read those thousands of pages.

02:09:16.520 | I've been way too focused on Hitler.

02:09:19.720 | - I was gonna say, one of my goals in coming to this

02:09:22.880 | is I was like, I gotta get Lex into two things,

02:09:24.560 | 'cause I know he'll love it.

02:09:25.600 | I know he'll love LBJ if he has the time to read the books.

02:09:29.240 | - Really?

02:09:30.080 | - 100%.

02:09:31.200 | He's the most- - Of all the presidents?

02:09:32.760 | - I didn't say you'll love him,

02:09:33.680 | but you'll love the books about him.

02:09:34.960 | Because the books are a story of America,

02:09:37.520 | the story of politics, the story of power.

02:09:39.600 | This is the guy who wrote "The Power Broker."

02:09:41.320 | These books are up there with

02:09:44.040 | "Decline and Follow the Roman Empire"

02:09:46.240 | by Edward Gibbon in terms of how power works.

02:09:48.840 | - Study of power.

02:09:49.800 | - Exactly.

02:09:50.640 | - No, that's why Carroll wrote the books.

02:09:52.840 | And that's why the books are not really about LBJ.

02:09:55.600 | They're about power in Washington

02:09:57.440 | and about the consolidation of power post New Deal.

02:10:00.200 | The consolidation then,

02:10:01.780 | or using the levers of power like Johnson knew

02:10:04.640 | in order to change the House of Representatives,

02:10:08.000 | the Senate of the United States,

02:10:09.520 | and ultimately the presidency of the United States,

02:10:11.500 | which ended in failure and disaster with Vietnam.

02:10:13.920 | Don't get me wrong.

02:10:14.960 | But he's overlooked for so many of the incredible things

02:10:18.840 | that he did with civil rights.

02:10:19.960 | Nobody else could have done it.

02:10:21.520 | No one else could have gotten it done.

02:10:23.960 | And the second thing is we gotta get you into World War I.

02:10:27.280 | We gotta get you more into World War I

02:10:29.640 | because I think that's a rabbit hole,

02:10:31.860 | which I know you're a Dan Carlin fan.

02:10:33.600 | So blueprint for Armageddon.

02:10:35.320 | - Yeah, it's good.

02:10:36.160 | - Guaranteed.

02:10:37.440 | - But there's fewer evil people there.

02:10:40.000 | - Yes, but that's what actually,

02:10:43.720 | there's a banality of that evil,

02:10:45.480 | of the Kaiser and of the Austro-Hungarians.

02:10:50.240 | And see, I like World War I more because it was unresolved.

02:10:54.440 | It's one of those periods I was talking to you about,

02:10:56.080 | about sometimes you're called and you fail.

02:10:58.840 | That's what happened.

02:10:59.680 | I mean, 50 million people were killed

02:11:02.240 | in the most horrific way.

02:11:04.000 | People literally drowned in the mud,

02:11:06.400 | like an entire generation.

02:11:09.200 | One stat I love is that Britain didn't need a draft

02:11:13.040 | till 1916.

02:11:15.000 | They went two years of throwing people

02:11:18.000 | into barbed wire voluntarily.

02:11:20.600 | And because people loved their country

02:11:22.640 | and they loved the king,

02:11:23.800 | and they thought they were going against the Kaiser,

02:11:26.320 | it's just like that conflict to me,

02:11:28.480 | I just can't read enough about it.

02:11:30.160 | Also just like births Russian revolution, Hitler.

02:11:34.560 | - You can't talk about World War II without World War I.

02:11:37.000 | - Right, and I'm obsessed with the conflict.

02:11:39.200 | I've read way too many books about it.

02:11:40.800 | For this reason is it's unresolved.

02:11:42.920 | And the roots of so much of even our current problems

02:11:46.200 | are happened in Versailles.

02:11:48.280 | Vietnam is because of the Treaty of Versailles.

02:11:51.760 | Many ways, the Middle Eastern problems

02:11:53.480 | and the division of the states there,

02:11:55.320 | the Treaty of Versailles in terms of the penalties

02:11:57.500 | against Germany, but also the fallout from those wars

02:12:01.820 | on the French and the German population,

02:12:03.940 | or the French and the British populations

02:12:05.380 | and their reluctance for war in 1939 or 1938

02:12:10.380 | when Neville Chamberlain goes.

02:12:12.940 | One of the things people don't understand

02:12:14.060 | is the actual appetite of the British public at that time.

02:12:16.540 | They didn't wanna go to war, only Churchill.

02:12:18.540 | He was the only one in the gathering storm,

02:12:21.940 | being like, "Hey, this is really bad," and all of that.

02:12:24.980 | And then even in the United States,

02:12:26.500 | our streak of isolationism, which swept,

02:12:28.860 | I mean, things were, because of that conflict,

02:12:32.100 | we were convinced as a country

02:12:34.780 | that we wanted nothing to do with Europe and its problems.

02:12:37.980 | And in many ways, that contributed

02:12:39.500 | to the proliferation of Hitler and more.

02:12:41.320 | So I'm obsessed with World War I for this reason,

02:12:43.980 | which is that it's just like the root,

02:12:46.060 | it's like the culmination of the monarchies,

02:12:48.660 | then the fall, and then just all the shit spills out

02:12:51.900 | from there for like 100 years.

02:12:53.620 | - So World War I is like the most important shift

02:12:56.300 | in human history, versus World War II

02:12:58.700 | is like a consequence of that.

02:13:00.420 | - Yeah, so I have a degree in security studies

02:13:03.060 | from Georgetown, and one of the thing is

02:13:04.900 | that we would focus a lot on that is like war,

02:13:07.580 | but also the complexity around war.

02:13:11.100 | And it's funny, we never spent that much time

02:13:13.800 | on World War II, 'cause it was actually quite a clean war.

02:13:17.420 | It's a very atypical war, as in the war object,

02:13:21.620 | which we learned from World War I,

02:13:23.260 | is we must inflict suffering on the German people

02:13:26.660 | and invade the borders of Germany and destroy Hitler.

02:13:30.580 | Like the center of gravity is the Nazi regime and Hitler.

02:13:34.320 | So it had a very basic begin and end.

02:13:37.380 | Begin, liberate France, invade Germany,

02:13:40.660 | destroy Hitler, reoccupy, rebuild.

02:13:44.060 | World War I, what are you fighting for?

02:13:46.860 | I mean, nobody even knew.

02:13:50.180 | The German general staff, they were like,

02:13:52.100 | even in 1917, they're like, the war was worth it

02:13:54.900 | because now we have Luxembourg.

02:13:56.200 | I'm like, really?

02:13:57.040 | You killed two million of your citizens

02:13:58.420 | for fucking Luxembourg?

02:13:59.760 | And like half of Belgium, which is now like a pond?

02:14:02.660 | And same thing, the French are like,

02:14:04.980 | well, the French more so, they're defending their borders,

02:14:07.500 | but like, what are the British fighting for?

02:14:09.500 | Why did hundreds of thousands of British people die?

02:14:11.540 | In order to preserve the balance of power in Europe

02:14:14.340 | and prevent the Kaiser from having a port

02:14:17.420 | on the English Channel?

02:14:19.300 | Like, really, that's why?

02:14:21.420 | That's more what wars are, is they become these like,

02:14:24.380 | atypical, they become these protracted conflicts

02:14:29.380 | with a necessary diplomatic resolution

02:14:33.260 | that's not clean, it's very dirty,

02:14:36.260 | it usually leads in the outbreak of another war

02:14:38.900 | and another war and another war

02:14:40.020 | and a slow burn of ethnic conflict, which bubbles up.

02:14:43.100 | So that's why I look at that one,

02:14:45.820 | 'cause it's more typical of warfare in terms of how it works.

02:14:49.060 | - Exactly, it's kind of interesting,

02:14:51.260 | you're making me realize that World War II

02:14:54.340 | is one of the rare wars where you can make a strong case

02:14:57.860 | for it's a fight of good versus evil.

02:14:59.700 | - Yeah, just war theory, obviously,

02:15:01.180 | like they're literally slaughtering Jews,

02:15:02.880 | like we have to kill them.

02:15:04.300 | - And there's one person doing it,

02:15:05.820 | I mean, there's one person at the core,

02:15:07.820 | yeah, that's fascinating.

02:15:11.320 | And it's short and there's a clear aggression.

02:15:15.660 | - It's interesting that Dan Carlin

02:15:18.780 | has been avoiding Hitler as well.

02:15:21.060 | - Yeah, probably for this reason.

02:15:24.020 | - Probably for this reason, I mean,

02:15:25.740 | but it's complicated too, because there's a pressure,

02:15:28.900 | that guy has his demons.

02:15:30.260 | I love Dan so much.

02:15:31.700 | I don't know if you feel this pressure,

02:15:36.700 | but as a creative, he feels the pressure

02:15:39.140 | of being maybe not necessarily correct,

02:15:43.900 | but maybe correct in the sense that his understanding,

02:15:48.540 | he gets to the bottom of why something happened,

02:15:53.540 | of what really happened, get to the bottom of it

02:15:59.540 | before he can say something publicly about it.

02:16:02.540 | And he is tortured by that burden.

02:16:04.900 | - I know, he takes so much shit

02:16:06.980 | from the historical community for no reason.

02:16:09.220 | I think he's the greatest popularizer,

02:16:11.580 | quote unquote, of history.

02:16:13.300 | And I wish more people in history understood it that way.

02:16:17.100 | He was an inspiration to me.

02:16:18.380 | I mean, I do some videos sometimes on my Instagram now,

02:16:21.180 | where I'll do like a book tour.

02:16:22.940 | I'll be like, here's my bookshelf of these presidents.

02:16:24.700 | And like, here's what I learned from this book,

02:16:26.140 | and this book, and this,

02:16:26.980 | and that was very much like a skill I learned from him

02:16:30.700 | of being like, as the historian writes.

02:16:33.980 | (both laughing)

02:16:34.820 | I just love the way he talks, he's like, in the mud.

02:16:38.180 | Or he'll be like, quote.

02:16:39.660 | (both laughing)

02:16:42.420 | He inspires me, man.

02:16:44.700 | He really does to like learn more.

02:16:46.660 | And I've read, I bought a lot of books

02:16:48.740 | because of Dan Carlin, because of this guy,

02:16:50.940 | because of that guy.

02:16:52.260 | In terms of, you know another thing he does,

02:16:53.980 | which nobody else, and I'm probably guilty of this,

02:16:56.220 | he focuses on the actual people involved.

02:16:59.420 | Like he would tell the story of actual British soldiers

02:17:03.300 | in World War I.

02:17:04.580 | And I probably, and maybe you're guilty of this too,

02:17:07.100 | we over-focus on what was happening

02:17:09.740 | in the German general staff,

02:17:11.020 | what was happening in the British general staff.

02:17:12.780 | And he doesn't make that mistake.

02:17:14.220 | That's what he tells real history.

02:17:16.100 | Yeah, and it gives it a feeling.

02:17:18.700 | The result is that there's a feeling,

02:17:20.540 | you get the feeling of what it was like to be there.

02:17:22.900 | Exactly.

02:17:24.300 | You know, you're becoming,

02:17:25.940 | quickly becoming more and more popular.

02:17:28.120 | Speaking about political issues in part,

02:17:34.100 | do you feel a burden, like almost like

02:17:38.500 | the prison of your prior convictions

02:17:43.660 | of having to, being popular with a certain kind of audience

02:17:47.660 | and thereby unable to really think outside the box?

02:17:51.380 | I have, I've really struggled with this.

02:17:54.460 | I came up in right-wing media.

02:17:56.380 | I came up a much more doctrinaire,

02:18:00.220 | conservative in my professional life.

02:18:02.100 | I wasn't always conservative.

02:18:02.980 | We can get to that later if you want.

02:18:05.260 | And I did feel an immense pressure

02:18:09.860 | after the election by people to say,

02:18:14.860 | wanted me to say the election was stolen.

02:18:17.620 | And I knew that I had a sizable part of my audience.

02:18:21.660 | Oh, well, here's the benefit.

02:18:22.820 | Most people know me from "Rising,"

02:18:24.260 | which is with Crystal and me.

02:18:26.220 | That is inherently a left-right program.

02:18:29.440 | So it's a large audience.

02:18:31.260 | So I felt comfortable and I knew that I could still be fine

02:18:35.540 | in terms of my numbers, whatever,

02:18:37.320 | because many people knew me who were on the left.

02:18:40.300 | And if my right listeners abandoned me, so be it.

02:18:44.660 | I had the luxury of able to take that choice,

02:18:47.100 | but I still felt an immense amount of pressure

02:18:51.020 | to say the election was stolen,

02:18:52.780 | to give credence to a lot of the stuff that Trump was doing,

02:18:55.500 | to downplay January 6th,

02:18:57.740 | to downplay many of the Republican senators

02:19:00.100 | or justify many of the Republican senators,

02:19:01.900 | some of whom I know,

02:19:03.300 | who objected to the electoral college certification

02:19:06.180 | and who stoked some of the flames

02:19:08.900 | that have eaten the Republican base.

02:19:11.700 | And I just wouldn't do it.

02:19:13.540 | And that was hard, man.

02:19:15.380 | Like, I feel more politically homeless right now

02:19:19.860 | than I ever have,

02:19:21.660 | but I have realized in the last couple of months

02:19:24.660 | that's the best thing that ever happened to me.

02:19:26.300 | - It's freedom.

02:19:27.140 | - It's true freedom.

02:19:28.620 | I now, I say exactly what I think.

02:19:32.700 | And it's not that I wasn't doing that before.

02:19:34.980 | It's maybe I would avoid certain topics

02:19:38.160 | or like I would think about things

02:19:40.700 | more from a team perspective of like,

02:19:42.820 | am I making sure that it's,

02:19:45.540 | I'm not saying I didn't fight it.

02:19:46.780 | And I still, I criticized the right plenty

02:19:48.780 | and Trump plenty before the election and more.

02:19:51.460 | It's more just like,

02:19:52.900 | I no longer feel as if I even have the illusion

02:19:56.620 | of a stake within the game.

02:19:58.620 | I'm like, I only look at myself as an outside observer

02:20:02.420 | and I will only call it as I see it truly.

02:20:05.660 | And I was aspiring to that before,

02:20:08.420 | but I had to have, in a way,

02:20:11.900 | Trump stopped the steel thing.

02:20:13.520 | It like took my shackles off 100%.

02:20:16.180 | 'Cause I was like, no, this is bullshit.

02:20:17.700 | And I'm gonna say it's bullshit.

02:20:19.060 | And I think it's bad.

02:20:20.260 | And I think it's bad for the Republican party.

02:20:22.420 | And if people in the Republican party

02:20:24.180 | don't agree with me on that, that's fine.

02:20:26.860 | I'm just not gonna be necessarily

02:20:29.060 | like associated with you anymore.

02:20:30.940 | - This is probably one of the first political,

02:20:32.780 | liberal politics-related conversations we've had.

02:20:35.980 | I mean, unless you count Michael Malice, who--

02:20:38.780 | - He was great.

02:20:39.620 | (laughing)

02:20:41.540 | He's a funny guy.

02:20:42.540 | - He's not so much political as he is like,

02:20:44.860 | burning down man.

02:20:46.340 | (laughing)

02:20:47.580 | - He leans too far into anarchy for me.

02:20:50.020 | - Yeah, I think he's--

02:20:52.020 | - There's a place for that.

02:20:53.300 | - It's almost, well, first of all,

02:20:54.980 | he's working on a new book, which I really appreciate.

02:20:58.020 | Outside of, he's working on like a big book for a while,

02:21:00.900 | which is White Pill.

02:21:02.380 | He's also working on this like short little thing,

02:21:07.140 | which is like anarchist handbook or something like that.

02:21:11.700 | It's like Anarchy for Idiots or something like that.

02:21:14.580 | Which I think is really--

02:21:16.100 | - I like that name, but.

02:21:16.940 | (laughing)

02:21:19.100 | - Well, me being an idiot and being curious about anarchy

02:21:22.540 | just seems useful, so I like those kinds of books.

02:21:24.700 | - That's Russian heritage, man.

02:21:26.060 | - Yeah.

02:21:26.900 | - Anarchist 101, yeah.

02:21:28.300 | - I find those kinds of things a useful thought experiment

02:21:33.300 | because that's why, it's frustrating to me

02:21:37.860 | when people talk about communism, socialism,

02:21:40.500 | or even capitalism, where they can't enjoy

02:21:43.780 | the thought experiment of like, why did communism fail

02:21:50.900 | and maybe ask the question of like,

02:21:53.340 | is it possible to make communism succeed

02:21:55.540 | or are there good ideas in communism?

02:21:57.380 | Like I enjoy the thought experiment,

02:21:58.980 | like the discourse of it, like the reasoning

02:22:02.460 | and like devil's advocate and all that.

02:22:04.580 | People seem to not have patience for that.

02:22:07.140 | They're like, communism bad, red.

02:22:09.300 | - I was obsessed with the question and still am.

02:22:11.620 | I will never be, I will never quench my thirst

02:22:16.260 | for Russian history.

02:22:18.500 | I love that period of 1890 to 1925.

02:22:23.500 | It's just like, it's so fucking crazy.

02:22:30.220 | Like the autocracy embodied in Czar Alexander.

02:22:35.020 | And then you get this like weird fail son, Nicholas,

02:22:38.820 | who is kind of a good guy, but also terrible.

02:22:42.240 | And also Russian autocracy itself is terrible.

02:22:45.020 | And then I just became obsessed with the question of like,

02:22:47.620 | why did the Bolshevik revolution succeed?

02:22:49.580 | Because like people in Russia

02:22:51.340 | didn't necessarily want Bolshevism.

02:22:53.940 | People suffered a lot under Bolshevism

02:22:56.420 | and it led to Stalinism.

02:22:58.120 | How did Vladimir Lenin do it, right?

02:23:01.140 | Like, and I became obsessed with that question.

02:23:04.540 | And it's still, I find it so interesting,

02:23:06.380 | which is that series of accidents of history,

02:23:10.640 | incredible boldness by Lenin,

02:23:13.820 | incredible realpolitik, smart, unpopular decisions

02:23:18.820 | made by Trotsky and Stalin,

02:23:21.780 | and just like the arrogance of the czars

02:23:25.440 | and of the Russian like autocracy.

02:23:30.440 | And just, but at the same time,

02:23:32.280 | there's all these like cultural implications of this, right?

02:23:35.220 | In terms of like how it became hollowed out

02:23:37.700 | post Catherine the Great and all that.

02:23:40.140 | I was obsessed with autocracy

02:23:41.380 | because Russia was an actual autocracy.

02:23:44.120 | And like actually, and I'm like, it was there.

02:23:46.260 | Like they didn't even remove serfdom

02:23:49.300 | to like the civil war in America.

02:23:51.780 | Like that's crazy.

02:23:52.980 | Like, you know, and nobody really talks about it.

02:23:55.900 | And I just became, yeah, I was like,

02:23:57.980 | was Bolshevism a natural reaction

02:24:01.140 | to the excesses of czarism?

02:24:03.940 | There is a convenient explanation where that is true,

02:24:07.340 | but there were also a series of decisions

02:24:10.000 | made by Lenin and Stalin to kill many of the people

02:24:13.140 | in the center left and marginalize them,

02:24:15.420 | and also not to associate with the more quote unquote,

02:24:19.260 | like amenable communists in order to make sure

02:24:24.080 | that their pure strain of Bolshevism was the only thing.

02:24:28.080 | And the reason I like that is because it comes back

02:24:29.980 | to a point I made earlier.

02:24:31.460 | It's all about intentionality,

02:24:32.780 | which is that you actually can will something

02:24:35.820 | into existence, even if people don't want it.

02:24:38.500 | That was the craziest thing.

02:24:39.500 | Like nobody wanted this,

02:24:41.380 | but it still ruled for half a century,

02:24:44.060 | more actually, I mean, almost, you know, 75 years.

02:24:47.660 | - To think that there could have been a history

02:24:50.180 | of the Soviet Union that was dramatically different

02:24:55.180 | than Leninism, Stalinism, that was completely different,

02:25:00.860 | like almost would be the American story.

02:25:03.020 | - Yeah, easily.

02:25:04.340 | I mean, there's a world where,

02:25:06.340 | and I don't have all the characters.

02:25:07.820 | There's like Kerensky, and then there was like,

02:25:10.380 | whoever Lenin's number two, Stalin's chief rival.

02:25:12.940 | And even, I mean, look, even a Soviet Union led by Trotsky,

02:25:15.900 | that's a whole other world, right?

02:25:17.340 | Like literally a whole other world.

02:25:19.420 | And yeah, it's just, I don't know.

02:25:21.620 | I find it so interesting.

02:25:22.500 | I will never not be fascinated by Russia.

02:25:24.540 | I always will.

02:25:25.660 | It's funny that I get to talk to you,

02:25:26.900 | 'cause it's like, I read this book.

02:25:28.620 | I forget what it's called.

02:25:29.460 | It won, I think it won a Pulitzer Prize.

02:25:31.220 | And it was like the story of,

02:25:34.580 | I tried to understand Russia post Crimea,

02:25:37.420 | 'cause I came up amongst people

02:25:40.100 | who are much more like neoconservative,

02:25:41.700 | and they're like, "Fuck Russia, Russia, bad."

02:25:43.900 | And I was like, "Okay, what do these people think?"

02:25:46.260 | And we have this narrative

02:25:48.260 | of like the fall of the Soviet Union.

02:25:49.860 | And then I read this book from the perspective of Russians

02:25:52.980 | who lived through the fall.

02:25:54.180 | And they were like, "This is, I was like, this is terrible.

02:25:56.020 | "Like actually the introduction of capitalism was awful.

02:25:59.420 | "And like the rise of all these crazy oligarchs,

02:26:02.980 | "that's why Putin came to power,

02:26:06.560 | "to like restore order to the oligarchy."

02:26:11.560 | - And he still talks to this day.

02:26:13.220 | Do you guys, I mean, that's always the threat of like,

02:26:15.540 | do you wanna return to the '90s?

02:26:17.220 | - Right.

02:26:18.060 | - Do you want to return to- - To Yeltsin.

02:26:19.380 | - Yeah. - And like,

02:26:20.380 | but the thing is in the West,

02:26:21.660 | we have this like our own propaganda of like,

02:26:23.940 | no, Yeltsin was great.

02:26:25.040 | That was the golden age.

02:26:26.000 | What could have been with Russia?

02:26:27.660 | And I was like, "Well, what do actual Russians think?"

02:26:30.020 | And so that, yeah, I'll always be fascinated by it.

02:26:34.300 | And then just like to understand the idea

02:26:37.960 | of feeling encircled by NATO and all of that,

02:26:41.320 | you have to understand like Russian defense theory,

02:26:44.500 | all the way going back to the czars,

02:26:46.460 | has always been defense in depth

02:26:48.960 | in terms of having Estonia, Lithuania,

02:26:51.800 | and more is like protection of the heartland.

02:26:54.560 | I'm not justifying in this,

02:26:55.600 | so NATO shills, like, please don't come after me.

02:26:57.920 | But, and look, Estonians like NATO.

02:27:01.200 | They wanna be in NATO.

02:27:02.040 | So I don't wanna minimize that.

02:27:03.080 | I'm more just saying like,

02:27:04.320 | I understand him and Russia much better having done that.

02:27:08.920 | And we are very incapable in America.

02:27:11.580 | I think this is probably 'cause my parents are immigrants

02:27:13.280 | and I've traveled a lot,

02:27:14.320 | of putting yourself in the mind of people

02:27:17.320 | who aren't Western and haven't lived a history,

02:27:21.060 | especially our lives of America's fucking awesome.

02:27:23.320 | We're the number one country in the world.

02:27:25.040 | I'm like, we're literally better than you,

02:27:26.480 | like in many ways.

02:27:27.960 | And they can't empathize with people

02:27:31.380 | who have suffered so much.

02:27:33.740 | And I just, yeah, it's just so interesting to me.

02:27:36.060 | - What about if we could talk for just a brief moment

02:27:38.800 | about the human of Putin and power.

02:27:42.800 | You are clearly fascinated by power.

02:27:46.960 | Do you think power changed Putin?

02:27:51.620 | Do you think power changes leaders?

02:27:54.260 | If you look at the great leaders in history,

02:27:57.480 | whether it's LBJ, FDR,

02:28:01.120 | do you think power really changes people?

02:28:02.940 | Like, is there a truth to that kind of old proverb?

02:28:06.120 | - It reveals, I think that's what it is.

02:28:08.400 | It reveals.

02:28:09.420 | So Putin was a much more deft politician,

02:28:13.220 | much more amenable to the West.

02:28:15.240 | If you think back to 2001 and more, right?

02:28:18.460 | When he came, 'cause he was still,

02:28:20.040 | 'cause at that time his biggest problem

02:28:21.900 | was intra-Russian politics, right?

02:28:24.200 | Like it was all consolidating power within the oligarchy.

02:28:27.460 | Once he did that by around like 2007,

02:28:31.100 | there's that famous time when he spoke out against the West

02:28:34.720 | at the Munich Security Conference.

02:28:36.180 | I forget when it was.

02:28:37.540 | And that's when everybody in the audience was like, whoa.

02:28:40.480 | And he was talking about like NATO encirclement

02:28:42.860 | and like, we will not be beaten back by the West.

02:28:45.700 | Very shortly afterwards, like the Georgia invasion happens.

02:28:49.020 | And that was like a big wake-up call

02:28:51.020 | of like, we will not be pushed around anymore.

02:28:53.340 | I mean, he said before publicly,

02:28:54.780 | like the worst thing that ever happened was the fall.

02:28:57.380 | Or what did he say?

02:28:58.220 | He was like, the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy.

02:29:00.640 | Right? - Yeah.

02:29:01.480 | - Of course, people in the West were like, what?

02:29:02.740 | I'm like, I get it.

02:29:04.180 | Like they were a superpower.

02:29:05.500 | Now their population is declining.

02:29:08.500 | Like it's like a petro state.

02:29:09.620 | It sucks.

02:29:10.460 | Like, I understand.

02:29:11.800 | I understand like how somebody could feel about that.

02:29:15.640 | I think it revealed his character,

02:29:17.520 | which is that he, I think he thinks of himself probably

02:29:23.440 | as he always has since 2001, as like this benevolent,

02:29:27.820 | almost as a benevolent dictator.

02:29:29.100 | He's like, without me,

02:29:29.940 | the whole system would collapse.

02:29:31.340 | I'm the only guy keeping these people in,

02:29:33.020 | I'm the only guy keeping all these people in check.

02:29:35.320 | Most Russians probably do support Putin

02:29:38.420 | because they feel like they support some form

02:29:41.460 | of functional government.

02:29:43.500 | And they view it as like a check against that,

02:29:46.440 | which is a long, you know,

02:29:48.140 | has a long history within Russia too.

02:29:51.020 | So I don't know if it changed him.

02:29:53.180 | I think it just revealed him.

02:29:55.100 | Because it's not like he, I mean, he has a,

02:29:56.820 | you know, Navalny has put that like billion dollar palace

02:29:59.220 | and all that.

02:30:00.700 | I don't know.

02:30:01.620 | Sometimes I feel like Putin does that for show.

02:30:03.820 | He doesn't seem like somebody who indulges

02:30:05.820 | in all that stuff.

02:30:06.780 | Or maybe we just don't see it.

02:30:08.020 | Like, I don't know.

02:30:08.860 | - Well, I don't.

02:30:09.780 | It's very difficult for me to understand.

02:30:11.260 | I've been hanging out, thanks to Clubhouse,

02:30:13.360 | a lot of, I've gotten to learn a lot about the Navalny folks

02:30:18.700 | and it's been very educational.

02:30:20.420 | Made me ask a lot of important questions about what,

02:30:24.780 | question a lot of my assumptions

02:30:27.180 | about what I do and don't know.

02:30:29.260 | But I'll just say that I do believe, you know,

02:30:34.260 | there's a lot of the Navalny folks say

02:30:36.160 | that Putin is incompetent and is a bad executive,

02:30:40.700 | like is bad at basically running government.

02:30:44.380 | But to me-

02:30:46.380 | - Well, why do Russians not think that?

02:30:48.500 | Right?

02:30:49.340 | Well, they probably say propaganda.

02:30:50.180 | - They would say it's the press.

02:30:51.100 | Yeah, they would say the control.

02:30:52.300 | There is a strong either control or pressure on the press.

02:30:56.780 | But I think there is a legitimate support

02:30:58.860 | and love of Putin in Russia that is not grounded

02:31:02.260 | in just misinformation and propaganda.

02:31:05.140 | There's legitimacy there.

02:31:07.420 | Mostly, I try to remain apolitical

02:31:09.940 | and actually genuinely remain apolitical.

02:31:12.900 | I am legitimately not interested

02:31:15.780 | in the politics of Russia of today.

02:31:18.940 | I feel I have some responsibility

02:31:20.780 | and I'll take that responsibility on as I need to.

02:31:23.620 | But my fascination, as it is perhaps with you

02:31:26.620 | in part, is in the historical figure of Putin.

02:31:30.660 | I know he's currently president,

02:31:32.420 | but I'm almost looking like as if I was a kid

02:31:34.860 | in 30 years from now reading about him,

02:31:37.060 | studying the human being,

02:31:39.180 | the games of power that are played

02:31:43.560 | that got him to gain power, to maintain power,

02:31:47.140 | what that says about his human nature,

02:31:51.140 | the nature of the bureaucracy that's around him,

02:31:54.900 | the nature of Russia, the people,

02:31:56.900 | all those kinds of things,

02:31:58.380 | as opposed to the politics and the manipulation

02:32:00.700 | and the corruption and the control of the media

02:32:03.660 | that results in misinformation.

02:32:05.660 | You know, those are the bickering of the day,

02:32:07.620 | just like we were saying,

02:32:08.660 | what will actually be remembered

02:32:10.220 | about this moment in history?

02:32:11.580 | - Totally.

02:32:12.400 | He's a transformational figure in Russian history, really.

02:32:14.420 | Like the bridge between the fall of the Soviet Union

02:32:16.820 | and the chaos of Yeltsin.

02:32:18.540 | That will be how he's remembered.

02:32:21.060 | The only question is what comes next

02:32:22.700 | and what he wants to come next.

02:32:24.420 | That's, I'm always, I'm like, he's getting old.

02:32:26.540 | How old is he?

02:32:27.380 | 60 something?

02:32:28.200 | - Yeah, 60.

02:32:29.040 | So he would be, I think he would be 80.

02:32:31.780 | So with the change of the constitution,

02:32:34.860 | he cannot be president until,

02:32:38.200 | six, four, 2034, I think it is.

02:32:44.500 | So he would be like 80 something

02:32:46.700 | and he would be in power for over 30 years,

02:32:48.540 | which is longer than Stalin.

02:32:50.700 | So, but he still, he still seems to be-

02:32:54.380 | - Seems fit.

02:32:55.220 | I think he's gonna be around for a long time.

02:32:57.940 | - But this is a fascinating question that you ask,

02:32:59.700 | which is like, what does he want?

02:33:01.900 | - I don't know.

02:33:02.740 | Yeah, that's the question.

02:33:03.580 | I don't, and this is where I think,

02:33:06.060 | given all of his behavior and more,

02:33:07.780 | I don't know if it's about money.

02:33:09.220 | I don't know if it's about enriching himself.

02:33:11.180 | Obviously he did to the tune of billions and billions

02:33:13.660 | and billions of dollars.

02:33:15.140 | But I think he probably,

02:33:17.420 | he's as close to like an actual Russian nationalist,

02:33:20.340 | like at the top, who really does believe in Russia

02:33:24.020 | as its rightful superpower.

02:33:26.060 | Everything he does seems to stem

02:33:28.140 | from that opposition to NATO, intro to Syria,

02:33:31.260 | like wanting to play a large role in affairs,

02:33:35.780 | deeply distrustful and yet coveting of the European powers.

02:33:40.340 | Like, I could describe every czar,

02:33:43.340 | you know, in those same language.

02:33:44.620 | Like every czar falls into the exact same category.

02:33:47.180 | - Yeah, and I mean, it makes me wonder,

02:33:48.940 | well, looking at some of the biggest leaders

02:33:51.420 | in human history, to ask the question of,

02:33:53.900 | what was the motivation?

02:33:55.420 | What was the motivation for even just the revolutionaries

02:33:58.140 | like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin?

02:34:00.300 | What was the motivation?

02:34:02.060 | Because it sure as hell seems like the motivation

02:34:05.780 | was at least in part driven by the idea,

02:34:10.780 | by ideas, not self-interest of like power.

02:34:15.620 | - For Lenin, it was, I think he was a true believer

02:34:18.060 | and an actual narcissist,

02:34:19.860 | who thought he was the only one who could do it.

02:34:21.620 | Stalin, I do think just wanted power.

02:34:23.700 | And realized, well, I don't know.

02:34:25.220 | Look, he wrote very passionately when he was young.

02:34:27.860 | - And he really believed in communism.

02:34:30.300 | - In the beginning he did.

02:34:31.500 | What I'm always fascinated is I'm like,

02:34:34.500 | around 1920, what happened, right?

02:34:36.980 | Post revolution, you crushed the whites.

02:34:40.340 | Now it's all about consolidation.

02:34:42.540 | That's where the games really began.

02:34:44.860 | And I'm like, I don't think that was about communism.

02:34:47.460 | (both laughing)

02:34:49.460 | - Yeah, maybe it became a useful propaganda tool,

02:34:53.260 | but it still seemed like he believed in it,

02:34:55.740 | whether it was, of course, this is the question.

02:34:58.300 | I mean, this is the problem with conspiracy theories for me.

02:35:01.540 | And this is legitimate criticism towards me

02:35:04.900 | about conspiracy theories, which is,

02:35:06.740 | just because you're not like this

02:35:09.860 | doesn't mean others aren't like this.

02:35:11.300 | So like, I can't believe that somebody be deeply two-faced.

02:35:16.300 | - Oh, I've met them.

02:35:17.740 | You're welcome to Washington.

02:35:18.940 | (both laughing)

02:35:20.460 | - But like, I think that I would be able to detect.

02:35:23.340 | - I don't think so. - No.

02:35:25.820 | - These people are good.

02:35:27.380 | - Well, my question is-- - I've seen it.

02:35:29.660 | - Well, so there's difference.

02:35:30.860 | There's two-faced, like,

02:35:32.300 | there's different levels of two-faced.

02:35:35.940 | What I mean is to be killing people,

02:35:39.380 | and it's like "House of Cards" style, right?

02:35:43.340 | And still present a front like you're not killing people.

02:35:49.060 | I don't know if, I guess it's possible,

02:35:52.100 | but I just don't see that scale.

02:35:54.940 | Like, there's a lot of people like that,

02:35:56.620 | and I don't, I have trouble imagining

02:35:58.980 | some, you know, that's such a compelling narrative

02:36:04.260 | that people like to say.

02:36:06.180 | Like, people, that's the conspiratorial mindset.

02:36:09.820 | I think that skepticism is really powerful

02:36:11.700 | and important to have because it's true.

02:36:14.020 | A lot of powerful people abuse their power,

02:36:15.920 | but saying that about,

02:36:18.000 | I feel like people over-assume that.

02:36:21.900 | It's like, I see that with use of steroids,

02:36:24.260 | often in sports.

02:36:25.580 | People seem to make that claim

02:36:28.040 | about, like, everybody who's successful.

02:36:30.700 | And I wanna be very, I don't know,

02:36:32.360 | something about me wants to be cautious

02:36:33.980 | 'cause I wanna give people a chance.

02:36:37.900 | - Being purely cynical isn't helpful.

02:36:39.500 | People say this about me.

02:36:40.340 | "He's only saying this to do this."

02:36:42.100 | - Yeah, but at the same time,

02:36:43.340 | being naively optimistic about everything

02:36:45.180 | is also kind of pedophilic

02:36:46.780 | 'cause people are gonna fuck you over.

02:36:49.140 | And more importantly, that doesn't bother me.

02:36:51.980 | More importantly, you're not gonna be able to reason

02:36:53.680 | about how to create systems that are going to be robust

02:36:56.260 | to corruption, to malevolent, like, parties.

02:37:01.260 | So in order to create,

02:37:04.220 | you have to have a healthy balance of both, I suppose,

02:37:07.500 | especially if you wanna actually engineer things

02:37:09.580 | that work in this world that has evil in it.

02:37:13.180 | I can't believe there's a book of Hitler on the desk.

02:37:15.780 | (Lex laughing)

02:37:17.340 | - We've mentioned a lot of books

02:37:18.660 | throughout this conversation.

02:37:20.460 | I wonder, and this makes me really curious

02:37:23.380 | to explore in a lot of depth

02:37:27.460 | the kind of books that you're interested in.

02:37:30.300 | I think you mentioned in your show

02:37:31.940 | that you provide recommendations.

02:37:35.780 | - Yes, I do.

02:37:37.220 | - In the form of spoken word,

02:37:39.440 | can you beyond what we've already recommended,

02:37:42.220 | mention books, whether it is historical, nonfiction,

02:37:47.220 | or whether it's more like philosophical or even fiction

02:37:50.460 | that had a big impact on your life?

02:37:52.540 | Is there a few that you can mention?

02:37:53.820 | - Sure, I already talked about the Johnson books,

02:37:55.740 | so I'll leave that alone.

02:37:56.820 | Robert A. Caro, he's still alive, thank God.

02:37:59.540 | He's finishing the last book.

02:38:01.540 | I hope he makes it.

02:38:03.000 | So those Johnson books.

02:38:05.380 | Second--

02:38:06.340 | - Can I ask you a question about those books?

02:38:07.780 | - Yes.

02:38:08.620 | - What the hell do you fit into so many pages?

02:38:11.020 | - Everything, man.

02:38:11.860 | (laughing)

02:38:12.940 | Let me tell you this.

02:38:13.780 | So I'll just give an anecdote.

02:38:14.900 | This is why I love these books.

02:38:16.540 | The beginning, the first book is about Lyndon Johnson.

02:38:19.540 | His life to when he gets elected to Congress.

02:38:22.820 | The book begins with a history of Texas

02:38:26.300 | and its weather patterns,

02:38:27.760 | and then of his great, great grandfather moving to Texas.

02:38:32.740 | Then the story of that,

02:38:34.500 | about 100 or so pages in, you get to Lyndon Johnson.

02:38:37.260 | (laughing)

02:38:38.260 | That's how you do it.

02:38:39.980 | - Okay, so it's like a Tolstoy-style retelling.

02:38:42.900 | - This is the thing.

02:38:43.720 | It's not a biography, it's a story of the times.

02:38:45.860 | That's a great biography.

02:38:47.460 | So another one, this isn't part of my list, so don't.

02:38:50.380 | (laughing)

02:38:52.020 | Is Grant-- - All right, off the record.

02:38:53.540 | - Ron Chernow.

02:38:54.820 | Ron Chernow's Grant.

02:38:56.060 | It's 1,000 pages.

02:38:57.500 | And the reason I tell everybody to read it

02:38:59.060 | is it's not just the story of Grant,

02:39:01.540 | it is the story of pre-Civil War America,

02:39:04.380 | the Mexican-American War, the Civil War,

02:39:07.460 | and Reconstruction all told in the life of one person

02:39:10.840 | who was involved in all three.

02:39:12.540 | Most people don't know anything

02:39:13.380 | about the Mexican-American War.

02:39:14.460 | It's fascinating.

02:39:15.820 | Most people don't know anything about Reconstruction.

02:39:18.120 | Now more so, because people are talking, it's a hot topic now.

02:39:21.120 | I've been reading about it for years.

02:39:22.820 | That is another thing people need to learn a lot more about.

02:39:26.260 | In terms of non-history books,

02:39:28.760 | the book that probably had the most impact on me,

02:39:31.820 | which is also historical nonfiction,

02:39:34.860 | is I am obsessed with Antarctic exploration.

02:39:39.860 | And it all began with a book

02:39:43.420 | called "Shackleton's Incredible Journey,"

02:39:45.900 | which is the collection of diaries

02:39:48.740 | of everybody who was on Shackleton's journey.

02:39:51.180 | For those who don't know,

02:39:52.900 | Shackleton was the last explorer

02:39:56.740 | of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.

02:39:59.780 | He led a ship called the Endurance,

02:40:03.060 | which froze in the ice off the coast of Antarctica in 1914.

02:40:08.060 | And they didn't have radios over the last exploration,

02:40:13.740 | the last one without the age of radio.

02:40:16.100 | And he happens to freeze in the ice.

02:40:18.580 | And then the ship collapses after a year,

02:40:21.980 | frozen in the ice.

02:40:23.180 | And this man leads his entire crew from that ship

02:40:28.180 | onto the ice with a team of dogs,

02:40:31.140 | survives out on the ice for another year

02:40:34.460 | with three little lifeboats,

02:40:36.380 | and is able to get all of his men,

02:40:38.820 | every single one of them alive,

02:40:40.720 | to an island hundreds of miles away called Elephant Island.

02:40:44.920 | And when they got there,

02:40:46.340 | he had to leave everybody behind except for six people.

02:40:50.420 | And him and two other guys, I'm forgetting their names,

02:40:54.680 | navigated by the stars 800 miles through the Drake Passage

02:41:00.060 | with seas of hundreds of feet to Prince,

02:41:03.580 | I think it's called Prince George's Island.

02:41:05.700 | And then when they got to Prince George's Island,

02:41:08.580 | they landed on the wrong side

02:41:10.380 | and they had to hike from one side to the other

02:41:14.100 | to go and meet the whalers.

02:41:15.700 | And every single one of those things

02:41:17.540 | was supposed to be impossible.

02:41:18.940 | Nobody was ever supposed to hike that island.

02:41:21.820 | It wasn't done again until like the 1980s

02:41:24.260 | with professional equipment.

02:41:25.860 | He did it after two years of starvation.

02:41:28.220 | Nobody was ever supposed to make it

02:41:30.740 | from Elephant Island to Prince George.

02:41:33.460 | The guy, they had to hold him steady, his legs,

02:41:36.440 | so that he could chart the stars.

02:41:38.380 | And if they miss this island,

02:41:40.040 | they're into open sea, they're dead.

02:41:42.780 | And then before that,

02:41:44.220 | how do you survive for a year on the ice?

02:41:46.380 | On seals.

02:41:47.580 | And before that, he kept his crew from depression,

02:41:51.700 | frozen one year in the ice.

02:41:53.700 | It's just an amazing story.

02:41:55.660 | And it made me obsessed with Antarctic exploration.

02:41:58.460 | So I've read like 15 books on.

02:42:00.020 | - What the hell is it about the human spirit?

02:42:02.700 | - That's the thing about Antarctica

02:42:03.780 | is it brings it out of you.

02:42:05.260 | So for example, I read another one

02:42:06.580 | recently called "Mawson's Will."

02:42:08.940 | Douglas Mawson, he was an Australian.

02:42:10.780 | He was on one of the first Robert Frost expeditions.

02:42:15.140 | He leads an expedition down to the South.

02:42:17.420 | Him and a partner, they're leading explorations,

02:42:21.700 | 1908, something like that.

02:42:23.460 | They're going around Antarctica with dog teams.

02:42:27.500 | And one of the, what happens is they keep going over

02:42:31.060 | these snow bridges where there's a crevice,

02:42:33.220 | but it's covered in snow.

02:42:34.660 | And so one of the lead driver,

02:42:38.460 | the dogs go over and they plummet.

02:42:40.980 | And that sled takes with it.

02:42:43.300 | So the guy survives, but that sled takes all their food,

02:42:47.460 | half the dogs, their stove, the camping tent,

02:42:52.900 | the tent specifically designed for the snow, everything.

02:42:56.180 | And they're hundreds of miles away from base camp.

02:42:59.860 | He and this guy have to make it back there

02:43:02.740 | in time before the ship comes to come get them

02:43:05.780 | on an agreed upon date.

02:43:07.740 | And he makes it, but the guy he was with, he dies.

02:43:11.180 | And it's a crazy story.

02:43:12.020 | First of all, they have to eat the dogs.

02:43:14.300 | A really creepy part of Antarctic exploration

02:43:16.380 | is everyone ends up eating dogs at different points.

02:43:20.220 | And part of the theory, which is so crazy,

02:43:22.940 | is that the guy he was with was dying

02:43:25.980 | because they were eating dog liver.

02:43:28.980 | And dog liver has a lot of vitamin E,

02:43:31.300 | which if you eat too much of it

02:43:32.980 | can give you like a poisoning.

02:43:34.740 | And so Mawson, by trying to help his friend,

02:43:38.180 | was giving him more liver.

02:43:39.300 | - Of all the things that kills you.

02:43:40.900 | - I know, it's dog liver.

02:43:42.500 | And so his friend ends up dying,

02:43:44.340 | have a horrific heart attack, all of that.

02:43:46.340 | Mawson crawls back hundreds of miles away,

02:43:49.700 | makes it back to base camp hours after the ship leaves.

02:43:54.180 | And two guys or a couple of guys stayed behind for him.

02:43:57.940 | And he basically has to recuperate

02:43:59.420 | for like six months before he can even walk again.

02:44:02.620 | But it's like you were saying about the human spirit.

02:44:04.180 | It's like Antarctica brings that out of people.

02:44:07.500 | Or Amundsen, the guy who made it to the South Pole,

02:44:10.500 | Robert Amundsen, oh my God.

02:44:12.780 | Like this guy trained his whole life in the ice

02:44:16.780 | from Norway to make it to the South Pole.

02:44:20.140 | And he beat Robert Frost,

02:44:21.660 | the British guy with all this money and all these.

02:44:24.700 | I could go on this forever.

02:44:26.060 | I'm obsessed with it.

02:44:27.340 | - Well, first of all, I'm gonna take this part

02:44:30.180 | of the podcast, I'm gonna set it to music,

02:44:33.020 | I'm gonna listen to it,

02:44:33.860 | 'cause I've been whining and bitching

02:44:35.620 | about running 48 miles with Goggins this next weekend.

02:44:39.260 | And this is gonna be so easy.

02:44:41.420 | I'm just gonna listen to this over and over in my head.

02:44:43.660 | You're gonna be cool.

02:44:44.500 | - Elon's obsessed with Shackleton.

02:44:45.820 | He talks about him all the time.

02:44:46.660 | - He uses, I was gonna ask him about that.

02:44:48.860 | He uses an example of,

02:44:51.100 | that as an example of what Mars colonization would be like.

02:44:56.940 | - He's right.

02:44:58.540 | No, Antarctica is as close to, you can simulate that.

02:45:02.220 | Antarctica's as close to what you could simulate

02:45:05.580 | what it would get.

02:45:06.420 | That Nat Geo series on Mars,

02:45:08.960 | I'm not sure if you watched it, it's incredible.

02:45:10.780 | Elon's actually in it.

02:45:11.980 | And it's like, they get there, everything goes wrong,

02:45:15.820 | somebody dies, it's horrible, they can't find any water,

02:45:20.540 | it's not working.

02:45:21.780 | - So what is it?

02:45:22.620 | Is it simulating the experience

02:45:23.980 | of what it'd be like to colonize?

02:45:25.220 | - So it's like a docu-series where the fictionalized part

02:45:28.940 | is the astronauts on Mars,

02:45:32.100 | but then they're interviewing people like Elon Musk

02:45:34.580 | and others who are the ones who paved the way

02:45:37.340 | to get to Mars.

02:45:38.780 | So it's a really interesting concept.

02:45:40.380 | I think it's on Netflix.

02:45:41.900 | And yeah, I agree with him 100%,

02:45:44.220 | which is that the first guys to make,

02:45:46.300 | like for example, Robert Frost, who went to Australia,

02:45:50.140 | sorry, to Antarctica, the British explorer

02:45:54.220 | who was beaten to the South Pole three weeks

02:45:56.220 | by Robert Amundsen, he died on the way back.

02:45:59.260 | And the reason why is 'cause he wasn't well-prepared,

02:46:01.460 | he was arrogant, he didn't have the proper amounts

02:46:05.260 | of supplies, his team had terrible morale.

02:46:08.460 | Antarctica was a brutal place.

02:46:09.940 | If you fuck up one time, you die.

02:46:12.260 | And it's like, and this is what you read a lot about,

02:46:14.780 | which is the reason why such heroic characters

02:46:17.220 | like Shackleton Shine is a lot of people died.

02:46:20.820 | Like there were some people who got frozen in the ice.

02:46:23.660 | I mean, man, this again also came to the North exploration.

02:46:28.020 | So I read a lot about like the exploration

02:46:29.700 | of the North Pole.

02:46:31.060 | And same thing, these unextraordinary men take people

02:46:35.900 | out into the ice and get frozen out there for years

02:46:38.780 | and shit goes so bad.

02:46:40.660 | They end up eating each other, they all die.

02:46:43.700 | There's a famous, I'm forgetting his name,

02:46:45.740 | the British Franklin Expedition,

02:46:47.580 | where they went searching for them for like 20 years.

02:46:50.860 | And they eventually came across a group of Inuit

02:46:52.900 | who were like, oh yeah, we saw some weird white men here

02:46:55.340 | like 15 years ago.

02:46:56.860 | And they find their bones and there's like saw marks

02:46:59.020 | which show that they were eating each other.

02:47:01.020 | - So history remembers the ones who didn't eat each other.

02:47:03.700 | - Yeah, well, yeah, we remember the ones who made it,

02:47:06.820 | but there are--

02:47:09.420 | - And that would be the story of Mars as well.

02:47:11.100 | - That will be the story of Mars.

02:47:12.300 | - But, and nevertheless, that's the interesting thing

02:47:14.500 | about Antarctica, nevertheless, something about human nature

02:47:19.500 | drives us to explore it.

02:47:22.100 | And that seems to be like, a lot of people have this kind

02:47:25.300 | of, to me, frustrating conversations like,

02:47:28.460 | well, Earth is great, man.

02:47:31.520 | Why do we need to colonize Mars?

02:47:33.140 | - You just don't get it.

02:47:34.660 | - I don't know, I mean, I don't know.

02:47:36.220 | It's the same people that say like, why are you running?

02:47:39.220 | Like, why are you running a marathon?

02:47:41.620 | What are you running from, man?

02:47:43.980 | I don't know, it's pushing the limits of the human mind,

02:47:48.580 | of what's possible.

02:47:51.300 | - It's George Mallory because it's there.

02:47:54.180 | - Yeah. - It's simple.

02:47:55.980 | - And that somehow actually, the result of that,

02:47:58.380 | if you wanna be pragmatic about it,

02:48:01.900 | there's something about pushing that limit

02:48:04.240 | that has side effects that you don't expect

02:48:06.420 | that will create a better world back home

02:48:08.780 | for the people, not necessarily on Earth,

02:48:11.020 | but just in general, it raises the quality of life

02:48:15.300 | for everybody, even though the initial endeavor

02:48:18.220 | doesn't make any sense.

02:48:19.900 | The very fact of pushing the limits of what's possible

02:48:24.820 | then has side effects of benefiting everybody.

02:48:28.740 | And it's difficult to predict ahead of time

02:48:32.100 | what those benefits will be.

02:48:33.540 | Say with colonizing Mars, it's unclear what the benefits

02:48:36.780 | will be for Earth or in general.

02:48:38.620 | - Well, what did we get from the moon?

02:48:41.260 | What did we get from Apollo, right?

02:48:43.500 | Technically, and there were a lot of socialists

02:48:45.500 | at the time making this argument.

02:48:46.660 | They're like, "All this money going."

02:48:48.780 | You know what?

02:48:49.600 | We went to the fucking moon in 1969.

02:48:52.820 | That was amazing.

02:48:53.940 | The greatest feat in human history, period.

02:48:58.020 | What did we learn from it?

02:48:59.340 | We learned about interstellar or interplanetary travel.

02:49:04.100 | We learned that we could do something

02:49:06.580 | off of a device less powerful than the computer

02:49:09.800 | in my pocket.

02:49:10.900 | Like the amount of potential locked within my pocket

02:49:15.540 | and your pocket.

02:49:16.940 | I mean, if you were to define my politics in one way,

02:49:19.420 | it's greatness, like a quest for national greatness.

02:49:23.600 | There is no greatness without fulfilling

02:49:26.500 | the ultimate calling of the human spirit, which is more.

02:49:30.260 | It's not enough, and why should it be?

02:49:32.540 | It wasn't enough.

02:49:34.540 | Our ancestors could have been content to sit,

02:49:38.380 | well, actually, many of them were content to sit

02:49:41.240 | and say, "These berries will be here for a long time."

02:49:43.460 | And they got eaten and they died.

02:49:44.980 | And it's the ones who got out and went to the next place

02:49:48.700 | and the next place and went across the Siberian land bridge

02:49:51.780 | and went across more and just did extraordinary things.

02:49:55.460 | The craziest ones, we are their offspring

02:49:58.220 | and we fail them if we don't go into space.

02:50:01.440 | That's how I would put it.

02:50:04.000 | - You should run for president.

02:50:05.100 | (laughing)

02:50:06.300 | - I'm just pro space, man.

02:50:07.540 | I love space.

02:50:08.580 | - No, you're pro doing difficult things

02:50:10.780 | and pushing, exploring the world in all of its forms.

02:50:14.860 | I hope that kind of spirit permeates politics too.

02:50:18.800 | That same kind of-

02:50:20.420 | - Can, can.

02:50:22.040 | - Well, it can, and I hope so.

02:50:24.780 | I don't know if you want to stay on it,

02:50:25.980 | but I think that was book number one or two.

02:50:28.140 | - Oh, shit, yeah.

02:50:28.980 | Okay, all right, all right.

02:50:30.620 | - Is there something-

02:50:31.460 | - Well, this one is a second,

02:50:32.280 | actually is a corollary to that, which is "Sapiens."

02:50:34.280 | And I know that's a very normal, normie answer.

02:50:37.640 | One of the best-selling book.

02:50:38.600 | I think there's a reason for that.

02:50:39.960 | "Yuval Noah Harari."

02:50:41.600 | Oh, cool.

02:50:42.440 | Okay, look, yes, he didn't do any new research.

02:50:44.660 | I get that.

02:50:45.500 | All he did was aggregate.

02:50:46.540 | I'm sure he's very controversial in the scientific community,

02:50:49.060 | but guess what?

02:50:49.900 | He wrote a great book.

02:50:50.720 | It's a very easy to read general explanation

02:50:55.720 | of the rise of human history.

02:50:58.160 | And it helps challenge a lot of preconceptions.

02:51:00.600 | Are we special?

02:51:01.600 | Are we an accident?

02:51:02.640 | Are we more like a parasite?

02:51:04.200 | Are we not?

02:51:05.160 | What, is there a destiny to all of us?

02:51:08.000 | I don't know.

02:51:09.240 | If anything, it's like what I just described,

02:51:11.000 | which is more.

02:51:12.000 | Move, move out.

02:51:14.140 | The evolution of money.

02:51:15.520 | Like, I know he gets a lot of hate,

02:51:17.780 | but I think that he writes it so clearly and well

02:51:21.220 | that for your average person to be able to read that,

02:51:23.560 | you will come away with a more clear understanding

02:51:26.200 | of the human race than before.

02:51:28.880 | And I think that that's why it's worth it.

02:51:30.720 | I agree with you 100%.

02:51:32.840 | I'm ashamed to, I usually don't bring up "Sapiens"

02:51:35.560 | because it's like-

02:51:36.520 | - Yeah, it's like everybody's uncle has read it,

02:51:38.760 | but that's a good thing, actually.

02:51:41.040 | - It is one of the, I think it'll be remembered

02:51:43.320 | as one of the great books of this particular era.

02:51:46.440 | Yeah, because it's so clearly,

02:51:48.480 | it's like the selfish gene with Dawkins.

02:51:50.760 | I mean, it just aggregates so many ideas together

02:51:53.440 | and puts language to it

02:51:54.800 | that makes it very useful to talk about.

02:51:57.260 | So it is one of the great books.

02:51:59.320 | - 100%.

02:52:00.880 | Another one is definitely "Born to Run"

02:52:03.460 | for the same reason by Christopher McDougall,

02:52:05.940 | which is that-

02:52:06.780 | - I'm just gonna listen to this whole podcast next week.

02:52:09.040 | - You have to.

02:52:09.880 | You should, because you are inheriting our most basic skill,

02:52:14.880 | which is running and re-imagining human history

02:52:19.120 | or re-imagining what we were as opposed to what we are

02:52:24.120 | is very useful because it helps you understand

02:52:27.740 | how to tap into primal aspects of your brain,

02:52:31.040 | which just drive you.

02:52:32.700 | And the reason I love McDougall's writing

02:52:34.920 | is because I love anybody who writes like this,

02:52:37.160 | Malcolm Gladwell, who else?

02:52:39.640 | Michael Lewis, people who find characters

02:52:42.600 | to tell a bigger story.

02:52:43.680 | Michael Lewis finds characters

02:52:45.360 | to tell us the story of the financial crisis.

02:52:48.120 | You know, Malcolm Gladwell writes,

02:52:49.640 | finds characters to tell us the story

02:52:51.160 | of learning new skills and outliers

02:52:53.080 | and whatever his latest book is, I forget what it's called.

02:52:56.640 | And, but McDougall tells the vignettes

02:53:00.160 | and a tiny story of a single person

02:53:02.560 | in the history of running

02:53:04.700 | and like how it's baked into your DNA.

02:53:07.760 | And I think there was just something very useful

02:53:10.560 | to that for me for being like,

02:53:11.760 | I don't need to go to the gym or like,

02:53:13.640 | I'm not saying you should still go to the gym.

02:53:15.420 | I'll be clear.

02:53:16.260 | I'm saying like, in order to fulfill like who you are,

02:53:19.840 | you can actually tap into something that's the most basic.

02:53:23.680 | I don't know if, I'm sure you've listened

02:53:24.920 | to the David Cho episode with Joe Rogan.

02:53:27.160 | - Can you remind me?

02:53:29.160 | Oh, where he's the animal?

02:53:30.400 | - Yeah, right, with the baboon.

02:53:32.000 | When he goes hunting.

02:53:32.840 | And there's something to that, man.

02:53:33.960 | There's something to that,

02:53:34.800 | where it's just like,

02:53:36.040 | they are living the way that we were supposed to.

02:53:39.560 | We're not supposed, well,

02:53:40.600 | I don't wanna put a normative judgment on it.

02:53:42.240 | They're living the way that we used to.

02:53:45.280 | There's something very- - It feels more honest

02:53:46.520 | somehow to our true nature.

02:53:48.800 | - There's a guy I follow on Instagram.

02:53:50.480 | I've come from, Paul Saladino, carnivore MD.

02:53:53.840 | He just went over there to the Hadza to live with them.

02:53:57.320 | And I was watching his stuff, just like,

02:53:59.480 | I was like, man, there's something in you that wants to go.

02:54:03.560 | I'm like, I wanna do that.

02:54:05.160 | I wouldn't be very good at it, but like, I want to.

02:54:07.560 | - I'm so glad that somebody

02:54:09.280 | that thinks deeply about politics

02:54:11.040 | is so fascinated with exploration

02:54:13.000 | and with the very basic nature,

02:54:17.840 | like human nature, nature of our existence.

02:54:20.240 | I love that.

02:54:21.600 | There's something in you.

02:54:23.160 | - And still you're stuck in DC.

02:54:25.160 | - For now, for now.

02:54:26.760 | - Speaking of which, you are from Texas.

02:54:31.480 | - Yes.

02:54:32.640 | - What do you make of the future of Texas politically,

02:54:35.960 | culturally, economically?

02:54:39.640 | I am in part moving, well, I'm moving to Austin.

02:54:43.600 | - Congrats.

02:54:44.440 | - But I'm also doing the Eric Weinstein advice,

02:54:46.920 | which is like, dude, you're not married,

02:54:49.440 | you don't have kids. - Blood everywhere.

02:54:51.080 | - There's no such thing as moving.

02:54:52.960 | What are you moving?

02:54:54.600 | You're like, you're three suits

02:54:58.440 | and some shirts and underwear.

02:54:59.960 | What exactly is the move entail?

02:55:02.720 | So I have nothing.

02:55:03.640 | So I'm basically, it's very just remain mobile,

02:55:08.000 | but there's a promise, there's a hope to Austin.

02:55:12.600 | Outside of, I mean, my, outside of just like friendships,

02:55:17.280 | I have no, it's a very different culture

02:55:19.000 | that Joe Rogan is creating.

02:55:20.200 | I'm mostly interested in the,

02:55:22.640 | what the next Silicon Valley will be,

02:55:24.520 | what the next hub of technological innovation,

02:55:28.480 | and there's a promise, maybe a dream,

02:55:32.040 | for Austin being that next place.

02:55:34.440 | - It's very possible.

02:55:35.400 | - Doesn't have the baggage of some of the political things,

02:55:40.400 | maybe some of the sort of things that hold back

02:55:46.080 | the beauty of, that makes capitalism,

02:55:49.720 | that makes innovation so powerful,

02:55:51.760 | which is like a meritocracy, which is excellence.

02:55:55.520 | Diversity is exceptionally important,

02:55:57.400 | but not, it should not be the only priority.

02:56:01.680 | It has to be something that coexists

02:56:05.840 | with a insatiable drive towards excellence.

02:56:10.280 | And it seems like Texas is a nice place.

02:56:13.560 | Like having Austin, which is like a kind of this weird,

02:56:18.560 | I hope it stays weird, man.

02:56:20.520 | I love weird people.

02:56:21.360 | - I don't know about that, but we can get into it.

02:56:24.360 | - But it's, there's this hope is,

02:56:29.080 | it remains this weird place of brilliant innovation

02:56:32.760 | amidst a state that's like more conservative.

02:56:36.400 | So like there's a nice balance of everything.

02:56:38.400 | What are your thoughts about the future of Texas?

02:56:40.400 | - I think it's so fascinating to me

02:56:43.160 | because I never thought I would want to move back,

02:56:46.880 | but now I'm beginning to be convinced.

02:56:50.520 | So I'm- - You hear that, Joe?

02:56:52.040 | I'm gonna send you this clip.

02:56:53.680 | - I am, I'm being honest,

02:56:55.220 | and many Texans will hate me for this.

02:56:56.720 | Texas was not a place that was kind to me, quote unquote.

02:57:00.520 | And this is because of my own parent.

02:57:04.120 | Like I was raised in College Station, Texas,

02:57:06.960 | which is a town of 50,000.

02:57:08.760 | It's a university town.

02:57:10.360 | It exists only for the university.

02:57:13.040 | So it was a very, I did not get the full Texas experience.

02:57:16.320 | It's purely speaking from a College Station experience.

02:57:19.240 | But growing up, first generation,

02:57:23.640 | or I forget what it is, whatever.

02:57:25.280 | I'm the first American,

02:57:26.180 | I was born and raised in College Station.

02:57:27.880 | My parents are from India.

02:57:29.160 | Being raised in a town where the dominant culture

02:57:34.820 | was predominantly like white evangelical Christian was hard.

02:57:38.840 | Like it was just difficult.

02:57:40.520 | And I think of it, in the beginning,

02:57:45.160 | I would say like ages like zero to like eight,

02:57:48.240 | it was like cultural ignorance,

02:57:50.520 | as in like they just don't know how to interact with you.

02:57:53.480 | And there was a level of,

02:57:55.600 | always there was like the evangelical kind of antipathy

02:57:58.560 | towards like you being not Christian.

02:58:01.120 | You know, my parents are Hindu,

02:58:02.200 | like that's how I was raised.

02:58:03.840 | And so like there was that.

02:58:05.880 | But 9/11 was very difficult.

02:58:08.200 | Like 9/11 happened when I was in third or fourth grade.

02:58:13.000 | And that changed everything, man.

02:58:15.000 | Like, I mean, our temple had to like print out t-shirts.

02:58:18.400 | And I'm not saying this is a sob story, to be clear.

02:58:20.400 | I've still actually largely for my adult life

02:58:22.960 | identified on the political right.

02:58:24.160 | So don't take this as some like, you know, race manifesto.

02:58:27.080 | I'm just telling it like this is what happened.

02:58:29.160 | Which is that, like we had,

02:58:32.480 | it was just hard to be brown, frankly.

02:58:35.300 | And to have some of the fallout from 9/11 and during Iraq.

02:58:40.300 | And the reason I am political is because I realize

02:58:45.520 | in myself I have a strong rebellious nature

02:58:49.640 | against systems and structures of power.

02:58:52.960 | And the first people I ever rebelled against

02:58:55.680 | were all the people telling me to shut up

02:58:58.840 | and not question the Iraq War.

02:59:00.640 | So the reason I am in politics

02:59:02.640 | is because I hated George W. Bush with a passion

02:59:07.300 | and I hated the war.

02:59:08.820 | And I was so, again, my entire background

02:59:10.920 | is largely in national security for this reason,

02:59:12.680 | which is I was obsessed with the idea

02:59:15.360 | of like how do we get people who are not gonna get us

02:59:18.300 | into these quagmire situations in positions of power.

02:59:21.340 | That's how I became fascinated by power in the first place

02:59:24.180 | was all a question of how do this happen?

02:59:27.780 | Like how did this catastrophe happen?

02:59:30.420 | I realized it's not as bad as like, you know,

02:59:32.260 | the previous conflicts, but this one was mine.

02:59:34.500 | And to see how it changed our domestic politics forever.

02:59:38.080 | And so that was my rebellion.

02:59:40.760 | But it's funny 'cause I identified as a left,

02:59:43.000 | on the left when I was growing up, up until I was 18.

02:59:46.520 | I had also a funny two-year stint.

02:59:48.720 | This is where everything kind of changed for me.

02:59:50.240 | When I was 16, actually, I moved to Qatar, to Doha, Qatar.

02:59:53.760 | 'Cause my dad was the dean or associate dean

02:59:57.400 | of Texas A&M University at Doha.

03:00:00.160 | So my last two years of high school were at this.

03:00:02.160 | I went from this small town in Texas.

03:00:04.160 | And I love my parents because they could recognize

03:00:07.440 | that I had within me that I was not a small town kid.

03:00:10.160 | So they took me out of this country every chance they got.

03:00:13.320 | I traveled everywhere and constantly let me go.

03:00:16.440 | And so I went from school in College Station

03:00:20.120 | to like this ritzy private school, American school.

03:00:24.400 | Best thing that ever happened to me

03:00:26.160 | because first of all, it got me out of College Station.

03:00:29.560 | Second, at that time, I had this annoying streak of,

03:00:34.320 | I wouldn't call it being anti-America,

03:00:36.440 | but you don't appreciate America.

03:00:38.680 | Let me tell everybody out there listening,

03:00:40.400 | leave for a while.

03:00:41.720 | You will miss it so much.

03:00:44.960 | You do not know what it is like

03:00:47.760 | to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it.

03:00:50.960 | And I was going to high school with these guys

03:00:55.960 | in the Qatari royal family.

03:00:58.000 | And all I wanted to do was speak out

03:00:59.960 | of how they were pieces of shit

03:01:01.440 | for the way that they treated Indian citizens

03:01:03.800 | in that country who are basically used as slave labor.

03:01:06.960 | And I could not say one word

03:01:08.800 | because I knew I would be deported.

03:01:10.520 | And I know my dad would lose his job

03:01:12.520 | and my mom would lose her job.

03:01:14.040 | And we would be forced out of the country.

03:01:15.960 | You don't know what it's like to live like that

03:01:17.680 | or to be in a society where like,

03:01:20.280 | you have like a high school girlfriend or something

03:01:22.480 | and you can't even touch in public

03:01:25.120 | or you're lectured for public decency.

03:01:27.640 | Like, listen, I've lived under a Gulf monarchy now.

03:01:31.160 | And that turned me into the most pro-America guy ever.

03:01:36.160 | Like I came back so like America, like pro.

03:01:40.800 | And I still am, frankly, because of that experience.

03:01:43.760 | Living abroad, like that will do it to you.

03:01:46.240 | Live in a non-democracy.

03:01:48.400 | You have, even in Europe, I would say,

03:01:51.600 | you guys aren't living as free as we are here.

03:01:53.240 | It's awesome and I love it.

03:01:55.160 | - You're ultimately another human being

03:01:56.680 | than the one who left Texas.

03:01:58.440 | - Yeah.

03:01:59.280 | - So, I mean, have you actually considered

03:02:02.040 | moving to Texas and broadly,

03:02:03.800 | just outside of your own story,

03:02:05.720 | what do you think is the future of Texas?

03:02:07.440 | What is the future of Austin?

03:02:09.000 | There's so much transformation seemingly happening now

03:02:12.920 | related to Silicon Valley, related to California.

03:02:15.480 | - That's the fascinating part to me,

03:02:16.300 | which is that since I left, it's changed dramatically,

03:02:19.000 | which is that it used to be like this conservative state

03:02:22.880 | where the main money to be made was oil

03:02:25.720 | and everybody knew that.

03:02:26.720 | Petro, it was a Petro state, Houston, all of that.

03:02:30.440 | Austin was always weird, but it was more of a music town

03:02:33.240 | and a university town.

03:02:34.280 | It was not a tech town.

03:02:35.760 | But in the 10 years or so since I left,

03:02:39.200 | I have begun to realize, I'm like,

03:02:40.920 | well, the Texas I grew up in is over.

03:02:43.240 | It is not a deep red state in any sense of the term.

03:02:48.240 | The number one U-Haul route in the country pre-pandemic

03:02:51.840 | already was San Francisco to Austin, okay?

03:02:54.520 | So you have this massive influx of people

03:02:57.560 | from California and New York,

03:03:00.160 | and the state, the composition of it

03:03:03.080 | is changed dramatically, the intra-composition

03:03:06.280 | and the outtra, or yeah.

03:03:08.080 | So the intra-composition, it's become way more urban.

03:03:10.520 | So when I grew up, Texas was a much more rural state.

03:03:13.580 | Its politics were much more static.

03:03:15.480 | It looked much more like Rick Perry.

03:03:18.320 | He was a very accurate representation of who we were.

03:03:22.640 | Now, I don't think that that's the case.

03:03:25.400 | Texas is now a dynamic economy,

03:03:28.160 | not just 100% reliant on oil

03:03:30.960 | because of its kind of like,

03:03:32.680 | I would call it like regulatory arbitrage

03:03:35.760 | relative to California and New York,

03:03:38.080 | offers a large incentive to people who are more,

03:03:41.560 | I wouldn't say culturally liberal,

03:03:43.040 | but they're not necessarily like culturally conservative,

03:03:45.400 | like the people who I grew up with.

03:03:47.160 | That's changed the whole state's politics.

03:03:49.200 | Beto came two points away from beating Ted Cruz.

03:03:51.920 | I'm not saying the state's gonna go blue.

03:03:53.480 | I think the Republican Party will just change

03:03:55.480 | and we'll have to readjust.

03:03:57.080 | But the re-urbanization of Texas has made it,

03:04:01.640 | I'll put it in this way,

03:04:03.200 | much more attractive to me than the place that I grew up.

03:04:08.200 | - And then from my perspective, well, first of all,

03:04:11.920 | I love some of the cowboy things that Texas stands for,

03:04:16.640 | but for more practically, from my perspective,

03:04:18.700 | the injection of the tech innovation

03:04:23.120 | that's moving to Texas has made it very exciting to me.

03:04:27.820 | It seems like outside of all that,

03:04:29.740 | maybe you can speak to the weird in Austin.

03:04:32.020 | It seems like, I know that Joe Rogan is a rich,

03:04:37.020 | sort of almost like mainstream at this point,

03:04:42.940 | but he's also attracting a lot of weirdos.

03:04:45.240 | And so is Elon.

03:04:46.800 | And a lot of those weirdos are my friends.

03:04:48.700 | And they're like Michael Malice, those weirdos.

03:04:52.540 | And it's like, I have a hope for Austin

03:04:55.800 | that all kinds of different flavors of weirdos

03:04:57.860 | will get injected.

03:04:58.980 | - It's possible.

03:05:00.100 | I actually think the most significant thing that happened

03:05:02.860 | were Tesla moving there.

03:05:06.180 | The reason why is I love Joe, obviously,

03:05:08.340 | but he can only attract X amount of people.

03:05:11.260 | Elon actually employs thousands of people.

03:05:14.460 | And then you will also, Oracle.

03:05:17.000 | Oracle's decision to move to Austin is just as important

03:05:20.840 | because those two men, Larry, was Ellison, right?

03:05:25.440 | Ellison and Elon,

03:05:27.240 | they actually employ tens of thousands

03:05:30.040 | of people collectively.

03:05:31.320 | That can change the nature of the city.

03:05:33.720 | So you combine that with Joe bringing

03:05:36.600 | this entire new entertainment complex

03:05:39.080 | with the bodies of people who will appreciate

03:05:42.760 | said entertainment complex.

03:05:44.580 | - Spend money on the entertainment.

03:05:46.220 | - Exactly.

03:05:47.060 | You just remade the entire city.

03:05:48.820 | And that's why I'm fascinated.

03:05:50.900 | And obviously there's network effects,

03:05:52.260 | which is now that all those people are down there.

03:05:54.700 | I mean, if I were Elon Musk,

03:05:55.980 | I would donate a shit ton of money

03:05:57.460 | to the University of Texas.

03:05:58.620 | And I would turn it into my Stanford for Silicon Valley.

03:06:01.340 | Let's introduce some competition

03:06:03.180 | and let UT Austin hire the best software developers,

03:06:07.140 | engineers, professors, and more,

03:06:08.880 | and turn Texas into a true Austin revolving door hub

03:06:12.960 | where people come to UT Austin

03:06:14.800 | to get an internship at Tesla

03:06:16.560 | and then become an executive there

03:06:18.480 | and then create their own company

03:06:20.040 | in their own garage in Austin,

03:06:22.720 | which is the next Facebook, Twitter.

03:06:24.600 | That's how it happens.

03:06:25.760 | This is why I'm much more skeptical of Miami.

03:06:27.680 | There's a whole tech Miami crew.

03:06:29.440 | I'm like, yeah, there's no university.

03:06:32.280 | It's pretty inorganic.

03:06:34.080 | Look, I think Miami is awesome.

03:06:35.480 | I just, I don't know if the same building blocks are there.

03:06:38.520 | And also no multibillion dollar companies

03:06:42.100 | which employ thousands of people are coming there.

03:06:44.880 | That's the ingredient.

03:06:45.920 | It's not just Joe Rogan.

03:06:47.360 | It's not just even Elon Musk,

03:06:48.960 | if he's still operated in California.

03:06:50.680 | It's all the people he employs.

03:06:52.760 | I think that is where,

03:06:55.320 | I think Texas is going to dramatically change

03:06:57.920 | within the next 10 years.

03:06:59.440 | Alternative to our,

03:07:00.440 | it's already become a more urbanized state

03:07:03.320 | that's moved away from oil and gas

03:07:05.800 | in terms of like its emphasis,

03:07:07.480 | not necessarily in terms of his real economics.

03:07:09.880 | And 10 years from now,

03:07:11.160 | I don't think it will be necessarily the name prop

03:07:14.320 | like of the town.

03:07:16.400 | The only question to me is how that manifests politically

03:07:19.360 | because it's very possible though,

03:07:22.080 | because a lot of these workers themselves

03:07:24.200 | are California culturally liberal.

03:07:27.340 | You could see a Gavin Newsom type person

03:07:29.680 | getting elected governor of Texas

03:07:31.960 | or like the mayor of Austin.

03:07:34.400 | I mean, look, mayor of Austin is already a Democrat, right?

03:07:36.400 | Like, I mean, Joe has his own problems with Austin.

03:07:39.480 | It's funny, I remember him leaving LA and I'm like,

03:07:41.920 | "Oh, have you been to Austin?"

03:07:43.800 | (both laughing)

03:07:45.320 | It ain't, you know,

03:07:46.160 | it's not everything you'd cracked up to be,

03:07:48.240 | you know, necessarily.

03:07:49.240 | - But no matter what, you know,

03:07:50.800 | a new place allows the possibility for new ideas,

03:07:54.880 | even if they're somehow left leaning

03:07:57.160 | and all those kinds of things.

03:07:58.200 | I do think the only two things missing

03:08:00.320 | from Austin and Texas are two dudes in a suit

03:08:05.560 | that sometimes have a podcast

03:08:07.160 | talking a bunch of nonsense on a mic.

03:08:08.720 | So let's bring the best suit game to Texas.

03:08:11.680 | I hope you do make it to Texas at some point.

03:08:15.120 | Thanks so much for talking to me.

03:08:17.240 | Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:08:18.800 | with Sagar and Jetty.

03:08:20.040 | And thank you to our sponsors,

03:08:22.000 | Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly Grammar Assistant,

03:08:25.640 | Eight Sleep Self-Cooling Bed,

03:08:27.440 | and Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal.

03:08:30.440 | Click the sponsor links to get a discount

03:08:32.440 | and to support this podcast.

03:08:34.880 | And now let me leave you with some words

03:08:36.920 | from Martin Luther King Jr.

03:08:38.880 | about the idea that what is just and what is legal

03:08:42.880 | are not always the same thing.

03:08:45.000 | He said, "Never forget that what Hitler did in Germany

03:08:49.320 | was legal."

03:08:50.320 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:08:54.160 | (upbeat music)

03:08:56.760 | (upbeat music)

03:08:59.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Saagar Enjeti: Politics, History, and Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #167

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