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March 14, 2021 - Lex Fridman Podcast

03:08:49

Saagar Enjeti: Politics, History, and Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #167

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	The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjati.
	He is a DC-based political correspondent, host of The Rising with Crystal Ball, and host of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Kozlov.
	He has interviewed Donald Trump four times and has interviewed a lot of major political figures And human beings who wield power.
	He loves policy and loves history, which makes him a great person to sail through the sometimes stormy waters of political discourse.
	He showed up to this conversation with a gift of the second volume of Ian Kershaw's biography on Hitler.
	A two-volume set that is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, most definitive studies of Hitler.
	Nothing wins my heart faster on a first meeting or a first date than a great book about the darkest aspects of human nature and human history.
	I think I started saying that as a joke, but actually there's probably a lot of truth to it.
	I love it when we skip the small talk and go straight to the in-depth conversation about the best and worst of human nature.
	Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammar League Grammar Assistant, Eight Sleep Self-Cooling Bed, and Magic Spoon Low-Carb Cereal.
	Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.
	As a side note, let me say that for better or for worse, I would like to avoid the trap of surface political bickering of the day.
	I do find politics fascinating, but not the talking points produced by the industrial engagement complex of Red vs.
	Blue Division. Instead, I'm fascinated by human beings who seek power, and how power changes them.
	I don't have a political affiliation, and my ideas, at least I hope so, are defined more by curiosity and learning in the face of uncertainty, and less by the echo chambers who tell me what I'm supposed to think.
	I'm constantly evolving, learning, and doing my best to do so without ego and with empathy.
	Please be patient with me.
	As far as I'm aware, I do not have any derangement syndromes, nor do I get a medical prescription of blue, red, white, or black pills.
	If I say something, I say it because I'm genuinely thinking and struggling with ideas.
	I have no agenda, just a bit of a hope to add more love to the world.
	If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow him on Spotify, support him on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
	And now, here's my conversation with Sagar Anjedi.
	There's no better gifts in this world than a book about Hitler.
	So thank you so much.
	I've gotten a gift when I was just talking about flying the watch from Joe Rogan, and this almost beats it.
	So tell me what this particular book on Hitler is.
	So this is volume two. Yes.
	So this is Ian Kershaw.
	He wrote the famous two-volume on Hitler.
	I'm a big book nerd, and I spend a lot of time reading biographies in particular.
	So this one, if you need a one-volume, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, right?
	You talked about that, William Shire, because that's like Hitler's rise, Nazi Germany, the war, etc.
	But I like bios because a good biography is Story of the Times, right?
	And so this one, the first volume, it does exactly that, which is that It doesn't just tell the story of Hitler.
	It's the context of, you know, this kid in Austria, and he's got all these dreams, but then actually pretty courageous in terms of World War I, right?
	Gets pinned a medal on by the Kaiser.
	and then what it's like to have to lose World War I and actually like lose this stain and
	then the rise within everybody knows that story, the Beer Hall Putsch and all that.
	This one I like and the reason I like Kershaw is obviously number one, it's English, which
	is actually hard, right? Like in order to write that story, who can do both the primary
	source material and then translate it for people like us.
	But he tells the dynamic story of Hitler so well in the second volume, just like the level
	of detail. And you've talked about this, Lex, like what was it like inside that room
	inside with Chamberlain?
	What was it like in terms of who was this magnetic madman who did convince the smartest people in the world at the time?
	And up until 1940, the Soviet gamble took tremendous risks, but highly calculated, thinking, no, no, no, I'm not going to pay for this one.
	I'm not going to pay for this one.
	He had a remarkable ability not just to put himself in the minds of the German people but in terms of his adversaries, like when he was across from Mussolini.
	He's like, how exactly did Mussolini, the guy who created fascism, become second fiddle to Hitler?
	I think it's an amazing bio.
	And yeah, Ian Kershaw along with Richard Evans, two of my favorite authors on the Third Reich.
	No question. Do you think he was born this way, that charisma, whatever that is?
	Or was it something he developed strategically?
	That's like the question you apply to some of the great leaders.
	Was he just a madman who had the instinct to be able to control people when in the room together with them?
	Or is this like he worked at it?
	I think he worked at it.
	This is 1925 or something like that.
	And so you read that and you're like, well, how does he get this crank wacko to basically believe he's the second coming, help him write this book?
	I mean, literally, they lived together in the prison cell and they would wake up every day.
	And as he was composing Mein Kampf and because of the Beer Hall putsch and all that, had this absolute ability to gather people around him.
	I think his greatest skill was he was just a very good politician.
	Truly. I mean, if you look at his ability in order to read coalitional politics and then convince exactly the right people in order to follow him, I think I heard you ask this once and I've thought about it a lot, which is like, who could have stopped Hitler in Germany, right?
	It's always like the ever-present question.
	Of course, like the whole baby Hitler thing.
	Really, the answer is Hindenburg.
	Like Hindenburg was the person who could have stopped and had the immense standing within the German public.
	The only, you know, real like war hero definitely was personally skeptical of fascism and Nazism.
	And didn't like Hitler. And didn't like him.
	And he knew he was full of shit.
	He was like, yeah, I think this guy is dangerous.
	I think this guy could do a lot of damage to the republic.
	But he acceded basically to Hitler at the time.
	And I think that he was one of the main people who could have done something about it.
	And also he was able to convince the generals, the military.
	I mean, that was very interesting.
	And to convince Chamberlain and the other political leaders.
	That's something I often think about, because we're just reading books about these people.
	I think about with, like, Jeffrey Epstein, for example.
	Oh, yeah. Like, evil people, not evil, but people have done evil things.
	Let's not go to the Dan Carlin thing of what is evil.
	People that do evil things, I wonder what they're like in a room because I know quite a lot of intelligent people that did not see the evil in Jeffrey Epstein and spend time with him and were not bothered by it.
	In the same sense, Hitler, it seems like he was able to get, just even before he had power, Because people get intoxicated by power and so on.
	They want to be close to power.
	But even before he had power, he was able to convince people.
	And it's unclear.
	Is there something that's more than words?
	It's like the way you...
	I mean, people talk, tell stories about this piercing look and whatever.
	All that kind of stuff. I wonder if that...
	If that's somehow a part of it, like that has to be the base floor of any of these charismatic leaders.
	You have to be able to, in a room alone, be able to convince anybody of anything.
	So I can tell you from my personal experience, Welcome to my show!
	And as a guy who reads these types of books, right?
	And you think of Trump, obviously most people, what they see on television, in articles and more, but being able to observe it one-on-one, I was closer to him than I am right now from you.
	That was one of the most educational experiences I got because it's like you just said,
	the look, the leaning forward, the way he talks, the way he is a master at taking the question
	and answering exactly which part he wants.
	And then if you try and follow up, he's like, excuse me.
	You know, like he knows.
	And then whenever you're talking, it's not that he's annoyed about getting interrupted.
	If he realizes he's been marandering and then you interrupt him, all good.
	But if he's driving home a point, which he has to make sure appears in your transcript
	or whatever, it's like, it really was fascinating for me to look at.
	And what was also crazy with Trump is I realized how much he was living in the moment.
	So like, when I went to the Oval...
	You know, I've read all these biographies, and, like, I walk in, and I'm like, holy shit.
	You're like, I'm in the Oval Office.
	Were you interviewing him in the Oval Office?
	In the Oval, every time. Was in the Oval Office.
	You scared shitless? Well, I wasn't scared.
	I was just, look, it's the Oval Office, right?
	I mean, I'm this nerd.
	He was, like, this kid. I'm so, I will admit this here.
	Like, I printed out on my dad's label maker when I was, like, seven, and I wrote, like, the Oval Office on my bedroom.
	So I was, like, you know, a huge nerd.
	Like, obviously, egomaniacal.
	Even from seven. But so like for this, I mean, it was huge, right?
	I'm like this 25 year old kid and like I walk in there.
	And I see the couch, right?
	And I'm like, oh man, that's Kissinger.
	I'm like, that's where Kissinger and Nixon got on their knees.
	And you see over by the door and you're like, are the scuff marks still there from when Eisenhower used to play?
	You know, this is all running through my mind.
	With Trump, none of it was there.
	None of it, right? It's all in the moment.
	Even the desk. I put my phone on the desk to record.
	And I'm like, this is the fucking resolution desk.
	I shouldn't put my phone on this thing.
	And I'm like, HMS, Resolute, you know, all that, you know, national.
	Even for him, he doesn't think about any of it.
	It was like... Amazing to me.
	He had this portrait of Andrew Jackson right next to the fireplace, right here on the right.
	And the most revealing question was when I was like, Mr.
	President, what are people going to remember you for in 100 years?
	And he was like, I don't know, veteran's choice.
	He has a list in front of him of his accomplishments, which is staff.
	Good question, by the way. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I wanted to know.
	And he's like, veteran's choice.
	And I remember looking at him being like, it's not going to be veteran's choice.
	I'm like, I'm looking at you, Donald Trump, the harbinger of something new.
	We still don't know what the hell it is.
	And so I realized with these guys and their charisma and more is that they don't think about themselves the way that we think about them.
	And that was actually important to understand because...
	A lot of people are like, Trump is playing all this chess.
	I'm like, I assure you, he's not.
	Like, he's truly...
	One time I was interviewing him, and he had, like, a certificate that he had to sign or something on his desk.
	He's like a... It was like a child, almost.
	Like, he got distracted by...
	He's like, oh, what's this? You know?
	He starts, like, picking it up, and I was like, wow.
	Like, this is the guy.
	Like, this is what he is.
	Well, I wonder if there was a different person because you were recording than offline and apart.
	I can tell you. Well, here's the thing, though, because that's another part of it.
	Because that two hours, I would say, like, half of that was not on the record.
	So, like, whenever he's off the record, he changes completely, right?
	I don't want to, like, go into too much of it or whatever, but, like...
	He, I mean, he is so mindful of when that camera is on and when the mic is hot in terms of the language that he uses, what he's willing to admit, what he's willing to talk about, how he's willing to even appear in front of his staff.
	I think the most revealing thing Trump ever did was there was this press conference like right after he lost the, right after the midterm elections in 2018.
	Yeah. And one of the journalists was like, Mr.
	President, thank you for doing this press conference.
	And he looks at him and he goes, it's called earned media.
	It's worth billions. He just had so much disdain for him because he's like, I'm not doing this for you.
	He's like, I'm doing this for me.
	So he's really aware of the narrative of the story.
	I mean, the people I've talked about, that all comes from the tabloid media, from New York and so on.
	He's a master of that. But I've also heard stories of just in private, he's...
	I don't want to overuse the word charismatic, but he is a really interesting, almost friendly, good person.
	I've heard actually surprising the same thing about Hillary Clinton.
	That I can't tell you anything about.
	But the way they present themselves is perhaps...
	Very different than they are as human beings, one-on-one.
	That's something, maybe that's just like a skill thing.
	Maybe the way they present themselves in public is actually their I mean, almost their real self, and they're just really good in private, one-on-one, to go into this mode of just being really intimate in some kind of human way.
	I think that's part of it, because I noticed that with Trump.
	You know, he's like, it's almost like a tour guide.
	It was very, like, it's very crazy, right?
	Because you're like, you're in the Oval.
	I mean, it's his office. And he's like, do you guys want anything?
	He's like, you want a Diet Coke?
	Because he drinks all this Diet Coke.
	That's awesome. You know? I apologize.
	I love it. He's like, you guys want a Diet Coke?
	And you're sitting there and you're like, the way he's able to like, the last time we interviewed him, he wanted to do it outside.
	Because he studied himself from all angles.
	And he knows exactly how he looks on a camera and with which lighting.
	And so we were supposed to interview him on camera in the Oval Office, which is actually rare.
	Like, you don't usually get that.
	And they ended up moving it outside at the last minute.
	And he came out and he's like, I picked this spot for you.
	He's like, great lighting. I was like, You are your own, like, lighting director.
	You're the president. It's great.
	It's so funny. But it's like you said, he's very charismatic and friendly.
	I mean, you wouldn't know. I mean, look, this is what I mean in terms of the dynamism of these people that gets lost.
	And I think even he knows that.
	Like, I don't think he would want that side of him.
	That you see in those off-the-record moments and more in order to come out because he's very keen about how exactly he presents to the public.
	It's like even his presidential portrait, everybody usually smiles, and he refused to smile.
	He was like, I want to look like Winston Churchill.
	Even he knew that.
	Do you think he believes what he kind of implies that he is one of, if not the greatest presidents in American history?
	People kind of laugh at this, but there's quite a lot of people, first of all, that make the argument that he's the greatest president in history.
	I've heard this argument being made.
	First of all, I don't care.
	You can't...
	Make an argument that anyone is the greatest.
	I come from a school of being humble and modest and so on.
	You can't have that conversation.
	I like that he's humble enough to say Abraham Lincoln or whatever.
	He says maybe Lincoln.
	Remember that. He says maybe Lincoln.
	Do you think he actually believes that?
	Or is that something he understands will create news and also, perhaps more importantly, piss off a large number of people?
	Is he almost like a musician masterfully playing the emotions of the public?
	Or does he...
	Or and does he believe when he looks in the mirror, I'm one of the greatest men in history?
	Combination of all three. I do think he believes it.
	And for the reason why is I don't think he knows that much about U.S. history.
	I really mean that.
	And that's what I meant whenever I was in there and I realized he was just living in the moment.
	I don't think he knew all that much about why.
	I mean, this is why he was elected in many ways, right?
	So I'm not saying this is in orbit.
	I'm not making a judgment on this.
	I'm just saying... I do think in his mind he does think he was one of the best presidents in American history largely because – and I encountered this with a lot of people who worked for him, which is that they didn't really know all that much kind of about what came before and all that.
	And it's not necessarily to hold it against them because for in many ways that's what they were elected to do or elected to be in many ways.
	It's an interesting question whether knowing history, being a student of history, is productive or counterproductive.
	I tend to assume I really respect people who are deeply well-read in history, presidents that are almost history nerds.
	I admire that.
	But maybe that gets in the way.
	Of governance.
	I don't know. It's not, you know, I'm just sort of playing devil's advocate to my own beliefs, but it's possible that focusing on the moment and the issues and letting history, it's like first principles thinking.
	Forget the lessons of the past and just focus on common sense reasoning through the problems of today.
	Yeah, it's a really hard question.
	In terms of the modern era, I mean, Obama was a student of history.
	Like, he used to have presidential biographers and people over in—I mean, famously, like Robert A. Caro, one of my favorite presidential biographers, he was invited to, you know, have dinner with Obama.
	And Obama would, like, pepper some of his—it was interesting because he'd try and justify some of the things he didn't do by being like, well, if you look at what they had to do and what I have to deal with, mine's much harder.
	So in that way, I was a little pissed off because— I'd be like, no, that actually, like, you're comparing apples to oranges and all that.
	But if you look at Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt in particular, this was, I mean, a voracious reader.
	Not of just American history, all history.
	He wrote- That guy's just such a badass.
	Incredible.
	The only the only president who willed himself to greatness.
	That's like the amazing thing about him.
	He wasn't tested by a crisis, right?
	Like it wasn't not even have a civil war.
	He didn't have World War Two.
	He didn't have to found the country literally or like, you know, didn't have to stave off
	that or he didn't buy, you know, Louisiana purchase like all he literally came into a
	pretty, you know, static country and he could have just governed, you know, with I mean,
	who was the person who came before him was assassinated.
	Like, he easily could have coasted, but he literally willed the country into something more.
	And that is, that's always why I focus a lot on him, too, because I'm like, that, in many ways, I wouldn't say it's easy to be great during crisis.
	I mean, like, look at Trump. But it can bring out the best within you, but it's a whole other level to bring out the best within yourself just for the sake of doing it.
	That's what I think is really interesting.
	The speeches were amazing.
	I'm also a sucker for great speeches because I tend to see the role of the president as in part like inspirer in chief, sort of to be able to I mean, that's what great leaders do, like CEOs of companies and so on.
	Establish a vision, a clear vision, and hit that hard.
	But the way you establish the vision isn't just like...
	Not to dig at Joe Biden, but like sleepy, boring statements.
	You have to sell those statements.
	And you have to do it in a way where everybody's paying attention.
	Everybody's excited. And that, I'll tell you as well, is definitely one of them.
	Obama was a... I think, at least early on, I don't know, was incredible at that.
	It does feel that the modern political landscape makes it more difficult to be inspirational in a sense, because everything becomes bickering and division.
	I do want to ask you about Trump.
	So you're now a successful podcaster.
	I've talked to Joe about Trump, Joe Rogan, and Joe's not interested in talking to Trump.
	It's just fascinating. I try to dig into why.
	Would you interview Trump on realignment, for example, and do you think it's possible to do a two-, three-hour conversation with him where you will get at something human, or you get at something...
	We were talking about the facade he puts forward.
	Do you think you could get past that?
	No, I don't.
	Look, I was a White House correspondent.
	I observed this man very closely.
	I interviewed him.
	I think if that mic is hot, he knows what he's doing.
	He's done this too long, Lex.
	He just knows. But do you think he's a different human now after the election?
	Do you think that...
	Not at all.
	I think he's been the same person since 1976.
	I really do.
	Basically, 1976.
	I studied Trump a lot, and I think he's basically been the core of who he is and elements of that.
	Ever since he built the ice rink in Central Park and got that media attention, that was it.
	Yeah, he's a fascinating study.
	Still, I feel there's a hope in me that there would be a podcast like a Joe Rogan, like a long-form podcast where something could be, you know, and you're actually a really good person to do that, where you can have a real conversation that looks back at the election and reveals something on us.
	But perhaps he's thinking about running again, and so maybe he'll never let down that guard.
	Yes. But, like, you know, I just love it when...
	There's this switch in people where you start looking back at your life and wanting to tell stories.
	Trying to extract wisdom and realizing you're in this new phase of life where the battles have all been fought.
	Now you're this old former warrior and now you can tell the stories of that time.
	And it seems like Trump is still at it like the young warrior he is.
	He's not in the mode of telling stories.
	You know what I got from Rogan? He's the only president who didn't age while in office.
	It's true, right?
	And this is what I mean, because he lives in the moment.
	Like, the job actually aged Obama.
	I mean, Bush, same thing.
	Even Clinton. Clinton was, like, fat.
	He looked miserable by, like, 2000.
	HW, like, I mean, Reagan, famous.
	Actually, yeah, pretty much everybody I think about, um...
	Yeah, including John F. Kennedy, who got much sicker while in office.
	The job, like, weighs on you and makes you physically ill.
	Trump was... He's the only person who just...
	He didn't happen to.
	He almost had gotten stronger.
	And he was one of the most divisive...
	Like, the climate...
	There's so many people attacking him.
	So much hatred. So much love and hatred.
	And it was just... I mean, it was...
	Whatever it was, it was quite masterful and a fascinating study.
	If we stick on Hitler for just a minute, what lessons do you take from that time?
	Do you think it's a unique moment in human history that World War II, I mean both Stalin and Hitler Is it something that's just an outlier in all of human history in terms of the atrocities, or is there lessons to be learned?
	You mentioned offline that you're not just a student of the entirety of the history, but you're also fascinated by just different policies and stuff.
	Like, what's the immigration policy?
	What's the policy on science?
	Yeah, it's a hard question in terms of the lessons that we can learn.
	Because there's a lot, and it's actually been over-indexed almost.
	Everything comes back to Hitler in a conversation.
	So I kind of think of it within Mao, Stalin, and Hitler as, I don't want to say payments for, but like...
	The end point payment for the sins and the problems of the monarchical system that evolved within Europe, basically like 1400 and more.
	I basically think that 1400, the wars between France, England, the balance of power, eventually World War I, and then serfdom within Russia, the Russian Revolution that birthed Stalin, Same thing, the Kaiser and Imperial Germany and this like incredibly crazy system of balance of power in World War I. And then same thing within China in terms of the warring states and then the disintegration, European, you know, how this is how they think of it, which
	is like the century of humiliation and they had to have something like this.
	I think of it – I try to think of it within the context of that. I don't want to think of – I don't want to sound
	like an inevitableist, but I think of it as – I like to think about systems, especially here in DC.
	That's where I got into politics, which is that you have to understand systems of power and the incentives within
	systems and the disincentives, the downside risk of what you're creating because that is what leads and creates the
	behavior within that system.
	I was just talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday.
	It's kind of funny.
	I'm obsessed with these books by Robert Caro, the biographies of Lyndon Johnson.
	He's written like 5,000 pages so far, and it's still not done.
	These are books I base my life on.
	These are Washington and the story of the post-New Deal era and forward.
	Not much has changed.
	Like the Senate is still the Senate.
	So many of the same problems with the Senate are still there.
	In some cases, no, not anymore.
	But for a while, some of the people who were there with Johnson are actually still.
	One of them is the President of the United States.
	Just a joke.
	And you think about also same with the media relationship, right?
	Like there's this media really, they may have come and gone.
	Like the people who were in the media and who were cozy with the administration officials.
	I mean, they just recreated themselves.
	It's like this.
	It's like an ecosystem which doesn't change.
	And that's why I'm like, oh, it's not.
	That was a specific time.
	That's just DC. Like, that is DC because of the way the system is architected.
	It's pretty much been that way since, like, 1908, whenever, like, you know, Teddy Roosevelt was dining with these journalists, and he would yell at them, and then he would go over to the society house.
	And, like, in many ways, that's now, instead of going to Henry Adams' house, like, the people are congregating in Calorama, which is the richest neighborhood here, At somebody else's house.
	It's the same thing.
	So you have to think about the system and then the incentives within that system about what the outcomes that they're producing if you actually want to think about how can I change this from the outside.
	That's also why it's very difficult to change because the system is designed in order to produce actually pretty specific outcomes that can only be changed in extraordinary times.
	Yeah, it's sometimes hard to predict what kind of outcomes will result from the incentive, the system that you create, right?
	In the case, because especially when it's novel kind of situations.
	Trump actually created a pretty novel situation and a lot of the things that we've seen in the 20th century were very novel systems where people were very optimistic about the outcomes, right?
	And then it turned out to not have the results that they predicted.
	In terms of things being unchanged for the past 100 years, can you Wikipedia style or maybe in musical form, like I'm Only a Bill, describe to me...
	I still sing that to my head sometimes.
	I'm just a bill.
	I don't know what the rest of the song is, but let's leave that to people's imagination.
	How does this whole thing work?
	How does the US political system work, the three branches?
	How do you think about the system we have now, if you were to try to describe?
	If aliens showed up And asked you, like, they didn't have time, so this is an elevator thing.
	Like, should we destroy you as you plead to avoid destruction?
	How would you describe how this thing works?
	I would say we come together and we pick the people who make our laws.
	Then we pick the guy who executes those laws.
	And they together pick the people who determine whether they or the president is breaking the law at the most basic level.
	That's how I would describe it.
	So the people who make the laws are Congress.
	The executive is charged with executing the laws as passed by Congress, the branches of government.
	And the Supreme Court is picked by the president, confirmed by the Senate, which then decides whether you or other people are breaking the law in terms of interpretation of that law.
	That's basically it. Oh, and they...
	Decide whether those laws fall within the restrictions and the I want to make sure I get this right.
	1787 and decided that we were going to live the rest of our lives barring a revolution and more.
	And we've made it 200 and something years in order on under that system.
	So So there's a balance of power because you have multiple branches.
	There's a tension and a balance to it as designed by those original documents.
	Which is the most dysfunctional of the branches?
	Which is your favorite? In terms of talking about systems and what's the greatest of concern and what is the greatest source of benefit in your view?
	The presidency, well, the presidency is my favorite to study, obviously, because it is the one where there's the most subject to variable change in terms of the personality involved because of so much power imbued within the executive.
	The Senate is actually pretty much the same.
	One of the things I love about reading about the Senate and histories of the Senate is You're like, oh yeah, there were always assholes in the Senate who were doing their thing and filibustering constantly based upon this or that.
	And then the personalities involved with the Senate haven't mattered as much Since like pre-Civil War, right?
	Like pre-Civil War, you had like Henry Clay and then Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, who even in their own way, they represented like larger constituencies and they crafted these like compromises up until the outbreak of the Civil War.
	But like Post since then, you don't think about like the titans within the Senate.
	Most of that is because a lot of the stuff that they had power over has transferred over to the executive.
	So I'm most interested in really in like power, like where it lies.
	It's actually pretty, you know, throughout American history, much more used to lie with Congress.
	Now it's obviously just so imbued within the executive that understanding executive power is, I think, the thing I'm probably most interested in here.
	Do you think at this point, the amount of power that the president has is corrupting to their ability to lead well?
	Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
	Is there too much power in the presidency?
	There definitely is.
	And part of the problem, one of the things I try to make come across to people is if you're the president, unless you have a hyper-intentional view of how something must be different in government, your view doesn't matter.
	So, for example, like if you were Trump, let's take Trump even, and even with a pretty intentional view, he was like, I'm going to end the war in Afghanistan.
	and Iraq, right?
	And he came in and he gets these generals in, he's like, I want to end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
	Oh, and I want to withdraw these troops from Syria.
	And they're like, okay, well give us like six months.
	He's like, okay.
	And this is the thing about Trump, he doesn't realize that it's bullshit.
	So they're like, he's like, yeah, six months seems fine.
	Right, so then six months comes and he's like, he's like, so, and then he'll announce it.
	He'll be like, and we're getting out of Syria.
	It's great. And then the generals freak out.
	They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't have a plan for that.
	He's like, but you guys told me six months.
	He's like, I don't know. Now we need another six months in order to figure this thing out.
	And by that time, now you're midterms.
	So now what? Now you're going to run for re-election.
	So more what I mean by that is, if you don't have a hyper-intentional view about how to change foreign policy,
	if you don't have a hyper-intentional view about how the Department of Commerce should do its job,
	they are just going to go on autopilot.
	So there's—this is part of the problem.
	When you ask me about the presidency, it's not the presidency itself,
	like the president himself, which has become too powerful.
	It's that we have less democratic checks on the people and the systems that are on autopilot.
	And I would say that basically since 2008, we have voted every single time to disrupt that system, except in the case of 2020 with Joe Biden, and there are a lot of different reasons around why that happened.
	And in every single one of those cases, Obama and Trump, they all failed.
	In order to radically disrupt that.
	And that just shows you how titanic the task is.
	And I'm using my language precisely, because I don't want to be like deep state, but obviously there's deep state.
	Deep state, I guess, has conspiratorial attention to it.
	So what you're saying is the true power currently lies with the autopilot.
	AKA Deep State.
	Well, but see, it's not – this is the thing too I want to make clear because I think people think conspiratorially that they're all coming together to intentionally do something.
	No, no, no, no. They are doing what they know, believe they are right, and don't have real democratic checks within that.
	And so now they have entire generations of cultures within each of these bureaucracies where they say, this is the way that we do things around here.
	And that's the problem, which is that we have a culture of within many of these agencies and more.
	I think the best example for this would be during the Ukraine gate with Trump and all that, with the impeachment.
	I'm not talking about the politics here, but the most revealing thing that happened was when the whistleblower guy, Alexander Vindman, was like, here you have the president departing from the policy of the United States.
	Let me educate you, Lieutenant Colonel.
	The President of the United States makes American foreign policy.
	But it was a very revealing comment because he and all the people within national security bureaucracy do think that.
	They're like, this is the policy of the United States.
	We have to do this.
	That's where things get screwy.
	Well, listen, for me personally, but also from an engineering perspective, I just talked to Jim Keller.
	It's just, this is the kind of bullshit that we all hate when you're trying to innovate and design new products.
	So that's what first principles thinking requires, is we don't give a shit what was done before.
	The point is, what is the best way to do it?
	And it seems like the current government, government in general, probably, bureaucracies in general, Are just really good at being lazy about never having those conversations, and just it becomes this momentum thing that nobody has the difficult conversations.
	It's become a game within a certain set of constraints, and they never kind of do revolutionary tasks.
	But you did say that the presidency is power, but you're saying that more power than the others, but that power has to be coupled with focused intentionality, like you have to keep hammering the thing If you want it done, it has to be done.
	I mean, and you gotta, you gotta, this is the other part too, which is that it's not just that you have to get it done.
	You have to pick the hundred people who you can trust to pick 10 people each to actually do what you want.
	One of the most revealing quotes is from a guy named Tommy Corcoran. He was the top aid to FDR this
	I'm getting from the Cara books too, and he said what is a government?
	It's not just one guy or even ten guys hell It's a thousand guys and what FDR did is he?
	Masterfully picked the right people to execute his will through the federal agencies Johnson was the same way
	He played these people like a fiddle. He knew exactly who to pick he knew the system and more
	Part of the reason that outsiders who don't have a lot of experience in Washington almost always fail is they don't know who to pick.
	Or they pick people who say one thing to their face, and then when it comes time to carry out the president's policy in terms of the government, they just don't do it.
	Think about this.
	I think Rahm Emanuel said this.
	He was like, by the time it gets to the president's desk, Nobody else can solve it.
	He's like, I can come in and I can make it two degrees left and two degrees right.
	In 100 years, two degrees left, that's a whole different trajectory.
	Same thing on the right.
	And he's like, that ultimately is really all you can do.
	I quibble and disagree with that in terms of how he could have changed things in 2008, but there's a lot of truth to that statement.
	Okay, that's really fascinating. You make me realize that actually both Obama and Trump are probably playing victim here to the system.
	You're making me think that, maybe you can correct me, that, because I'm thinking of like Elon Musk.
	Mm-hmm. Whose major success, despite everything, is hiring the right people.
	And like creating those thousands, that structure of a thousand people.
	So maybe a president has power in that if they were exceptionally good at hiring the right people.
	Personnel is policy, man.
	That's what it comes down to.
	But wouldn't you be able to steer the ship way more than two degrees if you hire the right people?
	So like, it's almost like Obama was not good at hiring the right people.
	Well, he hired all the Clinton people.
	That's what happened. What happened with Trump?
	He hired all the Bush people.
	And then you just sit back and say, oh, president can't, but that means you just suck at hiring.
	Correct. Yeah. I mean, look, it's funny.
	I'm giving you simultaneously the nationalist case against Trump and the progressive case against Obama.
	Yes. The progressive people were like, why the fuck are you hiring all these Clinton people in order to run the government and just recreate?
	Like, why are you hiring Larry Summers, who was one of the people who worked at all these banks and didn't believe that bailouts were going to be big enough, and then to come in in the worst economic crisis in modern American history?
	That was 2008. And Summers actively lobbied against larger bailouts, which had huge implications for working class people and Pretty much hollowed out America sense.
	Okay, from Trump, same thing.
	You're like, I'm going to drain the swamp.
	And by doing that, I'm going to hire Goldman Sachs' Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and all these other absolute Bush clowns in order to run my White House.
	Well, yeah, no shit.
	The only thing that you accomplished in your four years in office is passing a massive tax cut for the rich and for corporations.
	I wonder how that happened.
	What role does money play in all of this?
	Is money a huge influence in politics, super PACs, all that kind of stuff?
	Or is this more just kind of a narrative that we play with?
	Because from the outsider's perspective, that seems to be one of the fundamental problems with modern politics.
	So I was just having this conversation, Marshall and I, Marshall Kassel, my co-host on the realignment.
	And it's funny because if you do enough research, we actually live in the least corrupt age in American campaign finance.
	As in, it's never been more transparent.
	It's never been more up to the FEC, yeah, and all of that.
	If you go back and read not even 50 years ago, we're talking about Lyndon B. Johnson handing people,
	like literally as he came up in his youth, paying people for votes, like the boss of the, you know,
	the person who like had all the Mexican votes, like the person who had,
	and he was like giving out briefcases.
	This is like within people's lifetimes who are alive in America.
	So that doesn't happen anymore.
	But I don't like to blame everything on money.
	Although I do think money is obviously a huge part of the problem.
	I actually look at it in terms of How is money distributed within our society?
	Because I firmly believe that politics, this is going to get complicated, but I think politics is mostly downstream from culture.
	And culture, obviously, I'm using economics because there's obviously a huge interplay there.
	But in terms of the equitable or lack of equitable distribution of money within our politics, what we're really pissed off about is we're like, our politics only seems to work for the people who have money.
	I think that's largely true.
	I think that the reason why things worked differently in the past is because our economy was structured in different ways.
	And there's a reason that our politics today are very analogous to the last Gilded Age because we had very similar levels of economic distribution and cultural problems too at the same time.
	I don't want to erase that because I actually think that's what's driving all of our politics right now.
	So that's interesting. So in that sense, representative government is doing a pretty good job of representing the state of culture and the people and so on.
	Can I ask you, in terms of the deep state and conspiracy theories, there's a lot of talk about, again, from an outsider's perspective, if I were just looking at Twitter, it seems that at least 90% of people in government are pedophiles.
	90 to 95%.
	I'm not sure what that number is.
	If I were to just look at Twitter, honestly, or YouTube, I would think most of the world is a pedophile.
	I would almost feel like...
	Right. And if you don't fully believe that, you're a pedophile.
	Yeah, yeah. I always start to wonder, like, wait, am I a pedophile too?
	I'm either a communist or a pedophile, or both, I guess.
	Yeah, that's going to be clipped out.
	Thank you, internet. I look forward to your emails.
	But is there any kind of shadow conspiracy theories that give you pause?
	So the flip side, the response to a lot of conspiracy theories is like, No, the reason this happened is because it's a combination of just incompetence.
	So where do you land on some of these conspiracy theories?
	I think most conspiracy theories are wrong.
	Some are true, and those are spectacularly true.
	And if that makes sense.
	Yeah. And we don't know which ones.
	I don't know which ones. That's the problem.
	I think, well, I mean, look, man, I listened to your podcast.
	I think I was a huge non-believer in UFOs, and now I've probably never believed more in UFOs.
	Like, I believe in UFOs.
	Like, I'm very comfortable being like, not only do I believe in UFOs, like, I think we're probably being visited by an alien civilization.
	Yeah. Like, and if you asked me that three years ago, I would be like, you're out of your fucking mind.
	Like, what are you talking about? Well, listen to David Fravor.
	That's all I have to say. That's it.
	I have the sense that the government has information that hasn't revealed, but it's not like they're, I don't think they're holding, there's like a green guy sitting there in a room.
	They have seen things they don't know what to do with, so they're confused.
	They're afraid of revealing that they don't know.
	That's what I think it is. It's revealing that they don't know.
	And then in the process, there's a lot of fears tied up in that.
	First, looking incompetent in the public eye.
	Nobody wants to look that way.
	And the other is, in revealing it, Even though they don't know, maybe China will figure it out.
	So we don't want China to figure it out first.
	And so all those kinds of things result in basically secrecy that damages the trust in institutions.
	One of the most fascinating aspects Like, one of the most fascinating mysteries of humankind of is there life, intelligent life, out there in the universe.
	So that's one of them.
	But there's other ones.
	Like, for me, when I first came across, actually, Alex Jones.
	Mm-hmm. It was 9-11.
	I remember because I was in Chicago, I was thinking like, oh shit, are they going to hit Chicago too?
	That's what everybody was thinking.
	Yeah, everybody was thinking like, what does this mean?
	What scale? I mean, trying to interpret it.
	And I remember looking for information desperately.
	What happened? And I remember not being satisfied with the quality of reporting and figuring out rigorous information Here's exactly what happened.
	And so people like Alex Jones stepped up and others that said, like, there's some shady shit going on.
	And it sure as hell looked like there's shady shit going on.
	Yes. So, like, and I still stand behind the fact that it seems like there's not enough, like, it wasn't a good job of being honest and transparent and all those kinds of things.
	Well, because it would implicate the Saudis, let's be honest.
	See, that's my conspiracy theory.
	I'm like, yeah, I think they covered up a lot of stuff because they wanted to cover up for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
	I mean, that was a conspiracy theory not that long ago.
	I think it's true. I mean, I think it's 100% true.
	Yeah, so those kinds of conspiracy theories are interesting.
	I mean, there's other ones for me personally that touched the institution that means a lot to me is MIT and Jeffrey Epstein.
	I want to hear a lot more. I want to hear about that.
	I talk about Epstein a lot.
	Why has he given him over $100 million between 2015 and 2019?
	What's going on here?
	Lex Wexner. So, yeah, I want to hear because you know people who met him.
	And the only person I know who met him was Eric Weinstein.
	I've heard his... Oh boy.
	So I, listen, I'm still in, and Eric is fascinating, and like Eric is full on saying that- He was a Mossad or whatever.
	Yeah, there's a front for something much, much bigger.
	And there's, whatever his name, Robert Maxwell.
	All those stories, like you could dig deeper and deeper that Jeffrey's just like the tip of the iceberg.
	I just think he's an exceptionally charismatic, listen, this isn't speaking from confidence or deep understanding of the situation, but from my speaking with people, he just seems like, at least from the side of his influence and interaction with researchers, he just seems like somebody that was exceptionally charismatic.
	And actually took interest.
	He was unable to speak about interesting scientific things, but he took interest in them.
	So he knew how to stroke the egos of a lot of powerful people.
	In different kinds of ways.
	I suppose, I don't know about this, because I don't have Okay, this is weird to say, but I have an ability.
	Okay, I think women are beautiful.
	I like women. But if a supermodel came to me or something, I'm able to reason.
	It seems like some people are not able to think clearly when there's an attractive woman in the room.
	And I think that was one of the tools he used to manipulate people.
	Interesting. I don't know.
	Listen, it's like the pedophile thing.
	I don't know how many people are complete sex addicts, but it seems like looking out into the world, the Me Too movement have revealed that there's a lot of weird, creepy people out there.
	I don't know, but I think it was just one of the many tools that he used to convince people and manipulate people, but not in some...
	But more just really good at the art of conversation and just winning people over on the side.
	And then by building, through that process, building a network of other really powerful people and not explicitly but implicitly having done shady shit with powerful people.
	Like, building up a kind of implied power of, like, we did some shady shit together, so we're not, like, you're gonna help me out on this extra thing I need to do now.
	And that builds and builds and builds to where you're able to actually control, like, have quite a lot of power without explicitly having, like, a strategy meeting.
	And I think a single person or...
	Yeah, I think a single person can do that, can start that ball rolling, and over time it becomes a group thing, like I don't know if Julian Maxwell was involved or others, and yeah, over time it becomes almost like a really powerful organization that wasn't, that's not a front for something much deeper and bigger, but it's almost like, maybe it's because I love cellular automata, man.
	A system that starts out as a simple thing with simple rules can create incredible complexity.
	And so I just think that we're now looking in retrospect, it looks like an incredibly complex system that's operating.
	But that's just because there could be a lot of other Jeffrey Epstein's in my perspective that the simple thing just was successful early on and builds and builds and builds and builds.
	And then there's creepy shit that, like, a lot of aspects of the system helped it get bigger and bigger and more powerful and so on.
	So the final result is, I mean, listen, I have a pretty optimistic, I tend to see the good in people.
	And so it's been heartbreaking to me in general just to see, you know, people I look up to not have the level of integrity I thought they would, or like the strength of character, all those kinds of things.
	And it seems like You should be able to see the bullshit that is Jeffrey Epstein, like, when you meet him.
	Right. We're not talking about, like, Eric Weinstein, like, one or two or three or five interactions.
	But, like, there's people that had, like, years of relationship with him.
	Yeah. And I don't know.
	I'm not sure. Even after he was convicted.
	After he was convicted. That's the thing that always gets me.
	Yeah, there's stories.
	I mean, I don't need to sort of...
	I honestly believe...
	Okay, here's the open question I have.
	I don't know how many creepy sexual people there are out there.
	I don't know if there's like, the people I know, the faculty and so on, I don't know if they have like a kink that I'm just not aware of that was being leveraged.
	Because to me, it seems like if people aren't, if not everybody's a pedophile, Then it's just the art of conversation.
	That is just like the art of just like manipulating people by making them feel good about like the exciting stuff they're doing.
	Listen, man, academics, people talk about money.
	I don't think academics care about money as much as people think.
	What they care about is like Somebody, they want to be, it's the same thing that Instagram models post in their butt pictures, is they want to be loved.
	They want attention. My parents are professors.
	Yeah, I get it. And Jeffrey Epstein, the money is another way to show attention.
	Right, it's a proxy. My work matters.
	And he did that for some of the weirdest, most brilliant people.
	Drop names, but everybody knows them.
	It's like people that are the most interesting academics is the one he cared about.
	Like people are thinking about the most difficult questions in all of science and all of engineering.
	So those people were kind of outcasts in academia a little bit because they're doing the weird shit.
	They're the weirdos. And he cared about the weirdos.
	And he gave them money.
	And that's... I don't know if there's something more nefarious than that.
	I hope not, but maybe I'm surprised.
	And in fact, half the population of the world is pedophiles.
	No, I think it's what you were talking about, which is that it's the implication after the initial, right?
	Like you do some shady things together, or you do something that you want out of the public eye, and you're a public person.
	And look, we probably even experienced this to a limited extent, right?
	You're like, ah, you know, like, I don't want to...
	I don't know. I almost lost my temper, you know, one time whenever a car hit me and I'm like, I can't freak out in public anymore.
	Like that, you know, like what if somebody takes a photo or something?
	And so I think that there's an extent to that times a billion, literally when you have a billion dollars or more and you take that all together and you stack it up on itself.
	I saw a story about like Bill Clinton.
	Bill Clinton was with Epstein or with Ghislaine Maxwell in a private air terminal or something, and she had one of their sex – one of those girls who was underage had her dressed up in a literal pilot uniform, and she was underage in order to – and she was being disguised for being older.
	And she was a masseuse, right?
	Because that was one of the guises which they got in order to sexually traffic these women.
	And she was like, Bill was like complaining about his neck and she's like, give Bill Clinton a massage, right?
	So now there's a photo of an underage girl giving a massage to the former president
	of the United States.
	I don't think he knew, right?
	But like, that looks bad.
	And so this is kind of what we're getting at, which is that you're setting it all up
	and creating those preconditions.
	Or like Prince Andrew.
	Do I think Prince Andrew knew that Virginia Gouffre was underage?
	I don't know. Probably knew she was pretty young, which I think is, you know, skeevy enough where you're a fucking prince.
	You probably know better. But I don't think he knew she was underage.
	Or maybe he did. And if he did, then he's even more of a piece of shit than I thought.
	But when we look at these things...
	The stuff I'm more interested in is like what you were talking about.
	I'm like, Bill Gates?
	How do you get the richest man in the world in your house?
	Like, under what?
	And Gates is like, he was talking about financing and all this.
	I'm like, you don't have access to money?
	Or bankers? Like, you're the richest man in the world.
	You can call Goldman Sachs anytime you want on a hotline.
	Like, why do you need...
	That's where I start, again, to get more conspiratorial because I'm like, Bill, dude, you have the gold credit, right?
	Like you don't need Epstein to create some complicated financing structure.
	Or Leon Black, like what is 2015, 2009?
	I mean this is very recent stuff.
	Or – and this is the part that really got me is I read the – I think it's called the Department of Financial Services report around Deutsche Bank with Epstein.
	They knew he was a criminal. They solicited his business, explicitly knew that his business meant access to other high-net-worth individuals, consistently doled money out from his account for hush payments to women in Europe and prostitution rings.
	They knew all of this within the bank.
	It was elevated multiple times.
	Here was the other one. One of Epstein's associates was like, hey, how much money can we take out before we hit the, you know, automatic sensor before you have to tell the IRS? And that question, by their own standards, is supposed to result in a notification to the feds, and they never did it. And he was withdrawing like $2 million of cash in five years for tips.
	I'm like, okay, something's going on here.
	You see what I'm saying?
	There's a lot of signs that make you think that there's a bigger thing at play than just the man.
	That there is some...
	It does look like a larger organization is using this front.
	Again, I don't know. I truly don't know.
	And I'm not willing to use the certainty, which I think a lot of people online are, to say like, it was 100%.
	Yes, the certainty is always the problem, because that's probably why I hesitate to touch conspiracy theories, is because I'm allergic to certainty in all forms.
	In politics, any kind of discourse, and people are so sure.
	In both directions, actually.
	It's kind of hilarious.
	Either they're sure that the conspiracy theory, particular whatever the conspiracy theory is, is false.
	They almost dismiss it like they don't even want to talk about it.
	It's like the people, like the way they dismiss that the Earth is flat.
	Yes. Most scientists are like, they don't even want to like...
	Hear what the flat earthers are saying.
	They don't have zero patience for it, which is like, maybe in that case, is deserved.
	But everything else, you really have empathy.
	Consider the... This is weird to say, but I feel like You have to consider that the earth may be flat for like one minute.
	Like you have to be empathetic.
	You have to be open-minded.
	I don't see a lot of that through our cultural tastemakers and more.
	And that really is what concerns me the most.
	Because it's just another manifestation of all of our problems.
	is that we have this completely bifurcating economy, bifurcating culture, literally,
	in terms of we have the middle of the country and then we have the coast.
	And in terms of the population, it's almost 50-50.
	And with increasing mega cities and urban culture, like urban monoculture of LA, New York, and Chicago,
	and DC, and Boston, and Austin, relative to how an entire other group of Americans
	live their lives, or even the people within them who aren't rich and upwardly mobile,
	how they live their lives is just completely separating.
	And all of our language and communication in mass media and more is to the top,
	and then everybody else is forgotten.
	Do you think when you dig to the core, there is a big gap between left and right?
	Is that division that's perceived currently real?
	Or are most people center left and center right?
	It's so interesting because that's such a loaded term, center left.
	What does that mean? Like, to you, I think the way you're thinking of it is, I'm not like a...
	Well, even this, like, I'm not a radical socialist, but I'm marginally left on cultural issues and economic issues.
	This is how we've traditionally understood things.
	And then when in popular discourse, like center-right, like, what does it mean to be center-right?
	Like, I am marginally right on social issues and marginally right on economic issues.
	Yeah. But that's just not – like if you look at survey data, for example, like stimulus checks, people who are against stimulus checks are conservative, right?
	Well, 80% of the population is for a stimulus check.
	So that means a sizable number of Republicans are for stimulus checks.
	Same thing happens on like a wealth tax.
	Same thing happens on – okay, Florida voted for Trump 3.1%, more than Barack Obama 2008.
	On the same day, passes a $15 minimum wage at 67%.
	So what's going on?
	So that's why...
	What is going on? Well, that's my entire career.
	But it seems like...
	So that's fascinating.
	The conversation is different than the policies.
	Well, it's different than reality.
	That's what I would say. Which is that the way we have to understand American politics...
	Today, it didn't always used to be this way, is it's almost entirely long.
	Basic, I would say the main divider is, because even when you talk about class, this misses it in terms of socioeconomics.
	It's around culture, which is that It's basically, if you went to a four-year degree-granting institution, you are part of one culture.
	If you didn't, you're part of another.
	I don't want to erase the 20% or whatever of people who did go to a college degree who were Republicans or vice versa, etc.
	But I'm saying on average, in terms of the median way that you feel, we're basically bifurcating along those lines.
	And because people get upset, be like, oh, well, you know, there are rich people who vote for Trump.
	And I'm like, Yeah, but you know who they are?
	They're like plumbers or something.
	Like, they're people who make $100,000 a year, but they didn't go to a four-year college degree, and they might live in a place which is not an urban metro area.
	And then at the same time, you have, like, a Vox writer who makes, like, $30,000 a year.
	But they have a lot more cultural power than, like, the plumber.
	So you have to think about where exactly that line is.
	And I think, in general, that's the way that we're trending.
	So that's why, when I say, like, what's going on, are we divided?
	Yeah. Like, but it's not left and right.
	I mean, like, and that's why I hate these labels.
	So it's more just red and blue, like, teams.
	They're arbitrary teams.
	Yeah. So how arbitrary are these teams, I guess, is another...
	Completely arbitrary.
	So, well, you kind of implied that there's...
	I don't know if you're sort of in post analyzing the patterns because it seems like there's a network effects of like you just pick the team red or blue.
	And it might have to do with college, you might have to do all those things, but like it seems like it's more about just the people around you.
	Correct. So, less than whether you went to college or not.
	I mean, it's almost like, seems like, it's almost like a weird, like, network effects at heart.
	There's certain strong patterns that you're identifying.
	But I don't know. It's sad to think that it might be just teams that have nothing to do with what you actually believe in.
	Well, it is, Lex. Look, I mean, I don't want to believe that, but the data points me to this, which especially 2020.
	I'm one of the people, chief among them.
	I will own up to it here.
	I was totally wrong about why Trump was elected in 2016.
	I believed Trump. And I've based a lot of my public commentary beliefs on this.
	Trump was elected because of a rejection of Hillary Clinton neoliberalism on the back of a pro-worker message, which was anti-immigration.
	It was its pillar.
	But alongside of it was a rejection of free trade with China.
	And generally of the political correctness and globalism, which has been come in through the uniparty and same thing here with the military-industrial complex and endless war.
	He rejected all of that.
	Wait, what's wrong with that prediction?
	What's wrong, man? And the reason I know this is that it sounds right.
	I honestly wish it was true.
	But here's the truth.
	Trump actually governed largely as a neoliberal Republican who was meaner online and who departed from orthodoxy in some very important ways.
	Don't get me wrong. I will always support the trade war with China.
	I will always support not expanding the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
	I will support him moving the Overton window on a million different things and revealing once and for all that GOP voters don't care about economic orthodoxy necessarily.
	But here's what they do care about.
	Trump got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, despite not delivering largely, largely for all the Trump people out there on that agenda.
	He wasn't more pro-union, but he won more union votes.
	He wasn't necessarily more pro-worker, but he actually won more votes in Ohio than he did in 2016.
	And he won more Hispanic votes than despite being, you know, all the immigration rhetoric, etc.
	Here's why. It's about the culture, which is that the culture war is so hot that negative partisanship is at such high levels.
	All of the vote is geared upon what the other guy might do in office.
	And there's a poll actually just came out by Echelon Insights.
	Crystal and I were talking about it on Rising.
	The number one concern amongst Democratic voters is Trump voters.
	Number one concern. Not issues like Trump voters.
	And number two is white supremacy.
	And so, like, which is basically code for Trump voters.
	And is the same true for the other side?
	Well, so on the right, number one concern is illegal immigration.
	And number, I think...
	Three or four or whatever is Antifa, which is code for Democrats.
	That's nice. At least on the right, it's a policy kind of thing.
	Well, yeah, it's funny. I saw Ben Shapiro talking about this.
	But the reason why I would functionally say it's the same is because, I mean, you can believe whether this is true or not.
	I think it actually largely is true.
	But a lot of GOP voters feel like a lot of illegal immigration is code for people who are coming in who are going to be legalized and are going to vote Democrat.
	Right. I can just explain it from their point of view.
	So what does that actually mean?
	Each other. Which is that the number one concern is the other person.
	So negative partisanship has never been higher.
	And I think people who had my thesis in terms of why Trump was elected in 2016, you have to grapple with this.
	How did he win this?
	I think we're good to go.
	So much of it is people really hate liberals.
	Like, they just really hate them.
	And I was driving through rural Nevada before the election, and I was like literally in the middle of nowhere.
	And there was this massive sign this guy had out in front of his house, and it just said, And I was like, that's it.
	That is why people voted for Trump.
	And I don't want to denigrate it because they truly feel they have no cultural power in America except to raise the middle finger to the elite class by pressing the button for Trump.
	I get that. That's actually a totally rational way to vote.
	It's not the way I wish we did vote, but that's not my place to say it.
	So this is interesting.
	If you could just psychoanalyze.
	Again, I'm probably naive about this, but I'm really bothered by the hatred of liberals.
	It's this amorphous monster that's mocked.
	It's like the Shapiro liberal tears.
	And I'm also really bothered by probably more of my colleagues and friends, the hatred of Trump.
	The Trump and white supremacists.
	So apparently there's 70 million white supremacists.
	75 million, sorry.
	There's millions of white supremacists.
	And apparently, whatever liberal is...
	I mean, literally, liberal has become equivalent to white supremacist in the power of negativity it arouses.
	I don't even know what those...
	I mean, honestly, they've become swears, essentially.
	Is that... I mean, how do we get out of this?
	Because that's why I just don't even say anything about politics online, because it's like...
	Really? Here's what happens.
	Anything you say that's thoughtful, like, hmm, I wonder, immigration, something.
	I wonder why we allow these many immigrants in, or some version of thinking through these difficult policies and so on.
	They immediately tried to find a single word in something you say that can put you in a bin of liberal or white supremacists, and hammer you to death by saying you're one of the two, and then everybody just piles on happily that we finally nailed this white supremacist or liberal.
	Is this some kind of weird feature of online communication that we've just stumbled upon?
	Is there a way, or is it possible to argue that this is a feature, not a bug?
	Like this is a good thing?
	Yeah, well, look, I just think it's a reflection of who we are.
	People like to blame social media.
	I think we're just incredibly divided right now.
	I think we've been divided like this for the last 20 years.
	And I think that the reason I focus almost 99% of my public commentary on economics
	is because you asked an important question at the top.
	How do we fix this?
	What did I say about the stimulus checks?
	Stimulus checks have 80% approval rating.
	So that's the type of thing, if I was Joe Biden and I wanted to actually heal this country,
	that's the very first thing I would have done when I came into office.
	Same thing on when you look at anything that's gonna increase wages.
	I said on the show, I was like, look, I think Joe Biden will have an 80% approval rating if he does two things.
	If he gives every American a $2,000 stimulus check and gives everybody who wants a vaccine a vaccine.
	That's it.
	It's pretty simple.
	Because here's the thing, I don't really like Greg Abbott that much.
	We have like very different politics.
	I'm from Texas, but my parents got vaccinated really quickly.
	That means something to me.
	I'm like, listen, I don't really care about a lot of the other stuff.
	He got my family vaccinated.
	Like that, well, I will forever remember that.
	And that's how we will remember the checks.
	This is a part of the reason why Trump almost won the election and why, if the Republicans had been smart enough to give him another round of checks, 100% would have won, which is that people were like, look...
	I don't really like Trump, but I got a check with his name on it.
	And that meant something to me and my family.
	I'm not saying for all the libertarians out there that you should go and like endlessly spend money and buy votes.
	What I am saying is lean into the majoritarian positions without adding your culture war bullshit on top of it.
	So for example, what's the number one concern that AOC says after the first round of checks got out?
	Oh, the checks didn't go to illegal immigrants.
	I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind?
	Like, this is the most popular policy America has probably done in 50 years, you know, since, like, Medicare.
	And you're inserting it.
	ruining it. Yeah. And then on the right is the same thing, which is that they'll be like,
	these checks are going to like, you know, low level blah, blah, you know, people who
	are lazy and don't work. I'm like, Oh, there you go. You know, like you're just playing
	a caricature of what you are like, if you lean into those issues and you got to do it
	clean. This is, this is what everybody hates about DC, which is that Biden right now is
	doing the $1,400 checks, but he's looping it in with his COVID relief bill and all that.
	That's his prerogative. That's the Democrats prerogative.
	They won the election. That's fine. But I'll tell you what I would have done if I was him,
	I would have come in and I would have said, there's five United States senators who
	are on the record Republicans who said they'll vote for a $2,000 check. And I would put
	that on the floor of the United States Senate on my first or so the first day possible. And
	I would have passed it.
	And I would have forced those Republican senators to live up to that vote for this bill, come
	to the Oval Office for a signing. So that the very first thing of my presidency was
	to say, I'm giving you all this relief check. This night long national nightmare is over.
	Take this money, do with it what you need. We've all suffered together. The thing about
	Biden is he has a portrait of FDR and is in the Oval, which kind of bothers me because
	he thinks of himself as an FDR like figure.
	But this is – you have to understand the majesty of FDR. We're talking about a person who passed a piece of legislation five days after he became president, and he passed 15 transformative pieces of legislation in the first 100 days.
	We're on day like 34, 35, and nothing has passed.
	The reconciliation bill will eventually become law, but it'll become law with no Republican votes.
	And again, that's fine. But it's not fulfilling that legacy and the urgency of the action.
	And the mandate, which I believe that history has handed, it handed it to Trump and he fucked it up, right?
	He totally screwed it up.
	He could have remade America and made us into the greatest country ever coming out on the other side of this.
	He decided not to do that.
	I think Biden was again handed that, like a scepter almost.
	It's like all you have to do, all America wants is for you to raise it up high.
	But he's keeping it within the realm of traditional politics.
	I think it's a huge mistake.
	Why? So this is, everything you're saying makes perfect sense.
	It's like, again, if the aliens showed up, it's like the obvious thing to do.
	It's like, what's the popular thing?
	Like, 80% of Americans support this.
	Like, do that, clean.
	Also do it with grace, where you're able to bring people together, not in a political way, but obvious common sense way.
	Just people, the Republicans, the Democrats, just bring them together on a policy, and bold, just hammer it, without the dirt, without the mess, whatever, try to compromise.
	Just yell, have a good Twitter account, loud.
	Very clear.
	We're going to give a $2,000 stimulus check.
	Anyone who wants a vaccine gets a vaccine at scale.
	Let's make America great again by manufacturing.
	We are manufacturing most of the world's vaccine because we're bad motherfuckers.
	Yeah. With more eloquence than that and just do that.
	Why? Why?
	Haven't we seen that for many, for several presidencies?
	Because of coalitional politics, and they owe something to somebody else.
	For example, Biden has got a lot of the Democratic constituency he has to satisfy within this bill.
	So there's going to be a lot of shit that goes in there, state and local aid, all this stuff.
	Again, I'm not even saying this is bad, but he's like, his theory is, and this isn't wrong, Is like, we're going to take the really popular stuff and use it as cover for the more downwardly less popular.
	And so the Dems could face the accusation.
	The people who are on this side, this is their pushback to me.
	They're like, why would we give away the most popular thing in the bill?
	And then we would never be able to pass state and local aid.
	Why would we do that?
	And the Republicans do the same thing.
	Mitch McConnell, because he's a fucking idiot, decided to say, we're going to pair these $2,000 stimulus checks with Section 230 repeal.
	And it was like, oh, it's obviously dead.
	Like, it's not going to happen together.
	That's largely why I believe Trump lost the election and why those races down in Georgia
	went the way that they did.
	Obviously, Trump had something to do with it.
	But the reason why is they have longstanding things that they've wanted to get done.
	And in the words of Rahm Emanuel, never let a good crisis go to waste and try and get
	as much as you possibly can done within a single bill.
	My counter would be this.
	Things have worked this way for too long, which is that the reconciliation bill is almost
	certainly going to be the only large signature legislative accomplishment of the Biden presidency.
	That's just how American politics works.
	Maybe he gets one more, maybe one.
	He gets a second reconciliation bill.
	Then you're running through midterms.
	It's over.
	I believe that by trying to change the paradigm of our politics, leaning into exactly what
	talking here, you could possibly transcend that to a new one.
	And I'm not naive. I think people respond to political pressures.
	And the way that we found this out David Perdue, who was just a total corporate dollar general CEO guy.
	He was against the original $1,200 stimulus checks.
	But then Trump came out, who's the single most popular figure in the Republican Party.
	He's like, I want $2,000 stimulus checks.
	And all of a sudden, Perdue running in Georgia is like, yeah, I'm with President Trump.
	I want a $2,000 stimulus check.
	That was, if you're an astute observer of politics, to say...
	You can see there that you can force people to do the right thing because it's the popular thing.
	And that if it's clean, if you don't give them any other excuse, they have to do it.
	So this is what we've been gaslit into our culture war framework of politics.
	And the reason it feels so broken and awful is because it is.
	But there is a way out.
	It's just that nobody wants to be...
	It's a game of chicken, right?
	Because maybe it is true.
	Maybe we would never be able to get...
	Your other Democratic priorities, your Republican priorities.
	But I think that the country understands that this is fucking terrible and would be willing to support somebody who does it differently.
	There's just a lot of disincentives to not stay without – there's a lot of incentives to not stray from the traditional path.
	Yeah. Is it also possible that the A students are not participating?
	Like, we drove all of the superstars away from politics.
	I've heard this argument before.
	I mean, everything you're saying...
	Sort of rings true.
	This is the obvious thing to do.
	As a student of history, you can always tell.
	If you look at great people in history, this is what great leaders in history, this is what they did.
	It's like clean, bold action.
	Sometimes facing crisis, but we're facing a crisis right now.
	No, we're in a crisis. Exactly. So why don't we see those leaders step up?
	I mean, you say that's kind of like, it makes sense.
	There's a lot of different interests at play.
	You don't want to risk too many things, so on and so forth.
	But that sounds like the C students.
	Yeah. I don't think it's that.
	It's losing your primary, right?
	So that means, especially in a safe district, you're most concerned about being hit if you're a Republican from the right and if you're a Democrat from the left for not being a good enough one.
	That's actually what stops people, heterodox people in particular, from winning primaries because the people who vote in our primaries are the party faithful.
	That's how you get the production.
	It's important to understand the production pipeline, which is that I'm from Texas, so that's what I know best.
	So it's like, if you think in Texas, if you're a more heterodox state legislature or something who works with the left on this and does that, you're going to get your ass beat in a Republican primary because they're going to be like, he worked with the left to do this, blah, blah, take it out of context, and you're screwed.
	And then that means you never ascend up the next level of the ladder, and then so on and so forth all the way.
	But I do think Trump changed everything.
	This is why I have some hope.
	Which is that he showed me that all the people I listened to were totally wrong about politics.
	And that's the most valuable lesson you could ever teach me.
	Which was, I was like, wait, I don't have to listen to these people.
	They don't know anything, actually.
	You know? That's powerful, man.
	I'm like, he did it. That's exceptionally powerful.
	This guy. Even if he didn't...
	Do anything with it.
	It doesn't matter. Right. He showed that it's possible.
	Exactly. And that means a lot.
	You're absolutely right. There's young people right now that kind of turn around and like, huh.
	You're like, wait, I don't have to comb my hair a certain way.
	and go to law school and be an asshole who everybody knows is an asshole.
	And then get elected to state legislature.
	I mean, look, who's the number one person in the New York City primary right now?
	Andrew Yang.
	He's polling higher than everybody else in the race.
	Look, maybe the polls are totally fucked and maybe he'll lose because of ranked choice voting
	and all of that.
	But I consider Andrew, I mean, I know him a little bit and I've followed his candidacy from the very beginning.
	I consider him an inspiration.
	He's the new generation of politics.
	Like, if I see who's going to be president 20 years from now, it's going to be...
	I'm not saying it's going to be Andrew Yang.
	I think it's going to be somebody like Andrew Yang, outside the political system, who talks in a totally different way, right?
	Just a completely...
	One of my favorite things that he said on the debate stage, he's like, look at us.
	We're all wearing makeup.
	It's crazy, you know? And he, like, brought that, that he brought that.
	And he's right, like, yeah, why are...
	He probably, arguably, hasn't gone far enough almost.
	Yes. But he showed that it's possible.
	And then you see other, like AOC is a good example of somebody, at least in my opinion, is doing the same kind of thing, but going too far in like, well, I don't know.
	She's doing the Trump thing, but on the other side.
	So I don't know. What's too far?
	Who knows? Don't take a normative judgment of it.
	Yeah. I will tell you the future of politics.
	Appreciate the art of it. No, I do.
	Look, I don't, I'm not a big AOC fan.
	But she's a genius, media genius, once-in-a-generation talent.
	The way that she uses social media, Instagram, and everybody on the right is trying to copy her.
	Matt Gaetz is like, I want to be the conservative AOC. I'm like, it's just not going to happen, dude.
	You just don't have it.
	What she has, it's electric.
	And Trump had that.
	Like, I've been to a Trump rally, like, to cover as a journalist.
	There's nothing like it. And Yang is similar.
	It's the same way, where you're like, there is something going on here.
	Which is just...
	Like, I've been to an Obama rally.
	I've been to a Clinton rally.
	I've been to several normal...
	Eh, it's fine, you know?
	With Trump and with Yang, it's another world.
	Yeah. It's another world. Yang gang.
	There's probably thousands of people listening right now who are just, like, doing a...
	Slow clap.
	Yes! I know, I know.
	Yang gang, forever.
	Okay, but yeah, my worst fear, I prefer Andrew Yang kind of free...
	Improvisational, idea, exchange, all that, versus AOC, who I think, no matter what she stands for, is a drama machine, creates dramas, just like Trump does.
	I would say my worst fear would be in 2024, is AOC old enough?
	It'd be AOC versus Trump.
	I don't think she's old enough.
	I think you'd have to be, I don't know, I think she's 30.
	So she needs five more years.
	So probably not. Yeah.
	Okay. But that kind of, that's, or Trump Jr.
	Well, AOC probably wouldn't win a Democratic primary.
	So, I mean, look, Joe Biden is, you know, they pretty much showed that.
	That's exactly what you're saying.
	This process grooms you over time.
	You see the same thing in academia, actually, which is very interesting, is the process of getting tenure.
	There's this, it's like you're being taught, Without explicitly being taught, to behave in the way that everybody's behaved before.
	I've heard this, it was funny, I've had a few conversations that were deeply disappointing, which involved statements like, this is what's good for your career.
	This kind of conversation, almost like mentor to mentee conversation, where it's like, There's a grooming process in the same way, I guess you're saying, the primary process does the same kind of thing.
	So, I mean, that's what people have talked about with Andrew Yang.
	He was being suppressed by a bunch of different forces, the mainstream media and all.
	Just the democratic, just that whole process didn't like the honesty that he was showing, right?
	For now. But here's my question to you.
	People got to see – look, Jordan Peterson is one of the most famous people in America, right?
	Like, you have a massive podcast.
	You're more famous than half the – 99% of the people at MIT. So, like, from that perspective, everything has changed.
	And somewhere out there, there is a student who's taking notice.
	And I've noticed that with my own career, everybody thought I was crazy for doing this show with Crystal the Hill.
	They thought I was nuts. They're like, what are you doing?
	You're a White House correspondent.
	You're a White House correspondent. You've got a job forever.
	The other job offer I had was being a White House correspondent.
	And people thought I was nuts for not just sticking there and, you know, aging out within Washington, pining for appearances on Fox News and CNN and MSNBC. But I hated it.
	I just hated doing it.
	And I did not want to be a company man.
	Like a Washington man who's one of those guys who like brags to his friends about how many times he's been on Fox or whatever, mostly because I just have a rebellious streak and I hate being at the subject of other people.
	I created something new, which a lot of people watch to get their news.
	And I notice that younger people who are almost all my audience, they don't really look up to any of the people in traditional, right?
	They don't go and they're not coming up and being like, how do I be like Jim Acosta?
	You know, they're like, hey, how did you do what you do?
	And the way you did it is by bucking the system.
	So I think that we are at a total split point.
	And look, there will always be a path for people Because I don't want people to overlearn this lesson.
	I have people who are like, I'm not gonna go to college.
	And I'm like, well, just wait.
	Yeah, like, I'm like, just- I was starting a podcast.
	Yeah, like, stop. Just hold on a second.
	But there will always be a path for the institutional.
	That will always be there for you.
	But now there's something else.
	Now there's another game in town.
	And that's more appealing to millions and millions and millions and millions of people who feel unserved by the corporate media, CNN, and these people, possibly who feel unserved in the faculty.
	Like, if you are an up-and-comer who wants to teach as many young people as possible, I think you should be on YouTube, right?
	Like, look at the Khan Academy guy.
	That guy created a huge business.
	So I just think we can be cynical and, like, upset about what that system is, but we should also have hope.
	Like, I have a lot of hope for what can be in the future.
	Yeah, there's a guy people should check out.
	So my story's a little bit different because I basically stepped aside...
	With the dream of being an entrepreneur earlier in the pipeline than a legitimate senior faculty would.
	There's an example somebody, people should check out, Andrew Huberman from Stanford, who's a neuroscientist.
	Who's as world-class as it gets in terms of tenure faculty, just a really world-class researcher, and now he's doing YouTube.
	Yeah, I see him on Instagram, yeah.
	So he switched, so he not just does Instagram, he now has a podcast, and he's changing the nature of like, I believe that Andrew might be the future of Stanford.
	And for a lot, it's funny, like he's basically, Joe Rogan is an inspiration to Andrew.
	Mm-hmm. And to me as well.
	And those ripple effects, and Andrew is an inspiration probably, just like you're saying, to these young 25-year-olds who are soon to become faculty, if we're just talking about academia.
	And the same is probably happening with government.
	Funny enough, Trump probably is inspiring a huge number of people who are saying, wait a minute, I don't have to play by the rules.
	And I have to, I can...
	Think outside the box here.
	And you're right. And the institutions we're seeing are just probably lagging behind.
	So the optimistic view is the future is going to be full of exciting new ideas.
	So Andrew Young is just kind of the beginning of this whole thing.
	He's the tip of the iceberg. And I hope that iceberg doesn't...
	It's not this influencer.
	One of the things that really bothers me...
	I've gotten a chance—I should be careful here.
	I love everybody.
	But these people who talk about how to make your first million or how to succeed, and they're so—I mean, yeah, that makes me a little bit cynical about— I'm worried that the people that win the game of politics will be ones that want to win the game of politics.
	They already are, man. And like we mentioned, AOC, I hope they optimize for the 80% populist thing, right?
	Like, they optimize for that badass thing that history will remember you as the great man or woman that did this thing versus...
	How do I maximize engagement today and keep growing those numbers?
	The influencers are so, I'm so allergic to this, man.
	They keep saying how many followers they have on the different accounts.
	And it's like, I don't think they understand.
	Maybe I don't understand.
	I don't really care. I think it has destructive psychological effects.
	One, like thinking about the number, like getting excited, your number went from 100 to 101 and being like, and today went out to 105.
	Whoa, that's a big jump.
	That may be like thinking in this way, like, I wonder what I did.
	I'll do that again. In this way, one, it creates anxiety and almost psychological effects, whatever.
	The more important thing is it prevents you from truly thinking about Boldly in the long arc of history, creatively, thinking outside the box, doing huge actions.
	And I actually, my optimism is in the sense that that kind of action will beat out all the influencers.
	Well, I don't know, Lex.
	This is where my cynicism comes in.
	So there's a guy, Madison Cawthorn, the youngest member of Congress.
	And he, I don't want to say got caught, but there was like an email where he was like, my staff is only oriented around comms.
	Like he was basically saying, he got basically caught saying like, my staff is only centered on communications.
	And that's the right play if you do want to get the benefits of our current electoral, political, and engagement system, which is that what's the best way to be known within the right as a right-wing politician?
	It's to be a culture warrior.
	Go on Ben Shapiro's podcast.
	Be one of the people on Fox News.
	Go on Sean Hannity's show.
	Go on Tucker's show and all of that because you become a mini-celebrity within that world.
	Left unsaid is that that world is increasingly shrinking, a portion of the American population,
	and they barely – they can't even win a popular vote election, let alone barely
	win an – eke out an electoral college victory in 2016.
	Well, but the incentives are all aligned within that and it's the same thing really on the
	left.
	But you're right, which is that – and look, this is why geniuses are geniuses because
	they buck the short-term incentives.
	They focus on the long term.
	They bet big and they usually fail.
	But then when they get big, they succeed spectacularly.
	The people I know who have done this the best are like a lot of the crypto folks that I've
	spoken to. Like, some of the stuff they say I'm like, I don't know if that's gonna happen.
	But look, they're like billionaires, right?
	And you're like, so they were right.
	So the way I've heard it expressed is you can be wrong a lot, but when you're right, you get right big.
	And I mean, I've seen this in Elon Musk's career.
	I mean, he took spectacular risk, like spectacular risk.
	And just double down, double down, double down, double down, double down.
	And you can kind of tell to him, I mean, you know him better than I do, but like, from my observation, I don't think the money matters.
	Right? I just, like, when I see him, I'm like, I don't, it's, nobody works as hard as you do and builds the way that you build if it's just about the money.
	It just doesn't happen.
	Like, nobody wills SpaceX into existence just for the money.
	Like, it's not worth it, frankly, right?
	Like, he probably destroyed years of his life and, like, mental sanity.
	Money or attention or fame, none of that.
	It's not the primary priority.
	Well, that's what's so appealing to me.
	To me in particular about him, just like in how he built, like I read a biography of him and just like the way that he constructed his life and like is able to hyper-focus in meeting after meeting and drill down and also hire all the right people who execute each one of his tasks discreetly to his perfection is amazing.
	Like that's actually the mark of a good leader.
	But I mean, if you think about his career, the reason he's a renegade is because probably he was told to like put it in an index fund or whatever, like whenever he made his like 29 million.
	And from PayPal, I don't know how much he made.
	And then just go along that route.
	And he's like, no. So he succeeds spectacularly.
	So you have to have somebody who's willing to come in and buck that system.
	So for now, I think our politics are generally frozen.
	I think that that model is going to be most generally appealing to the mean person.
	But somebody will come along and we'll change everything.
	Yeah, I'm just surprised there's not more of them.
	Yeah. On that topic, it's now 20, what is it, 21?
	Yes. Let's make some predictions you can be wrong about.
	Good. What major political people are you thinking will run in 2024, including Trump Jr., Sr., or Ivanka?
	I don't know. Any Trump.
	Trump. And who do you think wins?
	I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024, and I think he will run against someone with the last name Trump.
	I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump Jr., but I think one of those people will probably be the GOP nominee in 2024.
	Who was it? Some prominent political figure.
	Was it Romney? Somebody like that said that Trump will win the primary if he runs again.
	Of course. That's not even a question.
	Trump is the single most popular figure in the Republican Party by orders of magnitude.
	I mean, probably more, honestly.
	Actually, I can tell you because I saw the data, which is that pre-January 6th, it was like 54% of Republicans wanted him to run again.
	Then it went down eight points after January 6th, two days later.
	And then after impeachment, it went right back up to 54%.
	So the exact same number is in February post-impeachment vote as it was after November.
	Now, look, yeah, again, surveys, bullshit, etc.
	But that's all the data we have.
	That's what I can point you to. If Trump runs, he will be the nominee, and he will be the 2024 nominee.
	I just don't know if he wants to.
	It really depends.
	Do you think he wins after the Trump vaccine heals all of us?
	Do you think Trump wins?
	It depends on how popular culture functions over the next four years.
	And I can tell you that they are, because I don't think Biden has that much to do with it.
	Because again, Trump is not a manifestation of an affirmative policy action.
	It is a defensive bulwark wall against cultural liberalism.
	So it's like, this is why it doesn't matter what Biden does.
	If there are more riots, if there is a more sense of persecution amongst people who are more lean towards conservative or like, hey, I don't know about that, that's crazy, then he very well could win.
	Okay, let's say Joe Biden doesn't run and they put up like Kamala Harris, I think he would beat her.
	I don't think there's a question that Trump would beat Kamala Harris in 2024.
	And you don't think anybody else—I don't know how the process works.
	You don't think anybody else on the Democratic side can take the— I think?
	rats, like we found that out during the election.
	There's an entire constituency which loves Joe Biden and Joe Biden-level politics.
	And so if he tells them to vote for Kamala, I think she would probably get it.
	But again, there's a lot of game theory obviously happening.
	But see, I think you're talking about everything you're saying is correct about mediocre candidates.
	It feels like if there's somebody, like a really strong, I don't want to use this term incorrectly, but populist, somebody that speaks to the 80% that is able to provide bold, eloquently described candidates Solutions that are popular.
	I think that breaks through all of this nonsense.
	How? How do they break through the primary system?
	Because the problem is, the primary system is not populism.
	It's primary. So it's like...
	But you don't think they can tweet their way to...
	Well, you have to be willing to win a GOP primary.
	You basically have to be at...
	Whoever wins the GOP primary, in my opinion, will be the person most hated by the left.
	One of the things that people forget is, you know who came in second to Trump?
	Ted Cruz. And the reason why is because Ted Cruz was the second most hated guy by liberals in America, second to Trump.
	They have nothing in policy in common.
	But don't you think this kind of brilliantly described system of hate being the main mechanism of our electoral choices, don't you think that just has to do with mediocre candidates?
	Like... Basically, the field of candidates, including Trump, including everybody, was just like, didn't make anyone feel great.
	It's like, really?
	This is what we have to choose from?
	Maybe a Mark Cuban, or like, Mark Cuban is a Democrat, or...
	It would have to be somebody like that.
	Somebody who... Because here's the thing about Trump.
	It's not just that it was Trump.
	He was so fucking famous.
	Like, people don't realize he was so famous.
	Like, I... Even when I first met Trump, I met a couple of other presidents.
	But when I met Trump, even I felt, like, kind of starstruck.
	Because I was like, Yo, this is the guy from The Apprentice.
	Yeah. I'm like, this is the dude!
	From The Apprentice? Yeah. Because I'm like, my dad and I used to sit and watch The Apprentice when I was in high school.
	And then one of the guys was from College Station where I grew up and we're like, oh my God, that guy's on The Apprentice.
	It was a phenomenon.
	There's that level. It's kind of like when I met Joe Rogan, I'm like, Holy shit.
	I don't feel that way when I meet Mitt Romney or Tom Cotton or Josh Hall.
	I met all of them. But there's a lot of celebrities, right?
	Do you think there's some celebrities we're not even thinking about that could step in?
	The Rock? I was about to say, I think The Rock could do it.
	But does he want to do it?
	I mean, it's terrible. It's a terrible gig.
	It's very hard to do.
	the formed policy agenda.
	Because then here's the other problem.
	What if we set ourselves up for a system where like these people keep winning,
	but like with Trump, they have no idea how to run a government.
	It's actually really hard, right?
	And you have to have the know-how and the trust to find the right people.
	This is where the genius element comes in is, you have to understand that front
	and you have to understand how to execute discrete tasks.
	Like this is the FDR.
	This is why it's so hard.
	Like, FDR, Lincoln, TR. They were who they were, and they live in history, and their name rings, like, for a reason.
	And, yeah, I mean, one of the most depressing lessons I got from 2020 is, it seems like, in my opinion, that we over-learn the lesson of our success and not of our failures.
	For example, like we have this narrative in our head that we always have the right person
	at the right time during crisis.
	And in some cases it was true.
	We didn't deserve Lincoln.
	We didn't deserve FDR.
	We didn't deserve, we didn't deserve a lot of presidents at times of crisis.
	But then you're like, okay, George W. Bush, 9-11, that was terrible.
	Reconstruction, Andrew Johnson, awful, right?
	Like we had several periods in our history where the crisis was there,
	they were called and they did not show up.
	And I really, it hadn't happened in my lifetime except for 9-11.
	And even then you could kind of see that as an opportunity for somebody like Obama
	to come in and fix it.
	But then he didn't do it.
	And then Trump didn't do it.
	And you realize, I feel like our politics are most analogous
	to like the 1910s, like all in terms of the Gilded Age,
	Remember there's that long period of presidents between, like, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt?
	We were like, wait, like, who was president?
	Or even TR was, like, an exception, where you'll have, like, Calvin Coolidge, who, like, Silent Cal!
	So we're living through that. Grover Cleveland.
	That's kind of how...
	If I think of us within history, I feel like we're in one of those times.
	We're just waiting. It feels really important to us right now.
	Like, this is the most important moment in history, but it might be...
	It could just be a blip, right?
	A 20-, 30-year blip.
	Like, when you think about who was president between 1890 and 19...
	Before... I mean, yeah. Between, like, 1888 and 1910.
	Like, nobody really thinks about that period of America.
	But, like, that was an entire lifetime for people.
	How did they feel about the country that they were in?
	That's hilarious. That's how I kind of think about where we are right now.
	It's funny to think. I mean, I don't want to minimize it, but we haven't really gone through a World War II-style crisis.
	So say that there is a crisis in several decades of that level, existential risks to a large portion of the world.
	Then what will be remembered is World War II, maybe a little bit about Vietnam, and then whatever that crisis is.
	And this whole period that we see as dramatic, even coronavirus.
	Even 9-11. Even 9-11.
	It's like, because you can look at how many people died and all those kinds of things, all the drama around the war on terror and all those kinds of things.
	Maybe Obama will be remembered for being the first African American president.
	But then, like, that's...
	Yeah, that's fascinating to think about.
	Oh, man. Even Trump will be like, oh, okay, cool.
	He was that guy. Yeah.
	Maybe he'll be remembered as the first...
	I mean, Reagan was already a governor, right?
	So like the first apolitical celebrity.
	So maybe if there's more celebrities in the future they'll say that Trump was the first person to pave the way for celebrities to win.
	Yeah. I still hold that this era will probably be remembered.
	People say I talk about Elon way too much, but the reality is there's not many people that are doing the kind of things he's doing is why I talk about it.
	I think this era, it's not necessarily Elon and SpaceX, but this era will be remembered by The new, of the space exploration, of the commercial, of companies getting into space exploration, of space travel, and perhaps Perhaps artificial intelligence around social media, all those kinds of things.
	This might be remembered for that.
	But all the political bickering, all that nonsense, that might be very well forgotten.
	One way to think about it is that the internet is so young.
	I think about it.
	So Jeff Jarvis, he's a media scholar I respect.
	He's not the only person to say this, but many others have.
	Which is that, look, this is kind of like the printing press.
	There was a whole 30 years war because of the printing press.
	It took a long time for shit to sort out.
	I think that's where we're at with the internet.
	Like at a certain level, it disrupts everything.
	And that's a good thing.
	It can be very tumultuous.
	I never felt like I was living through history until coronavirus.
	Like you know, like until we were all locked down, I was like, I'm living through history.
	Like this, there's this very overused cliche in DC where every comm staffer wants you to think that what their boss just did is history.
	And I've always been like, this isn't history.
	This is some like stupid fucking bill, you know, whatever.
	But like, that was the first time I was like, this is history.
	Like this right here.
	Well, I was hoping, tragedy aside, that this, I wish the primaries happened during coronavirus so that we, because then we can see, so okay, here's a bunch of people facing crisis and it's an opportunity for leaders to step up.
	I still believe the optimistic view is the game theory of influencers will always be defeated by actual great leaders.
	So maybe the great leaders are rare, but I think they're sufficiently out there that they will step up, especially in moments of crisis.
	And coronavirus is obviously a crisis, where mass manufacture of tests, all kinds of infrastructure building that you could have done in 2020, there's so many possibilities for just bold action.
	It makes me sad. None of that, even just forget actually doing the action.
	Advocating for it.
	Just saying, we need to do this.
	And none of that.
	The speeches that Biden made, I don't even remember a single speech that Biden made.
	Because there's zero bold...
	I mean, their strategy was to be quiet and let Donald Trump...
	Polarize the electorate.
	Polarize the electorate and hope that results in them winning.
	Yeah. Because of the high unemployment numbers and all those kinds of things.
	As opposed to like, let's go big.
	Let's go with a big speech.
	Yeah, it's a lost opportunity in some sense.
	So we talked a bunch about politics, but one of the other interesting things that you're involved with is, or involved with defining the future of is journalism, I suppose.
	You can think of podcasts as a kind of journalism.
	Of course it is. But also just writing in general, just whatever the hell the future of this thing looks like is up to be defined by people like you.
	So what do you think is broken about journalism and what do you think is the future of journalism?
	I think the future of journalism looks much more like what we and I are doing here right now.
	And journalism is going to be downstream from a culture that can be a good and a bad thing depending on how you look at it.
	We are going to look at our media.
	Our media is going to look much more like it did pre-mass media.
	And the way that I mean that is that back in the 1800s in particular, especially after the invention of the telegraph, when information itself was known.
	So for example, like you and I don't need to – let's say you and I are competing journalists.
	you and I are no longer competing, quote unquote, to tell the public X event happened.
	All journalism today is largely explaining why did X happen.
	And part of the problem with that is that that means that it's all up for partisan interpretation.
	Now you can say that that's a bad thing.
	I think it's a great thing because the highest level of literacy
	and news viewership in America was during the time of yellow journalism, was during the time.
	time of partisan journalism. Not a surprise. People like to read the news from people that
	they agree with. You could say that's bad, echo chambers, etc. That's the downside of
	it. The upside is more people are more educated. More people are interested in the news. So
	I think the proliferation of mass media, I mean, sorry, of this format.
	Long form. Of not just long form.
	Dude, I do updates on Instagram, which are five minutes.
	Oh, you consider like Instagram?
	Yeah. Almost even Twitter.
	Oh, of course Twitter. Twitter is where I get my news from.
	I don't read the paper. I have literally Twitter is my news aggregator.
	It's called my wire, where I find out about hard events, like the president has departed the White House.
	But not only that, I don't know about you, but I also looked at Twitter to the exact thing you're saying, which is the response to the news.
	The thoughtful, sounds ridiculous, but you can be pretty thoughtful in a single tweet.
	If you follow the right people, you can get that.
	And so that is the future of media, which is that the future of media is it will be much larger amounts of people which are famous to smaller groups.
	So Walter Cronkite's never going to happen again.
	At least in our – and probably within our lifetimes where everybody in America knows who this guy is.
	That age is over.
	I think that's a good thing because now people are going to get the news from the people that they trust.
	Yes, some of it will be opinionated.
	I'm in – my program, I'm – Crystal and I are like, we are – this – she's coming from this like view.
	I'm coming from this view.
	That's our bias when we talk about information and we're gonna talk about the information
	that we think is important.
	And it has garnered a large audience.
	I think that's very much where the future is gonna be.
	And the reason why I think that's a good thing is because people will be engaged more within it
	rather than the current system where news is highly concentrated, highly consolidated,
	has groupthink, has the same elite production pipeline problem of everybody knows,
	journalists all come from the same socioeconomic background and they all party together here in DC
	or in New York or in LA or wherever.
	And they're part of the same monoculture and that affects what they report.
	This will cause a total dispersion of all of that.
	The battle of our age is gonna be the guild versus the non-guild.
	So like what we see right now with the New York Times and Clubhouse,
	this is a very, very, very, very, very intentional thing that is happening,
	which is that the Times talking about unfettered conversations,
	that's happening on Clubhouse for people who aren't aware.
	This is important because they need to be the fetters of conversation.
	They need to be the interagent.
	That's where they get their power.
	They get their power from convincing Facebook that they are the ones who can fact-check stuff
	They are the ones who can tell you whether something is right or wrong
	that battle over Unimpeded conversation and the explosion of a format that
	you and I are doing really well in and then this more Consolidated one which holds cultural power and elite power
	which holds cultural power and elite power, and more importantly, money, right, over you and I,
	and more importantly money right over you and I that's the battle that we're all gonna
	that's the battle that we're all gonna play out.
	Do you think unfettered conversations have a chance to win this battle?
	Do you think unfettered conversations have a chance to win this battle?
	Yes, I do in the long run in the long run. The Internet is simply too powerful
	Yes, I do in the long run.
	In the long run, the internet is simply too powerful.
	But here's the mistake everybody makes the New York Times really well in, and then this more consolidated one,
	But here's the mistake everybody makes.
	The New York Times will never lose.
	It will just become one of us.
	See, they already are.
	They are the largest. The Daily?
	The Daily, look at the Daily.
	Not even that, think about it not in podcasting.
	The Times is not a mass media product.
	It is a subscription product for upper middle class, largely white liberals, who live the same circumstances
	across the United States and in Europe.
	There's nothing wrong with that, but here's the thing.
	You can't be the paper of record when you're actually the paper of upper middle class white America.
	Your job is to report on the news from that angle and deliver them the product that they want.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	Their stock price is higher than ever.
	They're making 10 times more money than they did 10 years ago, but it comes at the cost
	of not having a mass application audience.
	So like when people, I think people in our space are always like, the New York Times is gonna be destroyed.
	No, it's actually even better.
	They will just become one of us.
	They already are.
	They're a subscription platform.
	Well, yes, in terms of the actual mechanism.
	But, you know, New York Times is still...
	And I don't think I'm speaking about a particular sector.
	I think it... As a brand, it does have the level of credibility assigned to it still.
	There's politicization of it.
	Totally. But there's a credibility.
	It has much more credibility than, forgive me, than I think you and I have.
	No, you're right. In terms of your podcast, people are not going to be like, They're going to cite the New York Times versus what you said on the podcast for an opinion.
	I wonder, in the sense of battles, whether Unfettered Conversations, whether Joe Rogan, whether your podcast can have the same level of legitimacy, or the flip side, New York Times loses legitimacy to be at the same level in terms of how we talk about it.
	It's a long battle, right?
	It's going to take a long time.
	And I'm saying this is where I think the end state is going.
	And look at what The Times is doing.
	They're leaning into podcasting for a reason.
	But not just podcasting as in NPR level, like, here's what's happening.
	Michael Barbaro is a fucking celebrity, right?
	The guy who does The Daily.
	That guy's famous amongst these people.
	Because they're like, oh my god, I love Michael.
	Like, I love the way he does this stuff.
	Again, that's fine. More people are listening to the news.
	I think that's a good thing.
	And then, who else do they hire?
	Ezra Klein, from Vox.
	Kara Swisher, also from Vox, who does Pivot, which is an amazing podcast.
	Or Jane Koston, same thing.
	It's personalities who are becoming bundled together within this brand, right?
	Okay, maybe I'm just a hater.
	Because I loved podcasting from the beginning.
	I loved Green Day before they were cool, man.
	But I am bothered by it.
	Like, why doesn't Kara Swisher she's done successfully?
	I think in her own... No, she was always a part of some kind of institution.
	I'm not sure. She started her own thing, I think.
	Recode, right. Recode.
	I don't know if that's her own thing.
	So she was very successful there.
	Why the hell did she join the New York Times with the new podcast?
	Why is Michael Barbaro not do his own thing?
	Because he gets paid and because he has, he wants the elite cachet that you just referenced
	within his social circle in New York.
	Which is that I think the biggest mistake that some of the venture people make is,
	if we give everybody the tools that those people are all gonna leave
	to like go sub-stack and go independent, within their social circle,
	sacrificing some money from being independent is worth it to be a part of the New York Times.
	That's sad to me because it propagates old thinking.
	It propagates old institutions.
	And you could say that New York Times is going to evolve quickly and so on, but...
	I would love it if there was a mechanism for re-establishing, for building new New York Times in terms of public legitimacy.
	And I suppose that's wishful thinking because it takes time to build trust in institutions and it takes time to build new institutions.
	My main thing I would say is public legitimacy as a concept is not going to be there in mass media anymore because of the balkanization of audiences.
	I mean, think about it, right?
	This is like Lesion, you know, the classic stuff around a thousand true fans or no, sorry, like a hundred true fans even now.
	Like you can make a living on the internet just talking to a hundred people.
	As long as they're all high frequency traders, some of the highest paid people on Substack, they don't have that many subs.
	It's just that they're Wall Street guys, right?
	So people pay a lot of money. Again, that's great.
	So what you will have is an increasing balkanization of the internet.
	Of audiences and of niches, people will become increasingly famous within us.
	You will become astoundingly famous.
	I'm sure you've noticed this with your fan base.
	I certainly have with mine. Like, 99% of people have no idea who I am.
	But when somebody meets, they're like, oh my god, I watch your show every day.
	Right? Like, it's the only thing I watch for news.
	Right? Like, instead of casually famous, if that makes sense, be like, oh yeah, it's like Alec Baldwin.
	Yeah. I don't decry it.
	I think it's great because I think that the more that that happens, the more engaged people will be and it empowers different voices to be able to come in and then possibly, I wouldn't say destroy, but compete against.
	I mean, look at Joe. Joe is more powerful than CNN and MSNBC and Fox all put together.
	That gives me immense inspiration.
	He created the space for me to succeed and I told him that when I met him.
	I was like, Dude, like, I listened to this podcast when I was, like, young.
	And, like, I remember, like, when I got to meet him and all that, and I told him this on this pod, I was like, I didn't know people, millions, were willing to listen to a guy talk about chimps for three straight hours.
	Including me! I didn't know that I could be one of those people.
	Yeah, me too. I learned something about myself before the show, yeah.
	And so by creating that space, I'd be like, wait, there's a hunger here.
	Like, he showed us all the way.
	And none of us will ever again be as famous as Rogan because he was the first.
	And that's fine because he created the umbrella ecosystem for us all to thrive.
	That is where I see, like, a great amount of hope within that story.
	Yeah, and the cool thing, he also supports that ecosystem.
	He's such a- He's so generous.
	One of the things he paved the way on for me is to show that you can just be honest, publicly honest, and not jealous of other people's success, but instead be supportive and all those kinds of things, just loving towards others.
	He's been an inspiration. I mean, to the comics community, I think there were a bunch of, before that, I think there were all a bunch of competitive haters towards each other.
	Yeah, and now he's like, just injected love, you know?
	They're like, they're still, like, many are still resistant, but they're like, they can't help it because he's such a huge voice.
	He, like, forces them to be, like, loving towards each other.
	And the same, I tried to, one of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast was I wanted to do what Joe Rogan did, but for the scientific community, my little circle of scientific community of let's support each other.
	Yeah. Well, Avi Loeb, I would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you.
	I mean, I assume you put him in touch with Joe.
	He went on Joe's show. I had him on my show.
	Millions of people would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you.
	It wasn't for you. Just by the way, in terms of deep state and shadow government, Avi Loeb has to do with aliens.
	You better believe Joe.
	Dude, the last thing I sent to him was the American Airlines audio.
	Did you see that? The pilots who were, oh my God, dude, this is amazing.
	So like, this American Airlines flight crew was over New Mexico five or six days ago.
	Yeah. And the guy comes and goes, hey, do you have any targets up here?
	A large cylindrical object just flew over me.
	Oh, no. So this happens.
	Yes. Then a guy, like a radio catcher, records this and posts it online.
	American Airlines confirms that this is authentic audio.
	And they go, all further questions should be referred to the FBI.
	So then, okay, American Airlines just confirmed this is a legitimate transmission.
	FBI, then the FAA comes out and says, we were tracking no objects in the vicinity of this plane
	at the time of the transmission.
	So the only plausible explanation that online sleuths have been able to say is maybe he saw a Learjet, which was, you know, using like open source data.
	FAA rules that out.
	So what was it? He saw a large cylindrical object while he was mid-flight American Airlines, but you can go online
	Listen to the audio yourself. This is a hundred percent. No shit transmission confirmed by American Airlines of a
	commercial pilot over New Mexico
	Seeing a quote-unquote large cylindrical object in the air.
	Like I said When we first started talking I've never believed I've
	never believed more in UFOs and aliens. Yeah I just wish both American Airlines, FBI, and government would be more transparent.
	There would be voices...
	I know it sounds ridiculous, but the kind of transparency that you see...
	Maybe not Joe Rogan. He's overly transparent.
	He's just a comic, really. I don't know.
	A podcast from the FBI. Just being honest.
	Excited. Confused.
	I'm sure...
	They're being overly cautious about their release information.
	I'm sure there's a lot of information that would inspire the public, that would inspire trust in institutions that will not damage national security.
	Like, it seems to me obvious.
	And the reason they're not sharing it is because of this momentum of bureaucracy, of caution, and so on.
	But there's probably so much cool information that the government has.
	The way I almost, I wouldn't say it confirmed it's real, but Trump didn't declassify it.
	Like, you know that if there was ever a president that actually wanted to get to the bottom of it, it was him.
	I mean, he didn't declassify it, man.
	And people begged him to.
	I know for a fact, because I pushed to try and make this happen, that some people did speak to him about it.
	And he was like, no, I'm not going to do it.
	He might be afraid.
	That's what I mean, though. They were probably all telling him, like, sir, you can't do this, you know, all this.
	And I get that.
	And there's this legislation written in COVID that, like, they have six months to release him.
	Is that real? What is that? That's a bunch of bullshit.
	I think it's bullshit. I think it's bullshit. There's so many different levels of classification that people need to understand.
	I mean, look, I read John Podesta.
	He was the chief of staff to Bill Clinton.
	He's a big UFO guy.
	He tried, like him and Clinton tried to get some of this information, and they could not get any of it.
	And we're talking about the president and the White House chief of staff.
	Well, there's a whole bureaucracy built, just like you were saying, with intent.
	That has to be your focus, because there's a whole bureaucracy built around secrecy, probably for a good reason.
	So to get through to the information, there's a whole paperwork process, all that kind of stuff.
	You can't just walk in and get the...
	Unless, again, with intention, that becomes your thing.
	Let's revolutionize this thing.
	And then you get only so many things.
	It's sad that the bureaucracy has gotten so bulky.
	But I think the hopeful messages from earlier in our conversation seems like a single person can't fix it, but if you hire the right team, It feels like you can.
	Can't fix everything. I don't want to give people unrealistic expectations.
	You can fix a lot. Especially in Crisis, you can remake America.
	And the reason I know that is because it's already happened twice.
	FDR, or in modern history, FDR and JFK. Sorry, FDR and JFK's assassination, LBJ. Two, hyper-competent men who understood government, who understood personnel, and coincidentally were friends.
	I love this. I don't think actually people understand this.
	FDR met Johnson three days after he won his election to Congress, special election.
	He was only 29 years old.
	And he left that meeting and called somebody and said, this young man is going to be president of the United States someday.
	Even then, what was within him to understand and to recognize that?
	And sometimes Johnson, as a young member of Congress, would come and have breakfast with FDR, just to the great political minds of the 20th century, just sitting there talking.
	I would give anything to know what was happening.
	I hope they were real with each other.
	There's like a genuine human connection, right?
	Well, Johnson wasn't a genuine guy.
	Well, I need to read those thousands of pages.
	I've been way too focused on Hitler.
	I was going to say, one of my goals in coming to this is I was like, I got to get Lex into two things because I know he'll love it.
	I know he'll love LBJ if he takes the time to read the books.
	Really? 100%.
	Of all the presidents?
	I didn't say you'll love him, but you'll love the books about him because the books are a story of America, the story of politics, the story of power.
	This is the guy who wrote The Power Broker.
	These books are up there with Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon in terms of how power works.
	Study of power. Exactly.
	No, that's why Carroll wrote the books.
	And that's why the books are not really about LBJ. They're about power in Washington.
	And about the consolidation of power post-New Deal, the consolidation then, or using the levers of power like Johnson knew, in order to change the House of Representatives, the Senate of the United States, and ultimately the presidency of the United States, which ended in failure and disaster with Vietnam.
	Don't get me wrong. But he's overlooked for so many of the incredible things that he did with civil rights.
	Nobody else could have done it.
	No one else could have gotten it done.
	And the second thing is, we've got to get you into World War I. We gotta get you more into World War I because I think that's a rabbit hole, which I know you're a Dan Carlin fan.
	So, blueprint for Armageddon.
	Yeah, it's good. Guaranteed.
	But there's fewer evil people there.
	Yes, but well, but that's what actually there's a banality of that evil of the Kaiser and of the Austro-Hungarians and
	see I like World War One more because it was unresolved.
	It's one of those periods I was talking to you about, about, like, sometimes you're called and you fail.
	Like, that's what happened.
	I mean, 50 million people were killed in the most horrific way.
	Like, people literally drowned in the mud, like an entire generation.
	One stat I love is that...
	Yeah.
	two years of throwing people into barbed wire voluntarily.
	And because people love their country and they love the king
	and they thought they were going against the Kaiser.
	It's just like that conflict to me, I just can't read enough about it.
	Also just like births Russian revolution, you know.
	Yeah, I mean, Hitler.
	You can't talk about World War II without World War I.
	And I'm obsessed with the conflict.
	I've read way too many books about it for this reason is it's unresolved.
	And like the roots of so much of even our current problems are happened in Versailles, right?
	Like Vietnam is because of the Treaty of Versailles.
	In many ways, the Middle Eastern problems and the division of the states there, the Treaty of Versailles in terms of the penalties against Germany, but also the fallout from those wars on the French and the British populations and their reluctance for war in 1939 or 1938 when Neville Chamberlain goes.
	One of the things people don't understand is the actual appetite of the British public at that time.
	at that time, they didn't want to go to war.
	Only Churchill, he was the only one in the, you know, in the gathering storm, right?
	Like being like, hey, this is really bad and all of that.
	And then even in the United States, our streak of isolationism, which swept, I mean,
	things were, because of that conflict, we were convinced as a country that we wanted nothing to do
	with Europe and its problems.
	And in many ways that contributed to the proliferation of Hitler and more.
	So like, I'm obsessed with World War I for this reason, which is that it's just like the root.
	Well, it's like the culmination of the monarchies, then the fall, and then just all the shit spills out
	from there for like a hundred years.
	So World War I is like the most important shift in human history.
	World War II is like a consequence of that.
	Yeah, so I have a degree in security studies from Georgetown, and one of the things that we would focus a lot on that is war, but also the complexity around war.
	And it's funny, we never spent that much time on World War II, because it was actually quite a clean war.
	It's a very atypical war, as in...
	The war object, which we learned from World War I, is we must inflict suffering on the German people and invade the borders of Germany and destroy Hitler.
	Like, the center of gravity is the Nazi regime and Hitler.
	So it had a very basic begin and end.
	Begin, liberate France, invade Germany, destroy Hitler, reoccupy, rebuild.
	World War I... What are you fighting for?
	Like, are you, I mean, nobody even knew.
	You can go, the German general staff, they were like, even in 1917, they're like, the war was worth it because now we have Luxembourg.
	I'm like, really? Like, you killed two million of your citizens for fucking Luxembourg?
	And like half of Belgium, which is now like a pond?
	And same thing, the French are like, well, the French more so, they're defending their borders.
	But like, what are the British fighting for?
	Why did hundreds of thousands of British people die in order to preserve the balance of power in Europe and
	prevent the Kaiser?
	From having a port on the English Channel like really that's why these
	Yeah. With a necessary diplomatic resolution.
	It's not clean.
	It's very dirty.
	It usually leads in the outbreak of another war and another war and another war and a slow burn of ethnic conflict which bubbles up.
	So that's why I look at that one.
	Because it's more typical of warfare in terms of how it works.
	Exactly. It's kind of interesting.
	You're making me realize that World War II is one of the rare wars where you can make a strong case for it's a fight of good versus evil.
	Yeah, just war theory, obviously.
	They're literally slaughtering Jews.
	We have to kill them.
	And there's one person doing it.
	I mean, there's one person at the core.
	Yeah, that's fascinating.
	And it's short and there's a clear aggression.
	It's interesting that Dan Carlin has been avoiding Hitler as well.
	Yeah. Probably for this reason.
	Probably for this reason.
	Yeah. I mean, but it's complicated too.
	Right. Because there's a pressure.
	That guy has his demons.
	I love Dan so much.
	This is the...
	I don't know if you feel this pressure.
	Yeah. But as a creative, he feels the pressure of being maybe not necessarily correct, but maybe correct in the sense that his understanding, he gets to the bottom of why something happened, of what really happened.
	Get to the bottom of it before he can say something publicly about it.
	And he is tortured by that burden.
	I know. You know, he takes so much shit from the historical community for no reason.
	I think he's the greatest popularizer, quote-unquote, of history.
	And I wish more people in history understood it that way.
	He was an inspiration to me.
	I mean, I do some videos sometimes on my Instagram now where I'll do like a book tour.
	I'll be like, here's my bookshelf of these presidents.
	And like, here's what I learned from this book and this book and this.
	And that was very much like a skill I learned from him of being like, you know, as a historian writes.
	I just love the way he talks.
	He's like, in the mud.
	He'll be like, quote.
	He inspires me, man.
	He really does, to learn more.
	I bought a lot of books because of Dan Carlin, because of this guy, because of that guy.
	In terms of another thing he does, which nobody else, and I'm probably guilty of this, he focuses on the actual people involved.
	Like, he would tell the story of actual British soldiers in World War I. And I probably, and maybe you're guilty of this too, we over-focus on what was happening in the German general staff, what was happening in the British general staff.
	And he doesn't make that mistake.
	That's why he tells real history.
	Yeah, and it gives it a feeling.
	The result is that there's a feeling.
	You get the feeling of what it was like to be there.
	You know, you're quickly becoming more and more popular, right?
	Speaking about political issues in part, do you feel a burden, almost like the prison of your prior convictions of being popular with a certain kind of audience and thereby unable to really think outside the box?
	I've really struggled with this.
	I came up in right-wing media.
	I came up a much more doctrinaire, conservative in my professional life.
	I wasn't always conservative. We can get to that later if you want.
	And I did feel an immense pressure after the election.
	By people to say, wanted me to say the election was stolen.
	And I knew I had a sizable part of my audience.
	Well, here's the benefit.
	Most people know me from Rising, which is with Crystal and me.
	That is inherently a left-right program.
	So it's a large audience.
	So I felt comfortable and I knew that I could still be fine in terms of my numbers, whatever, because many people knew me who were on the left.
	And if my right listeners abandoned me, so be it.
	I had the luxury of able to take that choice, but I still felt an immense amount of pressure to say the election was stolen, to give credence to a lot of the stuff that Trump was doing, to downplay January 6th, to downplay many of the Republican senators or justify many of the Republican senators, some of whom I know, who objected to the Electoral College certification and who stoked some of the flames, That have eaten the Republican base.
	And I just wouldn't do it.
	And that was hard, man.
	Like, I feel more politically homeless right now than I ever have.
	But I have realized in the last couple of months, it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
	It's freedom. It's true freedom.
	I now say exactly what I think.
	And it's not that I wasn't doing that before.
	It's maybe I would avoid certain topics or I would think about things more from a team perspective of am I making sure that It's, I'm not saying I didn't fight it, and I still, I criticized the right plenty, and Trump plenty before the election and more.
	It's more just like, I no longer feel as if I even have the illusion of a stake within the game.
	I'm like, I only look at myself as an outside observer, and I will only call it as I see it truly.
	And I was aspiring to that before, but I had to have, in a way...
	Trump stopped the steal thing.
	It took my shackles off, 100%.
	Because I was like, no, this is bullshit.
	And I'm going to say it's bullshit.
	And I think it's bad.
	And I think it's bad for the Republican Party.
	And if people in the Republican Party don't agree with me on that, that's fine.
	I'm just not going to be necessarily associated with you anymore.
	This is probably one of the first political-related, politics-related conversations we've had.
	I mean, unless you count Michael Malice, who- He was great.
	He's a funny guy. He's not so much political as he is like, burned down, man.
	He leans too far in anarchy for me.
	There's a place for that.
	First of all, he's working on a new book, which I really appreciate.
	He's working on a big book for a while, which is White Pill.
	He's also working on this short little thing, which is an anarchist handbook or something like that.
	It's like Anarchy for Idiots or something like that.
	Which I think is really...
	Well, me being an idiot and being curious about anarchy seems useful.
	So I like those kinds of books.
	That's Russian heritage, man.
	Anarchist 101. I find those kinds of things a useful thought experiment.
	Because that's why it's frustrating to me when people talk about communism, socialism, or even capitalism, where they can't enjoy the thought experiment of like, Why did communism fail?
	And maybe ask the question of, like, is it possible to make communism succeed?
	Or are there good ideas in communism?
	Like, I enjoy the thought experiment, like, the discourse of it, like, the reasoning and, like, devil's advocate and all that.
	People have, like, seemed to not have patience for that.
	They're like, communism bad, red.
	I was obsessed with the question and still am.
	I will never be...
	I will never quench my thirst for Russian history.
	I love that period of 1890 to 1925.
	It's just like, it's so fucking crazy.
	Like, the autocracy embodied in Tsar Alexander.
	And then you get this like weird fail son, Nicholas, who is kind of a good guy, but also
	terrible and also Russian autocracy itself is terrible.
	And then I just became obsessed with the question of like, why did the Bolshevik revolution
	succeed?
	Because like people in Russia didn't necessarily want Bolshevism.
	People suffered a lot under Bolshevism and it led to Stalinism.
	How did Vladimir Lenin do it?
	Right?
	became obsessed with that question.
	And it's still I find it so interesting, which is that series of accidents of history,
	incredible boldness by Lenin, incredible real polity, smart, unpopular decisions made by Trotsky
	and Stalin, and just like the arrogance of the czars and of the of the Russian like autocracy.
	And just but at the same time, there's all these like cultural implications of this right in terms
	of like how it became hollowed out post Catherine the Great and all that.
	I was obsessed with autocracy because Russia was an actual autocracy.
	And like, actually.
	And I'm like, it was there. Like, they didn't even remove serfdom to like the Civil War in America.
	Like, that's crazy. Like, you know?
	And nobody really talks about it.
	Yeah, I was like, was Bolshevism a natural reaction to the excesses of czarism?
	There is a convenient explanation where that is true.
	But there were also a series of decisions made by Lenin and Stalin to kill many of the
	people in the center left and marginalize them, and also not to associate with the more
	quote unquote like amenable communists in order to make sure that their pure strain
	was the only thing and the reason I like that is because it comes back to a point
	I made earlier it's all about intentionality which is that you
	actually can will something into existence even if people don't want it
	That was the craziest thing.
	Nobody wanted this, but it still ruled for half a century.
	More, actually. I mean, almost 75 years.
	That's fascinating to think that there could have been a history of the Soviet Union that was dramatically different than Leninism, Stalinism.
	That was completely different, like almost would be the American story.
	Yeah, easily.
	I mean, there's a world where, and I don't have all the characters.
	There's like Kerensky, and then there was like whoever Lenin's number two, Stalin's chief rival.
	And even, I mean, look, even a Soviet Union led by Trotsky, that's a whole other world, right?
	Like literally a whole other world.
	And- Yeah, it's just – I don't know.
	I find it so interesting. I will never not be fascinated by Russia.
	I always will.
	It's funny that I get to talk to you because it's like I read this book.
	I forget what it's called. It won – I think it won a Pulitzer Prize, and it was like the story of – I tried to understand Russia post-Crimea because I came up amongst people who are much more like neoconservative, and they're like, fuck Russia.
	Russia is bad. And I was like, okay, like what do these people think?
	And – We have this narrative of the fall of the Soviet Union.
	And then I read this book from the perspective of Russians who lived through the fall.
	And they were like, this is terrible.
	Actually, the introduction of capitalism was awful.
	And the rise of all these crazy oligarchs.
	That's why Putin came to power.
	To restore order to the oligarchy.
	He still talks to this day.
	Do you guys, I mean, that's always the threat of like, do you want to return to the 90s?
	Right. Do you want to return to Yeltsin?
	Yeah. And like, but the thing is, in the West, we have this like our own propaganda of like, no, Yeltsin was great.
	That was the golden age. What could have been with Russia?
	And I was like, well, what do actual Russians think?
	And so that, yeah, I'll always be fascinated by it.
	And then just, like, to understand the idea of feeling encircled by NATO and all that, you have to understand, like, Russian defense theory, all the way going back to the czars, has always been defense in depth in terms of having Estonia, Lithuania, and more as, like, protection of the heartland.
	I'm not justifying in this, so NATO shills, like, please don't come after me.
	But, look, Estonians like NATO. They want to be in NATO, so I don't want to minimize that.
	I'm more just saying, like, I understand him and Russia much better, having done that.
	And we are very incapable in America.
	I think this is probably because my parents are immigrants and I've traveled a lot, of putting yourself in the mind of people who aren't Western and haven't lived a history, especially our lives, of America's fucking awesome.
	We're the number one country in the world.
	I'm like, we're literally better than you, like in many ways.
	And they can't empathize with people who have suffered so much.
	Yeah. And I just, yeah, it's just so interesting to me.
	What about if we could talk for just a brief moment about the human of Putin and power?
	You are clearly fascinated by power.
	Mm-hmm. Do you think power changed Putin?
	Do you think power changes leaders?
	If you look at the great leaders in history, whether it's LBJ, FDR, do you think power really changes people?
	Is there a truth to that kind of old proverb?
	It reveals. I think that's what it is.
	It reveals. So Putin was a much more deft politician, much more amenable to the West.
	If you think back, you know, to 2001 and more, right when he came, because he was still, because at that time, his biggest problem was intra-Russian politics, right?
	Like it was all consolidating power within the oligarchy, right?
	Once he did that by around like 2007, there's that famous time when he spoke out against the West at the Munich Security Conference.
	I forget when it was. And that's when everybody in the audience was like, Whoa.
	And he was talking about, like, NATO encirclement.
	And, like, we will not be beaten back by the West.
	Very shortly afterwards, like, the Georgia invasion happens.
	And that was, like, a big wake-up call of, like, we will not be pushed around anymore.
	I mean, he said before publicly, like, the worst thing that ever happened was the fall.
	Or what did he say? It was, like, the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, right?
	Yeah. Of course. People in the West were like, what?
	I'm like, I get it, right?
	Like, they were a superpower.
	Now... Their population is declining.
	It's like a petrostate.
	It sucks. I understand.
	I understand how somebody could feel about that.
	I think it revealed his character, which is that I think he thinks of himself probably, as he always has since 2001, Almost as a benevolent dictator.
	He's like, without me, the whole system would collapse.
	I'm the only guy keeping all these people in check.
	Most Russians probably do support Putin because they feel like they support some form of functional government.
	and they view it as like a check against that, which is a long, you know,
	has a long history within Russia too.
	So I don't know if it changed him.
	I think it just revealed him.
	Because it's not like he, I mean, he has a bill, you know, Navalny has put that like billion dollar palace
	and all that.
	I don't know.
	Sometimes I feel like Putin does that for show.
	He doesn't seem like somebody who indulges in all that stuff.
	Or maybe we just don't see it.
	Like, I don't know. Well, I don't.
	It's very difficult for me to understand.
	I've been hanging out, thanks to Clubhouse, I've gotten to learn a lot about the Navalny folks, and it's been very educational.
	Made me ask a lot of important questions about what, you know, question a lot of my assumptions about what I do and don't know.
	But I'll just say that I do believe, you know, there's a lot of the Navalny folks say that Putin is incompetent and is a bad executive, like, is bad at basically running government.
	But to me...
	Well, why do Russians not think that, then?
	Well, they probably say propaganda.
	Yeah, they would say the control.
	There is a strong either control or pressure on the press, but I think there is a legitimate support and love of Putin in Russia that is not grounded in just misinformation and propaganda.
	There's legitimacy there.
	Mostly I try to remain apolitical, and actually genuinely remain apolitical.
	I'm legitimately not interested in the politics of Russia of today.
	I feel I have some responsibility, and I'll take that responsibility on as I need to, but my fascination, as it is perhaps with you in part, is in the historical figure of Putin.
	I know he's currently president, but I'm almost looking like as if I was a kid and 30 years from now reading about him, Studying the human being, the games of power that are played that got him to gain power, to maintain power, what that says about his human nature, the nature of the bureaucracy that's around him, the nature of Russia, the people, all those kinds of things, as opposed to the politics and the manipulation and the corruption and the control of the media that results in misinformation.
	You know, those are the bickering of the day, just like we're saying what will actually be remembered about this moment in history.
	Totally. He's a transformational figure in Russian history, really.
	Like the bridge between the fall of the Soviet Union and the chaos of Yeltsin, that will be how he's remembered.
	The only question is what comes next and what he wants to come next.
	I'm always fat. I'm like, he's getting up.
	How old are you? 60-something?
	Yeah, 60. So he would be, I think he would be 80.
	So with the change of the Constitution, he cannot be president until...
	2034, I think it is.
	So he would be like 80-something, and he would be in power for over 30 years, which is longer than Stalin.
	But he still seems to be...
	He seems fit. I think he's going to be around for a long time.
	But this is a fascinating question that you ask, which is like, what does he want?
	I don't know. Yeah, that's the question. I don't, I, and this is where I think given all of his behavior and more, I
	don't know if it's about money. I don't know if it's about enriching himself. Obviously he did to the tune of billions
	and billions and billions of dollars.
	But I think he probably he's as close to like an actual Russian nationalist, like at the top, who really does
	believe in Russia as its rightful superpower. Everything he does seems to stem from that opposition to NATO intro to
	Syria, like wanting to play a large role in affairs, deeply distrustful and yet coveting of the European powers.
	Like I could describe every czar, you know, in those same language, like every czar falls into the exact same
	category.
	Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder, looking at some of the biggest leaders in human history, to ask the question of what was the motivation?
	What was the motivation for even just the revolutionaries like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin?
	What was the motivation?
	Because it sure as hell seems like the motivation was at least in part driven by the idea By ideas, not self-interest of, like, power.
	For Lenin, it was.
	I think he was a true believer and an actual narcissist who thought he was the only one who could do it.
	Stalin, I do think, just wanted power.
	And realized, well, I don't know.
	Look, he wrote very passionately when he was young.
	He really believed in communism.
	In the beginning, he did. What I'm always fascinated is, I'm like, around 1920, what happened, right?
	Post-revolution, you crushed the whites.
	Now it's all about consolidation.
	That's where the games really began.
	And I'm like, I don't think that was about communism.
	Yeah, maybe it became a useful propaganda tool, but it still seemed like he believed in it, whether it was, of course.
	This is the question. I mean, this is a problem with conspiracy theories for me, and this is legitimate criticism towards me about conspiracy theories, which is, you know, just because you're not like this doesn't mean others aren't like this.
	So, like, I can't believe that somebody would be, like, deeply two-faced.
	Oh, I've met them. You're welcome to Washington.
	But I think that I would be able to detect.
	I don't think so.
	Most people are good.
	Well, my question is...
	I've seen it. Well, so there's difference.
	There's two-faced...
	There's different levels of two-faced.
	What I mean is to be killing people.
	And it's like House of Cards style, right?
	And still present a front like you're not killing people.
	I don't know if, I guess it's possible, but I just don't see that at scale.
	Like there's a lot of people like that and I don't, I have trouble imagining That's such a compelling narrative that people like to say.
	That's the conspiratorial mindset.
	I think that skepticism is really powerful and important to have because it's true, a lot of powerful people abuse their power.
	But saying that about...
	I feel like people over-assume that.
	I see that with use of steroids often in sports.
	People seem to make that claim about everybody who's successful.
	And I want to be very, I don't know, something about me wants to be cautious, I want to give people a chance.
	Being purely cynical isn't helpful.
	People say this to me. He's only saying this to do this.
	Yeah. But at the same time, being naively optimistic about everything is also kind of pedophiles because people are going to fuck you over.
	And more importantly, that doesn't bother me.
	More importantly, you're not going to be able to reason about how to create systems that are going to be robust to corruption, to malevolent parties.
	So in order to create, you have to have a healthy balance of both, I suppose, especially if you want to actually engineer things that work in this world that has evil in it.
	I can't believe there's a book of Hitler on the desk.
	We've mentioned a lot of books throughout this conversation.
	I wonder, and this makes me really curious to explore In a lot of depth, the kind of books that you're interested in.
	I think you mentioned in your show that you provide recommendations.
	Yes, I do. In the form of spoken word, can you, beyond what we've already recommended, mention books, whether it is historical, nonfiction, or whether it's more like philosophical or even fiction that had a big impact on your life?
	Is there a few that you can mention?
	Sure. I already talked about the Johnson books, so I'll leave that alone.
	Robert A. Caro, he's still alive, thank God.
	He's finishing the last book.
	I hope he makes it.
	So, those Johnson books.
	Second... Can I ask you a question about those books?
	Yes. What the hell do you fit into so many pages?
	Let me tell you this. So I'll just give it an anecdote.
	This is why I love these books. The beginning, the first book, is about Lyndon Johnson.
	Yes. His life to when he gets elected to Congress.
	The book begins with a history of Texas and its weather patterns, and then of his great-great-grandfather moving to Texas.
	Yes. Then the story of that, about 100 or so pages in, you get to Lyndon Johnson.
	Yes. That's how...
	That's how you do it. Okay.
	So it's like a Tolstoy-style retelling.
	This is the thing. It's not a biography.
	It's a story of the times.
	That's a great biography.
	So another one—this isn't part of my list, so don't do it.
	All right. Off the record.
	It's Grant Ron Chernow. Ron Chernow's Grant.
	It's 1,000 pages. And the reason I tell everybody to read it is it's not just the story of Grant.
	It is the story of pre-Civil War America, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and
	Reconstruction all told in the life of one person who was involved in all three.
	Most people don't know anything about the Mexican-American War.
	It's fascinating.
	Most people don't know anything about Reconstruction.
	Now more so because people are talking—it's a hot topic now.
	I've been reading about it for years.
	That is another thing people need to learn a lot more about.
	In terms of non-history books, the book that probably had the most impact on me, which
	is also historical nonfiction, is I Am Obsessed with Antarctic Exploration.
	It all began with a book called Shackleton's Incredible Journey.
	which is the collection of diaries of everybody who was on Shackleton's journey.
	For those who don't know, Shackleton was the last explorer of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.
	He led a ship called the Endurance, which froze in the ice off the coast of Antarctica in 1914.
	And they didn't have radios over the last exploration.
	The last one without the age of radio.
	And he happens to freeze in the ice.
	And then the ship collapses after a year, frozen in the ice.
	And this man leads his entire crew...
	From that ship, onto the ice with a team of dogs, survives out on the ice for another year with three little lifeboats, and is able to get all of his men, every single one of them alive, to an island hundreds of miles away called Elephant Island.
	And when they got there, he had to leave everybody behind except for six people.
	And him and two other guys, I'm forgetting their names, navigated by the stars.
	800 miles through the Drake Passage, with seas of hundreds of feet,
	to Prince, I think it's called Prince George's Island.
	And then, when they got to Prince George's Island, they landed on the wrong side,
	and they had to hike from one side to the other to go and meet the whalers.
	And every single one of those things was supposed to be impossible.
	Nobody was ever supposed to hike that island.
	It wasn't done again until like the 1980s with professional equipment.
	He did it after two years of starvation.
	Nobody was ever supposed to make it from Elephant Island to Prince George.
	The guy, they had to hold him steady his legs so that he could chart the stars.
	And if they miss this island, they're into open sea.
	They're dead. And then before that, how do you survive for a year on the ice?
	On seals! And before that, he kept his crew from depression, frozen one year in the ice.
	It's just an amazing story.
	And it made me obsessed with Antarctic exploration.
	So I've read like 15 books on...
	What the hell is it about the human spirit?
	That's the thing about Antarctica is it brings it out of you.
	So for example, I read another one recently called Mawson's Will.
	Douglas Mawson, he was an Australian.
	He was on one of the first Robert Frost expeditions.
	He leads an expedition down to the south.
	Him and a partner, they're leading explorations.
	It's 1908, something like that.
	They're going around Antarctica.
	With dog teams.
	And what happens is they keep going over these snow bridges where there's a crevice but it's covered in snow.
	And so one of the lead driver, the dogs go over and they plummet.
	And that sled takes with it.
	So the guy survives, but that sled takes all their food, half the dogs, their stove, the camping tent, the tent specifically designed for the snow, everything.
	And they're hundreds of miles away from base camp.
	He and this guy have to make it back there in time before the ship comes to come get them on an agreed upon date.
	And he makes it. But the guy he was with, he dies.
	And it's a crazy story.
	First of all, they have to eat the dogs.
	A really creepy part of Antarctic exploration is everyone ends up eating dogs at different points.
	And part of the theory, which is so crazy, is that the guy he was with was dying because they were eating dog liver.
	And dog liver has a lot of vitamin E, which, if you eat too much of it, can give you, like, a poisoning.
	And so, Mawson, by trying to help his friend, was giving him more liver.
	Of all the things that kills you.
	I know, it's dog liver.
	And so his friend ends up dying, have a horrific heart attack, all of that.
	Mawson crawls back.
	Hundreds of miles away.
	Makes it back to base camp hours after the ship leaves.
	And two guys or a couple of guys stayed behind for him.
	And he basically has to recuperate for like six months before he can even walk again.
	But it's like you were saying about the human spirit.
	It's like Antarctica brings that out of people.
	Or Amundsen, the guy who made it to the South Pole.
	Robert Amundsen. Oh my god.
	Like this guy trained his whole life in the ice from Norway.
	To make it to the South Bowl.
	And he beat Robert Frost, the British guy with all this money and all these...
	I could go on this forever.
	I'm obsessed with it. Well, first of all, I'm going to take this part of the podcast.
	I'm going to set it to music.
	I'm going to listen to it because I've been whining and bitching about running 48 miles with Goggins this next weekend.
	And this is going to be so easy.
	I'm just going to listen to this over and over in my head.
	You know, Elon's obsessed with Shackleton.
	He talks about them all the time. I was going to ask you about that.
	He uses an example of what Mars colonization would be like.
	He's right. No, Antarctica is as close to you can simulate that.
	I don't know.
	So what is it? Is it like simulating the experience of what it'd be like to colonize?
	So it's like a docu-series where the fictionalized part is the like astronauts on Mars, but then they're interviewing people like Elon Musk and others who are the ones who like paved the way to get to Mars.
	So it's a really interesting concept.
	I think it's on Netflix.
	And yeah, I agree with him 100%, which is that the first guys to make, like, for example, Robert Frost, who went to Australia...
	Sorry, to Antarctica, the British explorer who was beaten to the South Pole three weeks by Robert Amundsen, he died on the way back.
	And the reason why is because he wasn't well prepared.
	He was arrogant.
	He didn't have the proper amounts of supplies.
	His team had terrible morale.
	Antarctica is a brutal place.
	If you fuck up one time, you die.
	And it's like... And this is what you read a lot about, which is the reason why such heroic characters like Shackleton Shine is a lot of people died.
	Like, there were some people who got frozen in the eye.
	I mean, man, this again also came to the North exploration.
	So I read a lot about, like, the exploration of the North Pole.
	And same thing.
	These unextraordinary men...
	Take people out into the ice and get frozen out there for years and shit goes so bad.
	They end up eating each other.
	They all die.
	There's the famous, I'm forgetting his name, the British Franklin Expedition, where they went searching for them for like 20 years.
	And they eventually came across a group of Inuit who were like, oh yeah, we saw some weird white men here like 15 years ago.
	And they find their bones and there's like saw marks which show that they were eating each other.
	So history remembers the ones who didn't eat each other.
	Well, yeah, we remember the ones who made it, but there are...
	And that would be the story of Mars as well.
	That will be the story of Mars. And nevertheless, that's the interesting thing about Antarctica.
	Nevertheless, something about human nature drives us to explore it.
	And that seems to be like...
	A lot of people have this kind of, to me, frustrating conversation.
	It's like, well...
	Earth is great, man.
	Why do we need to colonize Mars?
	You just don't get it. I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know. It's the same people that say, like, why are you running?
	Like, why are you running a marathon?
	What are you running from, man?
	I don't know. It's pushing the limits of the human mind, of what's possible.
	It's George Mallory because it's there.
	It's simple. And that somehow, actually, the result of that...
	If you wanna be pragmatic about it, there's something about pushing that limit that has side effects that you don't expect that will create a better world back home for the people, not necessarily on Earth, but just in general, it raises the quality of life for everybody.
	Even though the initial endeavor doesn't make any sense, the very fact of pushing the limits of what's possible Then has side effects of benefiting everybody.
	And it's difficult to predict Well, what did we get from the moon?
	What did we get from Apollo, right?
	Technically, and there were a lot of socialists at the time making this argument.
	They're like, all this money going...
	You know what? We went to the fucking moon in 1969.
	That was amazing.
	The greatest feat in human history, period.
	What did we learn from it?
	We learned... We learned about interstellar or interplanetary travel.
	We learned that we could do something off of a device less powerful than the computer in my pocket.
	Yeah. I mean, if you were to define my politics in one way, it's greatness, like a quest for national greatness.
	There is no greatness without fulfilling the ultimate calling of the human spirit, which is more.
	It's not enough, and why should it be?
	It wasn't enough.
	You know, our ancestors could have been content to sit.
	Well, actually, many of them were content to sit and say, these berries will be here for a long time.
	And they got eaten and they died.
	And it's the ones who got out and went to the next place and the next place and went across the Siberian land bridge and went across more and just did extraordinary things.
	The craziest ones, we are their offspring and we fail them if we don't go into space.
	That's how I would put it.
	You should run for president.
	I'm just pro-space, man.
	I love space. No, you're pro-doing difficult things and pushing, exploring the world in all of its forms.
	I hope that kind of spirit permeates politics, too.
	That same kind of...
	It can. It can. Well, it can, and I hope so.
	I don't know if you want to stay on it, but I think that was book number one.
	Oh, shit. Yeah. All right.
	Well, this one is a second.
	This actually is a corollary to that, which is Sapiens.
	And I know that's a very normal, normie answer.
	One of the best-selling books.
	I think there's a reason for that.
	Yuval Noah Harari.
	Okay, look. Yes, he didn't do any new research.
	I get that. All he did was aggregate.
	I'm sure he's very controversial in the scientific community.
	But guess what? He wrote a great book.
	It's a very easy-to-read general explanation of the rise of human history.
	And it helps challenge a lot of preconceptions.
	Are we special? Are we an accident?
	Are we more like a parasite?
	Are we not? What is there a destiny to all of us?
	I don't know. You know, if anything, it's like what I just described, which is more.
	Move. Move out.
	The evolution of money.
	Like... I think that that's why it's worth it.
	I agree with you 100%.
	I'm ashamed to...
	I usually don't bring up Sapiens because it's like...
	Yeah, it's like everybody's uncles read it.
	But that's a good thing.
	It is one of the...
	I think you'll be remembered as one of the great books of this particular era.
	Yeah, because it's so clearly...
	It's like the selfish gene with Dawkins.
	I mean, it just aggregates so many ideas together and puts language to it that makes it very useful to talk about.
	So it is one of the great books.
	100%. Another one is definitely Born to Run for the same reason by Christopher McDougall, which is that— I'm just going to listen to this whole podcast next week.
	You have to. You should because you are inheriting our most basic skill, which is running.
	Reimagining human history or reimagining what we were as opposed to what we are is very useful because it helps you understand how to tap into primal aspects of your brain which just drive you.
	And the reason I love McDougall's writing is because I love anybody who writes like this.
	Malcolm Gladwell, who else?
	Michael Lewis, people who find characters to tell a bigger story.
	Michael Lewis finds characters to tell us the story of the financial crisis.
	Malcolm Gladwell finds characters to tell us the story of learning new skills and outliers and whatever his latest book is.
	I forget what it's called. But McDougall...
	Tells the vignettes and a tiny story of a single person in the history of running and like how it's baked into your DNA. And I think there was just something very useful to that for me for being like, I don't need to go to the gym.
	Or like, I'm not saying you should still go to the gym.
	I'll be clear. I'm saying like, in order to fulfill like, who you are, you can actually tap into something that's the most basic.
	I don't know if I'm sure you listen to the David Cho episode with Joe Rogan.
	Oh, where he's the animal?
	Yeah, with the baboon.
	And there's something to that, man.
	There's something to that, which is like, they are living the way that we were supposed to.
	I don't want to put a normative judgment on it.
	They're living in the way that we used to.
	It feels more honest somehow to our true nature.
	There's a guy I follow on Instagram, Paul Saladino, CarnivoreMD.
	He just went over there to the Hadza to live with them.
	And I was watching his stuff just like, I was like, man, there's something in you that wants to go.
	I'm like, I want to do that.
	I wouldn't be very good at it.
	Yeah. I'm so glad that somebody who thinks deeply about politics is so fascinated with exploration and with the very basic nature, like human nature, nature of our existence.
	I love that. There's something in you.
	And still you're stuck in DC. For now, for now.
	Speaking of which, you are from Texas.
	Yes. What do you make of the future of Texas politically, culturally, economically?
	I am in part moving, well, I'm moving to Austin.
	Congrats. But I'm also doing the Eric Weinstein advice, which is like, dude, you're not married, you don't have kids.
	There's no such thing as moving.
	What are you moving?
	You're like, Like, your three suits and some shirts and underwear?
	What exactly does the move entail?
	So I have nothing.
	So I'm basically, you know, it's very just remain mobile.
	But there's a promise, there's a hope to Austin.
	I mean, my...
	Outside of just like friendships, I have no, it's a very different culture that Joe Rogan is creating.
	I'm mostly interested in what the next Silicon Valley will be, what the next hub of technological innovation.
	And there's a promise, maybe a dream for Austin being that next place that doesn't have the baggage of some of the political things, maybe some of the sort of...
	Things that hold back the beauty of That makes capitalism, that makes innovation so powerful, which is like meritocracy, which is excellence.
	Diversity is exceptionally important, but it should not be the only priority.
	It has to be something that coexists with an insatiable drive towards excellence.
	And it seems like Texas is a nice place, like having Austin, which is like a kind of This weird, I hope it stays weird, man.
	I love weird people. I don't know about that, but we can get into it.
	But there's this hope.
	It remains this weird place of brilliant innovation amidst a state that's more conservative.
	So there's a nice balance of everything.
	What are your thoughts about the future of Texas?
	I think it's so fascinating to me because I never thought I would want to move back But now I'm beginning to be convinced.
	You hear that, Joe?
	I'm going to send you this clip. I'm being honest, and many Texans will hate me for this.
	Texas was not a place that was kind to me, quote-unquote.
	And this is because of my...
	I was raised in College Station, Texas, which is a town of 50,000.
	It's a university town.
	It exists only for the university.
	I did not get the full Texas experience, purely speaking, from a College Station experience.
	But growing up, first generation, or I forget what it is.
	I'm the first American.
	I was born and raised in College Station.
	My parents are from India. Being raised in a town where the dominant culture was predominantly white evangelical Christian was hard.
	It was just difficult. In the beginning, I would say ages zero to eight, it was cultural ignorance, as in they just don't know how to interact with you.
	And there was a level of always there was like the evangelical kind of antipathy towards like you being not Christian.
	You know, my parents are Hindu, like that's how I was raised.
	And so like there was that.
	But 9-11 was very difficult.
	Like 9-11 happened when I was in third or fourth grade.
	And that changed everything, man.
	Like, I mean, our temple had to, like, print out t-shirts.
	And I'm not saying this is a sob story, to be clear.
	I've still actually, largely for my adult life, identified on the political right.
	So don't take this as some, like, you know, race manifesto.
	I'm just telling it, like, this is what happened.
	Which is that, like, we had...
	It was just hard to be brown, frankly.
	And to have some of the fallout from 9-11 and during Iraq...
	And the reason I am political is because I realize in myself I have a strong rebellious nature against systems and structures of power.
	And the first people I ever rebelled against were all the people telling me, To shut up and not question the Iraq War.
	So the reason I am in politics is because I hated George W. Bush with a passion, and I hated the war.
	And I was so again, my entire background is largely in national security for this reason, which is I was obsessed
	with the idea of like, how do we get people who are not going to get us into these quagmire situations in positions
	of power?
	That's how I became fascinated by power in the first place was all a question of how do this happen?
	Like, how did this catastrophe happen?
	I realized it's not as bad as like, you know, previous conflicts, but this one was mine.
	And to see how it changed our domestic politics forever.
	And so that was my rebellion.
	But it's funny because I identified as a left on the left when I was growing up, up until I was 18.
	I had also a funny two year stint.
	This is where everything kind of changed for me.
	When I was 16, actually, I moved to Qatar, to Doha, Qatar, because my dad was the dean or associate dean of Texas A&M University at Doha.
	So my last two years of high school were at this.
	I went from this small town in Texas, and I love my parents because they could recognize that I had within me that I was not a small-town kid.
	So they took me out of this country every chance they got.
	I traveled everywhere and constantly let me go.
	I went from school in College Station to this ritzy, private school, American school.
	Best thing that ever happened to me because, first of all, it got me out of College Station.
	Second, I don't know.
	What it is like to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it.
	And I was going to high school with these guys in the Qatari royal family, and all I wanted to do was speak out about how they were pieces of shit for the way that they treated Indian citizens in that country who are basically used as slave labor.
	And I could not say one word because I knew I would be deported and I knew my dad would lose his job and my mom would lose her job and we would be forced out of the country.
	You don't know what it's like to live like that.
	Or to be in a society where, like, you know, you have, like, a high school girlfriend or something, and you can't even touch in public or you're lectured for public decency.
	Like, listen, I've lived under a Gulf monarchy now, and I have—that turned me into the most pro-America guy ever.
	Like, I came back— So, like, America, like, and I still am, frankly, because of that experience.
	Living abroad, like, that will do it to you.
	Live in a non-democracy.
	You have, even in Europe, I would say, you guys aren't living as free as we are here.
	It's awesome, and I love it.
	You're ultimately another human being than the one who left Texas.
	Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, have you actually considered moving to Texas?
	And broadly, just outside of your own story, what do you think is the future of Texas?
	What is the future of Austin? There's so much transformation seemingly happening now related to Silicon Valley, related to California.
	part to me, which is that since I left, it's changed dramatically, which is that it used to be like this
	conservative state where the main money to be made was oil and everybody knew that Petro.
	It was a Petro state, Houston, all of that.
	Austin was always weird, but it was more of a music town and a university town.
	It was not a tech town.
	But in the 10 years or so since I left, I have begun to realize I'm like, well, the Texas I grew up in is over.
	It is not a deep red state in any sense of the term.
	The number one U-Haul route in the country pre-pandemic already was San Francisco to Austin.
	Okay, so like you have this massive influx of people from California and New York.
	And the state, the composition of it is changed dramatically.
	The intra composition and the outra, or yeah.
	So the intra composition, it's become way more urban.
	It's from when I grew up.
	When I grew up, Texas was a much more rural state.
	It's politics were much more static.
	It looked much more like Rick Perry.
	Like that, he was a very accurate representation of who we were.
	Now, I don't think that that's the case.
	Texas is now a dynamic economy, not just 100% reliant on oil
	because of it's kind of like, I would call it like regulatory arbitrage
	relative to California and New York offers a large incentive to people who are more.
	I wouldn't say culturally liberal, but they're not necessarily like culturally conservative like the people who I grew up with.
	That's changed the whole state's politics.
	Beto came two points away from beating Ted Cruz.
	I'm not saying the state's going to go blue.
	I think the Republican Party will just change and we'll have to readjust.
	But the re-urbanization of Texas has made it, I'll put it in this way, much more attractive to me than the place that I grew up.
	And from my perspective, well, first of all, I love some of the cowboy things that Texas stands for.
	But more practically, from my perspective, the injection of the The tech innovation that's moving to Texas has made it very exciting to me.
	It seems like, outside of all that, maybe you can speak to the weird in Austin.
	It seems like, I know that Joe Rogan is a rich, almost mainstream at this point, but he's also attracting a lot of weirdos, and so is Elon.
	And a lot of those weirdos are my friends, and they're like Michael Malice, like those weirdos.
	And it's like, I have a hope for Austin that all kinds of different flavors of weirdos will get injected.
	It's possible. You know, I actually think the most significant thing that happened were Tesla moving there.
	The reason why is I love Joe obviously, but like he can only attract X amount of people. Yeah, Elon actually employs
	thousands of people and then you will also Oracle Oracle's decision to move to Austin is just as
	important because those two men Larry was Ellison right?
	was Ellison, right?
	Yeah, Ellison and Elon they actually employ tens of thousands of people
	Yeah.
	Ellison and Elon, they actually employ tens of thousands of people collectively.
	collectively that can change the nature of the city Yeah, so you combine that with Joe bringing this entire new
	That can change the nature of the city.
	So you combine that with Joe bringing this entire new entertainment complex
	entertainment complex with the bodies of people Who will appreciate said entertainment complex spend money
	with the bodies of people who will appreciate said entertainment complex.
	Spend money on the entertainment.
	on the entertainment exactly Yeah, you just remade the entire city. Yeah, and and that's
	Exactly.
	You just remade the entire city.
	And that's why I'm fascinated.
	that's why I'm fast and obviously there's network effects Which is now that all those people are down there
	And obviously there's network effects, which is now that all those people are down there,
	I mean if I were Elon Musk I would donate a shit ton of money to the University of
	I mean, if I were Elon Musk, I would donate a shit ton of money
	to the University of Texas, and I would turn it into my Stanford for Silicon Valley.
	Texas and I would turn it into my Stanford for Silicon Valley
	Let's introduce some competition and let UT Austin hire the best
	Let's introduce some competition and let UT Austin hire the best software developers,
	software developers engineers professors and more and turn Texas into a true like
	engineers, professors, and more, and turn Texas into a true Austin revolving door hub
	Austin revolving door hub where people come to UT Austin to just as important because those two men, Larry,
	where people come to UT Austin to get an internship at Tesla
	and then become an executive there and then create their own company
	in their own garage in Austin, which is the next Facebook, Twitter.
	That's how it happens.
	This is why I'm much more skeptical of Miami.
	There's a whole like tech Miami crew.
	I'm like, yeah, like there's no university.
	It's very inorganic.
	Look, I think Miami's awesome.
	I just, like, I don't know if the same building blocks are there.
	And also, no multibillion-dollar companies, which employ thousands of people, are coming there.
	That's the ingredient. It's not just Joe Rogan.
	It's not just even Elon Musk, if he still operated in California.
	It's all the people he employs.
	I think that is where...
	Yeah.
	alternative to our it's already become a more urbanized state that's moved away from oil and gas
	in terms of like its emphasis, not necessarily in terms of his real economics. And 10 years from now,
	I don't think it will be necessarily the name prop like of the of the town. The only question to me
	is how that manifests politically, because it's very possible, though, because a lot of these
	workers themselves are California culturally liberal. You could see a Gavin Newsom type person
	getting elected governor of Texas or like the mayor of Austin. I mean, look, Mayor of Austin's
	already a Democrat, right? Like, I mean, Joe has his own problems with Austin. It's funny. I
	remember him leaving L.A. and I'm like, well, I don't know.
	Have you been to Austin? It's not everything it's cracked up to be, necessarily.
	But no matter what, a new place allows the possibility for new ideas, even if they're somehow left-leaning and all those kinds of things.
	I do think the only two things missing from Austin and Texas...
	Our two dudes in a suit that sometimes have a podcast, talk a bunch of nonsense on a mic.
	So let's bring the best suit game to Texas.
	I hope you do make it to Texas at some point.
	Thanks so much for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sagar Anjeti, and thank you to our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly Grammar Assistant, Eight Sleep Self-Cooling Bed, and Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal.
	Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.
	And now, let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr.
	about the idea that what is just and what is legal are not always the same thing.
	He said, never forget that what Hitler did in Germany was legal.

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