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

the following is a conversation with sagar anjeri he is a dc based political correspondent host of the rising with crystal ball and host of the realignment podcast with marshall kozlov he has interviewed donald trump four times and has interviewed a lot of major political figures and human beings who wield power he loves policy and loves history which makes him a great person to sail through the sometimes stormy waters of political discourse he showed up to this conversation with a gift of the second volume of ian kershaw's biography on hitler a two-volume set that is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest if not the greatest most definitive studies of hitler nothing wins my heart faster on a first meeting or first date than a grade book about the darkest aspects of human nature in human history i think i started saying that as a joke but actually there's probably a lot of truth to it i love it when we skip the small talk and go straight to the in-depth conversation about the best and worst of human nature quick mention of our sponsors jordan harbinger show grammarly grammar assistant 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 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 versus blue division instead i'm fascinated by human beings who seek power and how power changes them i don't have a political affiliation and my ideas at least i hope so are defined more by curiosity and learning in the face of uncertainty and less by the echo chambers who tell me what i'm supposed to think i'm constantly evolving learning and doing my best to do so without ego and with empathy please be patient with me as far as i'm aware i do not have any derangement syndromes nor do i get a medical prescription of blue red white or black pills if i say something i say it because i'm genuinely thinking and struggling with the ideas i have no agenda just a bit of a hope to add more love to the world if you enjoyed this thing subscribe on youtube review on apple podcast follow on spotify support it on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with sagar and jetty there's no uh better gifts in this world than a book about hitler so thank you so much i i've gotten a gift when i was what were you talking about yes blind right the watch from joe rogan and this almost beats it so uh so tell me what uh 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 um if you need a one volume rise and fall the third reich right i think you talked about that william shire because that's like hitler's rise nazi germany the war etc but i like bios because it's the 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 poor you know this kid in austria and he's got all these dreams but then actually pretty courageous in terms of world war one right gets pinned to metal on by the kaiser and then what it's like to have to lose world war one and actually like lose this the stain and then the rise within everybody knows that story the beer hall push and all that this one i like and the reason i like kirchhoff 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 um in the second volume just like the the level of detail and you've you've talked about this lex like what was it like inside that room inside with chamberlain like what was it like in terms of who was this like magnetic madman who did convince the smartest people in the world at the time and you know up until like 1940 the soviet gamble like was a trump he took tremendous risks but like highly calculated thinking no no i'm not gonna pay for this one i'm not gonna pay for this one and it put himself he had a remarkable ability not just to put himself in the minds of the german people but in terms of his adversaries like with when he was across from mussolini cow kill he's like how exactly did mussolini the guy who created fascism becomes like second fiddle to hitler i think it's an amazing bio and yeah like ian kershaw along with richard evans two of my favorite authors on the third reich no question do you think he was born this way that charisma whatever that is or was it something he developed strategically that's like the question you applied to some of the great leaders was he just a madman who had the instinct to be able to control people when in the room together with them or is this like he worked at it i think he worked at it and but but also there is an innate quality i'm forgetting his name his lifelong rudolph the one who flew to berlin in like 1940 anyway so he he helped hitler write minecon and he was like slavishly devoted to him in prison this is 1925 or something like that and so you read that and you're like well how does he get this like crank wacko to basically believe he's like the second coming help him write this book i mean literally they lived together in the prison cell and they would wake up every day and as he was composing mineconf and because of the beer hall putch and all that had this like absolute ability to gather people around him i think his greatest skill was is he was just a very good politician truly i mean if you look at his ability in order to read coalitional politics and then convince exactly the right people in order to follow him i think i heard you ask this once and i've thought about it a lot which is like who could have stopped hitler in germany right like it's always like the ever-present question of course like the whole baby kittler 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 then and didn't like him and he knew he was full of shit he was like yeah i think the sky 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 uh convince the generals the military i mean that was that was very interesting and to convince chamberlain and the other political leaders there's that's something i often think about because we're just reading books about these people i think about what 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 carl and they go people that do evil things i wonder what they are like in a room because i know quite a lot of intelligent people that were did not see uh did not see the evil in jeffrey epstein and spend time with him and not were not bothered by in the same sense hitler it seems like he was able to get just even on before he would have power because people get intoxicated by power and so on they want to be close to power but even before he had power he was able to convince people and it's unclear like is there something that's more than words it's like the way you i mean that people talk tell stories about like this piercing look or whatever all that kind of stuff i i wonder if that if that's somehow a part of it like that has to be the base floor of any of these charismatic leaders you have to be able to in a room alone be able to convince anybody of anything so i can tell you from my personal experience one of the best educated lessons i got was when i got to meet trump so i interviewed trump four different times as a journalist spent like two and a half hours with him in the oval office not alone but like me and one person and like the press secretary and that was it so i actually got to observe him and as a guy who reads these types of books right and you know you think of trump obviously most people what they see on television you know in articles and more but being able to observe it like one-on-one i was closer to him than you know than i am right now from you that was one of the most educational experiences i got because it's like you just said the look the the leaning forward the way he talks he the way he is a master at taking the question and answering exactly which party wants and then if you try and follow up he's like excuse me you know like he knows and then whenever you're talk it's not that he's annoyed about getting interrupted if he realizes he's been miranda and then you interrupt him all good but if he's driving home a point which he has to make sure appears in your transcript or whatever it's it's like it really was fascinating for me to look at and what was also crazy with trump is i realized how much he was living in the moment so like when i went to the oval you know i've read all these biographies and like i walk in i'm like holy shit you're like i'm in the oval office well you interviewed him in the oval office noble every time i was in the oval office you're scared shitless sorry 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 admit this here like i printed out on my dad's label maker when i was like seven and i wrote like the oval office on my bedroom so i was like you know a huge nerd like obviously you go maniacal even from seven but so like for this i mean it was huge right i'm like this 25 year old kid and like i walk in there and like i see the couch right and i'm like oh man like that's kissinger like you know i'm like that's where like kissinger and nixon got on their knees and you see over by the door and you're like are the scuff marks still there from when eisenhower used to play it you know this is all running through my mind yeah trump none of it was there yeah none of it right so like in the moment even the desk i put my phone on the desk to record yeah and i'm like this is the fucking resolution like i shouldn't put my phone on this thing yeah and and i'm like hms resolute you know all the international and even for him he doesn't think about any of it it was like amazing to me like he had this portrait of andrew jackson right next to his to the uh i think from on the fireplace like right here on the right and the most revealing question was when i was like mr president what are people gonna remember you for in a hundred years and he was like he had he was like i don't know like veteran's choice he like has a list in front of him of like his accomplishments which is station by the way yeah well i i mean that's what i wanted to know and he's like veteran's choice and i remember looking at him being like it's not going to be better you feel like i'd be like i'm like i'm looking at you donald trump the harbinger of something new yeah we still don't know what the hell it is and so i realized with these guys and their charisma and more is that they don't think about themselves the way that we think about them and that was actually important to understand because a lot of people like trump is playing all this chess i'm like i assure you he's not like he's truly living one time i was interviewing him and he had like a certificate that he had to sign or something on his desk he's like it was like child almost like he got distracted by he's like oh what's this you know he's just like picking up and i was like wow like this this is the guy like this is what he is well i wonder if there was a different person because you were recording then it's like offline and 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 that was not on the record so like whenever he's off the record he changes completely right i i don't want to like go into too much of it or whatever but like he uh 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 um i think the most revealing thing trump ever did was there was this press conference like right after he lost you the right after the midterm elections in 2018 and one of the journalists was like mr president thank you for doing this press conference and he looks at him and he goes it's called earned media it's worth billions he just he just like had so much disdain for him because he's like i'm not doing this for you he's like i'm doing this for me so he's really aware of the narrative story i mean that the people have talked about that all comes from the tabloid media of the from new york and so on he's a master of that but i've also heard stories of just in private he's a really i don't want to overuse the word charismatic but just like he is a really interesting almost like um friendly like a good person like like that's what i heard uh i've heard actually surprising the same thing about hillary clinton uh and like but like the the way they present themselves is perhaps very different than they are as human beings one-on-one that that's something uh maybe that's just like a skill thing maybe maybe the way they present themselves in public is actually their their uh 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 i would notice that with trump you know he's like it's almost like a tour guide it was very like it's it's very crazy right because you're like you're in the oval i mean it's his office and he's like he's like do you guys want anything he's like he want a diet coke because he drinks like all this diet coke that's like you know what he's great apologize yeah he's just like he's like you guys want a diet coke right and you're sitting there and you're like the way he he's able to like like the last time i interviewed him he he wanted to do it outside um because he like he's studied himself from all angles and he knows exactly how he looks on a camera and with the witch 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 yeah i was like you are your own like lightning director yeah the president is great it's so funny but it's like you said he's he's very charismatic and if friendly i mean you wouldn't i mean look this is what i mean in terms of dynamism of these people that gets lost and i think even he knows that like i don't think he would want that side of him that i see you know they've seen those off the record moments and more in order to come out because he's very keen about how exactly he presents to the public it's like you know even his presidential portrait everybody usually smiles and he refused to smile he was like i want to look like winston churchill you know like even he knew that do you think he believes that he um what what he kind of implies that he is one of if not the greatest presidents in american history like people kind of laugh at this but there's quite i mean there's quite a lot of people first of all that make the argument that he's the greatest president in history like i've heard this argument being made and i mean i don't know what the first of all i don't care like you can't make an argument that anyone is the greatest that's just that just uh i i come from a school of like being humble and modest and so on it's like even michael you can't have a conversation okay uh so i like that he's humble enough to say like uh abraham lincoln and whatever like i don't know he says maybe lincoln maybe remember that do you think he actually believes that or is that something he understands will uh create news and also perhaps more importantly piss off a large number of people is is he almost like a musician masterfully playing the emotions of the public or does he or or and does he believe when he looks in the mirror i'm one of the greatest men in history combination of all three um i do think he believes it and for the reason why is i don't think he knows that much about us history i i really mean that like and that's what i meant whenever i was in there and i realized he was just living in the moment i don't think he knew all that much about why i mean this is why i was elected in many ways right so i'm not i'm not saying this is an orbit like i'm not making a judgment on this i'm just saying i do think in his mind he does think he was one of the best presidents in american history largely because and i encountered this a lot of people work for him which is that they didn't really know all that much kind of about what came before and all that and it's not necessarily to hold it against them because for in many ways it'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 a is productive or counterproductive i tend to assume i really respect people who are deeply like well read in history like presidents that are almost like nerd history nerds i admire that uh but maybe that gets in the way well it's well governance i don't know it's not it's not you know i'm just sort of playing devil's advocate to my own beliefs but it's possible that focusing on the moment and the issues and letting history it's like first principles thinking forget the lessons of the past and just focus on common sense reasoning through the problems of today yeah it's really hard question in terms of the modern era i mean obama was a student of history like he used to have presidential biographers and people over and i mean famously like robert de 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 every 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 he's just such a badass jesus incredible the only the only president who willed himself to greatness that's like the amazing thing about him he wasn't tested by a crisis right like it wasn't not he didn't have civil war he didn't have world war ii he didn't have to found the country literally or like you know didn't have to stave off that or he didn't buy you know louisiana purchase like all that he literally came into a pretty you know static country and he could have just governed you know with i mean he was the person who came before him was assassinated like he easily could have coasted but he literally willed the country into something more and that is that's always why i focused a lot on him too because i'm like that in many ways i wouldn't say it's easy to be great during crisis i mean like look at trump right but like but there it can bring out the best within you yes but it's a whole other level to bring out the best within yourself just for the sake of doing it yeah that's what i think is really interesting the speeches were amazing i'm also a sucker for great speeches because i i tend to uh see the role the president is in part like inspire in chief sort of uh 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 like like hit that hard but the way you establish division isn't just like not to dig at joe biden but like like sleepy boring statements you have to sell those statements and you have to you know you have to do it in a way where everybody's paying attention everybody's excited yes and uh that uh teddy roosevelt was definitely one of them obama was i think at least early on i i don't know uh was incredible at that it does feel that the modern political landscape makes it more difficult to be inspirational in the sense because everything becomes bickering in division i do want to ask you please about trump us you're now a successful podcaster i've talked to joe about trump uh joe rogan and joe's not interested in talking to trump it's just fascinating i try to dig into like why yeah uh what would you interview uh trump on like realignment for example and uh do you think it's possible to do a two three hour conversation with him where you will get at something like human or you get something like we were talking about the facade he puts forward do you think you could get past that no i don't i i look i was a white house correspondent i observed i observed this man very closely i interviewed him i think if that mic is hot he knows what he's doing he just he's 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 don't i think he's been the same person since 1976. i i really do like basically 1976 i studied trump a lot and i think he's basically been the core of who he is and elements of that ever since he built that cent you know the ice rink in central park and got that media attention that was it yeah he's a fascinating study i still i feel uh there's a hope in me that there would be a podcast like uh like a joe rogan like a long form pockets 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 i just love it when um there's this switch in people where you start start looking back at your life and wanting to tell stories like you know trying to extract wisdom and like realizing you're in this new phase of life where like the battles have all been fought now you're this old like 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 like because and this is what i mean because he lives in the moment like the job actually aged obama i mean i mean bush same thing even clinton clinton was like fat yeah 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 knows he doesn't have to do it he almost 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 he's it was i mean it was uh whatever it was it was uh quite masterful and and a fascinating study i if we um if we stick on uh hitler for just a minute uh 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 you know is it something that's just an outlier in all of humans history in terms of the atrocities or is there uh the lessons to be learned you mentioned we mentioned offline that you're not just a student of the entirety of the history but you also are fascinated by just different like policies and stuff like what's the immigration policy what's the policy on science and look third reich in power let me plug it by richard uh richard evans i think is what it was because that actually will tell you like what was it like to live under the nazi regime without the war yeah um 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 it's 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 the state you know wars between france england the balance of power eventually world war one 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 one and then same thing within china in terms of the warring states and then the disintegration the european you know how this is how they think of it you know which is like the center of humiliation and they had to have something like this i think of it i try to think of it within the context of that i don't want to think of i don't want to sound like an inevitabilist but i think of it as i like to think about systems especially here in dc that's why i got into politics which is that you have to understand systems of power and the incentives within systems and the disincentives and the downside risk of what you're pur of what you're creating because it that is what leads and creates the behavior within that system i was just talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday it's kind of funny like i read these i'm obsessed with these books um by robert carro the biographies of lyndon johnson he's written like 5 000 pages so far and it's still not done okay so like these are these are like books i base my life on and look these are washington and the story of the post new deal era and forward not much has changed like the senate is the still the senate so many of the same problems with the senate are still there um in some cases no not not anymore but for a while some of the people who were there with johnson are actually still um 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 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 the 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's house like the people are congregating in calorama um which is the richest neighborhood here at somebody else's house like it's the same thing so you have to think about the system and then the incentives within that system about what the outcomes that they're producing if you actually want to think about how can i change this from the outside that's also why it's very difficult to change because the system is designed in order to produce actually pretty specific outcomes that can only be changed in extraordinary times yeah and sometimes hard to to predict what kind of outcomes will result from the incentive uh the system that you create right right in the case because especially when it's novel kind of situations what trump actually created a pretty novel situation and a lot of the uh things that we've seen in the 20th century were very novel systems where people were very optimistic about the the the outcomes right and then it turned out to not have the results that they predicted i in terms of like things being unchanged for the past hundred years and so on can you um like wikipedia style or maybe like in in a musical form like i'm only a bill describe to me uh i i still sing that to my head sometimes i'm just a bill uh i don't know what the rest of the song is but let's let's uh let's leave that to people's imagination uh how how does this whole thing work how does the us political system work the three branches is 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 should we destroy you yeah and be as you plead to avoid destruction how how would you uh 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 so that's the people who make the laws are congress the executive is is charged with executing the laws as passed by congress the system 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 they decide whether those laws are in they fall within the they fall within the restrictions and the want of the founders as expressed by the constitution of the united states which is a set of principles that we came together in 1787. i want to make sure i get this right um 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 there's a balance of power there's because we have multiple branches there's attention and a balance to it as designed by those original documents uh what which is the most dysfunctional the branches which is your favorite like uh in terms of talking about systems and like what's the greatest of concern and what is the greatest source of benefit in your view the presidency obvious well the presidency is my favorite to study obviously because it is the one where there's the most subjective variable change in terms of the personality involved because of so much power imbued within the executive the senate is actually pretty much the same one of the things i love about reading about the senate and histories of the senate is you're like oh yeah there were always like assholes in the senate who were doing their thing and and you know filibustering constantly based upon this or that and then the pers 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 et cetera 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 the president has is corrupting to the to their ability to lead well is this is you know uh power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely are we uh is there too much power in the in the presidency there definitely is and part of the problem i 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 him with a pretty intentional view he was like i'm gonna 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 we'll give you 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 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 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 yeah and by that time now you're midterms so now what now you gotta 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 gonna 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 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 and all but like obviously there's a deep state deep state i guess has conspiratorial attention to it but so you're 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 and 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 yeah and that's the problem which is that we have a culture of within many of these agencies and more i think the best example for this would be during the ukraine you know gate with trump and all that with the impeachment now i'm not talking about the politics here but the most revealing thing that happened was when the whistleblower guy alexander vinman was like here you have the president departing from the policy of the united states and i was like well um let me educate you lieutenant colonel um the president of the united states makes american foreign policy yeah but it was a very revealing comment because he and me all the people within national security bureaucracy do think that they're like this is the policy of the united states it's we we have to do this that's where things get screwy well listen for me personally yeah 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 in uh when you're trying to innovate and design new like products right so like that's the that's what first principles thinking requires is like 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 uh the current government government in general probably bureaucracies in general are just really good at being lazy about never having those conversations and just it becomes this momentum thing that nobody has the difficult conversations it's become a game within a certain set of constraints and they never kind of do revolutionary tasks but you did say that the presidency has power but you're saying that more power than the others and but that power has to be coupled with like focused intentionality like you have to keep hammering the thing if you want it done it has to be done i mean and you 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 100 people who you can trust to pick 10 people each to actually do what you want one of the most revealing quotes is from a guy named tommy corcoran he was the top aide to fdr this i'm getting from the cara books too and he said what is a government it's not just one guy or even 10 guys hell it's a thousand guys and what fdr did is he masterfully picked the right people to execute his will through the federal agencies johnson was the same way he played these people like a fiddle he knew exactly who to pick he knew the system and more part of the reason that outsiders who don't have a lot of experience in washington almost always fail is they don't know who to pick or they pick people who say one thing to their face and then when it comes time to carry out the president's policy in terms of the government they just don't do it and the president's too think about this i think some rahm emanuel said this he was like by the time it gets to the president's desk nobody else can solve it it's not easy it's not like a yes or no question it's every single thing that hits the president's desk is incredibly hard to do and obama actually even said and this was a very revealing quote about how how he thinks about the presidency which is he's like look the presidency is like one of those super tankers you know he's like i can come in and i can make it two degrees left and two degrees right in a hundred years two degrees left that's a whole different trajectory yeah 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're making me realize that um 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 like elon musk whose major success despite everything is is hiring the right people exactly 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 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 yeah that's what happened what happened with trump he hired all the bush people and then you sit back and say oh president can't but that means you're just sucking hiring correct yeah i mean look i know it's funny i'm giving you simultaneously the nationalist case against trump yeah 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 the bailouts were gonna be big enough and then to come in in the worst economic crisis in modern american history that was 2008 and summers actively lobbied against larger bailouts which had huge implications for working class people and pretty much hollowed out america since okay from trump same thing you're like i'm gonna drain the swamp and by doing that i'm gonna hire goldman sachs as 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 this is money huge influence in politics uh super pacs all that kind of stuff or is this is this more just kind of a narrative that we play with because from the outsider's perspective it seems to have that seems to be one of the fundamental problems with modern politics so i was just having this conversation marshall and i marshall castle of 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 uh campaign finance as in it's never been more transparent it's never been more up to the f 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 boats 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 distribution um which is that how is money distributed with an artist 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 like 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 um 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 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 yeah that's one so in that sense representative government is doing a pretty good job of representing it is the state of culture and the people and so on yeah uh can i ask you uh in terms of um you know the deep state and conspiracy theories there's a lot of talk about so again from an outsider's perspective if i were just looking at twitter it seems that at least ninety percent 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 yeah i would start to wonder like wait am i like what am i a pedophile too i'm either a communist or a pedophile or both i guess uh yeah that's going to be clipped out thank you internet i look forward to your emails uh but is there any kind of shadow conspiracy theories that uh give you pause or um so the flip side the response to a lot of conspiracy theories it's like no the reason this happened is because it's a combination of just incompetence so where do you land on some of these uh conspiracy theories i think most conspiracy theories are wrong some are true and those are spectacularly true and if that makes sense yeah um i and we don't know which ones i don't know which one that's the problem i think oh well i mean look man i listened to your podcast i think i was a huge non-believer in ufos and now i've probably never believed more in uf like i 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 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 fraber that's all i have to say that's it well i 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 exactly they just they have seen things they don't know what to do with so it's like they're confused like they're afraid yeah of revealing that they don't know that's what i think it is right it's revealing the yeah exactly you don't know and then they're in the process there's a lot of fears tied up in that first looking incompetent in the public eye nobody wants to be uh looked that way and the other is like in revealing it even though they don't know maybe china will figure it out exactly so like we don't want china to figure it out first and so that all those kinds of things result in basically secrecy then that damages the trust in institutions on one of the most fascinating aspects like one of the most fascinating mysteries of humankind of is there life intelligent life out there in the universe so that's one of them but there there's other ones like uh for me when i first came across actually alex jones was 9 11. yeah i remember like because i was um i was in chicago i was thinking like oh shit are they gonna hit chicago too that's what everybody was thinking yeah everybody everybody was thinking like what does this mean let's get what scale what i mean trying to interpret it and i remember like looking for information that's been like what what happened what and i remember not being satisfied with the quality of reporting and figuring out like rigorous like here's exactly what happened and so people like alex jones stepped up and others that said like there's some shady shit going on and it sure as hell looked like there's shady shit going on yes uh so like and i still stand behind the fact that it seems like there's not i there's and then i mean that is 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 uh the institution that means a lot to me is mit and uh you know jeffrey epstein yeah i want to hear a lot more i want to hear about that i talk about epstein a lot so i'm like oh you do yeah and and he i was going to say in terms of conspiracy theory that one changed my outlook because i was like i was like whoa like you have this dude who convinced some of the most successful people on earth that he was like some money manager and it looks like it was totally fake like leon black i mean this is one of the richest men on wall street nine billion dollar net worth why has he given him over a hundred million dollars between 2015 and 2019 yeah what's going on here lex wexner same thing so yeah i want to hear because you know people who met him and the only person i know who met him was eric weinstein i've heard his right oh boy so i listen i'm still lynn and eric is fascinating and like eric is full-on saying that he was a mossad or uh something much much bigger um and there's uh whatever his name robert maxwell all the 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 like deep understanding the situation but for my speaking with people he just seems like at least from the side of his influence and interaction with researchers he just seems like somebody that was exceptionally charismatic and actually took interest he was unable to speak about interesting scientific things but he took interest in them so he knew how to stroke the egos of a lot of powerful people like well like in in different kinds of ways i suppose i don't know about this because i don't have like if a really okay this is this is weird to say but i have an ability okay i think women are beautiful i like women but like if if like a supermodel came to me or something like like i'm able to reason it seems like some people yes are not able to think clearly when there's like an attractive woman in the room and i think that was one of the tools he used to manipulate people interesting i don't know listen it's like the pedophile thing right i don't know how many people are complete sex addicts but like it seems like like looking out into the world like there's a with like the metoo movement have revealed that there's a lot of like weird like uh creepy people out there i don't know but i think it was just one of the many tools that he used uh to uh convince people and manipulate people but not in some like um evil way but more just really good at the art of conversation and just winning people over on the side and then by building through that process building a network of other really powerful people and not explicitly but implicitly having done shady shit with powerful people yeah like building up a kind of implied power of like like we did some shady shit together so we're not like you're going to help me out on this extra thing i need to know 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 or 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 that becomes almost like a really powerful organization that wasn't that's not a front for something much deeper and bigger but it's almost like maybe it's because i love cellular automata man a system that starts out as a simple thing with simple rules can create incredible complexity yes and so i just think that uh we're now looking in retrospect it looks like an incredibly complex system that's operating in but like that's just because it's you know there could be a lot of other jeffrey epstein's in in my perspective that this simple thing just uh was successful early on it builds and builds and builds and builds and then there's uh creepy shit that like a lot of aspects of the system helped it get bigger and bigger and more powerful and so on so the final result is i mean listen i have a pretty optimistic i have i tend to see the good in people and so it's been heartbreaking to me in general just to see you know people i look up to not have the level of integrity i thought they would or like the strength of character all those kinds of things and it seems like you should be able to to see the bullshit that is jeffrey epstein like when you meet him right uh we're not talking about like eric weinstein like one or two or three or five interactions but like there's people that had like like years of relationship with him yeah and i don't know i i'm not sure even after he was convicted after he was convicted yeah there's there's stories i mean i don't need to sort of uh i honestly believe okay here's the open question i have i don't know how many creepy sexual people that are out there like i don't know if there's like like the people i know the faculty and so on i don't know if they have like a kink that i'm just not aware of that was being leveraged because to me it seems like if if if people aren't if not everybody's a pedophile [Laughter] then it's just the art of conversation that is just like the art of just like manipulating people by making them feel good about like the exciting stuff they're doing listen man academics are people talk about money i don't think academics care about money as much as people think what they care about is like somebody they they want to be uh it's the same thing that instagram models post in their butt pictures is they want to be loved they want attention my parents are professors yeah they they and jeff epstein the money is another way to show attention right it's my work matters and and and he for some of he did that for some of the weirdest most brilliant people i don't want to sort of drop names but everybody knows them it's like people that are the most interesting academics is the one he cared about yeah like people are thinking about the most difficult questions of in all of science and all of engineering so those people are we're kind of outcasts in academia a little bit because they're doing the weird shit they were the weirdos and he cared about the weirdos and he gave them money and that uh you know i that's i don't know if there's something more nefarious than that i i i hope not but maybe i'm surprised and in fact the half the population of the world is pedophiles no i i think it's what you were talking about which is that it's the it's the implication after the initial right like you do some shady things together or you do something that you want out of the public eye and you're a public person and look we probably even experienced this to a limited extent right you're like you know like i don't wanna i don't 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 that you know like what if somebody takes a photo or something yeah and so i think that there's an extent to that times a billion literally when you have a billion dollars or more and you take that all together and you stack it up on itself i saw a story about like bill clinton like bill clinton was with epstein or with gelane maxwell in a private air terminal or something and she had one of their like sex you know one of those girls who was underage had her dressed up in a literal like pilot uniform and she was underage in order to you know and she was just being disguised for being older and she was a masseuse right because that was one of the uh guyses 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 gouffrey was underage i don't know probably knew she was pretty young which i think is you know skeevy enough where if you're a fucking prince you should probably know better yeah but i don't think he knew she was underage or maybe he did and if he did and he's even more of a piece of shit than i thought but we when we when we look at these things the 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 yeah like under what got 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 that's where i start again to get more conspiratorial because i'm like bill dude you can you have the gold credit right like you don't need epstein to create some complicated financing structure or leon black like what is 2015 2009 i mean this is very recent stuff or and this is the part that really got me as i read the depart i think it's called the department of financial services report around deutsche bank with epstein the news 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 epson'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 by their own standards is supposed to result in a notification to the feds and they never did it and he was withdrawing like two million dollars of cash in five years for tips yeah i'm like okay like something's going on here you see what i'm saying there's a lot of signs that make you think that there is a bigger thing at play than just a man that there is some it does look like a larger organization is using this front right it's again i don't know i 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 wants one hundred years the search is always the problem because that 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 uh either they're sure that the conspiracy theory particular whatever the conspiracy theories is false like they almost dismiss it like like they don't even want to talk about 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 what the flat earthers are saying they don't have like zero patience for it which is like maybe in that case yeah it's deserved but everything else you really like have empathy like consider the f you have okay this is weird to say but i feel like you have to consider that the earth might be flat for like one minute like you have to be empathetic you have to be open-minded i don't see a lot of that there are cultural taste makers and more and that's that really is what concerns me the most because it's just another manifestation of all of our problems it's that we have this completely bifurcating economy bifurcating culture literally in terms of we have the middle of the country and then we have the coast and in terms of the population it's almost 50 50 and with you know increasing 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 go when you dick to the core there is a big there's a big gap between left and right is there is that division that that's perceived currently real or are most people look center left and center right it's so interesting because that's such a loaded term center left what does that mean like so 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 uh i'm marginally left on cultural issues and economic issues this is how we've traditionally understood things um and then when when in popular discourse like center right like what does it mean to be center right like i am marginally right on socially on conservat on social issues and marginally right on economic issues yeah but that's just not politic like if you look at survey data for example like uh stimulus checks people who are against stimulus checks are conservative right well eighty percent of the population is first stimulus check so that means a sizable number of republicans are for stimulus checks same thing happens on like a wealth tax um the 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 yeah so what's going on so that's why what is going on well that's my entire career no but but it seems like uh so that's that's fascinating yeah 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 dismisses 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 people who do go to a college degree who are republicans or vice versa et cetera but i'm saying on average in terms of the median way that you feel we're basically bifurcating along those lines and because people get upset be like oh well you know there are rich people who vote for trump and i'm like yeah but you know you know who they are they're like plumbers or something like they're people who make a hundred thousand dollars a year but they didn't go to a four-year college degree and they might live who are in a place which is not an urban metro area and then at the same time you have like a vox rider who makes like 30 grand but they have a lot more cultural power than like the plumber so you have to think about where exactly that line is and i think in general that's the way that we're trending so that's why when i say like what's going on are we divided yeah like but it's not left and right i mean like and that's why i hate these labels so it's more it's more just red and blue like teams they're arbitrary teams yeah are they so how arbitrary are these teams i guess is another completely arbitrary so yeah well you kind of imply that there's i don't know if you're sort of in post analyzing the patterns because it seems like there's a network effects of like you just pick the team red or blue and it might have to do with college you might have to do all those things but like it it seems like it's more about uh 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 it's almost like uh weird right like network effects that are hard there's certain strong patterns correct you're identifying but i don't know it's sad to think that it might be just teams that have nothing to do with what you actually believe well it is lex i look i mean i don't want to believe that but the data points me to this which especially 2020. i'm one of the people chief among them i will own up to it here i was totally wrong about why trump was elected in 2016. i believed and based a lot of my public commentary beliefs on this trump was elected because of a rejection of hillary clinton neo-liberalism on the back of a pro-worker message which was anti-immigration it was its pillar but alongside of it was a rejection of free trade with china and generally of the political correctness and globalism which has been come in through the uniparty and same thing here with the military industrial complex and endless war he rejected all of that wait what's wrong with that prediction it's wrong man and the reason i know this is that it sounds right i wish it i honestly wish it was true but here's the truth trump actually governed largely as a neo-liberal 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 agenda 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 it's the same for the other side well so on the right the number one concern is illegal immigration um and number i think three or four or whatever is antifa which is code four from the right is the policy well 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 the i mean you can believe whether it's a true or not i think it actually largely is true but like the a lot of gop voters feel like a lot of illegal immigration is code for like people who are coming in who are going to be legalized and are going to go vote democrat like i can i can just explain it from their point of view so like what does that actually mean each other like yeah each other which is that the number one concern is the other person so negative partisanship has never been higher and i think people who had my thesis in terms of why trump was elected in 2016 you have to grapple with this like how did he win 10 million more votes he came 44 000 votes away from winning the presidency across three states like i don't none of our popular discourse reflects that very stark reality and i think so much of it is people really hate liberals like they just really hate them and i was driving through rural nevada before the election and i was like literally in the middle of nowhere and there was this massive sign this guy had out in front of his house and it just said trump colon fuck your feelings and i was like that's it that is why people voted for trump and i don't want to denigrate it because they truly feel they have no cultural power in america except to raise the middle finger to the elite class by pressing the button for trump i get that that's actually a totally rational way to vote it's not the way i wish we did vote but like you know it's not my place to say so yeah this is interesting if you could just psychoanalyze i'm again i'm probably naive about this but i'm really bothered by the hatred of liberals it's uh 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 yeah uh the the trump and and white supremacist so apparently 70 there's 70 million white supremacists 75 million sorry there's millions of white supremacists and apparently whatever liberal is i mean lib you know you literally liberal has become equivalent to white supremacists in the power of negativity it arouses i don't even know what those i mean honestly i just don't they've become swears essentially uh is that i mean how do we get out of this because that uh that's why i just don't even say anything about politics online because it's like really like you you can't you if here's what happens anything you say that's like thoughtful like hmm i wonder like immigration something right i wonder like why you know uh we have these many we allow these many immigrants in or some version of the like thinking through these difficult policies and so on that they'll immediately try to find like a single word in something you say they can put you in a bin of liberal or white supremacist and then hammer you to death by saying you're one of the two and then everybody just piles on happily that we finally nailed this white supremacist or liberal and that is this some kind of weird like feature of online communication that we've just stumbled upon is there a way or is it possible to argue that this is like a feature not a bug like this is a 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 i can 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 uh when you look at anything that's gonna increase wages um i i said on the show i was like look i think joe biden will have a 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 isn't part of a reason why trump almost won the election and why if the republicans had been smart enough to give him a 2000 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 yeah 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 you're considering it you're 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 1400 checks but he's looping it in with his coveted 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 say they'll vote for a two thousand dollar check and i would put that on the floor of the united states senate on my you know first or 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 in his 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 hundred days we are on day like 34 35 and nothing is passed the reconciliation bill will eventually become law but it will become law with no republican votes and again that's fine if 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 yeah 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 is makes perfect sounds like take yeah okay it's like it's like again if the aliens showed up it's like the obvious thing to do is like what's the popular thing like 80 of americans support this like do that clean uh also do it like with like grace where you're able to bring people together not like in a political way but like obvious like obvious common sense way like uh just people the republicans the democrats just bring them together on a policy and like bold just hammer it without the dirt without the mess whatever tried to compromise just the yell with have a good twitter account like loud very clear we're gonna give a two thousand dollar stimulus check anyone who wants a vaccine guess a vaccine at scale would make america let's make america great again by manufacturing like we are manufacturing most of the world's vaccine because we're bad motherfuckers yeah and without maybe uh with more eloquence than that and and just do that why haven't we seen that for many for several presidencies because of coalitional politics and they owe something to somebody else for example biden has got a lot of the democratic constituency has to satisfy within this bill so there's gonna be a lot of shit that goes in there state and local aid um 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 gonna 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 push back to me they're like why would we give away the most popular thing in the bill and then we would never be able to pass state and local aid right why would we do that and the republicans are the same thing right like mitch mcconnell because he's a fucking idiot decided to say we're gonna pair these two thousand dollar stimulus checks with like section 230 repeal it was like oh it's obviously dead right like it's not gonna 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 long-standing things that they've wanted to get done and in the words of rahm emanuel never let a good crisis go to waste and try and get as much as you possibly can done within a single bill my counter would be this things have worked this way for too long which is that the reconciliation bill is almost certainly going to be the only large signature legislative accomplishment of the biden presidency that's just how american politics works maybe he gets one more maybe one he gets a second reconciliation bill then you're running for midterms it's over i believe that by trying to change the paradigm of our politics leaning into exactly what i'm talking here you could possibly transcend that to a new one and i'm not naive i think people respond to political pressures and the way that we found this out was david perdue who was just a total corporate you know dollar jor dollar general ceo guy he was against the original 1200 stimulus checks but then trump came out who's the single most popular figure in the republican party he's like i want two thousand dollar stimulus checks and all of a sudden purdue 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 yeah so this is this is what we've been gaslit into our culture war framework of politics and the reason it feels so broken and awful is because it is but there is a way out it's just that nobody wants to be it's a game of chicken right because maybe it is true maybe we would never be able to get your other democratic priorities or republican priorities but i think that the country understands that this is fucking terrible and would be willing to support somebody who does it differently there's just a lot of disincentives to not stay without there's 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 the the superstars away from politics so like you just had this argument before i mean everything you're saying sort of uh rings true like this is the obvious thing to do as a student of history you can almost like tell like if you look at great people in history this is what great leaders in history this is what they did it's like uh clean bold action uh sometimes facing crisis but we're facing a crisis no we're in a christ so why don't we uh uh why don't we see those leaders step up that's i mean you say that's kind of like it makes sense there's a lot of different interests to play you don't want to risk too many things so on so forth but that's what like that sounds like the c students i don't think it's that i think it's that the pipeline of politician creation is just totally broken from beginning to end so it's not that ace students don't want to be uh politicians it's basically the way that our current primary system is constructed is what is the greatest threat to you as a member of congress it's not losing your reelection it's losing your primary right so that means especially in a safe district you're most concerned about being hit if you're a republican from the right if you're a democrat from the left for not being a good enough one that's actually what stops people more heterodox people in particular from winning primaries because the people who vote in our primaries are the party faithful that's how you get the production the production it's important to understand the production pipeline which is that all right i'm from texas so that's what i know best so it's like if you think in texas if you're a more heterodox like state legislature or something who's real 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 yeah that's that's powerful man 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 that means uh that means a lot that means you're absolutely right there's young people right now that kind of look turn around like huh you're like wait i don't have to comb my hair a certain way yeah and go to law school and be an asshole who everybody knows is an asshole yeah and and then get elected to state legislature i mean look who's the number one person in the new york prime or new york city uh primary right now andrew yang he's polling higher than everybody else in the race i look maybe the polls are totally fucked and maybe he'll lose because of ranked choice voting and all that but i consider andrew i mean i know him a little bit and i've you know 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'll 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 cr you know yeah he like he like brought that that he brought that and he's writing like yeah why are they're all wearing makeup he probably arguably hasn't gone far enough almost yes uh but he showed that as possible and then you 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 don't know judgment of it yeah i will tell you the future of politics appreciate the art of it right no i do look i don't i'm not a big aoc fan but she's a genius media genius once in a generation talent the way that she uses social media instagram and everybody on the right is like trying to copy her like matt gates like i want to be the conservative aoc i'm like it's just not gonna happen dude like it you just don't have it like what she has it's like it's electric and trump had that like i've been to a trump rally like to cover as a journalist there's nothing like it in america and yang is similar it's the same way where you're like there is something going on here which is just like i've been to an obama rally i've been to a clinton rally i've been to um several normal politics that's fine you know with trump and with yang it was it's another world yeah it's another world yeah there's there's probably thousands of people listening right now who are just like doing a yes slow clap yes i know i know uh yang gang uh forever okay but uh yeah i mean my worst fear i i prefer yeah uh uh andrew yang kind of free uh 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 think she's 30 so she needs five more years so probably not yeah okay but that kind of yeah that that's or trump jr well aoc probably wouldn't win a democratic primary so i mean look joe biden is you know that's pretty much showed that that's exactly what you're saying yeah this process grooms you over time it's you see the same thing in academia actually which is very interesting is the the process of getting tenure there's this it's like you're being taught without explicitly being taught yes to behave in the way that everybody's behaved before i've heard this it was funny i've had a few conversations that um were deeply disappointing which which are which involved statements like this is what's good for your career yes this kind of conversation almost like mentor to mentee conversation or it's you know it's like there's a grooming process in the same way i guess you're saying the primary process does the same kind of thing so i mean that's what people have talked about with andre yang it was uh it was he was being suppressed by a bunch of different forces the mainstream media and all just the democratic just that whole process didn't didn't like the 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's a student who's taking notice and i've noticed that with my own career everybody thought i was crazy for doing the show with crystal the hill they thought it was nuts they're like what are you doing you're a white house correspondent you've got a job forever the other job offer i had was being a white house correspondent and people thought i was nuts for not just sticking there and you know aging out within washington pining for appearances on fox news and cnn and msnbc but i hated it i just hated doing it and i did not want to be a company man like a washington man who's one of those guys who like brags to his friends about how many times he's been on fox or whatever mostly because i just have a rebellious streak and i hate being at the subject of other people i created something new which a lot of people watch to get their news and i 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 they don't go and they're not coming up and being like how do i be like jim acosta you know they're like they're like hey how did you do what you do and the way you did it is by bucking the system yeah so i think that we are at a total split point and look there will always be a path for people because like i don't want people to over learn this lesson i have people who are like i'm not going to go to college and i'm like well just wait yeah like i'm like just i'm starting yeah like stop just like just hold on a second but there will always be a path for the institutional there will 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 um in the you know the faculty like if you are an up and comer who wants to teach as many young people as possible i think you should be on youtube right like look at the khan academy guy that guy created a huge business so i just think we can be cynical and like upset about what that system is but we should also have hope like i have a lot of hope for what can be in the future yeah there's a there's a guy people should check out so my story is a little bit different because i basically uh stepped aside with the dream of being an entrepreneur earlier in the pipeline than like a like a legitimate like 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 like 10-year faculty just a really world-class researcher and now he's doing youtube yeah i see him on instagram yeah and he's great so he switched so he not just does instagram he now has a podcast and he's doing he's changing the nature of like i believe that andrew might be the future of stanford and for a lot it's funny like he's basically joe rogan is an inspiration to andrew and and to me as well and so those ripple effects and andrew is an inspiration probably just like you're saying to these young like 25 year olds who are soon to become faculty if we're just talking about academia and the same is probably happening with with government is funny enough trump probably is inspiring a huge number of people who are saying wait a minute i don't have to play by the rules exactly and i have to i can think outside the box here and you're right and the institutions we're seeing are just probably lagging behind so the optimistic view is the future is going to be full of exciting new ideas so andrew young is just kind of the beginning of this tip of the iceberg and i hope that iceberg doesn't it's not this influencer one of the things that really bothers me yeah i've gotten a chance no i should be careful here i don't wanna i love everybody but you know these people who talk about like you know how to make your first million or how to succeed and and they're so i mean yeah that that makes me a little bit cynical about uh 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 alc it's i hope they optimize for the 80 populist thing right like they optimized 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 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 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 one from 100 to 101 and being like and today went out to 105. whoa that's a big jump that maybe like thinking this way like i wonder what i did i'll do that again in this way one it's uh it creates anxiety almost psychological effects whatever the the more important thing is it prevents you from truly thinking boldly in the long arc of history in uh creatively thinking outside the box doing huge actions and i actually up 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 cawthorne the youngest member of congress um and he i don't want to say god 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 like my staff is only uh centered on communications and that's the right play if you do want to get the benefits of our current electoral political and engagement system which is that what's the best way to be known within the right as a as a right-wing politician it's to be a culture warrior go on ben shapiro's podcast be one of the people on fox news go on sean hannity's show go on tucker's show and all that because you become a mini celebrity within that world left unsaid is that that world is increasingly shrinking portion of the american population and they barely they can't even win a popular vote election um let alone barely win and eek 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 ultimate look this is 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 uh succeed spectacularly yeah 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 going to happen but look they're like billionaires right yeah and you're like so they were wrong 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 on my 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 for my observation i don't think the money matters as right i just i 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 it just doesn't happen like nobody wills spacex into existence just for the money like it's not worth it frankly right like he probably destroyed years of his life and like mental sanity money or attention or fame none of that yeah that'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 and 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 run he's like no so he you know succeeds spectacularly so you have to have somebody who's willing to come in and buck that system so for for for now i think our politics are generally frozen i think that that model is going to be most generally appealing to the mean person but somebody will come along and we'll change everything yeah i'm just surprised there's not more of them yeah on on that topic uh it's now 20 what is it 21 yes let's let's make some predictions he can be wrong about good what major political people are you thinking will run in 2024 including trump junior senior mm-hmm or ivanka i don't know any trump trump uh and uh 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 uh 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 max oh i mean probably more honestly there was a actually i can tell you because i saw the data which is that pre-january 6th it was like 54 of republicans wanted him to run again then it went down eight points after january six two days later and then after impeachment it went right back up to 54 so the exact same number is in february at post impeachment vote as it was after november now look yeah again surveys bullshit etc but like that's all the data we have that's what i can point to if trump runs he will be the nominee and he will be he will be the 2024 nominee i just don't know if he wants to it it really depends like 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 wall against cultural liberalism at its best 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 let's okay let's say joe biden doesn't run and they put up like kamala harris i think he would i think he would beat her and i 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 the process works you don't think anybody else on the democratic side can uh take the well how could you run against the sitting vice president you know it's like if joe joe biden has a 98 approval rating in the democratic party if he says she is my heir i think enough people will listen to him in a competitive primary or a non-competitive primary and then there's all these things about how primary systems themselves are rigged the dnc could make it known that they'll blacklist anybody who does try and primary kamala harris um and look i mean progressives aren't necessarily all that popular amongst actual democrats like we found that out um 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 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 the 80 that's is able to provide bold eloquently described 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 primaries 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 people 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 a 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 the main mechanism of our electoral choices yeah don't you think that just has to do with mediocre candidates like it like it's basically the field of candidates including trump including everybody was just like didn't make anyone feel great right it's like really this is what we have to choose from maybe a mark cuban or like uh 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 star struck because i was like yo this is the guy from the apprentice yeah i'm like this is the dude yeah like because i'm like my dad and i used to sit and watch the apprentice when i was in high school and then one of the guys was from college station where i grew up and were like oh my god like that guy's on the apprentice like it was a phenomenon there's like that level it's kind of like when i met joe rogan i'm like holy shit that's yeah that's i don't feel that way when i meet mitt romney or tom cotton or josh hall i met all of them um 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 so i was about to say i think the rock could do it but does he want to do it i mean it's terrible like it's terrible gig it's very hard to do i don't know if the rock necessarily has like the formed policy agenda because then here's the other problem what 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 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 almost 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 911 that was terrible um reconstruction andrew johnson awful right like we had several periods in our history where the crisis was there they they were called and they did not show up and i really it hadn't happened in my lifetime except for 911 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 in terms of that remember there's that long period of presence between um between like lincoln and teddy roosevelt we were like wait like who's president like or or even in even tr was like an exception where you'll have like calvin coolidge who like silent cow so we're living through over cleveland that's kind of how i 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 could just be a blip right 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 right like what did they 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 funny to think i mean i don't want to minimize it but like we haven't really gone through uh a world war ii style crisis so like say that there is a crisis in like several decades of that level right 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 911 even 911 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 that guy yeah like maybe he'd be remembered as the first uh celebrity i mean reagan was already a governor right yeah so so like the first a political celebrity that was a so maybe if there's more celebrities in the future they'll say that trump was the first person to pave the the way for celebrities to win oh man yeah and uh yeah i still i still hold that this this era will probably be remembered the you know people say i talk about elon way too much but but the reality is like there's not many people that are doing the kind of things he's doing is why i talk about is i think this era it's not necessarily elon and spacex but this error will be remembered by the new the like of the space exploration of uh the commercial of companies getting into space exploration of space travel and perhaps perhaps like artificial intelligence around social media all those kinds of things this might be remembered for that but every all the political bickering all that nonsense that might might be very well forgotten one way to think about it is that the internet is so young yeah i think about it um 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 yeah 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 um i never felt like i was living through history until corona paris 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 com 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 yeah right here well i was hoping uh tragedy aside that this i wish the primaries happened during coronavirus so that we because like then we can see so okay here's a bunch of people facing crisis and it's an opportunity for leaders to step up like i still believe the optimistic view is uh the game theory of like influencers will always be defeated by actual great leaders so like maybe the great leaders are rare but i think they're sufficiently out there that they will step up especially in the moments of crisis and coronavirus is is obviously a crisis where like you know mass manufacture of tests uh all kinds of infrastructure building that you could have done in 2020 there's so many possibilities for just like bold action and sad uh none of that even just forget actually doing the action advocating for it yeah just saying like this we need we need to do this and none of that like the speeches that biden made i don't even remember a single speech that bad made because there's zero bold i mean their strategy was to be quiet and let donald trump uh polarize the electorate polarized electorate and hope that results in in uh them winning uh 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 like you know that ah yeah it's a loss lost opportunities in some sense so we talked a bunch about politics but one of the other interesting things is that you're involved with is uh or involved with defining the future of is journalism i suppose you can think of podcasts as a kind of journalism but also just writing in general just whatever the hell the future of this thing looks like uh 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 18 um 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 it was during the time of partisan journalism not a surprise people like to really read the news from people that they agree with you could say that's bad echo chambers etc that's the downside of it the upside is more people are more educated more people are interested in the news so i think the proliferation of mass media i mean sorry of this format of long form of not just long form dude i do 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 like that i don't know about you but for i also looked at twitter to the exact thing you're saying which is the response to the news right the thoughtful sounds ridiculous but you can be pretty thoughtful in a single tweet if you fi if you follow the right people yeah you can get that and so that is the future of media which is that the future of media is it will be much smaller amount or much larger amounts of people which are famous to smaller groups so walter cronkite's never gonna happen again at least in our probably within our lifetimes where everybody in america know who's this guy is that that age is over i think that's a good thing because now people are going to get the news from the people that they trust yes some of it will be opinionated i'm going to my my program i'm crystal and i are like we are this she's coming from this like view i'm coming from this view that's our bias when we talk about information and we're going to talk about the information that we think is important and it has garnered a large audience i think that's very much where the future is going to be and the reason why i think that's a good thing is because people will be engaged more within it rather than the current system where news is highly concentrated highly consolidated has group think has the same elite production pipeline problem of everybody knows journalists all come from the same socioeconomic background and they all party together here in dc or in new york or in la or wherever and there's part of the same mono culture and that affects what they uh that affects what they report this will cause a total dispersion of all of that the the a the battle of our age is going to be the guild versus the non-guild so like what we see right now with the new york times and clubhouse this is a very very very very very intentional thing that is happening which is that the times talking about unfettered conversations that's happening on clubhouse for people who aren't aware this is important because they need to be the fetterers of conversation they need to be the inter-agent that's where they get their power they get their power from convincing facebook that they are the ones who can check stuff they are the ones who can tell you whether something is right or wrong that battle over unimpeded conversation and the explosion of a format that you and i are doing really well in and then this more consolidated one which holds cultural power and elite power and more importantly money right over you and i that's the battle that we're all gonna do do you think unfettered conversations have a chance to win this battle yes i do in the long run in the long run the internet is simply too powerful but here's the mistake everybody makes the new york times will never lose it will just become one of us see you think so they already are they are the largest 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 going to be destroyed no it's actually even better they will just become one of us they already are their subscription platform well yes in terms of the actual mechanism but 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 is it does have the level of credibility assigned to it still you know there's politization of it totally but if there's a credibility like it has much more credibility than i forgive me but then i think you and i have no you're right in in terms of uh your podcast like people are not going to be like uh they're going to cite the new york times versus what you said on the podcast for uh for an opinion that i wonder in the sense of battles whether unfettered conversations whether joe rogan whether your podcast can become the have at the same level of legitimacy or the the flip side new york times loses the legitimacy to be at the same level of uh in terms of how we talk about it it's getting long 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 yeah 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 yeah and then who else do they hire ezra klein from vox yeah kara swisher also from box who does pivot which is an amazing podcast um or uh jane coston same thing it's personalities who are becoming bundled together within this brand right here's yeah okay maybe i'm just a hater [Laughter] 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 karis wish her she's done successfully i think i know oh no she was always a part of some kind of institution i'm not sure but she started her own thing i think it would i don't know if that's her own thing yeah yeah so she 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 going to leave to like go sub sack and go independent within their social circle sacrificing some money from being independent is worth it to be a part of the new york times that's sad to me because it propagates old thinking like you know 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 like for building new new york times in terms of public legitimacy and i suppose that's uh 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 it's not going to be there in mass media anymore because of the balkanization of audiences i mean think about it right like um this is like legion you know the classic stuff around a thousand true fans or no sorry like 100 true fans even now like you can make a living on the internet just talking to a hundred people yeah if as long as they're all high frequency traders some of the highest people pay people on sub stack they don't have that many subs it's just that they're wall street guys right so people pay a lot of money again that's great so what you will have is an increasing balkanization of the internet um 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 meet they're like oh my god i watch your show every day right looks the only thing watching for news right like instead of casually famous if that makes sense like oh yeah that's like alec baldwin yeah you know yeah oh shit that's solid ball but you're not like oh shit i love you alec baldwin it's this is a ben smith of the new york times actually he wrote this column he's like the future is everybody will be famous but only to a small group of people and i think that is true but again i don't decry it i think it's great because i think that the more that that happens the more engaged people will be and it empowers different voices to be able to come in and then possibly i wouldn't say destroy but compete against i mean look at joe joe is more powerful than cnn and msnbc and fox all put together that gives me like immense inspiration yeah like he created the space for me to succeed and i told him that when i met him i was like dude like i listened to his podcast when i was like young and like and i remember like when i got to meet him and all that and i told him this on this pod i was like i didn't know people were millions were willing to listen to a guy talk about chimps for three straight hours including me i didn't know that yeah he's one of those people yeah me too i learned something about myself okay 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 so generous one of the things he paved the way on for me is to to show that you can just be honest publicly honest yes and uh not jealous of other people's success but instead of being supportive and and all those kinds of things just like loving towards others he's been an inspiration i mean uh to the comics community i think there are a bunch of uh before that i think there were all a bunch of competitive haters towards each other yeah and now he's like just injected love yeah 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 to try to enj i wanted to be like a uh do what joe rogan did but for the scientific community like my little circle scientific community of like like let's support each other yeah well like 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 like millions of people would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you just by the way in terms of deep state of government avilo 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 uh the pilots who were oh my god dude this is amazing so like this american airlines flight crew was over new mexico this happened five or six days ago and they the guy comes and goes hey do you have any targets up here a large cylindrical object just flew over me oh so this happens so this happens yes then a guy or like a radio catcher records this and posts it online american airlines confirms that this is authentic audio and they go all further questions should we refer to the fbi so then okay american airlines just confirmed it's a legitimate transmission fbi then the faa comes out and says we were tracking no objects in the vicinity of this plane at the time of the transmission so the only plausible explanation that online salutes 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 100 no shit transmission confirmed by american airlines of a commercial pilot over new mexico seeing a quote-unquote large cylindrical object in the air like i said um when you first start talking i've never believed i've never believed more in ufos and aliens yeah yeah this is awesome yeah i i i just wish both the american airlines uh fbi and uh government would be more transparent like there would be voices i know it sounds ridiculous but the kind of transparency do you see maybe not joe rogan he's like overly transparent he's just a comic really but just uh i don't know like a podcast from the fbi just like being honest like excited confused uh i'm sure the car they're being overly cautious about the release information i'm sure there's a lot of information that would inspire the public that will 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 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 yeah i mean he didn't declassify it man and people begged him to i know for a fact because i pushed to try and make this happen that some people did speak to him about it and he was like no i'm not gonna do it so he might be afraid uh that's what i mean though he's a they were probably all telling him they're like sir you can't do this you know all this like wow and and i get that and there's this legislation written in coveted that like they have six months to release it is that real what is that that was a bunch of bullshit bullshit i think it's both 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 he tried like him and clinton tried to get some of this information and they could not get any of it and they were talking about the president and the white house chief of staff well there's a whole bureaucracy bill just like you're saying with intent you have to be like that has to be your focus because there's a whole bureaucracy built around secrecy for probably for a good reason so to get through to the information there's a whole like paperwork process all that kind of stuff you can't just walk in and get the unless again with intention that becomes your thing like exactly let's revolutionize this thing and then you get only so many things that it's it's sad that the the bureaucracy has gotten so bulky um but i think the hopeful messages from earlier in our conversation it seems like a single person can't fix it but if you hire the right team it feels like you can can't fix everything i don't want to i don't want to give people on real estate expectations you can fix a lot especially in crisis you can remake america yeah 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 congress his election to congress special election he was only 29 years old and he left that meeting and called somebody and said this young man is gonna be president of the united states someday like even then like what was within him to understand and to recognize that and sometimes johnson as a young member of congress would come and have breakfast with fdr like just to the great political minds of the 20th century just sitting there talking like i would give anything to know what that was happening i hope they were real with each other and there was like a genuine human connection right that i that seemed like johnson wasn't a genuine guy i need to read those thousands of pages uh i've been way too focused on hitler i was gonna say one of my goals in coming to this is i was like i gotta get lex into two things because i know he'll love it i know he'll love lbj if he's it has to take the time to read the books 100 he's the most 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 that's no that's why carol wrote the books and that's why the books are not really about lbj they're about power in washington and about the consolidation of power post new deal the consolidation then or the 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 no one else could have gotten it done and the second thing is we gotta get you into world war one we gotta get you more into world war one because i think that's a rabbit hole which i know you're a dan carlin fan so blueprint for armageddon yeah guaranteed but 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 uh austro-hungarians and of 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 like an entire generation one stat i love is that you know britain didn't need a draft till 1916. like they went two years of throwing people into barbed wire voluntarily yeah 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 one right right and i'm obsessed with the conflict i've read way too many books about it for this reason is it's unresolved and like the the roots of so much of even our current problems are happening in versailles right like vietnam is because of the treaty of versailles um 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 uh fallout from those wars on the french and the german population french and the british populations and their reluctance for war in 1939 or 1938 when when neville chamberlain goes right like that's one of the things people don't understand is the actual appetite of the british public at that time they didn't want to go to war only churchill he was the only one in the you know in the gathering storm right like being like hey this is really bad and all of that and then even in the united states our streak of isolationism which swept i mean things were because of that conflict we were convinced as a country that we wanted nothing to do with europe and its problems and in many ways that contributed to the proliferation of hitler and more so like i'm obsessed with world war one for this reason which is that it's just like the root oh it's like the culmination of the monarchies then the fall and then just all the shit spills out so from there for like a hundred years so world war one is like the most important shift in human history world war ii is like a consequence of that yeah it's so so i have a degree in security studies from georgetown and one of the thing is that we would focus a lot on that is like war and but also like the complexity around war and it's funny we never spent that much time on world war ii because there's actually quite a clean war it's a very atypical war as in the war object which we learned from world war one 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 one what are you fighting for like are you i mean and 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 yeah 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 that's more what wars are they become these like atypical they become these protracted conflicts 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 in a slow burn of ethnic conflict which bubbles up so that's why i look at that one even because it's it's more typical of warfare yeah how it works exactly yeah it's it's kind of interesting you're making me realize uh that uh world war ii is one of the rare wars where you can make a strong case for it's a fight of good versus war theory obviously like yeah they're literally slaughtering jews like you know we have to kill them and there's one person doing it i mean there's one person at the core there's it's uh yeah that's fascinating and it's short and there's a clear aggression it's interesting that dan uh carlin has been avoiding hitler as well yeah probably for this reason probably for this reason yeah i mean but it's it's complicated too right because there's a pressure that guy has his demons i love this so much it's so this is the the i don't know if you feel this pressure but as a creative he feels the pressure of being maybe not necessarily correct but maybe correct in the in the sense that his understanding he gets to the bottom of uh of why something happened of what really happened did get to the bottom of it before he can say something publicly about it and he is uh tortured by that burden i know it you know he takes so much shit from the historical community for no reason i think he's the greatest popularizer quote-unquote of history and i wish more people in history understood it that way he was an inspiration to me i mean i do some videos sometimes on my instagram now where i'll like i'll do like a book tour i'll be like here's my bookshelf of these presidents and like here's what i learned from this book in this book and this and that was very much like a a skill i learned from him of being like as you know as the historian writes you know you know i just love the way he talks he's like in the mud oh you know he'll be like quote he he inspires me man yeah he really does to like learn more and i've read i bought a lot of books because of dan carlin he'll be you know because of this guy because of that guy um in terms of you know another thing he does which nobody else and i'm probably guilty of this he focuses on the actual people involved like he would tell the story of actual british soldiers in world war one and i probably and maybe you're guilty of this too we over focus on what was happening in the german general staff what's happening in the british general staff and he doesn't make that mistake that's why he tells real history yeah and and make it gives it a feeling the result is that there's a feeling you get the feeling of what it was like to be there exactly you know you're becoming quickly becoming more and more popular speaking about political issues in part do you feel a burden like almost like uh the the prison of your prior convictions of having to being popular with a certain kind of audience and thereby unable to really think outside the box i had i've really struggled with this i came up in right-wing media i came up a much more doctrinaire conservative in my professional life i wasn't always conservative we can get to that later um if you want and i did feel an immense pressure after jan after the election by people to say wanted me to say the election was stolen and i knew 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 a lot many people knew me who were on the left and if you know my right listeners abandoned me so be it i was 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 um 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 that's the best thing that ever happened to me it's freedom it's true freedom i now say i say exactly what i think and it's not that i wasn't doing that before it's maybe um i would avoid certain topics or like i would think about things more from a team perspective of like am i making sure that it's it's i'm not saying i didn't fight it 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 i was aspiring to that before but i i had to have in a way trump's stopped the steel thing it like took my shackles off 100 yeah cause i was like no this is bullshit and i'm gonna 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 gonna be necessarily like associated with you anymore this is probably one of the first political related politics-related conversations we've had uh i mean unless you caught michael malus who he was great yeah i he's the funny guy he's not so much political as he is like burning down man he leans too far in anarchy for me yeah i i think he's uh there's a place for that it's it's almost well first of all he's uh he's working on a new book which i really appreciate outside of he's working on like a big book for a while which is white pill he's also working on this like short little thing which is uh like anarchist um handbook or something like that yeah it's like anarchy for idiots or something like that which i think is really yeah well me being an idiot right and being curious about anarchy seems useful so i like those kinds of books that's russian heritage man yeah anarchist 101 yeah i mean it's a uh i find those kinds of things a useful thought experiment because uh that's why and then it's it's frustrating to me when people talk about communism or socialism or even capitalism where they can't enjoy the thought experiment of like why did uh communism fail and maybe ask the question of like are there is it possible to make communism succeed or are there good ideas in communism like i enjoy the thought experiment like this the the discourse of it like the the reasoning and like devil's advocate and all that people have like seem to not have patience for that they're like communism bad red i was obsessed with the question and still am i will never 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 zara 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 like and i became obsessed with that question and it's still i find it so interesting which is that series of accidents of history incredible boldness by lenin incredible real politic smart unpopular decisions made by trotsky and stalin and just 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 talk 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 and i just beca yeah i was like was bolshevism a natural reaction to the excesses of tsarism there is a convenient explanation where that is true but there were also a series of decisions made by lenin and stalin to kill many of the people in the center left and marginalize them to and also not to associate with the more quote unquote like uh like amenable communists in order to make sure that their pure strain of bolshevism was the only thing and the reason i like that is because it comes back to a point i made it earlier it's all about intentionality which is that you actually can will something into existence yes even if people don't want it that was the craziest thing like that nobody wanted this yeah but it still ruled for half a century well more actually i mean almost you know that's seven years to think that there could have been a history of uh the soviet union that was dramatically different than uh leninism stalinism that was completely different like almost would be the american story yeah oh easily i mean there's a world where and i don't have all the characters there's like karensky and then there was like uh 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 pause surprise and it was like the story of i tried to understand russia post crimea because i i came up amongst people who are much more like neoconservative and they're like fuck russia russia bad bye and i was like okay like what do these people think and we have this narrative of like the fall of the soviet union and then i read this book from the perspective of russians who lived through the fall and they were like this i was like this is terrible like actually the introduction of capitalism was awful and all like the rise of all these crazy oligarchs that's why putin was came to power to like restore um restore order to the oligarchy and he still talks to this day do you guys i mean that's always the threat of like do you want to return to the 90s right do you want to return yeah and 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 i 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 up going back to the tsars has always been defense in depth in terms of having estonia lithuania and more as like protection of the heartland i'm not justifying in this so nato shills like please don't come after me but and look estonian 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're 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 is fucking awesome we're the number one country in the world yeah i'm like we're literally better than you like in many ways and they they 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 do you think power changed putin do you think power changes leaders if you look at the great leaders in history whether it's lbj fdr do you think power really changes people like is there 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 once he did that by around like 2007 there's that famous time when he spoke out against the west at the munich security conference i forget when it was and that's when everybody in the audience was like whoa and he was talking about like nato encirclement and like we will not be beaten back by the west very shortly afterwards like the georgia invasion happens and that was like a big wake up call of like we will not be pushed around anymore i mean he said before publicly like the worst thing that ever happened was the fall or what did he say it was like the fall of the soviet union was a tragedy right yeah of course people in the west were like what i'm like i get it right like they were a superpower now their population is declining like it's like a petrol state it sucks like i understand um i understand like how somebody could feel about that i think it revealed his character um which is that he i think he thinks of himself probably as he always has since 2001 as like this benevolent almost as a benevolent dictator he's like without me the whole system would collapse i'm the only guys keeping these people and 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 it's 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 um 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 i it's very difficult for me to understand i've been hanging out thanks to clubhouse a lot of i've gotten to learn a lot about the navalny folks and it's been very educational made me ask a lot of important questions about what um 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 there's a is a bad uh executive like is bad at basically running government but to me why do russians not think that right well they probably would probably press right yeah they will say the control there 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 uh propaganda there's there's legitimacy there mostly i try to remain apolitical and actually genuinely remain up apolitical i am legitimately not interested in the politics of russia of today i feel i have some responsibility and i'll take it that responsibility on as i need to but my fascination as it is perhaps with you in part is in the historical figure of putin i know he's currently president but i'm almost looking like as if i was a kid in 30 years from now reading about him studying the the human being the the games of power that are played that got him to gain power to maintain power what that says about his human nature the 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 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 that's i'm always fat i'm like he's getting up how old is he 60 something yeah 60 so he would be i think he would be 80 so with the with the change of the constitution he cannot be president until uh uh 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 so but he's still he still seems to be he seems fit i think he's gonna 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 uh 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 uh affairs deeply distrustful and yet coveting of the european powers like look i could describe every czar you know in those same language like every czar falls into the exact same category yeah and 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 lennon trotsky and stalin what was the motivation because it sure as hell seems like the motivation was at least in part the driven by the idea by ideas not self interest of like power for lenin it was i think he was a true believer and an actual narcissist who thought he was the only one who could do it stalin i do think just wanted power and realized well i don't know look he wrote very passionately when he was young and he was he really believed in communism in the beginning he did i i i always 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 begin yeah i mean i'm like i don't think that was about communism yeah yeah yeah yeah maybe it became a useful propaganda tool but it still seemed like he believed in it uh whether it was of course this the question i mean this is the problem with uh conspiracy theories for me and this is legitimate criticism towards me about conspiracy theories which is uh 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'd be like deeply two-faced oh i've met them you're welcome to washington but like i think that i would be able to detect like no people are good well this my question is i've seen it i mean well so this difference this just two-face like uh there's different levels of two-face like what i mean is to be killing people and uh it's like house of cards style right and and still present a front like you're you're 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 uh like there's a lot of people like that and i don't i have trouble imagining um some you know that's such a compelling narrative that people like to say like people that's the conspiratorial mindset i think that skepticism was really powerful and important to have because it's true a lot of powerful people abuse their power but saying that a bottle i feel like people over assume that it's like i see that with the use of steroids often in sports people seem to make that claim about like everybody who's successful and i want to be very i don't know something about me wants to be cautious because i want to give people a chance being purely cynical isn't helpful people say that's about me he's always saying this to do this yeah but at the same time being naively optimistic about everything is also kind of productive because people are going to fuck you over and more importantly that doesn't bother me more importantly you're not gonna be able to reason about how to create systems that are going to be robust to corruption to uh malevolent uh like parties so 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 that that work in this world that has evil in it right i can't believe there's a book of hitler on the desk um 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 uh you provide recommendations yes i do in the form of spoken word can you be on what we've already recommended mention books whether it is historical uh non-fiction or whether it's more like philosophical or even fiction that had a big impact on your life so is there a few that you can mention sure i already talked about the johnson book so i'll leave that alone robert a carro he's still alive thank god he's finishing the last book uh i hope he makes it so that those johnson books second but can i ask you a question about those books yes what the hell do you fit into so many pages everything man let me tell you this so i'll just give 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 a hundred or so pages in you get to lyndon johnson yes that's that's how you do it okay which is you like a tolstoy 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 [Laughter] is all right grant off the record ron chernow ron chernow's grant it's a thousand pages and the reason i tell everybody to read it is it's not just the story of grant it is the story of pre-civil war america the mexican-american war the civil war and reconstruction all told in the life of one person who was involved in all three most people don't know anything about the mexican-american war it's fascinating most people don't know anything about reconstruction now more so because people are talking it's a hot topic now i've been reading about it for years that is another thing people need to learn a lot more about in terms of non-history books the book that probably had the most impact on me which is also a historical nonfiction is i am obsessed with antarctic exploration and it all began with a book called shackleton's incredible journey which is the collection of diaries of everybody who was on shackleton's journey for those who don't know shackleton was the last explorer of the heroic age of antarctic exploration he led a ship called the endurance which froze in the ice um off the coast of antarctica in 1914 and they didn't have radios or the last exploration a 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 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 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 yeah 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 amazing 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 the or one of the first shackled uh frost robert frost expeditions he leads an expedition down to the south him and a partner they're leading uh explorations 1908 something like that they're going around antarctica with dog teams and one of the what happens is they keep going over these snow bridges where there's a crevice but it's covered in snow and so the one of the 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 they have first of all they have to eat the dogs the a really creepy part of antarctic exploration is everyone ends up eating dogs at different points yeah um 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 uh mawson by trying to help his friend was giving him more of all the things that kills you i know it's dog liver so his friend ends up dying have a horrific heart attack all of that mauson 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're saying about the human spirit it's like antarctica brings that out of people or amundsen the guy who made it to the south pole robert amundsen oh my god like this guy trained his whole life in the ice from norway to make it to the south pole and he beat robert frost the the british guy with all this money and all these i could go on this forever i'm sorry i'm obsessed with it well first of all i'm gonna you know i'm gonna take this part of the podcast i'm going to set it to music yeah i'm going to listen to it because i've been whining and bitching about uh 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're going to be elon's obsessed with shackleton he talks about him all the time he uses i was going to ask you about that yeah as an example of that is a as an example of what mars colonization would be like he's right no that antarctica is as close to you can simulate that um the antarctic goes as close to what you could simulate what it would get that that nat geo series on mars i'm not sure if you watched it it's incredible elon's actually in it um and it kind of and it's like they get there everything goes wrong somebody dies like it's horrible it they can't find any water it's not working so what what is it is it like simulating the experience of what it'd be like 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 this is 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 uh uh 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 you 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 a famous one 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 yeah we were well yeah we remember the ones who made it but there are uh and that would be the story of mars that will be the story of ours so but and nevertheless that's the interesting thing about antarctica nevertheless something about human nature drives us to explore it yes that and that seems to be like you know a lot of people have this kind of to me frustrating conversations like well earth is great man why do we need to colonize mars you just don't get it 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 yeah i don't know it's pushing the limits of the uh of the human mind of the of what's possible it's like mallory because it's there yeah it's simple and that and that somehow actually the result of that if you want to be pragmatic about it there's something about pushing that limit that has side effects that you don't expect that will create a better world back home for the people not necessarily on earth but like just in general it raises the quality of life for everybody even though the initial endeavor doesn't make any sense the very fact of pushing the limits of what's possible then has side effects of benefiting everybody and it's difficult to predict ahead of time or what those benefits will be same with colonizing mars it's unclear what the benefits will be for earth or in general what's struggling 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 and 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 like the the amount of potential locked within my pocket and your pocket i mean this is if you were to define my politics in one way it's greatness like national 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 yeah it wasn't enough you know our ancestors could have been content to sit well actually many of them were were content to sit and say these berries will be here for a long time and they got eaten and they died and it's the ones who got out and went to the next place in the next place and went across the siberian land bridge and went across more and it 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 broke space man i love face no you're pro doing difficult things and pushing uh exploring the world in all of its forms i hope that kind of spirit permeates politics too that same kind of uh can it well it can and i hope so i don't know if you want to stay on it but i think that was book number one or two shit yeah okay all right all right um is there 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 yeah um one of the best selling but i think there's a reason for that yeah you've all know harari of course 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 or 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 um the evolution of money like i know he gets a lot of hate but i think that he writes it so clearly and well that for your average person to be able to read that you will come away with a more clear understanding of the human race than before and i think that that's why it's worth it i agree with you 100 i uh i'm ashamed to i usually don't bring up sapiens because it's like yeah it's like everybody's uncle has read it but it's that's a good thing yeah it is one of the i think you'll be remembered as one of the great books of this particular era and yeah because it's it's so clearly it's like the selfish gene with darkest i mean it just aggregates so many ideas together and puts language to it that's makes it very useful to talk about so it is one of the great books 100 um another one is definitely born to run for the same reason by christopher mcdougall which is that i'm just gonna listen to this whole podcast next week you have to well you should because it you are inheriting our most basic skill which is running and reimagining human history or reimagining like what we were as opposed to what we are is very useful because it helps you understand how to tap into primal aspects of your brain which just drive you and the reason i love mcdougall's writing is because i love anybody who writes like this malcolm gladwell um 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 um you know malcolm gladwell writes finds characters to tell us the story of learning new skills and outliers and diff you know whatever his latest book is i forget what it's called and 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 um i i don't know i'm sure if you listen to the david cho episode with joe rogan um you know i mean oh where he's the animal yeah with the baboon when he goes 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 yeah we're not suppo well i don't want to put a normal judgment on it they're living the way that we used to yeah there's something feels very honest somehow to to our true nature there's a guy i follow on instagram i've come from paul saladino carnivore md yeah he just went over there to the hotza um to live with them and i was watching his stuff just like i was like man there's there's something in you that wants to go yeah like i'm like i want to do that yeah i wouldn't be very good at it but like i want to i'm so glad that somebody who thinks deeply about politics is so fascinating 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 the you are from texas yes what do you make of the future of texas politically culturally uh 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 everywhere there's no such thing as moving what what are you moving you're like you're like like your three suits and some shirts and underwear what exactly is the move and tail 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 uh austin outside of i mean my uh outside of just like friendships i have no it's a very different culture that joe rogan is creating i'm mostly interested in the what the next silicon valley will be with the next hub of technological innovation and there's a promise uh maybe a dream for austin being that next place that's very possible doesn't have this the baggage of uh some of the political things maybe some of the sort of um things that hold back the beauty of that makes capitalism that makes innovation so powerful which is like meritocracy which is excellence uh diversity is exceptionally important but not uh it should not be the only priority it has to be something that uh it coexists with a like insatiable drive towards excellence and uh it seems like texas is a nice place like having a austin which is like a kind of uh this weird i hope it stays weird man i love weird people know about that but we can get it but as this uh hope is it remains this weird place of brilliant innovation amidst the uh a state that's like more conservative so like there's a nice balance of everything what are your thoughts about the future of texas i think it's so fascinating to me because i never thought i would want to move back but now i'm beginning to be convinced so you have that joe i'm going to say this 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 own parent look i was raised in college station texas which is a town of 50 000 it's a university town it exists only for the university so it was a very str i did not get the full texas experiences purely speaking from a college station experience but growing up first you know first generation or i forget what it is whatever i'm the first american i was born and raised in college station my parents are from india being raised in a town where the dominant culture was predominantly like white evangelical christian was hard like he was just difficult and i think of it in the beginning i would say like ages like zero to like eight it was like cultural ignorance as in like they just don't know how to interact with you um 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 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 from 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 911 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 a national security for this reason which is i was obsessed with the idea of like how do we get people who are not gonna get us into these quagmire situations in positions of power that's how i became fascinated by power in the first place was all a question of how do this happen like how did this catastrophe happen i realized it's not as bad as like you know previous conflicts but this one was mine and to see how it changed our domestic politics forever and so that was my rebellion but it's funny because i identified as a left on the left when i was growing up up until i was 18 i had also a funny two-year stint this is where everything kind of changed for me when i was 16 actually i moved to qatar to doha qatar because my dad was a dean or associate dean of texas a m university at doha so my last two years of high school were at this i went from this small town in texas and i love my parents because they could recognize that i had within me that i was not a small town kid so they took me out of this country every chance they got i traveled everywhere and constantly let me go and so i was i went from school in college station to like this ritzy private school american school best thing that ever happened to me because first of all it got me out of college station second at that time i had this annoying streak of i wouldn't call it being anti-america but you don't appreciate america let me tell everybody out there listening leave for a while you will miss it so much yes you do not know what it is like to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it yeah and i was going to i was going to high school with these guys in the qatari royal family and all i wanted to do was speak out how they were pieces of shit for the way that they treated indian citizens in the 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 will 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 i 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 that's i still am frankly because of that experience living living abroad like that will do it to you live in a non-democracy you haven't even in europe i would say you guys aren't living as free as we are here it's awesome you're ultimately another human being than the one who left texas yeah so i mean have you actually considered moving to texas and broadly just outside your own story what do you think is the future of texas what is the future of austin yes there's so much transformation seemingly happening now related to silicon valley living in california 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 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 intracomposition and the outro yeah so the intracomposition it's become way more urban it's from when i grew when i grew up texas was a much more rural state its politics were much more static it looked much more like rick perry like that he was a very accurate representation yes of who we were now i don't think that that's the case texas is now a dynamic economy not just 100 reliant on oil because of its kind of like i would call it like regulatory arbitrage relative to california and new york offers a large incentive to people who are more i wouldn't say culturally liberal but they're not necessarily like culturally conservative like the people who i grew up with that's changed the whole state's politics beto came two points away from beating ted cruz i'm not saying the state's gonna 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 uh i'll put it in this way much more uh much much more attractive to me than the place that i grew up and from my perspective uh well first of all i love uh some of the the cowboy things that texas stands for but for more practically from my perspective the injection of the uh tech innovation right 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 i know that joe rogan is uh a rich sort of uh almost like mainstream at this point right but he's also attracting a lot of weirdos and so is elon and a lot of those weirdos are my friends and though they're like like michael malus 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 i actually think the most significant thing that happened were at tesla moving there yeah 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 also oracle oracle's decision to move to austin is just as important because those two men larry was ellison right yeah elson and uh elon they actually employ tens of thousands of people collectively that can change the nature of the city yeah so you combine that with joe bringing this entire new entertainment complex with the bodies of people who will appreciate said entertainment complex spend money on the entertainment exactly you just remade the entire city yeah and and that's that's why i'm fascinated 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 texas and i would turn it into my stanford for silicon valley let's introduce some competition and let ut austin hire the best software developers engineers professors and more and turn texas into a true like austin revolving door hub where people come to ut austin to get an internship at tesla and then become an executive there and then create their own company in their own garage in austin which is the next facebook twitter that's how it happens this is why i'm much more skeptical of miami there's a whole like tech miami crew i'm like yeah like there's no university it's very inorganic um look i think miami is awesome i just like i don't know if the same building blocks are there and also no multi-billion dollar companies which employ thousands of people are coming there that's the ingredient it's not just joe rogan it's not just even elon musk if he's still operated in california it's all the people he employs i think that is where i think texas is going to dramatically change within the next 10 years alternative to our it's already become a more urbanized state that's moved away from oil and gas um in terms of like its emphasis not necessarily in terms of its 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 newsome type person getting elected governor of texas yeah or like the mayor of austin i mean look mayor boston is already a democrat right like i mean uh joe has his own problems with austin it's funny i remember him leaving la and i'm like well we've been to austin it ain't you know it's not everything it's cracked up to me you know necessarily but no matter what you know a new place allows the possibility for new ideas uh even if they're somehow left-leaning and all those kinds of things i do think the only two things missing from austin and texas are two dudes in a suit that sometimes have a podcast talk a bunch of nonsense and a mic so let's let's bring the best suit game to texas i hope you do make it to texas uh at some point thanks so much for talking today thanks for listening to this conversation with sagar sagaranjeti 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 and not always the same thing he said never forget that what hitler did in germany was legal thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you