AI transcript
0:00:04 The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjedi, his second time in the podcast.
0:00:10 Sagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with
0:00:16 Crystal Ball and of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Kosloff.
0:00:20 Sagar is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met.
0:00:25 His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history
0:00:28 books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world.
0:00:33 In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological
0:00:35 movements that led up to the current political moment.
0:00:40 In doing so, we mentioned a large number of amazing books.
0:00:44 We’ll put a link to them in the description for those interested to
0:00:46 learn more about each topic.
0:00:50 And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
0:00:52 Check them out in the description.
0:00:53 It’s the best way to support this podcast.
0:00:58 We’ve got A Sleep, for Naps, AG1, for Health, Element, for Hydration,
0:01:02 BetterHelp, for the Mind, Shopify, for the Wallet, and Netsuite for your
0:01:04 business. Choose wisely, my friends.
0:01:09 Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a multitude of reasons,
0:01:11 go to lexfreedmen.com/contact.
0:01:13 And now onto the full lad reads.
0:01:16 I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please
0:01:17 still check out our sponsors.
0:01:18 I enjoy their stuff.
0:01:19 Maybe you will too.
0:01:24 This episode is brought to you by A Sleep and it’s Pod 4 Ultra.
0:01:29 I’m going to try a new thing where I hold on to a theme.
0:01:36 As I talk about these ads, I use A Sleep and the Pod 4 Ultra to cool the
0:01:41 bed. And since Sagar knows pretty much more than anybody I’ve ever
0:01:45 met about the various US presidents and presidential politics and the
0:01:49 history of politics in US, let me mention a little factoid.
0:01:54 Did you know that the White House didn’t get air conditioning until 1933
0:01:59 under Hoover, who funded it just before leaving office for FDR.
0:02:05 So all that praise that Sagar gives to FDR, just remember, maybe it wouldn’t
0:02:13 be possible without the cool, fresh air that Hoover gave to the great FDR.
0:02:18 And that, in fact, and I’m not sure why I’m using this voice in talking, but
0:02:21 that, in fact, is essential for sleep, controlling the temperature of the
0:02:25 bed, controlling the temperature of the sleeping environment.
0:02:25 There you go.
0:02:30 The more you know, create sleep.com/lex and use code Lex to get up to
0:02:35 $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled.
0:02:37 That’s a sleep.com/lex.
0:02:41 This episode is brought to you by AG1.
0:02:44 Basically a nice multivitamin.
0:02:46 That’s also delicious.
0:02:47 That drink every day.
0:02:51 It makes me feel like I have my life together, which I barely do.
0:02:57 Now, speaking of drinks that you believe make you feel better.
0:03:00 You know, placebo effect, that kind of thing.
0:03:02 Here’s a little presidential themed factoid.
0:03:09 John Adams drank hard cider every morning, believing it promoted good health.
0:03:16 I would love to get like a health advice podcast with Winston Churchill.
0:03:24 Another president, William Howard Taft, had the White House kitchen prepare special
0:03:27 protein shakes made from eggs, milk and beef extract.
0:03:31 I would love the dietary details of some of the presidents.
0:03:36 I’m sure a bunch of them just smoked and drank and, you know, had their own like
0:03:41 little habits that serve as a kind of escape from the madness of the world.
0:03:46 Anyway, get AG1 and they’ll give you one month’s supply of fish oil when you sign
0:03:49 up at drinkag1.com/lex.
0:03:56 This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious
0:03:57 electrolyte mix.
0:04:06 And here I have to return again to the presidents who consumed various kinds of liquids.
0:04:12 Did you know that Thomas Jefferson spent $11,000 on wine during his presidency?
0:04:15 And we’re not talking about quality here.
0:04:18 We are, in fact, talking about quantity.
0:04:23 That’s equivalent to about $300,000 in today’s money.
0:04:25 Whatever works.
0:04:30 It’s like that meme that there’s a perfect optimal amount of alcohol that makes you
0:04:31 productive in programming.
0:04:33 I have never found that optimal.
0:04:40 Actually, if I have a drink, my productivity and my clarity of thinking and my creativity
0:04:41 all go down.
0:04:48 Now, I start enjoying the social interactions more and more because I am fundamentally
0:04:51 an introvert that have anxiety about social interaction.
0:04:51 So that helps.
0:04:56 But in terms of productivity or creative juices or whatever.
0:04:57 Nope.
0:05:00 Anyway, you can get a sample pack for free with any purchase.
0:05:03 Try it at drinkelement.com/lex.
0:05:08 This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P Help.
0:05:13 They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
0:05:20 And there’s actually quite a lot of presidents that really struggled with anxiety, with
0:05:25 depression, with all kinds of complicated mental states.
0:05:30 Coolidge, for example, fell into a deep depression after his son died from blood poisoning.
0:05:33 And that changed him forever, actually.
0:05:36 It’s difficult to come back from that.
0:05:46 John Quincy Adams, somewhat famously, kept extremely detailed diary for 68 years, often
0:05:52 writing sort of a detailed analysis and almost like log of his mental states.
0:05:54 That’s an interesting thing to do, actually.
0:05:56 I don’t do that enough.
0:05:58 I speak it.
0:05:59 I don’t write it down.
0:06:01 Perhaps there’s some magic in writing it down.
0:06:06 But there is, with BetterHelp, also magic in speaking it.
0:06:08 With a professional.
0:06:12 Check them out at BetterHelp.com/lex and save on your first month.
0:06:14 That’s BetterHelp.com/lex.
0:06:21 This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere
0:06:23 with a great looking online store.
0:06:27 So Abraham Lincoln actually owned a general store.
0:06:32 And he has famously written that he wished he had Shopify.
0:06:33 It would be much more convenient.
0:06:36 Anyway, he had a general store that failed.
0:06:42 So, you know, sometimes you need the right job for the right man.
0:06:45 That match to be made and everything else is not going to work out.
0:06:54 I sold shoes, women’s shoes at Sears, kind of like Al Bundy for married with children.
0:06:55 If you know the show.
0:06:58 And, you know, I did okay.
0:07:04 But I think it wasn’t quite the right fit for me.
0:07:09 You know, I was quite technically savvy and knew about computers.
0:07:12 And I said, I should probably be selling electronics and computers.
0:07:18 And they said, yes, yes, yes, one day you will, but now we need helping shoes.
0:07:20 So let’s start you there.
0:07:25 And if I stayed there for many more years, perhaps I would have upgraded to electronics.
0:07:28 But then I also saw the beauty in selling women’s shoes.
0:07:32 There was a real joy in finding the right match for the right person.
0:07:36 And that joy can be scaled significantly with Shopify.
0:07:41 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/Lex.
0:07:42 That’s all lowercase.
0:07:45 Go to Shopify.com/Lex to take your business to the next level today.
0:07:52 This episode is brought to you by Netsuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
0:08:00 Ulysses S. Grant, the famed general, kept extremely detailed expense accounts,
0:08:02 recording every single penny he spent.
0:08:10 Now, rigor, attention to detail, obsession with detail, financial detail is important.
0:08:14 But, you know, if you have the right tool for the job, that’s made easier.
0:08:18 I would love to kind of throw some of these people, some of these leaders,
0:08:25 some of these brilliant minds from history into the modern world that is digitized.
0:08:30 I think a lot of them would actually be destroyed by it.
0:08:34 Because the machine of distraction will pull them away from the focus
0:08:39 that you can more easily attain in a non-technological world.
0:08:42 And some of them, I think, will become even more super productive.
0:08:43 So it’ll be really interesting.
0:08:50 And there’s been a lot of presidents that kind of pushed the White House and government in general
0:08:57 into the direction of great record keeping from George Washington to Carter to FDR,
0:08:59 as Sager talks a lot about.
0:09:03 Anyway, all that is in the realm of politics, but the realm of business
0:09:06 in many ways is the same, especially when the government is working well.
0:09:09 So Netsuite is for business.
0:09:12 In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to Netsuite.
0:09:17 Take advantage of their flexible financing plan at Netsuite.com/lex.
0:09:20 That’s Netsuite.com/lex.
0:09:23 This is a Lex Friedman podcast.
0:09:26 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
0:09:30 And now, dear friends, here’s Sager and Jetty.
0:09:49 So let’s start with the obvious big question.
0:09:51 What do you think Trump won?
0:09:54 Let’s break it down before the election.
0:09:58 You said that if Trump wins, it’s going to be because of immigration.
0:10:05 So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
0:10:07 Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration.
0:10:10 But without that, multifaceted explanation.
0:10:12 Let’s start with the easiest one.
0:10:16 There has been a wave of anti-incumbent energy around the world.
0:10:19 Financial Times chart recently went viral showing so the first time,
0:10:23 I think since World War II, possibly since 1905, I need to look at the data set
0:10:27 that all anti-incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats.
0:10:30 So that’s a very, very high level analysis.
0:10:33 And we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump’s victory in 2016,
0:10:36 because there were similar global precursors.
0:10:40 That individual level in the United States, there’s a very simple explanation as well,
0:10:42 which is that Joe Biden was very old.
0:10:43 He was very unpopular.
0:10:44 Inflation was high.
0:10:48 Inflation is one of the highest determiners of people switching their votes
0:10:52 and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box.
0:10:53 So that’s that.
0:10:58 But I think it’s actually much deeper at a psychological level for who America is
0:10:59 and what it is.
0:11:02 And fundamentally, I think what we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about today
0:11:08 is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy
0:11:12 and eventually the loss to Donald Trump in the popular vote,
0:11:16 where it really is like an apotheosis of several social forces.
0:11:19 So we’re going to talk about the great awakening or so-called awokening,
0:11:22 which is very important to understanding all of this.
0:11:26 There’s also really Donald Trump himself, who was really one of the most unique
0:11:30 individual American politicians that we’ve seen in decades.
0:11:34 At this point, Donald Trump’s victory makes him the most important and transformative
0:11:37 figure in American politics since FDR.
0:11:42 And thought process for the audience is in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old who’s
0:11:48 eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure.
0:11:52 And there’s stories in World War II where troops were on the front line.
0:11:54 Some of them are 18, 19 years old.
0:11:57 FDR died and they literally said, “Who’s the president?”
0:11:58 And they said, “Harry Truman, you dumbass.”
0:12:00 And they go, “Who?”
0:12:05 They couldn’t conceive of a universe where FDR was not the president of the United States.
0:12:10 And Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure.
0:12:14 Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man.
0:12:15 And obviously he’s failed.
0:12:20 We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency.
0:12:23 So I think at macro level, it’s easy to understand.
0:12:26 At a basic level, inflation, it’s easy to understand.
0:12:30 But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique
0:12:35 Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics
0:12:36 really forever.
0:12:42 I mean, in the white working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation really of
0:12:47 a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along
0:12:53 a single individual question of did you attend a four-year college degree institution or not?
0:12:56 And this is a crazy thing to say.
0:13:02 Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history.
0:13:10 We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups really voted in blacks, Latinos, blacks, whites.
0:13:15 There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college
0:13:17 educated white collar workers.
0:13:22 But by and large, you could pretty fairly say that Asians were Indians.
0:13:26 Everyone, 80, 90 percent were going to vote for the Democratic Party.
0:13:27 Latinos as well.
0:13:30 I’m born here in Texas, in the state of Texas.
0:13:34 George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40 percent of the Latino vote.
0:13:39 Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men.
0:13:45 So really, fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment in American politics.
0:13:48 And that’s a really fundamental problem for the modern left.
0:13:53 It’s erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the electoral college,
0:13:59 the so-called electoral college bias towards Republicans, really being able to win the
0:14:04 popular vote for the first time since 2004 is a shocking landmark achievement by a Republican.
0:14:10 In 2008, I have a book on my shelf and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things
0:14:11 can change.
0:14:17 James Carville and it says, “40 more years, how Democrats will never lose an election again.”
0:14:21 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama Coalition and the landslide.
0:14:27 And something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time.
0:14:28 I was born in 1992.
0:14:30 I watched red states go blue.
0:14:31 I’ve seen blue states go red.
0:14:33 I’ve seen swing states go red or blue.
0:14:35 I’ve seen millions of people pick up and move.
0:14:39 The greatest internal migration in the United States since World War II.
0:14:43 And it’s really inspiring because it’s a really dynamic, interesting place.
0:14:47 And I love covering and I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people.
0:14:47 It’s awesome.
0:14:51 One of the reasons I’m a big fan of yours is your student history.
0:14:54 And so you’ve recommended a bunch of books to me.
0:14:59 And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history.
0:15:02 Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time.
0:15:03 Some don’t.
0:15:08 And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people.
0:15:09 Some are mass movements.
0:15:16 And it’s just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves maybe
0:15:19 into the constraints of a two-party system.
0:15:22 And I’d love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that.
0:15:31 So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
0:15:37 Well, I won’t go that far because to say it’s a class struggle really implies that things
0:15:39 fundamentally align on economic lines.
0:15:41 And I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate.
0:15:44 Although if that’s your lens, you could get there.
0:15:50 So there’s a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her
0:15:56 vote share and won households over $100,000 or more and Donald Trump won households under $100,000.
0:15:59 So you could view that in an economic lens.
0:16:03 The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree
0:16:05 and for education.
0:16:08 And so one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray.
0:16:15 And that book really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in
0:16:19 when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life,
0:16:24 not only on where they move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to,
0:16:27 their cultural, what television shows that they watch.
0:16:31 One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray is called a bubble quiz.
0:16:34 I encourage people to go take it, by the way, which asks you a question.
0:16:37 It’s like, what does the word Branson mean to you?
0:16:39 And it has a couple of answers.
0:16:42 One of them is Branson is Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson.
0:16:46 Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination.
0:16:48 Three is it means nothing.
0:16:52 So you are less in a bubble if you say country music and you’re very much in the bubble if
0:16:53 you say Richard Branson.
0:16:56 And I remember taking that test for the first time ago.
0:16:58 Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic, like what?
0:17:01 And then I was like, wait, I’m in the bubble.
0:17:02 And there are other things in there.
0:17:04 Like, can you name various different military ranks?
0:17:08 I can because I’m a history nerd, but the vast majority of college-educated people
0:17:10 don’t know anybody who served in the United States military.
0:17:12 They don’t have family members who do.
0:17:16 The most popular shows in America are like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS.
0:17:21 Whereas people in our probably cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus,
0:17:22 The Last of Us.
0:17:24 This is prestige television, right?
0:17:27 With a very small audience, but high income, high education.
0:17:32 So the point is, is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live.
0:17:35 And rural urban is one way to describe it.
0:17:40 But honestly, with the work from Home Revolution and more rich people and highly educated people
0:17:45 moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in,
0:17:45 that’s changing.
0:17:48 And so really, the internet is everything.
0:17:51 The stuff that you consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing,
0:17:54 type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly.
0:17:59 Whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your
0:18:02 life, that is the real cultural divide in America.
0:18:08 And I actually think that’s what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people
0:18:13 to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from
0:18:20 the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling
0:18:24 that these people don’t understand me and my struggles in this life.
0:18:29 And so the trivial formulation is that it’s the wokeism, the anti-wokeism movement.
0:18:36 So it’s not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against wokeism.
0:18:38 It was the broader anti-elitism.
0:18:43 It’s difficult to say because I wouldn’t dismiss anti-wokeism or wokeism as an explanation.
0:18:47 But we need to understand the electoral impacts of woke.
0:18:54 So there’s varying degrees of how you’re going to encounter “wokeism,” and this is a very difficult
0:18:55 thing to define.
0:18:59 So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you’re going
0:19:02 to interact with on a cultural basis.
0:19:07 And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show, and just for some reason,
0:19:08 there’s two trans characters.
0:19:13 And it’s never particularly explained why they just are there, or watching a commercial,
0:19:13 and it’s the same thing.
0:19:18 Watching, I don’t know, I remember watching, I think it was Doctor Strange and the Multiverse
0:19:22 of Madness, and the main, it was a terrible movie, by the way, I don’t recommend it.
0:19:26 But one of the characters, I think it’s her name was like America, and she wore a gay pride flag.
0:19:29 Right, look, many left-wingers would make fun of me for saying these things.
0:19:34 But that is obviously a social agenda to the point, as in they believe it is like deeply
0:19:40 acceptable, that is used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress,
0:19:44 you know, in sexual orientation and others, and they really believe it’s important to
0:19:46 quote unquote showcase it for representation.
0:19:49 So that’s like one way that we may encounter quote unquote wokeism.
0:19:54 But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its
0:19:59 roots in, you know, American society, all the way going back to the 1960s, and how those have
0:20:04 manifested in our economy, and in our understanding of quote unquote discrimination.
0:20:06 So two books I can recommend.
0:20:09 One is called The Origins of Woke, that’s by Richard Hanania.
0:20:13 There’s another one by The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell.
0:20:17 And they make a very strong case that Caldwell in particular, that he calls it like a new
0:20:22 founding of America, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
0:20:27 Because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race and the American
0:20:30 character and how the government was going to enforce that.
0:20:34 And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about
0:20:40 The Origins of Trump by Jim Webb and Senator Jim Webb, incredible, incredible man.
0:20:43 He’s so underappreciated, intellectual.
0:20:44 He was anti-war.
0:20:49 And people may remember him from the 2016 primary.
0:20:53 And they asked him a question I don’t exactly remember about one of his enemies.
0:20:56 And he’s like, well, one of them was a guy I shot in Vietnam.
0:20:58 And he was running against Hillary.
0:21:01 And that guy, he wrote the book Born Fighting.
0:21:05 I think it’s history of the Scots-Irish people, something like that.
0:21:11 And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences
0:21:18 that were playing out through the HR managerial elite really turned a lot of people within
0:21:24 the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against
0:21:26 by the professional managerial class.
0:21:31 And so there’s a lot of roots to this, the managerial revolution by James Burnham.
0:21:37 And in terms of the origin of kind of how we got here, but the crystallization of like DEI
0:21:39 and or affirmative action.
0:21:43 I prefer to use the term affirmative action in the highest echelons of business.
0:21:48 And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered.
0:21:51 And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids.
0:21:54 And that’s why it’s not an accident Donald J. Trump elected in 2016.
0:22:00 At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that wokeism is a movement is dead?
0:22:01 I don’t know.
0:22:06 I mean, it’s very difficult to say because wokeism itself is not a movement with a party leader.
0:22:14 It’s a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years.
0:22:15 I mean, it’s effectively a religion.
0:22:20 And part of the reason why it’s difficult to define is it means different things to different people.
0:22:25 So for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define quote unquote woke.
0:22:30 Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language?
0:22:31 Yes, I do think they will.
0:22:34 I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that.
0:22:39 However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from quote unquote woke.
0:22:44 But she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019.
0:22:49 But a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me.
0:22:54 And not only do not understand me, but I have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding
0:22:59 that would lead to a quote unquote equity mindset, equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to
0:23:03 equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy.
0:23:06 So I can’t say, I think it’s way too early.
0:23:11 And again, you can not use the word Latinx.
0:23:16 But do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime in terms of how
0:23:21 you would run your Department of Justice in terms of how you view the world,
0:23:25 in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are?
0:23:28 And because I would say that’s still actually kind of a woke mindset.
0:23:31 And that’s part of the reason why the term itself doesn’t really mean a whole lot.
0:23:36 And we have to get actually really specific about what it looks like in operations.
0:23:38 In operation, it means affirmative action.
0:23:42 It means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something,
0:23:45 that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board.
0:23:52 Like this is a blatant and extraordinary look racialism that they’ve enshrined in their bylaws.
0:23:53 So you can get rid of ESG.
0:23:54 That’s great.
0:23:56 But you can get rid of DEI.
0:23:56 I think that’s great.
0:23:59 But it’s really about a mindset and a view of the world.
0:24:01 And I don’t think that’s going anywhere.
0:24:07 And you think the reason it doesn’t work well in practice is because there’s a big degree
0:24:09 to which it’s anti-meritocracy.
0:24:10 It’s anti-American, really.
0:24:15 I mean, DEI and woke and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries.
0:24:16 Okay.
0:24:22 And there are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic and they’re heterogeneous.
0:24:25 And they were run by basically quasi-dictators.
0:24:29 And the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims.
0:24:32 And they get this guy and they get that guy and everybody kind of shakes it.
0:24:35 It’s very explicit where they’re like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians.
0:24:37 We have 10 spots and they go to the Hindus.
0:24:39 I’m talking India is a country I know pretty well.
0:24:43 And this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect.
0:24:47 But in America, fundamentally, we really believe that no matter where you are from,
0:24:52 that you come here and basically within a generation, especially if you migrate here
0:24:56 legally and you integrate, that you leave a lot of that stuff behind.
0:25:01 And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is one that really
0:25:08 does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that’s not
0:25:14 meritocratic. And I mean, I will give the left-wingers some credit in the idea that
0:25:18 meritocracy itself could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds.
0:25:24 I think that’s true. And so the way I would like to see it is to increase
0:25:30 everybody’s equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at “willing out”
0:25:34 the American dream. But that doesn’t erase meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other
0:25:38 things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier.
0:25:42 So these are two ideologies which are really at odds. In a lot of ways,
0:25:46 like wokeism, racialism, and all this is a third-world ideology. It’s one that’s very
0:25:51 prevalent in Europe and all across Asia, but it doesn’t mix well here and it shouldn’t.
0:25:53 And I’m really glad that America feels the same way.
0:25:59 Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass, fascinating book.
0:26:06 Worn Fighting, How the Scots Ira Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree,
0:26:12 first of all, how badass the Scots are, and to the degree, many of the things that kind of
0:26:18 identifies America and part of the American spirit were defined by this relatively small
0:26:23 group of people. As he describes, the model could be summarized as fight, sing, drink, and pray.
0:26:29 So there’s the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government,
0:26:35 the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance. Over 2,000 years of a military tradition,
0:26:41 they made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders,
0:26:47 including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents,
0:26:52 some of the more gangster presidents, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt,
0:26:58 Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
0:27:03 We owe them so much, and they really don’t get their due, unfortunately. A lot of,
0:27:08 for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post mass immigration
0:27:14 from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to New Irish, to Italians,
0:27:19 to Slovenians. And as you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty
0:27:24 different. And it’s not the different here in the United States. Scott Cyrus was some of the
0:27:30 original settlers here in America, and particularly in Appalachia, and their contribution to the
0:27:34 fighting spirit and their own culture, and who we are as individualists, and some of the first
0:27:38 people to ever settle the frontier. And that frontier mindset really does come from them.
0:27:42 We owe them just as much as we do the Puritans, but they don’t ever really get their due.
0:27:47 And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then
0:27:52 how exactly could this group of white working class voters forgo from 2012 voting for a man
0:27:58 named Barack Hussein Obama to Donald J. Trump, you really seem to, it makes perfect sense if
0:28:02 you combine it with a lot of the stuff I’m talking about here, about affirmative action,
0:28:06 about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you,
0:28:13 and specifically also not valuing your contribution to American history. And in some cases,
0:28:18 actively looking down. I’m glad you pointed out not only their role in the Revolutionary War,
0:28:24 but in the Civil War as well. And just how a bunch of a contribution culturally really that we owe
0:28:29 them for setting the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt
0:28:32 some of their own ideas in their culture as our own. It’s one of the things that makes America
0:28:40 great. Mark Twain. Yeah. I mean, so much of the culture, so much of the American spirit,
0:28:46 the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy.
0:28:52 So would you trace the, that fierce individualism that we think of back to them?
0:28:57 Definitely. It’s a huge part of them about who they were, about the screw you attitude. I mean,
0:29:02 that book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hill Bailey Elegy came out.
0:29:06 I’m sure you remember this, which it’s kind of weird to think that it’s now the
0:29:10 Vice President-elect of the United States. It’s kind of wild, honestly, to think about.
0:29:16 But JD Vance’s book, Hill Bailey Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites
0:29:20 who were like, how do these people support Trump? Where does this shit come from? That they’re
0:29:25 really, I mean, that if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character
0:29:30 that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump and not just vote. He won the election.
0:29:34 How does that happen? And that’s Hill Bailey Elegy guided people in an understanding of what
0:29:40 that’s like on a lived day-to-day basis. And JD, to his credit, talks about Scott’s Irish heritage,
0:29:44 about Appalachia, and the legacy of what that culture looks like today, and how a lot of these
0:29:48 people voted for Donald Trump. But we got to give credit to Jim Webb, who wrote the history of these
0:29:55 people and taught me and you about their original fight against the oppressors in Scotland and Ireland
0:30:01 and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And they got their due
0:30:06 in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald
0:30:11 Trump, to where we are today. Dude, it got me pumped, excited to be an American. Me too. I love
0:30:18 that book. It’s crazy that JD, the same guy, because that’s Hill Bailey Elegy is what I kind of
0:30:22 thought of him as. Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you, for me, it’s actually pretty surreal. I met JD
0:30:28 Vance in like 2017 in like a bar. I didn’t ever think he would be the vice president-elect
0:30:33 of the United States. I mean, just kind of wild. One of my friends went back and dug up the email
0:30:36 that we originally sent him, just like, “Hey, do you want to meet up?” And he’s like, “Sure, you
0:30:41 know.” I was watching on television. I mean, the first time that it really hit me, I was like,
0:30:45 “Whoa.” It was like name in a history book. It’s whenever he became the vice presidential nominee,
0:30:49 I was watching him on TV, and the confetti was falling, and he was waving with his wife, and I
0:30:55 was like, “Wow, that’s it. You’re in the history books now forever, especially now.” So as the
0:31:03 literal vice president-elect of the US, but his own evolution is actually a fascinating story
0:31:07 for us too, because I think a lot of the time I’ve spent right now is kind of… A lot of what
0:31:13 I’m giving right now are like 2016 kind of takes about like why Trump won that time. But we just
0:31:17 spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election, and like how what happened, some of the
0:31:22 failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the great awokening. But also,
0:31:27 if you look at the evolution of J.D. Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy,
0:31:30 and not a lot of people pay attention to this, but if you read Hillbilly Elegy,
0:31:36 J.D. was much more of a traditional conservative at that time. He was citing, you know, report,
0:31:40 I think the famous passage is about like payday loans and why they’re good or something like that.
0:31:44 I don’t know his position today, but I would assume that he’s probably changed that. But the
0:31:51 point is, is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional
0:31:57 Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class, then eventually become a champion
0:32:02 and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing
0:32:07 and bettering the United States specifically for working class Americans, really, of all stripes.
0:32:16 And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project,
0:32:21 as an ideology. It’s also one of the Republican Party, which coalesced now with Donald Trump as
0:32:27 a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that
0:32:31 eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.
0:32:38 So let’s talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What’s
0:32:45 your take on Biden? Biden is, I try to remove myself from it, and I try not to give like
0:32:50 hit big history takes while you’re in the moment. But it’s really hard not to say that he’s one
0:32:55 of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I’m going to go with it
0:33:01 is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do. So Joe Biden has been the same
0:33:08 person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student who thinks he’s an A student.
0:33:14 The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election
0:33:18 to the United States Senate through his entire career as United States Senator, where he always
0:33:23 wanted to be the star and the center of attention. And to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of
0:33:27 the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what
0:33:34 he already was. And so a book recommendation, it’s called What It Takes. And it was written in 1988.
0:33:39 And there’s actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. And one of the
0:33:43 things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the
0:33:48 center of attention. Now, the reason I’m laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the
0:33:52 individual and his character is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a
0:34:00 person who was elected in 2020 really because of a feeling of chaos, of Donald Trump, of we need
0:34:06 normalcy, decides to come into the office, portrays himself as a quote unquote transitional president,
0:34:12 slowly, you know, begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants,
0:34:17 the same ones who have been around him for so long, that he had no single input into his life
0:34:22 to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly
0:34:28 undeniable to the vast majority of the American people. And that’s why I’m trying to keep it as
0:34:31 like him as an individual, as a president, because we can separate him from some of his
0:34:35 accomplishments and the things that happen. Some I support, some I don’t. But generally,
0:34:38 a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the Chips Act. A lot
0:34:42 of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the build back better bill or
0:34:47 whatever his Lena Kahn antitrust policy, they’re going to look back on him and they’re going to
0:34:53 remember high inflation. They’re going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the
0:34:59 job in the sense that one again book recommendation freedom from fear by David Kennedy is about
0:35:04 the Roosevelt years. And one of the most important things people don’t understand is the new deal
0:35:08 didn’t really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to, right? Like there was still
0:35:13 high unemployment, there was still a lot of suffering. But you know what changed? They felt
0:35:18 that they had a vigorous commander in chief who was doing everything in his power to attack
0:35:22 the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn’t even materially change,
0:35:27 the vigor that’s a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy at Vega,
0:35:32 you know, in the Massachusetts accent, we had this young vibrant president in 1960 and he was
0:35:36 running around and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly.
0:35:41 And we have an 80 year old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach
0:35:47 while people’s grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25%. And we don’t see the same vigor. We
0:35:52 don’t see the same action, the bias to action, which is so important in the modern presidency.
0:35:57 That is fundamentally why I think the Democrats, part of the reason why the Democrats lost the
0:36:02 election and also why I think that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way. And he had
0:36:06 the opportunity, he could have done it, you know, if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago. But
0:36:13 the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental
0:36:19 rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall. And it’s kind of amazing because again, if we
0:36:24 look back to his original campaign speech, 2019, why I’m running for president, it was
0:36:28 Charlottesville. And he said, I want to defeat Donald Trump forever. And I want to make sure
0:36:31 that he never gets back in the White House again. So by his own metric, he did fail.
0:36:34 That was his, it was the only thing he wanted to do. And he failed, failed from.
0:36:40 You said a lot of interesting stuff. So one FDR, that’s really interesting. It’s not about
0:36:46 the specific policy. It’s about like fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and
0:36:53 just uniting the entire country for a particular, this is the same with Bernie. Like maybe there’s
0:36:56 a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that still support him because like we just want
0:37:02 to be authentic. Yeah, that’s it. We just want somebody to fight authentically. Yes. Yes. FDR,
0:37:06 people really need FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ. Okay. And in the US.
0:37:11 And some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. So people need to go back
0:37:15 and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went
0:37:19 through his ability to bring Congress to heal and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through.
0:37:22 But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right?
0:37:29 We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference
0:37:34 was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House
0:37:40 and use a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has in fireside chats,
0:37:45 he’s passing legislation. But more importantly, so he tries various different programs,
0:37:49 then they get ruled on constitutional. He tries even more. So what does America take away from
0:37:53 that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really
0:37:59 part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it was, it gave him the strength
0:38:07 to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling
0:38:14 of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of
0:38:18 the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure. He really is. And I people think of him
0:38:23 for World War II. And of course, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early
0:38:29 years are not studied enough. ’33 to ’37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history.
0:38:33 We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by a king, by a monarch. And people liked it.
0:38:41 He was a dictator and he was a good one. Yeah. So to sort of push back against the implied
0:38:45 thing that you said. Sure. So when saying Biden is the worst president.
0:38:49 No, second worst in modern history, that’s what I said. In modern history, who’s the worst?
0:38:52 W, no question. I see because of the horrible wars probably. I mean,
0:38:57 Iraq is just so bad. Like one of my favorite authors is a guy, Gene Edward Smith. He’s
0:39:02 written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his book, W Biography,
0:39:06 he’s like, there’s just no question. There’s a single worst foreign policy mistake in all
0:39:11 of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever. He had terrible judgment and
0:39:16 got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster and it set us up for failure.
0:39:20 By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald
0:39:26 Trump than George W. Bush. But I could go off on Bush for a long time. We will return there.
0:39:31 So as part of the pushback, I’d like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance
0:39:36 and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump. You’re absolutely right.
0:39:42 Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American
0:39:46 history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
0:39:51 Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit, you have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be
0:39:57 president. I had put out a tweet that got some controversy. And I think it was Joe Rogan,
0:40:00 who I love. But he was like, I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being.
0:40:04 And I was like, I’m actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.
0:40:10 I was like, I’ve read too much about them to know. I know who you are. If you spend your life,
0:40:14 and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would-be politicians,
0:40:18 I know what it takes to actually become the president. It’s crazy. You have to give up
0:40:22 everything, everything, every night. You’re not spending it with your wife. You’re spending
0:40:26 it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect to you.
0:40:30 Every, even after you get elected, that’s even more so. Now you got to raise money.
0:40:33 And now you’re on to the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through.
0:40:36 You’re going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this.
0:40:41 Your entire life revolves around your career. It’s honestly, you need an insane level of
0:40:46 narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else,
0:40:53 which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles
0:40:58 lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self
0:41:03 and everything around you. There’s a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson
0:41:06 after Johnson becomes the president. He’s talking to the White House butler,
0:41:09 and she was like, “Everything in this house revolves around my husband.
0:41:12 Whatever’s left goes to the girls, her two children, and I’ll take the scraps.”
0:41:19 Everything revolves around Johnson’s political career. And his daughters, when they’re honest,
0:41:22 because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but
0:41:27 they didn’t spend any time with him. Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell,
0:41:32 I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Carroll books. Sunday was for Ray Byrne. There was no
0:41:38 time for his kids. That’s what it was. And by the way, he’s one of the greatest politicians
0:41:42 to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack and he was a deeply sad and depressed
0:41:49 individual. Yeah, I saw that tweet to go back to that. And also, I listened to your incredible
0:41:54 debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment Podcast. And I have to side with Marshall.
0:41:58 I think you’re just wrong on this, because I think revealing the character of a person
0:42:04 is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and full of…
0:42:10 Yeah, this gets to the judgment question. I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt,
0:42:16 even of FDR. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had.
0:42:22 I think they had a really, really good judgment. And I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal
0:42:27 character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. So JFK is… Actually, JFK
0:42:32 might be our best example, because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a
0:42:38 brand new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he
0:42:44 deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly
0:42:49 was his character. And we can go again, though, into his laundry list of that. But most of it
0:42:54 was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he was also
0:43:01 had a deeply inquisitive mind, and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT 109.
0:43:07 So it is… Look, I get it. I actually could steelman it. The response to what I’m saying is
0:43:12 judgment is not divisible from personal character. But just because I know a lot of politicians,
0:43:17 and I’ve read enough with the really great ones, the people who I revere the most,
0:43:21 there’s really bad personal stuff, basically, every single time.
0:43:24 But you’re saying the judgment was good.
0:43:25 Yeah, his judgment was great.
0:43:26 On the Missile Crisis.
0:43:26 Yes.
0:43:32 Some of the best judgment and decision-making in the history of America.
0:43:37 Yes. And we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there. This is a brutal text.
0:43:42 We were forced to read it in graduate school. The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I’m so
0:43:47 thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science, because it lays out theories
0:43:51 of how government works. This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about
0:43:57 Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up, because people really need to understand
0:44:03 Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care
0:44:07 about you. They don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating
0:44:12 mechanisms, which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event,
0:44:16 like World War II, to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while,
0:44:20 you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt, who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency
0:44:23 and transform the country. But it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like
0:44:29 that done. So the question around the Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban
0:44:34 Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different
0:44:38 schools of thought. But one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three,
0:44:43 the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the great man
0:44:49 theory as well. So you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT 109 and about
0:44:54 how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II as this, I think he was like a first lieutenant or
0:45:00 something like that, and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap
0:45:04 in his teeth with a broken back. And he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine
0:45:10 and he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why
0:45:18 England Slept, which to this day is considered a text which at the moment was able to describe in
0:45:23 detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement.
0:45:29 I actually have an original copy. It’s one of my most prized possessions. And from 1939,
0:45:33 because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy, turns out he’s a brilliant
0:45:39 man. And another just favorite aside is at the Potsdam Conference, where Harry Truman is there
0:45:43 with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, president of the United
0:45:50 States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, right, who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy
0:45:54 as a journalist, some shithead journalist on the side, and all three of those presidents were in
0:46:00 the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind
0:46:06 of amazing. I love people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power.
0:46:09 But are you announcing that you’re running for power? No, absolutely not. Yeah. I don’t have
0:46:14 what it takes. I don’t think so. I’m self-aware. Yeah. Well, maybe humility is necessary for
0:46:21 greatness. Okay. So actually, can we just linger on that book? Yeah. So the book Essence of Decision,
0:46:26 Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of
0:46:31 how government works. The rational actor model, so seeing government as one entity,
0:46:39 trying to maximize the national interest, also seeing government as through the lens of the
0:46:45 momentum of standard operating procedures, sort of this giant organization that’s just doing
0:46:51 things how it’s always been done. And the government politics model of there’s just these
0:46:59 individual internal power struggles within government. And all of that is like a different
0:47:05 way to view and they’re probably all true to a degree of how decisions are made within this
0:47:09 giant machinery of government. That’s why it’s so important is because you cannot read that book
0:47:13 and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is many more true than the other, but all of them
0:47:18 are deeply true. And this is one, this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because, and I
0:47:23 guess for the people out there who think I’ve been up too obsequious, he’ll be my criticism,
0:47:26 Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast. Probably
0:47:31 the most important thing that he ever said, which is he said, “I like to have people like John Bolton
0:47:36 in my administration because they scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational
0:47:41 individual in the room.” So at a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that and
0:47:46 then they can rationalize while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House,
0:47:51 people like Mike Walts and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a
0:47:58 quote unquote anti-Neocon, anti-Liz Cheney agenda. Now, Trump’s theory of this is that he likes to
0:48:04 have quote unquote like psychopaths like John Bolton in the room with him while he’s sitting
0:48:08 across from Kim Jong-un because it gets scared. What I think Trump never understood when he was
0:48:13 president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out
0:48:17 which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic
0:48:22 theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I don’t think quite gets
0:48:27 is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reach the president’s
0:48:30 desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is, “By the time it gets to my desk,
0:48:34 nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don’t have an
0:48:41 answer. That’s why I have to make the call.” So the theory that Trump has that you can have people
0:48:45 in there who are let’s say warmongers, neocons or whatever who don’t necessarily agree with you
0:48:49 is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I’ll still be able to
0:48:54 rein those people in as an influence. Here’s the issue. Let’s say for Mike Waltz, who’s going to
0:48:59 be the national security advisor. A lot of people don’t really understand, you know, there’s this
0:49:02 theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you’re the president,
0:49:06 you’re like, “Hey, what do we think about Iran?” I’m like, “I think you should do X, Y, and Z. No,
0:49:09 that’s not how it works.” The national security advisor’s job is to coordinate the interagency
0:49:15 process. So his job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room,
0:49:20 CIA, State Department, SECDEF, others. Before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. So we’re
0:49:26 like, “Hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. We need a package of options. Those packages of options
0:49:29 are conceded of three things. We’re going to have one group. We’re going to call it the dovish
0:49:34 option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package. Trump walks
0:49:38 in. This is how it’s supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, “Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine.
0:49:42 What do we do? Mr. President, we’ve prepared three options for you. We’ve got one, two, and three.
0:49:46 Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides
0:49:52 what’s even in option one, two, and three?” That is the part where Trump needs to really understand
0:49:55 how these things happen. And I watched this happen to him in his first administration.
0:50:00 He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn,
0:50:05 but him and Trump were at least like this, on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I
0:50:12 would call an FBI coup, whatever, 33 days. He’s out as a national security advisor. HR Master,
0:50:18 he’s got a nice, shiny uniform, four star, all of this. Master doesn’t agree with Donald Trump at
0:50:23 all. And so Trump says, “I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan. I want to get out of Afghanistan.”
0:50:26 They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get out of Afghanistan.” But before we get out, we got to go back in,
0:50:31 as in we need more troops in there. And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like all this and it
0:50:38 proves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017, where he ends up escalating and increasing
0:50:42 the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it’s only till February 2020 that he gets to sign a deal,
0:50:47 the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017. But the reason why
0:50:52 that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory,
0:50:57 where HR McMaster is able to guide the interagency process, bring the uniform
0:51:01 recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, just give Donald Trump no option but to
0:51:06 say we must put troops. Another example of this is a book called Obama’s War by Bob Woodward.
0:51:10 I highly encourage people to read this book, because this book talks about how Obama comes into
0:51:14 the White House in 2009, and he says, “I want to get out of Iraq and I don’t want to increase,
0:51:19 I want to fight the good war in Afghanistan.” And he’s doing, Obama’s a thoughtful guy,
0:51:24 too thoughtful, actually. And so he sits there and he’s working out his opinions.
0:51:31 And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his narrow, his options begin to narrow, because
0:51:35 strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we
0:51:41 should do in Afghanistan. And pretty soon, David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire
0:51:47 National Security apparatus has Obama pegged, where he basically politically at the time,
0:51:53 decides to take the advantage of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both
0:51:58 ways by saying, “But in two years we’re going to withdraw.” That book really demonstrates how the
0:52:05 deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with
0:52:12 ones which you don’t even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down
0:52:16 the extreme directions. That’s why when Trump says things like, “I want to get out of Syria,”
0:52:21 that doesn’t compute up here for the Pentagon. Because first of all, if I even asked you how
0:52:24 many troops we have in Syria, and you could go on the DoD website, it’ll tell you the number.
0:52:28 The number’s bullshit, because the way that they do it is if you’re only there for 179 days,
0:52:32 you don’t count as active, military contracts, the real numbers, let’s say five times. And so
0:52:36 Trump would be like, “Hey, I want to get out of Syria. We’ll do it six months, right? We need six
0:52:40 months.” And after six months ago, so are we out of Syria yet? And they’re like, “No, well, we got
0:52:44 to wrap this up. We got this base. We got that. We have this important mission. And next thing you
0:52:49 know, you’re out of office, and it’s over.” So there’s all these things which I don’t think he
0:52:53 quite understands. I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do, is
0:52:57 the reason why these picks really matter is not only are the voices in the situation room for
0:53:01 the really, really high-profile stuff. It’s for all the little things to never get to that president’s
0:53:07 desk, of which can shape extraordinary policy. And I’ll give you the best example. There was never
0:53:13 a decision by FDR as president of the United States to oil embargo Japan, one which he thought
0:53:18 about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision kind of made within the State Department.
0:53:22 It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it.
0:53:26 It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was understood,
0:53:31 the implications that by doing that, we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think
0:53:37 about what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that
0:53:42 we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire
0:53:47 national security chain in the White House. Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration,
0:53:52 which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the
0:53:57 massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is, is that it may actually be second to
0:54:02 inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win. The presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally
0:54:05 changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the
0:54:10 Scott’s Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery
0:54:16 and elitism and liberalism appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a
0:54:22 disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their ability to quote unquote pursue
0:54:27 the American dream, while the American dream is dying for the native born population, that is a huge
0:54:33 reason why people are turning against mass immigration. Historically as well, my friend
0:54:38 Raihan Salam wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War. And one of the most important
0:54:43 parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States. So if we think
0:54:49 about the transition from Scott’s Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to
0:54:56 mass European immigration, what a lot of people don’t realize is it caused a ton of problems.
0:55:01 There were mass movements at the time, the know nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against
0:55:07 mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism by as the religion
0:55:12 of a lot of the new immigrants. But really what it was is about the changing of the American character
0:55:19 by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native born population
0:55:23 and their understanding of what their owed and their role in American society is very different
0:55:29 from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was
0:55:34 actually during the resolution of the immigration question, where we had massive waves of foreign
0:55:41 born population come to the United States. We had them, you know, integrated, luckily actually at
0:55:47 the time with the industrial revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them. One of the problems
0:55:52 is that today in the United States, we have one of the highest levels of foreign born population
0:55:58 than ever before actually since that time in the early 1900s. But we have all of the same attendant
0:56:04 problems. But even worse is we don’t live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly
0:56:08 service based economy that has long, you know, moved past manufacturing. Now I’m not saying we
0:56:12 shouldn’t bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to
0:56:18 work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part
0:56:23 of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign born population, particularly unskilled,
0:56:28 and the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so
0:56:33 under fraudulent purposes. They’re doing so because they are economic migrants and they’re abusing,
0:56:38 you know, asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a
0:56:45 process of application or merit. And this has all of its traces back to 1965, where the Immigration
0:56:51 Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the
0:56:58 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration in the United States. In my opinion,
0:57:03 it was one of the most important things that ever happened. And one of the reasons why is it forced
0:57:09 and caused integration. It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign born
0:57:15 population, it redeveloped an American character and understanding that was more homogenous and was
0:57:20 the ability for you and me to understand despite the difference in our background. If you accelerate
0:57:25 and you continue this trend of the very high foreign born unskilled population, you unfortunately
0:57:32 are basically creating a mass, you know, it’s basically a non-citizen population of illegal
0:57:38 immigrants, people who are not as skilled. You know, I think it was, I read 27% of the people
0:57:43 who’ve come under Joe Biden illegally don’t even have a college degree. That means that we’re lucky
0:57:48 if they’re even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about
0:57:53 integrating that type of person, you know, even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial
0:57:59 economy. Now imagine today, the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass
0:58:05 citizenship happened, you know, to that population would be extraordinary. And even if we were to
0:58:10 do, I don’t think it’s a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it
0:58:14 with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don’t think a lot of people understand
0:58:19 the immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively, they call it
0:58:26 family-based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the term which implies that,
0:58:32 let’s say you come over here, and you get your green card, you can use sponsorship and others
0:58:36 by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with
0:58:41 that is who is your cousin? Like, is he a plumber? Is he, you know, is he a coder? You know, that
0:58:44 doesn’t actually matter because he’s your cousin. So actually, it’s preference. The way that it
0:58:49 should work is it should be nobody cares if he’s your cousin. What does he do? You know, what does
0:58:53 she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my
0:58:57 opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about, oh, they actually increased
0:59:03 the GDP or whatever. It’s like, we need a merit-based immigration system. We are the largest
0:59:07 country in the world. And one of the only non-Western, or one of the only Western countries in the
0:59:13 world that does not have a merit-based, points-based immigration system, like Australia and or Canada.
0:59:17 And I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non-merit-based
0:59:22 purposes. So they’re really reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the
0:59:27 immigration status quo and by basically just allowing tens of millions, potentially tens of
0:59:34 millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the U.S. under these pretenses of
0:59:42 complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people’s understanding and even like
0:59:46 mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump’s victory.
0:59:52 Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the borders are? Tom Holman.
0:59:59 Tom Holman is a very legit dude. Got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original
1:00:06 true believer on enforcing immigration law, as it is. Now, notice how I just said that.
1:00:12 That’s a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out for my left
1:00:22 wing critics in that he really believes in the ability in the necessity of mass deportation
1:00:26 and he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings and this will
1:00:33 apply to Doge too. Tsar has no statutory or constitutional authority. Tsar has as much
1:00:38 authority as the President of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to
1:00:42 say, even his critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times
1:00:49 and he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel. So, Tsar in and of
1:00:53 itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House and it’s one that I really wish we
1:00:58 would move away from. I understand why we do it. It’s basically to do a national security advisor,
1:01:05 interagency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller,
1:01:10 who will be in the White House, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, who has well founded beliefs,
1:01:16 experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, which I think would also give him the
1:01:22 ability to work with home and to pull that off. That said, the corollary to this, and frankly,
1:01:29 this is the one I am the most mystified yet, is Kirsti Noem as the Department of Homeland Security
1:01:32 Secretary. So, let me just lay this out for people because people don’t know what this is.
1:01:37 Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time the way you’re going to interact with them is TSA.
1:01:41 You don’t think about it. But people don’t know, the Department of Homeland Security is one of the
1:01:46 largest law enforcement, if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It’s gigantic.
1:01:53 You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have Border Patrol,
1:01:59 ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies that report up to you. But most importantly for this,
1:02:05 you will be the public face of mass deportation. So, I was there in the White House briefing room
1:02:10 last time around when Kirsten Nielsen, who was the DHS Secretary under Donald Trump and specifically
1:02:16 the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time, she was a smart woman,
1:02:22 she has long experience in government, and honestly, she melted under the criticism.
1:02:26 Kirsti Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that’s great. You have a little bit of
1:02:30 executive experience. But to be honest, I mean, you have no law enforcement background. You have
1:02:36 no ability to lie. You have no, frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like
1:02:41 to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history. You have
1:02:47 to go on television and defend that every single day, a literal job requirement under Donald Trump.
1:02:52 And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high
1:02:57 intellect. You have to have the ability to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how she
1:03:02 handled that situation with her dog and her interviews, and that does not give me confidence
1:03:04 that she will be able to do all that well in the position. So-
1:03:11 What do you think is behind that? So, Crystal Falls, on breaking point, is that there’s some
1:03:19 kind of interpersonal, like, I didn’t know, I should know this, but I didn’t know any of the,
1:03:23 there was some cheating or whatever. There’s a rumor, nobody knows if it’s true, that Cory
1:03:28 Lewandowski and Kirsten Noem had a previous relationship on going. Cory Lewandowski is a
1:03:32 Trump official, and that he may be put her in front. I don’t know. Is this like the real
1:03:36 Housewives of DC? Yeah, kind of. Although, I mean, it was the most open secret in the world.
1:03:40 Allegedly, I don’t know if it’s true. Okay, all right. I mean, I don’t like the traffic too much
1:03:45 in personal theories. But, I mean, in this respect, it might actually be correct in terms of how
1:03:49 it all came down. I have no idea what he’s thinking, to be honest. I truly don’t. I mean,
1:03:55 maybe it’s like he was last time. He said, I want a woman who’s like softer and like emotionally,
1:04:02 and the ability to be the face of my immigration program. I mean, again, like I said, I don’t see
1:04:07 it in terms of her experience and her media. It’s frankly, like, not very good. So, you think she
1:04:14 needs to be able to articulate, not just be like the softer face of this radical policy,
1:04:17 but also be able to articulate the what’s happening with the reasoning behind all this.
1:04:21 Yes. You need to give justification for everything. Here’s the thing. Under mass deportation,
1:04:28 the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person
1:04:32 who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really, what the quasi thing is,
1:04:36 that’s why the program itself is bad, and we should legalize everybody who is here illegally.
1:04:41 Okay. So, the thing is, is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a
1:04:45 great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way
1:04:50 that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say,
1:04:54 well, you know, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law,
1:05:00 the necessity. I mean, I just, I think, articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less
1:05:06 high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this
1:05:11 country. But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this, from a guy named Mark Cracorian,
1:05:16 who’s the center for immigration studies, is we don’t make immigration policy for the benefit
1:05:22 of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren. And that is
1:05:25 an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it’s a triumph of the American
1:05:31 system that somebody whose family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here.
1:05:36 My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process,
1:05:42 can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American
1:05:46 citizens. I’m not talking about other Indians or, you know, whatever. I’m talking about all of it.
1:05:51 I care about everybody who is here in this country. But fundamentally, that will mean that we are
1:05:57 going to have to exclude some people from the US. And another thing that the open borders people
1:06:03 don’t ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. So,
1:06:10 for example, a common left wing talking point is that it’s America’s fault that El Salvador and
1:06:15 Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to
1:06:20 take all those people in because it’s our fault or Haiti, right? But, you know, if you think about
1:06:24 it, America is responsible, and I’m just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of
1:06:30 countries, they just don’t benefit from the geographic ability to walk to the United States.
1:06:35 So, I mean, if we’re doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come
1:06:41 here than anybody from El Salvador who’s talking about something that happened in 1982. So, within
1:06:46 its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the asylum process, you know, people, I mean,
1:06:50 people don’t even know this, you’re literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence, okay?
1:06:57 There are, I mean, imagine that, like, that’s, frankly, that is a local law enforcement and
1:07:02 problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold-hearted this
1:07:07 sounds, but maybe, honestly, it could be because I’m Indian. One of the things that whenever you
1:07:11 visit India and you see a country with over a billion people, you’re like, holy shit, you know,
1:07:18 this, this is crazy. And you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved.
1:07:22 And also, there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody.
1:07:27 It’s a very complex and dynamic problem. And it’s really nice to be bleeding heart and to say,
1:07:31 oh, well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that, but it doesn’t work.
1:07:35 It doesn’t work by the nation-state. It doesn’t work with a sovereign nation. We’re the luckiest
1:07:39 people in the history of the world to live here in this country. And it, you need to protect it.
1:07:45 And protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not
1:07:50 telling us stories like what there’s a famous moment in the Trump White House where Jim Acosta,
1:07:56 CNN White House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, the current, you know,
1:08:00 who will be the current deputy chief. And he was like, what do you say something along the lines
1:08:04 to people who say you’re violating, you know, that quote on the Statue of Liberty, like,
1:08:09 give me your tired, your poor, your hungry, all of that, the Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen,
1:08:14 very logically, was like, what level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote?
1:08:19 Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million?
1:08:25 And that’s such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus
1:08:30 quote. There is, when you start talking, honestly, you’re like, okay, we live in X, Y, and Z society
1:08:36 with X, Y, and Z GDP. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us,
1:08:42 not rely on welfare, not, you know, be people who we have to take care of after because we have
1:08:46 our own problems here right now. And who are the population, the types of people that we can study
1:08:50 and look at, who will be able to benefit. And based on that, yeah, immigration is great. But
1:08:58 there are a lot of economic, legal, and societal reasons for why you definitely don’t want the
1:09:06 current level. But another thing is, even if we turn the switch, and we still let in a million
1:09:11 five people a year under the chain, the chain family based migration, I think it would be a
1:09:17 colossal mistake because it’s not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are
1:09:22 explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It’s doing so based on the familial connections
1:09:26 of people who already gained the immigration system to be able to come here. I have a lot of
1:09:30 family in India. And, you know, I love them, but and some of them are actually very talented and
1:09:34 qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit.
1:09:37 And that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I’m a U.S.
1:09:43 citizen. Like you mentioned, the book, Melting Potter, Civil War by Raihan Salam,
1:09:49 he makes an argument against the open borders. The thesis there is a simulation should be a big
1:09:55 part. I guess there’s some kind of optimal rate of immigration, which allows for a simulation.
1:09:58 Yeah. And there are ebbs and flows. And that’s kind of what I was talking about historically,
1:10:03 where, you know, I mean, the truth is, is you could walk the streets of New York City in the
1:10:08 early 1900s and late 1890s, and you’re not gonna hear any English. And I think that’s bad. I mean,
1:10:13 really what you had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically practicing their way of life,
1:10:17 just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their ethnic problems that they had and
1:10:22 even some of their cultural like unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America and then
1:10:26 New York City police and others are figuring out like, what the hell do we do with all this?
1:10:30 And it literally took shutting down immigration for an entire generation
1:10:35 to do away with that. And there’s actually still some. The point about assimilation is twofold.
1:10:42 One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding of the American
1:10:47 character that has nothing to do with race. And that’s so unique that I can sit here as a child
1:10:53 of people from India and that’s such a deep appreciation for the Scots-Irish. I consider
1:10:58 myself, you know, American first. And one of the things that I really love about that is that I
1:11:05 have no historical relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War. But I feel such kinship
1:11:11 with a lot of the people who did and reading the memoirs and the ideas of those that did because
1:11:18 that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were able to instill in the country
1:11:23 for 150 years later gives me the ability to connect to them. And that’s such an incredible
1:11:27 victory on their part. And that’s such a unique thing in almost every other country in the world
1:11:33 in China and India or wherever. You’re kind of like what you are. You’re a Hindu, you’re a Jew,
1:11:39 you’re Han Chinese, you’re a Uyghur, or you’re Tibetan, something like that. You’re born into it.
1:11:43 But really here was the only one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to
1:11:48 that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different people who come
1:11:54 to America. And that is a celebration of immigration as an idea. But immigration is also a discrete
1:12:00 policy. And that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate
1:12:07 the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in the US, our citizens, to actually be
1:12:13 able to benefit. And look, it’s going to be messy. And honestly, I still don’t know yet if Trump will
1:12:18 be able to pursue actual mass deportation, just because I think that I’m not sure the public
1:12:21 is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don’t know if the public is ready for it.
1:12:26 I think, I don’t know, I’ll have to see because there’s a lot of different ways that you can do
1:12:31 it. There’s mandatory you verify, which requires businesses to basically verify or a US citizen
1:12:34 or you’re here illegally whenever they employ you, which is not the law of the land currently,
1:12:40 which is crazy, by the way. There’s, you know, you can cut off or tax remittance payments,
1:12:45 which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala,
1:12:49 again, illustrating my economic migrant point. There are a lot of various different ways where
1:12:53 you can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the US, so people will self-deport.
1:13:00 But, you know, if he does pursue like real mass deportation, that will be a flashpoint in America.
1:13:05 Aren’t you talking about things like what Tom Holman said that works at raids,
1:13:09 sort of increasing the rate of that? Yeah. We used to do that, you know?
1:13:12 Yeah. But there’s a rate at which you can do that,
1:13:18 where it would lead to, I mean, a radical social upheaval.
1:13:22 Yeah, it will. I mean, and I think some people need to be honest here. And this actually flies
1:13:29 in the face of, I mean, one of the most common liberal critiques is this is going to raise prices.
1:13:35 And yeah, I think it’s true. I think it’s worth it. But that’s easy for me to say. I’m making a good
1:13:39 living. If you care about inflation, you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries or
1:13:44 whatever goes up because of this immigration policy, I think that needs to be extremely well
1:13:48 articulated by the president. And of course, he needs to think about it. The truth is,
1:13:52 this is America right now is built on cheap labor. It’s not fair to the consumer.
1:13:56 It’s not fair to the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves.
1:14:01 And it’s not fair to the natural born citizen. The natural born citizen has his wages suppressed
1:14:05 for competition by tens of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages.
1:14:10 They have to compete for housing, for social services. I mean, just even, you know, like basic
1:14:15 stuff at a societal level, it’s not fair to them. It’s definitely not fair to the other person.
1:14:19 Because I mean, whenever people say like, who’s going to build your houses or whatever,
1:14:28 you’re endorsing this quasi legal system where, you know, uninsured laborers from Mexico,
1:14:35 they have no guarantee of wages. They’re getting paid cash under the table. They are living, you
1:14:39 know, tend to a room. They’re sending Mexican remittance payments back just so that their
1:14:43 children can eat. I mean, that’s not really fair to that person either. So that’s the point.
1:14:49 The point is, is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval. But this gets to my kirstenome
1:14:54 point as well as you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here. Because if you
1:15:00 don’t, it’s going to go south real quick. The way Vivek articulates this is that our immigration
1:15:05 system is deeply dishonest. Like we don’t acknowledge some of the things he just said.
1:15:09 Yeah, exactly. And he wants to make it honest. So if we don’t do mass deportation, at least you
1:15:16 have to be really honest about the living conditions of illegal immigrants, about basically
1:15:22 mistreatment of them. Yes, it’s true. I mean, you know, if you support mass illegal migration,
1:15:28 you’re basically supporting tens of millions who are living lives as second class citizens.
1:15:34 That’s not fair to them. I also think it’s deeply paternalistic. So there’s this idea
1:15:40 that America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency
1:15:44 whatsoever. And they can never turn things around. What does that say about our confidence in them?
1:15:47 You know, one of the things they always say, they’re, oh, they’re law abiding. They’re great
1:15:51 people and all that. I agree. Okay, by and large, I’m not saying these are bad people.
1:15:56 But I am saying like, if they’re not bad and they’re law abiding and they’re citizens and thoughtful
1:16:01 and all that, they can fix their own countries. And they did in El Salvador. That’s the perfect
1:16:06 example. Look at the dramatic drop in their crime rate. Bukella is one of the most popular leaders
1:16:12 in all of South America. That is proof positive that you can change things around despite perhaps
1:16:19 a legacy of U.S. intervention. So, you know, to just say this idea that, you know, because it’s
1:16:23 America’s fault that they’re screwed up, it takes agency away from them. You know, another really
1:16:27 key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield and the whole Haitian thing. Because
1:16:32 everybody, you know, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge,
1:16:36 because when they’re like, the Haitians are here legally, they need to actually think about the
1:16:41 program. The program is called TPS. So, let me explain that. TPS is called temporary protected
1:16:46 status. Note, what’s the first word on that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed
1:16:52 under a regime in which, let’s say that there was a catastrophic, I think this is a real example,
1:16:56 I think there was like a volcano or an earthquake or something, where people were granted TPS to
1:17:00 come to the United States. And the idea was they were going to go back after it was safe.
1:17:07 They just never went back. There are children born in the United States today who are literally the
1:17:12 descent, who are adults, who are the descendants of people who are still living in the U.S. under
1:17:17 TPS. That’s a perfect example of what Vivek says is dishonest. You know, you can’t mass
1:17:23 de facto legalize people by saying that they’re here temporarily because of a program or because
1:17:29 of something that happened in their home country. When the reality is that, for all intents and
1:17:35 purposes, we are acknowledging them as full legal migrants. So, even the term migrant to these
1:17:40 Haitians in Springfield makes no sense because they’re supposed to be here under TPS. That’s not,
1:17:46 migrant implies permanency. So, the language is all dishonest. And people don’t want to tell you
1:17:50 about the things I just said about chain migration. The vast majority of Americans don’t even know
1:17:54 the immigration system works. They don’t understand what I just said about TPS. They don’t really
1:17:58 understand the insanity of asylum law, where you can just literally throw up your hands and say,
1:18:03 “I fear for my life,” and you get to live here for five years before your court date even happens.
1:18:09 And, you know, by that time, get a work permit or whatever, you can, you know, get housing,
1:18:13 like you just said, in substandard conditions. And you can kind of just play the game and wait
1:18:17 before a deportation order comes. And even if it does, you never have to leave because there’s no
1:18:21 ICE agent or whatever who’s going to enforce it. So, the whole system is nuts right now. We need
1:18:27 complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground. That said, sort of the image
1:18:35 and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems deeply un-American, right?
1:18:40 Well, I mean, look, it gets, okay, so, you know, I’m not going to defend it, but I’ll just put it
1:18:46 this way. Do you hate children? Yeah, see, that’s what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see
1:18:52 a drug addict who’s put in prison and their child is put in protective services? Nobody in America
1:18:58 thinks twice about that, right? Right? So, I mean, well, that’s kind of screwed up. Well, we should
1:19:03 think about why did we come to that conclusion? The conclusion was is that these adults willingly
1:19:08 broke the law and pursued a path of life, which put them on a, you know, which put them on a
1:19:14 trajectory where the state had to come in and determine that you are not allowed to be a parent
1:19:18 basically to this child while you serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very
1:19:24 different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances in US immigration
1:19:30 law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was because there was no way to
1:19:36 prosecute people for illegal entry without child separation, because previous doctrine, I believe
1:19:42 it’s called the Flores doctrine under some asylum law, people have to go check my work on this.
1:19:46 But basically, the whole reason this evolved is a legal regime was because
1:19:51 people figured out that if you bring a kid with you, because of the so-called Flores doctrine
1:19:56 or whatever, that you couldn’t be prosecuted for illegal entry. So, it was a de facto way
1:20:02 of breaking the law. And in fact, a lot of people were bringing children here who weren’t even theirs,
1:20:07 who weren’t, they weren’t even related to or couldn’t even, you know, prove it, were bringing them to
1:20:12 get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So, I’m not defending child separation. I think it was
1:20:17 horrible or whatever. But, you know, if I give you the context, it does seem like a very tricky
1:20:23 problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not? How are we able to do that? And the solution,
1:20:30 honestly, is what Donald Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete rewrite
1:20:37 of the way that we have U.S. asylum law applied and of asylum adjudication and really just about
1:20:43 enforcing our actual laws. So, when I try to explain to people is the immigration system right now
1:20:49 is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest, such a great word, deeply dishonest system in which
1:20:57 you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the
1:21:03 easiest things to do to accomplish immigration to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had
1:21:09 to apply. It wasn’t easy. Do you know in India, there’s a temple called the VISA temple where you
1:21:13 walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number. And if you do it when you’re applying
1:21:17 for a visa to the United States, all right, it costs a lot of money and it’s hard. People get
1:21:21 rejected all the time. There’s billions of people across the world who would love to be able to come
1:21:26 here. And many of them want to do so legally and they should have to go through a process. The
1:21:30 current way it works is it’s easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that’s
1:21:33 fundamentally right. It’s also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally.
1:21:37 Can you still be on the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?
1:21:42 The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society, that these people,
1:21:47 many of whom, millions of here have been here for many years, have children, natural born
1:21:52 citizens because of birthright citizenship. It would require something that’s fundamentally
1:21:57 inhumane and un-American, as you said, the idea of separating families across different borders
1:22:05 simply because of what is a “small decision” of coming here illegally. And the best case,
1:22:10 beyond any of this moral stuff, for no mass deportation is it’s good for business.
1:22:17 Illegal immigration is great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the
1:22:23 lowest prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation is a terrible idea. But first of all,
1:22:30 very convincing. And second of all, you can’t just do mass deportation without also fixing
1:22:35 the immigration system. Yes, exactly. And there are several pieces of legislation,
1:22:39 HR2, that’s something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It’s a border bill.
1:22:43 I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the U.S. immigration system.
1:22:48 I’m curious whether it’ll actually pass or not. Remember, there’s a very slim majority of the
1:22:52 House of Representatives for Republicans this time around. And people vote for a lot of things
1:22:56 when they’re not in power, but when it’s actually about to become the law, we’ll see. There’s a
1:23:01 lot of swing state people out there who may think twice before casting that vote. So I’m
1:23:07 definitely curious to see how that one plays out. The other thing is, is that, like I just said,
1:23:11 the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they’re going to
1:23:16 take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for everything that they have to keep
1:23:22 their pool of cheap labor because it’s great for them. I think JD said a story, I think he was
1:23:28 on Rogan about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was just, he was like, “Yeah, it’s just
1:23:32 terrible.” It’s like they would take away our whole workforce. And he was like, “Do you hear
1:23:37 yourself in terms of what you’re talking or bragging about?” But that’s real. That’s a real
1:23:44 thing. And that Tyson’s foods and all these other people, that’s another really sad part.
1:23:50 What I mean by second-class citizenship is this presumption, first of all, that Americans think
1:23:54 it’s too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for
1:24:00 the right wage, first of all. But second is, the conditions in a lot of those facilities are
1:24:05 horrible and they’re covered up for a reason, not only in terms of the way that businesses,
1:24:09 they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their illegal immigrant workforce.
1:24:11 So, honestly, I think it could make things better for everything.
1:24:14 You have studied how government works. What are the chances of mass deportation happens?
1:24:18 Well, it depends how you define it. So, I mean, mass deportation could mean one million. I mean,
1:24:21 nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million. It could
1:24:25 be 30 million. I’ve seen estimates of up to 30 million, which is crazy. That’s almost one-eleventh
1:24:30 of the entire US population. What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? One million
1:24:35 people? A million people is a lot. I mean, that’s a lot of people. That’s a lot. I mean, but the
1:24:40 crazy part is that’s only one-twelfth of what Joe Biden led in the country. So, that’s one of those
1:24:46 that just give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will
1:24:52 happen? It depends on the definition. Will one million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively
1:24:59 confident in that. Anything over that, it’s going to be tough to say. Like I said,
1:25:05 probably the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory e-verify and to have processes in
1:25:10 place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally, and then you will
1:25:17 have mass self-deportation, and they will take the victory lap on that. But actual, like rounding
1:25:24 millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to, God
1:25:29 knows, all across the globe, that’s a logistical nightmare. It also costs a lot of money. And
1:25:37 don’t forget, Congress has to pay for all of this. So, we can have doge or we can have mass
1:25:42 deportation. So, those two things are kind of irreconcilable, actually. There’s a lot of competing
1:25:47 influences at play that people are not being real about at all. Yeah, that was one of the tensions
1:25:54 I had talking to Vivek is he’s big on mass deportation and big on making government more
1:25:59 efficient. And it really feels like there’s a tension between those two in the short term.
1:26:04 Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I’ve been wanting to talk about this.
1:26:07 I am sympathetic to doge to the whole Department of Government Efficiency.
1:26:12 How unreal is it that it’s called doge? Actually, with Elon, it’s quite real. I guess I’ve just,
1:26:18 you know, I’ve accepted Elon as a major political figure in the US. But the doge committee,
1:26:24 the Department of Government Efficiency, is a non-statutory agency that has zero funding
1:26:31 that Donald Trump says will advise OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. Now, two things. Number
1:26:38 one is, as I predicted, doge would become a “blue ribbon commission.” So, this is a non-statutory
1:26:43 blue ribbon commission that has been given authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk.
1:26:49 Secondary, their recommendations to government should be complete by July of 2026, according
1:26:54 to the press release released by Trump. First of all, what that will mean is they’re probably
1:26:57 going to need private funding to even set all this up. That’s great. Not a problem for Elon.
1:27:02 But you’re basically going to be able to have to commission GAO reports, Government Accountability
1:27:08 Office, and other reports and fact-finding missions across the government, which is fantastic.
1:27:12 Trump can even empower you to go through every agency and to collect figures.
1:27:18 None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives
1:27:22 care what you have to say. Historically, they don’t give a shit what the Executive Office has to say.
1:27:27 So, every year, the President releases his own budget. It used to mean something,
1:27:32 but in the last decade or so, it’s become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means
1:27:37 Committee and the People’s House are the ones who originate all appropriations and set up spending.
1:27:45 So, that’s one. Doge in and of itself has no power. It has no ability to compel or force people to do
1:27:51 anything. Its entire case for being, really, if you think about it mechanically, is to try and
1:27:56 convince and provide a report to Republican legislators to be able to cut spending. So,
1:28:02 that’s that. Now, we all know how Congress takes to government reports and whether they get acted
1:28:08 on or not. So, that’s number one. Number two is the figures that Elon is throwing out there.
1:28:12 Again, I want to give them some advice because people do not understand federal government
1:28:18 spending. The absolute vast majority of government spending is entitlement programs like Social
1:28:23 Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and their most politically
1:28:28 popular programs in the world, and military spending. Discretionary non-military spending,
1:28:33 I don’t have the exact figure in front of me, is a very, very small part of the federal budget.
1:28:40 Now, within that small slice, about 90% of that eight is bipartisan and is supported by like
1:28:46 everybody. NOAA, you know the hurricane guys? Like people like that. You know, people who are flying
1:28:51 into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government inspectors of X, Y, and Z. The parts
1:28:57 that are controversial that you’re actually able to touch, things like welfare programs like food
1:29:02 stamps is an extraordinary small slice. So, what’s the number you put out there? $5 trillion?
1:29:07 Something like that? There is only one way to do that. And realistically, under the current thing,
1:29:13 you have to radically change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I support that,
1:29:19 but I just want to be very, very clear. But I haven’t seen enough energy around that. There’s
1:29:25 this real belief in the US that we spend billions on all of these programs that are doing complete
1:29:31 bullshit. But like the truth, the absolute vast majority of it is military spending and entitlements.
1:29:33 Trump has made clear entitlements are off the table. It’s not going to happen. So,
1:29:39 the way that you’re going to be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade
1:29:47 long period is to really change the way that the United States procures military equipment,
1:29:51 hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have the background to be able to accomplish
1:29:55 this because he has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that Boeing has been pulling
1:30:01 for over a decade. But I really want everybody’s expectations to be very set around this. Just
1:30:08 remember, non-statutory, blue ribbon. So, if he’s serious about it, I just laid out all of these
1:30:12 hurdles that he’s going to have to overcome. And I’m not saying him and Vivek aren’t serious dudes,
1:30:17 but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this. So, you just laid out the
1:30:24 reality of how Washington works to give the counterpoint that I think you’re probably also
1:30:29 rooting for is that one, as a statement like Peter Thiel said, don’t bet against Elon. Sure.
1:30:35 One of the things that you don’t usually have with blue ribbon is the kind of megaphone that
1:30:45 Elon has. True. And I would even set the financial aspects aside, just the influence he has with
1:30:52 the megaphone, but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can
1:30:57 have real power when backed by sort of a populist movement. I don’t disagree with you, but let me
1:31:02 give you a case where this just failed. So, Elon endorsed who for Senate Majority Leader,
1:31:08 Rick Scott, right? Who got the least amount of votes in the US Senate for GOP leader, Rick Scott?
1:31:13 John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I’m bringing that up, one of my favorite
1:31:19 books, Master of the Senate, by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series, the Senate as an institution,
1:31:26 it reveres independence. It reveres, I mean, the entire theory of the Senate is to cool down
1:31:31 the mob that is in the House of Representatives and to deliberate. That’s its entire body.
1:31:37 They are set up to be immune from public pressure. Now, I’m not saying they can’t be pressured,
1:31:42 but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of he literally endorsed somebody
1:31:47 for leader. So did Tucker Carlson. So did a lot of people online. And only 13 senators voted for
1:31:52 Rick Scott. The truth is, is that they don’t care. Like they’re set up where they’re marginally popular
1:31:56 in their own home states. They’ll be able to win their primaries. And that’s all they really need
1:32:01 to do to get elected. And they have six year terms, not even up for four years. So will Elon
1:32:05 still be interested in politics six years from now? That’s a legitimate question for a Republican
1:32:09 senator. So maybe he could get the House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his
1:32:15 things. But there’s no guarantee that the Senate is going to agree with any of that. There’s a story
1:32:21 that Caro tells in the Master of the Senate book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris
1:32:27 during the writing of the Constitution. And he asked Washington, he said, “Why did you put in a
1:32:34 Senate, a bicameral legislature?” And Washington said, “Why did you pour your tea into a saucer?”
1:32:40 And Jefferson goes to cool it. And Washington says, “Just so.” That’s what I had to explain.
1:32:46 He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man. Okay. So you actually outlined the most likely
1:32:51 thing that’s going to happen with Doja as it hits the wall of Washington.
1:32:58 What is the most successful thing that can be pulled off? The most successful thing they could
1:33:06 do is right now, I think they’re really obsessed with designing cuts and identifying cuts. I would
1:33:13 redesign systems, systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that we have processes in place
1:33:19 to dispense taxpayer dollars, because the truth is that appropriations itself, again,
1:33:26 are set by the United States Congress. But the way that those appropriations are spent by the
1:33:32 government, the executive has some discretionary authority. So your ability as the executive
1:33:37 to be a good steward of the taxpayer money and to redesign a system, which actually I think Elon
1:33:41 could be good at this, and Vivek too, in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit, is the entire
1:33:45 Pentagon procurement thing. It needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it’s bad for the Pentagon.
1:33:52 It gives them substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapons systems and programs and thinking
1:33:57 that can be easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect
1:34:04 example is all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare costs almost
1:34:10 nothing, and yet drone swarms and hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to U.S. systems,
1:34:17 which cost more than hundreds of billions of dollars. So my point is that giving nimble procurement
1:34:23 and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you
1:34:28 actually could save the most amount of money in the long run. That’s where I would really focus in on.
1:34:35 The other one is, counter to everything I just said, is maybe they will listen. Maybe the Republicans
1:34:41 are like, “Yeah, okay, let’s do it.” The problem again, though, is swing state people who need
1:34:45 to get reelected, they need to do one thing. They need to deliver for their district. They need to
1:34:51 run on stuff, and nobody has ever run on cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing
1:34:57 money to your state, and that’s why earmarks and a lot of these other things are extraordinarily
1:35:02 popular in Congress is because it’s such an easy way to show constituents how you’re working for
1:35:09 them whenever it does come re-election time. So it’s a very difficult system. And I also want
1:35:14 to tell people who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is designed to
1:35:19 work this way. And for two centuries, the Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every
1:35:26 popular change. And because of that, it’s designed to make sure that it’s so popular for long enough
1:35:30 that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That’s really,
1:35:35 really frustrating, but you should take comfort in that it’s always been that way. So it’s been okay.
1:35:39 Well, as I’ve learned from one of the recommendations of the age of acrimony,
1:35:44 as I feel embarrassed that I didn’t know that senators used to not be elected.
1:35:49 What a crazy system, huh? Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now,
1:35:59 as defining our democracy, was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War in the 50 years
1:36:03 after the Civil War. Absolutely correct. Age of acrimony, oh my God, I love that book. I cannot
1:36:09 recommend it enough. It is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is that
1:36:14 we study periods where greatness happened, but we don’t often study periods where nothing happened,
1:36:20 or where really bad shit happened. You know, we don’t spend nearly enough. Americans know about
1:36:24 FDR. They don’t really know anything about the depression or how we got there. What was it like
1:36:30 to be alive in the United States in 1840, right? Nobody thinks about that, really, because it’s
1:36:34 kind of an in-between time in history. There are people who lived their entire lives, who were born,
1:36:39 who had to live through those times, who were just as conscientious and intelligent as you and I are,
1:36:43 and we’re just trying to figure shit out, and things felt really big. So the age of acrimony
1:36:47 is a time where it was almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded Age aspect. But like you
1:36:53 just said, it was a time where progressive reform of government and of the tension between civil
1:37:01 rights, extraordinary wealth, and democracy, and really the reigning in of big business,
1:37:06 so many of our foundations happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that
1:37:11 book because one of the things I learned from the book is that voter participation is highest
1:37:16 when people are pissed off, not when they’re happy. And that’s such a counterintuitive thing,
1:37:21 but voter participation goes down when the system is working. So 2020, right? I think we can all
1:37:25 agree it was a very tense election. That’s also why it had the highest voter participation ever.
1:37:31 2024, very high rates of participation, same thing. People are pissed off, and that’s actually what
1:37:36 drives them to the vote. But something that take comfort in that is that people being pissed off
1:37:40 and people going out to vote, it actually does have major impact on the system. Because otherwise,
1:37:46 the status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so, yeah, like you just said, I mean, direct
1:37:51 election of senators, I mean, there are probably people alive today who were born when there was
1:37:56 no direct election of senators, which is an insane thing to think about. I mean, there’d be almost
1:38:02 a hundred or so. But the point is, is that at that time, it was so deeply corrupt. And it was one
1:38:08 where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading into the Gilded Age were able to enforce
1:38:13 their will upon the people. But you can take comfort in that that was one of those areas where
1:38:18 Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the constitution and actually forced the aristocrats
1:38:24 in power to give their own power. It’s like our version of when they flipped power and took away
1:38:29 the legislative power of the House of Lords in the UK. I just think that’s amazing. And such a cool
1:38:36 thing about our country in the UK too. It’s the continued battle between the people and the elite,
1:38:44 right? And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of candidates
1:38:50 for a party. Yes. That was also invented. It used to be that the quote unquote party bosses,
1:38:57 I say that with a half a chuckle, chose the candidate. Yeah, the whole system is nuts.
1:39:00 The way that we currently experience politics is such a modern invention.
1:39:06 With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but yeah, good point. But that was actually
1:39:10 more of a mean reversion, right? We’re living in an extraordinarily new era where we actually have
1:39:16 more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be, this is crazy. So the conventions
1:39:20 have always took in place two months before, right? Imagine a world where you did not know who
1:39:24 the pro nominee was going to be before that convention. And the nominee literally was decided
1:39:30 at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American
1:39:36 politics where presidents did not directly campaign. They in fact did not even comment
1:39:40 about the news or mentioned their opponents names. They were, they would give speeches from their
1:39:46 doorstep, but they, it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics. You would not get a
1:39:52 Bernie Sanders, you would not get a Donald Trump, Bill Clinton. I mean, basically every
1:39:56 president from John F. Kennedy onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior
1:40:01 to that has been much more of the older system. There was a in between period post FDR where
1:40:07 things were really changing, but the primary system itself had its first true big win under
1:40:12 John F. Kennedy. I think that the lesson from that is there’s a collective wisdom to the people,
1:40:18 right? I think so. I think it works. Yeah. I mean, well, okay, I’ll steal man it. We had some great
1:40:24 presidents in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of
1:40:28 coalitional politics of his ability. In fact, what really made him a genius was his ability to get
1:40:34 this overthrow, the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite Democrats to take
1:40:40 control in there at the convention and then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of
1:40:46 power where he had the, he had the, he had the elites basically under his boot because he was
1:40:51 the king and he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce
1:40:58 things up and down. I mean, you know, even in the party boss era, we would have no, a lot of the,
1:41:02 a lot of the people we revere really came out of that people like Abraham Lincoln.
1:41:07 I mean, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There’s no chance. He
1:41:15 won, he won, luck, thank God, from an insane process in the 1860 Republican convention. People
1:41:19 should go read about that because that was wild. I think we were this close to not having Lincoln
1:41:24 as president. And yeah, I mean, there, Teddy Roosevelt, there’s so many that I could point to
1:41:28 who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way to still produce good stuff.
1:41:34 That was a kind of beautiful diversion from the Doge discussion. If we’re going to turn
1:41:40 briefly to Doge. Sure. So we kind of talked about cost cutting, but there’s also increasing the
1:41:46 efficiency of government, which you also kind of talked about procurement. So maybe we can throw
1:41:53 into the pile the 400 plus federal agencies. So let’s take another perspective on what success
1:42:01 might look like. So like radically successful Doge, would it basically cut a lot of federal
1:42:06 agencies? Probably combine. Combine. Okay, so I can give great examples of this because I have a
1:42:12 great insight. Like for each agency will often use different like payroll systems. They’ll have
1:42:18 different internal processes, right? That makes no sense. And it’s all because it’s antiquated.
1:42:25 Now, everybody always talks about changing it. But there are a lot of like party interests about
1:42:30 why certain people get certain things. The real problem with government, the people like us who
1:42:34 are private and like, for example, when you want to do something, you can just do it. So I was
1:42:42 listening to a really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the
1:42:48 story was that the military was assign national guard guys were assigned to like help with the
1:42:53 border. And they were trying to provide, I think it was translation services to people at border
1:42:58 patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, Hey, this has got to stop. According to US Code X,
1:43:04 Y, and Z, the United States military cannot help with law enforcement, you know, abilities here.
1:43:10 And so even though that makes absolutely no sense, because they’re all work, there are literal legal
1:43:14 statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason,
1:43:21 we have to have a ton of Spanish speakers in Southcom, you know, in the US command that is
1:43:25 responsible for South America, who literally cannot help with a crisis at the border. Now,
1:43:31 maybe you can find some legal chicanery to make that work. But man, you got to have an attorney
1:43:34 general who knows what he’s doing. You need a White House counsel, you need to make sure that
1:43:39 shit stands up in a court of law. I mean, it’s not so simple. Whereas, let’s say, you know,
1:43:42 you have a software right here, and you want to get a new software, you can just do it. You can
1:43:47 hire whoever you want. When you’re the government, there’s a whole process you got to go through
1:43:53 about bidding. And it just takes forever. And it is so inefficient. But unfortunately,
1:44:00 the inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes. And that is something that,
1:44:05 yeah, again, actually, you know, radically successful doge quote unquote, would be
1:44:12 study the law and then change it. Like figure instead of cost cutting, like cut this program
1:44:17 or whatever, like I just said about why do different systems use payroll, just say that
1:44:24 you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let’s say, after 90 days.
1:44:27 You know, I’ve heard stories of people who work for the government who still have like IBM
1:44:32 mainframe that they’re still in 2024, that they’re still working because those systems
1:44:36 have never been updated. There’s also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff.
1:44:40 That’s where a lot of inefficiency happens, because a lot of contractors can only work
1:44:45 based upon previous clearance that they already got achieving a clearance is very expensive,
1:44:49 it’s very lengthy process. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be talking about security clearance,
1:44:54 but it does naturally, you know, create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts
1:45:00 fund. And I even mean stuff like, like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right?
1:45:06 So clearance, so there’s only like five people who can even apply for that contract. Well,
1:45:11 naturally, in an internal monopoly like that, he’s going to jack his price up because he literally
1:45:17 has a moat around his product. Whereas if you or I are hiring a jant, whatever, anybody for
1:45:21 anything, that type of credentialism and legal regime, it doesn’t matter at all. So there are
1:45:26 million problems like this that people in government run into. And that is what I would see as the
1:45:32 most successful. You know, paperwork slows everything down, and it feels impossible to break
1:45:37 through that in a sort of incremental way. It’s so hard. It feels like the only way to do it
1:45:45 is to literally shut down agencies in some kind of radical way, and then build up from
1:45:53 scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that’s going to be opposed by a lot of people within
1:45:56 government. Yeah. Well, historically, there’s only one way to do it. And it’s a really bad
1:46:04 answer, war. War. Yeah. So I was going to say, basically, you have the kind of consensus where,
1:46:08 okay, all this stupid bureaucratic bullshit we’ve been doing, we need to like put that
1:46:14 shit aside, get the fuck out of here, we need to win a war. So like all the paperwork, you know,
1:46:20 all the lawyers go leave. Yeah, exactly. No, but I want people to really understand that,
1:46:26 you know, up until 1865 or 1860, I forget the exact year, we didn’t even have national currency.
1:46:33 And then we were like, well, we need a greenback. And prior to that, people would freak out if we
1:46:37 were talking about having national currency, greenback, backed by the, you know, the US government
1:46:42 and all that, not even a question, passing like two weeks in the US Congress, an income tax eventually
1:46:48 went away, but not even in the realm of possibility. And they decided to pass it. Same thing after
1:46:53 World War One. And you think about how World War Two, I mean, World War Two just fundamentally
1:46:58 changed the entire way the United States government works. Even the DHS, which I mentioned earlier,
1:47:04 the Department of Homeland Security, it didn’t even exist prior to 9/11. It was done as response
1:47:09 to 9/11 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that
1:47:16 could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shitshow disaster war
1:47:22 is the only thing that moves and throws the paperwork off the table. And I wish I wasn’t
1:47:28 such a downer, but I’ve just, I’ve both, I’ve read too much, and I’ve had enough experience now
1:47:35 in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn’t that way.
1:47:39 I mean, it’s a cool idea. And I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics,
1:47:43 to think that they can do something. But I want them to be realistic too. And I want them to know
1:47:46 what they’re signing up for whenever they do something like that. And the titanic amount of
1:47:50 work it is going to take for you to be able to accomplish something. Yeah, but I’ve also
1:47:56 heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter.
1:47:58 Here’s this guy, Elon Musk. You are absolutely correct.
1:48:02 Knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course, you need all these
1:48:07 servers. Of course, you need all these employees. And nevertheless, the service keeps running.
1:48:11 He figured it out. And you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is
1:48:17 no, there was no law that he could fire him. You know, there was no, there was no like,
1:48:20 like at the end of the day, he owned the company. You know, he had total discretion of his ability
1:48:26 to move. So I’m not even saying his ideas are bad. I’m saying that the ability that’s that
1:48:32 what makes him such an incredible visionary entrepreneur, its movement, its difference
1:48:38 at times to the right people, but also the knowledge of every individual piece of the machine
1:48:43 and his ability to come in and to execute his full vision at any time and override
1:48:47 any of the managers. So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the
1:48:51 managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few people who’s ever built a multi-billion-dollar
1:48:56 company who has not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution and against
1:49:00 entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who can do it.
1:49:06 Elon, Steve Jobs, but you know, what do we learn is that unfortunately after Steve died,
1:49:10 Apple basically did succumb to the managerial revolution and has become like the product,
1:49:15 you know, they make all their money by printing services and making it impossible to leave
1:49:21 this ecosystem as opposed to building the most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision Pro,
1:49:25 don’t get me wrong. I think you just admitted that you’re part of a cult. I know, I literally am.
1:49:31 I am. I fully admit it. Yeah. I miss Steve. The grass is green on the other side. Come join us.
1:49:38 Okay. Whether it’s Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical
1:49:43 transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim?
1:49:49 What gives you hope that that would be possible? Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t think
1:49:54 slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people in its
1:50:00 government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of
1:50:06 our institutions. And I’ve really encouraged people. I don’t think people can quite understand
1:50:11 what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after
1:50:18 FDR. Like 90% of the people trusted the government. That’s crazy. Like when the president said
1:50:24 something, they were like, okay, he’s not lying. Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians
1:50:29 today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire
1:50:34 fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam in particular really broke the American character and its
1:50:38 ability and its relationship with government. And we’ve never recovered faith in institutions
1:50:44 ever since that. And it’s really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful at least this time is
1:50:49 anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset
1:50:56 and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is
1:51:02 different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually
1:51:08 carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics which got him elected. At this point,
1:51:14 we can’t deny it. McDonald’s thing is hilarious. It’s funny. It is. People love it. People like
1:51:18 the podcasting. People like… Garbage truck. The garbage truck. Yeah, exactly. They like the
1:51:23 stunts. And he will always excel and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other
1:51:28 things that he can and should do like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question
1:51:35 and also really figuring out our economy, the way that it currently runs and changing it so that
1:51:42 the actual American dream is more achievable. And housing is one of the chief problems that we have
1:51:47 right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean,
1:51:51 it’s just true. Households under $100,000 voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn’t do so for
1:51:56 economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for economic. A lot of them did for immigration,
1:52:01 for cultural, but he still owed them something. And there is… I would hope that they could
1:52:07 carry something out in that respect that is not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the
1:52:13 first time where everything felt like it exploded any time with staffing, with even his policy or
1:52:18 what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does come back to personnel.
1:52:23 So I’m concerned in some respects. I’m not thrilled in some respects. I’m happy in some
1:52:27 respects, but it remains to be seen. How he’s going to do it.
1:52:32 To the degree it’s possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology. What do you think
1:52:39 are the central pillars of it? MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That’s what I would say.
1:52:45 Cultural elitism, though, has many different categories. Immigration is one, right? Is that
1:52:50 cultural elitism and cultural liberalism has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of
1:52:55 itself is a natural good at any and all levels, that all immigrants are like replacement level,
1:53:00 that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign policy context
1:53:06 comes back to a lot of that human rights, democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier,
1:53:11 which divorces American values from American interests, and says that actually American
1:53:18 values are American interests. Cultural elitism and liberalism leads to the worship of the Postal
1:53:23 Rights Era bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of DEI, quote unquote Woke,
1:53:31 and of progressive social ideology. So I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA
1:53:38 is. It is a screw you. I once drove past, it was in rural Nevada and I was driving,
1:53:43 and I drove past the biggest sign I’ve ever seen, political sign to this J, and it’s just,
1:53:48 it was in 2020, it just said, “Trump, fuck your feelings.” And I still believe that it’s the most
1:53:55 coherent MAGA thing I’ve ever seen because everyone’s always like, “How can a neocon
1:54:01 and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist under the same
1:54:05 umbrella?” And I’m like, it’s very simple. All of them have rejected the cultural elite
1:54:11 in their own way, certainly, but they’ve arrived at the same place. It’s an umbrella,
1:54:15 and it’s an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to do with the status quo
1:54:20 and with the currently established cultural elite. That doesn’t mean they’re not elite,
1:54:23 and they’re not rich in their own regards. That doesn’t mean they don’t disagree,
1:54:27 but that’s the one thing that unites the entire party. And so that’s the way I would put it.
1:54:33 Anti-cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti-establishment, so basic distrust of all
1:54:39 institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions? Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who
1:54:45 runs our institutions. That said, anti-establishment is really not the right word, because there are
1:54:50 a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment. They are against that, but they’re not anti-cultural
1:54:57 leftism, and that’s the key distinction between MAGA and left populism. Left populism basically does
1:55:03 agree. They agree with basic conceits. Racism is one of the biggest problems facing America.
1:55:08 They’re one of the ways that we would fix that is through class-oriented economic programs,
1:55:14 in order to address that. But we believe in, I don’t know, reparations as a concept. It’s just
1:55:19 more about how we arrive there. Whereas in MAGA, we would say, no, we actually don’t think that at
1:55:24 all. We think we’ve evolved past that, and we think that the best way to fix it is actually
1:55:29 similar policy prescription, but the mindset matters a lot. The real distinction between
1:55:36 MAGA and left populism really is on culture. Trans, in particular, orientation about, actually,
1:55:41 immigration may be the biggest one, because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders,
1:55:47 Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years.
1:55:53 There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who’s one of the hardcore immigration
1:55:57 guys, and they agree with each other. Lou is like, Bernie’s one of the only guys out there.
1:56:03 Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left and its changing attitudes
1:56:09 on mass immigration. There are some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave,
1:56:13 where he started, I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian
1:56:19 concept, right? Because Bernie is basically of a European welfare state tradition. European
1:56:25 welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of
1:56:30 immigration, because we have high taxes and high services. We have a limited pool of people who
1:56:34 can experience and take those services. He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude.
1:56:39 Bernie also, I will say, look, he’s a courageous man and a courageous politician.
1:56:45 You know, as late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate, because he said that that
1:56:50 pro-life candidate was pro-worker. At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy.
1:56:54 He took a ton of shit for it. I don’t think he’s done it since. The sad part that’s really
1:57:04 happened is that a lot of left populist agenda and other has become subsumed in the hysteria around
1:57:08 cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. Ultimately, that cultural
1:57:14 leftism was the thing that really united the two wings of that party. That’s really why MAGA is
1:57:19 very opposed to that. They’re really not the same, but the left populist can still be anti-establishment.
1:57:24 That’s the key. It’s interesting to think of the left cultural elite
1:57:30 subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. You think that’s what happened?
1:57:35 That’s what I would say. What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible
1:57:42 future where he would have won? You and Chris wrote a book on populism in 2020. From that
1:57:48 perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time, by the way,
1:57:54 that would be pretty gangstered during 2016. Would he have, because I think Hillary went
1:57:58 towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly?
1:58:06 It was a very weird time. Yes and no. It wasn’t full-on BLM mania like it was in 2020,
1:58:13 but the signs were all there. The great awakening was in 2014. I know it’s a ridiculous term.
1:58:19 I love it. Please keep saying it. Just to give the origin, the great awakening is about the great
1:58:24 religious revival in the United States. Because wokeism is a religion, that’s a common refrain,
1:58:28 they’re like, “The great awakening is a really good term.” Thank you for explaining the joke.
1:58:34 The great awakening is basically when racial attitudes amongst college-educated whites
1:58:37 basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of reasons why this happened.
1:58:43 I really believe that Tanahisi Coates’ case for reparations in the Atlantic is one of those.
1:58:48 It radicalized an entire generation of basically white college-educated women
1:58:53 to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson and then it also happened immediately
1:59:00 after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover
1:59:05 of 2020, but fundamentally what they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst college-educated
1:59:13 elites to really think in a race-first construct. Worse is that they were rejected in 2016 at the
1:59:18 ballot box by the election of Donald Trump. In response, they ramped it up because they believed
1:59:23 that that was the framework to view the world, that people voted for Trump because he was racist
1:59:29 and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did. The point around this on
1:59:34 question of whether Bernie could have won in 2016, I don’t know. Crystal seems to think so.
1:59:40 I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is honestly one of
1:59:46 them. One of Trump’s core issues in 2016 was immigration, and Bernie and him did not agree
1:59:52 on immigration. If immigration, even if people did support Bernie Sanders and his vision for
1:59:56 working-class people, the debates and the understanding about what it would look like,
2:00:00 like a healthcare system which literally would pay for illegal immigrants,
2:00:04 I think he would have gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong. I honestly,
2:00:09 I will never know what that looked like. Let me reference you from earlier in the
2:00:15 conversation with FDR. It’s not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment
2:00:22 and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC.
2:00:30 Yeah. That’s a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I have a lot of love for the
2:00:35 Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from 2016 called America. You should watch it. It’s a great
2:00:40 ad. That’s another very interesting thing. It’s unapologetically patriotic. That is not something
2:00:46 that you see in a lot of left-wing circles these days. He understood politics at a base level
2:00:52 that a lot of people did not. But Bernie himself and then a lot of the Bernie movement was basically
2:00:58 crushed by the elite Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. They hated them. They
2:01:04 attacked Joe Rogan for even having him on and for giving him a platform that was ridiculous,
2:01:09 obviously backfired in their face, which is really funny. But there are a lot of
2:01:14 million examples like that. When they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro-life politician,
2:01:20 he never did it again. They attacked Bernie for having Bernie bros, people online, the bros who
2:01:26 were Super Bro Bernie. It was his fault. His supporters would say nasty things about Elizabeth
2:01:31 Warren. He would defend straight himself and be like, “Yes, I’m sorry. Please, my bro.” He was like,
2:01:38 “Stop that.” I think his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He didn’t go. He kept saying
2:01:43 “sorry.” Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the
2:01:48 time. He would always do stuff like, “Joe Biden, my friend.” It’s like, “No, he’s not your friend.
2:01:53 He stands for everything that you disagree with. Everything.” He’d be like, “Yeah, he’s a nice guy,
2:01:59 but he’s not my friend.” He would always be like, “Joe and I are great friends, but we have a small
2:02:04 disagreement on this.” Like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up
2:02:09 there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn’t trust anymore. That’s what people really
2:02:15 wanted. But the other side of this is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than
2:02:23 2016, because by 2020, they full-on had TDS, and they were basically like, “We need to defeat Trump
2:02:30 at all costs. We don’t give a shit what your name is. Bernie, Biden, whatever. Whichever of you is
2:02:35 going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the knob.” 2016 is different because they didn’t full-on
2:02:41 have that love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats
2:02:46 have. Democrats just care about winning. The current base of the party, all they want to do
2:02:50 is win. Republican base, they don’t give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it’s nice
2:02:58 to win, but one of those where they will express their id for what they really want. Now, it’s
2:03:02 worked out for them because it turns out that’s a very palpable political force. But one of the
2:03:09 reasons why you won’t see me up here doing James Carville 40 more years is there is a law of something
2:03:16 called thermostatic public opinion, where the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually.
2:03:20 So when you have a left-wing president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing
2:03:25 president in power, the country goes left. Amazing, right? You can actually look at a graph of economic
2:03:31 attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became president after Donald Trump. So Republicans,
2:03:35 Trump was president in the last year in office. Economy is great. Two months later, the economy
2:03:41 is horrible. That is a perfect example of thermostatic opinion. And I’m not counting these
2:03:47 Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate to
2:03:53 continue in Iraq. By ’06, he’s toasted. We have a massive midterm election. And by ’08, we’re writing
2:03:57 books about 40 more years and how there’s never going to be a Republican in office ever again.
2:04:01 So things can change a lot in a very short period of time. I think also for me personally, maybe I’m
2:04:08 deluded, sort of the great man view of history. I think some of it, it’s in programming circles,
2:04:14 the term skills issue. I think somebody just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are,
2:04:19 how good you are as a politician. I maybe disagree with this. I’d love to see what you think.
2:04:23 I think if Obama, if you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep
2:04:29 winning. He would win 2016. He would win 2020. He would win this year 2024.
2:04:33 It’s possible, but I would flip it on you and I would say Obama would never be elected
2:04:36 if there were no term limits, because Bill Clinton would have still been president.
2:04:43 Well, those two, right. That’s two examples of exactly. They extremely skilled politicians
2:04:51 and somehow can appear like populists. Man, Bill Clinton was a force in his time,
2:04:55 and it’s honestly sad what’s happened to him. I was actually just talking with a friend the other
2:04:59 day. I’m like, I kind of don’t think that presidents should become president when they’re young,
2:05:04 because they live to see themselves become irrelevant. That must be really painful,
2:05:08 because I know what it takes to get there. Imagine being Clinton. I mean,
2:05:15 your entire legacy was destroyed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then imagine being Obama,
2:05:20 who in 2016 you could argue it’s a one-off and say that Trump is just, “Oh, Hillary was a bad
2:05:26 candidate,” but Michelle Barack Obama went so hard for Kamala Harris, and they just got blown
2:05:31 out in the popular vote. I mean, the Obama era officially ended with Donald Trump’s re-election
2:05:36 to the presidency in 2024, and that was a 20-year period where Obama was one of the most popular
2:05:40 central figures in American politics. But I want to return to what you’re saying,
2:05:45 because it is important. And by the way, I do not support term limits on American presidents.
2:05:50 Are you a fascist? Well, that would imply that I don’t believe in democracy. I actually do believe
2:05:55 in democracy, because I think the people, if they love their president, should be able to re-elect him.
2:06:02 I think FDR was amazing. I think that the term limit change was basically what happened is
2:06:07 is that Republicans and a lot of elite Democrats always wanted to speak against FDR,
2:06:12 but he was a God, so they couldn’t. So they waited until he died. And then after he died,
2:06:16 they were like, “Yeah, this whole third, fourth term, that can never happen again.”
2:06:21 And America didn’t really think that hard about it. They were like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” But,
2:06:26 I mean, it had immense consequences for American history. Clinton is the perfect example. I mean,
2:06:33 Bill Clinton left office even despite the Lewinsky bullshit. He had a 60% approval rating.
2:06:38 Okay? No way George W. Bush gets elected. Impossible. Clinton would have blown his
2:06:43 ass out. And imagine the consequences of that. We would have no Iraq. I mean, I’m not saying he
2:06:47 was a great man. We probably still would have had the financial crisis, and there’s still a lot of
2:06:51 bad stuff that would have happened, but he was a popular dude. And I wouldn’t say he had the best
2:06:58 judgment at times, presidentially, not personally, definitely not personally, but presidentially.
2:07:03 But I’m pretty confident we would have not gone into the Iraq war. And so that’s where it really
2:07:07 cost us. If you’re a left wing and you’re talking about Obama, yeah, I think Obama probably would
2:07:15 have won in 2016. Although it’s a counterfactual because Obama was never challenged in the same way
2:07:22 that MAGA was able to to the liberal consensus. Like Romney really ran this like awful campaign,
2:07:27 honestly, about cutting spending. It was very traditional. Republican was deeply unpopular.
2:07:33 The autopsy of that election was we actually need to be more pro immigration that literally was the
2:07:40 autopsy. But Trump understood the assignment. There are two people who I so deeply respect for
2:07:45 their political bets, Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. So one of the books that I recommended called
2:07:50 “The Unwinding” by George Packer, he actually talks about Peter Thiel there. This is in 2013.
2:07:56 And Thiel talks about, he was like, you know, whoever runs for office next, they don’t need to
2:08:01 run on an optimistic message. They need to run on a message that everything is fucked up and that
2:08:08 we need to fix. And if you think about that’s why Thiel’s endorsement of Trump with the American
2:08:14 carnage message is, I mean, it took, it was shocking, right, at the time. But he had that
2:08:19 fundamental insight that that’s what the American people wanted. Trump too comes out of an election
2:08:25 in 2012 where the literal GOP autopsy, the report produced by the party, says we need to be pro
2:08:32 mass immigration. What happens? Immediately after 2012, they start to go for mass immigrant,
2:08:37 basically they go for like these amnesty plans, the so-called gang of eight plan, Marco Rubio,
2:08:43 and all of this in 2013, it falls apart. But Republicans get punished by their base
2:08:49 in 2014. So Eric Cantor, who was the House majority leader, the number two Republican,
2:08:53 spent more on stake in his campaign than his primary opponent who successfully defeated him,
2:08:58 a guy named Dave Bratt. Dave Bratt kicked his ass on the issue of immigration and said that
2:09:03 Eric Cantor is pro amnesty. All of the forces were there. And then in 2015, Trump comes down the
2:09:08 escalator and he gives the message on immigration that the GOP base has been roaring and wanting
2:09:14 to hear now, but that nobody wanted to listen to them. And that was his fundamental insight.
2:09:21 That bet was a colossal and a titanic political bet at a time when all political ideology and
2:09:25 thought process would have said that you should come out on the other side, which is where
2:09:30 Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and all these other guys were effectively there in varying different
2:09:36 ways, like they were hawkish or whatever. But Trump had such a monopoly on that as an idea.
2:09:40 That’s why he wins the 2016 primary. And then paired with immigration,
2:09:46 a hard line position on immigration, is this American carnage idea that actually everything
2:09:54 is wrong. The American dream is gone. We will stop this American carnage. And I think American
2:09:58 carnage is one of the most important inaugural speeches ever given in American history. It’s
2:10:03 put it up against every single other speech. There’s nothing else like it. But that was
2:10:08 what the country wanted at the time. And that’s what great politicians are able to do is they’re
2:10:14 able to suss something out. That’s also why Peter Thiel is who he is, because he saw that in 2000.
2:10:20 Imagine what it takes to come out of the 2012 election and to be honestly totally contrarian
2:10:25 to the entire national mood and this entire theory of Obama-esque star politics and say,
2:10:28 no, you need somebody who runs on the opposite of that to win.
2:10:33 Well, we’ll never know. And I love this kind of Mike Tyson versus Muhammad Ali.
2:10:37 I still think I would have loved to see Obama versus Trump.
2:10:38 Me too. I agree.
2:10:43 And first of all, Obama versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down.
2:10:45 Well, yes, definitely.
2:10:54 I love how this is a boxing talk. Now, when 2016, Obama has a bunch of Iraq and Afghanistan.
2:10:56 He’s vulnerable, though. I’ll tell you why, DACA.
2:10:59 That’s what nobody ever talks about in the Obama-Trump thing.
2:11:03 Don’t forget, Obama takes his 2012 victory, basically says,
2:11:09 oh, the GOP even now agrees with me on immigration. And then he does DACA and legalizes X million
2:11:14 in a number of illegal immigrants who are here, who are brought here as children.
2:11:18 That also fundamentally changed the immigration consensus on the Republican side because they
2:11:23 were like, wait, holy shit, you can just do that because we don’t agree with that at all.
2:11:27 And that really ignited the base as well. So I’m not sure.
2:11:32 I mean, a moment I think about a lot with Trump, just like being able to unleash the rage of the
2:11:38 Republican bases. In the 2012 debate, Kandy Crowley was the moderator with Mitt Romney,
2:11:42 and she fact-checked him famously. This was when fact-checking was shocking in a president debate.
2:11:47 And she said something about Benghazi, and she was like, no, he did say that.
2:11:53 She corrected Romney on behalf of Obama. To this day, it’s questionable whether she was even right.
2:11:57 But, and Romney was just like, oh, he did. Okay. Trump would have been like, excuse me,
2:12:02 excuse me. Look at this woman. You know, he would have gone off. And I was like,
2:12:07 and I think about that moment because that’s what the Republican base wanted to hear.
2:12:11 But also it turns out America had a lot of festering feelings about the mainstream media
2:12:19 that it needed unleashed. And Trump was just this incredible vector to just blow up this system,
2:12:22 which I mean, if you ask me about optimism, that’s the thing I’m most optimistic about.
2:12:26 Yeah. But don’t you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on,
2:12:29 how to be anti-establishment correctly? I will not deny that he’s one of the most
2:12:34 talented politicians literally to ever play the game. And he is, I mean, just unbelievable,
2:12:39 rhetorical talent. Look, is it counterfactual? Would he be in more talented than Hillary? Yeah,
2:12:45 okay, no question. In terms of anybody would have been for that one. But at the same time,
2:12:50 all the signs were there. All the signs for the Trump victory and for the backlash against
2:12:56 Obamacism kind of as a political project, it all existed. Like I just laid the tea leaves out there
2:13:01 from 2012 to 2015, in retrospect, it’s the most predictable thing in the world that
2:13:04 Donald Trump would get elected. But it was crazy in the moment. I got to live through that,
2:13:10 which was really fun, like professionally. I think it’s unfortunate that he kind of
2:13:17 led Kamala Harris borrow his reputation. Oh, it’s, I mean, it’s like, you know better, dude,
2:13:24 you know, you defeated these people, this Clinton machine, you destroyed them. And it was awesome
2:13:30 in ’08. What is that? Why do you, why, why did he, like, he’s so much bigger and better than the
2:13:35 machine. I don’t get it. It’s interesting, right? It’s so weird, though. I just think, I think this
2:13:40 was a wake-up call. 2024 was a wake-up call, like the, the DNC machine doesn’t work. Absolutely. I
2:13:44 mean, there needs to be new blood, new, new candidate, new Obama-like candidates. Well,
2:13:47 I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s important, too, in terms of the process and the
2:13:53 way that things currently stand. The DNC actually rigged its entire primary system under Biden,
2:13:59 way to the, not to the benefit of Obama. So for example, you know how they moved away from the
2:14:04 Iowa caucuses, and they actually moved some other primaries and moved the calendar to reward
2:14:09 traditional states that vote much more in line with the Democratic establishment. So the story
2:14:13 of Barack Obama is one that not many, actually, probably a lot of young people today don’t even
2:14:19 remember how it happened. In 2008, Obama was the underdog, right? And actually, here’s the critical
2:14:24 thing. Obama was losing with black people. Why? Black Democrats simply did not believe that white
2:14:30 people would vote for a black guy. So Barack Obama goes to where this white state, Iowa, all in on
2:14:37 the Iowa caucuses and shocks the world by winning the Iowa caucuses. Overnight, there’s a shift in
2:14:41 public opinion amongst the black population in South Carolina that says, “Oh, shit, he actually
2:14:45 could win.” And it comes out and you win South Carolina. And that’s basically was near the death
2:14:50 knell for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The problem is by moving South Carolina up and by
2:14:55 making it first, along with other more pro establishment friendly places, what do we do?
2:15:00 We make it so that Barack Obama could never happen again. We make it so that an older,
2:15:06 you know, base of Democratic Party voters who listens to the elites can never have their
2:15:11 assumptions challenged. And that’s one of the worst things Joe Biden did. You know,
2:15:15 I talked about his arrogance. He was so arrogant, he changed the freaking primary system. He was
2:15:22 so arrogant, he refused to do a debate. I mean, imagine history. How lucky are we, honestly,
2:15:27 that Joe Biden agreed to do that debate with Donald Trump early? And again, that was his arrogance.
2:15:34 I think we’re so lucky for it. Because if we hadn’t gotten, we got to understand as a country
2:15:40 how cooked he was and how fake everything was behind the scenes in front of all of our eyes.
2:15:43 And they tried for three straight years to make sure that that would never happen.
2:15:48 So, I mean, it’s still such a crime, honestly, against the American people.
2:15:52 I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to for three hours. And that’s why
2:16:00 bring up Obama, because he’s probably the number one person on the left. I would like
2:16:07 to hear analyze what happened in this election and what happened to the United States of America
2:16:12 over the past 20 plus years. I can’t imagine anybody else. Look, if anybody could do it,
2:16:16 it would be you. But there are layers upon layers with that man. I would love to actually sit with
2:16:21 a talk with him, for real. I think it’s fair to say that we talked about the great man
2:16:29 view of history. I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for
2:16:32 sure psychopaths. Not for sure. There are many who are good people. Harry Truman.
2:16:35 You’re like some of my best friends. Harry Truman.
2:16:43 Some, I assume, are good people. To be fair, though, most of the good ones are accidents
2:16:46 like Harry Truman. He never would have gotten himself elected. He was a great dude.
2:16:49 How do you know he was a great dude? David McCullough book. I highly recommend it.
2:16:53 Everybody should read it. Truman loved his wife. I think that’s really awesome. I love
2:16:59 when politicians love their wife. It’s so rare. He adored his wife. He adored his daughter,
2:17:05 spent time with them. He made family life a priority. He had really good small town judgment
2:17:09 that he would apply to foreign affairs. He was just a very well-considered,
2:17:16 very stand-up man. I so appreciate that about him. Another one is John Adams. I love and
2:17:21 revere John Adams. He’s my favorite founding father. Him and John Quincy, they don’t get nearly
2:17:27 enough of their due. They were some of the most intelligent, well-considered. They were family
2:17:33 men. The love, the relationship between John and Abigail Adams is literally legendary. I think
2:17:38 it’s amazing, especially in the context of the 1700s, the way that he would take her counsel
2:17:45 and into conversations and her own ability. She would sit there and go toe-to-toe as much with
2:17:51 Thomas Jefferson. There are some who are great, who are really, really good presidents, who have
2:17:56 good judgment and who are really good people and really think deeply about the world and have really
2:18:01 cool personal lives. There’s also the vast majority of them, especially in the, I would say,
2:18:06 especially in the modern era and where the price of the presidency extracts everything that you have.
2:18:12 You have to be able to, you have to be willing to give everything. It’s just, that’s not a price
2:18:18 that most people want to pay. Is it possible that some of the people who you think are sociopaths
2:18:23 and politics are, in fact, really good people and some of the people you think are good,
2:18:28 like Truman and Adams are actually sociopaths? Definitely. I mean, I could just be reading
2:18:34 the wrong books, right? Yeah, that’s right. It sounds like you’re, you just read some really
2:18:39 compelling biographies. Well, okay, to be fair, I don’t base this on one book. I read a lot of them,
2:18:44 and I’ll get like a, for example, I’ve read books about LBJ. You wouldn’t know any of his foibles,
2:18:48 but then you find out that they’re written by his friend or, you know, it was written by,
2:18:54 and I read the truth. I really worry about this kind of general, especially now the sense of the
2:19:02 anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. Now, well, the reason I worry
2:19:13 about that is it feels true. Yeah. So it’s, you can fall into this bubble of beliefs where every
2:19:18 politician is a sociopath, and because of that- It can be a self-reinforced. Self-reinforced.
2:19:22 Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I agree, by the way, we do need to dramatically change it,
2:19:26 but the problem is, is that, you know, people vote with their eyeballs and with their interests,
2:19:32 and people love, like to, you know, dissect people’s personal lives. And one of the reasons why you
2:19:37 were probably more likely in the pre-modern era to get a “good people” is they were not
2:19:41 subject to the level of scrutiny and to the insanity of the process that you are currently.
2:19:46 Like I just said about you, I mean, theoretically, you could run for president and you would just
2:19:51 get your nomination at the convention. It’s only two months to election day. That’s not so bad.
2:19:56 But, you know, you run for president today. You got your ass on the road for two years and then
2:20:01 two years before that, and then you have to run the damn government. So the price is so
2:20:08 extraordinarily high. I also think that, oh God, and just Washington is a system. It will burn you.
2:20:15 It will just, it will extract absolutely everything that you can give it. And at the end of the day,
2:20:19 you know, I mean, everyone always talks about this. It’s hilarious. How Trump is the only
2:20:24 president not to age in office. I think, I actually think it’s crazy. Like when you look
2:20:27 at the photos of how he actually looks better today than he did whenever he went into the office,
2:20:34 that’s amazing. And it actually says a lot about how his mind works. I think Trump is pure id.
2:20:39 Like, I think he’s, having observed him a little bit, and, you know, both at the White House and
2:20:43 having interviewed him, it’s pure just like, it’s calculating, but it’s also pure id,
2:20:47 which is very interesting. The ones who are the thinkers, guys like Obama and others who are really
2:20:53 in their heads, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. It will, they will, I mean, apparently Obama would
2:20:58 only sleep four hours a night, you know. Yeah, add like some empathy on top of that. It’s gonna
2:21:03 destroy you. It will kill you, man. All right. Speaking about the dirty game of politics, several
2:21:09 people, different people, told me that of everyone they have ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is
2:21:14 the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that?
2:21:17 In the modern era? Yeah, I think that’s fair. In the last 25 years, definitely.
2:21:23 Let’s think about it. Number one is longevity. So she’s had the ability to control the caucus
2:21:28 for a long period of time. So that’s impressive, because as I just laid out with Clinton, Obama,
2:21:33 these figures come and they go, but over 25, almost a year period, you’ve been at the very top
2:21:38 in the center of American politics. The other case I would be is that in this modern era has
2:21:43 been defined by access to money. She’s one of the greatest fundraisers in Democratic Party history.
2:21:49 And again, consistently, Obama, Kamala, all those people come and go, but she’s always had a very
2:21:55 central understanding of the ability to fundraise, to cultivate good relationships with Democratic
2:22:00 Party elites all across the country, use that money and dole it out to her caucus. She’s also
2:22:05 was really good at making sure that legislation that came to the floor actually had the votes to
2:22:11 do so. She ran an extremely well ordered process in the House of Representatives, one in which
2:22:17 you were able to reconcile like problems within her office. It didn’t usually go public. And then
2:22:22 it would make it to the floor and it would pass so that there will be no general like media frenzy.
2:22:27 And you know, Democrats in disarray or any of that put that on display with the Republicans
2:22:32 and we’ve had multiple speakers all resign or get fired in a 16 year period. That’s pretty
2:22:37 remarkable. Basically ever since John Boehner decided to leave in what was that 2012, I forget
2:22:42 the exact year. My point is that if you compare her record to the longevity on the Republican side,
2:22:48 it is astounding. The other interesting thing is that she also has pulled off one of the real
2:22:53 tests of political power is can you rule even when you don’t have the title anymore? So she gave up
2:22:58 the leader position to Hakeem Jeffries, but everybody knows she pulled Joe Biden out of the
2:23:03 race. That’s pretty interesting, right? So she’s a technically just a backbencher, nobody member
2:23:08 of Congress, but we all know that’s bullshit. So that’s that’s actually a very important case
2:23:14 of political power is can you rule without the title? And if you can, then you truly are powerful.
2:23:20 So I would make a good case for her. She’s done a lot of remarkable stuff for her party. I will
2:23:25 say they played Trump like a fiddle man last time around. They were able to. I mean, they really
2:23:32 got him. One of the craziest elements that I covered was during the Trump basically threatened
2:23:36 to shut down the government and actually did shut down the government for a period of time over
2:23:42 a dispute over border wall funding and Pelosi and Schumer, despite like genuine mass hysteria
2:23:47 in the Democratic Party, with even some people who were willing to try and to strike a deal,
2:23:55 never wavered and actually basically won and forced Trump to back down. Not a lot of MAGA people
2:23:59 want to admit it, but that was honestly really embarrassing for the Trump administration at
2:24:04 the time. And yeah, I mean, the amount of discipline that it took for her and Chuck,
2:24:09 to a lesser extent, but for the two of them to pull that off, it was honestly impressive
2:24:13 that they were able to do that. Even when the president has so much political power and it
2:24:19 literally shut down the government over it. Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised one billion
2:24:26 dollars. Insane. But I guess the conclusion is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it?
2:24:31 I don’t think money matters that much. I think Donald Trump has proven to us twice that you can
2:24:38 win an underdog campaign through earned media. And I don’t think that paid advertisement moves the
2:24:44 needle that much. Now, don’t notice, I didn’t say it doesn’t matter. But am I buying $425,000
2:24:49 a day spots on the Vegas sphere? No, we’re not doing that. Are we building? Okay, as people who do
2:24:56 this for a living, how do you even spend $100,000 to build a set for one interview? This is the
2:25:01 Call Her Daddy thing. Okay. How’s that possible? So think about the dollar per hour cost. That’s
2:25:06 like running a jet airplane in terms of what they did. You know what I want to note behind the scenes?
2:25:14 I’m not good with this. I get really frustrated and I shouldn’t. But dealing with PR and comms people
2:25:19 can sometimes break my soul. It’s maddening. Can we not talk about this? We need to pull them in
2:25:25 to 12 p.m. and you’re like, well, that’s only 30 minutes. Yeah, that but there’s stuff like
2:25:31 where to put the camera. It’s not that I don’t, it’s not actually hypothetically, I don’t even
2:25:37 disagree with any of the suggestions or this, but it’s like the micromanagement. Just the micromanagement
2:25:44 and the politeness, but the fake politeness. And it just makes me feel like, I think like,
2:25:49 what would Kubrick do? Would he murder all of them right now? He would just ban them
2:25:55 after he became Stanley Kubrick, but he dealt with it for a while. But I just went on a Kubrick
2:26:01 binge. Man, he was awesome. I watched that World War I movie of his, the one from the 50s. That is
2:26:05 such an underrated film. I feel like people don’t, whatever, we’ll get past.
2:26:15 But she, yeah, I guess you paid for 100 grand, bro. 100 and the Oprah thing. She paid for the
2:26:19 interviews. So, you know, that’s another one. I do this for a living. And as you can tell,
2:26:24 I’m a very cynical person. I did not even know that celebrities got paid for their endorsements.
2:26:30 I could never have imagined a universe where Oprah Winfrey has paid $1 million to endorse Kamala
2:26:35 Harris. I’m like, first of all, you’re a billionaire. Second, I thought you do this because
2:26:42 you believe. No, I think to be fair, I think the million just helps do the thing you would like
2:26:47 to do. It’s a nudge because I don’t think any celebrity would endorse. They’re not doing it
2:26:52 because of the money, but you should just do it for free. I can’t even believe that you’re doing
2:26:57 this for money. I mean, and the fact, what was it, Alanis Morissette? You know how they were able,
2:27:01 they had to cut her because they didn’t have the funds to pay her. I’m like, first of all,
2:27:05 if you believe you should just play for free. But second, again, as a person who is deeply
2:27:11 cynical, I still am genuinely shook that we are paying celebrities for their endorsements.
2:27:15 Yes, really fucked up. That’s insane. Why do you think people on the left
2:27:21 who are actually in the political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour?
2:27:27 That’s a great question. So let me just say, probably most of the people I’ve talked to on
2:27:34 this podcast are left-wing or have been for a long time. They just don’t sort of out and say it.
2:27:40 Like most scientists are left-wing. Most sort of vaguely political people are
2:27:45 a left-wing that I’ve talked to. But the closer you get to the actual political arena,
2:27:54 and I’ve tried really hard, I had a bunch of people with the highest profile people,
2:27:58 say 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I’m used to that, so welcome.
2:28:08 I just can’t imagine a conversation with Kamala, or with Joe Biden,
2:28:19 or AOC, or Obama, that’s of any quality at all, shows any kind of humanity of the person,
2:28:25 the genius of the person, the interesting nuance of the person in like 30 minutes.
2:28:33 I don’t know. Maybe if there’s people that are extremely skilled that can do that, you just can’t.
2:28:37 You should be optimistic because a huge narrative out of this election is that the
2:28:41 Democrats massively fucked up by not coming on this show or a broken show. So I actually,
2:28:46 fundamentally, number one, that’s going to change dramatically. So be optimistic and keep pushing.
2:28:51 But two is, this is a good segue actually, is I’ve been thinking a lot about, I know a lot of
2:28:55 people who listen to this show, who are in tech and may have some influence on the admin. So this
2:29:00 is kind of, this is something I want people to take really seriously. I was a White House
2:29:05 correspondent for The Daily Caller. It’s a conservative outlet in Washington during the
2:29:12 Trump years. And the most important thing I learned from that was that under the White House
2:29:17 Correspondents Association, the way that the media cartel has everything set up for access,
2:29:24 for press, to the president is fundamentally broken, anti-American, and bad for actual democracy.
2:29:29 So let me lay this out at a very mechanical level because nobody knows this. And I was a
2:29:33 former White House Correspondents Association member. So anybody who says I’m full of shit,
2:29:38 I was there. For example, number one, all the seats in the briefing room, those seats are assigned
2:29:42 by the White House Correspondents Association, not by the White House itself. The White House
2:29:48 Correspondents Association requires you to apply for a seat, right? That adjudication process can
2:29:53 take literally years for bylaws, elections, and all these things to do. This means that they can
2:29:59 slow roll the entrance of new media online outlets who are allowed into the room. The reason it really
2:30:03 matters not having a seat is if you don’t have a seat, you have to get there early and stand in
2:30:07 the wings like I used to and raise your hand like this and just hope and pray that the press secretary
2:30:11 can see it’s extremely inconvenient. I’m talking I have to get there hours early at a chance during
2:30:18 a 15 minute briefing. So one of the things is that Trump has is he owes a huge part of his election
2:30:24 to coming on podcasts and to new media. Now, because of that, it’s really important that the
2:30:29 White House Correspondents Association, which is a literal guild cartel that keeps people out of
2:30:36 the White House and credentials itself and creates this opaque mechanism through which they control
2:30:42 access to asking the press secretary questions is destroyed. And there are a lot of different ways
2:30:48 you can do this because what nobody gets to is that all of these rules are unofficial. So for
2:30:52 example, they’re just traditions. The White House is like, yeah, it’s our building, but you guys
2:30:57 figure it out, right? Because that’s a longstanding tradition. Let me give you another insane tradition
2:31:01 that currently exists in the White House. The Associated Press, the White Press Secretary or
2:31:07 the Associated Press Correspondent gets to start the briefing. Traditionally, they get the first
2:31:11 question. They also get to end the briefing when they think it’s been enough time. They’re like,
2:31:16 okay, cringe up here. Thank you. And that calls the briefing over. You’re not even the White
2:31:21 House Correspondents Association. You literally just happen to work for the Associated Press.
2:31:27 Why? Why do we allow that to happen? So number one, stop doing that. To their credit, the Trump
2:31:31 people didn’t really do that, but it’s a longstanding tradition. The other thing is that
2:31:36 what nobody gets either is that the first row is all television networks for logistical reasons
2:31:39 so that they can do their little standups with their mic and say, you know, I’m reporting longer
2:31:46 than this. Well, what people don’t seem to know is that all the television networks are basically
2:31:51 going to ask some version of the same question. The reason they do that is because they need
2:31:56 a clip of their correspondent going after the White House Press Secretary all out,
2:32:02 Robert Mueller, like whenever I was there. So you get the same goddamn version of the stupid
2:32:07 political questions over and over again. The briefing room is designed for traditional media
2:32:11 and they have all the access in the world. So in an election where you owe your victory,
2:32:17 to at least in part to new media and recognizing the changing landscape, you need to change the
2:32:24 conduit of information to the American people. And in an election, I don’t know if you saw this,
2:32:30 but election night coverage on cable news was down 25%. Just in four years, 25%. That’s astounding.
2:32:38 Cable news had a monopoly on election night for my entire lifetime. And yet my show had record
2:32:43 ratings that night. And look, I’m a small slice of the puzzle here. We’ve got Candace Owens,
2:32:48 Patrick Bette David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT, all these other people. From what I understand,
2:32:52 all of us blew it out that night because millions of Americans watching on YouTube,
2:32:58 we even partnered with some decision desk HQ. So we had live data. We could make state calls.
2:33:03 And we’re just a silly little YouTube show. My point, though, is that in an election where the
2:33:08 vast majority of Americans are the age of 55, are listening to podcasts, consuming new media,
2:33:13 and are not watching cable news, where the median age of CNN, which is the youngest viewership,
2:33:21 is 68. 68 is the median. So statistically, what does that tell us? There’s a decent number
2:33:28 of people who are watching CNN who are in their 80s and in their 90s. Yeah, I’m glad you brought up
2:33:33 Alex, because he deserves a tremendous shout out, Alex Brucewitz. He was the pioneer of the
2:33:39 podcast strategy for the Donald J. Trump campaign. He got on your show. He was able to get on Andrew
2:33:45 Schultz’s show, Rogan. He was the internal force that pushed a lot of this. My personal hope
2:33:49 is that somebody like Alex is elevated in the traditional White House bureaucracy,
2:33:54 that the number of credentials that are issued to these mainstream media outlets is cut, and there
2:33:59 is a new lottery process put in place where people with large audiences are invited. And
2:34:04 I also want to make a case here for why I think it’s really important for people like you and
2:34:09 others who don’t have as much traditional media experience to comment and practice some capital
2:34:16 J journalism, because it will sharpen you, too, giving you access in that pressure cooker environment
2:34:22 and having to really sit there and spar a little bit with a public official and not have as long
2:34:28 necessarily as you’re used to. It really hones your news media skills, your news gathering skills,
2:34:32 and it will make you a better interviewer in the long run. Because a lot of the things that I have
2:34:36 learned have just been through osmosis. I’ve just lived in DC. I’ve been so lucky. I’ve had a lot of
2:34:42 cool jobs, and I’ve just been able to experience a lot of this stuff. So I’m really hoping that people
2:34:47 who are listening to this, who may have some influence or even the viewership, if you want to,
2:34:53 you know, reach out to them and all them. This is a very easily changeable problem. It’s a cartel
2:34:58 which has no official power. It’s all power by tradition, and it needs to be blown up. It has,
2:35:03 it does not serve America’s interests to have 58 seats, I think, in the White House press briefing
2:35:10 room to people who have audiences of like five. It just makes absolutely zero workspace, seats,
2:35:16 access credentials, and also credentials that are issued to press and to other like new media
2:35:23 journalists at major events should take precedence. Because it’s not even about rewarding the creator.
2:35:30 The American people are here. You need to meet them. That’s your job. And I’ll just end with a
2:35:35 historical thing. Barack Obama shocked the White House press corps in 2009 because he took a question
2:35:42 from the Huffington Post. A brand new blog, but they were stunned because he knew he said these
2:35:47 blog people, they went all in for me, and I got to reward them. So there’s long-standing precedence
2:35:52 of this. They’ll bitch and they’ll moan, they’ll be upset, but it’s their fault, you know, that they
2:35:58 don’t have as much credibility. And it’s incumbent upon the White House, which serves the public,
2:36:02 to actually meet them where they are. So I really hope that at least some of this is
2:36:07 implemented inside of them. Yeah, if you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually
2:36:13 enable greater journalism, frankly, with the capitalist J, because actually in a long form
2:36:19 is when you can do better journalism from even just the politician perspective. You can disagree,
2:36:23 you can get criticized, because you can defend yourself. I had an idea, actually. Tell me what
2:36:28 you think. I think a really cool format would be there’s a room right near the press briefing room
2:36:32 called the Roosevelt Room. Beautiful room, by the way. It’s awesome. It has the Medal of Honor
2:36:36 for Teddy Roosevelt, and it has a portrait of him and a portrait of FDR. It’s one of my favorite
2:36:41 rooms in the White House. It’s so cool. And so my idea would be in the Roosevelt Room, which
2:36:48 traditionally used for press briefings and stuff, is like you, as the press secretary,
2:36:52 sit there. I think there’s like 12 seats, something like that. And you set it all up and you have,
2:36:56 let’s say, sure microphones like this. And that person that secretary is going to commit to being
2:37:01 there for like two hours. And new media people can sit around the room. All this is being streamed
2:37:06 live, by the way, just like the White House press briefing room. But the expectation is that
2:37:10 the type of questions have to be substantive. Obviously, nothing is off limits. You should
2:37:15 never ever, you know, accept I’m not going to ask about this, especially as a journalist,
2:37:18 you can’t do that. Every time they’re like, Hey, please don’t ask about this. It’s like,
2:37:23 actually, that’s probably one thing you should ask about. But my point being that the expectation
2:37:28 is that there’s no interference on the White House side, but that the format itself will lend
2:37:33 exactly to what you’re saying to allow people to explain. And again, in a media era where we need
2:37:41 to trust the consumer, like my show is routinely over two hours long, on cable television, on cable
2:37:46 television, you know, the Tucker Carlson program, whenever it was on Fox News, without commercial
2:37:52 breaks was about 42, 43 minutes, something like that of runtime. So I’m speaking for almost triple
2:37:59 what that is on a regular basis. The point is, is that millions are willing to sit and to listen,
2:38:04 but you just have to meet them where they are. So I would really hope that a format like that,
2:38:08 like a streamer briefing or something like that, I think, I think it’s, look, I know they would
2:38:13 dunk on it endlessly, but I think it could work. Yeah, I think the incentives are different. I
2:38:20 think it works because you don’t have to, like you saw good, don’t have to signal to the other
2:38:23 journalists that you’re part of the clique. Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up because
2:38:27 that was another lesson I learned. I go, oh, none of you are asking important questions for the
2:38:31 people. You’re asking questions because you all hang out with each other. And you’re like, oh,
2:38:38 wait, so this entire thing is a self-reinforcing guild to impress each other at cocktail parties
2:38:43 and not to actually ask anything interesting. I remember people were so mad at me because
2:38:50 this was 2018 or maybe 2017. And I said, do you think that Kim Jong-un is sincere
2:38:54 in his willingness to meet with you? Something like that to that effect.
2:38:58 They were furious because I didn’t ask about some bullshit political
2:39:04 controversy that was happening at the time. So in the historical legacy, what was more important?
2:39:11 The Mueller question or Donald Trump breaking 50 years or whatever of tradition with America’s
2:39:15 relationship with North Korea and meeting him in Singapore and basically resetting
2:39:19 that relationship for all time. As you can tell, I read a lot of book. I like to take the long
2:39:26 view. Every time I would ask a question, I go, okay, when the future Robert Caro is writing books
2:39:30 and he sees, he’s reading the transcript of the White House press briefing, you don’t even know
2:39:33 who this kid is. He goes, that was a pretty good question right there. That’s pretty relevant.
2:39:37 You got to think about all the bullshit that gets left on the cutting room floor.
2:39:44 I love that view of journalism actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book.
2:39:48 I just want a quote of what the president said to something that I asked in the book.
2:39:52 I would be happy. I would die happy with that. If you told me that when I’m like a 90-year-old
2:39:59 man, I’d be like, man, that means I succeeded. When the AI’s write the history of human civilization.
2:40:04 One of the things I continuously learned from you when looking back through history
2:40:10 is how crazy American politics has been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot
2:40:17 better about the current day. It should. Corruption, just the divisiveness also.
2:40:25 Just the incentive for stealing elections at all levels of government and direct stealing
2:40:30 and indirect stealing, all kinds of stuff. Is there stuff that jumps out to mind throughout
2:40:39 history that’s just like the craziest corruptions or stealing of elections that come to mind?
2:40:45 I’ll give the micro and the macro. My favorite example is Robert Caro, who I’ve probably talked
2:40:49 about him a lot. God bless you, Robert. I hope you live to write your last book because we really
2:40:57 need that from you. Robert came to Texas. He only intended on writing three books about Lyndon
2:41:01 Johnson. He’s currently completed four and he’s on his fifth. It’s taken him over 40 years to
2:41:07 write those. One of the reasons is he just kept uncovering so much stuff. One of them
2:41:13 is book two, means of ascent. He never intended to write it, but as he began to investigate
2:41:20 Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election, he realizes in real time how rigged and stolen it was.
2:41:27 I often tell people, “What if I told you that we lived in the most secure election period
2:41:32 in modern history?” They wouldn’t believe it. But if you read through that shit, I’m talking
2:41:39 about bags of cash, millions of dollars, literal stuffed ballot boxes. It’s great to be back here
2:41:45 in Texas because I always think about that place down in Zapata and Star County. I’m talking basically
2:41:53 Mexico where these dons were in power in the 1940s and they would literally stuff the ballot boxes
2:41:57 with the rolls and they wouldn’t even allow people to come and vote. They just checkmarked it all for
2:42:04 you based upon the amount that he paid. Means of ascent is the painstaking detail of exactly how
2:42:10 Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 Senate election. Nothing like that, as far as I know, is still
2:42:17 happening. Macro, we can talk about the 1876 election. Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the closest
2:42:21 elections in modern history. It was one of those that got kicked with House of Representatives.
2:42:27 That was an insane, insane time. The corrupt bargain that was struck to basically end reconstruction
2:42:31 and federal occupation of the South. And of course, the amount of wheeling and dealing
2:42:37 that happened inside of that was absolutely bonkers and nuts. That was what an actual
2:42:42 stolen election looks like. Just so people know. So on a micro and a macro, yeah, that’s what it
2:42:48 really looks like. And so, look, I understand where people are coming from. Also, let’s do what?
2:42:54 1960, that was pretty wild. I mean, in 1960, there was all those allegations about Illinois going for
2:43:00 Kennedy. If you look at the actual vote totals of Kennedy Nixon, wow, I mean, it’s such an
2:43:05 insanely close presidential election. And even though the electoral college victory looks a
2:43:11 little bit differently, Nixon would openly talk about, he’s like, oh, Joe Kennedy rigged Illinois
2:43:16 for his boy. And he’d be like, and we didn’t even have a chance in Texas with Lyndon pulling,
2:43:22 you know, like Lyndon or Lyndon stuffing the ballot boxes down there. So, and this is open
2:43:27 on the like, they openly admit this stuff, they talk about it. So actually, there’s a funny story.
2:43:38 LBJ lost is, I think it’s 1941 Senate primary. And it’s because that his opponent, Papio Daniel,
2:43:43 actually outstole Lyndon. So they’re both corrupt. But Papio Daniel stuffed the ballot box
2:43:50 in like the fifth day of the seventh days to count the votes. And FDR loved LBJ. And it’s
2:43:57 interesting, right? FDR recognized Johnson’s, his talent. And he goes, Lyndon, you, you know,
2:44:02 in New York, we sit on the ballot boxes till we count them, you know, because he’s admitting
2:44:08 that he, you know, you know, participated in a lot of this stuff. So this high level chicanery
2:44:13 of stolen elections is actually an American pastime that we luckily have moved on from.
2:44:20 And quite a lot of people do not know the exact intricate details of how wild it was back in the
2:44:24 day. Yeah, it’s actually one of the things, it’s harder to pull off a bunch of bullshit with all
2:44:29 these cameras everywhere. No. Transparency to lack of cash, banking regulations, there’s a variety
2:44:35 of reasons. But yeah. So that said, let’s talk about the 2020 election. It seems like forever ago.
2:44:42 Do you think it was rigged the way that Trump claimed? No. And was it rigged in other ways?
2:44:48 This is the problem with language like rigged. And by the way, when I interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy,
2:44:51 you said the exact same thing. So for all the MAGA people who are going to get mad at me,
2:44:59 Vivek agrees, all right? And if, okay, I have observed, and I’m going to put my analysts hat
2:45:06 on, there are two theories of stop the steal. One I call low IQ stop the steal and one I call
2:45:11 high IQ stop the steal. Low IQ stop the steal is basically what Donald Trump has advocated,
2:45:18 where the, you know, Dominion voting machines and bamboo ballots and Venezuela and Sidney Powell
2:45:21 and all the people involved basically got indicted by the state of Georgia. I’m not saying that
2:45:26 was correct. I’m just like, that’s what that actually looked like. Rudy Giuliani, et cetera.
2:45:32 High IQ stop the steal is basically, actually, I mean, these are not illegitimate arguments.
2:45:39 The school of thought is it was illegitimate for the state of Pennsylvania and other swing
2:45:45 states to change the mail in balloting laws as a response to COVID, which enabled millions of
2:45:50 people more to vote that wouldn’t have and that those change in regulations became enough to
2:45:55 swing the election. I actually think that that is true. Now, would you say that that’s rigged?
2:45:59 That’s a very important question, because we’re talking about a Republican state legislature
2:46:03 and Republican state Supreme Court, right? The two that actually ruled on this question.
2:46:07 So could you say that it was rigged by the Democrats to do that? Another problem with
2:46:13 that theory is that while you can say that that’s unfair to change the rules last time around,
2:46:17 you can also understand it to a certain extent. And I’m not justifying it. I’m just giving you
2:46:24 an example. So for example, after the hurricane hit North Carolina, Republican officials were
2:46:28 like, Hey, we need to make sure that these people who had Western North Carolina who were affected
2:46:32 by the hurricane could still be able to have access to the ballot box. And people were like, Oh,
2:46:36 so you’re saying in an extraordinary circumstance that you should change voting, right? You know,
2:46:42 access and regularity to make sure that people have access. So my point is, you can see the logic
2:46:48 through which this happened. And the high IQ version is basically the one that was adopted
2:46:54 by Josh Hawley whenever he voted against certification. He said that the the Pennsylvania
2:46:59 particularly election law and that those changes were unfair and led to the quote unquote rigging
2:47:04 of the election against Donald Trump. Now there’s an even higher IQ galaxy brain stop the steal.
2:47:10 Galaxy brain stop the steal is one that you saw with great love and respect, my friend JD Vance
2:47:17 at his debate with Tim Walsh when Tim Walsh asked him, what did he say? He said, did Donald Trump
2:47:23 win the 2020 election? He’s like, Tim, focused on the future. And then he started talking about
2:47:28 censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you take a look at the Joe Rogan interview,
2:47:32 Rogan actually asked JD this, he’s like, What do you mean you in the election was some version
2:47:37 of that? And JD was like, Well, what I get really frustrated by is people will bring up all these
2:47:43 insane conspiracy theories. But they ignore that the media censored the Hunter Biden laptop story
2:47:49 and that big tech had its finger on the thumb for the Democrats. Now that is empirically true.
2:47:54 Okay, that is true, right? Now, would you say that that’s rigged? I’m not going to use that word,
2:47:58 because that’s a very different word. Now, would you say that that’s unfair? Yeah, I think it’s
2:48:04 unfair. So there’s another, there’s a lot of MAGA folks picked up on this one. There was a Time
2:48:09 Magazine article in 2020 that’s very famous in their crowd called, you know, the, the, it was
2:48:14 like the fight to fortify the election. And it was about all of these institutions that put their
2:48:21 fingers on the scale for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. So I will put it this way, was Donald Trump
2:48:29 up against the Titanic forces of billionaires, tech censorship, and elite institutions who
2:48:37 all did absolute damnedest to defeat him in 2020. Yes, that is true. And in a sense,
2:48:43 the galaxy brain case is the only one of those, which I think is truly legitimate.
2:48:49 And I’m not going to put it off the table, but this is the problem. That’s not what Trump means.
2:48:53 You know, Trump, Trump, by the way, will never tell you what I just told you, right?
2:48:59 JD will, if you go and you ask any of these Republican politicians when they’re challenged
2:49:04 on it and they don’t want to say that Trump lost a 2020 election, they’ll give the, the galaxy brain
2:49:10 case that I just gave. And again, I don’t think it’s wrong, but it’s like, guys, that’s not what he
2:49:15 means when he says it. And that’s the important parsing of the case, right? So first at a high level,
2:49:20 Trump or otherwise, I don’t like anyone who winds when they lose, period. Yeah. Although he did
2:49:24 tell you he lost, you noticed that? That’s the only time he’s ever said it, ever. You’re famous,
2:49:31 you’re in history for that one. Lost by a whisker. Yeah. Lost by a whisker. I mean, there is a case
2:49:36 to be made that he was joking. I don’t know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with
2:49:42 humor where sometimes it’s sarcasm, sometimes not. Much easier to showcase in a three hour
2:49:48 interview, I’ll say. Good call. Go ahead. I couldn’t even like play with that when you have 40 minutes.
2:49:54 I know, bro. You’re like, you know, I could do just 40 minutes on weaving alone.
2:49:59 For your style, it doesn’t work. And I can tell you how the way I interview politicians is I just
2:50:04 do pure policy. So when I, the first time I interviewed Trump, I compiled a list of 15 subjects,
2:50:09 me and my editor, Vince Collinier, shout out to Vince, and the two of us sat in an office,
2:50:13 and then we had questions by priority in each category. And if we felt like we were running
2:50:17 short on time, we would move around those different ones. But that was purely he’s the
2:50:22 president, we’re asking him for his opinions on an immigration bill or whatever. For what you do,
2:50:28 it’s impossible to do it for him. Yeah, I just want to say that thank you for everybody involved,
2:50:32 for making my conversation with Donald Trump possible. But I’ve learned a lot from that that
2:50:41 I just, if I’m told that all I have is 40 minutes, I’m very politely sparing in that case,
2:50:46 Donald Trump, the 40 minutes and just walking away. Because I don’t think I can do a good job.
2:50:51 I think that is the correct decision on your part. And I also would encourage you to have
2:50:57 the confidence at this point that you are in a position of something that we call in the business
2:51:03 the ability to compel the interview. And to compel means to be able to bring somebody else to you
2:51:08 and not the other way around. And I think that you and Rogan and a few others are in that very
2:51:13 unique position. And I would really encourage you guys to stick to your guns on things that make
2:51:19 you feel comfortable. Because those of us in news, we will always negotiate. We’re willing to do
2:51:23 short form because we’re asking about policy. But for the style that you’ve helped popularize,
2:51:27 and I think that you’re uniquely talented and good at, that’s very important not to compromise on.
2:51:31 So thank you for saying those words. And that’s not just in the interest of journalism and the
2:51:34 interest of conversation. It’s the interest of the guests as well.
2:51:35 Yeah, absolutely.
2:51:36 To bring out the best in them.
2:51:40 Yeah. I mean, I would feel really added to service. And I would feel like people would not get a
2:51:46 unique understanding of my own thought process and my backstory if I was not able to sit here for
2:51:52 literally hours and to explain in deep detail how I think about the world. Not that anyone cares
2:51:58 that much. But I hope all I can do is I hope it’s helpful. I want to help people think.
2:52:03 Because when I was growing, I was growing up not far from here, 90 minutes from here,
2:52:09 in College Station, I felt very uniquely closed off from the world. And I found the world through
2:52:15 books and books saved my life. They’ve many, so many different times. And I hope to encourage that
2:52:20 in other people. I really, no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter how busy you
2:52:25 are, you have some time to either sit down with a book or put on an audio book. And you can transport
2:52:31 yourself into a different world. It’s so important. And that’s something that your show really helps
2:52:35 me with too. I love listening to your show whenever, sometimes when I’m too into politics and I need
2:52:38 to listen to something, I’ll listen to that Mayan historian guy. I love stuff like that.
2:52:43 Absolutely. I’ve been a deep dive on Jenkins Kahn, reading Jenkins Kahn and then making
2:52:50 the modern world. Yeah, Jack Weatherford. Yeah, he’s coming on. Is he? Yeah. Amazing. And again,
2:52:56 shout out to Dan Carlin. The Goat, the OG. Dan, I’ve never met you before. I would love to
2:53:00 correspond at some point. I love you so much. You changed my life, man. I met him once before
2:53:05 and it felt… I listened to your interview with him. Oh, Starstruck. Yeah. Very, very Starstruck.
2:53:10 And he means you’re so much. Painful attainment. If I’ve listened to that Mayan… I think his
2:53:14 best series, one of his best series, it gets no credit for, Ghosts of the Ostfront. Nobody gives
2:53:20 him credit for that one. That’s OG. This is a 2011 series. But his Ghosts of the Ostfront on
2:53:27 the Eastern Front of the Nazi war against Russia fundamentally changed my view of warfare forever.
2:53:32 And also, at that time, I was very young. And to me, World War II was saving Private Ryan. I
2:53:38 wasn’t as well-read as I am now. And I was like, “Oh, shit. This entire thing happened, which actually
2:53:44 decided the Second World War. And I don’t know anything about this.” So shout out to Dan. God
2:53:50 bless you, man. And his, quote, unquote, “short episodes,” I think, on slavery in general throughout
2:53:54 human history. That was an awesome episode. I actually bought a bunch of Hugh Thomas books
2:53:59 because of that episode. I’d never really read about African slavery or the slave trade outside
2:54:03 of the Civil War context. So again, shout out to him for that one. That was an amazing episode.
2:54:08 His Japan series, too. I’m going to Japan in a few days. And I keep thinking of what he always
2:54:13 talked about in his Supernova in the East. The Japanese are like everyone else, but only more so.
2:54:22 And God, I love that quote. Okay, he’s great. And we, ironically, arrived at this tangent
2:54:27 while talking about the 2020 election. Yeah. That’s why podcasting is fun.
2:54:33 Because he said, “Lost by a whisker.” And now we’re dragging us screaming back to the topic.
2:54:43 One of the things I was bothered by is Trump claiming that there’s widespread
2:54:49 as you’re saying low IQ theory, the widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of that that
2:54:56 he provided. And all right, well, let’s put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled
2:55:05 by that maybe you can comfort me in the context of history, how easily the base ate that up.
2:55:13 That they were able to believe the election was truly rigged based on no clear evidence
2:55:18 that I saw. And they just love the story. And there is something compelling to the story that,
2:55:24 you know, like this DNC type, like with Bernie, the establishment just, they’re corrupt and they
2:55:36 steal the will of the people. And like the lack of a desire from the base or from people to see any
2:55:40 evidence of that was really troubled me. Yeah. I’m going to give you one of the most depressing
2:55:46 quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to “The Loudest Voice in
2:55:50 the Room” by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too, because it really made me understand
2:55:55 the media. People don’t want to be informed. They want to feel informed. That is one of the most
2:56:02 fundamental media insights of all time. What a line. Roger Ailes, a genius, a genius in his own
2:56:08 right, who, you know, he changed the world. He certainly did. He, you know, he’s the one
2:56:12 who kind of gets credit for one of the greatest debate lines of all time, because he was an
2:56:17 advisor to President Reagan. Whenever he broke in, he was like, “Mr. President, people want to
2:56:22 know if you’re too damn old for this job or not.” And he inspired that joke that Reagan made,
2:56:27 where he was like, “I will not use age in this campaign. I will not hold my opponent’s youth
2:56:32 and inexperience against him.” That was Ailes, man. You got it. He did the Nixon Town Halls.
2:56:38 He did it all. He’s a fucking genius. And I’m not advocating necessarily for the world he created
2:56:44 for us, but he did it. And people should study him more. If you’re interested in media in particular,
2:56:46 that book is one of the most important books you’ll ever read.
2:56:52 Yeah, you know what? That quote just really connected with me, because there’s all this
2:56:59 talk about truth. And I think what people want to, they want to feel like they’re in possession
2:57:02 of the truth. Correct. Not actually being in the possession of the truth.
2:57:09 Yeah, I know. It hit me too. Actually, Russell Crowe does an amazing job of delivering that line
2:57:13 in the Showtime miniseries. So if you have the chance, you should watch it. And look,
2:57:17 this is the problem. Liberals will be like, “Yeah, see these idiot Republicans?” I’m like,
2:57:21 “Yeah, you guys have bought a lot of crazy stupid shit too, okay?” And if actually,
2:57:25 I would say liberal misinformation, quote unquote, is worse than Republican disinformation,
2:57:31 because it pervades the entire elite media like Russiagate or Cambridge Analytica or
2:57:36 any of these other hoaxes that have been foisted on the American people. The people who listen to
2:57:42 the Daily and from the New York Times are just as brainwashed, lack of informed, want to feel
2:57:48 informed as people who watch Fox News. So let me just say that out there. It’s an equal opportunity
2:57:53 to cancer in the American people. Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking
2:58:02 about bubbles. What’s your advice about how to figure out if you’re in a bubble and how to get
2:58:06 out of it? That’s such a fantastic question. Unfortunately, I think it comes really naturally
2:58:11 to someone like me, because I’m the child of immigrants and I was raised in Coliseation,
2:58:17 Texas. So I was always on the outside. And when you’re on the outside, this isn’t a sob story.
2:58:21 It’s a deeply useful skill, because when you’re on the outside, you’re forced to kind of observe.
2:58:28 And you’re like, oh, so like what I was raised was the Bible Belt. And people really, you know,
2:58:32 people were hardcore evangelical Christians. And I could tell them like, oh, they really believe
2:58:37 this stuff. And, you know, they were always trying to proselytize and all of that. And then the other
2:58:42 gift that my parents gave me is I got to travel the entire world. I probably visited 25, 30 countries
2:58:50 by the time I was 18. And one of the things that that gave me was the ability to just put yourself
2:58:54 in the brain of another person. So one of the reasons I’m really excited to go to Japan,
2:59:00 and I picked it as a spot for my honeymoon was because Japan is a first world developed country
2:59:06 where the vast majority of them don’t speak English. It’s distinguishedly non-western,
2:59:11 and they just do shit their own way. So they have a subway, but it’s not the same as ours.
2:59:14 They have restaurants, things don’t work the same way. They have, you know,
2:59:20 I could go to a laundry list, their entire philosophy of life of the daily rhythm,
2:59:26 even though it merges with service based managerial capitalism and they’re fucking good at it too,
2:59:32 they do it their own way. So exposure to other countries in the world gave me, and also just
2:59:37 being an outsider myself, gave me a more detached view of the world. So if you don’t have that,
2:59:43 what I would encourage you is to flex that muscle. So go somewhere that makes you uncomfortable.
2:59:48 This will be a very boomer take, but I hate the fact that you have 5G everywhere you go in the
2:59:53 world, because some of the best experiences that I’ve ever had in my life is walking around Warsaw,
2:59:59 Poland, trying to find a bus station to get my ass to Lithuania with a printed out bus ticket.
3:00:03 I have no idea where the street is. I have, I’m in a country where not that many people speak
3:00:08 English. We’re pointing and gesturing, right? And I figured it out. And it was really useful.
3:00:12 I got to meet a lot of cool Polish people. Same in Thailand. I’ve been in rural, like,
3:00:19 bumfuck Thailand, Colombia, places where people speak zero English. And your ability to gesture
3:00:26 and use pigeon really connects you and gives you, like, the ability to get an exposure to others.
3:00:32 And so I know this is a very, like, wanderlust, like, travel thing, but unironically, if you’re
3:00:37 raised in a bubble, pierce it. Like, that’s the answer is seek something out that makes you
3:00:40 uncomfortable. So if you’re raised rich, you need to go spend some time with poor people.
3:00:44 And consider that they might actually understand the world better than you.
3:00:48 Well, in some respects, so I think a lot of rich people have really screwed up personal lives.
3:00:52 So if you’re poor and you really value family, you say, oh, that’s interesting. There seems to be
3:00:58 a fundamental tradeoff between extraordinary wealth and something that I value. But what can I take
3:01:04 away from that person? Oh, put my money in index funds. Make sure that I am conscientious about
3:01:11 my budgeting and common sense shit, right? And vice versa, people who are very wealthy,
3:01:16 get so caught up in the rat race about their kids going to private school and all of this.
3:01:20 And then, you know, they very rarely engage with there’s that famous study where they ask
3:01:24 people on their deathbed, like what they valued in life and every single one of them was like,
3:01:28 I wish I’d spend more time with my children. I think about that every time that I am thinking
3:01:33 about pursuing a new work endeavor or something that’s going to have me spend significant time
3:01:39 away from my wife. And I’m almost always these days now that I’ve achieved a certain level of
3:01:44 success, the answer is, I’m not doing it unless you can come with me.
3:01:48 One of the bubbles I’m really concerned about San Francisco bubble, I visited there recently,
3:01:55 because there’s so many friends there that I respect deeply. There’s just so many brilliant
3:01:59 people in San Francisco, the Silicon Valley. But there’s just this,
3:02:06 I don’t even want to criticize it, but there’s definitely a bubble of thought.
3:02:12 I’m with you. I’m friends with some SV Silicon Valley people as well. I’m similarly struck by
3:02:20 that every time I go. And honestly, I do admire them because what I respect the most amongst
3:02:24 entrepreneurs, business and political thinkers is systems thinking. Nobody thinks systems better
3:02:29 than people who are in tech because they deal with global shit, right? Not even just America,
3:02:34 they have to think about the whole world, about the human being and his relationship to technology.
3:02:38 And coding in some ways is an expression of the human mind and about how that person wants to
3:02:44 achieve this thing. And hey, you mechanically can type that into a keyboard or even code something
3:02:50 to code for you to be able to achieve that. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. I do think
3:02:55 those people and people like that too, who think very linearly through math and they’re,
3:03:00 the geniuses are the ones who can take their creativity and merge it with linear thinking.
3:03:07 But I do think that that actually, those are the people who probably most need to get out of the
3:03:12 bubble, check themselves a little bit. And look, it’s really hard. Once you achieve a certain
3:03:17 level of economic success and others, what do most rich people do? They close themselves off from
3:03:22 the world, right? That’s the vast majority of the time. What do you do? Economy is annoying,
3:03:27 flying. They fly first class. Living in a small house is annoying. They buy a bigger house.
3:03:31 Dealing with a lot of these inconveniences of life is annoying. You pay a little bit more to
3:03:35 make sure you don’t have to do that. There’s a deep insidious thing within that, each one of those
3:03:40 individual choices where the more and more removed that you get from that, the more in the bubble
3:03:45 that you are. So you should actually seek out those experiences or create them in a concerted way.
3:03:55 Speaking of bubbles, Sam Harris, he has continued to criticize me directly and indirectly,
3:04:01 I think unfairly, but I love Sam. I deeply respect him. Everybody should listen to the
3:04:07 Making Sense podcast. It always makes me think. It’s definitely in the rotation for me.
3:04:14 That’s a very admirable view. I mean, he’s, I think, one of the sharpest minds of our generation.
3:04:20 And for a long time, I looked up to him. It was one of the weird moments for me to meet him,
3:04:23 because you listened to somebody for such a long time.
3:04:25 I feel that way with you. I’m serious.
3:04:30 Yeah, it’s a beautiful moment. I mean, same with Joe and stuff like this.
3:04:35 Oh, absolutely. It is one of the most surreal moments of your life to be able to meet somebody
3:04:40 who you spend hours listening to. I actually think about that when people come up to me,
3:04:43 because I’m like, oh, they’re feeling what I felt whenever I, yeah, yeah.
3:04:49 And you have to like, you see it, you feel it, and you have to celebrate that because there’s
3:04:56 an intimacy to it. I think it’s real that people really do form a real connection,
3:04:59 a real friendship. It happens to be one way, but I think it actually can
3:05:05 upgrade to a two-way pretty easily. It happens with me in a matter of like five minutes,
3:05:10 when I meet somebody at an airport or something like that. Anyway, Sam took a pretty strong
3:05:18 position on Trump. And has for a long time. Yeah, he has been consistent and unwavering.
3:05:27 So he thinks that Trump is a truly dangerous person for a democracy for maybe for the world.
3:05:33 Can you still man his position? Well, see, I think a lot of this podcast has
3:05:38 been stealing manning it because Sam is a big character matters guy. Like he focuses a lot
3:05:42 on Trump’s personality. By the way, I’m like you, I’ve listened to Sam Harris for years.
3:05:46 I bought his meditation app. So nobody’s going to accuse me of being some Sam Harris hater.
3:05:51 I listened to him for way before, long before even Donald Trump was elected. That’s how far
3:05:57 back I go with the Sam Harris podcast. I have a lot of respect for the dude. I enjoy a lot of his
3:06:02 older interviews. I do think after Trump, he did succumb a little bit, in my opinion, to the
3:06:10 elite liberalism view, both of the impetus behind Donald Trump and why he was able to be successful.
3:06:15 So in some ways very denigrating to the Trump voter, but also a fundamental misunderstanding
3:06:19 of the American presidency. Because like I said, he really is the one who believes that that
3:06:24 narcissism, that character, and all of that that makes Trump tick itself will eventually override
3:06:29 any potential benefit that he could have in office. And I just think that’s a really wrong way of
3:06:36 looking at it. And I mean, for example, I had this debate with Crystal, and this gets to the whole
3:06:41 Trump, you know, talking about the enemy from within. And she was like, he wants to prosecute
3:06:46 his political opponents. Do you disagree with that? And I was like, no, I don’t. And she was like,
3:06:49 so you’re not worried about it. And I go, no, I’m not. And she’s like, well, how do you square
3:06:55 that? And I was like, well, I actually unironically believe in the American system of institutional
3:07:01 checks and balances, which kept him quote unquote in check last time around. I also believe in
3:07:07 democracy, where, you know, this is really interesting. But, you know, in 2022, a lot of the
3:07:11 Republicans who were the most vociferous about stop the steal, they got their asses kicked at
3:07:17 the ballot box. You know, Americans also then in 2024 decided to forgive some of that from
3:07:22 Donald Trump, it’s definitely didn’t help, right? But they were able to oversee that for their own
3:07:28 interests. As in, democratically, people are able to weigh, in terms of checks and balances,
3:07:32 what they should and should not challenge a politician by. But also, we have the American
3:07:37 legal system. And I also know the way that the institutions in Washington themselves work,
3:07:43 that, you know, fundamentally, the way that certain processes and other things could play out
3:07:49 will not play out to some Hitlerian fantasy. And this gets to the whole like, Kamala and them
3:07:55 calling him a fascist and Hitler, you know, you and I probably spent hours of our life maybe more
3:08:01 thinking and reading about Hitler or Weimar Germany. And I just find it so insulting, you
3:08:09 know, because it becomes this moniker of like, these terms have meaning beyond the beyond just
3:08:15 the dictionary definition, the circumstances through which Hitler is able to rise to power
3:08:22 are not the same as today. It’s like, stop denigrating America to the point where you think
3:08:26 like really should flip it around. Why do you think America is Weimar Germany? That’s a ridiculous
3:08:32 thing to say. Do you unironically believe that? No, you don’t believe that. So that is personally
3:08:38 what drives me a little bit crazy. And I think that Sam has found himself in a mental framework
3:08:45 where he is not willing, he’s not able to look past the man and his quote unquote, danger. And
3:08:51 at the end of the day, his worldview was rejected wholly by the American people. And that because
3:08:56 the character argument, the fascist argument, the Hitler argument, the he is uniquely bad argument,
3:09:03 has been run twice before 2016 and in 2000, actually all three times, I guess it won in 2020.
3:09:07 But two out of the three times, Donald Trump has won the presidency. And his latest one,
3:09:12 where that argument has never been made before for a longer period of time and more in strength
3:09:18 by a political candidate was rejected completely. And I would ask him to reconcile himself to the
3:09:24 America that he lives in. I think one thing maybe to partially steal man in his case, but also just
3:09:32 to steal man the way the world works, is that there is some probability that Kamala Harris
3:09:40 will institute a communist state. And there is some probability that Donald Trump will indeed
3:09:47 like will fly a swastika with and deport, I don’t know, everybody who’s not Scott Irish.
3:09:54 You and I are screwed then. Maybe, is there a spirit test? Okay. But that probability is small.
3:10:02 And you have to, if you allow yourself to focus on a particular trajectory with a small probability,
3:10:07 it can become all-encompassing. Because you could see it. You could see a path. There are
3:10:12 certain character qualities to Trump. Yes. Where he wants to hold on to power. First of all,
3:10:20 every politician wants to hold on to power. Joe Biden, maybe because he’s part of the machine,
3:10:25 can’t even conceive of the notion of a third term. But he has the arrogance to want to hold
3:10:30 on to power, do everything he can. Absolutely. And like with Trump, I can see that if it was
3:10:36 very popular for him to have a third term, I think he would not be the kind of person
3:10:43 who doesn’t advocate for a third term. So what? That would require the Senate and the House,
3:10:49 or 70, what is it, 75% of the states, to pass and change the Constitution. Do you think that’s
3:10:52 going to happen? No, I don’t think it’s going to happen. So I’m not that worried about it. Now,
3:10:57 you can make a norms argument. Actually, I think that’s kind of fair, is that he’s the norms buster.
3:11:02 But, you know, with extraordinary candidates and people like Trump, you get the good and the bad.
3:11:09 There is a true duality. Like the norms he busts around foreign policy, I love. The norms he busts
3:11:14 around the economy, I love. The norms he busts around just so much of the American political
3:11:19 system, saying it, how it is, et cetera. I love that. You know what I hate? This 2020 election
3:11:25 bullshit. You know what else I hate? You know, this, I don’t know, just the lack of discipline
3:11:29 that I would want to think that a great leader could have, like when he was president and tweeting
3:11:33 about Mika Brzezinski’s facelift, that was objectively ridiculous. Like it was crazy,
3:11:40 okay? Was it funny? Yeah, but it was crazy. Like, and it’s not how I would conceive and have conceived
3:11:44 of some of my favorite presidents. I wouldn’t think that they would do that. But that’s what
3:11:49 you get. You know, everyone should be clear-eyed about who this man is. And that’s another problem.
3:11:54 The deification of politicians is sickening. It’s sickening. Like about Trump, around Obama,
3:12:00 around Hillary. Like these people are just people. Like the idea that they are godlike creatures
3:12:04 with extraordinary judgment. You know, one of the really cool things about your and I’s job is we
3:12:08 actually get to meet very important people. After you meet a few billionaires, you’re like, yeah,
3:12:13 there’s definitely something there. But you know, some of them get lucky. And like, after you meet
3:12:18 a few politicians, you’re like, oh, they’re not that smart. That was a rude awakening for me,
3:12:23 by the way, being here in Texas reading about these people. And pretty soon, I was on Capitol Hill,
3:12:27 I was like 19 years old. I was an intern. I’m actually interacting. And I see them behave in
3:12:32 ridiculous manners and, you know, whatever, to treat people badly or say something stupid.
3:12:37 And I was like, oh, this is not the West Wing. I’m like, this is not like, these people are just,
3:12:42 this is reality. And the weirdest part of my life is I’ve now been in Washington long enough. I know
3:12:48 some of the people personally, the vice president of the United States, literally the vice president
3:12:53 in elect, future cabinet secretaries, future, you know, these people I literally have met at
3:12:59 dinner with at a drink with whatever. That’s a wild thing. And that’s even more bringing you down
3:13:02 to earth. We were like, oh, shit, you’re actually going to have a lot of power. That’s, that’s kind
3:13:06 of scary. But you’re just a person. And so even though you don’t have to say I have my same life
3:13:12 experience, take it from me or anybody else who’s ever met really famous people, rich,
3:13:16 rich, successful, powerful people, they’re just people. There’s nothing that there’s some things
3:13:22 that are unique about them. But they have just as many human qualities as you or anybody else
3:13:27 is listening to this right now. Yeah, there’s, for each candidate, Trump is probably the extreme
3:13:32 version of that. There’s a, there’s a distribution of the possible trajectories the administration
3:13:38 might result in. Yes. And like, the range of possible trajectories is just much wider with
3:13:42 Trump. Yeah, you’re describing like a Bayesian theory, right? Like, and I think that’s actually
3:13:46 a really useful framework for the world is that people are really too binary. So like you said,
3:13:52 you know, there’s a theoretical possibility, I guess, of a communist takeover of government
3:13:57 and of fascist takeover of government under Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, you know,
3:14:04 their realistic probability, I would give it 0.05% probably in both directions. But there are,
3:14:07 you know, there are a lot of things that can happen that are bad that are not hit Larry
3:14:11 in her face. There are a lot of things that happen that are really good that are not FDR,
3:14:16 New Deal style. One of the worst things politicians do is they describe themselves
3:14:23 in false historical ways. So in Washington, one of the most overused phrases is made history.
3:14:28 And I’m like, you know, if you actually read history, most of these things are just,
3:14:32 they’re not even footnotes. They’re the stuff that the historians flip past and they’re like,
3:14:38 what a stupid bucking thing. I mean, and I’m talking about things that will that ruled American
3:14:42 politics. Like, what if I told you that the Panama Canal Treaty was one of the most important
3:14:48 fights in modern American politics? Nobody thinks about that today. It ruled American politics at
3:14:53 that time. You know, it genuinely is a footnote, but that’s how it felt at the time. So that’s
3:15:00 another thing I want people to take away. You tragically missed the UFO hearings.
3:15:06 Oh man, my brothers, I’m really sad. Let me tell you, I love them so much.
3:15:12 The UFO community are some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. Shout out to my brother
3:15:18 Jeremy Corbell, to George Knapp, the OG, to all of the people who fly from all around the
3:15:23 world to come to these hearings. It was so fun. I got to meet so many of them last time,
3:15:31 just walk the rope line like as people were coming in the excitement. I truly love the UFO
3:15:34 community. Shout out to all of them. This is the second one, I guess. This is the second one.
3:15:38 Do you hope they continue happening? It’s going to be a slow burn. So one of the things I always
3:15:46 tell the guys and everybody is, consider how long it took to understand the sheer insanity of the
3:15:52 CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. So if we think back to the Church Committee, I don’t, I forget the
3:15:56 exact year of the Church Committee, I think it was in the ’70s, the entire Church Committee and
3:16:03 knowledge of why this, of how the CIA and the FBI were up to all of this insane shit throughout the
3:16:09 ’50s and ’60s is because some people broke into a warehouse, discovered some documents, got the
3:16:14 names of programs which were able to be foiled and we were able to break open that case. It would
3:16:19 never have happened with real transparency, like in the official process. So we owe those people
3:16:26 a great debt, I guess I could say. Now the statute of limitations has passed. My point about the UFOs
3:16:30 is I don’t know what is real or not. I have absolute confidence and absolute ton is being
3:16:35 hid from the American people and that all of the official explanations are bullshit. I have had the
3:16:41 opportunity to interface with some of the whistleblowers and other activists in the community,
3:16:46 people who I trust, people who have great credentials, who have no reason to lie, who have
3:16:52 assured us that there is a lot going on behind the scenes. There has been too much misinformation
3:16:57 and effort by the deep state to cover up this topic. So I would ask people to keep the faith.
3:17:02 It’s 2024 and we still don’t have all the JFK files. Okay? Everyone involved is dead.
3:17:06 There’s no reason to let it go. And even though we basically know what happened,
3:17:11 we don’t know. If you read that fantastic book, the Tom O’Neill book about the Manson
3:17:16 murders, I mean, again, you know, it took him 20 years to write that book and he still didn’t get
3:17:22 the full story. So sometimes it takes an extraordinarily long agonizing period of time and
3:17:28 I know how deeply frustrating that is. But when you think about a secret, a program and knowledge
3:17:34 of this magnitude, it would only make sense that it would require a Titanic effort to reveal a
3:17:40 Titanic secret. You think Trump might be able to push for like aggressively break through the
3:17:46 secrecy. Let’s say even on the JFK files. I hope so. I have moderate confidence. You know,
3:17:51 RFK Jr. has pushed him to do so. I would like to think so. At the same time,
3:17:54 Thomas on got rolled last time. So I’m, you know, I’ll hold my breath.
3:17:56 Why do you think that happens? Why do you think it gets…
3:17:58 Remember that whole interagency thing I told you about? That’s how it happens.
3:18:02 That’s another thing. You’re presuming that the president has the power to declassify this stuff.
3:18:06 I’m saying that I’m not even sure we’re there, like in terms of…
3:18:11 So it’s basically like stability. He basically says like, I would like to declassify JFK files.
3:18:16 And they say, “Yes, sir. We’ll get that to you in three months and three months comes by.”
3:18:18 And then they’re like, “Well, there’s these hurdles.”
3:18:22 Well, the way you get around it is go, “Let’s release some, but these in particular,
3:18:25 there’s national security secrets is a good case for not releasing them. X, Y, and Z.”
3:18:28 You know, it’s like, you get around that. “Oh, okay. You know, that makes sense.”
3:18:31 You know, and again, he’s a busy guy. He’s the president. He got way bigger.
3:18:34 Shouldn’t worry about. So this is the, that’s the problem is that
3:18:38 unless you have that true urgency, I mean, look, people of immense power have tried.
3:18:42 Everyone forgets this. John Podesta was the White House chief of staff.
3:18:47 He is a UFO true believer in his heart. He tried. He’s talked about it. He tried
3:18:52 at the top level, the number two to the White House to get the Pentagon and others
3:18:56 to tell them what was going on. And they stonewalled him. So people need to understand what
3:19:00 you’re up against. And, you know, I would, and people are like, “How is that even possible?”
3:19:06 It’s like, “Well, go read about the terror that LBJ and the Kennedys and others had
3:19:13 in confronting J. Edgar Hoover. Go and read how terrified, you know, Eisenhower and some of them
3:19:17 were, were of the dullest brothers. They were scared. Like they, they knew where the power lies.
3:19:23 So, you know, the presidency, look, government, deep state, et cetera,
3:19:28 they’ve been there a long time and they know what’s happening. And presidents come and go,
3:19:34 but they stay forever. And so that’s, that’s the paradigm that you’re going to fight against.
3:19:40 Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a bit of a meme, but I wonder how deep the deep state is.
3:19:45 Much deeper than anyone can even imagine. And the worst part is with the deep state is it’s not
3:19:51 even individuals, it’s actually an ideology. And ideology is the most, you know, people often think
3:19:55 that if we took money out of politics that it would change everything. I’m not saying it wouldn’t
3:20:00 change everything, but it wouldn’t change a lot. But people are like, “Oh, so-and-so is only against
3:20:03 universal healthcare because they’re going to pay it.” I’m like, “No, no, no, that’s not why they
3:20:08 actually believe it.” Or it’s like, “Oh, so-and-so is only wants to advocate for war with Iran
3:20:12 because they’re on the payroll of APAC.” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, the APAC trips and the money
3:20:18 helps, but they think that.” Actually, the system itself, this is a very Chomsky-esque systemic critique
3:20:23 is that any journalist worth their salt would never have the ability to get hired in a mainstream.
3:20:28 So he’s like, “It’s not that you’re bad in the mainstream media. It’s that anyone good
3:20:34 is not allowed to be elevated to your position because they have an ideology.” And so, you know,
3:20:40 that is the most self-reinforcing pernicious mechanism of them all. And that’s really Washington
3:20:47 in a nutshell. It’s, again, a bubble, but a bubble that has a lot of power. Who do you think is the
3:20:53 future of the Republican Party? After Trump. What happens to Trumpism after Trump? Like you just
3:21:00 said, Bayesian, let’s take various theories, right? So let’s say it’s ’04. It’s Bush Cheney.
3:21:05 In 2004, the day after the election, I would have told you this. We live in a Bible belt,
3:21:11 Jesus Land America. This America wants to protect America, a war on terror against Iraq,
3:21:18 and the axis of evil, and American people just voted for George W. Bush. And so, I would have
3:21:22 predicted that it would have been somebody in that vein. And they tried that. His name
3:21:27 was John McCain. He got blown the fuck out by Barack Obama. So I cannot sit here and confidently
3:21:31 say it. What year would you be able to predict Obama? It was just his first time he gave the
3:21:36 speech, the 2004 speech at the DNC. We don’t live in Black America, White America, the John Kerry
3:21:42 DNC speech. You honestly could not have predicted it until ’07, whenever he actually announced his
3:21:48 campaign and activated a lot of anti-war energy. I mean, maybe ’06, actually, I could have said.
3:21:53 In ’06, if I was kind of the contrarian man now, I’m like, “Yeah, there’s a lot of anti-war energy.
3:21:57 I think the next president will be somebody who’s able to vote.” You know, the explosion of Keith
3:22:02 Oberman and MSNBC, it makes logical sense in hindsight. But, you know, at the same time,
3:22:06 you’re going up against the Clinton machine who’s never lost an election. So I would have been
3:22:12 afraid. I cannot confidently say. So I will say, if things go in different directions,
3:22:17 if Trump is a net positive president, then I think it will be JD Vance, his vice president,
3:22:23 who believes in the, a lot of the things that I’ve talked about here today about foreign policy
3:22:28 restraint, about the working class, about changing Republican attitudes to the economy,
3:22:34 and he would be able to build upon that legacy in the way that George W. H. W. Bush was able to
3:22:38 get elected off the back of Reagan. But H. W. Bush was fundamentally his own man. He’s a very
3:22:43 misunderstood figure, very different than Ronald Reagan. Didn’t end up working out for him, but,
3:22:48 you know, he did get himself elected once. So that’s one path. That’s if you have a net positive
3:22:54 Trump presidency. The other path is the 04 path that I just laid out. If George W. Bush, if Trump
3:23:01 does what Bush does, misinterprets his mandate, screws things up, creates chaos, and it makes it
3:23:07 just generally annoying to live in American society, then you will see somebody in the Republican
3:23:12 Party. I mean, still, it could even be JD Vance, because he could say JD is my natural and my
3:23:16 chosen successor, but then he would lose an election, and then he would no longer be the
3:23:22 so-called leader of the Republican Party. So I could see it swing in the other direction. I could
3:23:27 see, you know, Republicans or others, let’s say if it’s a total disaster, and we get down to like
3:23:34 20% approval ratings, and the economy is bad and stuff like that, Glenn Yonkid, or somebody like
3:23:41 that who’s very diametrically opposed to Donald Trump, or at least, you know, aesthetically,
3:23:45 is somebody like that who could rise from the ashes. And I’m just saying, like, in terms of his
3:23:50 aesthetic, not him per se. So there’s a variety of different directions. It’s a big question about
3:23:55 the Republican base. I mean, a shit ton of people voted Republican now for the first time ever.
3:23:59 So are they going to vote in party primaries? I don’t know. You know, the traditional
3:24:06 party primary voter is like a white boomer, who’s like 58, 59. Is the Latino guy in California,
3:24:10 who turned out to vote for Trump with a MAGA hat and rolling around, you know,
3:24:14 suburban Los Angeles? With that, is he going to vote in the Republican Party? That could
3:24:19 change. So the type of candidate themselves could come. So it’s just, it’s way too early to say,
3:24:22 you know, we have so many variety of paths that we go down.
3:24:29 Yeah, I think Trump is a singular figure in terms of, like, if you support Trump,
3:24:38 there, I just, there’s a vibe. I know Kamala has a vibe, but there’s definitely a vibe to Trump
3:24:46 and MAGA. And I just, I think even with JD, that that’s no longer going to be there. So if JD runs
3:24:51 and wins, that would be on principles. And it’s a very different human being.
3:24:56 He is so different than Trump, right? You can see his empathy, right? Remember in the VP debate,
3:24:59 when he was like, Christ have mercy when Tim Walsh was talking about his son? I mean,
3:25:04 that’s not something Donald Trump would say. Okay, it’s just not like, in terms of, I mean,
3:25:08 you know, and this, by the way, this is my own bubble test. I have no idea how
3:25:11 somebody listens to Trump and JD Vance is like Trump is the guy who should be the president
3:25:18 over. I honestly, I don’t get it. That’s my own cards on the table. I am in too much of a bubble
3:25:25 where I’m, my bias is to, you know, being well spoken and being empathetic or at least being
3:25:30 able to play empathetic and being extremely well read about the world and thoughtful and somebody
3:25:34 who’s, you know, somebody like him who’s engaged in the political process, but also has been able
3:25:39 to retain his values and be extremely well articulate his worldview. That’s my bias. That’s
3:25:43 who I would want to be the president. But you know, you know, that’s a big country. People
3:25:48 think differently. By the way, I share your bias and I sometimes try to take myself out of that
3:25:55 bubble. Like maybe it’s not important to have read a book or multiples of books on history.
3:26:00 I’m not saying everybody should be like me, but that’s my, I’m checking myself by being like,
3:26:04 because of who I am, that’s how I see the world. And that’s how I would choose a leader.
3:26:09 But that is not how people vote, period. And I’ve, nothing has taught me that more than this
3:26:12 election. I wish they did. I mean, I don’t know if that, I don’t know if that’s the lesson to
3:26:16 take away. I think, yeah, but who are we to say people are allowed to do what they want. And I’m
3:26:19 not going to tell somebody how to vote. No, what I’m saying is you take everything Trump,
3:26:28 everything that Trump is doing, everything, the whole, the dance, all of it, and add occasional
3:26:33 saga like references to history books. I think that’s just a better candidate.
3:26:36 I agree with you. I mean, listen, you know, it’s my bias.
3:26:41 Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s biased. I think, I think that’s not a bubble thinking.
3:26:44 I think it’s amazing to me, right? Like listen to the JD interview with Rogan.
3:26:53 I mean, JD, I mean, he’ll drop obscure references to studies, to like papers that have come out,
3:27:02 essays, books, like this is a very well read, high IQ, well thought out individual who also,
3:27:08 you know, has given his life to the political process and decided to like deal with all the
3:27:12 bullshit that this entire system is going to throw at you whenever you start to engage.
3:27:16 That’s who I would want to be president, but you know, I’m biased. So what can I say?
3:27:20 I like how you keep saying you’re biased as if there’s some percent of the population doesn’t
3:27:26 like people to read at all. Okay, what about the future? You kind of hinted at the future of the
3:27:31 Democratic Party. Yeah. Do you see any talent out there that’s promising? Is it going to be
3:27:36 Obama like figure that just rolls out of nowhere? Clinton is the better example, because the Democratic
3:27:43 Party was destroyed for 12 years from 1980, the 1980 election to 1992. They’re 12 years out of power.
3:27:50 In periods of that long of an era, it takes somebody literally brand new who is not tainted
3:27:54 by the previous to convince the base that you can one and convince the country that you’re
3:28:00 going in a new direction. So I would not put my money on anybody tainted by the great awokening,
3:28:06 by TDS, by the insanity of the Trump era, that has to be somebody post that,
3:28:13 and or somebody who is able to reform themselves. It will, in my opinion, it will likely not be
3:28:18 any establishment politician of today who will emerge for the future. Like I said,
3:28:24 my dark horse is Dean. I think that the Democratic base is going to give Dean a shit ton of credit,
3:28:30 and they should for him being out. Let’s be honest, he’s a no-name congressman from Minnesota. Nobody
3:28:35 cared who Dean Phillips was. But just like Obama, he had courage and he came out and spoke early
3:28:39 when it mattered. And by doing that, he showed good judgment and he showed that he’s willing to take
3:28:44 risk. So I would hope in America’s political system that we award something like that. And I do
3:28:49 think the Democrats will reward him. But I’m not saying it will be him per se, but it will be a figure
3:28:56 like that, who is not nationally known, who has read the tea leaves correctly, who took guesses
3:29:02 and did things differently than everybody else. And most of all, I’m hoping that heterodox attitudes,
3:29:08 ideas, behaviors, by definition, after a blowout, those will likely be the ones that are rewarded.
3:29:11 So I cannot give a name, but I can just describe the circumstances for what it will look like.
3:29:15 Can you imagine an amorphous figure that’s a progressive populist?
3:29:22 It would be very difficult at this point, just because a huge portion of the multiracial working
3:29:27 class has shifted to the right. But I could see it. I mean, look, people change their minds all the
3:29:32 time. Like there are people out there who voted for Barack Obama, who’ve now voted for Donald Trump
3:29:38 three times. So a lot can change in this country. If you make a credible case, you’ve got a track
3:29:45 record, you speak authentically, and you can try to divide the country along class lines and be
3:29:50 authentic and real about it. Maybe, I think you have a shot. I still think you’re probably going
3:29:54 to get dinged on culture, just because I think this election has really showed us how important
3:30:00 immigration and culture is. But you know, actually, what the left populist should pray for, and they
3:30:04 won’t admit this, is that Trump actually solves immigration, like in terms of changing the status
3:30:10 quo. You know how in the way that the Supreme Court just ended the conversation around gay marriage?
3:30:13 So Republicans were like, yeah, whatever, we support gay marriage. Because like that’s the
3:30:19 law of the land, it is what it is. They should just hope that their unpopular issue is resolved by
3:30:24 the president. And thus, they just don’t have to talk about it anymore. And now the battleground is
3:30:28 actually favorable for them. They get to talk about the economy and abortion. So their least
3:30:34 popular issue gets solved by the president, by consensus, from his mandate, and then they can
3:30:37 run on a brand new platform for the new issues that are facing America.
3:30:40 All right, let’s put our historian head back on. Okay.
3:30:47 Will the American Empire collapse one day? And if it does, when it does, what will be the reason?
3:30:56 Statistically, likely. Statistically, yes. You know, what’s the famous Fight Club quote? It’s
3:31:02 like on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero. And you know.
3:31:06 I like for all the books you’ve quoted, you went to Fight Club. I guess the movie, right?
3:31:12 The book is good, though. People should read that too. In terms of why, again, statistically,
3:31:20 the answer is quite simple. It usually comes back to a series of unpopular wars, which are pursued
3:31:30 because of the elite’s interests. Then it usually leads to a miscalculation and not a catastrophic
3:31:37 defeat. Normally, it comes gradually. And most of the times when these things end,
3:31:41 the crazy part is most people who are living through end of empire have no idea that they’re
3:31:45 living through the end of the empire. And I actually think about that a lot from, you know,
3:31:49 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon. Actually, your episode on Rome was fantastic.
3:31:54 People should go listen to that. So there you go. Another really good one. I like to think a lot
3:32:01 about the British Empire and what eventually led to that collapse. And nobody in 1919 said
3:32:05 the British Empire just collapsed. Basically, nobody still thought that. They were like,
3:32:09 “Yeah, the First World War is horrible. But actually, we came out of this, okay, we still
3:32:13 have India. You know, we still have all these African colonies and all that. But, you know,
3:32:19 long periods of servitude, of debt to the United States, of degradation, of social upheaval,
3:32:26 of Bolshevism, of American industrial might, and next thing you know, you find yourself at
3:32:31 Potsdam and Churchill’s like, “Holy shit, I have barely any power in this room.” Right? So,
3:32:38 revolutions happen slowly and then all at once. And so, could you really put a, you know, a real,
3:32:42 like, pain in the end of the British Empire? It took almost 40 years for it to end. So,
3:32:49 America’s empire will eventually end either from rising geopolitical competition, likely
3:32:55 China could be India, nobody knows. It will likely be because of being overstretched, of
3:33:04 elite capture is usually the reason why, and a misreading of what made your original society
3:33:09 work, you know, in the first place. And that is one where, honestly, like, all three of those
3:33:13 things will happen all at once. And it will happen over extremely long period of time. And
3:33:18 it’s very difficult to predict. I would not bet against America right now. I think we have a
3:33:22 lot of fundamental strengths, which is unique in dynamic country. It really is fucking crazy.
3:33:26 Every time I travel the world, as much as I love all these different places, I go, “Man,
3:33:31 I just, I love the United States so much.” You will love it more when you leave. I really
3:33:38 believe that. So, yeah. And it’s nice to remember how quickly the public opinion shifts. Like,
3:33:42 we’re very dynamic and adaptable, which annoys me. I understand that’s part of the political
3:33:47 discourse saying like, “If Trump wins, it’s the end of America. If Kamala wins, it’s the end of
3:33:53 America.” So stupid. Yeah. But I understand that the radical nature of that discourse is necessary
3:33:58 to, like we mentioned. Yeah, to drive out votes. To drive out votes. I like to think about Americans
3:34:03 in 1866. I cannot imagine going through a war where some X percent, I think it was like two or
3:34:08 three percent or whatever, the entire population was just killed. Our president, who was this
3:34:14 visionary genius who we’re blessed to have, is assassinated at Fork’s Theater immediately after
3:34:19 the surrender of Lee Andrew Johnson, who’s a bumbling, like, fucktard, is the one who is in
3:34:25 charge. And, you know, we’re having all these insane crises over like internal management,
3:34:30 while we’re also trying to decide like this new order in the South and whether to bring these
3:34:35 people, how to bring these people back into the Union. I mean, I would have despair, like in that
3:34:39 year. I was like, “It’s over. This is it.” You know, the war, I’m like, “Was it worth anything?”
3:34:43 You know, if Andrew Johnson is going to be doing this or even in the South, I mean, I can’t even
3:34:48 imagine for what they were going through, too. You know, they have to go home and their entire
3:34:52 cities are burned to the ground and they’re trying to readjust and, you know, their entire economy
3:34:57 and way of life is overthrown in five years. I mean, that’s an insane time to be alive. And
3:35:04 what do we know? It worked out, you know, by 1890s or so. There were people shaking hands,
3:35:11 you know, Union. There’s a cool video on YouTube, actually, of FDR, who is addressing some of the
3:35:16 last Gettysburg veterans. I think it was like the 75th anniversary or whatever. And you can literally
3:35:22 see these old men who are shaking hands across the stone wall. It gives me hope. Yeah.
3:35:29 Let’s linger on that hope. What is the source of optimism you have for the 21st century, for the
3:35:36 century beyond that, for human civilization in general? Because, you know, it’s easy to learn
3:35:43 cynical lessons from history, right? The shit eventually goes wrong. But sometimes it doesn’t.
3:35:53 So what gives you hope? I think that the fundamentals of what makes humanity great
3:35:59 and has for a long time are best expressed in the American character. And that despite all of our
3:36:05 problems, that as a country with our ethos, a lot of stuff we talked about today, individualism,
3:36:11 the frontier mindset, the blessings of geography, the blessings of our economy, of the way that
3:36:16 we’re able to just incorporate different cultures and the best of each and put them all together,
3:36:21 give us the best opportunity to succeed and to accomplish awesome things. We’re the country
3:36:27 that put a man on the moon, which is the epitome of the human spirit. I hope to see more of that.
3:36:32 And, you know, I think last time I was here, I shouted out, and I love Antarctic exploration.
3:36:36 I’ve read basically every book that there is on the exploration of Antarctica. And one of the
3:36:42 reasons I love to do so is because there is no reason to care about Antarctica. None. There’s
3:36:48 nothing down there. Zero. Going to the South Pole is a truly useless exercise. And yet,
3:36:53 we went. We went twice, actually. Two people went there within a span of five weeks and they
3:37:01 competed to do so. And the spirit that propelled Amundsen and Scott’s expedition and people like
3:37:06 Shackleton, who is like, if you were to ask me, my hero of all heroes, it’s Ernest Shackleton,
3:37:12 is because his spirit, I think, lives on in the United States. It unfortunately died in Great
3:37:16 Britain. And interestingly enough, the Brits even understand that they’re like, it’s very interesting
3:37:23 how popular Shackleton is in America. And even though he was Irish and he was a British subject,
3:37:27 to me, he’s a spiritual American. And I think that his spirit lives on within us
3:37:34 and has always been here to a certain extent. And everywhere else, I think it’s dying. But here,
3:37:38 I love it here, there’s so many cool things about America. People move around all the time. They
3:37:42 buy new houses. They start families. There’s no other place you can just reset your whole life.
3:37:47 In the same country, it’s wild. You can reinvent yourself. You can go broke. You can get rich.
3:37:53 You can go back and forth multiple times. And there’s nowhere else where you have enough freedom
3:37:58 and opportunity to pursue that. And I definitely have a lot of problems, but I’ve traveled enough
3:38:03 of the world now to know that it’s a special place. And that gives me a lot of hope.
3:38:08 I wish I could do a Bostonian accent of, we do these things, not because they’re easy,
3:38:10 but because they’re hard. Because they are hard.
3:38:19 Thank you. That’s so true. The Scott Irish guts. Well, listen, I’m a huge fan of yours,
3:38:24 Sager. I hope to see you in the White House interviewing the president. There you go.
3:38:27 That’s the only situation you’re going to see me in the White House.
3:38:39 Front row and just talking free. I would love to live in a country and a world where it’s you
3:38:46 who gets to talk to the press secretary, to the president. Because I think you’re a real,
3:38:50 you’re one of the good ones, as far as journalists go, as far as human beings.
3:38:55 So I hope to see you in there. And I hope you get to ask a question that
3:38:58 ends up in a book that ends up in a good history book.
3:39:03 Absolutely. Well, likewise, I’m a huge fan of yours. For anybody out there who’s interested,
3:39:09 I compiled a list and I will go and retroactively edit it. Just go to Sager and Jetty.io. I created
3:39:13 a newsletter with a website that has all the links to all the books I’m going to talk about here.
3:39:15 Beautiful. The hundreds of books that were mentioned here.
3:39:17 All right, brother, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you.
3:39:22 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sager and Jetty. To support this podcast,
3:39:27 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
3:39:37 Voltaire. History is the study of all the world’s crime. Thank you for listening and hope to see you
3:39:54 next time.
0:00:10 Sagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with
0:00:16 Crystal Ball and of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Kosloff.
0:00:20 Sagar is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met.
0:00:25 His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history
0:00:28 books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world.
0:00:33 In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological
0:00:35 movements that led up to the current political moment.
0:00:40 In doing so, we mentioned a large number of amazing books.
0:00:44 We’ll put a link to them in the description for those interested to
0:00:46 learn more about each topic.
0:00:50 And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
0:00:52 Check them out in the description.
0:00:53 It’s the best way to support this podcast.
0:00:58 We’ve got A Sleep, for Naps, AG1, for Health, Element, for Hydration,
0:01:02 BetterHelp, for the Mind, Shopify, for the Wallet, and Netsuite for your
0:01:04 business. Choose wisely, my friends.
0:01:09 Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a multitude of reasons,
0:01:11 go to lexfreedmen.com/contact.
0:01:13 And now onto the full lad reads.
0:01:16 I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please
0:01:17 still check out our sponsors.
0:01:18 I enjoy their stuff.
0:01:19 Maybe you will too.
0:01:24 This episode is brought to you by A Sleep and it’s Pod 4 Ultra.
0:01:29 I’m going to try a new thing where I hold on to a theme.
0:01:36 As I talk about these ads, I use A Sleep and the Pod 4 Ultra to cool the
0:01:41 bed. And since Sagar knows pretty much more than anybody I’ve ever
0:01:45 met about the various US presidents and presidential politics and the
0:01:49 history of politics in US, let me mention a little factoid.
0:01:54 Did you know that the White House didn’t get air conditioning until 1933
0:01:59 under Hoover, who funded it just before leaving office for FDR.
0:02:05 So all that praise that Sagar gives to FDR, just remember, maybe it wouldn’t
0:02:13 be possible without the cool, fresh air that Hoover gave to the great FDR.
0:02:18 And that, in fact, and I’m not sure why I’m using this voice in talking, but
0:02:21 that, in fact, is essential for sleep, controlling the temperature of the
0:02:25 bed, controlling the temperature of the sleeping environment.
0:02:25 There you go.
0:02:30 The more you know, create sleep.com/lex and use code Lex to get up to
0:02:35 $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled.
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0:02:41 This episode is brought to you by AG1.
0:02:44 Basically a nice multivitamin.
0:02:46 That’s also delicious.
0:02:47 That drink every day.
0:02:51 It makes me feel like I have my life together, which I barely do.
0:02:57 Now, speaking of drinks that you believe make you feel better.
0:03:00 You know, placebo effect, that kind of thing.
0:03:02 Here’s a little presidential themed factoid.
0:03:09 John Adams drank hard cider every morning, believing it promoted good health.
0:03:16 I would love to get like a health advice podcast with Winston Churchill.
0:03:24 Another president, William Howard Taft, had the White House kitchen prepare special
0:03:27 protein shakes made from eggs, milk and beef extract.
0:03:31 I would love the dietary details of some of the presidents.
0:03:36 I’m sure a bunch of them just smoked and drank and, you know, had their own like
0:03:41 little habits that serve as a kind of escape from the madness of the world.
0:03:46 Anyway, get AG1 and they’ll give you one month’s supply of fish oil when you sign
0:03:49 up at drinkag1.com/lex.
0:03:56 This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious
0:03:57 electrolyte mix.
0:04:06 And here I have to return again to the presidents who consumed various kinds of liquids.
0:04:12 Did you know that Thomas Jefferson spent $11,000 on wine during his presidency?
0:04:15 And we’re not talking about quality here.
0:04:18 We are, in fact, talking about quantity.
0:04:23 That’s equivalent to about $300,000 in today’s money.
0:04:25 Whatever works.
0:04:30 It’s like that meme that there’s a perfect optimal amount of alcohol that makes you
0:04:31 productive in programming.
0:04:33 I have never found that optimal.
0:04:40 Actually, if I have a drink, my productivity and my clarity of thinking and my creativity
0:04:41 all go down.
0:04:48 Now, I start enjoying the social interactions more and more because I am fundamentally
0:04:51 an introvert that have anxiety about social interaction.
0:04:51 So that helps.
0:04:56 But in terms of productivity or creative juices or whatever.
0:04:57 Nope.
0:05:00 Anyway, you can get a sample pack for free with any purchase.
0:05:03 Try it at drinkelement.com/lex.
0:05:08 This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P Help.
0:05:13 They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
0:05:20 And there’s actually quite a lot of presidents that really struggled with anxiety, with
0:05:25 depression, with all kinds of complicated mental states.
0:05:30 Coolidge, for example, fell into a deep depression after his son died from blood poisoning.
0:05:33 And that changed him forever, actually.
0:05:36 It’s difficult to come back from that.
0:05:46 John Quincy Adams, somewhat famously, kept extremely detailed diary for 68 years, often
0:05:52 writing sort of a detailed analysis and almost like log of his mental states.
0:05:54 That’s an interesting thing to do, actually.
0:05:56 I don’t do that enough.
0:05:58 I speak it.
0:05:59 I don’t write it down.
0:06:01 Perhaps there’s some magic in writing it down.
0:06:06 But there is, with BetterHelp, also magic in speaking it.
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0:06:12 Check them out at BetterHelp.com/lex and save on your first month.
0:06:14 That’s BetterHelp.com/lex.
0:06:21 This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere
0:06:23 with a great looking online store.
0:06:27 So Abraham Lincoln actually owned a general store.
0:06:32 And he has famously written that he wished he had Shopify.
0:06:33 It would be much more convenient.
0:06:36 Anyway, he had a general store that failed.
0:06:42 So, you know, sometimes you need the right job for the right man.
0:06:45 That match to be made and everything else is not going to work out.
0:06:54 I sold shoes, women’s shoes at Sears, kind of like Al Bundy for married with children.
0:06:55 If you know the show.
0:06:58 And, you know, I did okay.
0:07:04 But I think it wasn’t quite the right fit for me.
0:07:09 You know, I was quite technically savvy and knew about computers.
0:07:12 And I said, I should probably be selling electronics and computers.
0:07:18 And they said, yes, yes, yes, one day you will, but now we need helping shoes.
0:07:20 So let’s start you there.
0:07:25 And if I stayed there for many more years, perhaps I would have upgraded to electronics.
0:07:28 But then I also saw the beauty in selling women’s shoes.
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0:08:00 Ulysses S. Grant, the famed general, kept extremely detailed expense accounts,
0:08:02 recording every single penny he spent.
0:08:10 Now, rigor, attention to detail, obsession with detail, financial detail is important.
0:08:14 But, you know, if you have the right tool for the job, that’s made easier.
0:08:18 I would love to kind of throw some of these people, some of these leaders,
0:08:25 some of these brilliant minds from history into the modern world that is digitized.
0:08:30 I think a lot of them would actually be destroyed by it.
0:08:34 Because the machine of distraction will pull them away from the focus
0:08:39 that you can more easily attain in a non-technological world.
0:08:42 And some of them, I think, will become even more super productive.
0:08:43 So it’ll be really interesting.
0:08:50 And there’s been a lot of presidents that kind of pushed the White House and government in general
0:08:57 into the direction of great record keeping from George Washington to Carter to FDR,
0:08:59 as Sager talks a lot about.
0:09:03 Anyway, all that is in the realm of politics, but the realm of business
0:09:06 in many ways is the same, especially when the government is working well.
0:09:09 So Netsuite is for business.
0:09:12 In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to Netsuite.
0:09:17 Take advantage of their flexible financing plan at Netsuite.com/lex.
0:09:20 That’s Netsuite.com/lex.
0:09:23 This is a Lex Friedman podcast.
0:09:26 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
0:09:30 And now, dear friends, here’s Sager and Jetty.
0:09:49 So let’s start with the obvious big question.
0:09:51 What do you think Trump won?
0:09:54 Let’s break it down before the election.
0:09:58 You said that if Trump wins, it’s going to be because of immigration.
0:10:05 So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
0:10:07 Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration.
0:10:10 But without that, multifaceted explanation.
0:10:12 Let’s start with the easiest one.
0:10:16 There has been a wave of anti-incumbent energy around the world.
0:10:19 Financial Times chart recently went viral showing so the first time,
0:10:23 I think since World War II, possibly since 1905, I need to look at the data set
0:10:27 that all anti-incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats.
0:10:30 So that’s a very, very high level analysis.
0:10:33 And we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump’s victory in 2016,
0:10:36 because there were similar global precursors.
0:10:40 That individual level in the United States, there’s a very simple explanation as well,
0:10:42 which is that Joe Biden was very old.
0:10:43 He was very unpopular.
0:10:44 Inflation was high.
0:10:48 Inflation is one of the highest determiners of people switching their votes
0:10:52 and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box.
0:10:53 So that’s that.
0:10:58 But I think it’s actually much deeper at a psychological level for who America is
0:10:59 and what it is.
0:11:02 And fundamentally, I think what we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about today
0:11:08 is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy
0:11:12 and eventually the loss to Donald Trump in the popular vote,
0:11:16 where it really is like an apotheosis of several social forces.
0:11:19 So we’re going to talk about the great awakening or so-called awokening,
0:11:22 which is very important to understanding all of this.
0:11:26 There’s also really Donald Trump himself, who was really one of the most unique
0:11:30 individual American politicians that we’ve seen in decades.
0:11:34 At this point, Donald Trump’s victory makes him the most important and transformative
0:11:37 figure in American politics since FDR.
0:11:42 And thought process for the audience is in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old who’s
0:11:48 eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure.
0:11:52 And there’s stories in World War II where troops were on the front line.
0:11:54 Some of them are 18, 19 years old.
0:11:57 FDR died and they literally said, “Who’s the president?”
0:11:58 And they said, “Harry Truman, you dumbass.”
0:12:00 And they go, “Who?”
0:12:05 They couldn’t conceive of a universe where FDR was not the president of the United States.
0:12:10 And Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure.
0:12:14 Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man.
0:12:15 And obviously he’s failed.
0:12:20 We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency.
0:12:23 So I think at macro level, it’s easy to understand.
0:12:26 At a basic level, inflation, it’s easy to understand.
0:12:30 But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique
0:12:35 Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics
0:12:36 really forever.
0:12:42 I mean, in the white working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation really of
0:12:47 a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along
0:12:53 a single individual question of did you attend a four-year college degree institution or not?
0:12:56 And this is a crazy thing to say.
0:13:02 Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history.
0:13:10 We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups really voted in blacks, Latinos, blacks, whites.
0:13:15 There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college
0:13:17 educated white collar workers.
0:13:22 But by and large, you could pretty fairly say that Asians were Indians.
0:13:26 Everyone, 80, 90 percent were going to vote for the Democratic Party.
0:13:27 Latinos as well.
0:13:30 I’m born here in Texas, in the state of Texas.
0:13:34 George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40 percent of the Latino vote.
0:13:39 Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men.
0:13:45 So really, fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment in American politics.
0:13:48 And that’s a really fundamental problem for the modern left.
0:13:53 It’s erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the electoral college,
0:13:59 the so-called electoral college bias towards Republicans, really being able to win the
0:14:04 popular vote for the first time since 2004 is a shocking landmark achievement by a Republican.
0:14:10 In 2008, I have a book on my shelf and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things
0:14:11 can change.
0:14:17 James Carville and it says, “40 more years, how Democrats will never lose an election again.”
0:14:21 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama Coalition and the landslide.
0:14:27 And something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time.
0:14:28 I was born in 1992.
0:14:30 I watched red states go blue.
0:14:31 I’ve seen blue states go red.
0:14:33 I’ve seen swing states go red or blue.
0:14:35 I’ve seen millions of people pick up and move.
0:14:39 The greatest internal migration in the United States since World War II.
0:14:43 And it’s really inspiring because it’s a really dynamic, interesting place.
0:14:47 And I love covering and I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people.
0:14:47 It’s awesome.
0:14:51 One of the reasons I’m a big fan of yours is your student history.
0:14:54 And so you’ve recommended a bunch of books to me.
0:14:59 And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history.
0:15:02 Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time.
0:15:03 Some don’t.
0:15:08 And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people.
0:15:09 Some are mass movements.
0:15:16 And it’s just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves maybe
0:15:19 into the constraints of a two-party system.
0:15:22 And I’d love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that.
0:15:31 So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
0:15:37 Well, I won’t go that far because to say it’s a class struggle really implies that things
0:15:39 fundamentally align on economic lines.
0:15:41 And I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate.
0:15:44 Although if that’s your lens, you could get there.
0:15:50 So there’s a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her
0:15:56 vote share and won households over $100,000 or more and Donald Trump won households under $100,000.
0:15:59 So you could view that in an economic lens.
0:16:03 The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree
0:16:05 and for education.
0:16:08 And so one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray.
0:16:15 And that book really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in
0:16:19 when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life,
0:16:24 not only on where they move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to,
0:16:27 their cultural, what television shows that they watch.
0:16:31 One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray is called a bubble quiz.
0:16:34 I encourage people to go take it, by the way, which asks you a question.
0:16:37 It’s like, what does the word Branson mean to you?
0:16:39 And it has a couple of answers.
0:16:42 One of them is Branson is Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson.
0:16:46 Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination.
0:16:48 Three is it means nothing.
0:16:52 So you are less in a bubble if you say country music and you’re very much in the bubble if
0:16:53 you say Richard Branson.
0:16:56 And I remember taking that test for the first time ago.
0:16:58 Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic, like what?
0:17:01 And then I was like, wait, I’m in the bubble.
0:17:02 And there are other things in there.
0:17:04 Like, can you name various different military ranks?
0:17:08 I can because I’m a history nerd, but the vast majority of college-educated people
0:17:10 don’t know anybody who served in the United States military.
0:17:12 They don’t have family members who do.
0:17:16 The most popular shows in America are like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS.
0:17:21 Whereas people in our probably cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus,
0:17:22 The Last of Us.
0:17:24 This is prestige television, right?
0:17:27 With a very small audience, but high income, high education.
0:17:32 So the point is, is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live.
0:17:35 And rural urban is one way to describe it.
0:17:40 But honestly, with the work from Home Revolution and more rich people and highly educated people
0:17:45 moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in,
0:17:45 that’s changing.
0:17:48 And so really, the internet is everything.
0:17:51 The stuff that you consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing,
0:17:54 type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly.
0:17:59 Whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your
0:18:02 life, that is the real cultural divide in America.
0:18:08 And I actually think that’s what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people
0:18:13 to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from
0:18:20 the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling
0:18:24 that these people don’t understand me and my struggles in this life.
0:18:29 And so the trivial formulation is that it’s the wokeism, the anti-wokeism movement.
0:18:36 So it’s not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against wokeism.
0:18:38 It was the broader anti-elitism.
0:18:43 It’s difficult to say because I wouldn’t dismiss anti-wokeism or wokeism as an explanation.
0:18:47 But we need to understand the electoral impacts of woke.
0:18:54 So there’s varying degrees of how you’re going to encounter “wokeism,” and this is a very difficult
0:18:55 thing to define.
0:18:59 So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you’re going
0:19:02 to interact with on a cultural basis.
0:19:07 And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show, and just for some reason,
0:19:08 there’s two trans characters.
0:19:13 And it’s never particularly explained why they just are there, or watching a commercial,
0:19:13 and it’s the same thing.
0:19:18 Watching, I don’t know, I remember watching, I think it was Doctor Strange and the Multiverse
0:19:22 of Madness, and the main, it was a terrible movie, by the way, I don’t recommend it.
0:19:26 But one of the characters, I think it’s her name was like America, and she wore a gay pride flag.
0:19:29 Right, look, many left-wingers would make fun of me for saying these things.
0:19:34 But that is obviously a social agenda to the point, as in they believe it is like deeply
0:19:40 acceptable, that is used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress,
0:19:44 you know, in sexual orientation and others, and they really believe it’s important to
0:19:46 quote unquote showcase it for representation.
0:19:49 So that’s like one way that we may encounter quote unquote wokeism.
0:19:54 But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its
0:19:59 roots in, you know, American society, all the way going back to the 1960s, and how those have
0:20:04 manifested in our economy, and in our understanding of quote unquote discrimination.
0:20:06 So two books I can recommend.
0:20:09 One is called The Origins of Woke, that’s by Richard Hanania.
0:20:13 There’s another one by The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell.
0:20:17 And they make a very strong case that Caldwell in particular, that he calls it like a new
0:20:22 founding of America, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
0:20:27 Because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race and the American
0:20:30 character and how the government was going to enforce that.
0:20:34 And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about
0:20:40 The Origins of Trump by Jim Webb and Senator Jim Webb, incredible, incredible man.
0:20:43 He’s so underappreciated, intellectual.
0:20:44 He was anti-war.
0:20:49 And people may remember him from the 2016 primary.
0:20:53 And they asked him a question I don’t exactly remember about one of his enemies.
0:20:56 And he’s like, well, one of them was a guy I shot in Vietnam.
0:20:58 And he was running against Hillary.
0:21:01 And that guy, he wrote the book Born Fighting.
0:21:05 I think it’s history of the Scots-Irish people, something like that.
0:21:11 And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences
0:21:18 that were playing out through the HR managerial elite really turned a lot of people within
0:21:24 the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against
0:21:26 by the professional managerial class.
0:21:31 And so there’s a lot of roots to this, the managerial revolution by James Burnham.
0:21:37 And in terms of the origin of kind of how we got here, but the crystallization of like DEI
0:21:39 and or affirmative action.
0:21:43 I prefer to use the term affirmative action in the highest echelons of business.
0:21:48 And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered.
0:21:51 And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids.
0:21:54 And that’s why it’s not an accident Donald J. Trump elected in 2016.
0:22:00 At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that wokeism is a movement is dead?
0:22:01 I don’t know.
0:22:06 I mean, it’s very difficult to say because wokeism itself is not a movement with a party leader.
0:22:14 It’s a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years.
0:22:15 I mean, it’s effectively a religion.
0:22:20 And part of the reason why it’s difficult to define is it means different things to different people.
0:22:25 So for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define quote unquote woke.
0:22:30 Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language?
0:22:31 Yes, I do think they will.
0:22:34 I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that.
0:22:39 However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from quote unquote woke.
0:22:44 But she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019.
0:22:49 But a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me.
0:22:54 And not only do not understand me, but I have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding
0:22:59 that would lead to a quote unquote equity mindset, equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to
0:23:03 equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy.
0:23:06 So I can’t say, I think it’s way too early.
0:23:11 And again, you can not use the word Latinx.
0:23:16 But do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime in terms of how
0:23:21 you would run your Department of Justice in terms of how you view the world,
0:23:25 in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are?
0:23:28 And because I would say that’s still actually kind of a woke mindset.
0:23:31 And that’s part of the reason why the term itself doesn’t really mean a whole lot.
0:23:36 And we have to get actually really specific about what it looks like in operations.
0:23:38 In operation, it means affirmative action.
0:23:42 It means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something,
0:23:45 that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board.
0:23:52 Like this is a blatant and extraordinary look racialism that they’ve enshrined in their bylaws.
0:23:53 So you can get rid of ESG.
0:23:54 That’s great.
0:23:56 But you can get rid of DEI.
0:23:56 I think that’s great.
0:23:59 But it’s really about a mindset and a view of the world.
0:24:01 And I don’t think that’s going anywhere.
0:24:07 And you think the reason it doesn’t work well in practice is because there’s a big degree
0:24:09 to which it’s anti-meritocracy.
0:24:10 It’s anti-American, really.
0:24:15 I mean, DEI and woke and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries.
0:24:16 Okay.
0:24:22 And there are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic and they’re heterogeneous.
0:24:25 And they were run by basically quasi-dictators.
0:24:29 And the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims.
0:24:32 And they get this guy and they get that guy and everybody kind of shakes it.
0:24:35 It’s very explicit where they’re like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians.
0:24:37 We have 10 spots and they go to the Hindus.
0:24:39 I’m talking India is a country I know pretty well.
0:24:43 And this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect.
0:24:47 But in America, fundamentally, we really believe that no matter where you are from,
0:24:52 that you come here and basically within a generation, especially if you migrate here
0:24:56 legally and you integrate, that you leave a lot of that stuff behind.
0:25:01 And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is one that really
0:25:08 does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that’s not
0:25:14 meritocratic. And I mean, I will give the left-wingers some credit in the idea that
0:25:18 meritocracy itself could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds.
0:25:24 I think that’s true. And so the way I would like to see it is to increase
0:25:30 everybody’s equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at “willing out”
0:25:34 the American dream. But that doesn’t erase meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other
0:25:38 things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier.
0:25:42 So these are two ideologies which are really at odds. In a lot of ways,
0:25:46 like wokeism, racialism, and all this is a third-world ideology. It’s one that’s very
0:25:51 prevalent in Europe and all across Asia, but it doesn’t mix well here and it shouldn’t.
0:25:53 And I’m really glad that America feels the same way.
0:25:59 Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass, fascinating book.
0:26:06 Worn Fighting, How the Scots Ira Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree,
0:26:12 first of all, how badass the Scots are, and to the degree, many of the things that kind of
0:26:18 identifies America and part of the American spirit were defined by this relatively small
0:26:23 group of people. As he describes, the model could be summarized as fight, sing, drink, and pray.
0:26:29 So there’s the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government,
0:26:35 the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance. Over 2,000 years of a military tradition,
0:26:41 they made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders,
0:26:47 including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents,
0:26:52 some of the more gangster presidents, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt,
0:26:58 Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
0:27:03 We owe them so much, and they really don’t get their due, unfortunately. A lot of,
0:27:08 for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post mass immigration
0:27:14 from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to New Irish, to Italians,
0:27:19 to Slovenians. And as you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty
0:27:24 different. And it’s not the different here in the United States. Scott Cyrus was some of the
0:27:30 original settlers here in America, and particularly in Appalachia, and their contribution to the
0:27:34 fighting spirit and their own culture, and who we are as individualists, and some of the first
0:27:38 people to ever settle the frontier. And that frontier mindset really does come from them.
0:27:42 We owe them just as much as we do the Puritans, but they don’t ever really get their due.
0:27:47 And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then
0:27:52 how exactly could this group of white working class voters forgo from 2012 voting for a man
0:27:58 named Barack Hussein Obama to Donald J. Trump, you really seem to, it makes perfect sense if
0:28:02 you combine it with a lot of the stuff I’m talking about here, about affirmative action,
0:28:06 about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you,
0:28:13 and specifically also not valuing your contribution to American history. And in some cases,
0:28:18 actively looking down. I’m glad you pointed out not only their role in the Revolutionary War,
0:28:24 but in the Civil War as well. And just how a bunch of a contribution culturally really that we owe
0:28:29 them for setting the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt
0:28:32 some of their own ideas in their culture as our own. It’s one of the things that makes America
0:28:40 great. Mark Twain. Yeah. I mean, so much of the culture, so much of the American spirit,
0:28:46 the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy.
0:28:52 So would you trace the, that fierce individualism that we think of back to them?
0:28:57 Definitely. It’s a huge part of them about who they were, about the screw you attitude. I mean,
0:29:02 that book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hill Bailey Elegy came out.
0:29:06 I’m sure you remember this, which it’s kind of weird to think that it’s now the
0:29:10 Vice President-elect of the United States. It’s kind of wild, honestly, to think about.
0:29:16 But JD Vance’s book, Hill Bailey Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites
0:29:20 who were like, how do these people support Trump? Where does this shit come from? That they’re
0:29:25 really, I mean, that if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character
0:29:30 that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump and not just vote. He won the election.
0:29:34 How does that happen? And that’s Hill Bailey Elegy guided people in an understanding of what
0:29:40 that’s like on a lived day-to-day basis. And JD, to his credit, talks about Scott’s Irish heritage,
0:29:44 about Appalachia, and the legacy of what that culture looks like today, and how a lot of these
0:29:48 people voted for Donald Trump. But we got to give credit to Jim Webb, who wrote the history of these
0:29:55 people and taught me and you about their original fight against the oppressors in Scotland and Ireland
0:30:01 and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And they got their due
0:30:06 in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald
0:30:11 Trump, to where we are today. Dude, it got me pumped, excited to be an American. Me too. I love
0:30:18 that book. It’s crazy that JD, the same guy, because that’s Hill Bailey Elegy is what I kind of
0:30:22 thought of him as. Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you, for me, it’s actually pretty surreal. I met JD
0:30:28 Vance in like 2017 in like a bar. I didn’t ever think he would be the vice president-elect
0:30:33 of the United States. I mean, just kind of wild. One of my friends went back and dug up the email
0:30:36 that we originally sent him, just like, “Hey, do you want to meet up?” And he’s like, “Sure, you
0:30:41 know.” I was watching on television. I mean, the first time that it really hit me, I was like,
0:30:45 “Whoa.” It was like name in a history book. It’s whenever he became the vice presidential nominee,
0:30:49 I was watching him on TV, and the confetti was falling, and he was waving with his wife, and I
0:30:55 was like, “Wow, that’s it. You’re in the history books now forever, especially now.” So as the
0:31:03 literal vice president-elect of the US, but his own evolution is actually a fascinating story
0:31:07 for us too, because I think a lot of the time I’ve spent right now is kind of… A lot of what
0:31:13 I’m giving right now are like 2016 kind of takes about like why Trump won that time. But we just
0:31:17 spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election, and like how what happened, some of the
0:31:22 failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the great awokening. But also,
0:31:27 if you look at the evolution of J.D. Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy,
0:31:30 and not a lot of people pay attention to this, but if you read Hillbilly Elegy,
0:31:36 J.D. was much more of a traditional conservative at that time. He was citing, you know, report,
0:31:40 I think the famous passage is about like payday loans and why they’re good or something like that.
0:31:44 I don’t know his position today, but I would assume that he’s probably changed that. But the
0:31:51 point is, is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional
0:31:57 Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class, then eventually become a champion
0:32:02 and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing
0:32:07 and bettering the United States specifically for working class Americans, really, of all stripes.
0:32:16 And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project,
0:32:21 as an ideology. It’s also one of the Republican Party, which coalesced now with Donald Trump as
0:32:27 a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that
0:32:31 eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.
0:32:38 So let’s talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What’s
0:32:45 your take on Biden? Biden is, I try to remove myself from it, and I try not to give like
0:32:50 hit big history takes while you’re in the moment. But it’s really hard not to say that he’s one
0:32:55 of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I’m going to go with it
0:33:01 is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do. So Joe Biden has been the same
0:33:08 person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student who thinks he’s an A student.
0:33:14 The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election
0:33:18 to the United States Senate through his entire career as United States Senator, where he always
0:33:23 wanted to be the star and the center of attention. And to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of
0:33:27 the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what
0:33:34 he already was. And so a book recommendation, it’s called What It Takes. And it was written in 1988.
0:33:39 And there’s actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. And one of the
0:33:43 things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the
0:33:48 center of attention. Now, the reason I’m laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the
0:33:52 individual and his character is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a
0:34:00 person who was elected in 2020 really because of a feeling of chaos, of Donald Trump, of we need
0:34:06 normalcy, decides to come into the office, portrays himself as a quote unquote transitional president,
0:34:12 slowly, you know, begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants,
0:34:17 the same ones who have been around him for so long, that he had no single input into his life
0:34:22 to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly
0:34:28 undeniable to the vast majority of the American people. And that’s why I’m trying to keep it as
0:34:31 like him as an individual, as a president, because we can separate him from some of his
0:34:35 accomplishments and the things that happen. Some I support, some I don’t. But generally,
0:34:38 a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the Chips Act. A lot
0:34:42 of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the build back better bill or
0:34:47 whatever his Lena Kahn antitrust policy, they’re going to look back on him and they’re going to
0:34:53 remember high inflation. They’re going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the
0:34:59 job in the sense that one again book recommendation freedom from fear by David Kennedy is about
0:35:04 the Roosevelt years. And one of the most important things people don’t understand is the new deal
0:35:08 didn’t really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to, right? Like there was still
0:35:13 high unemployment, there was still a lot of suffering. But you know what changed? They felt
0:35:18 that they had a vigorous commander in chief who was doing everything in his power to attack
0:35:22 the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn’t even materially change,
0:35:27 the vigor that’s a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy at Vega,
0:35:32 you know, in the Massachusetts accent, we had this young vibrant president in 1960 and he was
0:35:36 running around and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly.
0:35:41 And we have an 80 year old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach
0:35:47 while people’s grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25%. And we don’t see the same vigor. We
0:35:52 don’t see the same action, the bias to action, which is so important in the modern presidency.
0:35:57 That is fundamentally why I think the Democrats, part of the reason why the Democrats lost the
0:36:02 election and also why I think that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way. And he had
0:36:06 the opportunity, he could have done it, you know, if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago. But
0:36:13 the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental
0:36:19 rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall. And it’s kind of amazing because again, if we
0:36:24 look back to his original campaign speech, 2019, why I’m running for president, it was
0:36:28 Charlottesville. And he said, I want to defeat Donald Trump forever. And I want to make sure
0:36:31 that he never gets back in the White House again. So by his own metric, he did fail.
0:36:34 That was his, it was the only thing he wanted to do. And he failed, failed from.
0:36:40 You said a lot of interesting stuff. So one FDR, that’s really interesting. It’s not about
0:36:46 the specific policy. It’s about like fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and
0:36:53 just uniting the entire country for a particular, this is the same with Bernie. Like maybe there’s
0:36:56 a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that still support him because like we just want
0:37:02 to be authentic. Yeah, that’s it. We just want somebody to fight authentically. Yes. Yes. FDR,
0:37:06 people really need FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ. Okay. And in the US.
0:37:11 And some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. So people need to go back
0:37:15 and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went
0:37:19 through his ability to bring Congress to heal and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through.
0:37:22 But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right?
0:37:29 We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference
0:37:34 was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House
0:37:40 and use a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has in fireside chats,
0:37:45 he’s passing legislation. But more importantly, so he tries various different programs,
0:37:49 then they get ruled on constitutional. He tries even more. So what does America take away from
0:37:53 that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really
0:37:59 part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it was, it gave him the strength
0:38:07 to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling
0:38:14 of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of
0:38:18 the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure. He really is. And I people think of him
0:38:23 for World War II. And of course, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early
0:38:29 years are not studied enough. ’33 to ’37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history.
0:38:33 We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by a king, by a monarch. And people liked it.
0:38:41 He was a dictator and he was a good one. Yeah. So to sort of push back against the implied
0:38:45 thing that you said. Sure. So when saying Biden is the worst president.
0:38:49 No, second worst in modern history, that’s what I said. In modern history, who’s the worst?
0:38:52 W, no question. I see because of the horrible wars probably. I mean,
0:38:57 Iraq is just so bad. Like one of my favorite authors is a guy, Gene Edward Smith. He’s
0:39:02 written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his book, W Biography,
0:39:06 he’s like, there’s just no question. There’s a single worst foreign policy mistake in all
0:39:11 of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever. He had terrible judgment and
0:39:16 got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster and it set us up for failure.
0:39:20 By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald
0:39:26 Trump than George W. Bush. But I could go off on Bush for a long time. We will return there.
0:39:31 So as part of the pushback, I’d like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance
0:39:36 and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump. You’re absolutely right.
0:39:42 Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American
0:39:46 history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
0:39:51 Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit, you have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be
0:39:57 president. I had put out a tweet that got some controversy. And I think it was Joe Rogan,
0:40:00 who I love. But he was like, I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being.
0:40:04 And I was like, I’m actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.
0:40:10 I was like, I’ve read too much about them to know. I know who you are. If you spend your life,
0:40:14 and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would-be politicians,
0:40:18 I know what it takes to actually become the president. It’s crazy. You have to give up
0:40:22 everything, everything, every night. You’re not spending it with your wife. You’re spending
0:40:26 it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect to you.
0:40:30 Every, even after you get elected, that’s even more so. Now you got to raise money.
0:40:33 And now you’re on to the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through.
0:40:36 You’re going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this.
0:40:41 Your entire life revolves around your career. It’s honestly, you need an insane level of
0:40:46 narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else,
0:40:53 which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles
0:40:58 lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self
0:41:03 and everything around you. There’s a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson
0:41:06 after Johnson becomes the president. He’s talking to the White House butler,
0:41:09 and she was like, “Everything in this house revolves around my husband.
0:41:12 Whatever’s left goes to the girls, her two children, and I’ll take the scraps.”
0:41:19 Everything revolves around Johnson’s political career. And his daughters, when they’re honest,
0:41:22 because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but
0:41:27 they didn’t spend any time with him. Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell,
0:41:32 I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Carroll books. Sunday was for Ray Byrne. There was no
0:41:38 time for his kids. That’s what it was. And by the way, he’s one of the greatest politicians
0:41:42 to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack and he was a deeply sad and depressed
0:41:49 individual. Yeah, I saw that tweet to go back to that. And also, I listened to your incredible
0:41:54 debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment Podcast. And I have to side with Marshall.
0:41:58 I think you’re just wrong on this, because I think revealing the character of a person
0:42:04 is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and full of…
0:42:10 Yeah, this gets to the judgment question. I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt,
0:42:16 even of FDR. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had.
0:42:22 I think they had a really, really good judgment. And I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal
0:42:27 character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. So JFK is… Actually, JFK
0:42:32 might be our best example, because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a
0:42:38 brand new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he
0:42:44 deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly
0:42:49 was his character. And we can go again, though, into his laundry list of that. But most of it
0:42:54 was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he was also
0:43:01 had a deeply inquisitive mind, and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT 109.
0:43:07 So it is… Look, I get it. I actually could steelman it. The response to what I’m saying is
0:43:12 judgment is not divisible from personal character. But just because I know a lot of politicians,
0:43:17 and I’ve read enough with the really great ones, the people who I revere the most,
0:43:21 there’s really bad personal stuff, basically, every single time.
0:43:24 But you’re saying the judgment was good.
0:43:25 Yeah, his judgment was great.
0:43:26 On the Missile Crisis.
0:43:26 Yes.
0:43:32 Some of the best judgment and decision-making in the history of America.
0:43:37 Yes. And we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there. This is a brutal text.
0:43:42 We were forced to read it in graduate school. The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I’m so
0:43:47 thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science, because it lays out theories
0:43:51 of how government works. This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about
0:43:57 Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up, because people really need to understand
0:44:03 Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care
0:44:07 about you. They don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating
0:44:12 mechanisms, which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event,
0:44:16 like World War II, to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while,
0:44:20 you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt, who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency
0:44:23 and transform the country. But it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like
0:44:29 that done. So the question around the Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban
0:44:34 Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different
0:44:38 schools of thought. But one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three,
0:44:43 the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the great man
0:44:49 theory as well. So you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT 109 and about
0:44:54 how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II as this, I think he was like a first lieutenant or
0:45:00 something like that, and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap
0:45:04 in his teeth with a broken back. And he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine
0:45:10 and he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why
0:45:18 England Slept, which to this day is considered a text which at the moment was able to describe in
0:45:23 detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement.
0:45:29 I actually have an original copy. It’s one of my most prized possessions. And from 1939,
0:45:33 because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy, turns out he’s a brilliant
0:45:39 man. And another just favorite aside is at the Potsdam Conference, where Harry Truman is there
0:45:43 with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, president of the United
0:45:50 States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, right, who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy
0:45:54 as a journalist, some shithead journalist on the side, and all three of those presidents were in
0:46:00 the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind
0:46:06 of amazing. I love people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power.
0:46:09 But are you announcing that you’re running for power? No, absolutely not. Yeah. I don’t have
0:46:14 what it takes. I don’t think so. I’m self-aware. Yeah. Well, maybe humility is necessary for
0:46:21 greatness. Okay. So actually, can we just linger on that book? Yeah. So the book Essence of Decision,
0:46:26 Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of
0:46:31 how government works. The rational actor model, so seeing government as one entity,
0:46:39 trying to maximize the national interest, also seeing government as through the lens of the
0:46:45 momentum of standard operating procedures, sort of this giant organization that’s just doing
0:46:51 things how it’s always been done. And the government politics model of there’s just these
0:46:59 individual internal power struggles within government. And all of that is like a different
0:47:05 way to view and they’re probably all true to a degree of how decisions are made within this
0:47:09 giant machinery of government. That’s why it’s so important is because you cannot read that book
0:47:13 and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is many more true than the other, but all of them
0:47:18 are deeply true. And this is one, this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because, and I
0:47:23 guess for the people out there who think I’ve been up too obsequious, he’ll be my criticism,
0:47:26 Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast. Probably
0:47:31 the most important thing that he ever said, which is he said, “I like to have people like John Bolton
0:47:36 in my administration because they scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational
0:47:41 individual in the room.” So at a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that and
0:47:46 then they can rationalize while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House,
0:47:51 people like Mike Walts and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a
0:47:58 quote unquote anti-Neocon, anti-Liz Cheney agenda. Now, Trump’s theory of this is that he likes to
0:48:04 have quote unquote like psychopaths like John Bolton in the room with him while he’s sitting
0:48:08 across from Kim Jong-un because it gets scared. What I think Trump never understood when he was
0:48:13 president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out
0:48:17 which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic
0:48:22 theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I don’t think quite gets
0:48:27 is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reach the president’s
0:48:30 desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is, “By the time it gets to my desk,
0:48:34 nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don’t have an
0:48:41 answer. That’s why I have to make the call.” So the theory that Trump has that you can have people
0:48:45 in there who are let’s say warmongers, neocons or whatever who don’t necessarily agree with you
0:48:49 is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I’ll still be able to
0:48:54 rein those people in as an influence. Here’s the issue. Let’s say for Mike Waltz, who’s going to
0:48:59 be the national security advisor. A lot of people don’t really understand, you know, there’s this
0:49:02 theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you’re the president,
0:49:06 you’re like, “Hey, what do we think about Iran?” I’m like, “I think you should do X, Y, and Z. No,
0:49:09 that’s not how it works.” The national security advisor’s job is to coordinate the interagency
0:49:15 process. So his job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room,
0:49:20 CIA, State Department, SECDEF, others. Before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. So we’re
0:49:26 like, “Hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. We need a package of options. Those packages of options
0:49:29 are conceded of three things. We’re going to have one group. We’re going to call it the dovish
0:49:34 option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package. Trump walks
0:49:38 in. This is how it’s supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, “Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine.
0:49:42 What do we do? Mr. President, we’ve prepared three options for you. We’ve got one, two, and three.
0:49:46 Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides
0:49:52 what’s even in option one, two, and three?” That is the part where Trump needs to really understand
0:49:55 how these things happen. And I watched this happen to him in his first administration.
0:50:00 He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn,
0:50:05 but him and Trump were at least like this, on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I
0:50:12 would call an FBI coup, whatever, 33 days. He’s out as a national security advisor. HR Master,
0:50:18 he’s got a nice, shiny uniform, four star, all of this. Master doesn’t agree with Donald Trump at
0:50:23 all. And so Trump says, “I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan. I want to get out of Afghanistan.”
0:50:26 They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get out of Afghanistan.” But before we get out, we got to go back in,
0:50:31 as in we need more troops in there. And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like all this and it
0:50:38 proves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017, where he ends up escalating and increasing
0:50:42 the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it’s only till February 2020 that he gets to sign a deal,
0:50:47 the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017. But the reason why
0:50:52 that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory,
0:50:57 where HR McMaster is able to guide the interagency process, bring the uniform
0:51:01 recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, just give Donald Trump no option but to
0:51:06 say we must put troops. Another example of this is a book called Obama’s War by Bob Woodward.
0:51:10 I highly encourage people to read this book, because this book talks about how Obama comes into
0:51:14 the White House in 2009, and he says, “I want to get out of Iraq and I don’t want to increase,
0:51:19 I want to fight the good war in Afghanistan.” And he’s doing, Obama’s a thoughtful guy,
0:51:24 too thoughtful, actually. And so he sits there and he’s working out his opinions.
0:51:31 And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his narrow, his options begin to narrow, because
0:51:35 strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we
0:51:41 should do in Afghanistan. And pretty soon, David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire
0:51:47 National Security apparatus has Obama pegged, where he basically politically at the time,
0:51:53 decides to take the advantage of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both
0:51:58 ways by saying, “But in two years we’re going to withdraw.” That book really demonstrates how the
0:52:05 deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with
0:52:12 ones which you don’t even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down
0:52:16 the extreme directions. That’s why when Trump says things like, “I want to get out of Syria,”
0:52:21 that doesn’t compute up here for the Pentagon. Because first of all, if I even asked you how
0:52:24 many troops we have in Syria, and you could go on the DoD website, it’ll tell you the number.
0:52:28 The number’s bullshit, because the way that they do it is if you’re only there for 179 days,
0:52:32 you don’t count as active, military contracts, the real numbers, let’s say five times. And so
0:52:36 Trump would be like, “Hey, I want to get out of Syria. We’ll do it six months, right? We need six
0:52:40 months.” And after six months ago, so are we out of Syria yet? And they’re like, “No, well, we got
0:52:44 to wrap this up. We got this base. We got that. We have this important mission. And next thing you
0:52:49 know, you’re out of office, and it’s over.” So there’s all these things which I don’t think he
0:52:53 quite understands. I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do, is
0:52:57 the reason why these picks really matter is not only are the voices in the situation room for
0:53:01 the really, really high-profile stuff. It’s for all the little things to never get to that president’s
0:53:07 desk, of which can shape extraordinary policy. And I’ll give you the best example. There was never
0:53:13 a decision by FDR as president of the United States to oil embargo Japan, one which he thought
0:53:18 about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision kind of made within the State Department.
0:53:22 It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it.
0:53:26 It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was understood,
0:53:31 the implications that by doing that, we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think
0:53:37 about what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that
0:53:42 we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire
0:53:47 national security chain in the White House. Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration,
0:53:52 which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the
0:53:57 massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is, is that it may actually be second to
0:54:02 inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win. The presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally
0:54:05 changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the
0:54:10 Scott’s Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery
0:54:16 and elitism and liberalism appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a
0:54:22 disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their ability to quote unquote pursue
0:54:27 the American dream, while the American dream is dying for the native born population, that is a huge
0:54:33 reason why people are turning against mass immigration. Historically as well, my friend
0:54:38 Raihan Salam wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War. And one of the most important
0:54:43 parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States. So if we think
0:54:49 about the transition from Scott’s Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to
0:54:56 mass European immigration, what a lot of people don’t realize is it caused a ton of problems.
0:55:01 There were mass movements at the time, the know nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against
0:55:07 mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism by as the religion
0:55:12 of a lot of the new immigrants. But really what it was is about the changing of the American character
0:55:19 by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native born population
0:55:23 and their understanding of what their owed and their role in American society is very different
0:55:29 from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was
0:55:34 actually during the resolution of the immigration question, where we had massive waves of foreign
0:55:41 born population come to the United States. We had them, you know, integrated, luckily actually at
0:55:47 the time with the industrial revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them. One of the problems
0:55:52 is that today in the United States, we have one of the highest levels of foreign born population
0:55:58 than ever before actually since that time in the early 1900s. But we have all of the same attendant
0:56:04 problems. But even worse is we don’t live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly
0:56:08 service based economy that has long, you know, moved past manufacturing. Now I’m not saying we
0:56:12 shouldn’t bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to
0:56:18 work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part
0:56:23 of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign born population, particularly unskilled,
0:56:28 and the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so
0:56:33 under fraudulent purposes. They’re doing so because they are economic migrants and they’re abusing,
0:56:38 you know, asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a
0:56:45 process of application or merit. And this has all of its traces back to 1965, where the Immigration
0:56:51 Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the
0:56:58 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration in the United States. In my opinion,
0:57:03 it was one of the most important things that ever happened. And one of the reasons why is it forced
0:57:09 and caused integration. It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign born
0:57:15 population, it redeveloped an American character and understanding that was more homogenous and was
0:57:20 the ability for you and me to understand despite the difference in our background. If you accelerate
0:57:25 and you continue this trend of the very high foreign born unskilled population, you unfortunately
0:57:32 are basically creating a mass, you know, it’s basically a non-citizen population of illegal
0:57:38 immigrants, people who are not as skilled. You know, I think it was, I read 27% of the people
0:57:43 who’ve come under Joe Biden illegally don’t even have a college degree. That means that we’re lucky
0:57:48 if they’re even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about
0:57:53 integrating that type of person, you know, even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial
0:57:59 economy. Now imagine today, the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass
0:58:05 citizenship happened, you know, to that population would be extraordinary. And even if we were to
0:58:10 do, I don’t think it’s a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it
0:58:14 with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don’t think a lot of people understand
0:58:19 the immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively, they call it
0:58:26 family-based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the term which implies that,
0:58:32 let’s say you come over here, and you get your green card, you can use sponsorship and others
0:58:36 by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with
0:58:41 that is who is your cousin? Like, is he a plumber? Is he, you know, is he a coder? You know, that
0:58:44 doesn’t actually matter because he’s your cousin. So actually, it’s preference. The way that it
0:58:49 should work is it should be nobody cares if he’s your cousin. What does he do? You know, what does
0:58:53 she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my
0:58:57 opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about, oh, they actually increased
0:59:03 the GDP or whatever. It’s like, we need a merit-based immigration system. We are the largest
0:59:07 country in the world. And one of the only non-Western, or one of the only Western countries in the
0:59:13 world that does not have a merit-based, points-based immigration system, like Australia and or Canada.
0:59:17 And I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non-merit-based
0:59:22 purposes. So they’re really reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the
0:59:27 immigration status quo and by basically just allowing tens of millions, potentially tens of
0:59:34 millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the U.S. under these pretenses of
0:59:42 complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people’s understanding and even like
0:59:46 mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump’s victory.
0:59:52 Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the borders are? Tom Holman.
0:59:59 Tom Holman is a very legit dude. Got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original
1:00:06 true believer on enforcing immigration law, as it is. Now, notice how I just said that.
1:00:12 That’s a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out for my left
1:00:22 wing critics in that he really believes in the ability in the necessity of mass deportation
1:00:26 and he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings and this will
1:00:33 apply to Doge too. Tsar has no statutory or constitutional authority. Tsar has as much
1:00:38 authority as the President of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to
1:00:42 say, even his critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times
1:00:49 and he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel. So, Tsar in and of
1:00:53 itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House and it’s one that I really wish we
1:00:58 would move away from. I understand why we do it. It’s basically to do a national security advisor,
1:01:05 interagency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller,
1:01:10 who will be in the White House, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, who has well founded beliefs,
1:01:16 experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, which I think would also give him the
1:01:22 ability to work with home and to pull that off. That said, the corollary to this, and frankly,
1:01:29 this is the one I am the most mystified yet, is Kirsti Noem as the Department of Homeland Security
1:01:32 Secretary. So, let me just lay this out for people because people don’t know what this is.
1:01:37 Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time the way you’re going to interact with them is TSA.
1:01:41 You don’t think about it. But people don’t know, the Department of Homeland Security is one of the
1:01:46 largest law enforcement, if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It’s gigantic.
1:01:53 You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have Border Patrol,
1:01:59 ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies that report up to you. But most importantly for this,
1:02:05 you will be the public face of mass deportation. So, I was there in the White House briefing room
1:02:10 last time around when Kirsten Nielsen, who was the DHS Secretary under Donald Trump and specifically
1:02:16 the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time, she was a smart woman,
1:02:22 she has long experience in government, and honestly, she melted under the criticism.
1:02:26 Kirsti Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that’s great. You have a little bit of
1:02:30 executive experience. But to be honest, I mean, you have no law enforcement background. You have
1:02:36 no ability to lie. You have no, frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like
1:02:41 to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history. You have
1:02:47 to go on television and defend that every single day, a literal job requirement under Donald Trump.
1:02:52 And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high
1:02:57 intellect. You have to have the ability to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how she
1:03:02 handled that situation with her dog and her interviews, and that does not give me confidence
1:03:04 that she will be able to do all that well in the position. So-
1:03:11 What do you think is behind that? So, Crystal Falls, on breaking point, is that there’s some
1:03:19 kind of interpersonal, like, I didn’t know, I should know this, but I didn’t know any of the,
1:03:23 there was some cheating or whatever. There’s a rumor, nobody knows if it’s true, that Cory
1:03:28 Lewandowski and Kirsten Noem had a previous relationship on going. Cory Lewandowski is a
1:03:32 Trump official, and that he may be put her in front. I don’t know. Is this like the real
1:03:36 Housewives of DC? Yeah, kind of. Although, I mean, it was the most open secret in the world.
1:03:40 Allegedly, I don’t know if it’s true. Okay, all right. I mean, I don’t like the traffic too much
1:03:45 in personal theories. But, I mean, in this respect, it might actually be correct in terms of how
1:03:49 it all came down. I have no idea what he’s thinking, to be honest. I truly don’t. I mean,
1:03:55 maybe it’s like he was last time. He said, I want a woman who’s like softer and like emotionally,
1:04:02 and the ability to be the face of my immigration program. I mean, again, like I said, I don’t see
1:04:07 it in terms of her experience and her media. It’s frankly, like, not very good. So, you think she
1:04:14 needs to be able to articulate, not just be like the softer face of this radical policy,
1:04:17 but also be able to articulate the what’s happening with the reasoning behind all this.
1:04:21 Yes. You need to give justification for everything. Here’s the thing. Under mass deportation,
1:04:28 the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person
1:04:32 who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really, what the quasi thing is,
1:04:36 that’s why the program itself is bad, and we should legalize everybody who is here illegally.
1:04:41 Okay. So, the thing is, is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a
1:04:45 great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way
1:04:50 that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say,
1:04:54 well, you know, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law,
1:05:00 the necessity. I mean, I just, I think, articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less
1:05:06 high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this
1:05:11 country. But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this, from a guy named Mark Cracorian,
1:05:16 who’s the center for immigration studies, is we don’t make immigration policy for the benefit
1:05:22 of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren. And that is
1:05:25 an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it’s a triumph of the American
1:05:31 system that somebody whose family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here.
1:05:36 My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process,
1:05:42 can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American
1:05:46 citizens. I’m not talking about other Indians or, you know, whatever. I’m talking about all of it.
1:05:51 I care about everybody who is here in this country. But fundamentally, that will mean that we are
1:05:57 going to have to exclude some people from the US. And another thing that the open borders people
1:06:03 don’t ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. So,
1:06:10 for example, a common left wing talking point is that it’s America’s fault that El Salvador and
1:06:15 Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to
1:06:20 take all those people in because it’s our fault or Haiti, right? But, you know, if you think about
1:06:24 it, America is responsible, and I’m just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of
1:06:30 countries, they just don’t benefit from the geographic ability to walk to the United States.
1:06:35 So, I mean, if we’re doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come
1:06:41 here than anybody from El Salvador who’s talking about something that happened in 1982. So, within
1:06:46 its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the asylum process, you know, people, I mean,
1:06:50 people don’t even know this, you’re literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence, okay?
1:06:57 There are, I mean, imagine that, like, that’s, frankly, that is a local law enforcement and
1:07:02 problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold-hearted this
1:07:07 sounds, but maybe, honestly, it could be because I’m Indian. One of the things that whenever you
1:07:11 visit India and you see a country with over a billion people, you’re like, holy shit, you know,
1:07:18 this, this is crazy. And you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved.
1:07:22 And also, there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody.
1:07:27 It’s a very complex and dynamic problem. And it’s really nice to be bleeding heart and to say,
1:07:31 oh, well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that, but it doesn’t work.
1:07:35 It doesn’t work by the nation-state. It doesn’t work with a sovereign nation. We’re the luckiest
1:07:39 people in the history of the world to live here in this country. And it, you need to protect it.
1:07:45 And protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not
1:07:50 telling us stories like what there’s a famous moment in the Trump White House where Jim Acosta,
1:07:56 CNN White House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, the current, you know,
1:08:00 who will be the current deputy chief. And he was like, what do you say something along the lines
1:08:04 to people who say you’re violating, you know, that quote on the Statue of Liberty, like,
1:08:09 give me your tired, your poor, your hungry, all of that, the Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen,
1:08:14 very logically, was like, what level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote?
1:08:19 Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million?
1:08:25 And that’s such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus
1:08:30 quote. There is, when you start talking, honestly, you’re like, okay, we live in X, Y, and Z society
1:08:36 with X, Y, and Z GDP. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us,
1:08:42 not rely on welfare, not, you know, be people who we have to take care of after because we have
1:08:46 our own problems here right now. And who are the population, the types of people that we can study
1:08:50 and look at, who will be able to benefit. And based on that, yeah, immigration is great. But
1:08:58 there are a lot of economic, legal, and societal reasons for why you definitely don’t want the
1:09:06 current level. But another thing is, even if we turn the switch, and we still let in a million
1:09:11 five people a year under the chain, the chain family based migration, I think it would be a
1:09:17 colossal mistake because it’s not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are
1:09:22 explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It’s doing so based on the familial connections
1:09:26 of people who already gained the immigration system to be able to come here. I have a lot of
1:09:30 family in India. And, you know, I love them, but and some of them are actually very talented and
1:09:34 qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit.
1:09:37 And that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I’m a U.S.
1:09:43 citizen. Like you mentioned, the book, Melting Potter, Civil War by Raihan Salam,
1:09:49 he makes an argument against the open borders. The thesis there is a simulation should be a big
1:09:55 part. I guess there’s some kind of optimal rate of immigration, which allows for a simulation.
1:09:58 Yeah. And there are ebbs and flows. And that’s kind of what I was talking about historically,
1:10:03 where, you know, I mean, the truth is, is you could walk the streets of New York City in the
1:10:08 early 1900s and late 1890s, and you’re not gonna hear any English. And I think that’s bad. I mean,
1:10:13 really what you had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically practicing their way of life,
1:10:17 just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their ethnic problems that they had and
1:10:22 even some of their cultural like unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America and then
1:10:26 New York City police and others are figuring out like, what the hell do we do with all this?
1:10:30 And it literally took shutting down immigration for an entire generation
1:10:35 to do away with that. And there’s actually still some. The point about assimilation is twofold.
1:10:42 One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding of the American
1:10:47 character that has nothing to do with race. And that’s so unique that I can sit here as a child
1:10:53 of people from India and that’s such a deep appreciation for the Scots-Irish. I consider
1:10:58 myself, you know, American first. And one of the things that I really love about that is that I
1:11:05 have no historical relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War. But I feel such kinship
1:11:11 with a lot of the people who did and reading the memoirs and the ideas of those that did because
1:11:18 that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were able to instill in the country
1:11:23 for 150 years later gives me the ability to connect to them. And that’s such an incredible
1:11:27 victory on their part. And that’s such a unique thing in almost every other country in the world
1:11:33 in China and India or wherever. You’re kind of like what you are. You’re a Hindu, you’re a Jew,
1:11:39 you’re Han Chinese, you’re a Uyghur, or you’re Tibetan, something like that. You’re born into it.
1:11:43 But really here was the only one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to
1:11:48 that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different people who come
1:11:54 to America. And that is a celebration of immigration as an idea. But immigration is also a discrete
1:12:00 policy. And that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate
1:12:07 the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in the US, our citizens, to actually be
1:12:13 able to benefit. And look, it’s going to be messy. And honestly, I still don’t know yet if Trump will
1:12:18 be able to pursue actual mass deportation, just because I think that I’m not sure the public
1:12:21 is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don’t know if the public is ready for it.
1:12:26 I think, I don’t know, I’ll have to see because there’s a lot of different ways that you can do
1:12:31 it. There’s mandatory you verify, which requires businesses to basically verify or a US citizen
1:12:34 or you’re here illegally whenever they employ you, which is not the law of the land currently,
1:12:40 which is crazy, by the way. There’s, you know, you can cut off or tax remittance payments,
1:12:45 which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala,
1:12:49 again, illustrating my economic migrant point. There are a lot of various different ways where
1:12:53 you can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the US, so people will self-deport.
1:13:00 But, you know, if he does pursue like real mass deportation, that will be a flashpoint in America.
1:13:05 Aren’t you talking about things like what Tom Holman said that works at raids,
1:13:09 sort of increasing the rate of that? Yeah. We used to do that, you know?
1:13:12 Yeah. But there’s a rate at which you can do that,
1:13:18 where it would lead to, I mean, a radical social upheaval.
1:13:22 Yeah, it will. I mean, and I think some people need to be honest here. And this actually flies
1:13:29 in the face of, I mean, one of the most common liberal critiques is this is going to raise prices.
1:13:35 And yeah, I think it’s true. I think it’s worth it. But that’s easy for me to say. I’m making a good
1:13:39 living. If you care about inflation, you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries or
1:13:44 whatever goes up because of this immigration policy, I think that needs to be extremely well
1:13:48 articulated by the president. And of course, he needs to think about it. The truth is,
1:13:52 this is America right now is built on cheap labor. It’s not fair to the consumer.
1:13:56 It’s not fair to the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves.
1:14:01 And it’s not fair to the natural born citizen. The natural born citizen has his wages suppressed
1:14:05 for competition by tens of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages.
1:14:10 They have to compete for housing, for social services. I mean, just even, you know, like basic
1:14:15 stuff at a societal level, it’s not fair to them. It’s definitely not fair to the other person.
1:14:19 Because I mean, whenever people say like, who’s going to build your houses or whatever,
1:14:28 you’re endorsing this quasi legal system where, you know, uninsured laborers from Mexico,
1:14:35 they have no guarantee of wages. They’re getting paid cash under the table. They are living, you
1:14:39 know, tend to a room. They’re sending Mexican remittance payments back just so that their
1:14:43 children can eat. I mean, that’s not really fair to that person either. So that’s the point.
1:14:49 The point is, is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval. But this gets to my kirstenome
1:14:54 point as well as you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here. Because if you
1:15:00 don’t, it’s going to go south real quick. The way Vivek articulates this is that our immigration
1:15:05 system is deeply dishonest. Like we don’t acknowledge some of the things he just said.
1:15:09 Yeah, exactly. And he wants to make it honest. So if we don’t do mass deportation, at least you
1:15:16 have to be really honest about the living conditions of illegal immigrants, about basically
1:15:22 mistreatment of them. Yes, it’s true. I mean, you know, if you support mass illegal migration,
1:15:28 you’re basically supporting tens of millions who are living lives as second class citizens.
1:15:34 That’s not fair to them. I also think it’s deeply paternalistic. So there’s this idea
1:15:40 that America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency
1:15:44 whatsoever. And they can never turn things around. What does that say about our confidence in them?
1:15:47 You know, one of the things they always say, they’re, oh, they’re law abiding. They’re great
1:15:51 people and all that. I agree. Okay, by and large, I’m not saying these are bad people.
1:15:56 But I am saying like, if they’re not bad and they’re law abiding and they’re citizens and thoughtful
1:16:01 and all that, they can fix their own countries. And they did in El Salvador. That’s the perfect
1:16:06 example. Look at the dramatic drop in their crime rate. Bukella is one of the most popular leaders
1:16:12 in all of South America. That is proof positive that you can change things around despite perhaps
1:16:19 a legacy of U.S. intervention. So, you know, to just say this idea that, you know, because it’s
1:16:23 America’s fault that they’re screwed up, it takes agency away from them. You know, another really
1:16:27 key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield and the whole Haitian thing. Because
1:16:32 everybody, you know, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge,
1:16:36 because when they’re like, the Haitians are here legally, they need to actually think about the
1:16:41 program. The program is called TPS. So, let me explain that. TPS is called temporary protected
1:16:46 status. Note, what’s the first word on that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed
1:16:52 under a regime in which, let’s say that there was a catastrophic, I think this is a real example,
1:16:56 I think there was like a volcano or an earthquake or something, where people were granted TPS to
1:17:00 come to the United States. And the idea was they were going to go back after it was safe.
1:17:07 They just never went back. There are children born in the United States today who are literally the
1:17:12 descent, who are adults, who are the descendants of people who are still living in the U.S. under
1:17:17 TPS. That’s a perfect example of what Vivek says is dishonest. You know, you can’t mass
1:17:23 de facto legalize people by saying that they’re here temporarily because of a program or because
1:17:29 of something that happened in their home country. When the reality is that, for all intents and
1:17:35 purposes, we are acknowledging them as full legal migrants. So, even the term migrant to these
1:17:40 Haitians in Springfield makes no sense because they’re supposed to be here under TPS. That’s not,
1:17:46 migrant implies permanency. So, the language is all dishonest. And people don’t want to tell you
1:17:50 about the things I just said about chain migration. The vast majority of Americans don’t even know
1:17:54 the immigration system works. They don’t understand what I just said about TPS. They don’t really
1:17:58 understand the insanity of asylum law, where you can just literally throw up your hands and say,
1:18:03 “I fear for my life,” and you get to live here for five years before your court date even happens.
1:18:09 And, you know, by that time, get a work permit or whatever, you can, you know, get housing,
1:18:13 like you just said, in substandard conditions. And you can kind of just play the game and wait
1:18:17 before a deportation order comes. And even if it does, you never have to leave because there’s no
1:18:21 ICE agent or whatever who’s going to enforce it. So, the whole system is nuts right now. We need
1:18:27 complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground. That said, sort of the image
1:18:35 and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems deeply un-American, right?
1:18:40 Well, I mean, look, it gets, okay, so, you know, I’m not going to defend it, but I’ll just put it
1:18:46 this way. Do you hate children? Yeah, see, that’s what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see
1:18:52 a drug addict who’s put in prison and their child is put in protective services? Nobody in America
1:18:58 thinks twice about that, right? Right? So, I mean, well, that’s kind of screwed up. Well, we should
1:19:03 think about why did we come to that conclusion? The conclusion was is that these adults willingly
1:19:08 broke the law and pursued a path of life, which put them on a, you know, which put them on a
1:19:14 trajectory where the state had to come in and determine that you are not allowed to be a parent
1:19:18 basically to this child while you serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very
1:19:24 different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances in US immigration
1:19:30 law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was because there was no way to
1:19:36 prosecute people for illegal entry without child separation, because previous doctrine, I believe
1:19:42 it’s called the Flores doctrine under some asylum law, people have to go check my work on this.
1:19:46 But basically, the whole reason this evolved is a legal regime was because
1:19:51 people figured out that if you bring a kid with you, because of the so-called Flores doctrine
1:19:56 or whatever, that you couldn’t be prosecuted for illegal entry. So, it was a de facto way
1:20:02 of breaking the law. And in fact, a lot of people were bringing children here who weren’t even theirs,
1:20:07 who weren’t, they weren’t even related to or couldn’t even, you know, prove it, were bringing them to
1:20:12 get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So, I’m not defending child separation. I think it was
1:20:17 horrible or whatever. But, you know, if I give you the context, it does seem like a very tricky
1:20:23 problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not? How are we able to do that? And the solution,
1:20:30 honestly, is what Donald Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete rewrite
1:20:37 of the way that we have U.S. asylum law applied and of asylum adjudication and really just about
1:20:43 enforcing our actual laws. So, when I try to explain to people is the immigration system right now
1:20:49 is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest, such a great word, deeply dishonest system in which
1:20:57 you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the
1:21:03 easiest things to do to accomplish immigration to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had
1:21:09 to apply. It wasn’t easy. Do you know in India, there’s a temple called the VISA temple where you
1:21:13 walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number. And if you do it when you’re applying
1:21:17 for a visa to the United States, all right, it costs a lot of money and it’s hard. People get
1:21:21 rejected all the time. There’s billions of people across the world who would love to be able to come
1:21:26 here. And many of them want to do so legally and they should have to go through a process. The
1:21:30 current way it works is it’s easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that’s
1:21:33 fundamentally right. It’s also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally.
1:21:37 Can you still be on the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?
1:21:42 The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society, that these people,
1:21:47 many of whom, millions of here have been here for many years, have children, natural born
1:21:52 citizens because of birthright citizenship. It would require something that’s fundamentally
1:21:57 inhumane and un-American, as you said, the idea of separating families across different borders
1:22:05 simply because of what is a “small decision” of coming here illegally. And the best case,
1:22:10 beyond any of this moral stuff, for no mass deportation is it’s good for business.
1:22:17 Illegal immigration is great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the
1:22:23 lowest prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation is a terrible idea. But first of all,
1:22:30 very convincing. And second of all, you can’t just do mass deportation without also fixing
1:22:35 the immigration system. Yes, exactly. And there are several pieces of legislation,
1:22:39 HR2, that’s something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It’s a border bill.
1:22:43 I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the U.S. immigration system.
1:22:48 I’m curious whether it’ll actually pass or not. Remember, there’s a very slim majority of the
1:22:52 House of Representatives for Republicans this time around. And people vote for a lot of things
1:22:56 when they’re not in power, but when it’s actually about to become the law, we’ll see. There’s a
1:23:01 lot of swing state people out there who may think twice before casting that vote. So I’m
1:23:07 definitely curious to see how that one plays out. The other thing is, is that, like I just said,
1:23:11 the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they’re going to
1:23:16 take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for everything that they have to keep
1:23:22 their pool of cheap labor because it’s great for them. I think JD said a story, I think he was
1:23:28 on Rogan about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was just, he was like, “Yeah, it’s just
1:23:32 terrible.” It’s like they would take away our whole workforce. And he was like, “Do you hear
1:23:37 yourself in terms of what you’re talking or bragging about?” But that’s real. That’s a real
1:23:44 thing. And that Tyson’s foods and all these other people, that’s another really sad part.
1:23:50 What I mean by second-class citizenship is this presumption, first of all, that Americans think
1:23:54 it’s too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for
1:24:00 the right wage, first of all. But second is, the conditions in a lot of those facilities are
1:24:05 horrible and they’re covered up for a reason, not only in terms of the way that businesses,
1:24:09 they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their illegal immigrant workforce.
1:24:11 So, honestly, I think it could make things better for everything.
1:24:14 You have studied how government works. What are the chances of mass deportation happens?
1:24:18 Well, it depends how you define it. So, I mean, mass deportation could mean one million. I mean,
1:24:21 nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million. It could
1:24:25 be 30 million. I’ve seen estimates of up to 30 million, which is crazy. That’s almost one-eleventh
1:24:30 of the entire US population. What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? One million
1:24:35 people? A million people is a lot. I mean, that’s a lot of people. That’s a lot. I mean, but the
1:24:40 crazy part is that’s only one-twelfth of what Joe Biden led in the country. So, that’s one of those
1:24:46 that just give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will
1:24:52 happen? It depends on the definition. Will one million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively
1:24:59 confident in that. Anything over that, it’s going to be tough to say. Like I said,
1:25:05 probably the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory e-verify and to have processes in
1:25:10 place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally, and then you will
1:25:17 have mass self-deportation, and they will take the victory lap on that. But actual, like rounding
1:25:24 millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to, God
1:25:29 knows, all across the globe, that’s a logistical nightmare. It also costs a lot of money. And
1:25:37 don’t forget, Congress has to pay for all of this. So, we can have doge or we can have mass
1:25:42 deportation. So, those two things are kind of irreconcilable, actually. There’s a lot of competing
1:25:47 influences at play that people are not being real about at all. Yeah, that was one of the tensions
1:25:54 I had talking to Vivek is he’s big on mass deportation and big on making government more
1:25:59 efficient. And it really feels like there’s a tension between those two in the short term.
1:26:04 Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I’ve been wanting to talk about this.
1:26:07 I am sympathetic to doge to the whole Department of Government Efficiency.
1:26:12 How unreal is it that it’s called doge? Actually, with Elon, it’s quite real. I guess I’ve just,
1:26:18 you know, I’ve accepted Elon as a major political figure in the US. But the doge committee,
1:26:24 the Department of Government Efficiency, is a non-statutory agency that has zero funding
1:26:31 that Donald Trump says will advise OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. Now, two things. Number
1:26:38 one is, as I predicted, doge would become a “blue ribbon commission.” So, this is a non-statutory
1:26:43 blue ribbon commission that has been given authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk.
1:26:49 Secondary, their recommendations to government should be complete by July of 2026, according
1:26:54 to the press release released by Trump. First of all, what that will mean is they’re probably
1:26:57 going to need private funding to even set all this up. That’s great. Not a problem for Elon.
1:27:02 But you’re basically going to be able to have to commission GAO reports, Government Accountability
1:27:08 Office, and other reports and fact-finding missions across the government, which is fantastic.
1:27:12 Trump can even empower you to go through every agency and to collect figures.
1:27:18 None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives
1:27:22 care what you have to say. Historically, they don’t give a shit what the Executive Office has to say.
1:27:27 So, every year, the President releases his own budget. It used to mean something,
1:27:32 but in the last decade or so, it’s become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means
1:27:37 Committee and the People’s House are the ones who originate all appropriations and set up spending.
1:27:45 So, that’s one. Doge in and of itself has no power. It has no ability to compel or force people to do
1:27:51 anything. Its entire case for being, really, if you think about it mechanically, is to try and
1:27:56 convince and provide a report to Republican legislators to be able to cut spending. So,
1:28:02 that’s that. Now, we all know how Congress takes to government reports and whether they get acted
1:28:08 on or not. So, that’s number one. Number two is the figures that Elon is throwing out there.
1:28:12 Again, I want to give them some advice because people do not understand federal government
1:28:18 spending. The absolute vast majority of government spending is entitlement programs like Social
1:28:23 Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and their most politically
1:28:28 popular programs in the world, and military spending. Discretionary non-military spending,
1:28:33 I don’t have the exact figure in front of me, is a very, very small part of the federal budget.
1:28:40 Now, within that small slice, about 90% of that eight is bipartisan and is supported by like
1:28:46 everybody. NOAA, you know the hurricane guys? Like people like that. You know, people who are flying
1:28:51 into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government inspectors of X, Y, and Z. The parts
1:28:57 that are controversial that you’re actually able to touch, things like welfare programs like food
1:29:02 stamps is an extraordinary small slice. So, what’s the number you put out there? $5 trillion?
1:29:07 Something like that? There is only one way to do that. And realistically, under the current thing,
1:29:13 you have to radically change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I support that,
1:29:19 but I just want to be very, very clear. But I haven’t seen enough energy around that. There’s
1:29:25 this real belief in the US that we spend billions on all of these programs that are doing complete
1:29:31 bullshit. But like the truth, the absolute vast majority of it is military spending and entitlements.
1:29:33 Trump has made clear entitlements are off the table. It’s not going to happen. So,
1:29:39 the way that you’re going to be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade
1:29:47 long period is to really change the way that the United States procures military equipment,
1:29:51 hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have the background to be able to accomplish
1:29:55 this because he has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that Boeing has been pulling
1:30:01 for over a decade. But I really want everybody’s expectations to be very set around this. Just
1:30:08 remember, non-statutory, blue ribbon. So, if he’s serious about it, I just laid out all of these
1:30:12 hurdles that he’s going to have to overcome. And I’m not saying him and Vivek aren’t serious dudes,
1:30:17 but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this. So, you just laid out the
1:30:24 reality of how Washington works to give the counterpoint that I think you’re probably also
1:30:29 rooting for is that one, as a statement like Peter Thiel said, don’t bet against Elon. Sure.
1:30:35 One of the things that you don’t usually have with blue ribbon is the kind of megaphone that
1:30:45 Elon has. True. And I would even set the financial aspects aside, just the influence he has with
1:30:52 the megaphone, but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can
1:30:57 have real power when backed by sort of a populist movement. I don’t disagree with you, but let me
1:31:02 give you a case where this just failed. So, Elon endorsed who for Senate Majority Leader,
1:31:08 Rick Scott, right? Who got the least amount of votes in the US Senate for GOP leader, Rick Scott?
1:31:13 John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I’m bringing that up, one of my favorite
1:31:19 books, Master of the Senate, by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series, the Senate as an institution,
1:31:26 it reveres independence. It reveres, I mean, the entire theory of the Senate is to cool down
1:31:31 the mob that is in the House of Representatives and to deliberate. That’s its entire body.
1:31:37 They are set up to be immune from public pressure. Now, I’m not saying they can’t be pressured,
1:31:42 but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of he literally endorsed somebody
1:31:47 for leader. So did Tucker Carlson. So did a lot of people online. And only 13 senators voted for
1:31:52 Rick Scott. The truth is, is that they don’t care. Like they’re set up where they’re marginally popular
1:31:56 in their own home states. They’ll be able to win their primaries. And that’s all they really need
1:32:01 to do to get elected. And they have six year terms, not even up for four years. So will Elon
1:32:05 still be interested in politics six years from now? That’s a legitimate question for a Republican
1:32:09 senator. So maybe he could get the House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his
1:32:15 things. But there’s no guarantee that the Senate is going to agree with any of that. There’s a story
1:32:21 that Caro tells in the Master of the Senate book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris
1:32:27 during the writing of the Constitution. And he asked Washington, he said, “Why did you put in a
1:32:34 Senate, a bicameral legislature?” And Washington said, “Why did you pour your tea into a saucer?”
1:32:40 And Jefferson goes to cool it. And Washington says, “Just so.” That’s what I had to explain.
1:32:46 He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man. Okay. So you actually outlined the most likely
1:32:51 thing that’s going to happen with Doja as it hits the wall of Washington.
1:32:58 What is the most successful thing that can be pulled off? The most successful thing they could
1:33:06 do is right now, I think they’re really obsessed with designing cuts and identifying cuts. I would
1:33:13 redesign systems, systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that we have processes in place
1:33:19 to dispense taxpayer dollars, because the truth is that appropriations itself, again,
1:33:26 are set by the United States Congress. But the way that those appropriations are spent by the
1:33:32 government, the executive has some discretionary authority. So your ability as the executive
1:33:37 to be a good steward of the taxpayer money and to redesign a system, which actually I think Elon
1:33:41 could be good at this, and Vivek too, in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit, is the entire
1:33:45 Pentagon procurement thing. It needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it’s bad for the Pentagon.
1:33:52 It gives them substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapons systems and programs and thinking
1:33:57 that can be easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect
1:34:04 example is all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare costs almost
1:34:10 nothing, and yet drone swarms and hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to U.S. systems,
1:34:17 which cost more than hundreds of billions of dollars. So my point is that giving nimble procurement
1:34:23 and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you
1:34:28 actually could save the most amount of money in the long run. That’s where I would really focus in on.
1:34:35 The other one is, counter to everything I just said, is maybe they will listen. Maybe the Republicans
1:34:41 are like, “Yeah, okay, let’s do it.” The problem again, though, is swing state people who need
1:34:45 to get reelected, they need to do one thing. They need to deliver for their district. They need to
1:34:51 run on stuff, and nobody has ever run on cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing
1:34:57 money to your state, and that’s why earmarks and a lot of these other things are extraordinarily
1:35:02 popular in Congress is because it’s such an easy way to show constituents how you’re working for
1:35:09 them whenever it does come re-election time. So it’s a very difficult system. And I also want
1:35:14 to tell people who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is designed to
1:35:19 work this way. And for two centuries, the Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every
1:35:26 popular change. And because of that, it’s designed to make sure that it’s so popular for long enough
1:35:30 that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That’s really,
1:35:35 really frustrating, but you should take comfort in that it’s always been that way. So it’s been okay.
1:35:39 Well, as I’ve learned from one of the recommendations of the age of acrimony,
1:35:44 as I feel embarrassed that I didn’t know that senators used to not be elected.
1:35:49 What a crazy system, huh? Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now,
1:35:59 as defining our democracy, was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War in the 50 years
1:36:03 after the Civil War. Absolutely correct. Age of acrimony, oh my God, I love that book. I cannot
1:36:09 recommend it enough. It is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is that
1:36:14 we study periods where greatness happened, but we don’t often study periods where nothing happened,
1:36:20 or where really bad shit happened. You know, we don’t spend nearly enough. Americans know about
1:36:24 FDR. They don’t really know anything about the depression or how we got there. What was it like
1:36:30 to be alive in the United States in 1840, right? Nobody thinks about that, really, because it’s
1:36:34 kind of an in-between time in history. There are people who lived their entire lives, who were born,
1:36:39 who had to live through those times, who were just as conscientious and intelligent as you and I are,
1:36:43 and we’re just trying to figure shit out, and things felt really big. So the age of acrimony
1:36:47 is a time where it was almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded Age aspect. But like you
1:36:53 just said, it was a time where progressive reform of government and of the tension between civil
1:37:01 rights, extraordinary wealth, and democracy, and really the reigning in of big business,
1:37:06 so many of our foundations happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that
1:37:11 book because one of the things I learned from the book is that voter participation is highest
1:37:16 when people are pissed off, not when they’re happy. And that’s such a counterintuitive thing,
1:37:21 but voter participation goes down when the system is working. So 2020, right? I think we can all
1:37:25 agree it was a very tense election. That’s also why it had the highest voter participation ever.
1:37:31 2024, very high rates of participation, same thing. People are pissed off, and that’s actually what
1:37:36 drives them to the vote. But something that take comfort in that is that people being pissed off
1:37:40 and people going out to vote, it actually does have major impact on the system. Because otherwise,
1:37:46 the status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so, yeah, like you just said, I mean, direct
1:37:51 election of senators, I mean, there are probably people alive today who were born when there was
1:37:56 no direct election of senators, which is an insane thing to think about. I mean, there’d be almost
1:38:02 a hundred or so. But the point is, is that at that time, it was so deeply corrupt. And it was one
1:38:08 where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading into the Gilded Age were able to enforce
1:38:13 their will upon the people. But you can take comfort in that that was one of those areas where
1:38:18 Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the constitution and actually forced the aristocrats
1:38:24 in power to give their own power. It’s like our version of when they flipped power and took away
1:38:29 the legislative power of the House of Lords in the UK. I just think that’s amazing. And such a cool
1:38:36 thing about our country in the UK too. It’s the continued battle between the people and the elite,
1:38:44 right? And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of candidates
1:38:50 for a party. Yes. That was also invented. It used to be that the quote unquote party bosses,
1:38:57 I say that with a half a chuckle, chose the candidate. Yeah, the whole system is nuts.
1:39:00 The way that we currently experience politics is such a modern invention.
1:39:06 With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but yeah, good point. But that was actually
1:39:10 more of a mean reversion, right? We’re living in an extraordinarily new era where we actually have
1:39:16 more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be, this is crazy. So the conventions
1:39:20 have always took in place two months before, right? Imagine a world where you did not know who
1:39:24 the pro nominee was going to be before that convention. And the nominee literally was decided
1:39:30 at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American
1:39:36 politics where presidents did not directly campaign. They in fact did not even comment
1:39:40 about the news or mentioned their opponents names. They were, they would give speeches from their
1:39:46 doorstep, but they, it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics. You would not get a
1:39:52 Bernie Sanders, you would not get a Donald Trump, Bill Clinton. I mean, basically every
1:39:56 president from John F. Kennedy onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior
1:40:01 to that has been much more of the older system. There was a in between period post FDR where
1:40:07 things were really changing, but the primary system itself had its first true big win under
1:40:12 John F. Kennedy. I think that the lesson from that is there’s a collective wisdom to the people,
1:40:18 right? I think so. I think it works. Yeah. I mean, well, okay, I’ll steal man it. We had some great
1:40:24 presidents in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of
1:40:28 coalitional politics of his ability. In fact, what really made him a genius was his ability to get
1:40:34 this overthrow, the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite Democrats to take
1:40:40 control in there at the convention and then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of
1:40:46 power where he had the, he had the, he had the elites basically under his boot because he was
1:40:51 the king and he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce
1:40:58 things up and down. I mean, you know, even in the party boss era, we would have no, a lot of the,
1:41:02 a lot of the people we revere really came out of that people like Abraham Lincoln.
1:41:07 I mean, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There’s no chance. He
1:41:15 won, he won, luck, thank God, from an insane process in the 1860 Republican convention. People
1:41:19 should go read about that because that was wild. I think we were this close to not having Lincoln
1:41:24 as president. And yeah, I mean, there, Teddy Roosevelt, there’s so many that I could point to
1:41:28 who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way to still produce good stuff.
1:41:34 That was a kind of beautiful diversion from the Doge discussion. If we’re going to turn
1:41:40 briefly to Doge. Sure. So we kind of talked about cost cutting, but there’s also increasing the
1:41:46 efficiency of government, which you also kind of talked about procurement. So maybe we can throw
1:41:53 into the pile the 400 plus federal agencies. So let’s take another perspective on what success
1:42:01 might look like. So like radically successful Doge, would it basically cut a lot of federal
1:42:06 agencies? Probably combine. Combine. Okay, so I can give great examples of this because I have a
1:42:12 great insight. Like for each agency will often use different like payroll systems. They’ll have
1:42:18 different internal processes, right? That makes no sense. And it’s all because it’s antiquated.
1:42:25 Now, everybody always talks about changing it. But there are a lot of like party interests about
1:42:30 why certain people get certain things. The real problem with government, the people like us who
1:42:34 are private and like, for example, when you want to do something, you can just do it. So I was
1:42:42 listening to a really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the
1:42:48 story was that the military was assign national guard guys were assigned to like help with the
1:42:53 border. And they were trying to provide, I think it was translation services to people at border
1:42:58 patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, Hey, this has got to stop. According to US Code X,
1:43:04 Y, and Z, the United States military cannot help with law enforcement, you know, abilities here.
1:43:10 And so even though that makes absolutely no sense, because they’re all work, there are literal legal
1:43:14 statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason,
1:43:21 we have to have a ton of Spanish speakers in Southcom, you know, in the US command that is
1:43:25 responsible for South America, who literally cannot help with a crisis at the border. Now,
1:43:31 maybe you can find some legal chicanery to make that work. But man, you got to have an attorney
1:43:34 general who knows what he’s doing. You need a White House counsel, you need to make sure that
1:43:39 shit stands up in a court of law. I mean, it’s not so simple. Whereas, let’s say, you know,
1:43:42 you have a software right here, and you want to get a new software, you can just do it. You can
1:43:47 hire whoever you want. When you’re the government, there’s a whole process you got to go through
1:43:53 about bidding. And it just takes forever. And it is so inefficient. But unfortunately,
1:44:00 the inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes. And that is something that,
1:44:05 yeah, again, actually, you know, radically successful doge quote unquote, would be
1:44:12 study the law and then change it. Like figure instead of cost cutting, like cut this program
1:44:17 or whatever, like I just said about why do different systems use payroll, just say that
1:44:24 you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let’s say, after 90 days.
1:44:27 You know, I’ve heard stories of people who work for the government who still have like IBM
1:44:32 mainframe that they’re still in 2024, that they’re still working because those systems
1:44:36 have never been updated. There’s also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff.
1:44:40 That’s where a lot of inefficiency happens, because a lot of contractors can only work
1:44:45 based upon previous clearance that they already got achieving a clearance is very expensive,
1:44:49 it’s very lengthy process. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be talking about security clearance,
1:44:54 but it does naturally, you know, create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts
1:45:00 fund. And I even mean stuff like, like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right?
1:45:06 So clearance, so there’s only like five people who can even apply for that contract. Well,
1:45:11 naturally, in an internal monopoly like that, he’s going to jack his price up because he literally
1:45:17 has a moat around his product. Whereas if you or I are hiring a jant, whatever, anybody for
1:45:21 anything, that type of credentialism and legal regime, it doesn’t matter at all. So there are
1:45:26 million problems like this that people in government run into. And that is what I would see as the
1:45:32 most successful. You know, paperwork slows everything down, and it feels impossible to break
1:45:37 through that in a sort of incremental way. It’s so hard. It feels like the only way to do it
1:45:45 is to literally shut down agencies in some kind of radical way, and then build up from
1:45:53 scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that’s going to be opposed by a lot of people within
1:45:56 government. Yeah. Well, historically, there’s only one way to do it. And it’s a really bad
1:46:04 answer, war. War. Yeah. So I was going to say, basically, you have the kind of consensus where,
1:46:08 okay, all this stupid bureaucratic bullshit we’ve been doing, we need to like put that
1:46:14 shit aside, get the fuck out of here, we need to win a war. So like all the paperwork, you know,
1:46:20 all the lawyers go leave. Yeah, exactly. No, but I want people to really understand that,
1:46:26 you know, up until 1865 or 1860, I forget the exact year, we didn’t even have national currency.
1:46:33 And then we were like, well, we need a greenback. And prior to that, people would freak out if we
1:46:37 were talking about having national currency, greenback, backed by the, you know, the US government
1:46:42 and all that, not even a question, passing like two weeks in the US Congress, an income tax eventually
1:46:48 went away, but not even in the realm of possibility. And they decided to pass it. Same thing after
1:46:53 World War One. And you think about how World War Two, I mean, World War Two just fundamentally
1:46:58 changed the entire way the United States government works. Even the DHS, which I mentioned earlier,
1:47:04 the Department of Homeland Security, it didn’t even exist prior to 9/11. It was done as response
1:47:09 to 9/11 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that
1:47:16 could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shitshow disaster war
1:47:22 is the only thing that moves and throws the paperwork off the table. And I wish I wasn’t
1:47:28 such a downer, but I’ve just, I’ve both, I’ve read too much, and I’ve had enough experience now
1:47:35 in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn’t that way.
1:47:39 I mean, it’s a cool idea. And I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics,
1:47:43 to think that they can do something. But I want them to be realistic too. And I want them to know
1:47:46 what they’re signing up for whenever they do something like that. And the titanic amount of
1:47:50 work it is going to take for you to be able to accomplish something. Yeah, but I’ve also
1:47:56 heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter.
1:47:58 Here’s this guy, Elon Musk. You are absolutely correct.
1:48:02 Knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course, you need all these
1:48:07 servers. Of course, you need all these employees. And nevertheless, the service keeps running.
1:48:11 He figured it out. And you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is
1:48:17 no, there was no law that he could fire him. You know, there was no, there was no like,
1:48:20 like at the end of the day, he owned the company. You know, he had total discretion of his ability
1:48:26 to move. So I’m not even saying his ideas are bad. I’m saying that the ability that’s that
1:48:32 what makes him such an incredible visionary entrepreneur, its movement, its difference
1:48:38 at times to the right people, but also the knowledge of every individual piece of the machine
1:48:43 and his ability to come in and to execute his full vision at any time and override
1:48:47 any of the managers. So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the
1:48:51 managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few people who’s ever built a multi-billion-dollar
1:48:56 company who has not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution and against
1:49:00 entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who can do it.
1:49:06 Elon, Steve Jobs, but you know, what do we learn is that unfortunately after Steve died,
1:49:10 Apple basically did succumb to the managerial revolution and has become like the product,
1:49:15 you know, they make all their money by printing services and making it impossible to leave
1:49:21 this ecosystem as opposed to building the most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision Pro,
1:49:25 don’t get me wrong. I think you just admitted that you’re part of a cult. I know, I literally am.
1:49:31 I am. I fully admit it. Yeah. I miss Steve. The grass is green on the other side. Come join us.
1:49:38 Okay. Whether it’s Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical
1:49:43 transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim?
1:49:49 What gives you hope that that would be possible? Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t think
1:49:54 slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people in its
1:50:00 government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of
1:50:06 our institutions. And I’ve really encouraged people. I don’t think people can quite understand
1:50:11 what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after
1:50:18 FDR. Like 90% of the people trusted the government. That’s crazy. Like when the president said
1:50:24 something, they were like, okay, he’s not lying. Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians
1:50:29 today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire
1:50:34 fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam in particular really broke the American character and its
1:50:38 ability and its relationship with government. And we’ve never recovered faith in institutions
1:50:44 ever since that. And it’s really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful at least this time is
1:50:49 anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset
1:50:56 and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is
1:51:02 different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually
1:51:08 carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics which got him elected. At this point,
1:51:14 we can’t deny it. McDonald’s thing is hilarious. It’s funny. It is. People love it. People like
1:51:18 the podcasting. People like… Garbage truck. The garbage truck. Yeah, exactly. They like the
1:51:23 stunts. And he will always excel and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other
1:51:28 things that he can and should do like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question
1:51:35 and also really figuring out our economy, the way that it currently runs and changing it so that
1:51:42 the actual American dream is more achievable. And housing is one of the chief problems that we have
1:51:47 right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean,
1:51:51 it’s just true. Households under $100,000 voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn’t do so for
1:51:56 economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for economic. A lot of them did for immigration,
1:52:01 for cultural, but he still owed them something. And there is… I would hope that they could
1:52:07 carry something out in that respect that is not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the
1:52:13 first time where everything felt like it exploded any time with staffing, with even his policy or
1:52:18 what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does come back to personnel.
1:52:23 So I’m concerned in some respects. I’m not thrilled in some respects. I’m happy in some
1:52:27 respects, but it remains to be seen. How he’s going to do it.
1:52:32 To the degree it’s possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology. What do you think
1:52:39 are the central pillars of it? MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That’s what I would say.
1:52:45 Cultural elitism, though, has many different categories. Immigration is one, right? Is that
1:52:50 cultural elitism and cultural liberalism has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of
1:52:55 itself is a natural good at any and all levels, that all immigrants are like replacement level,
1:53:00 that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign policy context
1:53:06 comes back to a lot of that human rights, democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier,
1:53:11 which divorces American values from American interests, and says that actually American
1:53:18 values are American interests. Cultural elitism and liberalism leads to the worship of the Postal
1:53:23 Rights Era bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of DEI, quote unquote Woke,
1:53:31 and of progressive social ideology. So I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA
1:53:38 is. It is a screw you. I once drove past, it was in rural Nevada and I was driving,
1:53:43 and I drove past the biggest sign I’ve ever seen, political sign to this J, and it’s just,
1:53:48 it was in 2020, it just said, “Trump, fuck your feelings.” And I still believe that it’s the most
1:53:55 coherent MAGA thing I’ve ever seen because everyone’s always like, “How can a neocon
1:54:01 and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist under the same
1:54:05 umbrella?” And I’m like, it’s very simple. All of them have rejected the cultural elite
1:54:11 in their own way, certainly, but they’ve arrived at the same place. It’s an umbrella,
1:54:15 and it’s an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to do with the status quo
1:54:20 and with the currently established cultural elite. That doesn’t mean they’re not elite,
1:54:23 and they’re not rich in their own regards. That doesn’t mean they don’t disagree,
1:54:27 but that’s the one thing that unites the entire party. And so that’s the way I would put it.
1:54:33 Anti-cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti-establishment, so basic distrust of all
1:54:39 institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions? Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who
1:54:45 runs our institutions. That said, anti-establishment is really not the right word, because there are
1:54:50 a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment. They are against that, but they’re not anti-cultural
1:54:57 leftism, and that’s the key distinction between MAGA and left populism. Left populism basically does
1:55:03 agree. They agree with basic conceits. Racism is one of the biggest problems facing America.
1:55:08 They’re one of the ways that we would fix that is through class-oriented economic programs,
1:55:14 in order to address that. But we believe in, I don’t know, reparations as a concept. It’s just
1:55:19 more about how we arrive there. Whereas in MAGA, we would say, no, we actually don’t think that at
1:55:24 all. We think we’ve evolved past that, and we think that the best way to fix it is actually
1:55:29 similar policy prescription, but the mindset matters a lot. The real distinction between
1:55:36 MAGA and left populism really is on culture. Trans, in particular, orientation about, actually,
1:55:41 immigration may be the biggest one, because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders,
1:55:47 Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years.
1:55:53 There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who’s one of the hardcore immigration
1:55:57 guys, and they agree with each other. Lou is like, Bernie’s one of the only guys out there.
1:56:03 Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left and its changing attitudes
1:56:09 on mass immigration. There are some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave,
1:56:13 where he started, I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian
1:56:19 concept, right? Because Bernie is basically of a European welfare state tradition. European
1:56:25 welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of
1:56:30 immigration, because we have high taxes and high services. We have a limited pool of people who
1:56:34 can experience and take those services. He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude.
1:56:39 Bernie also, I will say, look, he’s a courageous man and a courageous politician.
1:56:45 You know, as late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate, because he said that that
1:56:50 pro-life candidate was pro-worker. At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy.
1:56:54 He took a ton of shit for it. I don’t think he’s done it since. The sad part that’s really
1:57:04 happened is that a lot of left populist agenda and other has become subsumed in the hysteria around
1:57:08 cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. Ultimately, that cultural
1:57:14 leftism was the thing that really united the two wings of that party. That’s really why MAGA is
1:57:19 very opposed to that. They’re really not the same, but the left populist can still be anti-establishment.
1:57:24 That’s the key. It’s interesting to think of the left cultural elite
1:57:30 subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. You think that’s what happened?
1:57:35 That’s what I would say. What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible
1:57:42 future where he would have won? You and Chris wrote a book on populism in 2020. From that
1:57:48 perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time, by the way,
1:57:54 that would be pretty gangstered during 2016. Would he have, because I think Hillary went
1:57:58 towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly?
1:58:06 It was a very weird time. Yes and no. It wasn’t full-on BLM mania like it was in 2020,
1:58:13 but the signs were all there. The great awakening was in 2014. I know it’s a ridiculous term.
1:58:19 I love it. Please keep saying it. Just to give the origin, the great awakening is about the great
1:58:24 religious revival in the United States. Because wokeism is a religion, that’s a common refrain,
1:58:28 they’re like, “The great awakening is a really good term.” Thank you for explaining the joke.
1:58:34 The great awakening is basically when racial attitudes amongst college-educated whites
1:58:37 basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of reasons why this happened.
1:58:43 I really believe that Tanahisi Coates’ case for reparations in the Atlantic is one of those.
1:58:48 It radicalized an entire generation of basically white college-educated women
1:58:53 to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson and then it also happened immediately
1:59:00 after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover
1:59:05 of 2020, but fundamentally what they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst college-educated
1:59:13 elites to really think in a race-first construct. Worse is that they were rejected in 2016 at the
1:59:18 ballot box by the election of Donald Trump. In response, they ramped it up because they believed
1:59:23 that that was the framework to view the world, that people voted for Trump because he was racist
1:59:29 and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did. The point around this on
1:59:34 question of whether Bernie could have won in 2016, I don’t know. Crystal seems to think so.
1:59:40 I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is honestly one of
1:59:46 them. One of Trump’s core issues in 2016 was immigration, and Bernie and him did not agree
1:59:52 on immigration. If immigration, even if people did support Bernie Sanders and his vision for
1:59:56 working-class people, the debates and the understanding about what it would look like,
2:00:00 like a healthcare system which literally would pay for illegal immigrants,
2:00:04 I think he would have gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong. I honestly,
2:00:09 I will never know what that looked like. Let me reference you from earlier in the
2:00:15 conversation with FDR. It’s not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment
2:00:22 and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC.
2:00:30 Yeah. That’s a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I have a lot of love for the
2:00:35 Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from 2016 called America. You should watch it. It’s a great
2:00:40 ad. That’s another very interesting thing. It’s unapologetically patriotic. That is not something
2:00:46 that you see in a lot of left-wing circles these days. He understood politics at a base level
2:00:52 that a lot of people did not. But Bernie himself and then a lot of the Bernie movement was basically
2:00:58 crushed by the elite Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. They hated them. They
2:01:04 attacked Joe Rogan for even having him on and for giving him a platform that was ridiculous,
2:01:09 obviously backfired in their face, which is really funny. But there are a lot of
2:01:14 million examples like that. When they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro-life politician,
2:01:20 he never did it again. They attacked Bernie for having Bernie bros, people online, the bros who
2:01:26 were Super Bro Bernie. It was his fault. His supporters would say nasty things about Elizabeth
2:01:31 Warren. He would defend straight himself and be like, “Yes, I’m sorry. Please, my bro.” He was like,
2:01:38 “Stop that.” I think his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He didn’t go. He kept saying
2:01:43 “sorry.” Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the
2:01:48 time. He would always do stuff like, “Joe Biden, my friend.” It’s like, “No, he’s not your friend.
2:01:53 He stands for everything that you disagree with. Everything.” He’d be like, “Yeah, he’s a nice guy,
2:01:59 but he’s not my friend.” He would always be like, “Joe and I are great friends, but we have a small
2:02:04 disagreement on this.” Like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up
2:02:09 there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn’t trust anymore. That’s what people really
2:02:15 wanted. But the other side of this is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than
2:02:23 2016, because by 2020, they full-on had TDS, and they were basically like, “We need to defeat Trump
2:02:30 at all costs. We don’t give a shit what your name is. Bernie, Biden, whatever. Whichever of you is
2:02:35 going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the knob.” 2016 is different because they didn’t full-on
2:02:41 have that love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats
2:02:46 have. Democrats just care about winning. The current base of the party, all they want to do
2:02:50 is win. Republican base, they don’t give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it’s nice
2:02:58 to win, but one of those where they will express their id for what they really want. Now, it’s
2:03:02 worked out for them because it turns out that’s a very palpable political force. But one of the
2:03:09 reasons why you won’t see me up here doing James Carville 40 more years is there is a law of something
2:03:16 called thermostatic public opinion, where the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually.
2:03:20 So when you have a left-wing president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing
2:03:25 president in power, the country goes left. Amazing, right? You can actually look at a graph of economic
2:03:31 attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became president after Donald Trump. So Republicans,
2:03:35 Trump was president in the last year in office. Economy is great. Two months later, the economy
2:03:41 is horrible. That is a perfect example of thermostatic opinion. And I’m not counting these
2:03:47 Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate to
2:03:53 continue in Iraq. By ’06, he’s toasted. We have a massive midterm election. And by ’08, we’re writing
2:03:57 books about 40 more years and how there’s never going to be a Republican in office ever again.
2:04:01 So things can change a lot in a very short period of time. I think also for me personally, maybe I’m
2:04:08 deluded, sort of the great man view of history. I think some of it, it’s in programming circles,
2:04:14 the term skills issue. I think somebody just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are,
2:04:19 how good you are as a politician. I maybe disagree with this. I’d love to see what you think.
2:04:23 I think if Obama, if you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep
2:04:29 winning. He would win 2016. He would win 2020. He would win this year 2024.
2:04:33 It’s possible, but I would flip it on you and I would say Obama would never be elected
2:04:36 if there were no term limits, because Bill Clinton would have still been president.
2:04:43 Well, those two, right. That’s two examples of exactly. They extremely skilled politicians
2:04:51 and somehow can appear like populists. Man, Bill Clinton was a force in his time,
2:04:55 and it’s honestly sad what’s happened to him. I was actually just talking with a friend the other
2:04:59 day. I’m like, I kind of don’t think that presidents should become president when they’re young,
2:05:04 because they live to see themselves become irrelevant. That must be really painful,
2:05:08 because I know what it takes to get there. Imagine being Clinton. I mean,
2:05:15 your entire legacy was destroyed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then imagine being Obama,
2:05:20 who in 2016 you could argue it’s a one-off and say that Trump is just, “Oh, Hillary was a bad
2:05:26 candidate,” but Michelle Barack Obama went so hard for Kamala Harris, and they just got blown
2:05:31 out in the popular vote. I mean, the Obama era officially ended with Donald Trump’s re-election
2:05:36 to the presidency in 2024, and that was a 20-year period where Obama was one of the most popular
2:05:40 central figures in American politics. But I want to return to what you’re saying,
2:05:45 because it is important. And by the way, I do not support term limits on American presidents.
2:05:50 Are you a fascist? Well, that would imply that I don’t believe in democracy. I actually do believe
2:05:55 in democracy, because I think the people, if they love their president, should be able to re-elect him.
2:06:02 I think FDR was amazing. I think that the term limit change was basically what happened is
2:06:07 is that Republicans and a lot of elite Democrats always wanted to speak against FDR,
2:06:12 but he was a God, so they couldn’t. So they waited until he died. And then after he died,
2:06:16 they were like, “Yeah, this whole third, fourth term, that can never happen again.”
2:06:21 And America didn’t really think that hard about it. They were like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” But,
2:06:26 I mean, it had immense consequences for American history. Clinton is the perfect example. I mean,
2:06:33 Bill Clinton left office even despite the Lewinsky bullshit. He had a 60% approval rating.
2:06:38 Okay? No way George W. Bush gets elected. Impossible. Clinton would have blown his
2:06:43 ass out. And imagine the consequences of that. We would have no Iraq. I mean, I’m not saying he
2:06:47 was a great man. We probably still would have had the financial crisis, and there’s still a lot of
2:06:51 bad stuff that would have happened, but he was a popular dude. And I wouldn’t say he had the best
2:06:58 judgment at times, presidentially, not personally, definitely not personally, but presidentially.
2:07:03 But I’m pretty confident we would have not gone into the Iraq war. And so that’s where it really
2:07:07 cost us. If you’re a left wing and you’re talking about Obama, yeah, I think Obama probably would
2:07:15 have won in 2016. Although it’s a counterfactual because Obama was never challenged in the same way
2:07:22 that MAGA was able to to the liberal consensus. Like Romney really ran this like awful campaign,
2:07:27 honestly, about cutting spending. It was very traditional. Republican was deeply unpopular.
2:07:33 The autopsy of that election was we actually need to be more pro immigration that literally was the
2:07:40 autopsy. But Trump understood the assignment. There are two people who I so deeply respect for
2:07:45 their political bets, Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. So one of the books that I recommended called
2:07:50 “The Unwinding” by George Packer, he actually talks about Peter Thiel there. This is in 2013.
2:07:56 And Thiel talks about, he was like, you know, whoever runs for office next, they don’t need to
2:08:01 run on an optimistic message. They need to run on a message that everything is fucked up and that
2:08:08 we need to fix. And if you think about that’s why Thiel’s endorsement of Trump with the American
2:08:14 carnage message is, I mean, it took, it was shocking, right, at the time. But he had that
2:08:19 fundamental insight that that’s what the American people wanted. Trump too comes out of an election
2:08:25 in 2012 where the literal GOP autopsy, the report produced by the party, says we need to be pro
2:08:32 mass immigration. What happens? Immediately after 2012, they start to go for mass immigrant,
2:08:37 basically they go for like these amnesty plans, the so-called gang of eight plan, Marco Rubio,
2:08:43 and all of this in 2013, it falls apart. But Republicans get punished by their base
2:08:49 in 2014. So Eric Cantor, who was the House majority leader, the number two Republican,
2:08:53 spent more on stake in his campaign than his primary opponent who successfully defeated him,
2:08:58 a guy named Dave Bratt. Dave Bratt kicked his ass on the issue of immigration and said that
2:09:03 Eric Cantor is pro amnesty. All of the forces were there. And then in 2015, Trump comes down the
2:09:08 escalator and he gives the message on immigration that the GOP base has been roaring and wanting
2:09:14 to hear now, but that nobody wanted to listen to them. And that was his fundamental insight.
2:09:21 That bet was a colossal and a titanic political bet at a time when all political ideology and
2:09:25 thought process would have said that you should come out on the other side, which is where
2:09:30 Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and all these other guys were effectively there in varying different
2:09:36 ways, like they were hawkish or whatever. But Trump had such a monopoly on that as an idea.
2:09:40 That’s why he wins the 2016 primary. And then paired with immigration,
2:09:46 a hard line position on immigration, is this American carnage idea that actually everything
2:09:54 is wrong. The American dream is gone. We will stop this American carnage. And I think American
2:09:58 carnage is one of the most important inaugural speeches ever given in American history. It’s
2:10:03 put it up against every single other speech. There’s nothing else like it. But that was
2:10:08 what the country wanted at the time. And that’s what great politicians are able to do is they’re
2:10:14 able to suss something out. That’s also why Peter Thiel is who he is, because he saw that in 2000.
2:10:20 Imagine what it takes to come out of the 2012 election and to be honestly totally contrarian
2:10:25 to the entire national mood and this entire theory of Obama-esque star politics and say,
2:10:28 no, you need somebody who runs on the opposite of that to win.
2:10:33 Well, we’ll never know. And I love this kind of Mike Tyson versus Muhammad Ali.
2:10:37 I still think I would have loved to see Obama versus Trump.
2:10:38 Me too. I agree.
2:10:43 And first of all, Obama versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down.
2:10:45 Well, yes, definitely.
2:10:54 I love how this is a boxing talk. Now, when 2016, Obama has a bunch of Iraq and Afghanistan.
2:10:56 He’s vulnerable, though. I’ll tell you why, DACA.
2:10:59 That’s what nobody ever talks about in the Obama-Trump thing.
2:11:03 Don’t forget, Obama takes his 2012 victory, basically says,
2:11:09 oh, the GOP even now agrees with me on immigration. And then he does DACA and legalizes X million
2:11:14 in a number of illegal immigrants who are here, who are brought here as children.
2:11:18 That also fundamentally changed the immigration consensus on the Republican side because they
2:11:23 were like, wait, holy shit, you can just do that because we don’t agree with that at all.
2:11:27 And that really ignited the base as well. So I’m not sure.
2:11:32 I mean, a moment I think about a lot with Trump, just like being able to unleash the rage of the
2:11:38 Republican bases. In the 2012 debate, Kandy Crowley was the moderator with Mitt Romney,
2:11:42 and she fact-checked him famously. This was when fact-checking was shocking in a president debate.
2:11:47 And she said something about Benghazi, and she was like, no, he did say that.
2:11:53 She corrected Romney on behalf of Obama. To this day, it’s questionable whether she was even right.
2:11:57 But, and Romney was just like, oh, he did. Okay. Trump would have been like, excuse me,
2:12:02 excuse me. Look at this woman. You know, he would have gone off. And I was like,
2:12:07 and I think about that moment because that’s what the Republican base wanted to hear.
2:12:11 But also it turns out America had a lot of festering feelings about the mainstream media
2:12:19 that it needed unleashed. And Trump was just this incredible vector to just blow up this system,
2:12:22 which I mean, if you ask me about optimism, that’s the thing I’m most optimistic about.
2:12:26 Yeah. But don’t you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on,
2:12:29 how to be anti-establishment correctly? I will not deny that he’s one of the most
2:12:34 talented politicians literally to ever play the game. And he is, I mean, just unbelievable,
2:12:39 rhetorical talent. Look, is it counterfactual? Would he be in more talented than Hillary? Yeah,
2:12:45 okay, no question. In terms of anybody would have been for that one. But at the same time,
2:12:50 all the signs were there. All the signs for the Trump victory and for the backlash against
2:12:56 Obamacism kind of as a political project, it all existed. Like I just laid the tea leaves out there
2:13:01 from 2012 to 2015, in retrospect, it’s the most predictable thing in the world that
2:13:04 Donald Trump would get elected. But it was crazy in the moment. I got to live through that,
2:13:10 which was really fun, like professionally. I think it’s unfortunate that he kind of
2:13:17 led Kamala Harris borrow his reputation. Oh, it’s, I mean, it’s like, you know better, dude,
2:13:24 you know, you defeated these people, this Clinton machine, you destroyed them. And it was awesome
2:13:30 in ’08. What is that? Why do you, why, why did he, like, he’s so much bigger and better than the
2:13:35 machine. I don’t get it. It’s interesting, right? It’s so weird, though. I just think, I think this
2:13:40 was a wake-up call. 2024 was a wake-up call, like the, the DNC machine doesn’t work. Absolutely. I
2:13:44 mean, there needs to be new blood, new, new candidate, new Obama-like candidates. Well,
2:13:47 I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s important, too, in terms of the process and the
2:13:53 way that things currently stand. The DNC actually rigged its entire primary system under Biden,
2:13:59 way to the, not to the benefit of Obama. So for example, you know how they moved away from the
2:14:04 Iowa caucuses, and they actually moved some other primaries and moved the calendar to reward
2:14:09 traditional states that vote much more in line with the Democratic establishment. So the story
2:14:13 of Barack Obama is one that not many, actually, probably a lot of young people today don’t even
2:14:19 remember how it happened. In 2008, Obama was the underdog, right? And actually, here’s the critical
2:14:24 thing. Obama was losing with black people. Why? Black Democrats simply did not believe that white
2:14:30 people would vote for a black guy. So Barack Obama goes to where this white state, Iowa, all in on
2:14:37 the Iowa caucuses and shocks the world by winning the Iowa caucuses. Overnight, there’s a shift in
2:14:41 public opinion amongst the black population in South Carolina that says, “Oh, shit, he actually
2:14:45 could win.” And it comes out and you win South Carolina. And that’s basically was near the death
2:14:50 knell for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The problem is by moving South Carolina up and by
2:14:55 making it first, along with other more pro establishment friendly places, what do we do?
2:15:00 We make it so that Barack Obama could never happen again. We make it so that an older,
2:15:06 you know, base of Democratic Party voters who listens to the elites can never have their
2:15:11 assumptions challenged. And that’s one of the worst things Joe Biden did. You know,
2:15:15 I talked about his arrogance. He was so arrogant, he changed the freaking primary system. He was
2:15:22 so arrogant, he refused to do a debate. I mean, imagine history. How lucky are we, honestly,
2:15:27 that Joe Biden agreed to do that debate with Donald Trump early? And again, that was his arrogance.
2:15:34 I think we’re so lucky for it. Because if we hadn’t gotten, we got to understand as a country
2:15:40 how cooked he was and how fake everything was behind the scenes in front of all of our eyes.
2:15:43 And they tried for three straight years to make sure that that would never happen.
2:15:48 So, I mean, it’s still such a crime, honestly, against the American people.
2:15:52 I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to for three hours. And that’s why
2:16:00 bring up Obama, because he’s probably the number one person on the left. I would like
2:16:07 to hear analyze what happened in this election and what happened to the United States of America
2:16:12 over the past 20 plus years. I can’t imagine anybody else. Look, if anybody could do it,
2:16:16 it would be you. But there are layers upon layers with that man. I would love to actually sit with
2:16:21 a talk with him, for real. I think it’s fair to say that we talked about the great man
2:16:29 view of history. I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for
2:16:32 sure psychopaths. Not for sure. There are many who are good people. Harry Truman.
2:16:35 You’re like some of my best friends. Harry Truman.
2:16:43 Some, I assume, are good people. To be fair, though, most of the good ones are accidents
2:16:46 like Harry Truman. He never would have gotten himself elected. He was a great dude.
2:16:49 How do you know he was a great dude? David McCullough book. I highly recommend it.
2:16:53 Everybody should read it. Truman loved his wife. I think that’s really awesome. I love
2:16:59 when politicians love their wife. It’s so rare. He adored his wife. He adored his daughter,
2:17:05 spent time with them. He made family life a priority. He had really good small town judgment
2:17:09 that he would apply to foreign affairs. He was just a very well-considered,
2:17:16 very stand-up man. I so appreciate that about him. Another one is John Adams. I love and
2:17:21 revere John Adams. He’s my favorite founding father. Him and John Quincy, they don’t get nearly
2:17:27 enough of their due. They were some of the most intelligent, well-considered. They were family
2:17:33 men. The love, the relationship between John and Abigail Adams is literally legendary. I think
2:17:38 it’s amazing, especially in the context of the 1700s, the way that he would take her counsel
2:17:45 and into conversations and her own ability. She would sit there and go toe-to-toe as much with
2:17:51 Thomas Jefferson. There are some who are great, who are really, really good presidents, who have
2:17:56 good judgment and who are really good people and really think deeply about the world and have really
2:18:01 cool personal lives. There’s also the vast majority of them, especially in the, I would say,
2:18:06 especially in the modern era and where the price of the presidency extracts everything that you have.
2:18:12 You have to be able to, you have to be willing to give everything. It’s just, that’s not a price
2:18:18 that most people want to pay. Is it possible that some of the people who you think are sociopaths
2:18:23 and politics are, in fact, really good people and some of the people you think are good,
2:18:28 like Truman and Adams are actually sociopaths? Definitely. I mean, I could just be reading
2:18:34 the wrong books, right? Yeah, that’s right. It sounds like you’re, you just read some really
2:18:39 compelling biographies. Well, okay, to be fair, I don’t base this on one book. I read a lot of them,
2:18:44 and I’ll get like a, for example, I’ve read books about LBJ. You wouldn’t know any of his foibles,
2:18:48 but then you find out that they’re written by his friend or, you know, it was written by,
2:18:54 and I read the truth. I really worry about this kind of general, especially now the sense of the
2:19:02 anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. Now, well, the reason I worry
2:19:13 about that is it feels true. Yeah. So it’s, you can fall into this bubble of beliefs where every
2:19:18 politician is a sociopath, and because of that- It can be a self-reinforced. Self-reinforced.
2:19:22 Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I agree, by the way, we do need to dramatically change it,
2:19:26 but the problem is, is that, you know, people vote with their eyeballs and with their interests,
2:19:32 and people love, like to, you know, dissect people’s personal lives. And one of the reasons why you
2:19:37 were probably more likely in the pre-modern era to get a “good people” is they were not
2:19:41 subject to the level of scrutiny and to the insanity of the process that you are currently.
2:19:46 Like I just said about you, I mean, theoretically, you could run for president and you would just
2:19:51 get your nomination at the convention. It’s only two months to election day. That’s not so bad.
2:19:56 But, you know, you run for president today. You got your ass on the road for two years and then
2:20:01 two years before that, and then you have to run the damn government. So the price is so
2:20:08 extraordinarily high. I also think that, oh God, and just Washington is a system. It will burn you.
2:20:15 It will just, it will extract absolutely everything that you can give it. And at the end of the day,
2:20:19 you know, I mean, everyone always talks about this. It’s hilarious. How Trump is the only
2:20:24 president not to age in office. I think, I actually think it’s crazy. Like when you look
2:20:27 at the photos of how he actually looks better today than he did whenever he went into the office,
2:20:34 that’s amazing. And it actually says a lot about how his mind works. I think Trump is pure id.
2:20:39 Like, I think he’s, having observed him a little bit, and, you know, both at the White House and
2:20:43 having interviewed him, it’s pure just like, it’s calculating, but it’s also pure id,
2:20:47 which is very interesting. The ones who are the thinkers, guys like Obama and others who are really
2:20:53 in their heads, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. It will, they will, I mean, apparently Obama would
2:20:58 only sleep four hours a night, you know. Yeah, add like some empathy on top of that. It’s gonna
2:21:03 destroy you. It will kill you, man. All right. Speaking about the dirty game of politics, several
2:21:09 people, different people, told me that of everyone they have ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is
2:21:14 the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that?
2:21:17 In the modern era? Yeah, I think that’s fair. In the last 25 years, definitely.
2:21:23 Let’s think about it. Number one is longevity. So she’s had the ability to control the caucus
2:21:28 for a long period of time. So that’s impressive, because as I just laid out with Clinton, Obama,
2:21:33 these figures come and they go, but over 25, almost a year period, you’ve been at the very top
2:21:38 in the center of American politics. The other case I would be is that in this modern era has
2:21:43 been defined by access to money. She’s one of the greatest fundraisers in Democratic Party history.
2:21:49 And again, consistently, Obama, Kamala, all those people come and go, but she’s always had a very
2:21:55 central understanding of the ability to fundraise, to cultivate good relationships with Democratic
2:22:00 Party elites all across the country, use that money and dole it out to her caucus. She’s also
2:22:05 was really good at making sure that legislation that came to the floor actually had the votes to
2:22:11 do so. She ran an extremely well ordered process in the House of Representatives, one in which
2:22:17 you were able to reconcile like problems within her office. It didn’t usually go public. And then
2:22:22 it would make it to the floor and it would pass so that there will be no general like media frenzy.
2:22:27 And you know, Democrats in disarray or any of that put that on display with the Republicans
2:22:32 and we’ve had multiple speakers all resign or get fired in a 16 year period. That’s pretty
2:22:37 remarkable. Basically ever since John Boehner decided to leave in what was that 2012, I forget
2:22:42 the exact year. My point is that if you compare her record to the longevity on the Republican side,
2:22:48 it is astounding. The other interesting thing is that she also has pulled off one of the real
2:22:53 tests of political power is can you rule even when you don’t have the title anymore? So she gave up
2:22:58 the leader position to Hakeem Jeffries, but everybody knows she pulled Joe Biden out of the
2:23:03 race. That’s pretty interesting, right? So she’s a technically just a backbencher, nobody member
2:23:08 of Congress, but we all know that’s bullshit. So that’s that’s actually a very important case
2:23:14 of political power is can you rule without the title? And if you can, then you truly are powerful.
2:23:20 So I would make a good case for her. She’s done a lot of remarkable stuff for her party. I will
2:23:25 say they played Trump like a fiddle man last time around. They were able to. I mean, they really
2:23:32 got him. One of the craziest elements that I covered was during the Trump basically threatened
2:23:36 to shut down the government and actually did shut down the government for a period of time over
2:23:42 a dispute over border wall funding and Pelosi and Schumer, despite like genuine mass hysteria
2:23:47 in the Democratic Party, with even some people who were willing to try and to strike a deal,
2:23:55 never wavered and actually basically won and forced Trump to back down. Not a lot of MAGA people
2:23:59 want to admit it, but that was honestly really embarrassing for the Trump administration at
2:24:04 the time. And yeah, I mean, the amount of discipline that it took for her and Chuck,
2:24:09 to a lesser extent, but for the two of them to pull that off, it was honestly impressive
2:24:13 that they were able to do that. Even when the president has so much political power and it
2:24:19 literally shut down the government over it. Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised one billion
2:24:26 dollars. Insane. But I guess the conclusion is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it?
2:24:31 I don’t think money matters that much. I think Donald Trump has proven to us twice that you can
2:24:38 win an underdog campaign through earned media. And I don’t think that paid advertisement moves the
2:24:44 needle that much. Now, don’t notice, I didn’t say it doesn’t matter. But am I buying $425,000
2:24:49 a day spots on the Vegas sphere? No, we’re not doing that. Are we building? Okay, as people who do
2:24:56 this for a living, how do you even spend $100,000 to build a set for one interview? This is the
2:25:01 Call Her Daddy thing. Okay. How’s that possible? So think about the dollar per hour cost. That’s
2:25:06 like running a jet airplane in terms of what they did. You know what I want to note behind the scenes?
2:25:14 I’m not good with this. I get really frustrated and I shouldn’t. But dealing with PR and comms people
2:25:19 can sometimes break my soul. It’s maddening. Can we not talk about this? We need to pull them in
2:25:25 to 12 p.m. and you’re like, well, that’s only 30 minutes. Yeah, that but there’s stuff like
2:25:31 where to put the camera. It’s not that I don’t, it’s not actually hypothetically, I don’t even
2:25:37 disagree with any of the suggestions or this, but it’s like the micromanagement. Just the micromanagement
2:25:44 and the politeness, but the fake politeness. And it just makes me feel like, I think like,
2:25:49 what would Kubrick do? Would he murder all of them right now? He would just ban them
2:25:55 after he became Stanley Kubrick, but he dealt with it for a while. But I just went on a Kubrick
2:26:01 binge. Man, he was awesome. I watched that World War I movie of his, the one from the 50s. That is
2:26:05 such an underrated film. I feel like people don’t, whatever, we’ll get past.
2:26:15 But she, yeah, I guess you paid for 100 grand, bro. 100 and the Oprah thing. She paid for the
2:26:19 interviews. So, you know, that’s another one. I do this for a living. And as you can tell,
2:26:24 I’m a very cynical person. I did not even know that celebrities got paid for their endorsements.
2:26:30 I could never have imagined a universe where Oprah Winfrey has paid $1 million to endorse Kamala
2:26:35 Harris. I’m like, first of all, you’re a billionaire. Second, I thought you do this because
2:26:42 you believe. No, I think to be fair, I think the million just helps do the thing you would like
2:26:47 to do. It’s a nudge because I don’t think any celebrity would endorse. They’re not doing it
2:26:52 because of the money, but you should just do it for free. I can’t even believe that you’re doing
2:26:57 this for money. I mean, and the fact, what was it, Alanis Morissette? You know how they were able,
2:27:01 they had to cut her because they didn’t have the funds to pay her. I’m like, first of all,
2:27:05 if you believe you should just play for free. But second, again, as a person who is deeply
2:27:11 cynical, I still am genuinely shook that we are paying celebrities for their endorsements.
2:27:15 Yes, really fucked up. That’s insane. Why do you think people on the left
2:27:21 who are actually in the political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour?
2:27:27 That’s a great question. So let me just say, probably most of the people I’ve talked to on
2:27:34 this podcast are left-wing or have been for a long time. They just don’t sort of out and say it.
2:27:40 Like most scientists are left-wing. Most sort of vaguely political people are
2:27:45 a left-wing that I’ve talked to. But the closer you get to the actual political arena,
2:27:54 and I’ve tried really hard, I had a bunch of people with the highest profile people,
2:27:58 say 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I’m used to that, so welcome.
2:28:08 I just can’t imagine a conversation with Kamala, or with Joe Biden,
2:28:19 or AOC, or Obama, that’s of any quality at all, shows any kind of humanity of the person,
2:28:25 the genius of the person, the interesting nuance of the person in like 30 minutes.
2:28:33 I don’t know. Maybe if there’s people that are extremely skilled that can do that, you just can’t.
2:28:37 You should be optimistic because a huge narrative out of this election is that the
2:28:41 Democrats massively fucked up by not coming on this show or a broken show. So I actually,
2:28:46 fundamentally, number one, that’s going to change dramatically. So be optimistic and keep pushing.
2:28:51 But two is, this is a good segue actually, is I’ve been thinking a lot about, I know a lot of
2:28:55 people who listen to this show, who are in tech and may have some influence on the admin. So this
2:29:00 is kind of, this is something I want people to take really seriously. I was a White House
2:29:05 correspondent for The Daily Caller. It’s a conservative outlet in Washington during the
2:29:12 Trump years. And the most important thing I learned from that was that under the White House
2:29:17 Correspondents Association, the way that the media cartel has everything set up for access,
2:29:24 for press, to the president is fundamentally broken, anti-American, and bad for actual democracy.
2:29:29 So let me lay this out at a very mechanical level because nobody knows this. And I was a
2:29:33 former White House Correspondents Association member. So anybody who says I’m full of shit,
2:29:38 I was there. For example, number one, all the seats in the briefing room, those seats are assigned
2:29:42 by the White House Correspondents Association, not by the White House itself. The White House
2:29:48 Correspondents Association requires you to apply for a seat, right? That adjudication process can
2:29:53 take literally years for bylaws, elections, and all these things to do. This means that they can
2:29:59 slow roll the entrance of new media online outlets who are allowed into the room. The reason it really
2:30:03 matters not having a seat is if you don’t have a seat, you have to get there early and stand in
2:30:07 the wings like I used to and raise your hand like this and just hope and pray that the press secretary
2:30:11 can see it’s extremely inconvenient. I’m talking I have to get there hours early at a chance during
2:30:18 a 15 minute briefing. So one of the things is that Trump has is he owes a huge part of his election
2:30:24 to coming on podcasts and to new media. Now, because of that, it’s really important that the
2:30:29 White House Correspondents Association, which is a literal guild cartel that keeps people out of
2:30:36 the White House and credentials itself and creates this opaque mechanism through which they control
2:30:42 access to asking the press secretary questions is destroyed. And there are a lot of different ways
2:30:48 you can do this because what nobody gets to is that all of these rules are unofficial. So for
2:30:52 example, they’re just traditions. The White House is like, yeah, it’s our building, but you guys
2:30:57 figure it out, right? Because that’s a longstanding tradition. Let me give you another insane tradition
2:31:01 that currently exists in the White House. The Associated Press, the White Press Secretary or
2:31:07 the Associated Press Correspondent gets to start the briefing. Traditionally, they get the first
2:31:11 question. They also get to end the briefing when they think it’s been enough time. They’re like,
2:31:16 okay, cringe up here. Thank you. And that calls the briefing over. You’re not even the White
2:31:21 House Correspondents Association. You literally just happen to work for the Associated Press.
2:31:27 Why? Why do we allow that to happen? So number one, stop doing that. To their credit, the Trump
2:31:31 people didn’t really do that, but it’s a longstanding tradition. The other thing is that
2:31:36 what nobody gets either is that the first row is all television networks for logistical reasons
2:31:39 so that they can do their little standups with their mic and say, you know, I’m reporting longer
2:31:46 than this. Well, what people don’t seem to know is that all the television networks are basically
2:31:51 going to ask some version of the same question. The reason they do that is because they need
2:31:56 a clip of their correspondent going after the White House Press Secretary all out,
2:32:02 Robert Mueller, like whenever I was there. So you get the same goddamn version of the stupid
2:32:07 political questions over and over again. The briefing room is designed for traditional media
2:32:11 and they have all the access in the world. So in an election where you owe your victory,
2:32:17 to at least in part to new media and recognizing the changing landscape, you need to change the
2:32:24 conduit of information to the American people. And in an election, I don’t know if you saw this,
2:32:30 but election night coverage on cable news was down 25%. Just in four years, 25%. That’s astounding.
2:32:38 Cable news had a monopoly on election night for my entire lifetime. And yet my show had record
2:32:43 ratings that night. And look, I’m a small slice of the puzzle here. We’ve got Candace Owens,
2:32:48 Patrick Bette David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT, all these other people. From what I understand,
2:32:52 all of us blew it out that night because millions of Americans watching on YouTube,
2:32:58 we even partnered with some decision desk HQ. So we had live data. We could make state calls.
2:33:03 And we’re just a silly little YouTube show. My point, though, is that in an election where the
2:33:08 vast majority of Americans are the age of 55, are listening to podcasts, consuming new media,
2:33:13 and are not watching cable news, where the median age of CNN, which is the youngest viewership,
2:33:21 is 68. 68 is the median. So statistically, what does that tell us? There’s a decent number
2:33:28 of people who are watching CNN who are in their 80s and in their 90s. Yeah, I’m glad you brought up
2:33:33 Alex, because he deserves a tremendous shout out, Alex Brucewitz. He was the pioneer of the
2:33:39 podcast strategy for the Donald J. Trump campaign. He got on your show. He was able to get on Andrew
2:33:45 Schultz’s show, Rogan. He was the internal force that pushed a lot of this. My personal hope
2:33:49 is that somebody like Alex is elevated in the traditional White House bureaucracy,
2:33:54 that the number of credentials that are issued to these mainstream media outlets is cut, and there
2:33:59 is a new lottery process put in place where people with large audiences are invited. And
2:34:04 I also want to make a case here for why I think it’s really important for people like you and
2:34:09 others who don’t have as much traditional media experience to comment and practice some capital
2:34:16 J journalism, because it will sharpen you, too, giving you access in that pressure cooker environment
2:34:22 and having to really sit there and spar a little bit with a public official and not have as long
2:34:28 necessarily as you’re used to. It really hones your news media skills, your news gathering skills,
2:34:32 and it will make you a better interviewer in the long run. Because a lot of the things that I have
2:34:36 learned have just been through osmosis. I’ve just lived in DC. I’ve been so lucky. I’ve had a lot of
2:34:42 cool jobs, and I’ve just been able to experience a lot of this stuff. So I’m really hoping that people
2:34:47 who are listening to this, who may have some influence or even the viewership, if you want to,
2:34:53 you know, reach out to them and all them. This is a very easily changeable problem. It’s a cartel
2:34:58 which has no official power. It’s all power by tradition, and it needs to be blown up. It has,
2:35:03 it does not serve America’s interests to have 58 seats, I think, in the White House press briefing
2:35:10 room to people who have audiences of like five. It just makes absolutely zero workspace, seats,
2:35:16 access credentials, and also credentials that are issued to press and to other like new media
2:35:23 journalists at major events should take precedence. Because it’s not even about rewarding the creator.
2:35:30 The American people are here. You need to meet them. That’s your job. And I’ll just end with a
2:35:35 historical thing. Barack Obama shocked the White House press corps in 2009 because he took a question
2:35:42 from the Huffington Post. A brand new blog, but they were stunned because he knew he said these
2:35:47 blog people, they went all in for me, and I got to reward them. So there’s long-standing precedence
2:35:52 of this. They’ll bitch and they’ll moan, they’ll be upset, but it’s their fault, you know, that they
2:35:58 don’t have as much credibility. And it’s incumbent upon the White House, which serves the public,
2:36:02 to actually meet them where they are. So I really hope that at least some of this is
2:36:07 implemented inside of them. Yeah, if you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually
2:36:13 enable greater journalism, frankly, with the capitalist J, because actually in a long form
2:36:19 is when you can do better journalism from even just the politician perspective. You can disagree,
2:36:23 you can get criticized, because you can defend yourself. I had an idea, actually. Tell me what
2:36:28 you think. I think a really cool format would be there’s a room right near the press briefing room
2:36:32 called the Roosevelt Room. Beautiful room, by the way. It’s awesome. It has the Medal of Honor
2:36:36 for Teddy Roosevelt, and it has a portrait of him and a portrait of FDR. It’s one of my favorite
2:36:41 rooms in the White House. It’s so cool. And so my idea would be in the Roosevelt Room, which
2:36:48 traditionally used for press briefings and stuff, is like you, as the press secretary,
2:36:52 sit there. I think there’s like 12 seats, something like that. And you set it all up and you have,
2:36:56 let’s say, sure microphones like this. And that person that secretary is going to commit to being
2:37:01 there for like two hours. And new media people can sit around the room. All this is being streamed
2:37:06 live, by the way, just like the White House press briefing room. But the expectation is that
2:37:10 the type of questions have to be substantive. Obviously, nothing is off limits. You should
2:37:15 never ever, you know, accept I’m not going to ask about this, especially as a journalist,
2:37:18 you can’t do that. Every time they’re like, Hey, please don’t ask about this. It’s like,
2:37:23 actually, that’s probably one thing you should ask about. But my point being that the expectation
2:37:28 is that there’s no interference on the White House side, but that the format itself will lend
2:37:33 exactly to what you’re saying to allow people to explain. And again, in a media era where we need
2:37:41 to trust the consumer, like my show is routinely over two hours long, on cable television, on cable
2:37:46 television, you know, the Tucker Carlson program, whenever it was on Fox News, without commercial
2:37:52 breaks was about 42, 43 minutes, something like that of runtime. So I’m speaking for almost triple
2:37:59 what that is on a regular basis. The point is, is that millions are willing to sit and to listen,
2:38:04 but you just have to meet them where they are. So I would really hope that a format like that,
2:38:08 like a streamer briefing or something like that, I think, I think it’s, look, I know they would
2:38:13 dunk on it endlessly, but I think it could work. Yeah, I think the incentives are different. I
2:38:20 think it works because you don’t have to, like you saw good, don’t have to signal to the other
2:38:23 journalists that you’re part of the clique. Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up because
2:38:27 that was another lesson I learned. I go, oh, none of you are asking important questions for the
2:38:31 people. You’re asking questions because you all hang out with each other. And you’re like, oh,
2:38:38 wait, so this entire thing is a self-reinforcing guild to impress each other at cocktail parties
2:38:43 and not to actually ask anything interesting. I remember people were so mad at me because
2:38:50 this was 2018 or maybe 2017. And I said, do you think that Kim Jong-un is sincere
2:38:54 in his willingness to meet with you? Something like that to that effect.
2:38:58 They were furious because I didn’t ask about some bullshit political
2:39:04 controversy that was happening at the time. So in the historical legacy, what was more important?
2:39:11 The Mueller question or Donald Trump breaking 50 years or whatever of tradition with America’s
2:39:15 relationship with North Korea and meeting him in Singapore and basically resetting
2:39:19 that relationship for all time. As you can tell, I read a lot of book. I like to take the long
2:39:26 view. Every time I would ask a question, I go, okay, when the future Robert Caro is writing books
2:39:30 and he sees, he’s reading the transcript of the White House press briefing, you don’t even know
2:39:33 who this kid is. He goes, that was a pretty good question right there. That’s pretty relevant.
2:39:37 You got to think about all the bullshit that gets left on the cutting room floor.
2:39:44 I love that view of journalism actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book.
2:39:48 I just want a quote of what the president said to something that I asked in the book.
2:39:52 I would be happy. I would die happy with that. If you told me that when I’m like a 90-year-old
2:39:59 man, I’d be like, man, that means I succeeded. When the AI’s write the history of human civilization.
2:40:04 One of the things I continuously learned from you when looking back through history
2:40:10 is how crazy American politics has been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot
2:40:17 better about the current day. It should. Corruption, just the divisiveness also.
2:40:25 Just the incentive for stealing elections at all levels of government and direct stealing
2:40:30 and indirect stealing, all kinds of stuff. Is there stuff that jumps out to mind throughout
2:40:39 history that’s just like the craziest corruptions or stealing of elections that come to mind?
2:40:45 I’ll give the micro and the macro. My favorite example is Robert Caro, who I’ve probably talked
2:40:49 about him a lot. God bless you, Robert. I hope you live to write your last book because we really
2:40:57 need that from you. Robert came to Texas. He only intended on writing three books about Lyndon
2:41:01 Johnson. He’s currently completed four and he’s on his fifth. It’s taken him over 40 years to
2:41:07 write those. One of the reasons is he just kept uncovering so much stuff. One of them
2:41:13 is book two, means of ascent. He never intended to write it, but as he began to investigate
2:41:20 Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election, he realizes in real time how rigged and stolen it was.
2:41:27 I often tell people, “What if I told you that we lived in the most secure election period
2:41:32 in modern history?” They wouldn’t believe it. But if you read through that shit, I’m talking
2:41:39 about bags of cash, millions of dollars, literal stuffed ballot boxes. It’s great to be back here
2:41:45 in Texas because I always think about that place down in Zapata and Star County. I’m talking basically
2:41:53 Mexico where these dons were in power in the 1940s and they would literally stuff the ballot boxes
2:41:57 with the rolls and they wouldn’t even allow people to come and vote. They just checkmarked it all for
2:42:04 you based upon the amount that he paid. Means of ascent is the painstaking detail of exactly how
2:42:10 Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 Senate election. Nothing like that, as far as I know, is still
2:42:17 happening. Macro, we can talk about the 1876 election. Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the closest
2:42:21 elections in modern history. It was one of those that got kicked with House of Representatives.
2:42:27 That was an insane, insane time. The corrupt bargain that was struck to basically end reconstruction
2:42:31 and federal occupation of the South. And of course, the amount of wheeling and dealing
2:42:37 that happened inside of that was absolutely bonkers and nuts. That was what an actual
2:42:42 stolen election looks like. Just so people know. So on a micro and a macro, yeah, that’s what it
2:42:48 really looks like. And so, look, I understand where people are coming from. Also, let’s do what?
2:42:54 1960, that was pretty wild. I mean, in 1960, there was all those allegations about Illinois going for
2:43:00 Kennedy. If you look at the actual vote totals of Kennedy Nixon, wow, I mean, it’s such an
2:43:05 insanely close presidential election. And even though the electoral college victory looks a
2:43:11 little bit differently, Nixon would openly talk about, he’s like, oh, Joe Kennedy rigged Illinois
2:43:16 for his boy. And he’d be like, and we didn’t even have a chance in Texas with Lyndon pulling,
2:43:22 you know, like Lyndon or Lyndon stuffing the ballot boxes down there. So, and this is open
2:43:27 on the like, they openly admit this stuff, they talk about it. So actually, there’s a funny story.
2:43:38 LBJ lost is, I think it’s 1941 Senate primary. And it’s because that his opponent, Papio Daniel,
2:43:43 actually outstole Lyndon. So they’re both corrupt. But Papio Daniel stuffed the ballot box
2:43:50 in like the fifth day of the seventh days to count the votes. And FDR loved LBJ. And it’s
2:43:57 interesting, right? FDR recognized Johnson’s, his talent. And he goes, Lyndon, you, you know,
2:44:02 in New York, we sit on the ballot boxes till we count them, you know, because he’s admitting
2:44:08 that he, you know, you know, participated in a lot of this stuff. So this high level chicanery
2:44:13 of stolen elections is actually an American pastime that we luckily have moved on from.
2:44:20 And quite a lot of people do not know the exact intricate details of how wild it was back in the
2:44:24 day. Yeah, it’s actually one of the things, it’s harder to pull off a bunch of bullshit with all
2:44:29 these cameras everywhere. No. Transparency to lack of cash, banking regulations, there’s a variety
2:44:35 of reasons. But yeah. So that said, let’s talk about the 2020 election. It seems like forever ago.
2:44:42 Do you think it was rigged the way that Trump claimed? No. And was it rigged in other ways?
2:44:48 This is the problem with language like rigged. And by the way, when I interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy,
2:44:51 you said the exact same thing. So for all the MAGA people who are going to get mad at me,
2:44:59 Vivek agrees, all right? And if, okay, I have observed, and I’m going to put my analysts hat
2:45:06 on, there are two theories of stop the steal. One I call low IQ stop the steal and one I call
2:45:11 high IQ stop the steal. Low IQ stop the steal is basically what Donald Trump has advocated,
2:45:18 where the, you know, Dominion voting machines and bamboo ballots and Venezuela and Sidney Powell
2:45:21 and all the people involved basically got indicted by the state of Georgia. I’m not saying that
2:45:26 was correct. I’m just like, that’s what that actually looked like. Rudy Giuliani, et cetera.
2:45:32 High IQ stop the steal is basically, actually, I mean, these are not illegitimate arguments.
2:45:39 The school of thought is it was illegitimate for the state of Pennsylvania and other swing
2:45:45 states to change the mail in balloting laws as a response to COVID, which enabled millions of
2:45:50 people more to vote that wouldn’t have and that those change in regulations became enough to
2:45:55 swing the election. I actually think that that is true. Now, would you say that that’s rigged?
2:45:59 That’s a very important question, because we’re talking about a Republican state legislature
2:46:03 and Republican state Supreme Court, right? The two that actually ruled on this question.
2:46:07 So could you say that it was rigged by the Democrats to do that? Another problem with
2:46:13 that theory is that while you can say that that’s unfair to change the rules last time around,
2:46:17 you can also understand it to a certain extent. And I’m not justifying it. I’m just giving you
2:46:24 an example. So for example, after the hurricane hit North Carolina, Republican officials were
2:46:28 like, Hey, we need to make sure that these people who had Western North Carolina who were affected
2:46:32 by the hurricane could still be able to have access to the ballot box. And people were like, Oh,
2:46:36 so you’re saying in an extraordinary circumstance that you should change voting, right? You know,
2:46:42 access and regularity to make sure that people have access. So my point is, you can see the logic
2:46:48 through which this happened. And the high IQ version is basically the one that was adopted
2:46:54 by Josh Hawley whenever he voted against certification. He said that the the Pennsylvania
2:46:59 particularly election law and that those changes were unfair and led to the quote unquote rigging
2:47:04 of the election against Donald Trump. Now there’s an even higher IQ galaxy brain stop the steal.
2:47:10 Galaxy brain stop the steal is one that you saw with great love and respect, my friend JD Vance
2:47:17 at his debate with Tim Walsh when Tim Walsh asked him, what did he say? He said, did Donald Trump
2:47:23 win the 2020 election? He’s like, Tim, focused on the future. And then he started talking about
2:47:28 censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you take a look at the Joe Rogan interview,
2:47:32 Rogan actually asked JD this, he’s like, What do you mean you in the election was some version
2:47:37 of that? And JD was like, Well, what I get really frustrated by is people will bring up all these
2:47:43 insane conspiracy theories. But they ignore that the media censored the Hunter Biden laptop story
2:47:49 and that big tech had its finger on the thumb for the Democrats. Now that is empirically true.
2:47:54 Okay, that is true, right? Now, would you say that that’s rigged? I’m not going to use that word,
2:47:58 because that’s a very different word. Now, would you say that that’s unfair? Yeah, I think it’s
2:48:04 unfair. So there’s another, there’s a lot of MAGA folks picked up on this one. There was a Time
2:48:09 Magazine article in 2020 that’s very famous in their crowd called, you know, the, the, it was
2:48:14 like the fight to fortify the election. And it was about all of these institutions that put their
2:48:21 fingers on the scale for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. So I will put it this way, was Donald Trump
2:48:29 up against the Titanic forces of billionaires, tech censorship, and elite institutions who
2:48:37 all did absolute damnedest to defeat him in 2020. Yes, that is true. And in a sense,
2:48:43 the galaxy brain case is the only one of those, which I think is truly legitimate.
2:48:49 And I’m not going to put it off the table, but this is the problem. That’s not what Trump means.
2:48:53 You know, Trump, Trump, by the way, will never tell you what I just told you, right?
2:48:59 JD will, if you go and you ask any of these Republican politicians when they’re challenged
2:49:04 on it and they don’t want to say that Trump lost a 2020 election, they’ll give the, the galaxy brain
2:49:10 case that I just gave. And again, I don’t think it’s wrong, but it’s like, guys, that’s not what he
2:49:15 means when he says it. And that’s the important parsing of the case, right? So first at a high level,
2:49:20 Trump or otherwise, I don’t like anyone who winds when they lose, period. Yeah. Although he did
2:49:24 tell you he lost, you noticed that? That’s the only time he’s ever said it, ever. You’re famous,
2:49:31 you’re in history for that one. Lost by a whisker. Yeah. Lost by a whisker. I mean, there is a case
2:49:36 to be made that he was joking. I don’t know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with
2:49:42 humor where sometimes it’s sarcasm, sometimes not. Much easier to showcase in a three hour
2:49:48 interview, I’ll say. Good call. Go ahead. I couldn’t even like play with that when you have 40 minutes.
2:49:54 I know, bro. You’re like, you know, I could do just 40 minutes on weaving alone.
2:49:59 For your style, it doesn’t work. And I can tell you how the way I interview politicians is I just
2:50:04 do pure policy. So when I, the first time I interviewed Trump, I compiled a list of 15 subjects,
2:50:09 me and my editor, Vince Collinier, shout out to Vince, and the two of us sat in an office,
2:50:13 and then we had questions by priority in each category. And if we felt like we were running
2:50:17 short on time, we would move around those different ones. But that was purely he’s the
2:50:22 president, we’re asking him for his opinions on an immigration bill or whatever. For what you do,
2:50:28 it’s impossible to do it for him. Yeah, I just want to say that thank you for everybody involved,
2:50:32 for making my conversation with Donald Trump possible. But I’ve learned a lot from that that
2:50:41 I just, if I’m told that all I have is 40 minutes, I’m very politely sparing in that case,
2:50:46 Donald Trump, the 40 minutes and just walking away. Because I don’t think I can do a good job.
2:50:51 I think that is the correct decision on your part. And I also would encourage you to have
2:50:57 the confidence at this point that you are in a position of something that we call in the business
2:51:03 the ability to compel the interview. And to compel means to be able to bring somebody else to you
2:51:08 and not the other way around. And I think that you and Rogan and a few others are in that very
2:51:13 unique position. And I would really encourage you guys to stick to your guns on things that make
2:51:19 you feel comfortable. Because those of us in news, we will always negotiate. We’re willing to do
2:51:23 short form because we’re asking about policy. But for the style that you’ve helped popularize,
2:51:27 and I think that you’re uniquely talented and good at, that’s very important not to compromise on.
2:51:31 So thank you for saying those words. And that’s not just in the interest of journalism and the
2:51:34 interest of conversation. It’s the interest of the guests as well.
2:51:35 Yeah, absolutely.
2:51:36 To bring out the best in them.
2:51:40 Yeah. I mean, I would feel really added to service. And I would feel like people would not get a
2:51:46 unique understanding of my own thought process and my backstory if I was not able to sit here for
2:51:52 literally hours and to explain in deep detail how I think about the world. Not that anyone cares
2:51:58 that much. But I hope all I can do is I hope it’s helpful. I want to help people think.
2:52:03 Because when I was growing, I was growing up not far from here, 90 minutes from here,
2:52:09 in College Station, I felt very uniquely closed off from the world. And I found the world through
2:52:15 books and books saved my life. They’ve many, so many different times. And I hope to encourage that
2:52:20 in other people. I really, no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter how busy you
2:52:25 are, you have some time to either sit down with a book or put on an audio book. And you can transport
2:52:31 yourself into a different world. It’s so important. And that’s something that your show really helps
2:52:35 me with too. I love listening to your show whenever, sometimes when I’m too into politics and I need
2:52:38 to listen to something, I’ll listen to that Mayan historian guy. I love stuff like that.
2:52:43 Absolutely. I’ve been a deep dive on Jenkins Kahn, reading Jenkins Kahn and then making
2:52:50 the modern world. Yeah, Jack Weatherford. Yeah, he’s coming on. Is he? Yeah. Amazing. And again,
2:52:56 shout out to Dan Carlin. The Goat, the OG. Dan, I’ve never met you before. I would love to
2:53:00 correspond at some point. I love you so much. You changed my life, man. I met him once before
2:53:05 and it felt… I listened to your interview with him. Oh, Starstruck. Yeah. Very, very Starstruck.
2:53:10 And he means you’re so much. Painful attainment. If I’ve listened to that Mayan… I think his
2:53:14 best series, one of his best series, it gets no credit for, Ghosts of the Ostfront. Nobody gives
2:53:20 him credit for that one. That’s OG. This is a 2011 series. But his Ghosts of the Ostfront on
2:53:27 the Eastern Front of the Nazi war against Russia fundamentally changed my view of warfare forever.
2:53:32 And also, at that time, I was very young. And to me, World War II was saving Private Ryan. I
2:53:38 wasn’t as well-read as I am now. And I was like, “Oh, shit. This entire thing happened, which actually
2:53:44 decided the Second World War. And I don’t know anything about this.” So shout out to Dan. God
2:53:50 bless you, man. And his, quote, unquote, “short episodes,” I think, on slavery in general throughout
2:53:54 human history. That was an awesome episode. I actually bought a bunch of Hugh Thomas books
2:53:59 because of that episode. I’d never really read about African slavery or the slave trade outside
2:54:03 of the Civil War context. So again, shout out to him for that one. That was an amazing episode.
2:54:08 His Japan series, too. I’m going to Japan in a few days. And I keep thinking of what he always
2:54:13 talked about in his Supernova in the East. The Japanese are like everyone else, but only more so.
2:54:22 And God, I love that quote. Okay, he’s great. And we, ironically, arrived at this tangent
2:54:27 while talking about the 2020 election. Yeah. That’s why podcasting is fun.
2:54:33 Because he said, “Lost by a whisker.” And now we’re dragging us screaming back to the topic.
2:54:43 One of the things I was bothered by is Trump claiming that there’s widespread
2:54:49 as you’re saying low IQ theory, the widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of that that
2:54:56 he provided. And all right, well, let’s put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled
2:55:05 by that maybe you can comfort me in the context of history, how easily the base ate that up.
2:55:13 That they were able to believe the election was truly rigged based on no clear evidence
2:55:18 that I saw. And they just love the story. And there is something compelling to the story that,
2:55:24 you know, like this DNC type, like with Bernie, the establishment just, they’re corrupt and they
2:55:36 steal the will of the people. And like the lack of a desire from the base or from people to see any
2:55:40 evidence of that was really troubled me. Yeah. I’m going to give you one of the most depressing
2:55:46 quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to “The Loudest Voice in
2:55:50 the Room” by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too, because it really made me understand
2:55:55 the media. People don’t want to be informed. They want to feel informed. That is one of the most
2:56:02 fundamental media insights of all time. What a line. Roger Ailes, a genius, a genius in his own
2:56:08 right, who, you know, he changed the world. He certainly did. He, you know, he’s the one
2:56:12 who kind of gets credit for one of the greatest debate lines of all time, because he was an
2:56:17 advisor to President Reagan. Whenever he broke in, he was like, “Mr. President, people want to
2:56:22 know if you’re too damn old for this job or not.” And he inspired that joke that Reagan made,
2:56:27 where he was like, “I will not use age in this campaign. I will not hold my opponent’s youth
2:56:32 and inexperience against him.” That was Ailes, man. You got it. He did the Nixon Town Halls.
2:56:38 He did it all. He’s a fucking genius. And I’m not advocating necessarily for the world he created
2:56:44 for us, but he did it. And people should study him more. If you’re interested in media in particular,
2:56:46 that book is one of the most important books you’ll ever read.
2:56:52 Yeah, you know what? That quote just really connected with me, because there’s all this
2:56:59 talk about truth. And I think what people want to, they want to feel like they’re in possession
2:57:02 of the truth. Correct. Not actually being in the possession of the truth.
2:57:09 Yeah, I know. It hit me too. Actually, Russell Crowe does an amazing job of delivering that line
2:57:13 in the Showtime miniseries. So if you have the chance, you should watch it. And look,
2:57:17 this is the problem. Liberals will be like, “Yeah, see these idiot Republicans?” I’m like,
2:57:21 “Yeah, you guys have bought a lot of crazy stupid shit too, okay?” And if actually,
2:57:25 I would say liberal misinformation, quote unquote, is worse than Republican disinformation,
2:57:31 because it pervades the entire elite media like Russiagate or Cambridge Analytica or
2:57:36 any of these other hoaxes that have been foisted on the American people. The people who listen to
2:57:42 the Daily and from the New York Times are just as brainwashed, lack of informed, want to feel
2:57:48 informed as people who watch Fox News. So let me just say that out there. It’s an equal opportunity
2:57:53 to cancer in the American people. Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking
2:58:02 about bubbles. What’s your advice about how to figure out if you’re in a bubble and how to get
2:58:06 out of it? That’s such a fantastic question. Unfortunately, I think it comes really naturally
2:58:11 to someone like me, because I’m the child of immigrants and I was raised in Coliseation,
2:58:17 Texas. So I was always on the outside. And when you’re on the outside, this isn’t a sob story.
2:58:21 It’s a deeply useful skill, because when you’re on the outside, you’re forced to kind of observe.
2:58:28 And you’re like, oh, so like what I was raised was the Bible Belt. And people really, you know,
2:58:32 people were hardcore evangelical Christians. And I could tell them like, oh, they really believe
2:58:37 this stuff. And, you know, they were always trying to proselytize and all of that. And then the other
2:58:42 gift that my parents gave me is I got to travel the entire world. I probably visited 25, 30 countries
2:58:50 by the time I was 18. And one of the things that that gave me was the ability to just put yourself
2:58:54 in the brain of another person. So one of the reasons I’m really excited to go to Japan,
2:59:00 and I picked it as a spot for my honeymoon was because Japan is a first world developed country
2:59:06 where the vast majority of them don’t speak English. It’s distinguishedly non-western,
2:59:11 and they just do shit their own way. So they have a subway, but it’s not the same as ours.
2:59:14 They have restaurants, things don’t work the same way. They have, you know,
2:59:20 I could go to a laundry list, their entire philosophy of life of the daily rhythm,
2:59:26 even though it merges with service based managerial capitalism and they’re fucking good at it too,
2:59:32 they do it their own way. So exposure to other countries in the world gave me, and also just
2:59:37 being an outsider myself, gave me a more detached view of the world. So if you don’t have that,
2:59:43 what I would encourage you is to flex that muscle. So go somewhere that makes you uncomfortable.
2:59:48 This will be a very boomer take, but I hate the fact that you have 5G everywhere you go in the
2:59:53 world, because some of the best experiences that I’ve ever had in my life is walking around Warsaw,
2:59:59 Poland, trying to find a bus station to get my ass to Lithuania with a printed out bus ticket.
3:00:03 I have no idea where the street is. I have, I’m in a country where not that many people speak
3:00:08 English. We’re pointing and gesturing, right? And I figured it out. And it was really useful.
3:00:12 I got to meet a lot of cool Polish people. Same in Thailand. I’ve been in rural, like,
3:00:19 bumfuck Thailand, Colombia, places where people speak zero English. And your ability to gesture
3:00:26 and use pigeon really connects you and gives you, like, the ability to get an exposure to others.
3:00:32 And so I know this is a very, like, wanderlust, like, travel thing, but unironically, if you’re
3:00:37 raised in a bubble, pierce it. Like, that’s the answer is seek something out that makes you
3:00:40 uncomfortable. So if you’re raised rich, you need to go spend some time with poor people.
3:00:44 And consider that they might actually understand the world better than you.
3:00:48 Well, in some respects, so I think a lot of rich people have really screwed up personal lives.
3:00:52 So if you’re poor and you really value family, you say, oh, that’s interesting. There seems to be
3:00:58 a fundamental tradeoff between extraordinary wealth and something that I value. But what can I take
3:01:04 away from that person? Oh, put my money in index funds. Make sure that I am conscientious about
3:01:11 my budgeting and common sense shit, right? And vice versa, people who are very wealthy,
3:01:16 get so caught up in the rat race about their kids going to private school and all of this.
3:01:20 And then, you know, they very rarely engage with there’s that famous study where they ask
3:01:24 people on their deathbed, like what they valued in life and every single one of them was like,
3:01:28 I wish I’d spend more time with my children. I think about that every time that I am thinking
3:01:33 about pursuing a new work endeavor or something that’s going to have me spend significant time
3:01:39 away from my wife. And I’m almost always these days now that I’ve achieved a certain level of
3:01:44 success, the answer is, I’m not doing it unless you can come with me.
3:01:48 One of the bubbles I’m really concerned about San Francisco bubble, I visited there recently,
3:01:55 because there’s so many friends there that I respect deeply. There’s just so many brilliant
3:01:59 people in San Francisco, the Silicon Valley. But there’s just this,
3:02:06 I don’t even want to criticize it, but there’s definitely a bubble of thought.
3:02:12 I’m with you. I’m friends with some SV Silicon Valley people as well. I’m similarly struck by
3:02:20 that every time I go. And honestly, I do admire them because what I respect the most amongst
3:02:24 entrepreneurs, business and political thinkers is systems thinking. Nobody thinks systems better
3:02:29 than people who are in tech because they deal with global shit, right? Not even just America,
3:02:34 they have to think about the whole world, about the human being and his relationship to technology.
3:02:38 And coding in some ways is an expression of the human mind and about how that person wants to
3:02:44 achieve this thing. And hey, you mechanically can type that into a keyboard or even code something
3:02:50 to code for you to be able to achieve that. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. I do think
3:02:55 those people and people like that too, who think very linearly through math and they’re,
3:03:00 the geniuses are the ones who can take their creativity and merge it with linear thinking.
3:03:07 But I do think that that actually, those are the people who probably most need to get out of the
3:03:12 bubble, check themselves a little bit. And look, it’s really hard. Once you achieve a certain
3:03:17 level of economic success and others, what do most rich people do? They close themselves off from
3:03:22 the world, right? That’s the vast majority of the time. What do you do? Economy is annoying,
3:03:27 flying. They fly first class. Living in a small house is annoying. They buy a bigger house.
3:03:31 Dealing with a lot of these inconveniences of life is annoying. You pay a little bit more to
3:03:35 make sure you don’t have to do that. There’s a deep insidious thing within that, each one of those
3:03:40 individual choices where the more and more removed that you get from that, the more in the bubble
3:03:45 that you are. So you should actually seek out those experiences or create them in a concerted way.
3:03:55 Speaking of bubbles, Sam Harris, he has continued to criticize me directly and indirectly,
3:04:01 I think unfairly, but I love Sam. I deeply respect him. Everybody should listen to the
3:04:07 Making Sense podcast. It always makes me think. It’s definitely in the rotation for me.
3:04:14 That’s a very admirable view. I mean, he’s, I think, one of the sharpest minds of our generation.
3:04:20 And for a long time, I looked up to him. It was one of the weird moments for me to meet him,
3:04:23 because you listened to somebody for such a long time.
3:04:25 I feel that way with you. I’m serious.
3:04:30 Yeah, it’s a beautiful moment. I mean, same with Joe and stuff like this.
3:04:35 Oh, absolutely. It is one of the most surreal moments of your life to be able to meet somebody
3:04:40 who you spend hours listening to. I actually think about that when people come up to me,
3:04:43 because I’m like, oh, they’re feeling what I felt whenever I, yeah, yeah.
3:04:49 And you have to like, you see it, you feel it, and you have to celebrate that because there’s
3:04:56 an intimacy to it. I think it’s real that people really do form a real connection,
3:04:59 a real friendship. It happens to be one way, but I think it actually can
3:05:05 upgrade to a two-way pretty easily. It happens with me in a matter of like five minutes,
3:05:10 when I meet somebody at an airport or something like that. Anyway, Sam took a pretty strong
3:05:18 position on Trump. And has for a long time. Yeah, he has been consistent and unwavering.
3:05:27 So he thinks that Trump is a truly dangerous person for a democracy for maybe for the world.
3:05:33 Can you still man his position? Well, see, I think a lot of this podcast has
3:05:38 been stealing manning it because Sam is a big character matters guy. Like he focuses a lot
3:05:42 on Trump’s personality. By the way, I’m like you, I’ve listened to Sam Harris for years.
3:05:46 I bought his meditation app. So nobody’s going to accuse me of being some Sam Harris hater.
3:05:51 I listened to him for way before, long before even Donald Trump was elected. That’s how far
3:05:57 back I go with the Sam Harris podcast. I have a lot of respect for the dude. I enjoy a lot of his
3:06:02 older interviews. I do think after Trump, he did succumb a little bit, in my opinion, to the
3:06:10 elite liberalism view, both of the impetus behind Donald Trump and why he was able to be successful.
3:06:15 So in some ways very denigrating to the Trump voter, but also a fundamental misunderstanding
3:06:19 of the American presidency. Because like I said, he really is the one who believes that that
3:06:24 narcissism, that character, and all of that that makes Trump tick itself will eventually override
3:06:29 any potential benefit that he could have in office. And I just think that’s a really wrong way of
3:06:36 looking at it. And I mean, for example, I had this debate with Crystal, and this gets to the whole
3:06:41 Trump, you know, talking about the enemy from within. And she was like, he wants to prosecute
3:06:46 his political opponents. Do you disagree with that? And I was like, no, I don’t. And she was like,
3:06:49 so you’re not worried about it. And I go, no, I’m not. And she’s like, well, how do you square
3:06:55 that? And I was like, well, I actually unironically believe in the American system of institutional
3:07:01 checks and balances, which kept him quote unquote in check last time around. I also believe in
3:07:07 democracy, where, you know, this is really interesting. But, you know, in 2022, a lot of the
3:07:11 Republicans who were the most vociferous about stop the steal, they got their asses kicked at
3:07:17 the ballot box. You know, Americans also then in 2024 decided to forgive some of that from
3:07:22 Donald Trump, it’s definitely didn’t help, right? But they were able to oversee that for their own
3:07:28 interests. As in, democratically, people are able to weigh, in terms of checks and balances,
3:07:32 what they should and should not challenge a politician by. But also, we have the American
3:07:37 legal system. And I also know the way that the institutions in Washington themselves work,
3:07:43 that, you know, fundamentally, the way that certain processes and other things could play out
3:07:49 will not play out to some Hitlerian fantasy. And this gets to the whole like, Kamala and them
3:07:55 calling him a fascist and Hitler, you know, you and I probably spent hours of our life maybe more
3:08:01 thinking and reading about Hitler or Weimar Germany. And I just find it so insulting, you
3:08:09 know, because it becomes this moniker of like, these terms have meaning beyond the beyond just
3:08:15 the dictionary definition, the circumstances through which Hitler is able to rise to power
3:08:22 are not the same as today. It’s like, stop denigrating America to the point where you think
3:08:26 like really should flip it around. Why do you think America is Weimar Germany? That’s a ridiculous
3:08:32 thing to say. Do you unironically believe that? No, you don’t believe that. So that is personally
3:08:38 what drives me a little bit crazy. And I think that Sam has found himself in a mental framework
3:08:45 where he is not willing, he’s not able to look past the man and his quote unquote, danger. And
3:08:51 at the end of the day, his worldview was rejected wholly by the American people. And that because
3:08:56 the character argument, the fascist argument, the Hitler argument, the he is uniquely bad argument,
3:09:03 has been run twice before 2016 and in 2000, actually all three times, I guess it won in 2020.
3:09:07 But two out of the three times, Donald Trump has won the presidency. And his latest one,
3:09:12 where that argument has never been made before for a longer period of time and more in strength
3:09:18 by a political candidate was rejected completely. And I would ask him to reconcile himself to the
3:09:24 America that he lives in. I think one thing maybe to partially steal man in his case, but also just
3:09:32 to steal man the way the world works, is that there is some probability that Kamala Harris
3:09:40 will institute a communist state. And there is some probability that Donald Trump will indeed
3:09:47 like will fly a swastika with and deport, I don’t know, everybody who’s not Scott Irish.
3:09:54 You and I are screwed then. Maybe, is there a spirit test? Okay. But that probability is small.
3:10:02 And you have to, if you allow yourself to focus on a particular trajectory with a small probability,
3:10:07 it can become all-encompassing. Because you could see it. You could see a path. There are
3:10:12 certain character qualities to Trump. Yes. Where he wants to hold on to power. First of all,
3:10:20 every politician wants to hold on to power. Joe Biden, maybe because he’s part of the machine,
3:10:25 can’t even conceive of the notion of a third term. But he has the arrogance to want to hold
3:10:30 on to power, do everything he can. Absolutely. And like with Trump, I can see that if it was
3:10:36 very popular for him to have a third term, I think he would not be the kind of person
3:10:43 who doesn’t advocate for a third term. So what? That would require the Senate and the House,
3:10:49 or 70, what is it, 75% of the states, to pass and change the Constitution. Do you think that’s
3:10:52 going to happen? No, I don’t think it’s going to happen. So I’m not that worried about it. Now,
3:10:57 you can make a norms argument. Actually, I think that’s kind of fair, is that he’s the norms buster.
3:11:02 But, you know, with extraordinary candidates and people like Trump, you get the good and the bad.
3:11:09 There is a true duality. Like the norms he busts around foreign policy, I love. The norms he busts
3:11:14 around the economy, I love. The norms he busts around just so much of the American political
3:11:19 system, saying it, how it is, et cetera. I love that. You know what I hate? This 2020 election
3:11:25 bullshit. You know what else I hate? You know, this, I don’t know, just the lack of discipline
3:11:29 that I would want to think that a great leader could have, like when he was president and tweeting
3:11:33 about Mika Brzezinski’s facelift, that was objectively ridiculous. Like it was crazy,
3:11:40 okay? Was it funny? Yeah, but it was crazy. Like, and it’s not how I would conceive and have conceived
3:11:44 of some of my favorite presidents. I wouldn’t think that they would do that. But that’s what
3:11:49 you get. You know, everyone should be clear-eyed about who this man is. And that’s another problem.
3:11:54 The deification of politicians is sickening. It’s sickening. Like about Trump, around Obama,
3:12:00 around Hillary. Like these people are just people. Like the idea that they are godlike creatures
3:12:04 with extraordinary judgment. You know, one of the really cool things about your and I’s job is we
3:12:08 actually get to meet very important people. After you meet a few billionaires, you’re like, yeah,
3:12:13 there’s definitely something there. But you know, some of them get lucky. And like, after you meet
3:12:18 a few politicians, you’re like, oh, they’re not that smart. That was a rude awakening for me,
3:12:23 by the way, being here in Texas reading about these people. And pretty soon, I was on Capitol Hill,
3:12:27 I was like 19 years old. I was an intern. I’m actually interacting. And I see them behave in
3:12:32 ridiculous manners and, you know, whatever, to treat people badly or say something stupid.
3:12:37 And I was like, oh, this is not the West Wing. I’m like, this is not like, these people are just,
3:12:42 this is reality. And the weirdest part of my life is I’ve now been in Washington long enough. I know
3:12:48 some of the people personally, the vice president of the United States, literally the vice president
3:12:53 in elect, future cabinet secretaries, future, you know, these people I literally have met at
3:12:59 dinner with at a drink with whatever. That’s a wild thing. And that’s even more bringing you down
3:13:02 to earth. We were like, oh, shit, you’re actually going to have a lot of power. That’s, that’s kind
3:13:06 of scary. But you’re just a person. And so even though you don’t have to say I have my same life
3:13:12 experience, take it from me or anybody else who’s ever met really famous people, rich,
3:13:16 rich, successful, powerful people, they’re just people. There’s nothing that there’s some things
3:13:22 that are unique about them. But they have just as many human qualities as you or anybody else
3:13:27 is listening to this right now. Yeah, there’s, for each candidate, Trump is probably the extreme
3:13:32 version of that. There’s a, there’s a distribution of the possible trajectories the administration
3:13:38 might result in. Yes. And like, the range of possible trajectories is just much wider with
3:13:42 Trump. Yeah, you’re describing like a Bayesian theory, right? Like, and I think that’s actually
3:13:46 a really useful framework for the world is that people are really too binary. So like you said,
3:13:52 you know, there’s a theoretical possibility, I guess, of a communist takeover of government
3:13:57 and of fascist takeover of government under Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, you know,
3:14:04 their realistic probability, I would give it 0.05% probably in both directions. But there are,
3:14:07 you know, there are a lot of things that can happen that are bad that are not hit Larry
3:14:11 in her face. There are a lot of things that happen that are really good that are not FDR,
3:14:16 New Deal style. One of the worst things politicians do is they describe themselves
3:14:23 in false historical ways. So in Washington, one of the most overused phrases is made history.
3:14:28 And I’m like, you know, if you actually read history, most of these things are just,
3:14:32 they’re not even footnotes. They’re the stuff that the historians flip past and they’re like,
3:14:38 what a stupid bucking thing. I mean, and I’m talking about things that will that ruled American
3:14:42 politics. Like, what if I told you that the Panama Canal Treaty was one of the most important
3:14:48 fights in modern American politics? Nobody thinks about that today. It ruled American politics at
3:14:53 that time. You know, it genuinely is a footnote, but that’s how it felt at the time. So that’s
3:15:00 another thing I want people to take away. You tragically missed the UFO hearings.
3:15:06 Oh man, my brothers, I’m really sad. Let me tell you, I love them so much.
3:15:12 The UFO community are some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. Shout out to my brother
3:15:18 Jeremy Corbell, to George Knapp, the OG, to all of the people who fly from all around the
3:15:23 world to come to these hearings. It was so fun. I got to meet so many of them last time,
3:15:31 just walk the rope line like as people were coming in the excitement. I truly love the UFO
3:15:34 community. Shout out to all of them. This is the second one, I guess. This is the second one.
3:15:38 Do you hope they continue happening? It’s going to be a slow burn. So one of the things I always
3:15:46 tell the guys and everybody is, consider how long it took to understand the sheer insanity of the
3:15:52 CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. So if we think back to the Church Committee, I don’t, I forget the
3:15:56 exact year of the Church Committee, I think it was in the ’70s, the entire Church Committee and
3:16:03 knowledge of why this, of how the CIA and the FBI were up to all of this insane shit throughout the
3:16:09 ’50s and ’60s is because some people broke into a warehouse, discovered some documents, got the
3:16:14 names of programs which were able to be foiled and we were able to break open that case. It would
3:16:19 never have happened with real transparency, like in the official process. So we owe those people
3:16:26 a great debt, I guess I could say. Now the statute of limitations has passed. My point about the UFOs
3:16:30 is I don’t know what is real or not. I have absolute confidence and absolute ton is being
3:16:35 hid from the American people and that all of the official explanations are bullshit. I have had the
3:16:41 opportunity to interface with some of the whistleblowers and other activists in the community,
3:16:46 people who I trust, people who have great credentials, who have no reason to lie, who have
3:16:52 assured us that there is a lot going on behind the scenes. There has been too much misinformation
3:16:57 and effort by the deep state to cover up this topic. So I would ask people to keep the faith.
3:17:02 It’s 2024 and we still don’t have all the JFK files. Okay? Everyone involved is dead.
3:17:06 There’s no reason to let it go. And even though we basically know what happened,
3:17:11 we don’t know. If you read that fantastic book, the Tom O’Neill book about the Manson
3:17:16 murders, I mean, again, you know, it took him 20 years to write that book and he still didn’t get
3:17:22 the full story. So sometimes it takes an extraordinarily long agonizing period of time and
3:17:28 I know how deeply frustrating that is. But when you think about a secret, a program and knowledge
3:17:34 of this magnitude, it would only make sense that it would require a Titanic effort to reveal a
3:17:40 Titanic secret. You think Trump might be able to push for like aggressively break through the
3:17:46 secrecy. Let’s say even on the JFK files. I hope so. I have moderate confidence. You know,
3:17:51 RFK Jr. has pushed him to do so. I would like to think so. At the same time,
3:17:54 Thomas on got rolled last time. So I’m, you know, I’ll hold my breath.
3:17:56 Why do you think that happens? Why do you think it gets…
3:17:58 Remember that whole interagency thing I told you about? That’s how it happens.
3:18:02 That’s another thing. You’re presuming that the president has the power to declassify this stuff.
3:18:06 I’m saying that I’m not even sure we’re there, like in terms of…
3:18:11 So it’s basically like stability. He basically says like, I would like to declassify JFK files.
3:18:16 And they say, “Yes, sir. We’ll get that to you in three months and three months comes by.”
3:18:18 And then they’re like, “Well, there’s these hurdles.”
3:18:22 Well, the way you get around it is go, “Let’s release some, but these in particular,
3:18:25 there’s national security secrets is a good case for not releasing them. X, Y, and Z.”
3:18:28 You know, it’s like, you get around that. “Oh, okay. You know, that makes sense.”
3:18:31 You know, and again, he’s a busy guy. He’s the president. He got way bigger.
3:18:34 Shouldn’t worry about. So this is the, that’s the problem is that
3:18:38 unless you have that true urgency, I mean, look, people of immense power have tried.
3:18:42 Everyone forgets this. John Podesta was the White House chief of staff.
3:18:47 He is a UFO true believer in his heart. He tried. He’s talked about it. He tried
3:18:52 at the top level, the number two to the White House to get the Pentagon and others
3:18:56 to tell them what was going on. And they stonewalled him. So people need to understand what
3:19:00 you’re up against. And, you know, I would, and people are like, “How is that even possible?”
3:19:06 It’s like, “Well, go read about the terror that LBJ and the Kennedys and others had
3:19:13 in confronting J. Edgar Hoover. Go and read how terrified, you know, Eisenhower and some of them
3:19:17 were, were of the dullest brothers. They were scared. Like they, they knew where the power lies.
3:19:23 So, you know, the presidency, look, government, deep state, et cetera,
3:19:28 they’ve been there a long time and they know what’s happening. And presidents come and go,
3:19:34 but they stay forever. And so that’s, that’s the paradigm that you’re going to fight against.
3:19:40 Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a bit of a meme, but I wonder how deep the deep state is.
3:19:45 Much deeper than anyone can even imagine. And the worst part is with the deep state is it’s not
3:19:51 even individuals, it’s actually an ideology. And ideology is the most, you know, people often think
3:19:55 that if we took money out of politics that it would change everything. I’m not saying it wouldn’t
3:20:00 change everything, but it wouldn’t change a lot. But people are like, “Oh, so-and-so is only against
3:20:03 universal healthcare because they’re going to pay it.” I’m like, “No, no, no, that’s not why they
3:20:08 actually believe it.” Or it’s like, “Oh, so-and-so is only wants to advocate for war with Iran
3:20:12 because they’re on the payroll of APAC.” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, the APAC trips and the money
3:20:18 helps, but they think that.” Actually, the system itself, this is a very Chomsky-esque systemic critique
3:20:23 is that any journalist worth their salt would never have the ability to get hired in a mainstream.
3:20:28 So he’s like, “It’s not that you’re bad in the mainstream media. It’s that anyone good
3:20:34 is not allowed to be elevated to your position because they have an ideology.” And so, you know,
3:20:40 that is the most self-reinforcing pernicious mechanism of them all. And that’s really Washington
3:20:47 in a nutshell. It’s, again, a bubble, but a bubble that has a lot of power. Who do you think is the
3:20:53 future of the Republican Party? After Trump. What happens to Trumpism after Trump? Like you just
3:21:00 said, Bayesian, let’s take various theories, right? So let’s say it’s ’04. It’s Bush Cheney.
3:21:05 In 2004, the day after the election, I would have told you this. We live in a Bible belt,
3:21:11 Jesus Land America. This America wants to protect America, a war on terror against Iraq,
3:21:18 and the axis of evil, and American people just voted for George W. Bush. And so, I would have
3:21:22 predicted that it would have been somebody in that vein. And they tried that. His name
3:21:27 was John McCain. He got blown the fuck out by Barack Obama. So I cannot sit here and confidently
3:21:31 say it. What year would you be able to predict Obama? It was just his first time he gave the
3:21:36 speech, the 2004 speech at the DNC. We don’t live in Black America, White America, the John Kerry
3:21:42 DNC speech. You honestly could not have predicted it until ’07, whenever he actually announced his
3:21:48 campaign and activated a lot of anti-war energy. I mean, maybe ’06, actually, I could have said.
3:21:53 In ’06, if I was kind of the contrarian man now, I’m like, “Yeah, there’s a lot of anti-war energy.
3:21:57 I think the next president will be somebody who’s able to vote.” You know, the explosion of Keith
3:22:02 Oberman and MSNBC, it makes logical sense in hindsight. But, you know, at the same time,
3:22:06 you’re going up against the Clinton machine who’s never lost an election. So I would have been
3:22:12 afraid. I cannot confidently say. So I will say, if things go in different directions,
3:22:17 if Trump is a net positive president, then I think it will be JD Vance, his vice president,
3:22:23 who believes in the, a lot of the things that I’ve talked about here today about foreign policy
3:22:28 restraint, about the working class, about changing Republican attitudes to the economy,
3:22:34 and he would be able to build upon that legacy in the way that George W. H. W. Bush was able to
3:22:38 get elected off the back of Reagan. But H. W. Bush was fundamentally his own man. He’s a very
3:22:43 misunderstood figure, very different than Ronald Reagan. Didn’t end up working out for him, but,
3:22:48 you know, he did get himself elected once. So that’s one path. That’s if you have a net positive
3:22:54 Trump presidency. The other path is the 04 path that I just laid out. If George W. Bush, if Trump
3:23:01 does what Bush does, misinterprets his mandate, screws things up, creates chaos, and it makes it
3:23:07 just generally annoying to live in American society, then you will see somebody in the Republican
3:23:12 Party. I mean, still, it could even be JD Vance, because he could say JD is my natural and my
3:23:16 chosen successor, but then he would lose an election, and then he would no longer be the
3:23:22 so-called leader of the Republican Party. So I could see it swing in the other direction. I could
3:23:27 see, you know, Republicans or others, let’s say if it’s a total disaster, and we get down to like
3:23:34 20% approval ratings, and the economy is bad and stuff like that, Glenn Yonkid, or somebody like
3:23:41 that who’s very diametrically opposed to Donald Trump, or at least, you know, aesthetically,
3:23:45 is somebody like that who could rise from the ashes. And I’m just saying, like, in terms of his
3:23:50 aesthetic, not him per se. So there’s a variety of different directions. It’s a big question about
3:23:55 the Republican base. I mean, a shit ton of people voted Republican now for the first time ever.
3:23:59 So are they going to vote in party primaries? I don’t know. You know, the traditional
3:24:06 party primary voter is like a white boomer, who’s like 58, 59. Is the Latino guy in California,
3:24:10 who turned out to vote for Trump with a MAGA hat and rolling around, you know,
3:24:14 suburban Los Angeles? With that, is he going to vote in the Republican Party? That could
3:24:19 change. So the type of candidate themselves could come. So it’s just, it’s way too early to say,
3:24:22 you know, we have so many variety of paths that we go down.
3:24:29 Yeah, I think Trump is a singular figure in terms of, like, if you support Trump,
3:24:38 there, I just, there’s a vibe. I know Kamala has a vibe, but there’s definitely a vibe to Trump
3:24:46 and MAGA. And I just, I think even with JD, that that’s no longer going to be there. So if JD runs
3:24:51 and wins, that would be on principles. And it’s a very different human being.
3:24:56 He is so different than Trump, right? You can see his empathy, right? Remember in the VP debate,
3:24:59 when he was like, Christ have mercy when Tim Walsh was talking about his son? I mean,
3:25:04 that’s not something Donald Trump would say. Okay, it’s just not like, in terms of, I mean,
3:25:08 you know, and this, by the way, this is my own bubble test. I have no idea how
3:25:11 somebody listens to Trump and JD Vance is like Trump is the guy who should be the president
3:25:18 over. I honestly, I don’t get it. That’s my own cards on the table. I am in too much of a bubble
3:25:25 where I’m, my bias is to, you know, being well spoken and being empathetic or at least being
3:25:30 able to play empathetic and being extremely well read about the world and thoughtful and somebody
3:25:34 who’s, you know, somebody like him who’s engaged in the political process, but also has been able
3:25:39 to retain his values and be extremely well articulate his worldview. That’s my bias. That’s
3:25:43 who I would want to be the president. But you know, you know, that’s a big country. People
3:25:48 think differently. By the way, I share your bias and I sometimes try to take myself out of that
3:25:55 bubble. Like maybe it’s not important to have read a book or multiples of books on history.
3:26:00 I’m not saying everybody should be like me, but that’s my, I’m checking myself by being like,
3:26:04 because of who I am, that’s how I see the world. And that’s how I would choose a leader.
3:26:09 But that is not how people vote, period. And I’ve, nothing has taught me that more than this
3:26:12 election. I wish they did. I mean, I don’t know if that, I don’t know if that’s the lesson to
3:26:16 take away. I think, yeah, but who are we to say people are allowed to do what they want. And I’m
3:26:19 not going to tell somebody how to vote. No, what I’m saying is you take everything Trump,
3:26:28 everything that Trump is doing, everything, the whole, the dance, all of it, and add occasional
3:26:33 saga like references to history books. I think that’s just a better candidate.
3:26:36 I agree with you. I mean, listen, you know, it’s my bias.
3:26:41 Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s biased. I think, I think that’s not a bubble thinking.
3:26:44 I think it’s amazing to me, right? Like listen to the JD interview with Rogan.
3:26:53 I mean, JD, I mean, he’ll drop obscure references to studies, to like papers that have come out,
3:27:02 essays, books, like this is a very well read, high IQ, well thought out individual who also,
3:27:08 you know, has given his life to the political process and decided to like deal with all the
3:27:12 bullshit that this entire system is going to throw at you whenever you start to engage.
3:27:16 That’s who I would want to be president, but you know, I’m biased. So what can I say?
3:27:20 I like how you keep saying you’re biased as if there’s some percent of the population doesn’t
3:27:26 like people to read at all. Okay, what about the future? You kind of hinted at the future of the
3:27:31 Democratic Party. Yeah. Do you see any talent out there that’s promising? Is it going to be
3:27:36 Obama like figure that just rolls out of nowhere? Clinton is the better example, because the Democratic
3:27:43 Party was destroyed for 12 years from 1980, the 1980 election to 1992. They’re 12 years out of power.
3:27:50 In periods of that long of an era, it takes somebody literally brand new who is not tainted
3:27:54 by the previous to convince the base that you can one and convince the country that you’re
3:28:00 going in a new direction. So I would not put my money on anybody tainted by the great awokening,
3:28:06 by TDS, by the insanity of the Trump era, that has to be somebody post that,
3:28:13 and or somebody who is able to reform themselves. It will, in my opinion, it will likely not be
3:28:18 any establishment politician of today who will emerge for the future. Like I said,
3:28:24 my dark horse is Dean. I think that the Democratic base is going to give Dean a shit ton of credit,
3:28:30 and they should for him being out. Let’s be honest, he’s a no-name congressman from Minnesota. Nobody
3:28:35 cared who Dean Phillips was. But just like Obama, he had courage and he came out and spoke early
3:28:39 when it mattered. And by doing that, he showed good judgment and he showed that he’s willing to take
3:28:44 risk. So I would hope in America’s political system that we award something like that. And I do
3:28:49 think the Democrats will reward him. But I’m not saying it will be him per se, but it will be a figure
3:28:56 like that, who is not nationally known, who has read the tea leaves correctly, who took guesses
3:29:02 and did things differently than everybody else. And most of all, I’m hoping that heterodox attitudes,
3:29:08 ideas, behaviors, by definition, after a blowout, those will likely be the ones that are rewarded.
3:29:11 So I cannot give a name, but I can just describe the circumstances for what it will look like.
3:29:15 Can you imagine an amorphous figure that’s a progressive populist?
3:29:22 It would be very difficult at this point, just because a huge portion of the multiracial working
3:29:27 class has shifted to the right. But I could see it. I mean, look, people change their minds all the
3:29:32 time. Like there are people out there who voted for Barack Obama, who’ve now voted for Donald Trump
3:29:38 three times. So a lot can change in this country. If you make a credible case, you’ve got a track
3:29:45 record, you speak authentically, and you can try to divide the country along class lines and be
3:29:50 authentic and real about it. Maybe, I think you have a shot. I still think you’re probably going
3:29:54 to get dinged on culture, just because I think this election has really showed us how important
3:30:00 immigration and culture is. But you know, actually, what the left populist should pray for, and they
3:30:04 won’t admit this, is that Trump actually solves immigration, like in terms of changing the status
3:30:10 quo. You know how in the way that the Supreme Court just ended the conversation around gay marriage?
3:30:13 So Republicans were like, yeah, whatever, we support gay marriage. Because like that’s the
3:30:19 law of the land, it is what it is. They should just hope that their unpopular issue is resolved by
3:30:24 the president. And thus, they just don’t have to talk about it anymore. And now the battleground is
3:30:28 actually favorable for them. They get to talk about the economy and abortion. So their least
3:30:34 popular issue gets solved by the president, by consensus, from his mandate, and then they can
3:30:37 run on a brand new platform for the new issues that are facing America.
3:30:40 All right, let’s put our historian head back on. Okay.
3:30:47 Will the American Empire collapse one day? And if it does, when it does, what will be the reason?
3:30:56 Statistically, likely. Statistically, yes. You know, what’s the famous Fight Club quote? It’s
3:31:02 like on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero. And you know.
3:31:06 I like for all the books you’ve quoted, you went to Fight Club. I guess the movie, right?
3:31:12 The book is good, though. People should read that too. In terms of why, again, statistically,
3:31:20 the answer is quite simple. It usually comes back to a series of unpopular wars, which are pursued
3:31:30 because of the elite’s interests. Then it usually leads to a miscalculation and not a catastrophic
3:31:37 defeat. Normally, it comes gradually. And most of the times when these things end,
3:31:41 the crazy part is most people who are living through end of empire have no idea that they’re
3:31:45 living through the end of the empire. And I actually think about that a lot from, you know,
3:31:49 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon. Actually, your episode on Rome was fantastic.
3:31:54 People should go listen to that. So there you go. Another really good one. I like to think a lot
3:32:01 about the British Empire and what eventually led to that collapse. And nobody in 1919 said
3:32:05 the British Empire just collapsed. Basically, nobody still thought that. They were like,
3:32:09 “Yeah, the First World War is horrible. But actually, we came out of this, okay, we still
3:32:13 have India. You know, we still have all these African colonies and all that. But, you know,
3:32:19 long periods of servitude, of debt to the United States, of degradation, of social upheaval,
3:32:26 of Bolshevism, of American industrial might, and next thing you know, you find yourself at
3:32:31 Potsdam and Churchill’s like, “Holy shit, I have barely any power in this room.” Right? So,
3:32:38 revolutions happen slowly and then all at once. And so, could you really put a, you know, a real,
3:32:42 like, pain in the end of the British Empire? It took almost 40 years for it to end. So,
3:32:49 America’s empire will eventually end either from rising geopolitical competition, likely
3:32:55 China could be India, nobody knows. It will likely be because of being overstretched, of
3:33:04 elite capture is usually the reason why, and a misreading of what made your original society
3:33:09 work, you know, in the first place. And that is one where, honestly, like, all three of those
3:33:13 things will happen all at once. And it will happen over extremely long period of time. And
3:33:18 it’s very difficult to predict. I would not bet against America right now. I think we have a
3:33:22 lot of fundamental strengths, which is unique in dynamic country. It really is fucking crazy.
3:33:26 Every time I travel the world, as much as I love all these different places, I go, “Man,
3:33:31 I just, I love the United States so much.” You will love it more when you leave. I really
3:33:38 believe that. So, yeah. And it’s nice to remember how quickly the public opinion shifts. Like,
3:33:42 we’re very dynamic and adaptable, which annoys me. I understand that’s part of the political
3:33:47 discourse saying like, “If Trump wins, it’s the end of America. If Kamala wins, it’s the end of
3:33:53 America.” So stupid. Yeah. But I understand that the radical nature of that discourse is necessary
3:33:58 to, like we mentioned. Yeah, to drive out votes. To drive out votes. I like to think about Americans
3:34:03 in 1866. I cannot imagine going through a war where some X percent, I think it was like two or
3:34:08 three percent or whatever, the entire population was just killed. Our president, who was this
3:34:14 visionary genius who we’re blessed to have, is assassinated at Fork’s Theater immediately after
3:34:19 the surrender of Lee Andrew Johnson, who’s a bumbling, like, fucktard, is the one who is in
3:34:25 charge. And, you know, we’re having all these insane crises over like internal management,
3:34:30 while we’re also trying to decide like this new order in the South and whether to bring these
3:34:35 people, how to bring these people back into the Union. I mean, I would have despair, like in that
3:34:39 year. I was like, “It’s over. This is it.” You know, the war, I’m like, “Was it worth anything?”
3:34:43 You know, if Andrew Johnson is going to be doing this or even in the South, I mean, I can’t even
3:34:48 imagine for what they were going through, too. You know, they have to go home and their entire
3:34:52 cities are burned to the ground and they’re trying to readjust and, you know, their entire economy
3:34:57 and way of life is overthrown in five years. I mean, that’s an insane time to be alive. And
3:35:04 what do we know? It worked out, you know, by 1890s or so. There were people shaking hands,
3:35:11 you know, Union. There’s a cool video on YouTube, actually, of FDR, who is addressing some of the
3:35:16 last Gettysburg veterans. I think it was like the 75th anniversary or whatever. And you can literally
3:35:22 see these old men who are shaking hands across the stone wall. It gives me hope. Yeah.
3:35:29 Let’s linger on that hope. What is the source of optimism you have for the 21st century, for the
3:35:36 century beyond that, for human civilization in general? Because, you know, it’s easy to learn
3:35:43 cynical lessons from history, right? The shit eventually goes wrong. But sometimes it doesn’t.
3:35:53 So what gives you hope? I think that the fundamentals of what makes humanity great
3:35:59 and has for a long time are best expressed in the American character. And that despite all of our
3:36:05 problems, that as a country with our ethos, a lot of stuff we talked about today, individualism,
3:36:11 the frontier mindset, the blessings of geography, the blessings of our economy, of the way that
3:36:16 we’re able to just incorporate different cultures and the best of each and put them all together,
3:36:21 give us the best opportunity to succeed and to accomplish awesome things. We’re the country
3:36:27 that put a man on the moon, which is the epitome of the human spirit. I hope to see more of that.
3:36:32 And, you know, I think last time I was here, I shouted out, and I love Antarctic exploration.
3:36:36 I’ve read basically every book that there is on the exploration of Antarctica. And one of the
3:36:42 reasons I love to do so is because there is no reason to care about Antarctica. None. There’s
3:36:48 nothing down there. Zero. Going to the South Pole is a truly useless exercise. And yet,
3:36:53 we went. We went twice, actually. Two people went there within a span of five weeks and they
3:37:01 competed to do so. And the spirit that propelled Amundsen and Scott’s expedition and people like
3:37:06 Shackleton, who is like, if you were to ask me, my hero of all heroes, it’s Ernest Shackleton,
3:37:12 is because his spirit, I think, lives on in the United States. It unfortunately died in Great
3:37:16 Britain. And interestingly enough, the Brits even understand that they’re like, it’s very interesting
3:37:23 how popular Shackleton is in America. And even though he was Irish and he was a British subject,
3:37:27 to me, he’s a spiritual American. And I think that his spirit lives on within us
3:37:34 and has always been here to a certain extent. And everywhere else, I think it’s dying. But here,
3:37:38 I love it here, there’s so many cool things about America. People move around all the time. They
3:37:42 buy new houses. They start families. There’s no other place you can just reset your whole life.
3:37:47 In the same country, it’s wild. You can reinvent yourself. You can go broke. You can get rich.
3:37:53 You can go back and forth multiple times. And there’s nowhere else where you have enough freedom
3:37:58 and opportunity to pursue that. And I definitely have a lot of problems, but I’ve traveled enough
3:38:03 of the world now to know that it’s a special place. And that gives me a lot of hope.
3:38:08 I wish I could do a Bostonian accent of, we do these things, not because they’re easy,
3:38:10 but because they’re hard. Because they are hard.
3:38:19 Thank you. That’s so true. The Scott Irish guts. Well, listen, I’m a huge fan of yours,
3:38:24 Sager. I hope to see you in the White House interviewing the president. There you go.
3:38:27 That’s the only situation you’re going to see me in the White House.
3:38:39 Front row and just talking free. I would love to live in a country and a world where it’s you
3:38:46 who gets to talk to the press secretary, to the president. Because I think you’re a real,
3:38:50 you’re one of the good ones, as far as journalists go, as far as human beings.
3:38:55 So I hope to see you in there. And I hope you get to ask a question that
3:38:58 ends up in a book that ends up in a good history book.
3:39:03 Absolutely. Well, likewise, I’m a huge fan of yours. For anybody out there who’s interested,
3:39:09 I compiled a list and I will go and retroactively edit it. Just go to Sager and Jetty.io. I created
3:39:13 a newsletter with a website that has all the links to all the books I’m going to talk about here.
3:39:15 Beautiful. The hundreds of books that were mentioned here.
3:39:17 All right, brother, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you.
3:39:22 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sager and Jetty. To support this podcast,
3:39:27 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
3:39:37 Voltaire. History is the study of all the world’s crime. Thank you for listening and hope to see you
3:39:54 next time.
Saagar Enjeti is a political journalist & commentator, co-host of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar and The Realignment Podcast. He is exceptionally well-read, and the books he recommends are always fascinating and eye-opening. You can check out all the books he mentions in this episode here: https://lexfridman.com/saagar-books
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep454-sc
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Transcript:
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(09:47) – Why Trump won
(14:48) – Book recommendations
(18:24) – History of wokeism
(25:54) – History of Scots-Irish
(32:32) – Biden
(36:34) – FDR
(38:36) – George W Bush
(40:59) – LBJ
(46:15) – Cuban Missile Crisis
(53:48) – Immigration
(1:25:46) – DOGE
(1:52:27) – MAGA ideology
(1:55:39) – Bernie Sanders
(2:04:00) – Obama vs Trump
(2:21:00) – Nancy Pelosi
(2:24:14) – Kamala Harris
(2:40:00) – 2020 Election
(3:03:49) – Sam Harris
(3:14:55) – UFOs
(3:20:47) – Future of the Republican Party
(3:27:24) – Future of the Democratic Party
(3:35:21) – Hope