David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #375
- I tweet that and then I finish the day and I wake up the next morning
and I glance at my phone. I'm seeing all these verified
accounts that are, you know, quote tweeting it, and demanding
a retraction and whatever. And I go, uh oh, okay, this looks like it's
getting some attention. I then continue about my day. Around noon, I hear from my
dad that he got 100 messages, from, "You should have aborted your son", to, "We're gonna find all
of you", to whatever else. My dad has no idea what's going on. He's like, I don't know what this is, but I have 100 DMs to
everything else you can imagine. And I start to get emails about, you know, your Jewish faith, this and
that and the other thing. And so at that point, to me, I thought, this is just going to get
worse and worse and worse. And so I deleted the tweet. And I really regret doing that, because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated, it went through Candace Owens
and then at foxnews.com, Newsmax, kind of peaking
with, with Donald Trump Jr. And it was horrible. The following is a
conversation with David Pakman, a left wing, progressive
political commentator and host of the David Pakman Show. I hope to continue to have
many conversations on politics with prominent, insightful, and sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum. David and I have been planning
to speak for a long time, and I'm sure we'll speak many more times. This conversation was
challenging, eye-opening and fun. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's David Pakman. Are there interesting differences to you between terms like Liberal,
Democrat, left wing, leftist, progressive, socialist,
communist, Marxist, far left, center left, all of these labels? Is there interesting
distinctions between them? - Yeah, there's two sets of distinctions. One is if you just want to say, let's define each of
these as political terms. They're all different terms. You can be a progressive ideologically but not be a member of
the Democratic Party. Many say the Democratic Party isn't even really very progressive. So these are certainly
terms that we could define in order to have a conversation
about the next thing, kind of as a precursor to a conversation. Sometimes the terms are
used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not really linked to policy or any particular political question, but they can be used
positively or negatively to just kind of say, here is the image of this
individual that I have in my mind. So like Marxist is right now
very popularly being used by some on the right to attack Democrats. There's very few actual Marxists, certainly not in positions of
power in the United States, but even among the general population. So I think it's important to distinguish, are we defining these terms because we want to compare
and contrast the ideas that a particular group might
bring to the discussion, or are we using them as insults
or to stifle conversation? There are terms that can be used to start conversation or to stop it. - And the use of those terms is evolving rapidly month by month. So the term leftist, I think is a relatively popular term now to use in the negative context to describe what an outraged left wing commentator. - I think what you're
kind of grasping onto is that there's probably some set of ideas that would apply to most of those who consider themselves to be on the left. The discussion of how that
term is mostly being used is not about policy ideas. You're accurately kind
of identifying that. And it does seem like progressive is no longer being used as a smear, and leftist is being used as
a smear more at this point. - Okay, but sometimes some
of these terms are useful, like can we try to pick
the terms that are useful, like Liberal and progressive and Democrat. Liberal and progressive, is there an interesting
definable distinction between Liberal and progressive to you? - That's a maybe one of
the most interesting ones. 10 years ago Liberal often meant what now we mean by progressive. More recently, the progressive
socialist leaning part of the political spectrum has started to use
Liberal to mean Joe Biden, to mean someone who is
not really left enough. So Liberal's very interesting because I remember talking
with my audience years ago, maybe eight years ago
or something like that, where I identified I'm going to now use the term progressive more commonly to describe my own beliefs, because Liberal has now been made a smear. It's being shifted into something else. And it also means more of
like a center left politics. So it's changed in some
sense by necessity, by force. And also because the spectrum
has shifted to some degree. - So the term Liberal has evolved, now Liberal meaning
some kind of embodiment of the mainstream Democratic Party almost. - To some degree. Sometimes I'm called, I'm
written off by, you know, within my space, there are
all sorts of shades of gray, which I'm sure we can talk about, about where I am, versus should be, could be, or am wrongly placed. And sometimes an attack
on me is, he's just a Lib, meaning I'm not left enough,
I'm not progressive, socialist, wherever else you want to go. So yeah, the problem with
a lot of these terms, and they're used very casually by people who call into my show, is that unless we actually
define them each time, they very often mean very different things to different people, and often come with an
agenda attached to them. And so I find that they often
stifle meaningful conversation rather than encourage it. - Hey, do you sense
that there's a drifting of what is the threshold
to be a progressive? Or is there, should we use
progressive synonymously with Democratic socialists? - I think we should
not use it synonymously with Democratic socialists. And this is where there's
another linguistic confusion and a political confusion. So we'll first talk
about the linguistic one. Social democracy versus
Democratic socialism. Very similar words in a
different order, okay? The way I operate is Democratic socialism is actually a form of socialism where one would seek
to socialize ownership of the means of production as an example. Social democracy is a
very highly regulated form of capitalism, the likes of which we would see in Northern Europe, Denmark, et cetera. These are very different things. I associate progressivism in
2023 with social democracy and would consider Democratic socialism a form of actual socialism. That is different. We're no longer talking about
a capitalist organization of society. - So transition from one to the other is a fundamental shift in
how society operates then? - Absolutely. And when you talk about social democracy, you're talking about
socializing a couple more things than we socialize in most
modern capitalist countries. I had this conversation with
Patrick Bet-David recently. Social democracy is, okay, we've socialized
the military already in the United States. We've socialized some
healthcare in the sense of like the VA and Medicaid, et cetera. We're talking about socializing
a couple more things still in a capitalist country. Democratic socialism would
be something beyond that. And as someone who is not a
Democratic socialist myself, I'm maybe not the best
advocate for explaining exactly how that system would function, but it would have some version
of socializing ownership of the means of production
businesses, et cetera. - So you mentioned you
appeared on the PBD podcast with Patrick Bet-David. The debate was pretty intense. - [David] Was it? - I should say, I personally enjoyed it. I thought actually you did well, and I thought Patrick did well, and it was a good conversation. There was a little bit of tension. - [David] Yeah. - And I thought that Patrick actually, so I disagreed with the internet. I thought Patrick just took
on a kind of devil's advocate. Like he was purposely being stubborn to bring out the best in you. But the internet thought
that he's being stubborn, not being open to your ideas. I thought the tension between ideas, I think a lot of the tension had to do probably with Donald
Trump and Trump supporters. - That certainly could be the case. And people wrote to me the full gamut of everything you can imagine, from this was your best thing
you've ever done in public, to you got humiliated and your mother should have aborted you. Okay, so and everything in between. So, you know, take your pick. But the most interesting feedback I got was from people who asked me, after, was it incredibly
tense and awkward, and because it seemed so combative. And I think for, I'm so used
to those types of tensions in the discussions that I have that it's very comfortable to me. It's not like afterwards it's, there's a grudge or it's tense
or whatever the case may be. I'm very comfortable just, I disagree with people and that's it. So I did not find anything
that happened inappropriate. I disagreed with a lot of the
things he said, certainly. - So you also spoken with Michael Knowles, I think about the idea of what is a woman. Can you speak broadly
about your conversations with people you disagree with? You know, some of the cases
it feels like it's gone wrong. - The conversations have gone wrong. - [Lex] Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, I think there's
a couple different things. And I'm the first to tell you that depending on who I'm talking to, I go in with a different attitude about how, quote, seriously I'm taking it in the sense of whether
I think it's going to be a deep policy discussion, versus whether it's going
to be more of a performance for an audience that is
expecting a certain thing. And I think there's
different types of shows. When I was interviewed by this guy, Jesse Lee Peterson in Los Angeles, it's very different, for example, than when I'm talking
to Patrick Bet-David, just to give two examples. I think the reason I stopped
doing the Michael Knowles Show was the number of of threats
I would get after the fact. That's really the, I was
glad to engage with him to the extent that the
interviews were interesting and, you know, we could organize
it reasonably efficiently. But the reason I stepped away
was sort of the aftermath. But I did find him to be
someone who was abundantly clear about his view and where he comes from. And while I could not possibly
disagree more with him in terms of politics and
culture and our backgrounds, everything is just so different. I found it easy to engage
in the conversation just because of how
upfront and clear he was about what his beliefs were. - But the number of
threats, it's too much. - Yeah, it was just too much. And this, you know, I don't
know if how much you saw about this recent Twitter
dust up I was involved in that peaked with Donald
Trump Jr. tweeting about me, and then that then declining from there. - Oh, let's talk through
it, I didn't see it. - Okay. - I have to understand, like
the way you study Shakespeare, I have to study your Twitter. I have to understand how
much of it is sarcasm, how much-- - It's mostly sarcasm. I mean here's the thing, and I know that there
are people who will say, David, you're dealing
with such serious issues, it's really not okay not to take everything you
do completely seriously. But my view is, it's so
incredible that I've, between chance and timing
and so different things fallen into a position where this is what I do professionally, and it's a career, and it's
financially sustainable and all these different things. I don't wanna end up
taking myself too seriously because I recognize the timing and luck and all of these other things. And this could have gone a
completely different way. So my approach to a lot of this is let's not take ourselves too seriously, and in particular on
Twitter, a platform that, you know, the degree to which it should be taken very seriously maybe
has changed over time. I'm always sort of thinking
a little bit tongue in cheek on Twitter. - So what happened with Donald Trump Jr.? - [David] So. - Or the full arc of it. - Yeah, to give you a one minute arc and then we can pick
whichever parts we want. After a mass shooting, now you might say there's
like two or three a day, you're correct. After the Nashville mass
shooting at a Christian school, I tweeted snarkily, tongue in cheek, to point that thoughts and prayers not only aren't particularly
useful after a shooting, they also don't prevent shootings. That there's some confusion about how there would be a
shooting at a Christian school given that it is a place
where prayer is taking place. I think, you know, jokingly
said something like, were they not praying enough or correctly? - In my deep journalistic integrity. - You have it. - I have your tweet. - [David] Beautiful, beautiful. - This is the only display
of journalistic integrity I will show today. Okay, and then I have
a couple of responses. - [David] Beautiful. - And you deleted the tweet since then. - Which I regret. - Oh, interesting. - [David] And we can talk about that. - Well I would love to because it's such a interesting decision, because when you tweet something, one of the things I've also learned is you don't often understand
how it's going to be read. It's going to be analyzed,
like I mentioned, Shakespeare. Like there's certain, the use of certain words
that you regret saying in a certain kind of way, maybe just 'cause it wasn't
as eloquent, as powerful. It didn't actually convey the thing, or is the distraction to the main message, all that kind of stuff. Okay, the actual tweet is, "Very surprising that there
would be a mass shooting at a Christian school, "given that lack of prayer is often blamed "for these horrible events. "Is it possible they weren't
praying enough or correctly "despite being a Christian school?" And a lot of people quote retweeted that, which I'm assuming was criticism. So Colin Wright wrote, "I used to consider you
a reasonable progressive, "but you clearly devolved
into partisan hackery. "I'm an atheist. "It cannot begin to fathom "using the murder of children and adults "at a Christian school as an opportunity "to dunk on the concept of prayer." And you responded, "I'm dunking on the people
who send thoughts and prayers "and do nothing else, and
the shootings continue." Okay, I'm sure there's a
lot of other interactions with this. - There's a few other a
hundred thousand interactions. So do you want the arc
leading to the deleting of it? - [Lex] Yes, please. - So basically-- - [Lex] I just wanted to display-- - Do you know what time of day
I tweeted the original one? I feel like it was in the
afternoon or evening on a Monday. - 3:42 PM on 27th, March 27th. - Which was a Monday, okay. So basically I tweet that
and then I finish the day. - So you tweet, and then
you go on with your day. - I might have looked once at Twitter, and it had 2,000 likes
and a few people saying, eh, this might have missed the mark. But it's sort of like, it's
one of my 20,000 tweets, I don't know. I wake up the next morning, my baby daughter did not sleep till 7:30 the way I would like, so she's up at 6:00 AM, and I get up, and I'm just there
starting to make breakfast. And I glance at my phone,
and I'm starting to, this was when verified
meant a different thing than it means now. I'm seeing all these
verified accounts that are, you know, quote tweeting it, and demanding a retraction and whatever. And I go, uh oh, okay, this
looks like it's getting, looks like it's getting some attention. I then continue about my day. Around noon, I hear from my
dad that he got 100 messages from, "you should have aborted your son", to, "we're gonna find all
of you", to whatever else. My dad has no idea what's going on. He's like, I don't know what this is, but I have 100 DMs, to
everything else you can imagine. And I start to get emails about, you know, your Jewish faith, this and
that, and the other thing. And so at that point to me, I thought, this is just going to get
worse and worse and worse. And so I deleted the tweet. And I really regret doing that. Because over the 48 hours that followed, yes the attacks escalated, it
went through Candace Owens, and then at foxnews.com, Newsmax, kind of peaking with Donald Trump Jr. And it was horrible. I mean thousands and
thousands of the, okay. But once I told my audience
about what happened, I got thousands of messages
from people saying, David, only someone who doesn't know you and is determined to interpret this in the worst possible faith would think you're blaming
kids who died for getting shot. Of course you weren't doing that, I wish you hadn't deleted it,
so that it would still be up and you would now see the
tide kind of turning on it. This was not a fun three days regardless, but I do regret having
deleted it because it was a- I wanted to do the quickest
thing I thought I could to get people to stop trying
to find family members and send them threats. And so around noon, that's what I did. And the truth is the
threats didn't stop anyway, 'cause everybody had screenshotted it. And I do wish I had left it up. - And is there some degree,
maybe stepping outside yourself, do you regret tweeting that, in that it feeds the mockery
engine that fuels Twitter? So like, does that tweet really
represent what you believe? - It absolutely represents
the disgust with politics that includes saying we can't
touch guns, we just, we can't. But we're willing to
point to mental health, or say we need more prayer
in schools or whatever. 1000% it represents that view. Is it the type of snark and
sarcasm that I would use if given an hour to discuss the topic rather than whatever
the number of characters is now on Twitter? No, definitely not. And so I am very cognizant of the fact that it was unnecessarily
provocative how it was written. - I think I asked similar
question to Ben Shapiro. Do you worry that this
style of presentation can turn you from being, you
know, a deeply thoughtful, objective political thinker, to somebody who is just a partisan hack? Or partisan, what's a
good word, talking head? - Do you mean with regard to Twitter, or the format of my show in general? - So Twitter for now, let's
start with Twitter for now. And can you silo your style
of communication on Twitter from being a virus that affects your mind? - Right. I don't have deep thoughts
about the Twitter component, beyond, I think across
all sorts of disciplines, this is not the best way to
most effectively solve problems and figure out solutions
to complex issues. - [Lex] You're talking about Twitter? - Now, right now I'm
talking about Twitter. That being said, I think all of us to some
degree have to adapt our content to the platform that we're using, in the same way that
what I post to YouTube is different than what I post to TikTok. What I post to Twitter is also different. Do I think Twitter has been an
unmitigated good for society? No. Have I chosen to step into Twitter as one of the ways in
which I get my message out with the good and the bad? Yes. And I think that there
is a deep conversation to be had there. I think zooming out a little
bit in terms of what I do, and I was hoping this would come up because I think it's really interesting. I will often get emails from
people who say two things. I will get the, you would
have such a bigger audience if you did X type emails. And usually they are
plays to sensationalism, salacious and titillating content, more pop culture stuff, et cetera. On the other hand, it's folks who say, listen, what you're doing
really isn't as serious as it could be, and it seems like you could
do something more serious, and you should consider doing deep dives. You know, once it was, do a deep dive into Calvin Coolidge, and I was like, nobody will watch that. So it's not by accident that my show is the way it is, right? In an hour, I'm thinking of
all the platforms I'm on, and I'm saying, okay, I wanna
do a relatively deep dive on the federal budget, and I want to talk about some of the political tomfoolery going on within the post office. And I'm gonna do a segment
about the wacky rally where Trump said crazy things and made up three words and
said he endorsed a candidate who's named it, right? I'm crafting that in
total to find a balance between let's build this
audience as much as I can in order to have a bigger base,
to get my message out there, and include the more serious stuff with the hope that there's a little bit of something for everyone, and I'm finding a balance between those two sides of the spectrum. It's a deliberate thing. And I'm aware that if I were
producing my show 50 years ago, the balance would probably be different, and it would probably change again. If we didn't, if the show was audio only, rather than having all
these video platforms, it would also be different. But it's a decision
that's proactively made to try to get the best
and most out of the hour that I'm creating every day. - Well it just feels like
there's an entire machine fed by Twitter and journalism
that wants to divide people. And the drama of that division, highlighting the partisan division, the drama of that division
feels like it's a tension with objective, clear thinking sometimes. And so that's the, I worry
that there's a drug to it. There's too much fun to
mock ridiculous people on the other side. - I think you're right about that. And the fact that that is true, to me supports, I've talked
with my audience about, you know, like the old food pyramid, which I guess was like wrong, but let's imagine that there
was a pyramid that made sense. - [Lex] What's at the bottom, bread? - I think like whole grains maybe? I don't remember, it's been a while-- - Sugar is on the top. - Junk food is at the very top. I'm very open with my audience. The vast majority of what I
do is the top of that pyramid. And I tell people very openly, I don't consume a lot of the
type of content I produce. And I think it's really important to, as a base, be doing critical
thinking, epistemology, how do we believe the things we believe, basics about the world. After that, reading history,
economics, philosophy, et cetera. After that, now we're
getting into current events. I would mostly be looking at consuming primary source reporting, things like Associated Press, whatever. I know everybody will
have a different list of what counts there. After that is when I'd say indulge in some of the commentary
type stuff that I do, if you find that I'm thoughtful
enough to make it into that. But I'm very open and
really what I try to do on my show often is in being that at
the top of the pyramid, tell people there's all this other stuff that should be forming your foundation, that I hope you're consuming in addition to just watching me. And I'm very open with
my audience about that. - What about the shape, the dynamics, the characteristics of your audience? Is there some degree to which
you're, through mocking, maybe Republicans, that there's
a lean to that audience, and then you become
captured by the audience? Do you worry about the audience capture? - I worry about it. I'm relatively comfortable that
it's not shaping the program to a great degree in the sense that at this point, I have a pretty good sense
of the things I can say that will upset what I
might call my core audience. You know, one of the interesting things, just to briefly go back
to the Twitter thing was, those people who were
furious with me on Twitter, and they contacted my advertisers, and some advertisers dropped
me, and on and on and on. None of them are actually in my audience. None of them are regular
consumers of my audience. They were kind of weaponized against me by people who said, hey, look at this. The people who follow
Candace Owens on Twitter, other than for their kind of shock value, they're not in my audience. And with my core audience, I know there are things I can talk about that will generate displeasure, I guess you could say with my audience. Sometimes when I touch the
Israeli Palestinian conflict, that will happen. Sometimes on vaccines, there's
a portion of my audience that is more generally
skeptical of vaccines. Sometimes on some foreign
policy issues, or you know, I'm not a big fan of Marianne Williamson nor Bobby Kennedy Jr's
challenges to Joe Biden, not because I love Joe Biden, but because I don't consider them to be the most serious challengers. I know there's people I know my audience who don't like that, they
get mad at me about that. And I'm totally okay with that, and that tension with my core audience. So in that sense, I don't feel as though I've
had that audience capture take place, but I know it can happen, and I'm very open to to being told ways in which it may be happening
without me noticing. - So I've made a call
for questions on Reddit for this conversation. There's a lot of good questions
that I'll probably bring up, but one of them was about
Marianne Williamson, asking why David thinks
she's a garbage candidate, which of course-- - I've never said. - But perhaps you have
more eloquently criticized. So let's go there to the 2024 election. - [David] Okay. - So Biden, Joe Biden officially announced that he's running again. Donald Trump officially announced
that he's running again. If that's the matchup,
who do you think wins? - If the election's held today? I think Biden. - Why? - Well first of all, I
believe he won last time. And if I start with the results from 2020, and I think to myself what
has happened since then that would push or pull
voters one way or the other, I have a hard time making a case that Trump is in a better position today than he was in November of 2020. So that's kind of my starting point, which is it's a rematch of an
election with a known outcome. What has changed? And I can't make a case for
circumstances having changed in Trump's favor. To give a couple of state level examples, Florida seems to be kind of moving more to the Republican side since 2020, but Trump won that state already in 2020. So it wouldn't really change the outcome. Arizona was close. I think Arizona has moved
to the left since 2020. So I don't see Trump taking that one. Wisconsin, I think the
same sort of thing applies. So being very like practical, that would be kind of the
start of my reasoning. - Do you think Joe Biden
is a better candidate now than he was in 2020? - I think he's a worse candidate. This is going to sound ageist, but I think he's a worse
candidate in that he's even older and there already seems to be an appetite for younger candidates, particularly on the
Democratic voting side. So he's going to be four years older, and in a sense that could be a liability. However, he also is going to have four years of accomplishments. Now, you might not like
the things he's done, in which case that would hurt him, but he has started to accumulate a not insignificant
number of accomplishments. Some of the big things that are known, Inflation Reduction Act, and
COVID stimulus, you know, but also less well known things, like a bunch of little
tweaks to healthcare, a bunch of little tweaks
to student lending. There's been a lot of little things. At the macro level, I don't
actually think Joe Biden has that much to do with this, the same way I didn't
credit or attack Trump for a lot of the macroeconomic stuff, but inflation has started
to come down significantly, the stock market's quite
steady, these sort of things. I think looking historically, it's a pretty okay
environment for Joe Biden, with the exception that he was
already the oldest President to be inaugurated in 2021, and he would beat his own
record in January of 2025. And I just don't know how
voters are gonna see that. - So in terms of just
a public human being, how would you compare Trump and Biden? So if I were to give
criticism towards Trump, it would be that he's chaotic, maybe to the point of being disrespectful to a lot of different groups,
to a lot of different ideas, to a lot of different nations and leaders and all that kind of stuff. And then the criticism towards Biden would be that he, maybe
perhaps because of age, or any other kind of
cognitive capabilities is not really there mentally as a, you know, in the way that
perhaps you could say like Barack Obama was there. Just mentally being able to
handle all kinds of aspects of being a public representative
of a nation to the world and to the people of that nation. So, which, in the competition
of personality flaws, which do you think is more powerful? - You've laid out fair, and I
believe accurate assessments of elements of both of those men. You haven't weighed in on to what degree you value each of those assessments, which is where I think the kind of meat of
this question really is. I don't see, and I know that, you know, Biden's gonna get us into World War III, World War III doesn't
seem to be happening. I don't see the Biden deficits you listed, which I agree with you on. I don't see them as
dangerous or threatening to the standing of the United States in this kind of environment with our traditional western
allies and geopolitics, et cetera, in the way that the sort of
unhinged personality of Trump, combined with his lack of
knowledge about most issues is a threat. So for me, if those
two are the candidates, Biden would be my choice. Now, are there people I would rather see on the Democratic side? Yes. If I knew the President
would be a Republican, can I think of better options than Trump? Absolutely. You know, it's so funny, when in 2012 it was Obama versus Romney, the difference seemed so
significant between them. Thinking back, I'm sure I
would disagree with Mitt Romney about tax rates and his
views on LGBT are, I'm sure, I know are different than mine. But it seems without looking at him with rose colored glasses, so comparatively benign given
the four years of Trump. So that's kind of where I come down. - Even McCain and Obama, the differences seemed quite drastic. - Yeah. McCain was interesting because
Palin, as his running mate, opened the door to the
sort of cartoonish stuff that we've started to see
on the Republican side. Palin, Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, it started going in that direction, which has made the party a bit of a joke, aside from what you believe
the tax rate would be, right? You can say taxes are too high, but Jewish space lasers come on, you know? So, but I agree with you on McCain also. - So going back to the
political terms we talked about, where in that spectrum do
you place yourself today? Which of the label do you think captures your political views? - Progressive Social Democrat,
which, again is a capitalist. I own my own business. I pay the taxes I'm
legally required to pay and not a penny more. And, you know, all those things, that's where I place myself. - Would you place yourself to the left of Joe Biden for Senate? - Yes, yes. - Where does AOC fit into that? - That's a good question. - What do you think
about AOC as a candidate? Do you think she eventually runs? - I think that if she doesn't
run into some kind of scandal, and I don't mean scandal in the sense of some personal
impropriety, that you know, but I mean some kind of
major political problem. It seems that she has the staying power to be in American elected
politics for a long time. Whether she would even
want to be President, versus maybe going to the
Senate, or being Governor, or whatever the case may be, I have no idea what her
ambitions are in that sense. But certainly like policy aside, she has this combination of
charisma, likability to some, but also something about her personality that angers the people who don't like her in a way that only fuels
her sort of presence. Which I think applies to Trump as well, that I do think that she
has the potential to be, to have significant staying
power in American politics. President, I don't know. - Do you think that's the
future of political elections and politics in general, is people who are able to skillfully piss off the other side,
like AOC and Trump did? - I think it's an aspect of it. I think it's also understanding how to communicate policy ideas. Trump, you know, I have things I can praise Trump about if we wanna get to that
segment at some point. You let me know when that is, but I do think that there are some things Trump is very good at. And this is why it's very
hard for me to believe that Ron DeSantis has what it takes to actually fight Trump
in a national primary. And one of those things is Trump has a, even though he often
says very strange things, that if you transcribe them, you go, what language is that? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. In the moment, the way he relates to
adversaries on stage, et cetera, is very good in that he is very much aware of how it is going to
be seen by the audience. And so that's why a lot of times, it's more about doesn't matter that a word salad came out of his mouth, how he immediately responded
and related to the person, very good. So I think that knowing how to be good when clips are shared all the time, often out of context is
extraordinarily important. Knowing how to use social media, which every election cycle,
that means something different. But understanding how to use
social media, very important. Those things are absolutely so important. And whether you're able to do
a deep dive on the deficit, it's certainly useful. But I would say it's a bad thing. It's becoming less important
in terms of figuring out who we want to represent us. - So just lingering on the AOC, and then maybe let's throw
in Bernie Sanders on that. So where do you place yourself and how do you do the layout of the land of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Joe
Biden, and David Pakman? - My instinct is, and
I'm going to answer it, the thing that makes this
tough is Bernie says, he's a Democratic socialist. He ran as a social Democrat. He didn't run on anything
that was really socialism. So I'm going by their
public facing platforms. - I've been listening to
him for many, many years, and all the way back to
the Thom Hartman Show. And I think using the terms
as you've been using them, he has, I don't think ever
been a Democratic socialist. I haven't heard him speak about socialism. I think, I've heard him
speak about social programs and the value of social programs throughout the history
of the United States and how they've been beneficial. - My understanding is
very similar to yours. Although there may be stuff from the '70s where he really was talking about-- - [Lex] We've all been
associated in the '70s. - Yeah, yeah. You and I even who weren't around, we were doing stuff in the '70s. - [Lex] I feel like we did, yeah. - My sense would be, you know,
Biden is like center left, and then I'm to the left of that. But maybe just inside of
where AOC and Bernie are, or very, very similar to Bernie. I mean I identify with
a lot of Bernie's ideas. Maybe their implementation,
I'm more flexible on. I'll give you one example, Medicare for all. One way of trying to get
healthcare to everybody, which Bernie's very big on, is you take the current Medicare program, you just eliminate the age limit, make it available to everybody,
pay for it through taxation. Interesting. However, I'm open to other models if they get everybody healthcare, that is good quality and affordable. Singapore has an interesting model, Germany has an interesting model. I am more agnostic about how
we do it than just saying, let's expand Medicare. Whether that puts me to the
right of Bernie, I don't know, but I'm not like exactly right there on it has to be Medicare for all. - Yeah, that's more just
flexibility versus dogmatism. So I don't know if that
puts you to the left or to the right. - I don't either. - What do you think about the, we could term manipulation
or the corruption in the DNC that perhaps tipped the
skills against Bernie in the election? Do you think there was such a-- - In 2016 or 2020? (Lex laughing) - Both, I would say, in different, the dynamics there were
different with Hillary Clinton and the pressure from Hillary
Clinton as a candidate and so on. I mean, was there, why didn't Bernie win, I guess is one way to ask? - Okay, I think there's
a couple things here. First, the DNC, I'm not a Democrat. Just your audience may not
know, I'm just a independent. I mostly vote for candidates
that end up being Democrats. In local elections, often
there's no party designation. So okay, I'm obviously on the
left, I'm not denying that. But the Democratic Party as an institution has never really been interesting to me. - You're still a rebel that resists belonging to any institution. - Exactly right, exactly right. And whether it matters, I don't know. The DNC and the RNC
really are organizations that to some degree exist to
justify their own existence because if they were no longer necessary, they would go away. And so they have to assert their
value and their importance. They do this in a number
of different ways. Organizing the way that
the nominee is chosen, the convention, working
with states on everything from redistricting to
whatever else the case may be. Setting the order of primaries and having some involvement in how that's all going to happen. And also coordinating behind the scenes, I guess they would describe it
as making sure our candidates don't get in each other's ways. We might see it and say,
they're picking the winner. There's nothing illegal
about them being involved in picking the winner, but we might say it's not
in people's interests. I think the 2020 primary
was really interesting. Bernie supporter myself, I started telling my audience
after a couple primaries and even before, based on
polling and different things, I see a real uphill
battle here for Bernie. And it's really important, people in my audience are not the average, you know, union worker in Michigan who is mostly working
and raising a family, and then goes to vote on primary day and goes to vote on election day. If you spend a lot of time
on Reddit and Twitter, you're going to have an inflated sense of Bernie's popularity
within the Democratic Party. That was my sense. And to some degree we saw
that in certain states. I don't have the exact
primary order in results in front of me or or in my head. But the big turning
point was South Carolina. South Carolina was when Joe
Biden won and won handily, understood to be because of the larger African American population
in South Carolina. And right around that exact same time, I actually don't remember now whether it was the day
after or the day before, some of the smaller Democratic candidates, smaller in terms of support, got out and said, I'm endorsing Joe Biden. And to some degree, of course, it was all organized and timed to help Joe Biden. There's no doubt about that. This is what the DNC does. It's hard for me to be mad at the DNC because this is sort of like, if we believe they were
there to be unbiased arbiters and to stay as much on
the side as possible, it would make sense to be furious that they've gone against their stated, you know, kind of mandate. But we know that the DNC negotiates and is working behind the
scenes, and has a favorite, that favorite was Hillary in 2016, 2020. So I share the frustration about
the power that the DNC has, but for people who were saying
they did something illegal or whatever else the case may be, that doesn't seem to be the case. But this is part of why, I mean, I would love there not to be this duopoly of Republicans and Democrats. And there's probably four major
changes that have to happen in order to make that a reality. But I share the frustration
of folks while recognizing that Reddit was not
accurately representing Bernie's level of popularity. - Still I wish that the
bias wasn't towards the, what could be negatively
termed the deep state, towards the bureaucracy, towards
the momentum of the past, which I think Joe Biden kind
of represents versus new ideas. Which is funny to say that Bernie Sanders somehow represents new ideas, 'cause he is also an older gentleman. - Well it's a lot of framing. And the other aspect to that is, on paper, Joe Biden's platform was arguably the most progressive of
any Democratic candidate who won the nomination. Now of course there were
people who challenged the nominations who were
to Joe Biden's left. A lot of this is perspective,
and it, you know, that's how you end up saying, the guy who's a couple
years older than Biden is actually the guy with
the fresh perspective. Which is interesting because
I don't disagree with you. - Yeah, and you also have to say, the perspective doesn't always
align with the policies. You're right on, you know, the actual policies of
Joe Biden are different than maybe the perception of Joe Biden. - Or what he ran on. I mean, just two examples
I would give are, during his campaign, he
played up a little bit, his interest in doing
student loan forgiveness and something on cannabis. I never bought it. I told my audience, I think
he's saying this stuff because this is the way
the tide is kind of, the wind is blowing and he's being advised to say this stuff. I don't think he's gonna do very much on either of these things. He did actually do some
student loan stuff. But that would be two examples I think. - Okay, let's go to the,
something you alluded to, which is the pros and cons
of a particular candidate. Well, what to you, as a critic of Trump, what to you are the pros, the
strengths of Donald Trump, and what to you are
his biggest weaknesses? - The strengths of Trump. Let's see how I can frame them in a way that is both accurate and accurately assesses
my feeling about it. - And could be taken out
of context most masterfully through the clipping process. - Yes. Trump's strengths are mostly superficial, and in terms of presentation. Trump was able to, I call it a grift. Some on the right say he's just so good at relating to different types of people. Trump as a rich guy from New York City, was able to convince people
that he spent most of his life trying to be kept isolated from, that he had their best interests in mind, that he knew why they weren't doing well in the 2016 economy, and that he had solutions that he was going to bring forward. The truth is, he never
really liked those people. And as soon as they weren't useful to him for a brief period of time, he, you know, that love affair
with his followers stopped, and then now it's back
that he needs them again. He didn't really understand
the causes of the problems that those folks were experiencing. And his solutions were laughable, right? Like Jared was going to solve the Israeli Palestinian
conflict in year one. He was gonna replace Obamacare in 2017. Things that were never
going anywhere, anywhere. But what he did really well was he put up a united front of,
I know what is ailing you, I know how to fix it, and I know how to fix it, I guess, because he's a businessman and he's been above the fray
of politics for so long, knowing how to use political
donations to his advantage. He called that smart, et cetera. I think that's his greatest strength. - Why do you say that the Jared plan for Israel and Palestine and the plan for healthcare
to improve Obamacare, why do you say that's laughable? - Well, only someone, I would include the
North Korea plan as well, which I'm glad to talk about. Only someone who doesn't know anything about the size and scope of these issues could so arrogantly say
that they could solve them in that way and on that timeframe. I'm all for optimism and
bringing a new face to things, absolutely, without a doubt. But, you know, a wall with
Mexico that Mexico will pay for at the end of my first term. I know there are people who believed it because they would call
into my show and say, I'm voting for Trump because of it. But it's hard to believe
that anybody serious would fall for that, unless you were deliberately wanting to just believe whatever
was being fed to you, or you just hadn't ever thought
about these issues before. The healthcare plan, you know, in 2017 they proposed one would've led to 24 million or so people ending up without healthcare. Didn't go anywhere 'cause
it was so terrible. And then in August of 2020, Trump said, in two weeks I'm gonna finally
have my healthcare proposal. It's 2023, we still never got it. You know, with all of these things when you think them through,
it was just sort of arrogance. And I get the perspective of, I want optimism and I liked that optimism. It worked. I mean fair. A lot of people saw it and liked it. As someone who followed a
lot of those issues closely, they seemed of course
like impossible promises. - Well it's a double-edged sword. So to push back a little bit, if you look at the things I have a little bit more knowledge about, which is the space of
artificial intelligence, there's a company called DeepMind, and there's a company called OpenAI that we're laughed at for a long time when they were talking about that they're going to solve intelligence. And now they've made, especially DeepMind, and now most recently OpenAI with GPT, they've made progress that
most of the AI community would not have imagined
they'd be able to make. Everything from AlphaGo
beating the world Go champion. Just all the different steps and progress that I can get into,
were surprised everybody. And they are legitimately fearlessly pursuing the task of solving intelligence. The other aspect, he gets
a lot of criticism now, but another example is Elon Musk. I can say a lot of things, like SpaceX, so commercial space flight. He was laughed at for a long
time that that's possible. Same thing with autopilot in
Tesla, autonomous vehicles. His approach was harshly
criticized by all the experts, and still criticized, to
this day, deeply criticized. And as a person that I believe objectively can look at the progress of autopilot as a semi-autonomous vehicle system has been incredibly surprising. So the reason I mentioned
that is sometimes it feels like you need the guy or the gal who makes those preposterous,
ambitious statements, like we're going to solve
healthcare this year. Like, and then there's
experts like yourself that are looking, thinking, have you read anything about the history of Israel Palestine, is a good example of that. Do you know there's a history there? Do you realize how complicated,
how many people have tried, how many people have failed? How many millions of
people hate each other in this little place,
in this land, that like, sometimes the expertise
can really weigh you down. So sort of to push back, sometimes you have to have
the almost be naive and stupid and just rush in with an optimism in order to actually make some progress. - I agree with you 100%. I think it's interesting that
all of the examples you gave of successes are from
the technology space. - Not politics, yes. - Not from politics, which I mean, listen, I would love to be able to make headway on some of these issues more
quickly without a doubt. I do think at some point though, when it comes down to voting and saying, one of these people is going
to be ostensibly in charge for four years through
all of the departments, and secretaries and
choices that they make, we do wanna apply some level of realism with the understanding that your examples are from the tech space. And they're good examples. There's no question about it. One thing I'll add to this, I recently read Bradley Hope's
new book about North Korea, and it's really about an activist who doesn't even really matter, but in the background of the book, it's written, much of
what is written about happens during the Trump era. And when Trump did the
first and then the second, I guess you'd call them
summits with Kim Jong Un. And it actually did seem
like to some degree, Trump's were gonna handle this like I do a business deal
approach to Kim Jong Un. In some sense it actually was logical because of Kim Jong Un and the way that it was so ego-driven, and they both as sort of
authoritarian strong men types to different degrees wanted that. There was actually a colonel where I actually thought as I read it, Trump's initial idea wasn't crazy. The problem was he knew nothing about the backstory of the relationship. He fell for all sorts of
lies from Kim Jong Un, and he made offers that
didn't make any sense to make. It fell apart, fine. But that's an example where
I think Trump's personality was not actually at its base, the problem, when it came to North Korea. - Well there's other things of this nature that could go and, or some people argue goes
into the strengths and pros of Donald Trump for China, for
example, tariffs and China. Can you make the case that
there's some positive outcomes of the way Donald Trump acted with China? - It's really tough, and I'll
give you a couple reasons. - [Lex] Okay, then also cons. - Give you, it's tough to make. So the China thing is
really, so just very recently to when we're recording this, Trump was on Fox News interviewed
by a guy named Mark Levin. And Trump proposed a new, I
call it a conspiracy theory, maybe it will strike you
as something different about China, COVID, and tariffs. And Trump's suggestion was that the tariffs cost China so much money, China sent the US so much money in tariffs that they released COVID as punishment. Now there's a couple problems with that. One, American companies pay the tariffs. Trump still doesn't seem to know this. Trump seems to believe
that when he puts a tariff on Chinese imports, someone in China is cutting
a check to the United States. American companies buy
the stuff from China, and then American companies cut
a check to the United States for the tariff. Trump doesn't seem to get that. - But it still has a sting
to the Chinese economy. - You can make the argument that if there is a suitable
alternative domestically or from a different country, that it will reduce imports,
but it didn't happen. And we actually have reports
now that the tariffs on China cost about a quarter
million American jobs. The other problem with that idea is China created and released
a virus in order to hurt you. But as of today, 5.7 of the 6.8 million deaths
were in other countries. It's a very indirect way. You're mostly killing
people in other countries to hurt Trump. Maybe there was a, this
is the sort of thing where when I think about
how Trump dealt with China, it's very scary. Because given another four years, who knows what he might do if
he still doesn't understand how tariffs work. - So geopolitics operates
in complicated ways with carrots and sticks, and Henry Kissinger has
written quite a lot about this. And in some sense the positive aspect here that Donald Trump is
willing to take big risks in the game of geopolitics
with this giant superpower that is China. And a lot of others are too afraid, too afraid to call them out, to come to the table and criticize. - I certainly think that's
an argument that can be made. My question would be, what tangible positive
outcomes did it lead to? And it's tough to identify any. But I think it's a great thing. I mean, listen, one of the
things you're kind of getting at maybe indirectly is that there's been
this sense that politics has been done very
similarly for a long time. And even between Democrats
and Republicans still, even with some policy differences, there's still the kind of feeling that it's disconnected folks in DC, mostly dealing with issues
that don't directly affect. Look, I get that. I'm with you on that. I think the question as
to whether Trump's bluster was positive rather than
extraordinarily humiliating in many ways, I just come down on, it was an absolute and total humiliation. But I understand that you can recognize Trump doesn't know a lot of stuff, but his attitude was
refreshing in some way. That's a reasonable position
for someone to take. I disagree with it, but I understand it - Well, is trying and failing
better than not trying? - This goes well beyond politics. You know, Wayne Gretzky
has weighed in about this. Michael Jordan has weighed
in about, I mean this is, yeah, is it better to have
tried and failed than never? Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved? I don't know. I mean, listen, we lived
through four years of Trump. We know what that four year term was like, and it's very hard for me to
say that the things he tried were overwhelmingly reasonable. But I get the point you're trying to make, and I appreciate it. And it's, if we don't do any of it, then where do we end up, sure. We know where we ended up with with Trump and it was pretty embarrassing. - Okay, let's linger
on some more strengths. We didn't start any new wars. - [David] We didn't start-- - Is there something to that? - Yeah, that's, it's interesting. There's a few different
approaches to dealing with that. First, it's really important to remember that the counterpoint to that from the folks who like to say that was that Hillary Clinton
was gonna start three wars. Sometimes they say four wars,
sometimes they say five wars. Okay. The geopolitical situation
during the four years that Trump was in office, I don't know that they obviously
lent themselves to wars that Trump just barely was
able to keep us out of. I think the Russia thing is interesting, because now it's very
popular to go back and say, you know, the reason Putin
didn't do the Ukraine thing when Trump, right, and to somehow give Trump credit for that. There's a counterpoint to it,
which is Putin under Trump, particularly if Trump got four more years, would've been able to maybe
consolidate power in other ways because of his relationship with Trump. I'm not coming down on
one side or the other. It's not my area of expertise. But it's not the open shut slam dunk that, you know, Trump likes to say this. Putin didn't invade because
he knew I would crush 'em, and okay. So it's not obvious to me that
there were imminently wars that would've started during that time. That being said, you know, for all the criticism
of Obama during Crimea, Trump seemed to just
kind of forget about that after all the criticism and say, I'm not actually gonna
do anything about that. And so there are foreign policy criticisms that could be made. But it is true, no new wars
were started under Trump. And I like that. I don't like wars. - What do you think about
his handling of COVID? Can you say, what are the pros and cons
of his handling of COVID? - The con for him is he'd
be President right now if he had handled it differently. I think it's abundantly clear. Early on, and there's now a
lot of really good reporting about the conversations he was having with Jared Kushner and others. He became convinced, either because of things
he was being told, or because he decided this
is the way it's going to be. This is gonna go away. Fine, it's in China. Okay, it's in China. In Italy, okay, we have 15
cases, but it'll soon be zero. We'll be open by Easter of 2020. None of it happened. If he had handled it in the following way, and I've said this to Rogan, and I've said this to Patrick Bet-David, and they tend to all see my side of this. If Trump had said, listen, we don't know
how bad this is gonna be, but I care too much
about the American people to take a shot. So it's not gonna be two weeks,
it's gonna be a little bit, but I need your help. We're gonna bring everybody together. I don't care if you're a
Democrat or a Republican, we're gonna have MAGA masks, and he could have kept
50 cents on the dollar to pay off Stormy or whoever, right? But it would've been, I
think he wins reelection, because the perception was, and reality is a version of that. The perception was that he
was way too cavalier about it early on. People died who didn't need to die. And I think that it was
arguably the one area where he could have all but guaranteed that he was going to
get himself reelected. - Well to push back on that,
I mean, because you mentioned sort of masks and lockdowns
kind of a solution to COVID. - I didn't mention lockdowns, but I'm glad to talk about policy. - Sure, quarantine, like there's several
solutions to a pandemic broadly speaking. And one of them is a vaccine. And so you didn't mention that. He fast tracked the development. He, his administration fast
tracked the development of the vaccine, which surprising he didn't
really take much credit for. - I think he did, I think he tried. There's a couple, there's a lot there. - Well, to me, it seems
like you could make the case with the Trump hand gestures, that his decisions for fast tracking the development of the vaccine saved tens of millions of lives You could make, he could
in the Trumpian way, make that case. - So, couple different things. I know you don't necessarily
follow Trump's rallies as closely as I do, and I'm
jealous of you for that. But he did tout the vaccine
stuff hugely for a while, until his audience turned against him. And then he had to draw this
line where he was going, I made the vaccines, which
none of you have to take, by the way, freedom. You don't have to take
them, but it's fantastic. And nobody else could have done it. But don't worry, nobody's gonna
make you take the vaccine. And he actually got booed at
a couple of his own rallies when talking about the vaccines. But let's back up a little bit. Fast tracking, my
understanding of what he did is he did what any President
in his situation would do, and what many world leaders
elsewhere did as well, which is he agreed to
pre-purchase supply of vaccine, in order to provide money
to pharmaceutical companies to scale up the manufacturing,
which is absolutely fine. But he wants, one of the stories he tells is it usually takes 12
years to develop a vaccine. We did it in nine months thanks to me. Decades of mRNA technology
being developed, created the platform in which you can make a particular
vaccine in nine months. Didn't have anything to do with Trump. He did pre-fund and say,
we will buy huge supply. And that provided liquidity to
the pharmaceutical companies. - But he also delegated control to people, to experts that enabled that kind of fast tracking
of vaccines, right? - He was very eager for
the FDA to approve it, because he saw that there
would be a political benefit. - [Lex] And he didn't get in
the way, I guess is what-- - He didn't get in the way, fair. I think now we're on the same page. He did not get in the way
of vaccines being developed, which is good. - Presidents and bureaucracies have a way of getting in the way. - And I don't disagree with that. I'm not aware of really any
governments that got in the way. I mean, it seemed, given
the global situation, everybody, European countries
were pre-purchasing vaccine. African countries were, who were going to be
later to receive vaccines, were partnering with
the European countries that had pre-purchased. But the most interesting
thing about all of this is Trump did play up the
vaccines for a long time until his crowd didn't
wanna hear about it anymore, which was crazy. It was sort of like he became a victim of the monster he created to some degree. - One of the effects of all
this that makes me truly sad is this division over the vaccines has created distrust in science. - Yeah. - And also what makes me sad
is the scientific leaders, Anthony Fauci being one
of the representatives of that community, I would say
completely dropped the ball. - Hmm, in what way? - They spoke with arrogance. They spoke down to people, they spoke in a way that a
great scientist does not speak, which is they spoke with
certainty, without humility. Like they have all the wisdom, and all of us are too
dumb to understand it, but they're going to be the parent that tells us exactly what to do, versus speaking to the
immensity of the problem, the deep core of the problem
being the uncertainty. We don't know what to do. The terrifying thing about the pandemic, we don't know anything
about it as it's happening. And so you have to make decisions, you have to take risks about, well maybe you have to overreact in order to protect the populace. But it's in the face of
uncertainty, they have to do that, not powered, empowered by science somehow, and the deep expertise as
somebody like Anthony Fauci claims to have. So like the, I just,
I'm really troubled by, yeah, the distrust and science
that resulted from that. And that you have to blame the leaders, I mean, to the degree,
leaders take responsibility. And I think Anthony Fauci
was the scientific leader behind the American
response to the pandemic. And I think he failed as a scientist, as a representative of science. - I'm less, I don't know if
interested is the right word, but the kind of the Fauci
review is less interesting to me in terms of what comes next than the first part you mentioned, which is the distrust in science. And sometimes I'll get
voicemails or emails from people in my audience who say, that I have had to
backpedal on certain things related to this. And one of the things I tried
to do from the beginning was not speak in certain terms when we really didn't
have complete information. So there was this period
where hydroxychloroquine was first sort of mentioned
as a possible treatment, prophylactic, or you know,
proactive treatment for COVID, or active treatment for COVID, along with a bunch of other stuff. There was ivermectin, there was Vitamin D, there were all sorts of different things. And I tried to be careful to say, right now we don't have rigorous science that tells us that some
of these things work. It doesn't mean that
won't come in the future. At which point, if there was something as
cheap as hydroxychloroquine that treated COVID effectively,
unbelievable, fantastic. It's not, there's no way
it ever will be determined. We don't have that information right now. So it's not super wise right now to go and start taking this stuff. We eventually learned,
like with Vitamin D, having an appropriate Vitamin
D level does seem to be, based on what I've most recently read, generally protective, and a good thing when it comes to infections
of different, great. Okay, so that one we figured out. One of the really difficult
things is that the quote, truth about the vaccines did change. And the original, again, this is all, I don't pretend to be an expert, but just someone who's
synthesizing the medical data and writing about it, originally, the first vaccine related to the wild type strain did
seem to be very effective, not only at preventing
death and serious illness, but also transmission. There were people then saying, it doesn't prevent transmission. Over time, as the variants came forward, the vaccine became less effective at that. At that point I started telling my audience something different, because as far as I was concerned, the reality on the ground had changed. In my mind, that's how science works. It's not backpedaling, it's
we're adjusting our beliefs to what is taking place in the real world. - Well, to be fair, the scientists, many of whom are my friends,
viralogists and biologists, they have way more humility
than people like Anthony Fauci, who are speaking about
this, or the CEO of Pfizer who are speaking about this. This is the fundamental problem here. Is the way science work is, has, the way science works is there's
usually a lot more humility and a lot more transparency about what we know and what we don't know. And people like Anthony Fauci thought it would be beneficial for the world if he speaks with more certainty. But because of the political division that formed around that, that certainty resulted in, became completely counterproductive, that people didn't trust
anything about the vaccine, didn't trust any institutions. There were, that contained the experts that actually knew what they were doing, and basically didn't trust anything that was coming out of
the mouths of scientists, some large percent of the population. So that made you
completely ineffective in, at scale, as a society trying to respond to a terrible pandemic. And that's where I put a
lot of blame on leaders. So political leaders
and scientific leaders are the ones that should inspire us to all get together and respond, and that should be the
case for the pandemic, that should be the case
in the time of war, all this kind of stuff. - I generally agree with you, and for me it's really about shared blame. And there were a lot of different reasons why that the early
communication wasn't good. Part of it was, I mean, for me, I prefer accuracy
rather than overconfidence. I would prefer, listen, we
don't really know right now whether masks do X or Y. What we do know is the
supply is really limited of this type of mask. We're gonna try to keep 'em
for the frontline workers. I love that. That's the way I want
to be communicated to. A call was made to do it differently, which was to say the
masks don't actually help, but the real reason is
they want to keep them for healthcare workers. And then later the masks
are what's going to solve. I'm with you 100%. I think the other layer to it, is you can't ignore the
political situation at the time. If Trump had won reelection, and the vaccine
distribution had taken place while Trump was President
rather than Biden, my belief is that the
same number of Democrats would've gotten vaccinated, but way more Republicans would've as well, because they were following not science, but political leaders. And when it was Biden
in DC instead of Trump, a lot of those people said,
I don't trust the vaccine. But wait, it's Trump's vaccine, I thought. Yeah, but something about the
way Biden's distributing it. So I do think you can't
ignore that political layer. I agree with you, the
communication was a disaster. - Let me ask you about Joe Biden. What are the strengths and
weaknesses of Joe Biden? - Weaknesses, I think
are some of the things you've identified. He is not seen as high energy. He is not the same Joe Biden
that debated Paul Ryan in 2012 and ran circles around him, in just an incredible debate performance. He is not inspiring in the way that someone like a Barack
Obama was to people coming up and starting to get
interested in politics. I think a lot of those
are fair criticisms. I think on policy, he's not interested in a lot of the things that younger voters are interested in. I mentioned cannabis reform,
I mentioned student loans. So I think that that's
a deficit for Biden. I think the upside to Biden, is when it comes to
foreign policy, diplomacy, high level negotiations, knowing how to engage with
allies in a productive way, it's tough to find someone with
more experience than Biden. I know that there are
counterpoints to what I'm saying, and those include that was the old Biden, the new Biden doesn't have it. That includes, that's just a sign of rot because he's been around for so long. Nobody should be around
that long in politics. Perfectly reasonable
criticisms to talk about. But I do see that as one of his strengths. And he also is good at knowing when he can work with
Republicans, and when he can't, and not wasting more time
than is sort of expected for posturing reasons. And I think that that's a good thing. - Do you think he's actually there, so in day-to-day operation of government, given his cognitive capabilities, do you think he is an active
and practicing executive? - I don't know that I can say that it's because of what
may be going on cognitively, but my sense from the people I talk to, is that he's very much involved in the highest level geopolitical, and big domestic economic stuff. But that a lot of the smaller issues that presidents might or might not be in sort of plugged into, that he's not plugged into the details of a lot of the lower level stuff. - Yeah, you could probably
apply the same exact criticism even more so towards the
Donald Trump administration in terms of being a
practicing active executive who's paying attention. Like for example, like Vladimir Putin is somebody who loves the
role of the executive, has a huge amount of meetings, is constantly tracking
information about agriculture and all the different
subsystems of government. Stalin, funny enough, was
also extremely good at this. So certain people just love
the job of being an executive. And I'm not sure if Donald Trump did, and I'm not sure if Joe
Biden in this current state has the cognitive capability to. - It's a good question, Kim Jong Un's another one by the way. You know, there's videos
of him examining a pottery, you know, a factory
where they make plates, and making very specific comments about how the plates should be made. I think that in that case, there's a lot of propaganda value to it. With Trump, I think you're probably right. You know, he did get involved
in the minutiae of things. I mean once he pulled out a weather map, and with a sharpie, drew
a different hurricane path that was more politically
convenient to him. That's pretty micro, you know, saying the weather channel's wrong. - I see what you did there. - [David] This is, okay. - I see what you did there. - So that's a micro,
he went to Puerto Rico and he gave out paper
towels after a hurricane. Now he was shooting them like free throws, which didn't look very good. So he will get involved in the
micro when it's advantageous, you know what I mean? But I do agree with you that he wants to just kind of
make it, so build the wall. I don't know, just build it,
figure it out, get it done. - [Lex] Quick pause, bathroom break. - Sure. - Yeah, you're hilarious. And just for the sake of completeness, I should mention the
subreddit, what Biden has done. There's also what Trump has
done, but it's not as active. And it has like this master
list of all the accomplishments. It's, I recommend people
look at it 'cause there's, it's kind of rigorous and
interesting with links, a list of all the things he's done. Just to list some of them,
restored daily press briefings, canceled the Keystone Pipeline,
reversed Trump's Muslim ban, required masks on federal property, rejoins the Paris Climate Agreement, extend student loan payment
freeze, extend eviction freeze, historic stimulus bill, as you mentioned, ends funding for border
wall, and so on and so forth. DACA, border strengthening of DACA, rejoins the World Health Organization. And the timing of this
of course is important. Yeah, several historic stimulus bills, which of course you could
criticize or support. Raise the minimum wage
for federal contractors and federal employees for $15. There's a lot, there's a lot. It makes you realize
with both Trump and Biden that there's a bunch of
small details that matter. - [David] Yeah. - Like that matter on people's lives, like actual little policies. Trump did a lot of stuff as far
as I heard for the military. Like not big stuff, but small stuff. - Yeah, I'd be curious
what you're thinking of. I mean, I know one of the
big things under Trump was we're gonna get trans
people out of the military. - [Lex] That's not what
I was referring to. - You weren't referring to that. He, Trump's hilarious with
these stories that he tells, and one of the story,
and you get to know them, if you follow him at all. He tells the story, you know,
when I came into office, the generals came to me and they said, "Sir, the cupboards are bare. "We have no bullets. "And so I rebuilt the military, you know, "the cupboards were
bare when Obama left it, "and it was just terrible. "But I rebuilt it and the generals, "I've got the best generals, they said, "Sir, it's incredible
what you were able to do." You look into it and it's like, yeah, that's not really true. Like it is true that there are armaments that just like on a
schedule, do get replaced, and that's part of the
military industrial complex. But there's nothing like
special Trump really did. But these stories become, they take on like a life of their own. And it's interesting to sometimes try to dig down and figure out like, was there any policy connected to that or is that just a story? - Do you think it's possible to have a good conversation
with each of them, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in a podcast context
or in a debate context? - Absolutely. Yeah, you're saying like,
could I with of either them? - [Lex] Yes. - Oh, 100%, yeah. - [Lex] Joe Biden too? - Sure, yeah. - But can you dig into that a little more? - Well, I mean, I don't know what, I think there's maybe something implicit in your question, but-- - That's deeper about
the nature of politics and politicians, yes. - I think with either of them, I mean the political differences
wouldn't be an impediment to having a good conversation
with either of them. I think one of the things
that's really tough in my experience when
talking to elected officials, is they could be super interesting about 100 different topics, but handlers decide or try
to get you to talk about something you don't really care about and something really narrow, which doesn't bring out
your best nor their best. And that's a frustration. But I think that given an unstructured three hour conversation, I think it would be
interesting to talk to both. I mean, listen with Biden, aside from his view on
cannabis or whatever, his background and the incredible unimaginable family tragedy
that he had in his first wife, and you know, multiple kids dying. And I mean it's just incredible, you know? And with Trump, I think also you could have
an interesting conversation. - Yeah, the human beings
were the life story. - [David] Yes. And they're some of the
most successful humans who have ever lived to have rose to this highest office in
interesting complex ways. - [David] Yes. - I mean one of the
things I'm troubled by, maybe you can speak to,
is why we're so negative towards presidential
candidates and presidents. Why, it's just they go
through this shit storm no matter who they are. They're like hated. Like all the conspiracy theories, and just the dynamics of how
we talk about them is vicious. If you just look at replies to
even Barack Obama on Twitter, it's like, what is going on here? Why, because we look at other
leaders in other spaces, and we're generally positive about it. - Yeah, there's a couple different things. There's this dynamic which
is really unfortunate, which is, you ask people, do you approve of the job a
particular president is doing? And very often if at any point
while they were in office they did something you don't like, people will say, I don't approve. And so by its nature what that means is just like the longer you're in office, the lower your approval
rating's going to be. And very often that's the way it works. I mean there's major events like 9/11 spiked George W. Bush's
approval to a incredible level. Then it came back down with the Iraq war. But there's this unfortunate thing that when people are just asked, you think Biden's doing a good job? If four months ago Biden
did something on healthcare that somebody didn't like,
even if you like most of it, a lot of people from that
point forward will say, I don't approve. They might still vote for 'em, because they like him better than the alternative or whatever. It's just the dynamic of politics. And I agree it's very- - Does it have to be that way, you think? - I don't think it has to be
that way, but to unwind it, so many things would have to change. I think our election system
is part of why politics is the way it is, where you have two choices and
it's first passed the post, and we have this electoral college so that depending on
which state you vote in, the kind of meaning and
significance of your vote is different. If you vote in Montana, it's the Republican
candidate's going to win, and that changes the dynamics. I think that's part of it. I think that at a personal level, I've experienced this in my life a lot. We've become, and by we, I mean
people in the United States to some degree who talk about this stuff, we've become uncomfortable
when there is disagreement, and it bleeds over into now we can't have a normal interpersonal
relationship anymore. I'm from Argentina, and in
Argentina it's really common, even in my family, there are incredibly
heated political debates, at the start, the middle, the
end of some kind of gathering. But then everybody just goes back to like, okay, we disagree on some
things, but that's okay. And we can now go, and you know, finish cooking the beef, or
whatever it is that we're doing. And I experienced the civic, even with people who come
up to me on the street, and they go, just earlier today, a guy came up to me and he said, "RFK all the way baby",
talking about Bobby Kennedy Jr. And I just kind, you know, I said, "Oh, all right, you know,
let's see what happens." And then there was another moment where the guy ended up standing next to me for maybe longer than he thought. And I could tell this
guy's getting so awkward, because it was an utterance he thought that would just be
on the fly and he'd be gone. But now we're standing next to each other waiting for our sandwiches. It's like no big deal. You know, it's just, oh okay,
you like Bobby Kennedy Jr. I don't plan to vote
for, it's fine, you know? And that's like a sociocultural thing. I think there's lots of other countries. I've spent time in Italy, I have relatives in Israel where
like shouting at each other is sort of like normal. And then you just go back and finish the, it sounds like shouting,
I'm sort of exaggerating, but very animated, what
seemed like big disagreements. And then everybody's cool. I wish it were more normal. - So maybe the mechanism of going from shouting to being
cool again needs to improve, because maybe we can't solve
the shouting at each other. - [David] Maybe not. - So maybe we need to somehow
figure out the deescalation, like making up, I've had a few recent fights
with friends like that. - Really? - Yeah.
- For politics? - No.
- Oh. - No, but political style,
emotionally drenched stuff. And it was interesting to
go through that full process and then make up at the end. But it was a process, and it was a process that
required being in person, and talking through it. And it was stressful, the whole thing. And then maybe because most of
our interactions are online, we don't get a chance to do
that in person, making up again. I don't know, but do you think it's a
feature or a bug of the system that we're so, we just hate the powerful. - You mentioned the online part. I think it's a, you mentioned
it earlier perfectly, which is you take
contentious political issues, you create a platform that rewards controversy and disagreement, and limits the number of
characters you can use to express yourself. You kind of throw it into a
baking dish, and you know, mix the entire thing up. It's complete and total chaos. And one of the things that, you know, I've talked before about all
the angry emails and threats and stuff that I get. I'm acutely aware that if I
had in-person conversations with most of these people, the conversations would basically be like, oh, we have different views about how to solve some of
the problems we're facing. We probably agree about
what the problem is, and we probably share many values. But on these particular four issues, we may have very different
views, but that's okay. Online, that's not the case. And it leads to, you know, the mess that we get ourselves in. But I think that it's a
feature of a lot of the systems that are being used to
disseminate information. - Again, let me linger on that. Do you regret some of the mockery and the snarky use on
Twitter, and even in your show that kind of feeds that division? - I don't regret it in the sense that it's a calculated
part or tool that I use in addition to figuring out how to simplify complicated concepts, and choosing stories that I
think are underrepresented, and you know, it's all part of like the
package of what I'm doing. I recognize that my show is
not the audio visual version of a peer reviewed, you know,
randomized controlled trial about views on abortion
or whatever the case. Like I'm very much aware of that. But I don't regret including it as a tool that I've used to build the community in sum total that I've built over the last more than 10 years. - I guess I could ask about
the different trajectories you think your show might take. So, you know, the dynamic
you had with Donald Trump Jr. and maybe Candace Owens is the
more appropriate comparison. Are you okay having that
dance for the next few years between you and Candace Owens, and just kinda the mockery, the derision that's a part of that process and taking part in that, you know? - I'm fine with it in the sense of, personally I tolerate it well, until it crosses the line, and people pull my family in and- So that's the part that-- - If we set the family stuff aside-- - [David] If I set that aside-- - So just in the digital space-- - I'm glad to mix it up. Now the truth is, Candace Owens
has had me blocked for years up until this incident. I don't lie. - [Lex] Did she unblock you? - She unblocked me just to tweet
about what I tweeted about. I don't know the backstory
of that, genuinely, I have no idea. So I don't have a sense
that she's super interested in engaging with me on that. But all of these people, I mean Candace Owens is
welcome on my show anytime, Don Jr.'s welcome on my show anytime. It's been a decade since
I had Ben Shapiro on. He's welcome at any time. I'm glad to have these conversations, and I think it's an important thing. And also I wish that everybody was willing to have the
conversations in good faith, rather than as performance. It's not even really performance, or rather than being simply
performative for an audience that you have. - In terms of your
motivations, do you see, do you worry about the effects
of something we spoke of, spoke about offline with
like the YouTube algorithm? Are you driven by the number
of views your videos get, or are you driven by something else? - So in my world, I guess I would say, the number of views that
any platform generates is a metric that I can
choose how to interpret. I can choose to interpret it as, I've created content that's
interesting to people, or I've created content
that's really angering people, and that's why they're showing up, they don't actually like it, it's because they're angry or
whatever else the case may be. But it is true that there
are algorithmic changes that can take place. Something happened in early January that affected us on YouTube, or there are periods on
TikTok where you can tell, we're doing all the same things. Something has happened and then you never usually
figure out what it is. So for me it's sort of
just like a general tool to see what is the level of
interest in what I'm doing, and are the numbers so out of whack, with what I would expect, that I should look into
whether something deeper is happening. Has there been some change to an algorithm or whatever the case may be. I had a debate once with
someone who accused me of using clickbait to generate views, and we had a really interesting
conversation where I said, tell me really what you mean by that. Is your argument that I'm using titles that don't actually represent
what's in the video? No, what's in the title is in the video. I go, okay, so it's not
that the title is dishonest, are you saying I'm
deliberately picking titles that will garner a larger audience? And they said, yeah,
that's kind of what I mean. And I said, isn't that kind
of what we're all doing? The alternative would be choosing titles to generate a smaller audience, which seems like a real
kind of waste of time. So I'm trying to navigate
and play the game in a way that's comfortable, but use the metrics more as a tool than as something to obsess over. - Nevertheless, the
metrics are what they are in that they're able
to affect your psyche. It's very difficult, which is why I have a Chrome extension that hides all the views and
all that on YouTube for me. Is difficult not to let it
affect how you think about ideas. So maybe your extensive exploration of a particular topic like healthcare, generated very few views, is it difficult for you to
still care about healthcare? There's some aspect of the human mind that starts being affected by those views. And I think that's a
really dangerous thing. Mostly it's probably beneficial, because it probably makes
you a better presenter, if you do care about a topic a lot, you become more charismatic, more, you learn sort of
in Jimmy Mr. Beast way how to present the ideas better. But it also can affect which
topics you choose to cover, what you choose to think
about those topics, the audience capture of those topics. And that's a really scary effect. I'm really worried about
my own mind in that, so I run from that aggressively. - One of the things that I
include in my overall approaches, I don't think about any one clip, I think about an entire
show, or a week of shows, or a month of shows. And so it's less about
does one clip do well. My view going in is, I'm going to do stuff
that won't do that well, but I think it's really important to do, and I want to make it part of my show. And so when I did a clip with 10 ideas for reducing gun violence, I know that that's not gonna
get 500,000 or a million views. I know it's just not going to. And the first day it'll
get 12,000 and I'll go, I don't care, that's fine. There's a group of people in my audience that values this stuff, and I
wanna keep doing this stuff. I'll end up surprised sometime. And two weeks later, it has 150,000 views because it started being shared, great. But I don't go into it thinking, these all need to be
home runs by that metric. I always go in saying, I want to put out a diversity of content, including stuff that is less
titillating and salacious, but is important to do, it's
more researched, et cetera. And so that's the way I try to resist exactly what you're talking about. - And I think you have to
probably know yourself. Like for me, metrics, I
just like numbers too much. And for me, metrics do affect me. This is why I don't pay attention at all. Like I can't, I would
love to hire somebody on the team who cares, 'cause we currently have folks who just, all of us just don't care. 'Cause it probably is good to care enough to kind of just do good
thumbnails and this kind of stuff to pay attention. But to me personally, I just
find inner peace and focus if I don't think about the numbers at all. 'Cause I find myself, I just remember a long time
ago when I started a podcast, I would think that I failed
if it didn't do well. Like if I didn't celebrate
the person well enough, I didn't do a good job
enough of a conversation, when that's not necessarily
at all what that means. And it's hard not to like-- - This is tough stuff. I mean yeah, I know
exactly what you're saying. And part of it is, I mean it starts in my, you have a little bit of a
different situation than me, because you're doing long form
conversations with people, and the prep is a little bit different. One of the things in my space, because I'm reacting mostly
to what's going on in the news and then also picking
topics to dive into it a little bit more deeply, is I have very little
control over the news cycle, and there is a meta
metric or a macro metric that affects me, that will quadruple my audience, and then take 75% of it away, which is the seasonality
of election cycles. And the first few election
cycles, it's very tough, because I go, it's October, I'm like, at this rate we're gonna
have 20 million subscribers by the next, these
numbers are unbelievable. And then it's January 30th,
the inauguration's over, the debate is about the debt ceiling, and nothing's going on, and I go, nobody's watching my content. I must have forgotten to upload a, like something must be wrong. It's completely beyond my control. So I just, and I think part
of what you're saying is, I try to focus on the
things I can control, and understand those that I really have no
control over whatsoever, and try not to worry about them. - And try to do the
things that make you happy at the end of the day. You mentioned RFK, the guy you met. What do you think about
some of the other candidates outside of Joe Biden in
the Democratic Party? RFK Jr, what do you think
of him as a candidate? - I've met him, we once had dinner, and we have a number of friends in common, which is what makes this
a little more awkward. But I think his campaign is basically sort of like a chaos
candidacy to raise awareness, and maybe raise money either for his book, or his anti-vaccine organization, Children's Defense Fund,
I believe it's called. I think there's some reporting that Steve Bannon really liked the idea of him running as a Democrat, again, to just generate chaos. I don't find it super interesting. I don't find it worthy
of that much discussion. Smart guy, nice guy, has
been doing anti-vaccine work that I don't find particularly inspiring. - So it's not just anti-COVID vaccine, it's more broader than that? - He's been in that space long
before the COVID vaccines. Yeah, I don't find it super interesting. - Well, he also wrote the
book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is that the name of the book? - Did he write that? That's, I don't know. I'm not sure about that. I'm aware of that book, I
didn't know he wrote it. - I think I need, but it's
been on my reading list to get, I've been trying to get a
good balanced reading list about the COVID pandemic, to understand what the hell happened. And anytime I start to
try to go into that place, it's just, I'm exhausted by it. - Well, it's interesting to me
that you wouldn't wait longer before delving into those books, to have maybe a more clear hindsight. - But I think this is a pretty good time. You don't think so? Like this, it depends on your goals. If you're thinking of it
as a historical event, yes, you should probably wait longer. But if you're thinking
about like understanding what is broken about our system, that we responded so poorly, that there was so much division? What is broken about our political system that it didn't unite us, it divided us? Who's to blame? There's probably a lot
of different narratives, but I feel like the more
you learn about this, the better you can understand. I've read on just Vladimir Putin, I read like five biographies
already, maybe more. Just it helps to really
understand, the people involved, the organizations evolved. I don't know, everything
from the scientists to the political leaders. It felt like the blog posts and the tweets didn't quite capture. - They didn't quite get. No, one of the things I read a ton, I don't read any like
modern political books. So I don't read the memoirs
of elected officials. I don't read any, I just feel like I get
enough of it in my job. So my reading list is just other things. It's history, it's narrative non-fiction, economics, et cetera. And that's my bias
because I'm so overloaded with a lot of the stuff
you're talking about. I haven't read any of Obama's books. I didn't read John
Bolton's book, or you know, I don't read any of that stuff. Although I'm sure there is
value to be gleaned from it. - What about the other candidate that, according to the subreddit, and as you mentioned, you've
criticized a little bit, Marianne Williamson. Do you think, what are the pros and cons
of her as a candidate? - This is another area
where many in my audience really are angry with me. I don't find her candidacy
super interesting. I'll tell you the pros and
the cons as I see them. I do think that we have
elected officials in the US, particularly presidents, from a really narrow range of backgrounds. So it's lawyers and
sometimes business people, very, very often lawyers. I think we would benefit from a much greater
diversity of backgrounds. And I once said, and that would include
people from education, people from the science world, people with backgrounds maybe
running nonprofits, et cetera. Now Marianne Williamson
did, I guess at one point, run some kind of small nonprofit, and some in my audience
thought that credential alone would make me fall head over heels in love with the idea
of a Marianne candidacy. I've interviewed for her. It's just not for me is
the way I like to say it. It's the background of
the woo-woo type stuff is a bit off-putting to me. I understand that someone with literal Christian Bible
beliefs that also I don't like, maybe I'm more willing to accept as most of our presidents of
course have had those views, because they're otherwise more qualified. But some of the things that she says, just strike me as, I just don't know. I'll give you an example. When she was on with Russell Brand, she said there's no such
thing as clinical depression. It just means someone in a clinic told you you have depression. I don't believe that to be the case. I think we have an understanding, there's two types of depression. There's like a genetic
predisposition depression, there's like a acute,
something's happening in my life, temporary depression. You know, when she was asked
about it recently, she said, "I didn't mean it, "I was just trying to
impress Russell Brand." I don't know if I'm more bothered by the things she first said, or by the fact that she wanted
to impress Russell Brand. But it's just like, it's
just really not for me. And I agree with her on, we need to take the
climate more seriously, we need to expand access to health. I'm with all of that stuff. Now I wanna say one
other thing about this. Anybody who wants to run should run. I am not suggesting there should be an uncontested
primary for Joe Biden. Absolutely. - So you think he should be contested? - Well what I mean by contested is, so there's two parts to
what we mean by contested. Will the DNC organize debates? And we'll get to that in a second, but should anybody who's on
the left get out of the way because Joe Biden is President and he's running for reelection? Absolutely not. The question about
should there be debates, I would like there to be debates. The DNC pretty clearly isn't
going to organize them. I think if you did them, you would have to say at what
polling level do you qualify? And I don't know exactly
where you put that number. But I think it would be a great thing to put Joe Biden on a stage with, if you can get, what, 6%, 8%, I'm not really sure what
the number would be. I'm totally all for that. - Why is this set of candidates, at least from my perspective, so weak? Do you have an understanding of this? - There's a lot of
different answers to this. One aspect to this, which I think is more of
a sociocultural thing, which I've recently read
about to some degree, is the job actually turns off the people who would be best at it, because of what you need
to do to become President. And it includes all but
completely abandoning your existing day-to-day life
job, which you may depend on, and family to some degree. It's horribly negative, as
we already talked about. And at the end of all of that, you either lose and then have to rebuild, and maybe you're not in a
position to be able to do that, or you win and then now
you've got four years of being one of the most hated people, no matter how good a job you do. So I think by its nature it
turns off a lot of people that would otherwise be good. I also think that there's
a lot of posturing from within the parties about, well, you might be good
but it's not your time yet, so you should wait. And then let's talk about maybe a Senate seat here and there. So it's like a company essentially, and they're figuring out
where they wanna place people. I think all of these things make it so we end up with candidates most people aren't super thrilled with. - So it's difficult for somebody
who's young or an outsider to quickly become a candidate. - I think that that's true, and I think also in a lot
of ways it's just not, I mean, would you wanna be President? - No. - I mean I can't be 'cause
I wasn't born in the US, so it's easy for me to say, but. - If everyone says no, then we're get the people that we have. - No, I understand that. - So I would love to help somehow. - [David] Sure. - And I feel like there's not
even a mechanism for helping, except through the democratic,
through the voting process. But I'm just annoyed how
little technology there is in the whole process, how little innovation there
is in the whole process, all of this. - The sad thing is, this
is written about a lot, which is there's this thing
called political hobbyism. And I think there's a good chance that some of the people in my audience are political hobbyists in the sense that they follow this stuff as entertainment to some degree. And I've written a lot about how, I've read a lot and
talked a lot about how, okay, we vote every two
years or every four years in our local elections, et cetera. And then we think about
politics all the time. Neil Postman wrote about this in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. But what are you actually
going to do about the kids starving in this country, and the nuclear buildup in that country? It's okay, if everybody
refocused their attention on their immediate communities, and that could mean any number, it could mean the town
or city you live in, or it might mean an
athletic club or whatever. If everybody this time they
spent on political hobbyism, they moved somewhere else, which might put me out
of a job, that's okay. I'm willing to lose my job because I think it would be so beneficial, then our communities would
just be that much better, because you can actually affect change in a much more tangible way locally, whether it's, people talk about potholes, but other things as well. - Yeah, and I wish our
system was more amenable to that kind of contribution. Hopefully through the
digital space, it would be. Let me ask you about on the
Republican side, Ron DeSantis, what do you think of him as a candidate running against Donald Trump? - I think in the couple of weeks before our discussion today, his campaign, which hasn't even started, has sort of started to implode. And this was something that
I started thinking about in September, October. He really doesn't seem
ready for primetime, in the sense that just being confronted, and confronted is not even the right word, just being asked about some topics he didn't really seem
to want to talk about. He responded in such a sort of disproportionate, unhinged way. During his recent trip to Asia, he was asked about why aren't you or why are you responding
but in this weird way to Trump's attacks on you? And he went into this
weird bobblehead thing with a weird smile, and something came out
that didn't make any sense, and he sort of got mad at the reporter, and it was just like, if
you can't handle that, you can't be on a debate
stage with Donald Trump. And again, for all my criticisms of Trump, the guy gets you on a debate stage, he can make you look pretty silly. He was recently asked about
his role at Guantanamo Bay when he was an officer in, I forget which branch of the armed forces. And he just sort of
attacked the journalist asking the question, and
it just looked very bad. And there are increasingly
big Republican donors who are not fans of Trump and were sort of hoping to put their eggs in the Ron DeSantis basket who are saying, this guy just doesn't have what it takes, I don't think he can do it. So I don't know if DeSantis
will be able to get away. Once you're polling 20
something like he is, and you haven't even announced,
it's very attractive. And he probably to some
degree is thinking, if I wait till 2028, I might not have this opportunity again. But Trump's polling 52, 53, which means even if DeSantis gets all of the current non-Trump vote, he has to figure out how to
take something more from Trump. I just don't know how he does it. - First of all, the implosion aspect, that's part of the process, isn't it? You kind of implode a bunch of times. - [David] And then rebuild yourself. - And rebuild and because the
new cycle kind of forgets. - It's possible. The problem is if he, the
first debate is in August. So that's only a few months away, and the decision's going to
have to be made pretty soon. And unless he can get
a new momentum going, I just don't know how
he gets what he needs in order to really have a shot. - So would anyone else
run against Donald Trump? - It's very tough right now. I mean there are other people running. There's this guy, Vivek
Ramaswamy who's running, Nikki Haley is running. Her campaign basically dead on arrival. Trump actually does better
in polls the more people run. When it's just him and DeSantis, that's the best scenario for DeSantis. It's not great for DeSantis,
but it's certainly better. But I think the difficulty is, this is a question for
Republicans to figure out. The people who rightly recognized in 2016 that this guy is not good for their party, still believe this guy is
not good for their party. But many of them recognize
that most of the voters are still behind him. You can always say, it's early, his polling doesn't really mean anything. Anything could happen. Something major would have to happen for Trump to lose that
lead, if he got more, if he was arrested two more
times, and had more indictments, and it just became like
this guy can't even campaign because he's so busy
going from court to court. Maybe that would make a difference. It's really tough to imagine. - You said that there are
three categories of people who vote Republican, and that Trump introduced the fourth one. Can you go through the four categories? - Sure. So you've got like your
pro-business, low tax Republicans. These are mostly people like Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney has a bit of the
social conservatism as well. He's Mormon and that's there. But Mitt Romney primarily, particularly as a northeast
sort of Republican, I mean, I know Utah, but
Governor of Massachusetts, he is like a low tax
pro-business type guy. You've got your libertarian
type Republicans who are primarily about
freedom and liberty. Often they are actually
more socially Liberal where they go, I don't
care about gay marriage, Liberal, you know, I don't
care so much about abortion. And that overlapped a little bit with the Tea Party Movement in 2010, although Tea Party did
have a religious component, but sort of like the libertarian
freedom-minded folks, and then the religious Conservatives, people that support candidates like Josh Hawley, or Ted Cruz, et cetera, where their big thing are social issues. Often they actually want Christianity, being civil government. They don't want separation
of church and state. Those are traditionally the
three Republican groups. The one that Trump introduced was people who just didn't
really pay attention to politics, but either followed celebrity, or had grievances that they
didn't yet have scapegoat for, and were sort of right-leaning culturally even though they didn't
attribute that to Republicanism. And Trump was able to
bring them into politics often for the first time as voters. They could be part of
any of those three groups if they get more into politics or kind of be their own thing. But they're more kind of
like cult of personality, I'm here for Trump types. - Did it have to do anything
about the culture wars and the identity politics,
all that kind of stuff? - Yeah, I mean, so in 2016
when Trump mobilized them, those weren't really issues
the way they are now. So I think at that time, it
certainly was not a factor. - What was the mobilizing issue? Was it just anti-Hillary in 2016? - He did a good job on anti-Hillary, but a lot of it was identifying
real economic problems, wage depression, lack of
jobs in parts of the country. You know, Ohio and Indiana, Trump rightly identified
like we have an issue here, we don't have enough
entrepreneurship, et cetera. But there was also a lot
of scapegoating that was, you know, China and people coming through the US-Mexico border
were popular scapegoats for a lot of those problems. This gets us kind of to populism. Populism is a rhetoric, and populism as a rhetoric
doesn't necessarily come with particular policies. You can be a populist, a user of populist rhetoric
and proposed solutions that would be more aligned
with Bernie or Tucker Carlson. Populists will often identify the plight of the middle class. The difference would be Bernie will say, we've gotta put some restrictions on how much billionaires can make, and we've gotta reinvest
in these social programs. Tucker will say, BLM taking your house, and a brown person from
Mexico taking your job are what we need to deal with. So the the populist
rhetoric can lend itself to very different policy, and Trump used that very
effectively in 2016. - Why do you think Hillary Clinton was hated as intensely as she was by a certain percent of the population? It feels like that's the
first election I witnessed where there's a lot of hate. Maybe I'm misremembering. I don't remember Obama, I don't
remember the degree of hate. There was conspiracy theories that he wasn't born in this country, but I don't remember hate towards Obama. - Record death threats under Obama more than any previous President. - Towards who, towards him? - Towards him, yeah. Do you mean more hate between voters or- - Between voters. Between voters, but like that's I guess
what I was speaking to, but that hate was directed
towards the narrative, the thread that connected
all of that in 2016 was Hillary Clinton. - Few different things. And I'm not ranking these, these are just all
things that come to mind. One is Hillary Clinton had been around in the political space for a long time, from her time as First
Lady, through as Senator, Secretary of State, et cetera. So I think that there was
enough time for different groups to develop an antipathy towards
her for different reasons. So time. Secondly, Trump's
branding of her as crooked was very effective, where there were so many people demanding that she be imprisoned. If you ask them what is
the crime, they don't know. But she should definitely be locked up. That became a very big thing. The email story as it were, and James Comey doing
a second public event about that investigation, even though there wasn't
any actual news about it, just doing a second event
about it at the last minute, I think hurt her and
also generated some hate. And I don't find Hillary Clinton
to be particularly likable, although I voted for her, I thought she was the better candidate. And I think that there are others who also didn't find her
particularly likable. Those are a lot of impediments
to becoming President. - Well I was trying to understand why there's so many conspiracy theories about Clintons in general, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. And I, maybe I'm not
researched well enough. - [David] Of the why of it. - The why of it, actually the extent of
the conspiracy theories, the sort the conspiracy theories that they've killed a lot of
people, this kind of stuff. - It's hard for me to speak to them because I'm aware that they exist, but I'm not an expert in them, because they seem so obviously baseless, to the degree that I've
researched them a little bit, and then I move on, and you know, it's been years since I've looked at this stuff. I know there's the Seth Rich one, and there's the Clinton body count one. I think there's one connected to Epstein if I recall correctly. There's all sorts of these different ones. Without speaking to any
of them specifically, because I'm not the expert
on Clinton conspiracies, it does seem as though
this stuff for so long has generated an audience. I mean, I remember in the supermarket when Bill Clinton was
President at the checkout seeing the tabloids, and there were stuff about
Hillary birthed an alien baby, and, you know, all the, it seems like it's been
titillating to people for a very long time. - Well, another question from
Reddit, speaking of aliens. I would be curious to hear David's views on conspiracies and conspiracy theories, the extent to which real
conspiracies happen, and why conspiracies that have
little evidence behind them managed to be so compelling
to people regardless. Also, please bring up aliens and UAPs. - [David] Okay, where do we start? - The conspiracy, so what are, in general, as a person who thinks about politics, thinks about this world, like where do conspiracy
theories fit in for you? - I think there have been conspiracies, and by conspiracies, I'm
using a colloquial definition, which is basically individuals
working together to, in a clandestine way, impact or affect some kind
of event or phenomenon very, very broadly. I mean, certainly that
those things have happened. To pick, to jump around
to some of the things that were in there, I think the reason that
conspiracy theories are so compelling, is that it's really tough
for a lot of people to accept there are random events, not
predictable specifically. At a stochastic level, we
might be able to predict them, but specifically unpredictable,
bad events in many ways. I could be the victim
of one, or you could, or my family could. That's really scary to a lot
of people understandably so. And for some people it's less scary and more soothing in a way to say, there aren't really
random events like this. Somebody planned it. And if we had just known who planned it, it just could have been stopped because we would've known exactly when. That's just a psychological level, easier to accept for people. And I get that to some degree, because listen, it's not
the most exciting thing that everything can just be going fine and something absolutely
horrible happens and kills, who knows, some number of people or. So I think that's the biggest at attractor to a lot of these conspiracy theories. It doesn't apply to all of 'em though. - But yeah, but there's still
kind of a basic understanding of human nature where people, some people are greedy and want power, and are corrupted by power. So there's kind of these
compelling narratives that stick that, I don't know, the
vaccine is a opportunity for a powerful billionaire
to implant chips into you so he can control you further. - [David] Right. - It doesn't seem, what do I want to say? It's like, for some reason, that doesn't seem as crazy as it should, because you think like maybe
Hollywood contributes to that. But you think, yeah, you
could imagine an evil person, a person that wants more
control, more power, and is also at the same time
able to convince themselves, as history shows, that they're actually
have the best interest of the populace in mind, that they're trying to
do good for the world. So they do evil while trying to do good. And you can kind of imagine it. So it's like, why not? And you listen to people
in power, authorities, they kind of look and
sound shady, you know? Like the transparency,
especially the older ones. I think younger folks are better at being like real and transparent, and just like revealing their
flaws and the basic humanity. But people that are a little bit older, in the positions of power,
they're more polished. They're more like, it feels like they're
presenting a narrative, what the truth is hidden in the shadows. - I don't think there's
anything wrong with suspecting, maybe a public figure isn't
giving me the full story. Totally reasonable thing to question. I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring a lot of
these different things. I think the problem becomes, and I know you've talked about this in so many different
ways with other guests, the problem becomes when we
lose a shared understanding of how we would assess whether
any of these things are true, and then both alleged evidence
and then absence of evidence, both become supportive
of the conspiracy theory. Because if there's bad evidence, you manipulate it and
say it's good evidence. If there's no evidence, you say the evidence was obviously hidden by the people who carried
out the thing or whatever. So unless we can have
a shared understanding of how we would determine what's true, these are common conversations often between atheists
and religious folks. How can we deter, like,
is my faith in something or my desire for something to be true a good way to evaluate whether it is true? They're really similar questions. - Well, let me ask you
about Trump on that front, about the election, 2020 election. And maybe the better question
is about January 6th. Do you think January 6th was a big deal? - I do. - [Lex] How big of a deal? - Compared to what. - Civil War. - I think it was less of a
big deal than the Civil War. - [Lex] Okay. - No, I mean, so you, well that it's a very
interesting thing though, right? Because we have not only the event, that's clever actually. It's not only the event,
but it's what led up to it, and what has happened since, and did it change what is
considered on the table that citizens can, should or might do if they disagree with the
results of an election? So I think that there are
further reaching consequences than just the six hour
period on January 6th, a bigger or smaller
deal than the Civil War? And there's so much wrapped up into it. Many conspiracy theories flowed
from January 6th as well. 60 Minutes recently featured
a guy named Ray Epps who was targeted by some on the right, claiming that he was an
instigator or an agent of the FBI or something along those lines. There were people claiming that no real it was like a No True
Scotsman sort of thing. Like Trump supporters wouldn't riot, so by definition it must have been Antifa, police let 'em in, or
police were, you know, all these different things. I think it was a big deal in a lot of ways because it completely made
us have to go back to the top to say, okay, what are the parameters of valid discussion and
activism in the United States? - But what aspect of the
January 6th was bad for you? - [David] Well, I mean. - If you're thinking of
from a big philosophical, political perspective, so presumably the number of people hurt and the number of people who died is not the only metric to consider here. - Absolutely. I think the sum total of what it means about how the United States operates is what's most concerning. And I'll kind of just like
flesh it out a little bit. So summer of 2020, Trump's already saying
they're going to cheat. Now the polling is close, but it shows that Biden's
in a good position, people aren't happy with Trump. Any reasonable person would look and say, it's gonna be close, but Biden certainly wouldn't
be a crazy thing if Biden won. Trump's already saying they're gonna cheat with mail-in ballots, or they're gonna cheat with early voting, or they're gonna cheat with machines, or we should do only in person or whatever else the case may be. We have the election. We knew in certain states how the vote count was going to go. Some states stopped counting at 10:00 PM, some states count all of
the mail-in stuff up front, some don't. Everything was completely predictable. At 2:00 AM, Trump comes
out and says, I won. Okay, but where are you getting that, Sir, as he claims people always refer to him, where are you getting that? And with that statement,
immediately we see that there is a large
portion of this country that either is unable or unwilling to say, wait a second, the polling all said this was a real possibility. The counting schedules
are all being adhered to, but Trump won? That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't happen. It builds. People are donating millions
to Trump for supposed audits, which nobody can define, and
lawsuits which go nowhere. And it builds and builds and builds. And we have a total separation
from a factual reality. There's no reason to think,
by December 1st, right, give three weeks to look
through some of this stuff. By December 1st, there's no
reasonable case to be made that Trump actually won. But it doesn't end there. It goes into, maybe we can just like
send different electors, even though Biden won
Arizona, let's just like send, I don't remember how many
electors it is in Arizona. Let's just like send
Republican electors to say, we vote for Trump. But that's not democracy. That's not the way the system works. Let's make sure we're ready. Ready for what exactly? And then it builds to, maybe Mike Pence can
just like prevent Biden from being President, or maybe we can just
interfere in this other way. And then it gets to, let's
break into the Capitol. It's the height of saying we
no longer comport ourselves attached to what is a
verifiable factual reality. And when we no longer do that, we're also willing to commit
crimes, property crimes, violent crimes, okay, to different degrees in order to try to have
something other than democracy. It wouldn't be democracy if any of those things had happened. - Yeah, I think it's not the height of it. I think there's still a case to be made that that did not leave
the realm of protest, versus a violation of the
principles of democracy. So to me, the height of what
could happen on January 6th, is if Donald Trump was
much better executive, he could take control of the military. - [David] If it had succeeded. - No, not even succeeded. The attempt would've been more empowered. - [David] I understand. - So like, the way not to bring
up Hitler every other word, which is something your subreddit had also told me not to do. - [David] Okay. - He's kind of an important figure and it's interesting to
study that moment in history 'cause it reveals so
much about human nature, and that all of us are
capable of good and evil. But thank you dear subredditor or redditor for your contribution to the conversation. I will keep bringing up
Hitler and the Third Reich and I'll keep bringing up Stalin. There's so much to learn from that. Anyway, the, an effective
practiced authoritarian could roll the tanks out
into the city streets to establish order. And in so doing pause
the process of democracy as opposed to a few
protestors breaking in, to a questionably protected building. - I agree that what you're
saying would be worse. I don't want to use it to minimize what the protestors were intent on doing. They failed fortunately. - But to you, the intention was there too. - Well, the intention was
Trump should remain President. That's the intention. And to what length they
would've been willing to go if by the evening, early evening, they, you know, were sort of
like forced out, I don't know. I agree with you that Trump
trying to use the military would absolutely be worse. You know, there's these reports that he tried to seize voting machines, which is kind of funny 'cause it's like, once you get the machine at Mar-a-Lago, what do you do with it
exactly, I don't know. There's a like a comedic element to Trump sitting around
with voting machines. But he did float trying
to do some other things. I don't believe there's reporting that he actually tried
to use the military. - I wonder to what degree
this opened the door to further things like this
with other candidates on, you know, even in the
Democratic Party also. Do you think there would be
more and more questioning of the election results? - There has been already. It's very clearly the playbook. Kari Lake lost, she ran for Governor in
Arizona 2022, she lost. What I mean by that is her
opponent received more votes. It's like very clear what
it means that she lost. She insists to this day
that she won, to this day. She did the same grift
Trump did about donate, we've got a case, we won in the case. You didn't win. They just set a court date. Like that's not, you know? Lies upon grift upon lies. So they did it then. It is, it's extraordinarily saddening, but it seems like this is now going to be part of the playbook. - Do you think people on the
left will start doing it? - I don't have a reason to believe that that is going to happen, but I'm not going to say it never could. It certainly could. People on the left could
start using it as a tactic. Right now, there's not a sign
that that's going to happen, but it's certainly could. My expectation is, and
I'm not a betting man, but I would bet money. If Joe Biden loses in November of 2024, he will say, I lost, he
will call the winner. He will concede and he
will leave the White House in an orderly fashion. - You don't think there will
be claims of a hacked election? The ability to hack elections is becoming more and more effective with the developments on the
artificial intelligence side. - The difficulty is
you're basically saying, will something happen without me knowing anything
about the election? Imagine there really was
evidence of a hacked election, then I would want those claims to be made. But the way elections
have gone in the past, I don't expect that that's a
claim that would be made, no. - Speaking of evidence of
things that were claimed, what do you think about
the Hunter Biden laptop, or as you tweeted, The
Laptop From Hell TM. - [David] Right. - To what degree was this
laptop story important and to what degree was it not? - At this point, I have said many times, if there is any reason to
believe that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Naomi Biden, Jill
Biden, Hillary, Obama, Doug, if there's any evidence any
of them committed a crime, they should be investigated,
they should be charged, and they should be tried, period. The Hunter Biden laptop thing has been floating around for so long, and we still have zero
actual pieces of evidence of any crime, particularly
involving Joe Biden. There's the claim from some
that references to the big guy, are about Joe Biden getting
10% for some illicit, it's been years they've been saying this, they've not been able to bring
forward any evidence on it. So my assessment of the
Hunter Biden laptop is, it seems to mostly be a story about nude images released
without someone's consent, which is illegal in most states, and violates Twitter's own policies. That's the main story to me. Beyond that, I don't know how many people have a copy of this hard
drive at this point. Rudy had it. Tucker, do you remember when
Tucker, this is unbelievable. Tucker said that he mailed
himself a copy, a USB stick. - [Lex] Yeah. - And it got lost in the mail. You have the mother load
proving the criminality of Joe and Hunter Biden, and you just dropped it off with a stamp and it got lost in the mail. You don't have a backup copy, you don't- So I'm ready for the
evidence to come forward. Hunter Biden has nothing to do with Joe Biden's administration. But as a person who, if
he committed a crime, charge him, investigate 'em, whatever. But it's getting, it's
almost getting satirical, the degree to which they're talking about the Hunter Biden laptop. - Well what do you think about the social media aspect of
this, that story got censored, and what do you think
about censorship in general on social media that that
story during an important time in the electoral process got censored? - So I, as a matter of principle, I think we have to define
what we mean by censorship. But I'm against censorship,
short of illegal content, I guess is the way I would put it. I do respect a company's
right to have terms of service and to enforce them as long
as they're not illegal. If Twitter were to say, we don't publish content
from Jewish people. Okay, now we've got a
problem on our hands. But what is dubious to me is the claim that had people been able to
see Hunter Biden's genitals, they would've voted for Trump. Which I know it's like,
David, you're making light of- And, but at the end of the day, what exactly is the claim that if you had known
more about Hunter Biden, I guess allegedly hiring prostitutes and having a drug problem
and seeing pictures, you wouldn't have voted for Joe Biden? I mean, I know me as a
voter, I don't feel that way. - I think it's less about
the content of the story and about the actions of
a social media company to control what you see
and what you don't see. So you could imagine
a social media company like Facebook and Twitter
making the same kind of decision about a more impactful story than a few dick pics on a laptop. - Well, I think if that happened, then my view might be different, right? But I do, my general view though on the Hunter Biden story is, had the articles not
contained those images that were illegal in many states and violated Twitter's policies, I would say publish it, absolutely. I don't think it would've had an impact, but I would be in favor of it being, of the links being allowed, 100%. - Okay, you mentioned Tucker. What do you think about
Tucker getting fired from Fox? You're a media person
that works independently. - [David] Yes. - Tucker was a media person
who doesn't work independently. - [David] Right. - Yeah, what do you think about
that particular situation? Is it representative of some big shift that's happening in mainstream media? - What would the shift be? - Basically, mainstream media freaking out because the funding is getting less and
less and less and less. And there's gonna give more power to individual commentators, basically Tucker Carlson
just starting a podcast, and a YouTube channel. - I think that's what he should do. I think that's the most profitable path rather than maybe going
to work for Newsmax or whatever the case may be. But the firing fundamentally was not a politically oriented firing that suggests Fox News is
changing its tune politically in any way. There's no evidence of that whatsoever. Tucker Carlson basically
became a legal problem for Fox News. There's really four points to it. One is the $787 and a half
million settlement with Dominion partially was because of the claims that went out on Tucker Carlson's program. So to some degree, Tucker's
program was a prominent node of the problematic claims that became the subject of the lawsuit. That's number one. Number two, Smartmatic, which is another voting machine company, still has a similarly sized
lawsuit against Fox News, based on the exact same sorts of claims. It may cost Fox News again. So this is now two problems that Tucker's a big contributor to. Number three, former Tucker
staffer has brought a lawsuit, and I don't remember the exact claims, but I know that there are claims of different types of discrimination. It seems like it has legs, and that may be a third payout
related to Tucker Carlson. And based on the 60 Minutes
piece from a few weeks ago, Ray Epps saying, Tucker ruined his life by
fomenting conspiracies about him around January 6th. That's ripe for another lawsuit. So to me, Tucker's firing was
a risk mitigation strategy of many that will be employed as these lawsuits come forward. There's no evidence that
it's because Fox didn't like, and what we mean by that,
who are we talking about? Rupert Murdoch doesn't
like, or the, I don't know. But I don't have any reason to believe it's because Tucker's ideas
were no longer welcome on Fox. Certainly the audience liked them. - So interesting, it's not about, it's not even about the ratings, it's about just the legal costs. - Fox is interesting, the ratings question is
interesting, because Fox, unlike most other or every
other cable news channel, they negotiate a fee from
every cable subscriber. If you have Fox News as a channel, even if you don't watch it,
Fox gets a little bit of money. They are dramatically less
dependent on ad revenue than CNN and MSNBC. So the ratings question
is an interesting one, but Fox's position is different on that. - Another question from Reddit. "Both sides are the same", in quotes, is a meme notion that
has spread far and wide in American political
discourse on the internet. To what extent do you agree
or disagree with this notion and why do you think it is so popular? Now, this Reddit comment also says that podcasts like Russell
Brand and Joe Rogan, or the legendary comic George Carlin, are examples of big
proponents of this notion, all of which I kind of disagree with. Russell Brand, Joe Rogan and
George Carlin claim that-- - [David] Say both sides the same. - The same, and use that, you know, all politicians are
crooked, and they suck, and this kind of thing. I don't know if that's
true, maybe George Carlin. Anyway, let's leave that aside. - [David] Yeah. - To what degree do you think, do you agree with this notion
that both sides are the same, left and right, the crooked
corrupt politicians, they do what politicians do? - I don't agree that it's the same. I think there are different
factions that like to say that for different reasons. There are some individuals
who want to present themselves as kind of being of above the
fray of partisan politics. And so I call it enlightened centrism. - [Lex] Do you mean that
positively or negatively? - No, I mean it negatively, yeah. It's a bit of a pejorative. The idea that I am not going to fall for being a Democrat or a Republican. I can see that these are just
two sides of the same coin, equally bad, lying to
every, okay, so that's one. It's sort of like it's
popular at dinner parties in some circles to go, I'm, both all these politicians,
you know, left and right. So that's one side of it. The other side of it
is that it's often used when your side has really stepped in it, it's a popular way to acknowledge that your side has done something wrong, but while framing it as
it's not uniquely wrong, and it's not worse than
what anybody else does. And I find that it's one of the lamest and most kind of
cringe-inducing things to hear because of the what comes next. And usually what comes next is
not a good accurate criticism of something that took place, and a discussion of how
to solve a real problem that we have. I find it a conversation stifler. It also is used to kind
of suppress voter turnout. Not actively, it's not that
the people who say that go around saying don't vote. But the idea of course is
the more people that believe that it doesn't really make a
difference who you vote for, it's going to suppress voter turnout. And I want voter turnout
to be as high as possible, not as low as possible, so I also dislike it for that reason. - So is it possible to
say that one side is worse than the other in modern
current political climate? - Listen, I'm a person on the left. I'm not pretending to come here as, and not knowing that my view is biased, because I'm a person of the left. If you ask Ben Shapiro, he'll
tell you something different. I think in 2023, sum total, the influence of the American right wing, if the American right wing were
to get everything it wants, it would be a horrifying reality. If the left were to get
everything it wants, we'd have to figure out a few things, including exactly how we
pay for certain programs. But they're mostly noble goals. And I believe that they
are more supportive of an individual self-determining
what they wanna do in life and how they wanna live, and is more in line with the
idea of freedom and liberty than what the right is
currently proposing. That's my view. And of course people will
disagree with me and they, no, we get the freedom and liberty the way that the right wants to do it. Okay, well we can have that conversation. - So I think you've
implied in your answer, it was kind of focused on policy. It felt like it was focused on policy. There's other stuff
that people worry about. - [David] Sure. - Particularly with the left, what maybe termed, the woke mind virus. - Where have I heard, who's
using that term a lot now? I'm trying to think. - I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Not sure where it comes up. But the cultural aspect
of this, that, you know, if you give a lot of power
to people on the left, like as you gave as an example, there would be a lot of kind of censorship and suppression of speech, and a kind of dividing up of a society of who's allowed to, basically a reallocation of
resources, not based on merit, but based on some kind
of high ethical notions of what is right. And only a very small
percent of the population gets to decide what is
fair, what is right, which is, you know. - We already have a small
portion of the population society and fair, okay. - But I don't know how many
different ways I can say kind of a negative characterization
of folks on the left when we're now comparing it just as a, to play devil's advocate. - [David] Sure. - So is that something
that you worry about? So setting policies aside, wokeism. - [David] Yes. - How big of a problem is it? - This is a great conversation. So two sides of it. Okay, we have new polling
that seems to suggest so-called wokeism is kind of more popular in the United States than anti-wokeism. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. This is the less interesting part, we'll go to the more
interesting part in a second. Sometimes what people mean by wokeism is an overreaction to
a perceived injustice that goes beyond what would
be fair and equitable. There was this really interesting poll and it asked questions like, for example, do you believe society has gone too far, not far enough, or just
about the right amount in dealing with issues
affecting the trans community? The woke position, which is
society hasn't gone far enough, was far more popular
than we've gone too far. Now the right wing media narrative is we've gone way too far,
this is out of control. And there are lots of
other similar answers. It's not a huge margin. A lot of these are like
58 to 42, 60 to 40. It's not like 90 to 10. But by a small margin, the
so-called woke perspective, of we actually haven't yet done enough to fix some of these issues
is a little bit more popular. So if we went back to DeSantis, this is part of why I think
DeSantis is anti-woke agenda may just be a political misstep. - That's a really interesting result. I wonder how the questions are framed, but it's still interesting, nevertheless, no matter what to hear that, people are, majority of
people in America are woke, not in the negative sense of the word. - The poll didn't use the term woke. - [Lex] Right. - This is a critical thing. - [Lex] Let's use the
term woke positively. - The term has kind of been perverted. Four years ago when the
term was started to be used, I would've said, oh yeah, woke just means like I have become aware of problems that are bigger than any one
person can fix for themselves that relate to the system. I think that's what, and we might disagree on which problems fall into that category, but
like, it was kind of benign. I think now it just means
like outrageously left wing, maybe even with socialist
or Marxist undertones, it's become a pejorative at this point. - But also like bullies, like people-- - [David] Sure, censorers. - Yeah, but people that go
around calling others racist sometimes oftentimes without
any proof or justification. - [David] Fair. - But that's a few folks on Twitter. You're saying like the
polling is starting to show that like no, there's still, most of Americans still
care about these issues and wanna improve, and
wanna make progress. - I think that's the case and they wanna do it in a genuine way that doesn't suppress or oppress anybody. But now let me get to, like to what degree do
I think that actual, when it goes too far is a problem? It absolutely exists. We can find instances of
where this exists on the left. I've been told many times that as a Jewish Argentinian
immigrant to the United States, I actually don't qualify
as oppressed enough because Jews are privileged now in the US, and my family had just enough
money to leave Argentine. So there's this kind of like
oppression Olympics thing where I've been told you
don't get to comment, for example, like a topic in
the Latino community now is, are you familiar with Latinx? Okay, in Spanish, there's
an analogous movement where words by their nature
sort of like have a gender. So like the word for friend is amigo, but if it's a woman, you would say amiga. So right from there, you can tell the gender
that we're talking about. And if it's a mixed group, you say amigos, it's the male with an S,
but it could include both. There's a movement now which
wants to do away with that and put the letter E in. It's a new word, okay? It's a gender neutral word. Amiges, totally new. I don't like that. And I don't know anyone, no
one in my family uses it. And I think it's kind of
like a strange imposition from someone kind of with a
solution in search of a problem. I've been told, you
moved to the US long ago, and like, your English is
good, and like you look white. And so like, you don't
get to weigh in on that. That I think is an example,
if I understand correctly, of the type of thing you're talking about. I'm kind of being bullied. I'm fine, I'm surviving fine, but I'm being bullied
over it and disqualified, and saying, you don't get
to speak on this issue. All of those example, all of that stuff I am completely against. And I tell people on the left, we're actually hurting our
own movement with this stuff. I just don't think it's as
big as some others believe. - You don't think it's
an existential threat to our civilization in the west, to west civilization? - No, I don't. And I mean, look, we've
got a Biden administration, I see Biden as center left. Those who see Biden as extreme far left, this stuff has played
almost no role whatsoever in the first two plus years
of his administration. - There's people that see him as far left? - There's people on the right who, I mean, Trump says Biden's a
Marxist Socialist Communist. - I haven't heard that because I don't think that
would stick very much. - He said that at every rally, yeah. I'm so jealous that you
don't watch these things. - I love how deeply
researched you are in Trump. I can only imagine how good
your Trump impression is at this point. - [David] It's not very,
sadly, it's not good. - It's not, all right. - No, but, and I'll say
one other thing on that. You know, take trans, because trans, just to talk about it a little bit, we haven't dealt with it much. The trans issue has become huge, I believe because the
right is obsessed with it. The right is very much not
concerned with gay men anymore. It used to be that gay men, it's like, oh, we have to stop gay men
from adopting, and unnatural, and pedophiles. Now it's trans, it's
drag shows, et cetera. I do think that there is
a fair question to say, how do we deal with trans women in a very small short list of sports? That's real, okay? My view though is I go,
okay, we have all issues. We have issues related to
gender and sexual orientation. We have issues related to trans. Within that, we have specifically sports. You can eliminate from that, trans men, nobody's worried, right,
about women, biological women who are trans. And then when you say, it's only in certain
sports that it matters. Hey, I'm right there. I think it's a complicated question. I don't know how we deal with it. I would ask leagues that have
experienced with this already and whatever. The problem I have is
pretending that the vanguard of left wing politics right now is trying to force
trans women into sports. It's like, it's just not the big issue that the right is reacting as if it were. - But perhaps because of the right, it's forcing the left to
continue discussing it. I mean, I feel like it, even in institutions,
even at universities, it feels like these ideas of diversity, inclusion, and equity are taking some of the air out of the room of what a university should
also care about, which is merit. And it feels like reprioritization is going a little too far the other way, meaning prioritizing this kind of amorphous concept
of diversity is moving away, is giving power to people
that don't care about merit and are just wanna bully
people with a big stick that says racism, or
sexism, or anti-diversity. And it kind of suffocates the
people that care about merit, about meritocracy, about inspiring people from all kinds of backgrounds to succeed. And it's just, you kind of observe that. I'm sure that happens in
all kinds of institutions. And the concern, I think the people that
are concerned about wokeism are concerned about at scale, what impact does that have on a society, when there's so much
conversation about racism, and a pressure not to talk about merit. Like who's the actual
good person in the room, the best person in the room? - Generically, that's a concern to me. The degree to which it's happening
at different institutions I think, is worthy of exploration. I know people who work in academia that are getting out of academia because they don't like the
environment on their campuses for exactly the reason you're saying. So it exists, there is
no question about it. I also think that the idea
of a perfect meritocracy is maybe not necessarily the goal in the sense that when you
talk about perfect meritocracy, someone wrote a book about this who I interviewed about
a year and a half ago and whose name escapes me. There are problems with
a perfect meritocracy. I think what we want to do is generate roughly equal
opportunity for people, understanding that there is going to be an outcome on a gradient or a bell curve, allowing people generally speaking, to determine the path
that they want to take and giving them, if it's possible, the ability to pursue that
without suppressing, limiting. I mean this is like relatively
uncontroversial stuff among, I would argue 95% of the left, with the caveats of what
you're talking about, which I agree exist. - And it would be nice
to know the actual data. Sometimes people blow stuff
out of the proportion. But it's hard to measure
how much self-censorship happens at university campuses. It's hard. - That's true. I think also it's sort of like the pitbull bite stories thing, where when a pitbull bites a person, it's more likely to be reported on because it fits a certain narrative. And there are right wing publications that are very interested
in making this seem as if it is an epidemic. I'm the first to say it
is happening to a degree. I don't know the degree
that it's happening to. I know a lot of people in academia, only a couple of them
say that it's an issue. - Would they say it though,
if they believed it? - I think they would say it, to me, these are just personal contacts. It's not like I'm gonna go blabbing. - To push back, I kind of agree with you, but at the same time, most, I mean I'm deeply connected in academia, I have huge number of colleagues. Most people self-censor by
not thinking about it at all. They're like, screw it. - [David] That's deeper. - Whatever.
- Yeah. - I'm just gonna focus on
the thing I love doing, which is the work. And they don't think about, they basically remove themselves from politics and social issues
and they just kind of say, I'm gonna do my engineering,
I'm gonna do my mathematics. - Sure. The problem with that is it's kind of, you can't go anywhere
further to figure it out. It's sort of like, there's this funny clip
where Jordan Peterson says, even atheists are actually religious, they just don't know it. And it's like, it's hard
to test that, you know? I don't know. Okay, I mean, I don't- But it's a fair point. I mean, there may be some people, if it has become so toxic for some people, they may have repressed it way
down into their subconscious, but I don't know how we would know that. - But you know symptoms of it, because when certain people
speak up kind of lightly, and then 19 year old or
a 20 year old responds and is outraged, the fact that the administration listens to that 19 and 20 year old, and then reprimands whoever
spoke up a little bit, that's a really dangerous sign to me. And I don't really care about these, like, so I'm more with you. I don't think it's a big
issue, but then I notice it. I wonder, wait a minute. Would this kind of environment allow a young Noam Chomsky to be around? Would this environment allow like a, I don't know, like a what
tenure was designed for, which is to have controversial thinkers, and not kind of weird
controversial thinkers, but really people that challenge things that should be challenged? - Yeah, I sympathize
with that significantly. I always try to look at specific examples. And sometimes I'll look at
people, I'll ask for them, and people will send me five. And one of them is a
legit bonafide example of what we're talking about. And four are kind of like, eh, there was a complaint
and it was investigated, but the teacher's tenure
was never in jeopardy, and I don't know that I chalked
this up to a big woke event. What do you think the kind of apparatus of the four year degree in college is going to look like in 20 years? - Oh, that's, I mean,
we're like day by day, that seems to be changing with GPT. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to interact with ChatGPT. - Absolutely. My entire show now is written by ChatGPT. - I mean there's, that's partially a joke. - It is only because it
stopped looking at the internet in 2021. If it was current, I could
completely just tune it out. No, I'm kidding. But it's a fascinating tool. - And it's changing the nature of how we do homework assignments, it's changing the nature of how we learn, how we look up new information,
how we explore information, how we care about things
we're interested in. I think it, I don't think we'll have value for university degree in
20 years the way we do now. I just think it changes everything. I think language models, I mean Google search has already, and Wikipedia has already transformed, I would say our civilization. But it's, there was still a
value for basic education. I don't, I think that starts
to dissipate with ChatGPT. So I don't, I don't know. I really don't think there's a university the way we think of a
university in 20, 30 years. - I mean, I have a personal interest in it in that my daughter is 10 months old. And I'm doing the 529 account. I'm going through the motions as if. But I also recognize, you know, if she went to the schools I went to just with the rate of tuition increase, you're talking 200K a
year by the time she's 18. And what happens with
wages relative to that? This is like separate from
the technological thing. And in my mind I'm thinking, is this going to continue
being the right path? What I would love to see is so many people that I interact with, just by virtue of what I do, have no foundation in critical thinking, epistemology, philosophy,
media or literacy. And if there were some way to make that the core
of some basic education that everybody's receiving,
which goes beyond, you know, ChatGPT can do so many things, but I've not yet seen good examples of how it can teach you to think. Maybe you have a different
view on how ChatGPT can teach a user to think. But those skills seem to be so lacking in so many of the people I interact with. If there's any positive change to come from a changing
dynamic with higher education, I wish it would be to
go in that direction. - Well, no ChatGPT is actually much better at helping me think than any educator, even books that I've encountered. Because it's very good at
presenting the full picture, even better than a lot of
Wikipedia articles, you know, on questions like, did
the virus leak from a lab, did the COVID leak from a lab? It just presents to you all
the different hypotheses, the amount of evidence available to it. It's like a full calm
objective picture of it. There's no partisanship. It's like a really nice list
of things that's available. - But I guess what I mean is, does it tell you how as a thinking human, you should evaluate the strength of each of the paragraphs
it presents to you? - [Lex] You can literally ask it. - You can ask it to do, okay, yeah. - And then it's actually a fun, it's fun to ask ChatGPT that question 'cause you'll get good answers. And so you'll basically
have a kind of Socratic, like a deep intimate, like great podcast style
conversation with an AI system every single day for as
many hours as you want, especially as it improves as, and as the interfaces
by which you communicate with the thing improves. So yeah, I think it will do exactly that, which is teach you how to think, because you will offload the
memory of facts and equations, and whatever else school teaches you, you'll offload that to AI. And instead you'll be
using your human mind, which is what it for now
at least uniquely good at, which is asking good questions, thinking through the
complexities of issues when there's multiple
perspectives on it, all of that. - Well then I stand corrected maybe. Then I don't know what college
is gonna be in 20 years. - Well, but you were sort
of commenting, I see, to the financial aspect of it. Like why does it even
make sense at this point? - [David] Yeah. - I am thinking about the
transformative effects of AI and starts to ask, what is even education? - [David] Right. - What are you supposed, what
is the purpose of education? So one is to give you kind
of a background knowledge on a bunch of different topics. But the other is to discover the thing you're truly passionate about, and the thing you're really good at, such that you can make money, and you can contribute to society, and have a fulfilling life. - Yeah, and I think and also learning to interact with other people. With how relationships are built, socializing, and so many
other things as well. - But is that, you know, that is the big value of university. - [David] Yeah. - And maybe should be
called something else. - Can you get that for less
than 200K a year somewhere else? Yeah, no, it's a fair question. - [David] Kind of social club. - And you know, one of the
things I think about also is, people who are well connected, I mean this has always
been, this isn't new, right? But if you're well connected, and you have a sort of drive
towards entrepreneurship, and doing your own thing, and you're not pursuing a field that is very licensing-dependent
like medicine or law, getting started four years
earlier with some internships can be a privilege in some cases. But again, that path is available to the people that would likely do well regardless of whether
they went to college. And so it's a very privileged,
self-selected group anyway. - Another question from Reddit. Ask David to explain why
American style libertarianism is an unserious philosophy. - I don't know what they mean by American style libertarianism. I've talked before about these
kind of utopian libertarians where, you know, we have,
we don't have police, you just kind of like
hire a for-profit company if you want protection. And if there's a conflict between two of these
private security companies, then I don't know, you
figure it out somehow. - [David] So it's almost like anarchism, so take it to that degree. - Yeah, if by, I don't know
what the question means by that American style libertarianism. But in general my problems
with libertarianism as it is often presented, come from the work of sociology
as well as human psychology. Which is the reality
that once you get a group that's bigger than 150 people, you really have to start
centralizing some decisions. Unless you're gonna subdivide
the 150 endlessly into 275s that now no longer have contact, but then that's not really
one society, now it's two. I've not seen good evidence. And I've read a fair bit about this, that once you get beyond 150, you can keep all decisions decentralized. And once you say some things
need to be centralized, then it's a matter of how you do it. And it's going to be some
version of government that conflicts with
aspects of libertarianism. - Well it could be companies, right? It could be more market-driven, which is the idea of
anarchism that you're not, you don't give any centralized entity a monopoly over violence. You know, and then if you think that the markets are
efficient at delivering, especially in this 21st
century and beyond, where a market could have
perfect information about people. So one of the issues is that
you can manipulate markets because there's not perfect information. But now in a digital age, we can be higher bandwidth
participants in the market. So if you're choosing between
different security companies, are you choosing between
different providers and different services, you could do so more
efficiently and more effectively in the digital space. So you could kind of imagine it, but we haven't successfully
done it without governments. - Yeah, and I think there's a practical, once you get beyond 150, you also start specializing. It just is a matter of fact. You don't have, everybody
isn't growing their own food. Some people grow the food and
other people do other things. And you come across a lot of the problems that started at the
agricultural revolution. And whether you say that it's a company that's solving it or a government, the problems are going to be very similar. And I've not read anything
that to my satisfaction explains how you deal with that. - Well there's underlying
principles of libertarianism, which is putting priority at the freedom of the individual, right? And that's a compelling notion. - Yeah, whenever I do these
various political compass things that put you on two axes, on the authoritarian libertarian axis, I am way down on the libertarian
side as a left libertarian. So my tendencies are
always anti-authoritarian, and towards that option
when it makes sense. So I sympathize with that a lot. - Another question from Reddit. Ask David what issues he
disagrees with you on. Is there something you-- - I have no idea. - Okay, that's good. There you go, there's no issues. Perfect agreement. - What's your view on Tesla? - That's a good opportunity to ask. What do you think is strengths
and weaknesses of Elon Musk? You mentioned Twitter. Have you paid your $8? - I have not paid my $8. I don't see the point in paying for it. I have no problem paying for services. I use a ton of services. I'll try the free, I'll go to the paid. Right now, so the way I used
to use the Verified feed was I would post a tweet, and then the next day when I, you know, review what's going on on my social media, I would look at the replies to the tweet, which would give me a mix of replies from verified and unverified people. But then I would also look at the verified and see who that are verified public folks have responded to me, or maybe I wanna engage with
or whatever the case may be. I don't even understand why I would look at the
Verified feed anymore. So I never do because it's
random folks who I don't know. And it sort of lost its utility to me. And then-- - Oh yeah, sorry to interrupt. But the idea is if everybody
who's human pays the $8, it shows to you that it's not
bots, it's at least humans. - From the reports about
the number of people that have bought the blue check mark, I think we may be a thousand
years from enough signups in order to make that
sort of like a reality. - That was the idea.
- That was the idea. It's an interesting idea. Honestly from my experience, obviously I was seeing all
sorts of attack comments, some of which were, I'm sure from bots. But I'm ignoring all of
those comments anyway. So it really didn't affect
my experience that much. I mean here's the thing
about Elon and I say this, people sometimes are like, David, you obviously hate Elon
or you obviously love Elon. I was an investor in
Tesla starting in 2015. I've since sold all my shares. Great run. I'm on my second Tesla right now. I probably won't get a third one because I think that
electric vehicle technology is now maturing such
that when my lease is up, I'm gonna have many more options with the range and charging
network, that's important to me. But I could be wrong. Maybe, you know, I don't know. I have no, the cults of
personality around people, they mean nothing to me. So for me it's just
like people are people. Nobody has only good ideas. Fine. I think that what Elon Musk did accelerating and pushing forward the battery and electric vehicle
technology is unbelievable. It's a one person wrecking
ball in the best sense of saying we're not gonna slow play this and do okay, now Toyota,
hasn't actually entered, but now whoever, we've
got a 90 mile range car, and next year it'll be 110. And it's just like we're
doing this right now, you can compete or you can opt out and look at what's happened. Fantastic. On the Twitter side of things, I don't really get the whole plan. I don't know if it started
maybe as kind of a goof of some kind and it developed into, I guess I have to buy it. And I think something
about it ended up with, there was a clause invoked where I think he did try
to get out of buying it but then was forced to to some degree. - Yeah, he was forced. - The way Twitter used to
work was you followed people and when you looked at your feed, you either saw the posts from
the people you were following in reverse chronological order, or posts from the people you followed algorithmically tailored to what you're most likely to wanna see. And if you didn't follow someone, you generally wouldn't see their posts unless it was like a sponsored tweet, or someone you follow quoted
or retweeted them, fine. The For You feed, TikTok I believe first had
a so-called For You feed. The idea is this is stuff you might like based on, I don't know what, either demographic data about you, your other habits, whatever. And so it's useless to me. It's just basically
mostly right wing content that is not interesting to me. - Why do you think that is? I mean, so the signals that are used to generate the For You page
is looking at all your likes, all your comments, all your
blocks and mutes and all that. It should-- - [David] You know that, I mean, I don't know what it's looking at, okay. - So it's supposed to be
very pleasant for you. - I'm sure other people go, wow, this For You thing is awesome. And I'll get like, if you had insert some
rightwinger sitting here, they would go Twitter used to
suppress right wing voices, and now finally they're
getting the fair shake that they deserve in the For You feed. Okay, I mean. - I wonder if there's left wing folks setting their feelings of Elon aside that are enjoying the For You page. That's a really important question 'cause it's supposed to be, people on the left and people on the right should be enjoying the For You page. - Sure. Yeah, I mean, so for me, my thought on Elon is
some incredible successes. I don't know about Twitter. I do think that, I don't
believe Elon is a right-winger, and when you see interviews with him, certainly at least socially,
and in many ways culturally, seems very moderate or
even somewhat on the left in my experience. So I don't think it's
Elon's a rightwinger. I don't, that it's not
an interesting critique. It does seem though that
throughout the Twitter escapade, he certainly ended up
closer to some voices that may be influencing
him in a particular way that's giving some people
that impression, you know? But as far as like the
Elon hate or the Elon love, it's just a person who's
done some interesting things, some of which I like and some of which I could
kind of leave aside. - I have seen folks be
drift towards the right more in response to just the
viciousness of attacks from the left. - [David] Hmm, like who? - Well Elon and-- - So you do think he's
drifted towards the right. - So I don't think at the core,
but I think on the surface. - [David] Okay. - And I think Joe Rogan
has as well on the surface, 'cause I think, so maybe
you can correct me, but it feels like people on
the left attack more viciously. - That has not been my experience. - Oh it hasn't? No, so yeah, let me know because my sense was that
they attack people on the left viciously as well. Left attacks its own, because you're not progressive
enough, you're not, you know, it is just this kind of bullying that happens very intensely. - No you're 100% right that
when the left has attacked me, it's almost as vicious as
when the right attacks me. The difference in my experience is, it's a smaller contingent on the left that's willing to levy
those attacks against me. But I'm on the left. So to some degree you could say, well, that's to be expected. There is toxicity on the left. - But it's intense, isn't it? Like, and that's what I mean, like the attacks on people
who are on the left, just you're not left enough. - Yeah, that's, no, that's the-- - [Lex] And it is a
small number of people. - I can't deny that that is
absolutely a real phenomenon, and depending on what sort of
topics you take on publicly, you are going to suffer the wrath of that to a greater or lesser degree. But with all of these things,
what I always go back to is, you know, I probably would
have more disagreements with Rogan today than the
last time I was on his show, which was like at the
beginning of the pandemic. But there would be zero, and I've done clips critical
of things that he has said, substantive, of course. To me it's sort of like, oh yeah, I could sit down with
him and do a podcast, and it would be zero big deal. And I would tell him, I stand by everything I
said about what you said, and I would say it to you right now. There are people who write to me and go, oh man, things must be
really, really tense now. If you were to, Rogan
would never have you on because you disagreed, and it's like-- - [Lex] He loves you. - I'm sure he's just not thinking of me. I'm not the most important
thing to Joe Rogan. I think both of us would
be able to sit down and talk about every one of my criticisms. It would not be taken personally, and then we would move on
and it would be the next day. - You get attacked a lot. How do you not let that
break you mentally? - Oof, I don't know. So let's see. I try to, I mean, I'm in a toxic space. The news in politics,
partisan news in politics, partisan news in politics on the internet with a social media component, just completely and totally toxic. From a personal perspective,
when I'm done producing my last show of the week until Monday, I try to completely tune out from news and politics altogether, and also make an effort to
just not look at feedback and what's going on. I also really limit my visibility. I don't need to read every comment. I don't need to look at
every email or every tweet. I have 15 minutes each day where I go through my
social media platforms, look at generally what
has the reaction been, maybe include that in my assessment of how I want to tackle a certain issue if I missed a good point
or something like that, and basically try to move on. When something like we talked about at the beginning happens,
it becomes obsessive. I mean, it's unhealthy, right? Where I'm going, oh my God,
who's attacking me now, and scrolling? It becomes, you know, I'm
sweating, it's horrible. But I think just like
limiting exposure to that, and remembering that it is
impossible to please everybody. And so I'd really rather have
fresh, genuine views each day rather than views that are sort of like restricted and flattened by what I perceive to
be people's preferences. - So just can you speak a little more to the full process of
creating the David Pakman Show? Like what, you wake up because you're
doing five shows a week? - I have the Letterman schedule, which means I do five shows in four days. I shoot Monday to Thursday,
but we're doing five episodes. Basically our guests,
we schedule in advance. I'm picking six to eight
stories each day that are, like I said, a blend of stuff I think
will be interesting, things I want to talk about,
and things where there's, it's being discussed at one layer and I want to go deeper on it, and I feel like I'm able to do that. I choose those stories in the morning, record in the early afternoon, and we put the show out by that afternoon. - What's the preparation, what's
the, how do you take notes? Are you on a sheet of paper? - No sheets of paper anymore. I used to do sheets of paper. I found something about it, like at work, the tactile nature of it. It became inconvenient for
sharing the notes with my team. But basically we use a wiki type system. It's called Media Wiki, which is basically like a Wikipedia clone. - [David] Old school. - Yeah, old school. So we can have pages for
every guest, every topic. - [David] Oh, that's interesting,
I haven't heard that. - Yeah, I don't know
anyone else who's using it. It works really well. It's so fast and it
takes up almost no space. So it just is a really good tool. When my team, you know, when we book a guest and they
have notes from the publicist, they'll put it in there,
and then I can access it. So I'm basically working off
of notes rather than a script. I'll pull any audio
visual stuff that I want so that that's available. And it's, I mean it's
really a very seamless, you know, we're doing this
every day, four days a week. And so we have it down
to a well oiled machine. - Where do you get ideas from? - Everywhere. I have a bunch of subreddits that I follow that I think are talking
about interesting things. I have a curated list for
which I still use Twitter, and it is very good for this. It's a curated private list of journalists that I think are doing interesting work. So I'll see what's there. Look at the sort of standard
news reporting wire services, AP and Reuters. Glance at what everything
from Drudge, to CNN, to whoever is covering that day. Look at Google News. - How do you try to fact
check stuff on your show? So like is there sources
or is there a process? - I always try to get to a
primary source first and foremost for the facts of the story. And then I'll use other tools
for background research. Oftentimes Wikipedia's footnotes,
I find to be useful tools. ChatGPT is a good one. You really have to fact check it, but it'll give you ideas of
where to do the fact checking, which I think is fantastic. Sometimes it gives me information
that's flat out wrong, and when you ask for the source, it's like, oh yeah, that
actually is not real, which is, hey, it's part of the process. But, and then when there's like
an expertise type of thing, if it's a breaking legal matter, I'll just call like a
friend who's a lawyer, or call a friend who's a
doctor or something like that if it lends itself to that. - Let me ask you about
the nature of truth. Do you think it's becoming
more and more difficult to know what is true, and will become continuously, continue to get more
difficult, especially with GPT? - I think the big difficulty
is in getting people to agree as to what is a statement of fact and what is a statement of opinion. I think once we can do that, reasonable people can more or less agree on how to get to the truth. Or if we can't get to it, at
least figure out how we would if the information were available. But the bigger challenge I'm having is, someone will call in with an opinion, but say they want to talk about fact, and I have to explain to them, you're talking about an
opinion and not a fact. And this goes back to the
lack of critical thinking and lack of media literacy. But that's the bigger
challenge for me right now. - But I mean, I think the big statements are always gonna be somewhat opinions. Like was the 2020 election fair? I think any answer to that is an opinion. - [David] I disagree. If we define fair. - Well, yes, so then I don't think it's possible to define fair in a way that's not several paragraphs where each sentence it
now has facts, right? So you what do you mean by fair? Is it who could show up to vote? What was the process of
how easy it is to vote? Was there actual cheating
going on in different, like what is the evidence
of that cheating? You have to actually get to the actual like details of a thing. High level, you know, everything is just going to
be an opinion it feels like. And you can approximate that to be, like it's a well-founded opinion. Well, most of science is an opinion, even physics is an opinion. So like, I think there's a
threshold beyond which an opinion becomes like, uh, this is
a pretty reliable thing to assume for now that that's just true. - Okay, so let me revise. So I think maybe better said,
I think that the difficulty, I mean, the process you described is probably the right process, and is it's exhausting for mundane things. And that causes major problems. If we were to say, is it better for the economy to have a tax rate on people
making over a million dollars, that's 20% or 50%. Okay, what do we mean by
better for the economy? It's not an overwhelming
task to decide on that. We could say, well, we'll say
it's better for the economy by looking at what was
the unemployment rate based on the tax rate on million, you know, people earning a million a year, and what was GDP and whatever. Okay, we've agreed. This is a statement, we are now in the realm of
just determining what is given the parameters
that we've established. I think that that's relatively doable. The issue is with the bigger ones, like you're talking about, where what do we mean by a fair election, and fair in whose eyes? And I am with you that it often
devolves into a conversation about opinions about what is fair, rather than an ascertainment of the facts. - Yeah, and it feels like maybe
avoiding some of these big, maybe there's some trigger words too, maybe avoiding them allows you to actually talk about the facts, and through that, educate
yourself and learn about, like whether the virus
leaked from a lab or not. To me, it was always a
super interesting question. I don't know why everybody
got super touchy about it. Mostly people I know,
colleagues, biologists thought it's pretty good likelihood that it leaked from a
lab given everything. They just didn't, the evidence is not there for either one. And so like you should be able
to just openly talk about it unless you're in a high political office where there could be
geopolitical consequences to your statements. But in general, it's an
interesting question. You should be able to talk
about it, but there's no, first of all, there's not many facts
around there, unfortunately. And a lot of very
conclusive statements about, especially in the early
days, were just opinions. And so you have to, the
idea of what is true or not becomes a little, even mentioning the word
truth in that context, it feels divisive. - Yeah, I completely agree
with you, which is strange. Like it really, you think it shouldn't. One of the really good opening
questions that I've had work to my advantage
when talking with people who I know disagree with me
about a contentious topic, is how do you think we would figure out X? And it often gets people
thinking first collaboratively, and obviously we might have
very different opinions, but with something like
the COVID lab leak, I think it's an interesting
one because if you say, okay, maybe it leaked, maybe it didn't, how would we figure that out? Who would we trust to weigh in on that? What evidence would count? Now we're kind of on the same team, and then if we can establish that, then we're on a search for capital T truth together or whatever. It's kind of pie in the sky,
but in some conversations, I've actually had success with that. - And then you can kind of realize, if there's no amount of
evidence that's gonna prove, show to you that you're wrong
in your current opinion, that that's probably a
really bad sign for you. - It may be a waste to pursue
the conversation further at that point. Yeah, I mean, yeah, what, oh, so okay, you think Trump was a good President. How do you determine that
and what evidence might exist that would change your mind? There is no evidence. Trump was the best President ever. I think the conversation's probably done. - [Lex] Except Abraham Lincoln. - Right. - You mentioned Israel Palestine. Well, what do you think
about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and something you've thought
about or spoken about for quite a time. Do you think we'll ever see
peace in this part of the world? - I don't know. You know, I mean, I could say yes. - [David] It's a synonymous answer. - I could say yes. You know, one of the problems is, and I'll give, you may not know that there are people on
the left of my audience who call me a Netanyahu Shill, even though I've never been
a supporter of Netanyahu, and I'm on the left. I just don't think that some of the, kind of black and white
characterizations about Israel are even remotely accurate. And I think most people, it's
become a sort of litmus test. Are you criticizing Israel enough? Are you showing us that
you're actually left wing? I don't do any of that stuff. I really look at the
situation for what it is. - That's become a litmus
test in American politics, in the spectrum of American politics. - Yes. My view big picture, is that I don't think we're
going to really get anywhere until some pre-negotiated terms are set, and the parties to do the negotiating are all good faith parties. For example, I don't think
Israel's right wing party, Likud, is a particularly good
faith arbiter of peace, because I think Likud benefits
from there not being peace, and the threat of violence. And there is violence, it's not
just the threat of violence. I don't think Hamas is going
to be an arbiter of peace for the Palestinian people either. I think the Palestinian
authority is a question mark, I'm not sure. So I think that there need
to be some preconditions that would need to be set with regard to everything
from settlements, to, you know, a lot of this minutia. Big picture though, if I imagine what the most
likely solution looks like, it doesn't mean it's a perfect solution. And obviously it's a solution, many people will say
it's not going to happen. I think it's a solution
where the borders are similar to what was being discussed
in the Clinton era to some degree, as many of the settlements
as possible have to go, understanding that some of the bigger ones are just not going to go and there's gonna have to
be meaningful land swaps which Yasser Arafat
seemed to be amenable to when he weighed in on it, I
believe it was in the '90s. The topic of the Temple Mount, and Jerusalem, et cetera
is a complicated one. But I think that almost certainly, East Jerusalem is going to have to be part of an eventual Palestinian state. You know, I mean like we can go as kind of as far as we want
to with a lot of this stuff. - What role does us have to play in this, coming to the table
with good faith parties? - I don't know whether the, I go back and forth between believing that the US should play a big role, to the US should play
essentially no role whatsoever, because of course of the funding of Israel that the US provides. It's not that I have a personal problem with American involvement, and somebody like Bill
Clinton was arguably relatively well positioned to
try to make something happen. It's more just will there, will it be seen as credible
on the global stage? And that's, I think, the
most important thing, because at the end of whatever
negotiation takes place, both sides need to agree that this is where we are
renouncing all past claims. And in the future, if
there's a disagreement, we can't go back to that thing
from the '80s or the '90s. That's just like a critical piece of this. - Yeah, it has to be stable, and you know, materialize into
something stable over years. - Yes. - Another difficult conflict
going on in the world is the war in Ukraine. What do you think about the
Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022? - I don't pretend to be
an expert on this issue. I think you probably know
more about this than I do, just from the brief conversation we had before we started filming. My view as a general
observer of geopolitics and the way that this area, this part of the world has
related to American presidents over the last several, you know, cycles, is I don't think it's controversial to say that this was a war of aggression, an invasion of aggression, an act of aggression by Vladimir Putin. I do believe that if
Trump had been reelected, Putin may have seen himself as having other tools with which
to try to expand influence, that may have been different
than geographical pursuits, geographic pursuits. But we don't know that for sure. I also have a really hard time imagining what the end of this looks like. And that's very scary, because
sometimes the most benign end seems to be that Putin
ends up out of power, either through no longer being
alive or deposed in some way. It doesn't feel like that
latter is super likely, the former, there's
reports about his health, I don't know how accurate they are. It's just hard to imagine
a face-saving exit that is going to be even
remotely, what's the word? It's not even a question of acceptable, just, it's not satisfying either. Just not tragic, I guess
is what I'm looking for. - In terms of Putin speaking
to the Russian people and being able to figure out what to say, what kind of narrative to
say why this war made sense. - [David] Yes. - And the same on the Ukrainian side, to figure out how to exit this war. - Yes. I mean, to some degree it
requires Russian troops leaving Ukraine, and that is
somewhat under the control. I mean, of course it's not up to Ukraine whether the initiative continues, but what I am not thrilled
with are some of the reflexive, you know, if Trump had been
in power instead of Joe Biden, a lot of the reflexive comments about, oh, if you say Ukraine is
just acting defensively, you're supporting neo-Nazis, or some of these things that have come out of the
American Republican Party seem both wacky, and like they would be saying
completely different things if Trump happened to
be in the Oval Office. They're really proxy attacks on Joe Biden. - Yeah. Well that in some sense, Ukraine is also kind of
political litmus tests of how you speak about it. I think, because of the
huge amount of funding that's going from US to Ukraine, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this topic has become politicized already. - 100%. There are people like Marjorie
Taylor Greene and others saying, we should be
doing nothing for Ukraine. Zelenskyy is a comedian, and
we're supporting neo-Nazis. That's it, full stop. And you either subscribe
to that or you don't. And it very quickly becomes, it very quickly becomes as
partisan as so many other issues. And it's really, the
most disappointing thing is that some of these issues
become incredibly divisive but they're simple. Like for example, a conspiracy theory
that we know isn't true. It shouldn't be divisive
because it's so simple. Other issues become divisive,
and they are simplified, but in reality they're
extraordinarily complex, and you lose the ability to
talk about the complexity because they're becoming partisan. - Do you think there will
always be war in the world. There's a bunch of folks on the subreddit that were interested in your
different complex perspectives on foreign policy. So let's talk about war. You look at the war in Ukraine, you look at what's going
on in Israel and Palestine, you look at the wars across the world. Do you think there will always be war? As a redditor put it, is it a necessary evil in
the game of geopolitics? - I used to have what I now believe is an extremely naive perspective, which is that if we somehow, if intelligent aliens arrived here, it would be so momentous for homosapiens, that all of our differences
would immediately be exposed to so insignificant. We would never fight again, and we would realize
that intelligent life. And then I spoke to people
who deal in space exploration and other scientists, and they all said, David, that's extraordinarily naive. There would be a period during which this was as momentous
as you're imagining, and then it would become normal. And then we would go back to
many of the same conflicts that we have now, sectarian, et cetera. I think that in all likelihood, there will always be
conflict between factions, whether it's what we
currently think of as war, probably not. I mean, it seems as though
the tactics will evolve, and it will be less about missiles, and I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know whether it's going
to become more biological, or cyber, or certainly something we haven't even considered yet. But I think there will always be conflicts we would refer to in that way. - Do you agree with Chomsky on the, his general harsh criticism
of US foreign policy in war, that many actions, military
actions in the United States are criminal in nature,
almost terrorist in nature? - I am not, it's been a decade or more since I've read any Chomsky, and I don't keep up with everything that he has recently said. So I don't want to
mischaracterize any of it. - In general, Americans are sold the view that we're the good guys spreading
freedom across the world. And I know Chomsky takes
a perspective that, yeah, but if you look at the
number of civilians you kill while doing it, it's incomparable to any
other military actions across the world. - Right, so I very much
disagree with those who take the view that the US is this wonderful global police force that's spreading democracy
and fixing problems. Very, very much wrong. I think where I've had disagreements with Chomsky in the past is more, he seems to frame the US
as a uniquely bad actor in some of these cases. And I think it's more an outcropping of the size and wealth of the US, and less about uniquely
negative intentions. And so I think that would
be my general disagreement with Chomsky based on
stuff I read a decade ago. - Well, he says that he
lives in the United States, he's an American. And so he feels his focus of
criticism should be on America. And I think that's one of the great things about being an American
and being in America is the freedom to criticize harshly. - [David] Sure. - While being a university
professor, by the way. He's basically the embodiment of why tenure is a really valuable thing. - [David] I agree. - Whether you agree with him or not. Question from Reddit. Ask David what he plans
for his garden this year. Is this a joke or is this-- - It's not a joke. I got into gardening a few years ago. Honestly, I'm with the baby. I can't do a garden this year. And I have a lot of travel coming up, so everything would die. But I did start to try
to figure out gardening. If you're stressed by the toxicity of the social media world, gardening is a great hobby. It really is. But it is extraordinarily time consuming. So I have no garden planned this year. - Are there books or
maybe movies in your life that had a big impact on you, that, you know, you're
thinking about that diet, has there been stuff you read,
forget about even just books, like blogs or writers, or
just sources of information that had, that molded you
into the intellectual, into the political thinker that you are? - It's so hard to, this
is sort of like, you know, you win an Oscar, and you wanna make sure you
thank all the right people. I read so much and have
been reading for so long that it's really hard to say. But I think certainly for me, narrative nonfiction has
been a fantastic genre to learn not only about history, but also about people and psychology. And very often when people
say, I don't really read, like, what can you recommend to me that might be interesting. Depending on, you know,
knowing them to some degree, I'll give recommendations there. In terms of just things
I picked up recently that I think are interesting, I've been reading a bunch of Neil Postman, I read a Jenny Odell
has a new book on time and the concept of like saving time, spending time, et cetera. She just published it. Super interesting. I just read Lansing's book
about the Shackleton voyage in Antarctica in 1914, '15, and '16. Super interesting. I'm really all over the map. - [Lex] I have that one on audiobook I've been meaning to listen to. - It's very interesting
and it seems inconceivable how these guys survived,
completely inconceivable, and yet they did. - It kind of inspires you to
think of space exploration, and taken on similar kinds of
risky and dangerous journeys. In narrative nonfiction, I
agree with you very much. I've been reading a lot
of 20th century history about Stalin and about Hitler. Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich I've read twice now, and I recommend. - [David] What did you
get out of reading it the second time? - So what I, so the second time
I listened to the audiobook as I ran. I get the same thing from it, as I get maybe reading
Man's Search for Meaning, which is all the troubles of
day-to-day in the modern world kind of fade away and dissipate
when I'm thinking about the, you know, basically the
embodiment of evil at scale at that recent time in human history. So it makes me sort of appreciate all the, it fills me with gratitude
to have all the freedoms, all the just simple joys
of life that we have today. And I think the second
time as I was reading it, because William Shire was
there, he's the author, he was there through the whole thing. You start to pick up little details as opposed to like big things. You start to pick up the little
quirks of how history turns, and just like these little events. You notice of the dynamics
between people in a room during a meeting with Hitler. You just notice these little
things that are mentioned, 'cause like he was either there directly or hurted the next day. So you get, that's why to me, Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich is interesting is 'cause it's by a guy who was there, who's reporting on it, versus a sort of a more
distant displaced retaliant. And I also like biographies. I'm a big fan of biographies. And Walter Isaacson has just
written some incredible ones, and Steve Jobs, and Einstein,
all that kind of stuff. - Viktor Frankl's book is one
I've read a bunch of times. And it's so short. And you know, reading in general, I know a lot of people who
read way more than I do, and I also know a lot of
people who don't read at all. I mean, they haven't read a
book since college essentially. To me, it's almost like
the amount I get from it, it's almost like a secret weapon, where when I think, you know,
in two or three or 400 pages, which I can read in, whatever 10 days, or however long it takes,
reading 30 pages a day, the amount of information, insights into so many
aspects of the human psyche that I can get. It's sort of like, it's not
like I'm in a competition for anything in particular with
anybody, I just do my show. But it's sort of like, if I'm reading dozens of books a year and you're reading zero, I'm exposed to so many
different things and ideas that are not even in your universe. It just seems like, the power of reading
just seems overwhelming. - And I had, speaking of getting attacked, I had a fun time getting
attacked a few months ago for publishing a reading list. So I'm reading at least a book a week, read 18 or 19 books from
the beginning of the year. - [David] You got attacked
for the books you chose, or for this-- - I don't know for what. But it would get, became quite viral. - [David] Attacked for reading? That's something. - So it's basically what
happened is that people, I actually don't, it's not
worth folks who know know, folks who don't, don't
even worry about it. It's the, what I really loved
about being attacked for it is it shows you can get
attacked for anything. - [David] Apparently. - So it's not like I did something wrong, it was kind of a beautiful thing, and it was just the most
intensely beautiful display of absurdity of Twitter and the internet, that there were articles written about me with the book list. There's no bad books on it. The thing I was being mocked
for is reading Dostoevsky, reading stuff that sounds like
a high school reading list. - [David] Oh I see. - Or all these kinds of
aspects of the reading list, which doesn't stand up to any sort of legitimate
kind of criticism. But the fact that people are
just looking for single words or single aspects of a tweet
and so on to criticize is, it actually forced me to,
'cause I released a video about, you know, summarizing my
takeaways from one of the books, and I've been meaning to do more and more. But every time I start
to like, wanna record it, I have this negative feeling. They kind of ruin the fun
of sharing with others. - I know exactly what
you're talking about. My advice on that is don't do it. Just don't record it. Because, and is that what you basically. - Yeah, for now, but
I think time cures it. But for now I decide not to. - [David] Yes. - It's just, until I
feel joy when I do it. - We are in such a privileged position to even be able to do
this sort of thing, right? I have taken on projects, and then it sort of sounds good, or I end up doing it because
there's some third party that brings the idea, and I feel like I can't
really say no or whatever. And then when I get in
front of the camera, or I have to write something, for a while, I did a newspaper
column that I hated doing. I realized that I'm
ruining the exact thing that I have worked to build, which is that I can
just do whatever I want. Why am I doing this? And sometimes it takes
me a week to realize it, sometimes it takes me a year. But just don't do it, that's the path. - In this case in
particular, it's also the, there's a private thing I
enjoy, which is reading. - [David] Right. - And if sharing that private
thing you enjoy is not fun, then just don't share it. That's, yeah. There's certain things, there's certain private things
that should remain private. That's like, which is one
of the first things ever. I'm the same person
privately as I am publicly. But the books, it's like,
man, I don't get to share, I guess through these conversations I can, I share some of the stuff
I'm reading and enjoying it, 'cause it sucks. It sucks to get attacked for stuff, and it sucks to get
attacked for stuff you love. - Yeah, especially reading. I mean it's, you know, that's
the bottom of the barrel. I have these ideas where I'll go, you know, maybe for my next thing, I'll go from politics, which is so toxic, I'll go to travel blogging, 'cause there's so many
travel bloggers I follow, and there's so many interesting places. And then I go, wait a second, I like traveling and just hanging out. Now traveling is gonna be my job, and now I've gotta bring
two cameras with me, and I've gotta get shots
and I've gotta film my food. And I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna do what I'm doing, but then I'll travel when
I want to take a vacation. - And of course some of it could be fun. I mean, I have to say,
when I did the one video on a book, 1984, I really enjoyed it. That whole process, it was fun. It was, I don't think I've ever
thought as hard about a book when I had to make a video about it. 'Cause I had to like,
you know, I read 1984, I don't know how many times. Probably five, 10 times, I don't remember. I read Animal Farm way more. But I don't think I was like,
what do I think about like, what are the key takeaways for me? I didn't really know. Like if you asked me what I
think about even Animal Farm, 'cause I haven't done that one, and I've read that one, I
don't know, over 50 times. It's probably my favorite book. Is like, I would have to struggle. And making a video about it, basically a little mini lecture, forced me to actually have an opinion about the details of it, and to do enough research to think like, okay, what is the historical
context of this book? I mean, it allowed me to say interesting, and to think interesting
stuff about the book. I found it to be really rewarding to basically the old Feynman thing, one of the best ways to
learn is to teach, right? - Yeah, I can't think of one thing I would say about Animal Farm, and I read it again not that long ago, but I don't know what comments are. - You kind of have a generic comment, about like authoritarianism
and so on, whatever. But there could be interesting
quirks of the book, and the characters and
how corruption happens. You could say all kinds of stuff that it may be contrasting it. Like even with 1984, it allowed me to contrast
with Brave New World, and how that 1984 was politicized, and how it's used by the
Republican Party after day. Like you could say a
lot of interesting stuff if you like, think about it, and write it down on a sheet of paper, maybe you don't need to
make a video about it. So I found it to be really
rewarding in general. So I probably will do more
of it, but not always. Not as a main profession, just like with the travel blogging. - I agree with that. - I mean, you get threatened a lot, you get attacked a lot online. Do you think about your mortality? - Well, the other day
I went to the doctor, and he said, you know, next physical, we're gonna be talking
about a lot of new things. And so I was thinking
about it a lot that day. No, I mean it's funny, I like, I recently did
a bunch of estate stuff. - [Lex] Yeah. - And when you have intellectual property, there's a question of like,
okay, I have my assets. But also if I died tomorrow, especially in a particularly fiery death, my YouTube channel would
probably for a while generate more money, because it would be like, oh my goodness, this person died in a terrible. What happens with a future revenue stream and all these different things? And it got me thinking about legacy, and about the fact that people
who do this sort of thing, it's kind of a new thing in a sense. And so, you know, if you work at ABC News, at some point you just retire and someone else fills in for you. How does my career wind down given like I don't actually know the answer. I'm not sure. What is it, I just one
day stop posting videos, but all my content stays up
getting fewer and fewer views. Or do I delete everything? Do I, I don't know. What is-- - If you die, I mean,
so my trip to Ukraine, 'cause I knew I was going to the front, is the first time I did,
I record a video if I die. And I posted it and I give
instructions to folks what to do. And so like there's a closure. - [David] Yeah. - But it's an interesting process. Like what happens to your, at which point does GPT take over and continue tweeting for
David Pakman, you know? - Well, the tweeting I
care less about right now, unless Blue becomes
something unbelievable, I'm less worried about Twitter. But some of my audience members
have been saying, you know, some of these tools, David,
are getting good enough, that we could clone your voice
and also make it match video. And with scripts, you could
just keep pumping out content even if you were gone. And I said, now that I'm interested in, that I wanna learn more about. - Boy, it's gonna be a weird future. What advice do you have to young folks that are facing this future? - Almost always, it's some
version of start right away. And that applies in so
many different ways. So if you're thinking about, oftentimes the context is
people want to do what I do. And I always say, do not
sit around for a year thinking about lighting. This is how you never do anything. And dozens of people
who I've felt obligated to talk to on the phone because
of a personal connection, I go through all the advice, and I can tell they're not gonna do it. They just, it's already
sounding too complicated. And so instead they'll sort of say, well, I gotta get the right
lighting in the right room and blah, blah, blah, blah. The best thing you can do,
no matter what you're doing, is just start right away. And that applies in this business and in whatever else you're doing. If you wanna learn a new
thing, find a new hobby. The ability to get data right away about what's working, what's not working, and whether you even like this
approach that you're taking is so valuable. And it will allow you to iterate. And the sooner you do it, the cost to a change of
direction will also be lower. If there's any, I don't do like self-help or generic advice type stuff, but the one thing that applies
in so many situations is, just try it right away
and iterate from there. - Yeah, start today and
then do it every day. - Or decide, hey, you know what? I figured out I don't
actually wanna do it. - Yeah, hence iterate. Well usually you'll discover you do. You think we'll make
it out of the century, humanity, human civilization? - Out of the, so like to 2100? - Yeah, how much we got? 80 years. - Yeah, 77. I think we're gonna make it. - You think so? - [David] Yeah. - What are the biggest threats
facing our civilization, if not wokeism? - If it's not wokeism, it's hard to say. No. I actually think that if you believe that we are on an
inflection point of sorts in changes to society and
acceleration of technology, et cetera, I think it's really tough to know in 2090 what will actually be the biggest threat. So, I don't know, it's
so cliche to say nuclear, and climate change, and another pandemic. - Technologically our world
might look so different than it's almost-- - [David] Yes, yes. - Unimaginable. What it means to be human is unimaginable. And also the degree that we
make progress out into space is also unimaginable. - I think space is super interesting, and there's people on
both the left and right who for different reasons are kind of not into the
whole space exploration thing. The people I hear from, the ones on the right think
it's just kind of dumb. The ones on the left think it's an excuse not to fix problems here. I think-- - And also they say it's the
play thing of billionaires. - [David] Sure. - Which is another funny kind of concept. - Yeah, I mean, someone's
gotta pay for it. Why not be people who have
a lot of money to blow. - It could either be billionaires or governments that are trillionaires. - [David] Sure. - Somebody has to pay for big
ambitious moonshot projects. - To me, the most interesting thing is that in getting closer to the next step of space exploration, we may well learn things that can then be used to
improve circumstances here. For me, it's not one or the other. And I recently read a long
piece about why not Mars? Because it's terrible in
every way for supporting life. Okay, so like that's one perspective, but still in so exploring, who knows what we might end up learning. So I'm big on it. I don't share the view of
some on the left about it. - So I guess to add to your
advice to young people, if a thing seems terrible, you still might wanna consider doing it? - I would say so, yeah. How many things have seen, I mean, listen, there are so
many trips where the day before I say, why am I doing this? The jet lag, I've gotta do this and that. And now who, if my guest
host falls through. I should just stay in work. And I go, hold on. You do this every time. Just go, you never regret it. You learn something, you try something. I never regret the trip. - This hopefully applies to
the conversation we had today. David, I'm a big fan of yours. Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being patient with me. We tried to talk earlier. Please continue doing what you're doing. Please continue being objective
and thoughtful and fearless. - Thank you.
- On the internet. - Big fan of yours as
well, I appreciate it. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Pakman. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi. What difference does it make
to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless? Whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism, or in the holy name of
liberty or democracy. Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.