Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #454
- So people need to go back and read the history of the
first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of
legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time
to put into place, right? We've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was, Hoover was
seen as this do nothing joke, who would dine nine course
meals in the White House and he is a filthy rich banker, FDR comes in there and every single day
has seen fireside chats, he's passing legislation. But more importantly, so he tries various different programs. Then they get ruled
unconstitutional, he tries even more. So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down,
he comes back fighting. And that was a really
part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it was, it gave him the
strength to persevere through personally what he could
transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight
that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself
out of the Great Depression. He's such an inspirational figure. I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR, I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that
all those people had. I think they had a really,
really good judgment and I'm not sure how intrinsic their own
personal character was to their exploration and
thinking about the world. So JFK is actually, JFK
might be our best example because he had the best judgment
out of anybody in a room as a brand new president in
the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. And I encourage people out
there, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read
it in graduate school. The "Essence of Decision"
by Graham Allison. I'm so thankful we did. It's one of the foundations
of political science because it lays out theories
of how government works. People really need to
understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that
don't care about you. They don't even really
care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes
a great shocking event like World War II to
change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while, you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who's actually able to
take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done. So the question around the
"Essence of Decision" was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various
different schools of thought, but one of the things I love
about the book is it presents a case for all three, the
organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the
great man theory as well. So there's a, you know,
you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy
experienced World War II and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man's life
jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the
cover of Life Magazine and he was a war hero and he
was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939
called "Why England Slept," which to this day is considered a text, which at the moment was
able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy. It's one of my most prized possessions. Because, and from 1939, because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he's a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference, you know, where Harry Truman is there
with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, president
of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, right, who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F.
Kennedy as a journalist. And all three of those
presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that's the story
of America right there. It's kind of amazing. I'm gonna give you one of
the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to "The Loudest
Voice in the Room" by Gabriel Sherman, that
book changed my life too, because it really made
me understand media. People don't wanna be informed,
they wanna feel informed. - The following is a
conversation with Saagar Enjeti, his second time in the podcast. Saagar is a political
commentator, journalist, co-host of "Breaking
Points" with Krystal Ball and of "The Realignment"
podcast with Marshall Kosloff. Saagar is one of the most
well-read people I've ever met. His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of
history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world. In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological
movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a
large number of amazing books. We'll put a link to
them in the description for those interested to
learn more about each topic. This is a "Lex Fridman Podcast." To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here is Saagar Enjeti. So let's start with the
obvious big question. Why do you think Trump won? Let's break it down. Before the election, you
said that if Trump wins, it's going to be because of immigration. - Hmm.
- So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than
obvious reasons that Trump won? - Yes, we absolutely need
to return to immigration, but without that multifaceted explanation, let's start with the easiest one. There has been a wave
of anti-incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart
recently went viral showing, so the first time, I
think since World War II, possibly since 1905, I need
to look at the dataset, that all anti-incumbent
parties all across the world suffered major defeat. So that's a very, very high level analysis and we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump's victory in 2016 'cause there were similar
like global precursors. That individual level
in the United States, there's a very simple explanation as well, which is that Joe Biden was very old, he was very unpopular, inflation was high. Inflation is one of
the highest determiners of people switching their votes and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other
issue at the ballot box. So that's that, but I think
it's actually much deeper at a psychological level for
who America is and what it is. And fundamentally, I think
what we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about
today is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy and eventually, the loss to
Donald Trump in the popular vote where really is like an apotheosis
of several social forces. So we're gonna talk about
the great awakening, or so-called awokening,
which is very important to understanding all of this. There's also really Donald Trump himself, who was really one of the most unique individual American politicians
that we've seen in decades. At this point, Donald
Trump's victory makes him the most important and
transformative figure in American politics since FDR. And a thought process for
the audience is, in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old
who's eligible to vote, who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not
the central American figure. And there's stories in World War II where troops were on the front lines. Some of they were 18, 19 years old, FDR died and they literally said, "Well, who's the president?" And they said, "Harry
Truman, you dumb ass." And they go, "Who?" They couldn't conceive of a universe where FDR was not the
president of the United States. And, you know, Donald Trump, even during the Biden
administration, he was the figure. Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man and obviously, he's failed. We should talk a lot
about Joe Biden as well for his own failed
theories of the presidency. So I think, at a macro level, it's easy to understand. At a basic level, inflation,
it's easy to understand. But what I really hope that a
lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique Donald Trump is as a political figure and
what he was able to do to realign American
politics really forever. I mean in the white
working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation really of a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along a single individual
question of did you attend a four-year college
degree institution or not? And this is a crazy thing to say, Donald Trump is one of the
most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history. We lived in 2016 at a time
when racial groups, you know, really voted in blocks,
Latinos, Blacks, whites. There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college
educated, white collar workers. But by and large, you
could pretty fairly say that Asians were gonna, Indians, everyone, 80, 90% were gonna vote
for the Democratic Party. Latinos as well. I'm born, you know, here in
Texas, in the State of Texas, George W. Bush shocked
people when he won some 40% of the Latino vote. Donald Trump just beat
Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men. So really fundamentally, we have witnessed a full
realignment in American politics. And that's a really fundamental problem for the modern left is erase a lot of the conversation
around gerrymandering, around the electoral college, the so-called electoral college
bias towards Republicans. Really the, being able
to win the popular vote for the first time since 2004 is shocking and landmark achievement by a Republican. In 2008, I have a book
on my shelf and I never, and I always look at it to remind myself how much things can change, James Carville and it
says "40 More Years," how Democrats will never
lose an election again. 2008, they wrote that book
after the Obama coalition and the landslide. And something I love so
much about this country, people change their minds all the time. I was born in 1992, I
watched red states go blue, I've seen blue states go red. I've seen swing states go red or blue. I've seen millions of
people pick up and move the greatest internal
migration in the United States since World War II. And it's really inspiring because it's a really
dynamic, interesting place. And I love covering and
I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people. It's awesome. - One of the reasons I'm
a big fan of yours is you're a student of history and so you've recommended a
bunch of books to me and they, and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and
do hold power for a long time. Some don't and some are started
by a small number of people and are controlled by a
small number of people, some are mass movements and it's just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves
maybe into the constraints of a two-party system. And I'd love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say
that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle? - Well, I won't go that far because to say it's a class
struggle really implies that things fundamentally
align on economic lines. And I don't think that's
necessarily accurate. Although if that's your
lens, you could get there. So there's a very big statistic
going around right now where Kamala Harris
increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more, and Donald Trump won
households under 100,000. So you could view that
in an economic lens. The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college
degree and for education. And so one of my favorite
books is called "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray. And that book really, really underscores how the cultural milieu
that people swim in when they attend a
four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they
move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store
they go to, their cultural, what television shows that they watch. One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray is
called a "Bubble Quiz." I encourage people to
go take it by the way, which it asks you a question. It's like, what does the
word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music
tourist style destination. Three is, it means nothing. So you are less in a bubble
if you say country music. And you're very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that
test for the first time, I go, "Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic, like what?" And then I was like, "Wait,
I'm like, I'm in the bubble." And there are other things in there like, can you name various
different military ranks? I can 'cause I'm a history
nerd but the vast majority of college educated people
don't know anybody served in the United States military. They don't have family members who do. The most popular shows in America are like "The Big Bang Theory" and "NCIS." Whereas people in our
probably cultural milieu, our favorite shows are "White
Lotus," "The Last of Us." This is prestige television, right, with a very small audience, but
high income, high education. So the point is, is that culture
really defines who we are as Americans where we live. And rural urban is one way to describe it, but honestly with the
work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people
moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally
weren't able to commute in, that's changing. And so really, and the
internet is everything. The stuff that you
consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly, whether you travel to Europe,
whether you have a passport, you know, all the things
that you value in your life, that is the real cultural
divide in America. And I actually think that's what, this revolution of Donald
Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those
traditional working class voters of all races away from
the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling that these people don't understand me and my struggles in this life. - And so the trivial formulation
is that is the wokeism, the anti-wokeism movement. - Yeah.
- So it's not necessarily that Trump winning was a
statement against wokeism, it was the broader anti-elitism. - It's difficult to say
because I wouldn't dismiss anti-wokeism or wokeism as an explanation. But we need to understand like the electoral impacts of woke. So there's varying degrees of like how you're going to encounter
quote unquote "wokeism." And this is a very
difficult thing to define. So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you're going to interact
with on a cultural basis. And what I mean by that is
going to watch a TV show and just for some reason there's
like two trans characters and it's never like
particularly explained why, they just are there, or
watching a commercial and it's the same thing. Watching, I don't know, I
remember I was watching, I think it was "Dr. Strange
in the Multiverse of Madness" and the main, it was a
terrible movie by the way, I don't recommend it. But one of the characters, I think is, her name was like America and she wore a gay pride flag, right? Look, many left-wingers
would make fun of me for saying these things, but that is obviously a
social agenda to the point as in they believe it is like
deeply acceptable that is used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress, you know, in sexual orientation and others, really believe it's important to quote unquote "showcase"
it for representation. So that's like one way
that we may encounter quote unquote "wokeism," but the more important
ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action,
which really has its roots in, you know, American society
all the way going back to the 1960s and how those
have manifested in our economy and in our understanding of
quote unquote "discrimination." So two books I can recommend. One is called "The Origins of Woke," that's by Richard Hanania. There's another one by
"The Age of Entitlement" by Christopher Caldwell. And they make a very strong case that, Caldwell in particular, that he calls it like a new founding of
America, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it created an
entire new legal regime and understanding of race
in the American character and how the government
was going to enforce that. And that really ties in with
another one of the books that I recommended to you
about the origins of Trump by Jim Webb. And Senator Jim Webb.
incredible, incredible man. He's so underappreciated. Intellectual, he was anti-war and he was, people may remember
him from the 2016 primary and they asked him, they'd asked him a question, I don't exactly remember
about one of his enemies. And he is like, "Well,
one of them was a guy I shot in Vietnam." And he was running against Hillary. And that guy the, he wrote
the book "Born Fighting," I think it's history of
the Scots-Irish people, something like that. And that book really
opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action
and racial preferences that were playing out, you know, through the HR, managerial elite, really turned a lot of people
within the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally
discriminated against by the professional managerial class. And so there's a lot of roots to this, "The Managerial Revolution"
by James Burnham. And in terms of the origin
of kind of how we got here, but the crystallization of like DEI and/or affirmative action, I prefer to use the
term affirmative action, in the highest echelons of business. And there became this idea that representation itself was
the only thing that mattered. And I think that right around 2014 that really went on steroids. And that's why it's not an accident Donald J. Trump elected in 2016. - At this point. Do you think this election
is the kind of statement that wokeism as a movement is dead? - I don't know. I mean it's very difficult to say because wokeism itself is not a movement with a party leader. It's a amorphous belief
that has worked its way through institutions now
for almost 40 or 50 years. I mean, it's effectively a religion and part of the reason why it's difficult to find is it means done different things to different people. So for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define
quote unquote "woke." Do I think that the
Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language? Yes, I do think they will. I think that the next democratic
nominee will not do that. However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away
from quote unquote "woke" but she basically was
punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019, but a general cultural feeling that her and the people around
her do not understand me and not only do not understand me, but have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding that would lead to a quote unquote "equity mindset," you know, equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy. So I can't say, I think it's way too early and, you know, again, like you
can not use the word Latinx, but do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime? You know, in terms of how you would run your Department of Justice? In terms of how you view the world? In terms of what you think
the real dividing lines in America are? 'Cause I would say that's still actually kind of a woke mindset. And that's part of the
reason why the term itself doesn't really mean a whole lot. And we have to get
actually really specific about what it looks like in operations. In operation, it means affirmative action, it means the Nasdaq passing some law that if you wanna go public or something, that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board. Like this is a blatant and
extraordinary look racialism that they've enshrined in their bylaws. So you can get rid of ESG, that's great, but, you know, you can get rid
of DEI, I think that's great, but it's really about a
mindset and a view of the world and I don't think that's going anywhere. - And you think the reason
it doesn't work well in practice is because it, there's a big degree to
which it's anti-meritocracy, - It's anti-American, really. I mean, you know, DEI and woke, and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries, okay? There are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic
and they're heterogeneous and they were run by
basically quasi dictators. And the way it works is that
you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims
and they get this guy and they get that guy and
everybody kinda shakes it. It's very explicit where they're like, we have 10 spots and they
go to the Christians, we have 10 spots, and
there goes the Hindus, you know, I'm talking, India's a country I know pretty well and this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect. But in America, you know,
fundamentally, we really believe that no matter where you
are from that you come here and basically, within a generation, especially if you migrate here legally and you integrate that you leave
a lot of that stuff behind. And the story, the American
dream that is ingrained in so many of us is one that
really does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that's not meritocratic. And I mean, I will give
the left-wingers some, you know, credit in the idea
that meritocracy itself, you know, could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds. I think that's true. And so, you know, the way I would like to
see it is to increase everybody's equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at quote unquote "willing
out the American dream." But that doesn't erase
meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other
things that we associate with the American character,
with the American frontier. So these are two ideologies
which are really at odds, like in a lot of ways,
like wokeism, racialism, and all this is a third world ideology. It's one that's very prevalent in Europe and in all across Asia but
it doesn't mix well here. And it shouldn't and I'm really glad that the America feels the same way. - Yeah, I got to go back
to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass, fascinating book. - [Saagar] Oh, my God. It's the most amazing.
- "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America." So I did not realize to the degree, first of all how badass
the Scots-Irish are and that to the degree, many of the things that
kind of identify as American and part of the American
spirit were defined by this relatively small group of people.
- Yes, yeah. - As he describes the
motto could be summarized as fight, think, drink and pray. So there's the principles
of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust
of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance, over 2000 years of a military tradition, they made up 40% of the
Revolutionary War army and produced numerous military leaders including Stonewall
Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and
a bunch of presidents. - Yeah. - Some of the more gangster presidents, Andrew Jackson, Teddy
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. - Hmm.
- Just the, the whole cultural
legacy of country music. - We owe them so much and they really don't get
their due, unfortunately. A lot of big, for the
reasons that I just described around racialism is because post, you know, mass
immigration from Europe, the term white kind of became
blanket applied to new Irish, to Italians, to Slovenians. And, you know, as you and I both know, if you travel those countries,
people are pretty different. And it's not different
here in the United States, Scots-Irish are some of
the original settlers here in America, and
particularly in Appalachia, and their contribution
to the fighting spirit and their own culture and like
who we are as individualists and some of the first people
to ever settle the frontier. And that frontier mindset
really does come from them. We owe them just as
much we do the Puritans but they don't ever really get their due. And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book
and you understand then, you know, how exactly could this group of white working class
voters forgo from 2012 voting for a man named Barack Hussein
Obama to Donald J. Trump. You really seem to, it makes
perfect sense if you combine it with a lot of the stuff
I'm talking about here, about affirmative action,
about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions
are not seeing through to you and specifically also
not valuing your contribution to American history. And in some cases, actively looking down. You know, I'm glad you pointed
out not only their role in the Revolutionary War but
in the Civil War as well. And, you know, just how
much of a contribution culturally really that we owe them for setting the groundwork
that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt some of their own ideas and their culture as our own. It's one of the things
that makes America great. - Mark Twain.
- Yeah. - I mean, so much of the
culture, so much of the, yeah, the American spirit, the
whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism
that represents our democracy. So you, would you trace
that fierce individualism that we think of back to them? - Definitely, it's a huge part
of them about who they were, about the screw-you attitude. I mean, that book actually
kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when
"Hillbilly Elegy" came out. - Oh, yeah.
- I'm sure you remember this. Which, it's kind of
weird to think that he, he's now the Vice President-elect
of the United States. It's kind of wild,
honestly to think about. But JD Vance's book, "Hillbilly Elegy," I think was really important
for a lot of American elites who were like, "How do
these people support Trump?" "Where does this shit come from?" That they really, I mean that if you really think back to
that time, it was shocking to the elite character that any person in the
world could ever vote for Donald Trump and, not just
vote, he won the election. How does that happen? And that's "Hillbilly Elegy" guided people in an understanding of what that's like on a
lived day-to-day basis. And JD, to his credit, talks
about Scots-Irish heritage about Appalachia and the legacy of what that culture looks like today and how a lot of these people
voted for Donald Trump, but we got to give credit to
Jim Webb who wrote the history of these people and taught me and you about, you know, their original fight against the oppressors
in Scotland, in Ireland and their militant spirit and how they were able
to bring that over here. And, you know, they got
their due in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populous presidents who set us up on the road to Donald Trump to where we are today. - Dude, you got me pumped,
excited to be an American. - Me too, I love that book. - It's crazy that JD, the same guy, because that's, "Hillbilly
Elegy" is what I kind of thought of him as. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, for me, it's actually pretty surreal. I met JD Vance in like 2017. I didn't ever, in like a bar, I didn't ever think he would
be the vice president-elect of the United States. I mean, just kind of wild. One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, "Hey, do you wanna meet up?" And he was like, "Sure,"
you know, okay. (laughs) And I was watching on television. I mean, the first time
that it really hit me, I was like, "Whoa, and he's
like name in a history book." It's whenever he became the
vice presidential nominee, I was watching him on TV
and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his
wife and I was like, "Wow." Like, that's it, you're in, you're in the history books now forever, especially now so as the
literal vice president-elect of the U.S. But his own evolution is
actually a fascinating, a fascinating story for us too. Because I think a lot of the time I've spent right now is kind of, this, a lot of what I'm giving
right now are like 2016 kind of takes about
like why Trump won that time. But we just spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election and like how, what happened,
some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for
the great awokening. But also if you look at
the evolution of JD Vance, this is a person who
wrote "Hillbilly Elegy." And not a lot of people
pay attention to this, but if you read "Hillbilly Elegy," JD was much more of a traditional
conservative at that time. He was citing, you know, report. I think the famous passage
is about like payday loans and why they're good
or something like that. I don't know his position today, but I would assume that
he's probably changed that. But the point is, is that
his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican
with a deep empathy for the white working class
than eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump. And to believe that he
himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and
bettering the United States, but specifically for
working class Americans, really of all stripes. And that story is really one
of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political
project, as an ideology. It's also one of the Republican
party which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark
against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually
was normalized to the point that majority of Americans
decided to vote for him in 2024. - So let's talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What's your take on Biden? - Biden is, I try to remove myself from it and I try not to give
like hit big history takes while you're in the moment. But it's really hard not to say that he's one of the worst
presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I'm
gonna go with it is because I wanna judge him by the
things that he set out to do. So Joe Biden has been the same person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student
who thinks he's an A student. The chip on his shoulder
against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate through his entire career
as a United States Senator, where he always wanted to be the star and the center of attention and to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of the most
fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is
watching him become even more of what he already was. And so, book recommendation,
it's called "What It Takes." And it was written in 1988 and there's actually a
long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. And one of the things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be
the center of attention. Now the reason I'm laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the individual and his character
is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a person who was elected in 2020, really because of a feeling
of chaos of Donald Trump, of we need normalcy, decides to come into the
office, portrays himself as a quote unquote
"transitional president." Slowly, you know, begins to
lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds
himself with sycophants, the same ones who have been
around him for so long, that he had no single input
into his life to tell him that he needed to stop and he
needed to drop out of the race until it became truly
undeniable to the vast majority of the American people. And that's why I'm trying to keep it as like him as an
individual, as a president, 'cause we could separate him from some of his accomplishments and the things that happened on, some I support, some I don't. But generally a lot of people
are not gonna look back and think about Joe
Biden and the CHIPS Act. A lot of people are not gonna look back and think about Joe Biden and
the Build Back Better Bill or whatever his Lina
Khan Antitrust policy. They're going to look back on him and they're going to
remember high inflation. They're going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the job in the sense that, one of, again, book recommendation, "Freedom from Fear," by David Kennedy is about
the Roosevelt years. And one of the most important things people don't understand is the
New Deal didn't really work in the way that a lot of
people wanted it to, right? Like there was still high unemployment, there was still a lot of suffering, but you know what changed? They felt that they had a
vigorous commander-in-chief who was doing everything in his
power to attack the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn't
even materially change the vigor, that's a term
that was often associated with John F. Kennedy at vigah, you know, in the Massachusetts accent. We had this young
vibrant president in 1960 and he was running around
and he wanted to convince us that he was working every
single day tirelessly. And when you have an 80-year-old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach while
people's grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25% and we don't see the same vigor, we don't see the same
action, the bias to action, which is so important in
the modern presidency, that is fundamentally
why I think the Democrats part of the reason why the
Democrats lost the election and also why I think
that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way. And he had the opportunity,
he could have done it, you know, if he wanted to,
but maybe 20 years ago, but the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental rise to the presidency ended
up in his downfall. And it's kind of amazing because again, if we look back to his original campaign speech 2019, why I'm running for president,
it was Charlottesville. And he said, "I want to
defeat Donald Trump forever and I wanna make sure
that he never gets back in the White House again." So by his own metric, he did fail. That was his, it was the
only thing he wanted to do. And he failed them, he failed from. - You said a lot of interesting stuff. - Yeah.
- So one FDR that's really interesting. It's not about the specific policy, it's about like fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for a, this is the same with Bernie.
- Yeah. - Like maybe there's a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that still supporting him 'cause like, we just want somebody-
- He feels authentic. - Yeah.
- That's it. - We just want somebody
to fight authentically for us.
- Yes. Yes, FDR, people really
need, FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus
Christ, okay, in the U.S. and some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. So people need to go back and read the history of the
first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of
legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress
to heel and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time
to put into place, right? We've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was
seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course
meals in the White House. And he is a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day
has seen fireside chats, he's passing legislation, but more importantly, so he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional. He tries even more. So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down,
he comes back fighting. And that was a really
part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it was, it gave him the
strength to persevere through personally what he could
transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself
out of the Great Depression. He's such an inspirational figure. He really is. And people think of him for World War II of course, you know, we
can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early
years are not studied enough. '33 to '37 is one of the
most remarkable periods in American history. We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by king, by a
monarch, and people liked it. He was a dictator and he was a good one. - Yeah, so to sort of push
back against the implied thing that you said. - Sure.
- So when saying Biden is the worst president- - No second worst in modern history, that's what I said. Second-
- In modern history. - Yeah.
- Who's the worst? - W. with no question. - I see. Because of the
horrible wars probably. - [Saagar] I mean Iraq is just so bad. - It is just mess, yeah.
- Like a, One of my favorite authors
is a guy, Jean Edward Smith. He's ruined a bunch of
presidential biographies and in the opening of his
W biography, he's like, there's just no question this is a single worst
foreign policy mistake in all of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever. He had terrible judgment
and got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster and it
set us up for failure. By the way, we talked a
lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald Trump than George W. Bush. But I could go off on
Bush for a long time. Oh we will.
- Yeah. - We will return there.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- So as part of the pushback I'd like to say 'cause I
agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism
against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump. - You're absolutely right.
- Of arrogance. - Yeah.
- So, and I think you've also articulated
that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of
arrogance and narcissism. - Absolutely, but sometimes fewer benefit, you know, you have to be a
pretty crazy person to be, to wanna be president. I, you know, I had put out a tweet that got some controversy, and I think it was Joe Rogan who I love, but he was like, "I wanna find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being." And I was like, I'm
actually not interested in who politicians are
as human beings at all. I was like, I've read too
much about them to know, I know who you are. If you spend your life and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time
around would be politicians, I know what it takes to
actually become the president. It's crazy. You have to give up everything, everything. Every night, you're not
spending it with your wife. You're spending it at dinner
with potential donors, with friends, with people
who can connect you every, even after you get elected, that's even more so, now
you got to raise money and now you're onto the next thing. Now you wanna get your
political thing through, you're gonna spend all
your time on your phone. You and your staff are
gonna be more like this. Your entire life revolves
around your career. It's honestly, you need an
insane level of narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own
personal characteristics and foibles lead you to
the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of
the idolatry of the self and everything around you. There's a famous story
of Lady Bird Johnson after Johnson becomes the president and he's talking to
the White House butler. And she was like, "Everything
in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever's left goes to the
girls," her two children, "and I'll take the scraps." So everything revolved around Johnson's political career and his daughters, when they're honest, 'cause they like to paper
over some of the things that happened under him, but they didn't spend any time with him. Saturday morning was for
breakfast with, you know, Richard Russell, I forget, these are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for,
you know, for his kids. That's what it was. And by the way, he's one
of the greatest politicians to ever live, but he also died from
a massive heart attack. And he was a deeply sad
and depressed individual. - Yeah, I saw that tweet
to go back to that. - Yeah.
- And also I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on "The
Realignment" podcast. And I have to side with Marshall. - Okay.
- I think you're just wrong on this.
- All right. - Because I think revealing the character of a person is really
important to understand how they will act in a
room full of generals and full of-
- Yeah. This gets to the judgment question. - The judgment.
- And that's, I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR, I can give you a laundry
list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had a really,
really good judgment. And I'm not sure how intrinsic their own
personal character was to their exploration and
thinking about the world. So JFK is actually, JFK
might be our best example because he had the best judgment
out of anybody in a room as a brand new president in
the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly was his character. And we can go again though
into his laundry list of that. But most of it was around
being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes
that he would make. And he was also had a
deeply inquisitive mind and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT-109. So it is, look, I get it. I actually could steel man and I could, the response to what I'm saying
is judgment is not divisible from personal character. But just because I know
a lot of politicians, and I've read enough with
the really great ones, the people who I revere the most. There's really bad personal stuff basically every single time. - But you're saying the judgment was good. - His judgment was great. His judgment was great.
- On through a missile crisis. - Yes.
- Some of the best judgment and decision-making in
the history of America. - Yes, and we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read
it in graduate school, the "Essence of Decision"
by Graham Allison. I'm so thankful we did. It's one of the foundations
of political science because it lays out theories
of how government works. This is also a useful
transition, by the way, if we want to talk about
Trump and some of his cabinet and how bad it's shaping up because people really need
to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that
don't care about you. They don't even really
care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes
a great shocking event like World War II to
change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while you have
a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who's actually able to
take peacetime presidency and transform the country. But it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done. So the question around the essence of decision was the theory
behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various
different schools of thought, but one of the things I love
about the book is it presents a case for all three, the
organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the
great man theory as well. So there's a, you know,
you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy
experienced World War II as this, I think he was
like a first lieutenant or something like that. And how he literally swam miles with a wounded man's life
jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him. And he ended up on the
cover of Life Magazine. And he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939
called "Why England Slept," which to this day is considered a text, which at the moment was
able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy, it's one of my most prized
possessions because, and from 1939, because
this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he's a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference, you know, where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same
time, Harry S. Truman, president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, right, who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F.
Kennedy as a journalist, some shithead journalist on the side, and all three of those
presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that's the story
of America right there. It's kind of amazing. And I loved people to say
that because you never know about who will end up rising to power. But-
- Are you announcing that you're running for-
- No, absolutely not. Yeah, yeah. - Okay.
- I don't have what it takes. I don't think so, I'm self-aware. - Yeah, well, maybe humility
necessary for greatness. Okay, so yeah, actually, can
we just linger on that book? - Yeah.
- So the book, "Essence of Decision: Explaining
the Cuban Missile Crisis," by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of how government works. The Rational Actor Model, so seeing government as one entity, trying to maximize the national interest, also seeing government as
through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures, sort of this giant organization
that's just doing things, how it's always been done, and the government politics model of there's just these individual internal power struggles within government. - Yes.
- And all of that is like a different way to view, and they're probably all true to a degree of how decisions are made. - Yes.
- Within this giant machinery of government. - That's why it's so important is because you cannot
read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is may
more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one or this is
probably a good transition to Donald Trump because, and I guess for the people out there who think I've been up too obsequious, he'll be my criticism, Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast, probably the most important
thing that he ever said, which is he said, "I like to
have people like John Bolton in my administration. Well, because they scare people and it makes me seem like
the most rational individual in the room." So at a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that. And then they can rationalize
while there are picks that Donald Trump has
brought into his White House, people like Mike Waltz and
others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with
a quote unquote "anti-neocon anti-Liz Cheney agenda." Now, Trump's theory of this is that he likes to have quote
unquote "like psychopaths" like John Bolton in the room with him while he's sitting
across from Kim Jong Un, because it gets scared. What I think Trump never
understood when he was president, and I honestly question
if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out, which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I
don't think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions
that get made in government never reach the president's desk. One of the most important
Obama quotes ever is, "By the time it gets to my
desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here
don't have an answer. That's why I have to make the call." So the theory that Trump has, that you can have people in there who are, let's say war mongers,
neocons or whatever, who don't necessarily
agree with you is that when push comes to shove at
the most important decisions, that I'll still be able
to reign those people in as an influence. Here's the issue. Let's say for Mike Waltz, who's gonna be the
national security advisor, a lot of people don't
really understand, you know, there's this theory of
national security advisor where you call me into your
office and you're the president you're like, "Hey, what
do we think about Iran?" And I'm like, "I think you
should do X, Y, and Z." No, that's not how it works. The national security
advisor's job is to coordinate the inter-agency process. So his job is actually convene
meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation
room CIA, State Department, Sec Def, others before
the POTUS even walks in, we have options. So we're like, "Hey, Russia
just invaded Ukraine, weed a package of options Those packages options are
gonna concede of three things. We're gonna have one group, we're gonna call it the dovish option, two, we're gonna call
it the middle ground, three, the hardcore package." Trump walks in, this is
how it's supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes,
"Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do?" "Mr. President, we've prepared
three options for you. We've got one, two, and three." Now who has the power? Is it Trump when he
picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides
what's even in option one, two, and three? That is the part where Trump
needs to really understand how these things happen. And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least
like this on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I would call an
FBI coup, whatever, 33 days, he's out as a national security advisor. H.R. McMaster, he's got
a nice, shiny uniform, four star, all of this, Master doesn't agree
with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, "I ran on
pulling out of Afghanistan, I want to get out of Afghanistan." They're like, "Yeah,
we'll get out Afghanistan, but before we get out we got to go back in as we need more troops in there." And he is like, "oh, okay." You know, it's like all this
and yeah, approves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number
of troops in Afghanistan. And it's only till February 2020 that he gets to sign a deal,
the Taliban peace deal. Which in my opinion, you
should have done in 2017. But the reason why that
happened was because of that organizational theory, of that
bureaucratic politics theory where H.R. McMaster is able to guide the interagency process, bring the uniform recommendations of the joint chiefs of staff
and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say we must put troops. Another example of this is a book called "Obama's War" by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage
people to read this book because this book talks about how Obama comes into
the White House in 2009 and he says, "I wanna get out of Iraq and I don't wanna increase, I wanna fight the Good War
in Afghanistan," right? And he's doing, Obama's a thoughtful guy too thoughtful actually. And so he sits there and he's
working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is
that very slowly his narrow, his options begin to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we should do in Afghanistan. And pretty soon David
Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security
apparatus has Obama pegged where he basically politically
at the time decides to take the advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it
both ways, but by saying, "but in two years, we're gonna withdraw." That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be
able to move by presenting you with ones which you don't even want, and then making it politically
completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions. That's why when Trump says things like, "I wanna get out of Syria," that doesn't compute up
here for the Pentagon, because first of all, you know, if I even asked you how many
troops we have in Syria, and you could go on the DOD website, it'll tell you a number. The number's bullshit, because the way that they do it is if you're only there for 179 days, you don't count as active
military contracts. The real numbers, let's say five times. And so Trump would be like,
"Hey, I wanna get out of Syria." They're like, "Yeah, yeah,
we'll do it six months," right? We need six months and
after six months ago, so are we out of Syria yet? And they're like, "No, well
we got to wrap this up. We got this base, we got that, and we have this important mission." And you know, next thing you know, you're out of office and it's over. So that, there's all these things which I don't think he quite understands. I know that some of the
people around him who disagree with these picks do is
the reason why these picks really matter is not only are the voices in the situation room for the really, really high profile stuff, it's for all the little things to never get to that president's desk of which can shape extraordinary policy. And I'll give you the best example. There was never a decision
by FDR as president of the United States to oil embargo Japan. One, which he thought about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision kind of made
within the State Department. It was a decision that was
made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it. It was a conscious choice, but it was not one
whichever was understood the implications that by doing that we invite a potential
response like Pearl Harbor. So think about, you know, what the organizational
bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary
blowback that we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the
entire national security chain in the White House. Also, I just realized I did
not talk about immigration, which is so insane. One of the reasons
Donald Trump won in 2024, of course was because
of the massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is, is that it may
actually be second to inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win the presidency was because Joe
Biden fundamentally changed the immigration status
quo in this country. That was another thing
about the Scots-Irish people and others that we need
to understand is that when government machinery and elitism and liberalism appears
to be more concerned about people who are
coming here in a disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their, you know, ability to quote unquote
"pursue the American dream," while the American dream is dying for the native-born population, that is a huge reason
why people are turning against mass immigration. Historically as well, my friend Reihan Salam wrote a book called "Melting Pot or Civil War" and one of the most important parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States. So if we think about the transition from Scots-Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to mass European immigration, what a lot of people
don't realize is it caused a ton of problems. There were mass movements at that time, the Know-Nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against
mass European migration, they were particularly
concerned about Catholicism by, as the religion of a lot
of the new immigrants. But really what it was
is about the changing of the American character by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the
native-born population and their understanding
of what they're owed and their role in American
society is very different from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of U.S. politics was actually
during the resolution of the immigration question, where we had massive waves
of foreign-born population come to the United States. We had them, you know, integrated, luckily, actually at the time with the Industrial Revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them. One of the problems is that
today in the United States we have one of the highest levels of foreign-born population
than ever before, actually since that
time in the early 1900s, but we have all of the
same attendant problems. But even worse is we don't live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly
service-based economy that has long, you know,
moved past manufacturing. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't
bring some of that back, but the truth is, is that
manufacturing today is not what it was to work in
a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable
and we can agree on that. And part of the problems
with extremely high levels of foreign-born population,
particularly unskilled, and the vast majority of the
people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so under fraudulent purposes. They're doing so because
they are economic migrants and they're abusing, you know, asylum law to basically gain entrance
to the United States without going through a process
of application or of merit. And this has, its all of
its traces back to 1965 where the Immigration
Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed
the status quo of immigration from the 1920s to 1960,
which really shut down levels of immigration
to the United States. In my opinion, it was one
of the most important things that ever happened and one of the reasons why is it forced and caused integration. It also forced by
slowing down the increase in the number of foreign-born population, it redeveloped an American character and an understanding
that was more homogenous and was the ability for
you and me to understand despite the difference in our background. If you accelerate and
you continue this trend of the very high foreign-born
unskilled population, you unfortunately are basically
creating a mass, you know, it's basically it's a
non-citizen population of illegal immigrants. People who are not a skilled,
you know, I think it was, I read 27% of the people who've come under Joe Biden illegally don't
even have a college degree. That means that we are lucky if they're even literate in
Spanish, let alone English. So there are major
problems about integrating that type of person. You know, even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial economy, now imagine today the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass citizenship happened, you know, to that population would be extraordinary. And even if we were to do, I
don't think it's a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair
it with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don't think a lot of people understand the immigration system. The immigration system
in the United States, effectively they call it
family-based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the
term which implies that let's say you come over here and you get your green card, you can use sponsorship
and others by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with that
is who is your cousin? Like is he a plumber? Is he, you know, is he a coder? You know, that doesn't actually matter 'cause he's your cousin so
he actually has preference. The way that it should
work is it should be, nobody cares if he's your cousin. What does he do? You know, what does she do? What is she gonna bring to this country? All immigration in the
United States, in my opinion, should be net positive without
doing fake statistics about, oh, they actually increased
the GDP or whatever. It's like we need a
merit-based immigration system. We are the largest country in the world and one of the only non-Western or one of the only Western
countries in the world that does not have a merit-based points-based immigration
system like Australia and or Canada. And I mean, I get it because
a lot of people did come to this country under
non-merit-based purposes. So they're really
reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the immigration status quo and by basically just allowing,
you know, tens of millions, potentially tens of millions
at the very least 12 million, new entrants to come to the
U.S. under these pretenses of complete disorder and of no conduct really broke a lot of
people's understanding and even like mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a
massive part of Trump's victory. - Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about
the border are Tom Homan? - Tom Holman is a very legit dude, got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0, he is an original, like true believer on enforcing
immigration law as it is. Now notice how I just said it that, that's a politically correct
way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out from my
left-wing critics in that, yeah, he really believes in the ability, in the ability, in the
necessity of mass deportation. And he has the background to
be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings and
this will apply to DOGE too. Czar has no statutory or
constitutional authority. Czar has as much
authority as the president of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it's
fair to say even his critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times and he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel. So Czar in and of itself is
frankly a very flawed position in the White House and it's one that I really
wish we would move away from. I understand why we do it. It's basically to do a
national security advisor interagency convener to
accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a
person, Steven Miller, who will be in the White House, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff who has well-founded beliefs
experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, which I think would also
give him the ability to work with home and to pull that off. That said, a corollary to this, and frankly this is the one
I'm the most mystified yet, is Kristi Noem, as the Department of
Homeland Security Secretary. So let me just lay this out for people 'cause people don't know what this is. Department of Homeland
Security, 90% of the time, the way you're gonna
interact with them is TSA, you don't think about it,
but people don't know, the Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest law enforcement
if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It's gigantic. You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations, you have border patrol, ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies
that report up to you. But most importantly for this,
you will be the public face of mass deportation. So I was there in the
White House briefing room last time around when Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the DHS secretary
under Donald Trump, and specifically the one who
enforced child separation for a limited period of time. She was a smart woman. She has long experience in government and honestly she melted
under the criticism. Kristi Noem is the
governor of South Dakota. I mean, that's great, you have a little bit
of executive experience, but to be honest, I mean you have no law
enforcement background. You have no ability to, you have no frankly with understanding of what it is going to be
like to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history. You have to go on television and defend that every single day. A literal job requirement
under Donald Trump. And you will have to have. extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high intellect. You have to have the ability
to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how
she handled that situation with her dog in her interviews. And that does not give me confidence that she will be able to do all that well in the position so.
- What do you think is behind that? So crystal ball's theory
on breaking points- - Yeah.
- Is that there's some kind of interpersonal, like I didn't know- - I can explain it.
- I should know this, but I didn't know any of the- - Yeah.
- There was some cheating or whatever.
- There's a rumor nobody knows if it's true that Corey Lewandowski and Kristi Noem had a
previous relationship and ongoing Corey Lewandowski
is a Trump official and that he maybe put her
in front, I don't know. - Is this like the Real Housewives of DC? - Yeah, kind of, although, I mean it was the most open
secret in the world allegedly. I don't know if it's
true. Okay, all right. I mean, I don't like to traffic too much in personal theories, but I mean, in this respect
it might actually be correct in terms of how it all came down. I have no idea what he's
thinking to be, I truly don't. I mean, maybe it's like
he was last time he said, "I want a woman who's like
softer and like emotionally and the ability to be the face
of my immigration program." I mean, again, like I said, I don't see it in terms of
her experience and her media. It's frankly like not very good. - So you think she needs
to be able to articulate, not just be like the softer
face of this radical- - Yeah, so-
- Policy, but also be able to articulate the what's
happening with the reasoning behind all that?
- Yes. You need to give
justification for everything. Here's the thing, under mass deportation, the media will drag up every sob story known to
planet Earth about this person and that person who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really what the quasi thing is, that's why the program itself is bad. And we should legalize
everybody who's here illegally. Okay, so the thing is, is
that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way that the media
is being handled is that you throw every question
back in their face and you say, well, you know,
you either talk about crime or you talk about the
enforceability of the law, then necessity, I mean I just, I think articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who
immigrated to this country. But one of the favorite
phrases I heard from this, from a guy named Mark Krikorian who's a center for immigration studies is we don't make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren. And that is an extraordinary
and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it's a triumph of the American system that somebody whose
parent family benefited from the immigration regime
and was able to come here. My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of
dollars through the process, can arrive at the conclusion
that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American citizens. I'm not talking about other Indians or you know, other whatever. I'm talking about all of us. I care about everybody who
is here in this country, but fundamentally, that will mean that we are going to have to exclude some people from the U.S. And I mean, another thing that the open borders people
don't ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. So for example, a common
left-wing talking point is that it's America's fault that
El Salvador and Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that,
we have a responsibility to take all those people in 'cause it's our fault or Haiti, right? But you know, if you think about
it, America is responsible, and I'm just being honest for destroying and ruining a lot of countries. They just don't benefit from
the geographic like ability to walk to the United States. So I mean, if we're
doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a
claim to be able to come here than anybody from El Salvador who's talking about something
that happened in 1982. So within its own logic,
it doesn't make any sense. Even under the asylum
process, you know, people, I mean, people don't even know this. You're literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence, okay? I mean, imagine that like that's frankly, that is a local law enforcement and problem of people
who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold-hearted this sounds, but maybe honestly it could
be because I'm Indian. One of the things that
whenever you visit India and you see a country with
over a billion people, you're like, holy shit, you know this, this is crazy. And you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved. And also, there is nothing in
the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody. It's a very complex and dynamic problem. And it's really nice to be bleeding heart and to say, "Oh, well, we
have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that." But it's just, it doesn't work. It doesn't work with a nation state, it doesn't work with the sovereign nation. We're the luckiest people in the history of the world live here in this country. And you need to protect it. And protecting it requires really thinking about the
fundamentals of immigration itself and not telling us stories. Like there's a famous moment
from the Trump White House where Jim Acosta, CNN White
House correspondent got into it with Stephen Miller,
the current, you know, who'll be the current deputy chief. And he was like, what do you say, something along the
lines to people who say you're violating, you know, that quote on the Statue of Liberty, like give me, you're tired, you're poor, you're hungry, all of that, the Emma Lazarus quote, and Stephen very logically was like, what level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote? Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million? And that's such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus quote. There is, when you start
talking, honestly, you're like, okay, we live in X, Y, and Z
society with X, Y and Z GDP, people who are coming here
should be able to benefit for themselves and us not rely on welfare, not, you know, be people who
we have to take care of after because we have our own
problems here right now. And who are the population and the types of people that
we can study and look at who will be able to benefit? And based on that, yeah,
immigration is great, but there are a lot of economic, legal, and societal reasons for why you definitely don't
want the current level. But another thing is,
even if we turn the switch and we still let in
1,000,005 people a year under the chain family-based migration, I think it would be a colossal mistake because it's not rooted
in the idea that people who are coming to America
are explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It's doing so based on the
familial connections of people who already gamed the immigration system to be able to come here. I have a lot of family in India and you know, I love them, but, and some of them are actually
very talented and qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able
to apply on their own merit. And that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I'm a U.S. citizen. - Like you mentioned the book
"Melting Pot or Civil War" by Reihan Salam, he makes an argument against open borders. The thesis there is assimilation
should be a big part. I guess there's some kind of
optimal rate of immigration which allows for assimilation. - Yeah, and there are ebbs and flows and that's kinda what I was
talking about historically where, you know, I mean the truth is, is you could walk the
streets of New York City in the early 1900s and late 1890s and you're not gonna hear any English. And I think that's bad. I mean, really what you
had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically
practicing their way of life just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their
ethnic problems that they had and even some of their cultural
like unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America. And then New York City police and others are figuring out like, what the hell do we do with all this? And it literally took
shutting down immigration for an entire generation
to do away with that. And there's actually still some. The point about assimilation is twofold. One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding
of the American character that has nothing to do with race. And that's so unique that I can sit here as a child of people from India and has such a deep appreciation
for the Scots-Irish. I consider myself, you
know, American first. And one of the things that I
really love about that is that I have no historical
relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War, but I feel such kinship with
a lot of the people who did and reading the memoirs and
the ideas of those that did, because that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were
able to instill in the country for 150 years later gives me
the ability to connect to them. And that's such an incredible
victory on their part. And that's such a unique thing in almost every other
country in the world, in China and India or wherever, you're kind of like what you are, you're a Hindu, you're a
Jew, you're a, you know, you're Han Chinese, you're a Uyghur, or you're Tibetan, something like that. You're born into it, but really here, one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different
people who come to America. And that is a celebration
of immigration as an idea. But immigration is also a discreet policy and that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in
the U.S., our citizens, to actually be able to benefit and, look, it's gonna be messy. And honestly, I still don't know yet if Trump will be able to
pursue actual mass deportation just because I think that I'm not sure the public is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don't know if the
public is ready for it. I think, I don't know, I'll have to see, because there's a lot of
different ways that you can do it. There's mandatory E-Verify,
which requires businesses to basically verify you're a U.S. citizen or you're here illegally
whenever they employ you. Which is not the law
of the land currently, which is crazy by the way. There's, you know, you can cut off for tax remittance payments, which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico,
Honduras, and Guatemala. Again, illustrating my
economic migrant point. There are a lot of various different ways where you can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the
U.S. so people will self-deport, but you know, if he does pursue
like real mass deportation, that will be a flashpoint in America. - Aren't you talking about things like what Tom Holman said that works at raids, sort of increasing the rate of that? - Yeah, we used to do that, you know. - But.
- Yeah, - But there's a rate at
which you can do that, where it would lead to, I
mean, radical social upheaval. - Yeah, it will, I mean, and I think some people
need to be honest here. And this actually flies in the face of, I mean one of the most
common liberal critiques is this is gonna raise prices. And yeah, I think it's true. I think it's worth it. But that's easy for me to
say, I'm making a good living. If you care about inflation,
you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries
or whatever goes up because of this immigration policy. I think that needs to be
extremely well articulated by the president. And of course, he needs to think about it. The truth is is America right
now is built on cheap labor. It's not fair to the consumer, it's not fair to the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves. And it's not fair to the
natural-born citizen. The natural-born citizen
has his wages suppressed for competition by tens
of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages. They have to compete for
housing, for social services. I mean just even, you know, like basic stuff at a societal
level, it's not fair to them. It's definitely not
fair to the other person 'cause I mean when everyone, people say like who's gonna
build your houses or whatever, you're endorsing this
quasi-legal system where, you know, uninsured laborers from Mexico, they have no guarantee of wages. They're getting paid cash under the table. They are living, you know, 10 to a room. They're sending Mexican
remittance payments back just so that their children can eat. I mean, that's not really
fair to that person either. So that's the point. The point is, is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval. But this gets to my Kristi
Noem point as well is you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here, because if you don't, it's
gonna go south real quick. - The way that Vivek
articulates this is that our immigration system
is deeply dishonest. Like we don't acknowledge some
of the things you just said. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah. - And he wants to make it honest. So if we don't do mass deportation, at least you have to be really honest about the living conditions
of illegal immigrants, about basically mistreatment of them. - Yes, it's true, I mean, you know, if you support mass illegal migration, you're basically
supporting tens of millions who are living lives as
second class citizens. That's not fair to them. I also think it's deeply paternalistic. So there's this idea that
America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency whatsoever and they can never turn things around. What does that say about
our confidence in them? You know, one of the things
they always say there, oh, they're law abiding, they're
great people and all that. I agree, okay? By and large, I'm not
saying these are bad people, but I am saying like if they're not bad and they're law abiding and
they're citizens and thoughtful and all that, they can
fix their own countries. And they did in El Salvador. That's the perfect example. Look at the dramatic
drop in their crime rate. Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in all of South America that is proof positive that
you can change things around despite perhaps the legacy
of U.S. intervention. So you know, to just say
this idea that, you know, because it's America's fault
that they're screwed up, it takes agency away from them. You know, another really
key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield
and the whole Haitian thing because everybody, you know, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge 'cause when they're like the
Haitians are here legally, they need to actually
think about the program. The program is called TPS. So let me explain that. TPS is called temporary protected status, note, what's the first word in that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed under a regime in which, let's say that there was a catastrophic, I think this is a real example. I think there was like a volcano or an earthquake or something where people were granted TPS to come to the United States. And the idea was they were
gonna go back after it was safe. They just never went back. There are children born
in the United States today who are literally the descent, who are adults, who are
the descendants of people who are still living
in the U.S. under TPS. That's a perfect example of
what Vivek says is dishonest. You know, you can't mass
defacto legalize people by saying that they're here temporarily because of a program or because
of something that happened in their home country when
the reality is is that in, for all intents and purposes, we are acknowledging them
as full legal migrants. So you know, even the term migrant to these Haitians in
Springfield makes no sense 'cause they're supposed to be
here under TPS, that's not, migrant implies permanency. So the language is all dishonest. And people don't wanna
tell you about the things I just said about chain migration. You know, the vast majority
of Americans don't even know the immigration system works. They don't understand what
I just said about TPS. They don't really understand
the insanity of asylum law where you can just literally
throw up your hands and say, "I fear for my life." And you get to live here
for four, five years before your court date even happens. And you know, by that time,
get a work permit or whatever, you can, you know, get housing like you just
said in substandard conditions and you can kind of just
play the game and wait before a deportation order comes. And even if it does,
you never have to leave because there's no ICE agent or whatever who's gonna enforce it. So the whole system is nuts right now, and we need complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground. - That said sort of the image and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems
deeply un-American, right? - Well, I mean look, it
gets, okay, so, you know, I'm not gonna defend it, but I'll just put it this way. Nobody-
- Do you hate children? - Yeah. See, this is what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see a drug
addict who's put in prison and their child is put
in protective services? Nobody in America thinks
twice about that, right? - Yeah.
- So I mean, well, that's kind of screwed up. Well, what we should think about, why did we come to that conclusion? The conclusion was is that these adults willingly broke the law and pursued a path of life
which put them on a, you know, which put them on a trajectory where the state had to
come in and determine that you are not allowed
to be a parent basically to this child while you
serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances
in U.S. immigration law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was 'cause there was no
way to prosecute people for illegal entry
without child separation. Because previous doctrine, I believe it's called the
Flores Doctrine under, it's some asylum law, people will have to go
check my work on this. But basically, the whole reason this evolved is illegal regime was because people figured out that if you bring a kid with you because of the so-called
Flores Doctrine or whatever, that you couldn't be
prosecuted for illegal entry. So it was a defacto way
of breaking the law. And in fact, a lot of people
were bringing children here who weren't even theirs, who weren't, they weren't even related
to or couldn't even, you know, prove it. We're bringing them to get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So I'm not defending child separation, I think it was horrible or whatever. But you know, if I gave you the context, it does seem like a very tricky problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not, how are we able to do that. And the solution, honestly, is it's just what Donald
Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete
rewrite of the way that we have U.S. asylum law applied
and of asylum adjudication and really just about
enforcing our actual laws. So when I try to explain to people is the immigration
system right now is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest,
such a great word, deeply dishonest system in
which you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the easiest things to do to accomplish immigration
to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had to apply. It wasn't easy. Do you know in India
there's a temple called the Visa Temple where you
walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number. And if you do it when
you're applying for a visa to the United States, all right, it costs a lot of money and it's hard. People get rejected all the time. There's billions of
people across the world who would love to be able to come here. And many of them want to do so legally, and they should have to
go through a process. The current way it works is it's easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that's fundamentally right. It's also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally. - Can you steer me on the
case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments? - The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society. That these people, many
of whom, millions of here, have been here for many
years, who have children, natural-born citizens because
of birthright citizenship. It would require something that's fundamentally inhumane
in an American, as you said, the idea of separating families, you know, across different borders simply because of what is quote unquote like "small decision" of
coming here illegally. And the best case beyond
any of this moral stuff for no mass deportation
is, it's good for business. Illegal immigration is
great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the lowest
prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation
is a terrible idea. - But first of all, very convincing. And second of all-
- Yeah. - I mean you can't just
do mass deportation without also fixing
the immigration system, right?
- Yes, exactly. And I mean there are, there's several pieces
of legislation, H.R.2, that's something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It's a border bill. I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the U.S. immigration system. I'm curious whether it'll
actually pass or not. Remember, there's a very slim majority of the House of
Representatives for Republicans this time around. And people vote for a lot of things when they're not in power, but when it's actually about
to become the law, we'll see. There's a lot of swing
state people out there who may think twice
before casting that vote. So I'm definitely curious to
see how that one plays out. The other thing is, is
that, like I just said, the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they're gonna
take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for
everything that they have to keep their pool of cheap labor because it's great for them. You know, I think JD said a story, I think he was on Rogan
about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was just, he was like,
"Yeah, it's just terrible. You know, it's like they would take away our whole workforce." And he was like, "Do you hear yourself? In terms of what you're talking, you're bragging about," but that's real. That's a real thing. And that, you know, Tyson's Foods and all these other people like, you know, that's another really sad part is, what I mean by second class
citizenship is this presumption first of all that Americans
think it's too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for the right wage first of all. But second is, you know, the conditions in a lot of
those facilities are horrible and they're covered up for a reason. Not only in terms of the way
that businesses, you know, like do they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their
illegal immigrant workforce. So honestly, I think it could make things
better for everything. - You have studied how government works. What are the chances of
mass deportation happens? - Well, it depends how you define it. So I mean, mass deportation
could lean one million. I mean, nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million,
it could be 30 million. I've seen estimates of up to
30 million, which is crazy. That's almost 1/11 of the
entire U.S. population. - What number do you think will
feel like mass deportation? One million people? - A million people is a lot. I mean, if you think about-
- That's a lot of people. - It's a lot, I mean, but the crazy part is that's only 1/12 of what Joe Biden led to the country. So it's one of those that
just to give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will happen? It depends on the definition. Will one million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively confident in that. Anything over that, it's
gonna be tough to say. Like I said, probably
the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory E-Verify and to have processes in place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally. And then you'll have mass self-deportation and they will take the
victory lap on that. But actual, like rounding
millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to God knows all across the globe, that's a logistical nightmare. It would also cost a lot of money. And don't forget, Congress
has to pay for all of this. So you know, we can have DOGE or we can have, you
know, mass deportation. So those two things are kind
of irreconcilable actually. There's a lot of competing
influences at play that people are not
being real about at all. - Yeah, that was one of the
tensions I had talking to Vivek, is he's big on mass deportation and big on making
government more efficient. And it really feels like there's a tension between those two in the short-term. - Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I've been wanting to talk about this. I'm sympathetic to DOGE, to the whole Department
of Government Efficiency. - How unreal is it that it's called DOGE. - Actually with Elon, it's quite real. I guess I've just, you
know, I've accepted Elon as a major political figure in the U.S., but the DOGE Committee, the Department of Government
Efficiency is a non-statutory agency that has zero funding that Donald Trump says will advise OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. Now, two things. Number one is, as I predicted, DOGE would become a quote
unquote "Blue Ribbon Commission." So this is a non-statutory
Blue Ribbon Commission that has been given
authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk. Secondary, their recommendations to government should be
complete by July of 2026, according to the press
release released by Trump. First of all, what that will mean is
they're probably gonna need private funding to even set all this up. That's great, not a problem for Elon, but you're basically gonna
be able to have to commission GAO Reports, Government
Accountability Office and other reports and
fact finding missions across the government, which is fantastic. Trump can even empower you to go through to every agency
and to collect figures. None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives
care what you have to say, historically, they don't give a shit what the executive office has to say. So every year, the president
releases his own budget. It used to mean something, but in the last decade or so, it's become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means Committee and the People's House
are the ones who originate all appropriations and set up spending. So that's one is that DOGE in
and of itself has no power, it has no ability to compel or force people to do anything. Its entire case for being, really, if you think
about it mechanically, is to try and convince
and provide a report to Republican legislators
to be able to cut spending. So that's that. Now we all know how Congress
takes to government reports and whether they get acted on or not. So that's number one. Number two is the figures that
Elon is throwing out there. I, again, I wanna give them some advice because people do not understand federal government spending. The absolute vast majority of government spending
is entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and the most politically
popular programs in the world. And military spending,
discretionary, non-military spending, I don't have the exact
figure in front of me, is a very, very small part
of the federal budget. Now, within that small slice, about 90% of that eight is bipartisan and is supported by like everybody. NOAA the, you know, the hurricane guys, like people like that. You know, people who are flying into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government
inspectors of X, Y, and Z. The parts that are controversial that you're actually able to touch, things like welfare programs, like food stamps is an
extraordinary small slice. So there, what's the
number he put out there? 5 trillion, something like that. There is only one way to do that. And realistically,
under the current thing, you have to radically
change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I support that, but I just
wanna be very, very clear, but I haven't seen enough
energy around that. There's this real belief in the U.S. that we spend billions
on all of these programs that are doing complete bullshit. But like the truth, the
absolute vast majority of it is military
spending and entitlements. Trump has made clear
entitlements are off the table, it's not gonna happen. So the way that you're
gonna be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade long period
is to really change the way that the United States procures, you know, procures military equipment,
hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have
the background to be able to accomplish this because he
has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that
Boeing has been pulling for over a decade. But I really want everybody's expectations to be very set around this. Just remember non-statutory, Blue Ribbon. So if he's serious about it, I just laid out all of these hurdles that he's gonna have to overcome. And I'm not saying him and
Vivek aren't serious dudes, but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this. - So you just laid out the
reality of how Washington works. To give the counterpoint that I think you're probably
also rooting for is that one as a statement like Peter Thiel said, don't bet against Elon.
- True. - One of the things that
you don't usually have with Blue Ribbon is the kind
of megaphone that Elon has. - True.
- And I would even set the
financial aspects aside, just the influence he
has with the megaphone, but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can have real power when backed by sort of
a populous movement. - I don't disagree with you, but let me give you a case
where this just failed. So Elon endorsed who for
Senate Majority Leader? Rick Scott, right? Who got the least amount
of votes in the U.S. Senate for GOP leader? Rick Scott. John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I'm bringing that up, one of my favorite books,
"Master of the Senate" by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series, the Senate has an institution,
it reveres independence, it reveres, I mean, the
entire theory of the Senate is to cool down the mob that is in the House of
Representatives and to deliberate. That's its entire body. They are set up to be
immune from public pressure. Now, I'm not saying
they can't be pressured, but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of. He literally endorsed somebody for leader. So did Tucker Carlson. So did a lot of people online and only 13 senators voted for Rick Scott. The truth is, is that they don't care. Like they're set up where they're marginally popular
in their own home states, they'll be able to win their primaries and that's all they really
need to do to get elected. And they have six year terms,
not even up for four years. So will Elon still be interested in politics six years from now? That's a legitimate question
for a Republican senator. So maybe he could get the
House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his things. But there's no guarantee that the Senate is going
to agree with any of that. There's a story that Caro's tells in the "Master of the
Senate" book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the writing of the Constitution. And he asked Washington, he said, "Why did you put in a senate,
a bicameral legislature?" And Washington said, "Why did you pour your tea into a saucer?" And Jefferson goes, "To cool it." And Washington says, "Just so." That's how to explain it. He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man. - Okay, so you actually
outlined the most likely thing that's going to happen with DOGE as it hits the wall of Washington. What is the sort of the
most successful thing that can be pulled off? - The most successful
thing they could do is, right now I think they're really obsessed with designing cuts, right? And identifying cuts. I would redesign systems,
systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that
we have processes in place to dispense taxpayer dollars. Because the truth is, is that
appropriations itself, again, are set by the United States Congress. But the way that those
appropriations are spent by the government, the executive has some
discretionary authority. So your ability as the
executive to be a good steward of the taxpayer money
and to redesign a system which I actually think
Elon could be good at this and Vivek too, in terms of
their entrepreneurial spirit, is the entire Pentagon procurement thing, it needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it's bad for the Pentagon. It does, it gives them
substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapon
systems and programs and thinking that can be
easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect example is
all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare
costs almost nothing. And yet drone swarms and
hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to U.S. systems, which cost hundreds of billion, of more than hundreds
of billions of dollars. So my point is that
giving nimble procurement and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you actually could save the
most amount of money in the long run. That's where I would really focus in on. The other one is, you know, counter to
everything I just said is maybe they would listen. You know, maybe the Republicans are like, "yeah, okay, let's do it." The problem again though
is swing state people who need to get reelected,
they need to do one thing, they need to deliver for their district. They need to run on stuff. And nobody has ever run on
cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing
money to your state. And that's why earmarks and a lot of these other things
are extraordinarily popular in Congress is because
it's such an easy way to show constituents how
you're working for them whenever it does come reelection time. So it's a very difficult system and I also wanna tell people
who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is
designed to work this way. And for two centuries the
Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every popular change. And because of that, it's
designed to make sure that it's so popular for long enough that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That's really, really frustrating. But you should take comfort in that it's always been that way. So it's been okay. - Well, as I've learned from one of the recommendations
of "The Age of Acrimony," is I feel embarrassed that I didn't know that senators used to not be elected. - What a crazy system, huh? - Yeah, I mean many of the
things we take for granted now as defining our democracy
was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War. - Right.
- In the sort of 50 years after the Civil War. - Absolutely correct. - "Age of Acrimony." Oh
my god, I love that book. I cannot recommend it
enough, it is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is
that we study periods where greatness happened, but we don't often study
periods where nothing happened or where really bad shit happened. - Yeah.
- You know, we don't spend nearly enough. Americans know about FDR, they don't really know
anything about the depression or how we got there. What was it like to be
alive in the United States in 1840, right? Nobody thinks about that really, 'cause it's kind of an
in-between time in history. There are people who
lived their entire lives, who were born, who had to
live through those times, who were just as
conscientious and intelligent as you and I are, and we're
just trying to figure shit out and things felt really big. So "The Age of Acrimony" is a time where it's almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded Age aspect. But like you just said, it was a time where progressive
reform of government and of the tension between civil rights, extraordinary wealth and democracy and really the reigning
in of big business, so many of our foundations
happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that book because one of the things I
learned from the book is that voter participation is highest when people are pissed off, not when they're happy.
- Yeah. - And that's such a
counterintuitive thing. But voter participation goes down when the system is working. So 2020, right. I think we can all agree
it was very tense election. That's also why it had the
highest voter participation ever. 2024, very high rates of
participation, same thing. People are pissed off and that's actually what
drives them to the vote. But something that I take
comfort in that is that people being pissed off and
people going out to vote, it actually does have
major impact on the system because otherwise, the
status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so, yeah, like you just said, I mean, direct election
of senators wasn't, I mean, there are probably
people alive today who are like, who were born when there was
no direct election of senators. Which is an insane thing to think about. I mean, it'd be almost a hundred or so. But the point is, is that at that time it was so deeply corrupt and it was one where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading
into the Gilded Age were able to enforce their will upon the people, but you can take comfort in that, that was one of those areas where Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the constitution and actually forced the
aristocrats in power to give their own power. - Yeah.
- It's like our version of when they flipped power and took away the legislative power of the House of Lords in the UK. I just think that's amazing. And it's such a cool thing about
our country and the UK too. - It's the continued battle between the people and the elite. Right, and we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of
candidates for a party. - Yes.
- That was also invented. It used to be that the quote
unquote "party bosses," I say that with a half a
chuckle, chose the candidate. - Yeah, the whole system is nuts. The way that we currently
experience politics is such a modern invention. - With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but you know.
- Right. Yeah, good point. - But, well, that was actually more of a mean reversion, right?
- Yeah. - We're living in an
extraordinarily new era where we actually have
more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be, this is crazy. So the conventions have always taken place two months before, right? Imagine a world where you did not know who the pre-nominee was gonna
be before that convention. And the nominee literally was
decided at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American politics where presidents did
not directly campaign. They in fact did not even
comment about the news or mention their opponent's names. They would give speeches
from their doorstep, but it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics. - You would not get a Bernie Sanders. - No, no.
- You would not get a Donald Trump, - Obama, Bill Clinton, I mean, basically every president from John F. Kennedy
onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior to
that has been much more of the older system. There was a in-between period post FDR where things were really changing. But the primary system
itself had its first true big win under John F. Kennedy. - I think that the lesson from that is there's a collective wisdom
to the people, right? - I think so. - I think it works. - Yeah. I mean, well,
okay, I'll steel man it. We had some great presidents
in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of coalitional
politics of his ability. In fact, what really made
him a genius was his ability to get this overthrow the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite democrats to take part, to take control in
there at the convention. And then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of power. Where he had the elites
basically under his boot 'cause he was the king and
he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce things up and down. I mean, you know, even
in the party boss era, we would have no, a lot of the people we revere
really came out of that, people like Abraham Lincoln. I mean, I don't think Abraham
Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There's no chance he won. He won, luck, thank God, from an insane process in the
1860 Republican Convention. People should go read about
that because that was wild. I think we were this close
to not having Lincoln as president and yeah, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt. There's so many that I could point to who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way
to still produce good stuff. - That was a kind of beautiful diversion from the DOGE discussion. If you're gonna return briefly to DOGE.
- Sure. - So we kind of talked about cost cutting, but there's also increasing
the efficiency of government. - Yes.
- Which you also kind of talked about procurement.
- Yeah- - So, and maybe we can throw into the pile the 400 plus federal agencies. So let's take another perspective on what success might look like. So like radically successful DOGE, would it basically cut a
lot of federal agencies? - Probably combine. - Combine?
- Okay, so I can give great examples of this
'cause I have great insight. Like for each agency, we'll often use different
like payroll systems. They'll have different
internal processes, right? That makes no sense. And it's all because it's antiquated. Now, everybody always
talks about changing it, but there are a lot of
like party interests about why certain people
get certain things. The real problem with government, the people like us who are
private and like for example, when you wanna do something,
you can just do it. So I was listening to a
really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the story was that
the military was assigned, National Guard guys were
assigned to like help with the border and they
were trying to provide, I think it was translation services to people at border patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, "Hey, this has got to stop, according to U.S. code X, Y, and Z, the United States Military
cannot help with law enforcement, you know, abilities here." And so even though that
makes absolutely no sense, because there all work, there
are literal legal statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason we have to
have a ton of Spanish speakers in SOUTHCOM, you know, in the U.S. Command that is responsible for South America, who literally cannot help
with a crisis at the border. Now maybe you can find
some legal chicanery to make that work, but man, you got to have an attorney general who knows what he's doing, you need a White House counsel, you need to make sure that shit
stands up in a court of law. I mean, it's not so simple. Whereas let's say, you know,
you have a software right here and you wanna get a new
software, you can just do it. You can hire whoever you want. When you're the government,
there's a whole process you got to go through about bidding and it just takes forever
and it is so inefficient. But unfortunately, the
inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes. And that is something that, yeah, again, actually, you know, radically successful
"DOGE," quote unquote, would be study the law and
then change it, you know, like, figure, instead of cost cutting, like cut this program or whatever, like I just said about why do
different systems use payroll? Just say that you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let's say after 90 days. You know, I've heard
stories of people who work for the government who still
have like IBM mainframe, that they're still, in 2024,
that they're still working 'cause those systems
have never been updated. There's also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff. That's where a lot of inefficiency happens because a lot of contractors
can only work based upon previous clearance that they already got. Achieving a clearance is very expensive. It's very lengthy process. I'm not saying it shouldn't be, talking about security clearance, but it does naturally, you know, create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts from. And I even mean stuff like, like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right? So clearance, so there's only
like five people who are, or can even apply for that contract. Well, naturally, in an
interim monopoly like that, he's gonna jack his price up because he literally has
a moat around his product. Whereas if you or I are
hiring a gen, whatever, anybody for anything, that type of credentialism
and legal regime, it doesn't matter at all. So there are million problems like this that people in government run into, and that is what I would
say as the most successful. - You know, paperwork
slows everything down and it feels impossible
to break through that in a sort of incremental way. - It's so hard.
- It feels like the only way to do it is literally shut down agencies in
some kind of radical way and then build up from scratch. Of course, as you highlight,
that's going to be opposed by a lot of people within government. - Yeah, well, historically
there's only one way to do it and it's a really bad answer, war, war, that's the-
- Yeah. So I was gonna say, basically, you have the
kind of consensus where, okay, all this stupid
bureaucratic bullshit we've been doing, we need to like put that shit aside. Get the fuck out of here,
we need to win a war. So like all the paperwork.
- That's it, yeah.
- You know, all the lawyers go leave, please. - Yeah, exactly. No, but I want people to
really understand that, you know, up until 1865 or
1860, I forget the exact year, we didn't even have national currency. And then we were like,
well, we need a greenback. And prior to that, people would freak out if we were talking about
having national currency greenback backed by the, you know, the U.S. government and all that. Not even a question
passed in like two weeks in the U.S. Congress. An income tax eventually went away, but not even in the realm of possibility and they decide to pass it. Same thing after World War I and you think about how World War II, I mean, World War II just
fundamentally changed the entire way the United
States government works. Even the DHS, which I mentioned earlier, the Department of Homeland Security, it didn't even exist prior to 9/11. It was done as response
to 9/11 to coalesce all of those agencies under
one branch to make sure that nothing like that
could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shit show disaster
war is the only thing that moves and throws the
paperwork off the table. And I wish I wasn't such
a downer, but I've just, I've both, I've read too much and I've had enough
experience now in Washington to just see how these dreams
get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn't that way. I mean, it's a cool idea and I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics to think that they can do something, but I want them to be realistic too. And I want them to know
what they're signing up for whenever they do something like that. And the titanic amount of
work it's going to take for you to be able to
accomplish something. - Yeah, but I've also
heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing
when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter. Here's this guy, Elon Musk, that- - You are absolutely correct.
- Knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course, you need all these servers, of course, you need all these employees. - Right.
- And nevertheless, the service keeps running. - He figured it out and
you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is no, there was no law that he could fire him. You know, there was no, like at the end of the,
he owned the company. You know, he had total discretion
of his ability to move. So I'm not even saying his ideas are bad. I'm saying that the ability that's, what makes him such an incredible
visionary entrepreneur? Its movement, its deference
at times to the right people, but also, the knowledge
of every individual piece of the machine and his ability to come in and to execute his full vision at any time and override any of the managers. So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few
people who's ever built a multi-billion dollar company who has not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution
and against entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who
can do it, Elon, Steve Jobs. But you know, what do we
learn is that unfortunately after Steve died, Apple
basically needs succumb to the managerial revolution and has become like the product, you know, they make all their money
by printing services and making it impossible
to leave this ecosystem as opposed to building the
most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision
Pro, don't get me wrong. - I think you just admitted
that you're part of a cult. - I know, I literally am. - Yeah.
- I am. I'm fully admit it. - Yeah.
- Yeah. I miss Steve. - Grass is greener on the other side. Come join us. Okay. Whether it's Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of
government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that
that would be possible? - Well, I wouldn't put it that way. I don't think slimness in and
of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the
relationship to people at its government. So the biggest problem
that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith
in all of our institutions. And I really encourage people, I don't think people can quite understand what the relationship between America and its government was
like after World War II and after FDR, like 90% of the people
trusted the government. That's crazy. Like when the president said something, they were like, okay, he's not lying. Think about our cynical attitude
towards politicians today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon. And that entire fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam in particular really
broke the American character and its ability and its
relationship with government. And we've never recovered faith in institutions ever since that. And it's really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful, at least this time is
anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election
is they have the ability to reset and to actually
try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope
is that this is different from the first Trump
administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually
carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics,
which got him elected. You know, at this point we can't deny it. McDonald's thing is hilarious,
it's funny, well, it is. People love it. People like the podcasting. People like-
- Garbage truck. - The garbage truck. Yeah, exactly. They like the stunts
and he will always excel and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other
things that he can and should do like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question and also, really figuring out our economy the way that it currently
runs and changing it so that the actual American
dream is more achievable. And housing is one of the chief problems that we have right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean, it's just true. Households under $100,000
voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn't do so
for economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for economic, a lot of them did for
immigration, for cultural, but you still owe them something. And there is a, I would hope that they
could carry something out in that respect that is
not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the first time where everything felt
like it exploded any time with staffing, with even his
policy or what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does
come back to personnel. So I'm concerned in some respects, I'm like, you know, not
thrilled in some respects I'm happy in some respects, but it remains to be seen
how he's gonna do it. - To the degree it's
possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology. What do you think are the
central pillars of it? - MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That's what I would say. Cultural elitism though has
many different categories. Immigration is one, right, is that cultural elitism and cultural liberalism
has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of
itself is a natural good at any and all levels. That all immigrants are
like replacement level, that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign
policy context comes back to a lot of that human
rights democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier, which divorces American values from American interests and says that actually American values
are American interests. Cultural elitism and
liberalism leads to the worship of the postal rights era of bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of DEI of quote unquote "woke" and of progressive social ideology. So I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA is. It is a screw you. I once drove past, it was in rural Nevada, and I was driving and I drove past the biggest sign I've ever seen, political sign to this day. And it's just, it was in 2020 and just said, "Trump,
fuck your feelings." And I still believe that is the most coherent
MAGA thing I've ever seen. Because everyone's always like, how can a neocon and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist
under the same umbrella? And I'm like, it's very simple. All of them have rejected
the cultural elite in their own way certainly, but they've arrived at the same place. It's an umbrella and it's an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to
do with the status quo and with the, you know, currently established cultural elite, that doesn't mean they're not elite and they're not rich in their own regards, that doesn't mean they don't disagree, but that's the one thing
that unites the entire party. And so that's the way I would put it. - Anti-cultural elite. Is that synonymous with
anti-establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions. Is elitism connected to institutions? - Yes, absolutely. Because elites are the ones
who runs our institutions. That said anti-establishment
is really not the right word because there are a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment, right? They are against that, but they're not anti-cultural leftism. And that's the key
distinction between MAGA and like left populism. Left populism basically does agree. They agree with like basic conceits, like racism is one of the
biggest problem facing America. They're like, one of the ways that we would fix that
is through class-oriented economic programs in
order to address that. But we believe in, I don't know, like reparations as a concept. It's just more about how we arrive there. Whereas in MAGA we would say no, we actually don't think that at all. We think we've evolved past that and we think that the
best way to fix it is, actually similar policy prescription. But the mindset matters a lot. So the real distinction between MAGA and like left populism
really is on culture. Trans in particular, orientation about, actually immigration
may be the biggest one because if you look at the
history of Bernie Sanders, you know, Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years. There are famous interviews
of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who's one of
the hardcore immigration guys, and they agree with each other. And Lou is like, "Bernie's one
of the only guys out there," Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left. And its changing attitudes
on mass immigration. There's some famous clips
from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave where he started, I think he started talking about how the open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian concept, right? Because Bernie is a basically of a European welfare state tradition. European welfare states
are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high
services, low rates of immigration because we have high
taxes and high services, we have a limited pool of people who can experience and
take those services. He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude. Bernie also, I will say,
look, he's a courageous man and a courageous politician. You know, as late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate because he said that that
pro-life candidate was, you know, pro-worker. And he's like, "At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy." He took a ton of shit for it and I don't think he's done it since. So the sad part that's
really happened is that a lot of left populist, you know, agenda, and other has become subsumed, you know, in the hysteria around
cultural leftism wokeism, whatever the hell you wanna call it. And that ultimately that
cultural leftism was the thing that really united, you know,
the two wings of that party. And that's really why MAGA
is very opposed to that. They're really not the same, but the left populist can
still be anti-establishment. That's the key. - It's interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming
consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. So you think that's what happened? - That's what I would say. - What do you think happened
in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible future
where he would've won? You and Krystal wrote a
book on populism in 2020. So from that perspective,
just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time, by the way, that would be
pretty gangster June 2016. Would he have, because I think Hillary went
towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly? - It was a very weird time. So yes and no, it wasn't full on BLM
mania like it was in 2020, but the signs were all there. So the Great Awokening was in 2014. I know it's a ridiculous term. I'm sorry.
- I love it. Please keep saying it.
- But- - There's a ring to it.
- Well, just to give the origin, the Great Awakening is about the great religious revival
in the United States. So people had, you know,
because wokeism is a religion, you know, that's a common refrain. They were like, the Great
Awokening is a really good term so. - Thank you for explaining the joke. Yep.
- Yeah. So the Great Awokening is
basically when racial attitudes amongst college educated whites basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of
reasons why this happened. I really believe that
Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations in the
Atlantic is one of those, it radicalized an entire generation of basically like white
college educated women to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson, and then it also happened immediately after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover of 2020. But fundamentally what
they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst
college educated elites to really think in a race first construct. And worse is that they
were rejected in 2016 at the ballot box by the
election of Donald Trump. And in response, they ramped it up because they believed that
that was the framework to view the world. That people voted for
Trump because he was racist and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did. And so the point around this on question of whether Bernie could have
won in 2016, I don't know, Krystal seems to think so, I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is
honestly one of them. One of Trump's core issues
in 2016 was immigration. And Bernie and him did
not agree on immigration. And if immigration, you know,
even if people did, you know, support Bernie Sanders and his vision for working class people like the debates and the understanding about
what it would look like, like a healthcare system
which literally would pay for illegal immigrants, I think he would've gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong, I honestly, I will never know, you
know what that looked like. - Let me reference you from earlier in the conversation with FDR. It's not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment and more populist as
opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC. - Yeah, I mean, that's
a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I have a lot of love
for the Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from
2016 called "America." You should watch it, it's a great ad. That's another very interesting thing. It's unapologetically patriotic and that is not something that you see in a lot of left-wing circles these days. So he understood politics at a base level that a lot of people did not. But you know, Bernie himself, and then a lot of the Bernie
movement was basically crushed by the elite Democratic Party
for a variety of reasons. They hated them. You know, they basically, they attacked Joe Rogan
for even having him on and for giving him a
platform that was ridiculous. Obviously, it backfired their
face, which is really funny. There is, but there were
a lot of million examples like that, you know,
when they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro-life politician, he never did it again. They attacked Bernie for run, for having Bernie bros, you know, people online, the
bros who were Super Bro Bernie. And it was his fault. His supporters would say nasty
things about Elizabeth Warren and he would like defend straight himself and be like, "Yes, I'm sorry,
you know, please my bro." He was like, "stop that." - I think that his biggest
problem is he never went full Trump, like he didn't go, like he kept saying sorry. - Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. It, actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis
on this at the time. He would always do stuff
like, "Joe Biden, my friend." And it's like, no, he's not your friend. He stands for everything that you disagree with.
- Yeah. - Everything. He'd be like, "Yeah, he's a nice guy, but he's not my friend." But he would always be like,
"Joe and I are great friends, but you know, we have a
small disagreement on this," but you know, like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump
up there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn't trust anymore. That's what people really wanted. But the other side of this
is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than 2016 because by 2020 they full on had TDS and they were basically like, we need to defeat Trump at all costs. We don't give a shit what your name is, Bernie, Biden, whatever, whichever of you is
gonna best defeat Trump, you get the knob. 2016 is different because they didn't full on have that like love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats have. Democrats just care about winning, the current base of the party. All they wanna do is win. Republican base, they don't
give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it's nice to win. But one of those where
they will express their id for what they really want. Now it's worked out for
them because it turns out that's a very palpable political force. But one of the reasons why, you know, you won't see me up here
doing James Carville, "40 More Years," is there is a law of something called thermostatic public opinion, where, you know, the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually, so when you have a left-wing
president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing
president in power, the country goes left. Amazing, right? You can actually look at a graph of economic attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became
president after Donald Trump. So Republicans, Trump was president of the last year in
office, economy's great, two months later, the economy is horrible. That is a perfect example
of thermostatic opinion. And I'm not counting these Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush
wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate
to continue in Iraq by '06, he's toasted. We have a massive midterm election, and by '08, we're writing
books about 40 more years and how there's never gonna be Republican in office ever again. So things can change a lot in
a very short period of time. - I think also for me
personally, maybe I'm deluded, sort of the great man view of history. I think some of it, it's
in programming circles, the term skills issue. I think some of it just
has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are, how
good you are as a politician. I, maybe, you disagree with this. I'd love to see what you think. I think if Obama, if you were
allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep winning. He would win 2016, he would win 2020, he would win this year, 2024. - It's possible, but
I would flip it on you and I would say Obama
would never be elected if there were no term limits because Bill Clinton would've
still been president. - Right.
- Yeah. - So, well those two, right?
- Yeah. Yeah. - Those two examples of exactly, they, extremely skilled politicians and somehow can appear like populists. - Man, Bill Clinton was
a force in his time. And it's honestly sad
what's happened to him. I was actually just talking
with a friend the other day. I'm like, I kind of don't think that presidents should become
president when they're young because they live to see
themselves become irrelevant. And that must be really painful. - Yeah.
- Because I know what it takes to get there. Imagine being Clinton, I mean, your entire legacy was destroyed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. And then imagine being Obama, who in 2016, you could argue it's a one-off and say that Trump is just, oh,
Hillary was a bad candidate, but Michelle and Barack Obama
went so hard for Kamala Harris and they just got blown
out in the popular vote. I mean, the Obama era officially ended with Donald Trump's reelection
to the presidency in 2024. And that was a 20-year period where Obama was one of the
most popular central figures in American politics. But I wanna return to what you're saying because it is important, and by the way, I do not support term limits
on American presidents. - Are you a fascist? - Well, that would imply, that would imply that I
don't believe in democracy. I actually do believe in democracy because I think the people,
if they love their president, should be able to reelect him. I think FDR was amazing. I think that the term limit change was a, basically what happened is, is that Republicans and
a lot of elite Democrats always wanted to speak
against FDR, but he was a God. So they couldn't, so they
waited until he died, and then after he died,
they were like, yeah, this whole third, fourth term,
that can never happen again. And America didn't really
think that hard about it, but they were like, yeah, okay, whatever. But I mean, it had immense consequences for American history. Clinton is the perfect example. I mean, just- Bill Clinton left office, even despite the Lewinsky bullshit, he had a 60% approval rating. Okay, no way George W. Bush
gets elected, impossible. Clinton would've blown his ass out. And imagine the consequences of that. We would've no Iraq. I mean, I'm not saying he was a great man, like we probably still would've
had the financial crisis and there's still a lot of bad
stuff that would've happened. But he was a popular dude. And you know, I wouldn't say he had the
best judgment at times, presidentially, not personally,
definitely not personally, but you know, presidentially. But I'm pretty confident
we would've not gone into the Iraq war. And so that's where it really cost us. If you're left-wing and you're
talking about Obama, yeah, I think Obama probably
would've won in 2016, although it's a counterfactual. Because Obama was never
challenged in the same way that MAGA was able to, to the liberal consensus. Like Romney really ran this
like awful campaign, honestly, about cutting spending. It was very traditional Republican. It was deeply unpopular. The autopsy of that election was, we actually need to be
more pro-immigration. That literally was the autopsy. But Trump understood the assignment. There are two people
who I so deeply respect for their political bets,
Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. So one of the books that
I recommended called "The Unwinding" by George Packer, he actually talks about Peter Thiel there, this is in 2013. And Thiel talks about, he was like, "You know, whoever runs for office next, they don't need to run
on an optimistic message. They need to run on a message that everything is fucked
up and that we need to fix." And if you think about,
that's why Thiel's endorsement of Trump with the American
carnage message is, I mean it took, it was
shocking, right, at the time. But he had that fundamental insight that that's what the
American people wanted. Trump too comes out of an election in 2012 where the literal GOP autopsy, the report produced by the party says, we need to be pro mass immigration. What happens? Immediately after 2012, they
start to go for mass immigrant, basically they go for
like these amnesty plans, the so-called Gang of
Eight plan, Marco Rubio, and all of this in 2013, it falls apart, but Republicans get punished
by their base in 2014. So Eric Cantor, who was
the House majority leader, the number two Republican, spent more on stake in his campaign than his primary opponent who
successfully defeated him, a guy named Dave Brat. Dave Brat kicked his ass
on the issue of immigration and said that Eric Cantor, is pro-amnesty. All of the forces were there. And then in 2015, Trump
comes down the escalator and he gives the message on immigration that the GOP base has been
roaring and wanting to hear now, but that nobody wanted to listen to them. And that was his fundamental insight. That bet was a colossal and a Titanic political bet at a time when all political ideology and thought process would've said that you should come
out on the other side, which is where Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and all these other guys
were effectively there, you know, in varying different ways like they were hawkish or whatever. But Trump was just so, had such a monopoly on that as an idea. That's why he wins in 2016 primary. And then paired with immigration, a hard line position on immigration, is this American carnage idea that actually everything is wrong. The American dream has gone. You know, we will stop
this American carnage. And I think American carnage is one of the most important
inaugural speeches ever given in American history. Put it up against every
single other speech. There's nothing else like it. But that was what the
country wanted at the time. And that's what great
politicians are able to do, is they're able to suss something out. That's also why Peter Thiel is who he is, because he saw that in 2000. Imagine, you know, what
it takes to come out of the 2012 election to be, and to be honestly totally contrarian to the entire national mood and this entire theory of
Obama-esque star politics and say, no, you need somebody who runs on the opposite of that to win. - Well, we'll never know. And I love this kind of Mike
Tyson versus Muhammad Ali. I still think I would've loved
to see Obama versus Trump. - Me too. I agree. - And first of all, Obama
versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down. - Well, yes, definitely. - So this is, I love how
this is a boxing talk. - Yeah.
- Now when 2016, Obama has a bunch of, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan. - He's vulnerable though,
I'll tell you why. DACA, that's what nobody ever talks about in the Obama Trump thing. Don't forget Obama takes his 2012 victory. Basically says, "Oh,
the GOP even now agrees with me on immigration." And then he does DACA and he legalizes, you know, X million in a number of illegal immigrants who are here, who are brought here as children. That also fundamentally changed the immigration consensus
on the Republican side, 'cause they were like, "Wait, holy shit, you can just do that? because we don't agree with that at all." And that really ignited the base as well. So I'm not sure, I mean, a
moment I think about a lot with Trump and just like
being able to unleash the rage of the Republican bases,
in the 2012 debate, Candy Crowley was the
moderator with Mitt Romney And she fact-check him famously. This was when fact checking
was shocking in a present. And she said something about Benghazi and she was like, "No, he did say that," she like corrected
Romney on behalf of Obama to this day it's questionable
whether she was even right. But, and Romney was just
like, "Oh, he did? Okay." Trump would've been like,
"Excuse me, excuse me." Be like, "Look at this woman." And you know, he would've gone off. And I was like, and I
think about that moment because that's what the
Republican base wanted to hear. But also, it turns out America had a lot of festering feelings
about the mainstream media that it needed unleashed. And Trump was just this incredible vector to just blow up this system. Which, I mean, if you
ask me about optimism, that's the thing I'm most optimism about.
- Yeah. Don't you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on? How to be anti-establishment correctly? - I will not deny that he's one of the most
talented politicians, literally, to ever play the game. And he is, I mean, just
unbelievable rhetorical talent. Look, as a counterfactual, would he be in more talented than Hillary? Yeah. Okay. No question. In terms of anybody
would've been for that one. But at the same time,
all the signs were there. All the signs for the Trump victory and for the backlash against Obama-ism kind of as a political project. It all existed. You know, the tea, if you like, I just laid
the tea leaves out there from 2012 to 2015, in retrospect, it's the most
predictable thing in the world that Donald Trump will get elected. But it was crazy in the moment, I got to live through that, which was really fun, like professionally. - I think it's unfortunate that he kind of let Kamala Harris borrow his reputation. - Oh it's, I mean it's
like, you know better, dude. You know. You defeated these people. - Yeah.
- The Clinton machine, you destroyed them and it was awesome in '08. - What is that? Why do you, why did he, like, he's so much bigger
and better than the machine. - I don't get it.
- It's interesting, right? - Yeah. It's so weird though. I just think-
- I think this was a wake up call, 2024 was a wake up call. Like the DNC machine doesn't work. - Absolutely, I mean-
- There needs to be new blood, new candidate,
new Obama-like candidates. - Well, I'm glad you brought that up. 'Cause that's important too,
in terms of the process, and the way that things currently stand. The DNC actually rigged
its entire primary system under Biden way to the, not to the benefit of Obama. So for example, you
know how they moved away from the Iowa caucuses and they actually moved
some other primaries and moved the calendar to
reward traditional states that vote much more in line with the Democratic establishment. So the story of Barack
Obama is one that not many, actually, probably a lot
of young people today don't even remember how it happened. In 2008, Obama was the underdog, right? And actually, here's the critical thing, Obama was losing with Black people. Why? Black Democrats simply did not believe that white people would
vote for a Black guy. So Barack Obama goes to
this white state, Iowa, all in on the Iowa caucuses and shocks the world by
winning the Iowa caucuses. Overnight, there is a
shift in public opinion amongst the Black population
in South Carolina that says, "Oh, shit, he actually could win." And he comes out and
he wins South Carolina. And that's basically
was near the death now for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The problem is by moving South Carolina up and by making it first along with other more
pro-establishment friendly places, what do we do? We make it so that Barack
Obama could never happen again. We make it so that an older, you know, base of Democratic Party voters who listens to the elites can never have their
assumptions challenged. And that's one of the
worst things Joe Biden did. You know, I talked about his arrogance. He was so arrogant, he changed the freaking primary system. He was so arrogant, he
refused to do a debate. I mean, imagine history. How lucky are we, honestly, that Joe Biden agreed to do that debate with Donald Trump early. And again, that was his arrogance. I think we're so lucky for it because if we hadn't gotten, we got to understand as a
country how cooked he was and how fake everything was behind the scenes in
front of all of our eyes. And they tried for three straight years to make sure that that would never happen. So, I mean, it's still
such a crime, honestly, against the American people. - I've been thinking about
who I want to talk to for three hours and that's
why I bring up Obama 'cause he's probably the
number one person on the left. I would like to hear, analyze
what happened in this election and what happened to the
United States of America over the past 20 plus years. I can't imagine anybody else. - Look, if anybody could
do it, it'd be you. But there are layers upon
layers with that man. I would love to actually sit
with talk with him for real. - I think it's fair to say that we talked about the
great man view of history. I think you have a
psychopath view of history where all great leaders
are for sure psychopaths. - Not for sure. There are many who are good
people, Harry Truman was- - You're like some of my best friends.
- Yeah. Some-
- Harry Truman. Harry Truman, okay.
- I assume are good people. To be fair though,
(Lex laughing) most of the good ones are
accidents like Harry Truman. He never would've gotten himself elected. He was a great dude. - How do you know he's a great dude? - David McCullough book, I highly recommended
everybody should read it. Truman loved his wife. I think that's really awesome. I love when politicians love their wife. It's so rare. He adored his wife, he adored his daughter,
spent time with them. He made family life a priority. He had really good small town judgment that he would apply to foreign affairs. He was just a very well
considered, very standup man. And I so appreciate that about him. Another one is John Adams. I love and revere John Adams. He's my favorite Founding Father. Him and John Quincy, they don't get nearly enough of their due. They were some of the most
intelligent, well-considered, they were family men that he, you know, the love, the relationship between John and Abigail Adams
is literally legendary. And I think it's amazing, you know, especially in the context of the 1700s, the way that he would take her counsel and into conversations
and her own ability. And she would sit there and go toe to toe as much with Thomas Jefferson. There are some who are great, who are really, really good presidents, who have good judgment and who are really good people and really think deeply about the world and have really cool personal lives. But there's also the
vast majority of them, especially in the, I would say, especially in the modern era and where the price of
the presidency extracts everything that you have. You have to be able to, you have to be willing to
give everything and it's just, that's not a price that
most people wanna pay. - Is it possible that some of the people who you think are sociopaths
in politics are in fact really good people? And some of the people you
think are good, like Truman- - Yeah,
- And Adams are actually sociopaths? - Definitely, I mean,
I could just be reading the wrong books, right? - Yeah, that's right.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- It sounds like you're- - Yeah.
- You just read some really compelling biographies. - Well, okay, to be fair, I
don't base this on one book. I read a lot of them, and I'll get like a, for example, I've read books about LBJ, you wouldn't know any of his foibles, but then you find out that they're written by his friend or, you
know, it was written by, and you read it through-
- I just, I really worry about this kind of general, especially now the sense of
the anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. Now, while it could, the reason I worry about
that is it feels true. - Yeah.
- So it's, you can fall into this bubble of beliefs where every politician is a sociopath and because of that- - It can be self-reinforcing. - Self-reinforcement.
- Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I agree by the way, we do need
to dramatically change it. But the problem is, is that, you know, people vote with their eyeballs and with their interests and people love like to, you know, dissect people's personal lives. And one of the reasons why
you were probably more likely in the pre-modern era to get
a quote unquote "good people" is they were not subject
to the level of scrutiny and to the insanity of the
process that you are currently. Like I just said about, I mean, theoretically, you
could run for president and you would just get your
nomination at the convention. It's only two months to
election day, that's not so bad. But you know, you run for president today, you got your ass on the road for two years and then two years before that, and then you have to
run the damn government. So the price is so extraordinarily high. I also think that, oh God, and just Washington
as a system, it will burn you. It will just, it will extract absolutely everything that you can give it. And at the end of the day, you know, I mean, everyone always talks
about this, it's hilarious, how Trump is the only
president not to age in office. I think, I actually think it's crazy. Like when you look at the photos of how he actually looks
better today than he did whenever he went into the office. That's amazing. And it actually says a lot
about how his mind works. I think Trump is pure id. Like I think he's having
observed him a little bit and you know, both at the White House and having interviewed him, it's pure, just like it's calculating,
but it's also pure id, which is very interesting. The ones who are the
thinkers, guys like Obama, and others who are really in
their heads, it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. They will, I mean, apparently
Obama would only sleep four hours a night, you know? - Yeah, add like some
empathy on top of that. - Oh.
- It's gonna destroy you. - It will kill you, man. - All right, speaking about
the dirty game of politics, several people, different people told me that of everyone they
have ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that? - In the modern era?
Yeah, I think that's fair. In the last 25 years, definitely. Let's think about it. Number one is longevity. So she's had the ability
to control the caucus for a long period of time. So that's impressive
because as I just laid out with Clinton, Obama, and these
figures come and they go, but over a 25 almost year period, you've been at the very top in the center of American politics. The other case I would be is that in this modern era has been
defined by access to money, she's one of the greatest fundraisers in Democratic Party history. And again, consistently, Obama, Kamala, all those people come and go, but she's always had a
very central understanding of the ability to fundraise,
to cultivate good relationships with Democratic Party elites
all across the country, used that money and dole
it out to her caucus. She's also was really good at
making sure that legislation that came to the floor actually
had the votes to do so. She ran an extremely well-ordered process in the House of Representatives one in which you were able
to reconcile like problems within her office. It didn't usually go public and then it would make it to the floor and it would pass so that
there would be no general like media frenzy and you
know, Democrats in disarray or any of that, put that on display with the Republicans, and we've had multiple speakers all resign or get fired in a 16-year period. That's pretty remarkable. Basically ever since John
Boehner decided to leave in, what was it, 2012? I forget the exact year. My point is that if you compare her record to the longevity on the
Republican side, it is astounding. The other interesting thing is
that she also has pulled off, one of the real tests of political power is can you rule even when you don't
have the title anymore? So she gave up the leader
position to Hakeem Jeffries, but everybody knows she pulled
Joe Biden out of the race. That's pretty interesting, right? So she's a, technically,
just a back bencher, nobody member of Congress, but
we all know that's bullshit. So that's actually a very important case of political power is can
you rule without the title? And if you can, then
you truly are powerful. So I would make a good case for her. Yeah, she's done a lot of
remarkable stuff for her party. I will say they played
Trump like a fiddle man. Last time around, they were able to, I
mean they really got him. One of the craziest
elements that I covered was during the Trump basically threatened to shut down the government
and actually did shut down the government for a period of time over a dispute over border wall funding and Pelosi and Schumer, despite like genuine mass
hysteria in the Democratic Party with even some people
who are willing to try and to strike a deal, never wavered and actually
basically won and forced Trump to back down. Not a lot of MAGA people want to admit it, but that was honestly really embarrassing for the Trump administration at the time. And yeah, I mean the amount
of discipline that it took for her and for Chuck to a lesser extent, but for the two of them to pull that off, it was honestly impressive
that they were able to do that. Even when the president
has so much political power and it literally shut down
the government over it. - Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised $1 billion. - Insane. - But I guess the conclusion
is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it? - I don't think money matters that much. I think Donald Trump
has proven to us twice that you can win an underdog
campaign through earned media. And I don't think that
paid advertisement moves the needle that much. Now don't notice, I didn't
say that it does matter, but am I buying $425,000 a
day spots on the Vegas sphere? No, we're not doing that. Are we building? I can't, okay. As people who do this for a living, how do you even spend $100,000 to build a set for one interview? - Is this the Call Her Daddy?
- The Call Her Daddy thing. - Okay.
- How's that possible? So think about the dollar per hour cost. That's like running a jet airplane in terms of what they did. You become-
- You know what I wanna note behind the scenes? - Yeah.
- Haven't got, and I'm not good with this. I get really frustrated and I shouldn't, but dealing with PR and comms people can sometimes break my soul. - It's maddening. Can we not talk about this and we need to pull them at 2:12 PM, and you're like, but
that's only 30 minutes. You know, it's like. - Yeah, that, but there's stuff like, like where to put the camera? It's not that I don't-
- Oh yeah. - It's not actually hypothetically, I don't even disagree with
any of the suggestions or, but it's like-
- The micromanagement. - Just the micromanagement and your, and the politeness, but
the fake politeness. And it just makes me feel like, I think like what would Kubrick do? Would he murder all of them right now? - He would just ban them after he became Stanley Kubrick. But he dealt with it for a while. By the way, I just went
on a Kubrick binge, man, he was awesome. - Yeah.
- I watched that World War I movie of his, the one from the '50s. That is such an underrated film. I feel like people don't, whatever, we'll get past it. - [Lex] Yeah, yeah, like, but she, dag yeah, I guess she paid for- - A hundred grand, bro. - A hundred and the Oprah thing, she paid for the interviews. - So, you know, that's another one. I do this for a living and as you can tell, I'm
a very cynical person. I did not even know that
celebrities got paid for their endorsements. I could never have imagined a universe where Oprah Winfrey has paid $1 million to endorse Kamala Harris. I'm like, first of all,
you're a billionaire. Second, I thought you do
this 'cause you believe, you know?
- No, I think to be fair, I think the million
just helps do the thing you would like to do. It's like, it's a nudge, 'cause I don't think any
celebrity would endorse, like-
- Yeah, they're not doing it because of the money, but you should just do it for free. I can't even believe that
you're doing this for money. I mean, and the fact, what
was it, Alanis Morissette, you know how they were able, they had to cut her because they didn't have
the funds to pay her. I'm like, first of all, if you believe you should just play for free. But second, again, as a
person who is deeply cynical, I still am genuinely shook that we are paying celebrities
for their endorsements. - Yeah, it's really fucked up.
- That's insane. - Why do you think people on the left who are actually in the
political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour? - That's a great question.
- So let me just say- - Yeah.
- Probably most of the people I've talked to on this
podcast are left-wing or have been for a long time. They just don't sort of out and say it like most
scientists are left-wing. Most sort of vaguely
political people are left-wing that I've talked to. - Yeah.
- But the closer you get to the actual political arena,
and I've tried really hard. They just is the, nope,
I had a bunch of people, the highest profile people say 15 minutes. - Yeah.
- 20 minutes. - Yeah.
- And I say, nope. - I'm used to that, so welcome, yeah. (Saagar laughs)
- Well, I just can't, you know,
like I can't imagine a conversation with
Kamala or with Joe Biden or AOC-
- Obama. - Or Obama that's of any
quality at all of any, the shows, any kind of
humanity of the person, the genius of the person, the interesting nuance of the
person in like 30 minutes. Like I just can't, I can't like, I don't know, maybe there's people that
are extremely skilled that can do that. You just can't. - You should be optimistic because a huge narrative
out of this election is that the Democrats massively fucked up by not coming on this
show or a real good show. So I actually fundamentally, number one, that's gonna change dramatically. - I hope so.
- So be optimistic and keep pushing. But two is, this is a
good segue actually is, I've been thinking a lot about, I know a lot of people
listening to this show who are in tech and may have
some influence on the admin. So this is kind of some, this is something I want people
to take really seriously, is I was a White House
correspondent for The Daily Caller. It's a conservative outlet in Washington during the Trump years. And the most important thing
I learned from that was that under the White House
Correspondents' Association, the way that the media
cartel has everything set up for access for press to the President is fundamentally
broken, anti-American, and bad for actual democracy. So let me lay this out at
a very mechanical level 'cause nobody knows this. And I was a former White House Correspondents'
Association member. So anybody who says I'm
full of shit, I was there. For example, number one, all
the seats in the briefing room, those seats are assigned by the White House
Correspondents' Association, not by the White House itself. The White House Correspondents'
Association requires you to apply for a seat, right? That adjudication process
can take literally years for bylaws, elections and
all these things to do. This means that they can
slow roll the entrance of new media online outlets
who are allowed into the room. The reason it really
matters not having a seat is if you don't have a seat,
you have to get there early and stand in the wings like I used to and raise your hand
like this and just hope and pray that the press secretary can see, it's extremely inconvenient. I'm talking, I have to
get there hours early at a chance during a 15-minute briefing. So one of the things is that Trump has, is he owes a huge part of his election to coming on podcast and to new media. Now because of that, it's really important that the White House
Correspondents' Association, which is a literal guild
cartel that keeps people out of the White House and credentials itself and creates this opaque mechanism through which they control access. You know, to asking the press secretary
questions is destroyed. And there are a lot of
different ways you can do this because nobody gets too is that all of these rules are unofficial. So for example, they're just traditions. The White House is like,
yeah, it's our building, but you guys figure it out, right? Because that's a longstanding tradition. Let me give you another insane tradition that currently exists in the White House. The Associated Press,
the White Press Secretary or the Associated Press correspondent gets to start the briefing, traditionally, they get the first question. They also get to end the briefing when they think it's been enough time, they'll be like, "Okay,
Cringe Jean Pierre, Thank you," right? And that calls the briefing over. What, who? You're not even the White House
Correspondents' Association. You literally just happen to
work for the associated press. Why? Like why do we allow that to happen? So number one, stop doing that. To their credit, the Trump
people didn't really do that, but it's a longstanding tradition. The other thing is that what
nobody gets either is that the first row is all television networks for logistical reasons. So that they can do their
little standups with their mic and say, "Oh, I'm reporting
online for the White House." Well, what people don't
seem to know is that all the television networks
are basically going to ask some version of the same question. The reason they do that is
because they need a clip of their correspondent going after the White House Press Secretary
all out Robert Mueller, like whenever I was there. So you get the same God damn version of the stupid political
questions over and over again. The briefing room is designed
for traditional media and they have all the access in the world. So in an election where
you owe your victory to, at least in part to new media and recognizing and changing landscape, you need to change the
conduit of information to the American people. And in an election, I
don't know if you saw this, but election night coverage
on cable news was down 25%, just in four years, 25%. That's astound, that's
cable news had a monopoly on election night for my entire lifetime. And yet, my show had
record ratings that night. And I, look, I'm a small
slice of the puzzle here. We've got Candace Owens,
Patrick Bet-David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT, all these other people, every, from what I understand, all of us blew it out that night because millions of Americans
watched it on YouTube. We even partnered with
some, Decision Desk HQ, so we had live data, we
could make state calls and we're just a silly
little YouTube show. My point though is that in an election where the vast majority of Americans under the age of 55 are
listening to podcasts, consuming new media and are not watching cable news
where the median age of CNN, which is the youngest viewership is 68. 68 is the median. So statistically what
does that tell us, right? There's a decent number of people who are watching CNN who are in their 80s and in their 90s. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Alex 'cause he deserves a tremendous
shout out Alex Bruesewitz. He was the pioneer of the podcast strategy for the Donald J. Trump campaign. He got on your show, he was able to get on
Andrew Schulz's show, Rogan. He was the internal force
that pushed a lot of this. My personal hope is that
somebody like Alex is elevated in the traditional
White House bureaucracy. That the number of
credentials that are issued to these mainstream media outlets is cut. And there is a new lottery
process put in place where people with large
audiences are invited. And I also wanna make a case here for why I think it's really important for people like you and others who don't have as much
traditional media experience to come in and practice
some Capital J journalism 'cause it will sharpen you too, giving you access in that
pressure cooker environment and having to really like sit there and spar a little bit
with a public official and not have as long
necessarily as you're used to. It really hones your news media skills, your news gathering skills. And it will make you a better
interviewer in the long run. Because a lot of the
things that I have learned have just been through osmosis. I've just lived in DC, I've been so lucky. I've had a lot of cool jobs and I've just been able to
experience a lot of this stuff. So I'm really hoping that
people who are listening to this who may have some influence
or even the viewership, if you wanna, you know, reach out to them and all of them, this is a very easily changeable problem. It's a cartel which has no official power. It's all power by tradition
and it needs to be blown up. It has, it does not
serve America's interests to have 50, 48 seats, I
think in the White House press briefing room with two people who have audiences of like five. It's just makes absolutely zero. Workspace, seats, access, credentials and also, credentials
that are issued to press and to other, like new media journalists at major events should take precedence because it's not even about
rewarding the creator. The American people are
here, you need to meet them. That's your job. And I'll just end with a historical thing. Barack Obama shocked the White
House Press Corps in 2009 because he took a question
from The Huffington Post, a brand new blog. But they were stunned because he knew, he
said, "These blog people, they went all in for me
and I got to reward them." So there's longstanding
precedence of this, they'll bitch and they'll
moan, they'll be upset, but it's their fault, you know, that they don't have as much credibility and it's incumbent upon the White House, which serves the public to actually meet them where they are. So I really hope that at least some of this is
implemented inside of them. - Yeah, if you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually enable
greater journalism, frankly. - Of course.
- With the capital J. Because actually in the long form is when you can do better journalism of, from even just the politician perspective, you can disagree, you can get criticized, 'cause you can defend yourself. - I had an idea, actually. You tell me what you think. I think a really cool format would be, there's a room right near
the press briefing room called the Roosevelt Room. Beautiful room by the way, it's awesome. It has the Medal of
Honor for Teddy Roosevelt and it has a portrait of
him and a portrait of FDR. It's one of my favorite
rooms in the White House. - Okay.
- It's so cool. And so my idea would be,
in the Roosevelt Room, which traditionally used for
press briefings and stuff, is like you as the press
secretary sit there, I think there's like 12
seats, something like that. And you set it all up
and you have, let's say, Shure microphones like this, and that person, that
secretary is gonna commit to being there for like two hours. And new media people like
can sit around the room, all of this being
streamed live by the way, just like the White House
press briefing room. But the expectation is that the type of questions
have to be substantive. Obviously, nothing is off limits. You should never, ever, you know, except I'm not gonna be asked about this. Especially as a journalist,
you can't do that. Every time they're like, "Hey,
please don't ask about this." It's like, actually that's probably one thing you should ask about. But my point being that the expectation is that
there's no interference on the White House side, but that the format
itself will lend exactly to what you're saying to
allow people to explain. And again, in a media era where we need to trust the consumer, like my show is routinely
over two hours long on cable television. On cable television, you know, the Tucker Carlson program, whenever it was on Fox News, without commercial breaks
was about 42, 43 minutes something like that of runtime. So I'm speaking for almost triple what that is on a regular basis. The point is that millions are
willing to sit and to listen but you just have to
meet them where they are. So I really hope that a format like that, like a streamer briefing or something like that, I think it's, look, I know they would
dunk on it endlessly, but I think it could work. - Yeah, I think the
incentives are different. I think it works because
you don't have to, like you, Saagar, don't have to signal to the other journalists that
you're part of the clique. - Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up because that was another lesson I learned. I go, oh, none of you are
asking important questions for the people. You're asking questions
because you all hang out with each other and you're like, oh wait. So this entire thing is
a self-reinforcing guild to impress each other at cocktail parties and not to actually ask
anything interesting. I remember people were so mad at me because, this was 2018 or maybe 2017, and I said, "Do you think
that Kim Jong Un is sincere in his willingness to meet with you?" Something like that, to that effect. They were furious 'cause
I didn't ask about some bullshit political controversy that was happening at the time. So in the historical legacy,
what was more important, the Mueller question, or Donald Trump breaking 50 years or whatever of tradition
with America's relationship with North Korea and
meeting him in Singapore and basically resetting that
relationship for all time? As you can tell, I read a lot of book. I like to take the long view. Every time I would ask
a question, I go, okay, when the future Robert
Caro is writing books and he sees, he's reading the transcript of the White House press briefing, you don't even know who this kid is. He goes, "Oh, that was a pretty
good question right there." That's pretty relevant, you know. You got to think about all the bullshit that gets left on the cutting room floor. - I love that view of journalism actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book-
- Yeah. - 50 years from now.
- I just want a quote of what the president said to something that I ask.
- Yeah. - In a book, I'd be happy, I would die happy with that. If you told me that when
I'm like a 90-year-old man, I'd be like, man, and I,
that means I succeeded. - Yeah, when the AIs write the history- - Yeah, that's right.
- Of human civilization. One of the things I
continuously learned from you when looking back through
history is how crazy (Saagar laughing) American politics has
been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot
better about the current day. - It should. - Corruption.
- Yes. - Just the divisiveness also. - Just the-
- It's been way worse. - Stealing elections. - Yes. - At all levels of government
and direct stealing and indirect stealing,
all kinds of stuff so. Is there stuff that jumps out
to mind throughout history that's just like the craziest corruptions
or stealing of elections that come to mind? - I'll give them micro and the macro. So my favorite example is Robert Caro, who I've probably talked about him a lot. God bless you, Robert. I hope you live to write your last book because we really need that from you. But Robert came to Texas, he only intended on writing three books about Lyndon Johnson. He's currently completed
four and he is on his fifth and it's taken over 40
years to write those. And one of the reasons is
he just kept uncovering so much stuff. And one of them is book
two, "Means of Ascent," he never intended to write it. But as he began to
investigate Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Senate election,
he realizes in real time how rigged and stolen it was. And so I often tell people, what if I told you that we
lived in the most secure election period in modern history? - Yeah.
- They wouldn't believe it. But if you read through that shit, I'm talking about bags of
cash, millions of dollars, literal stuffed ballot boxes. It's great to be back here in Texas because I always think
about that place like down in Zapata and Starr County. I'm talking like basically Mexico, where these dons were
in power in the 1940s and they would literally
stuff the ballot boxes with the rolls and they
wouldn't even allow people to come and vote, they just checkmarked it all
for you based upon the amount that you paid. "Means of Ascent" is the
painstaking detail of exactly how Lyndon Johnson stole
the 1948 Senate election. And so nothing like that as far as I know is still happening. Macro, we can talk
about the 1876 election, Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the closest
elections in modern history. It was one of those that got kicked with the House of Representative that was an insane, insane time. The corrupt bargain that was struck to basically end reconstruction and federal occupation of the South. And of course, the amount
of wheeling and dealing that happened inside
of that was absolutely bonkers and nuts. That was what an actual
stolen election looks like. Just so people know. So on a micro and a macro, yeah, that's what it really looks like. And so, look, I understand
where people are coming from, also, let's do what, 1960. That was pretty wild. I mean in 1960, there
was all those allegations about Illinois going for Kennedy. If you look at the actual vote totals of Kennedy and Nixon, wow. I mean, it's such an insanely
close presidential election. And even though the electoral
college victory looks a little bit differently, Nixon would openly talk about, he's like, "Oh, old Joe Kennedy rigged
Illinois for his boy." And he'd be like, "And we didn't
even have a chance in Texas with Lyndon pulling," you know, like Lyndon stuffing the
ballot boxes down there. So, and this is open on the, like they openly admit this stuff. They talk about it. So actually there's a funny story. LBJ lost his, I think it's 1941 Senate primary and it's because the, his
opponent Pappy O'Daniel actually outstole Lyndon. So they were both corrupt. But Pappy O'Daniel stuffed the ballot box in like the fifth day of the
seven days to count the votes. And FDR loved LBJ. And it's interesting right,
that FDR recognized Johnson's, his talent and he goes,
"Lyndon, you, you know, in New York we sit on the ballot
boxes till we count them." You know, 'cause he's admitting that he, you know, participated
in a lot of this stuff. So this high level chicanery of stolen elections is
actually an American pastime that we luckily have moved on from. And quite a lot of people
do not know the exact intricate details of how
wild it was back in the day. - Yeah, it's actually one of the things, it's harder to pull
off a bunch of bullshit with all these cameras everywhere now. - Transparency too, lack of
cash, banking regulations, there's a variety of reasons, but yeah. - So that said, let's talk
about the 2020 election. Seems like forever ago. Do you think it was rigged
the way that Trump claimed? - No. - And was it rigged in other ways? - Look, this is the problem
with language like rigged. And by the way, when I
interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy, he said the exact same thing. So for all the MAGA, people
who are gonna get mad at me, Vivek agrees, all right? And if, okay, I have observed, and I'm
gonna put my analyst hat on, there are two theories
of "Stop the Steal." One I call low IQ "Stop the Steal" and one I call high IQ "Stop the Steal." Low IQ "Stop the Steal" is basically what Donald Trump has advocated, where, you know, Dominion voting
machines and bamboo ballots and Venezuela and Sidney Powell and all the people involved
basically got indicted by the State of Georgia. I'm not saying that that was correct, I'm just like, that's what
that actually looked like, Rudy Giuliani, et cetera. High IQ "Stop the Steal" is basically, and actually, I mean these are
not illegitimate arguments. The school of thought
is, it was illegitimate for the State of Pennsylvania
and other swing states to change mail-in balloting
laws as a response to COVID, which enabled millions of people more to vote that wouldn't have and that those change
in regulations became enough to swing the election. I actually think that that is true. Now, would you say that that's rigged? That's a very important question 'cause we're talking about a
Republican state legislature, a Republican state supreme court, right? The two that actually
ruled on this question. So could you say that it was rigged by the Democrats to do that? Another problem with that theory is that while you can say that that's unfair to change the rules last time around, you can also understand
it to a certain extent. And I'm not justifying it, I'm
just giving you an example. So for example, after the
hurricane hit North Carolina, Republican officials were like,
"Hey, we need to make sure that these people who in
Western North Carolina, who were affected by the
hurricane could still be able to have access to the ballot box." And people were like,
"Oh, so you're saying in an extraordinary circumstance that you should change
voting reg, you know, access and regularity to make
sure that people have access?" So my point is, you can see the logic through which this happened. And the high IQ version
is basically the one that was adopted by Josh Hawley whenever he voted against certification. He said that the State of Pennsylvania, particularly election law, and that those changes were unfair and led to the quote unquote
"rigging" of the election against Donald Trump. Now there's an even higher IQ, galaxy brain "Stop the Steal." Galaxy brain "Stop the
Steal" is one that you saw, with great love and
respect, my friend JD Vance, at his debate with Tim Walz. When Tim Walz asked him, what did he see, he said, "Did Donald Trump
win the 2020 election?" He's like, "Tim, I focus on the future." And then he started
talking about censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you take a look at
the Joe Rogan interview, Rogan actually asked JD this. He's like, what do you
mean you in the election? Some version of that. And JD was like, "Well, what I get really frustrated
by is people will bring up all these insane conspiracy
theories but they ignore that the media censored the
Hunter Biden laptop story and that big tech had
its finger on the thumb for the Democrats." Now that is empirically true, okay? That is true, right? Now would you say that that's rigged? I'm not gonna use that word 'cause that's a very different word. Now, would you say that that's unfair? Yeah, I think it's unfair. So there's another, there's, a lot of MAGA folks picked up on this one. There was a Time Magazine article in 2020 and that's very famous in
their crowd called, you know, it was like the fight
to fortify the election. And it was about all of these institutions that put their fingers on the scale for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. So I will put it this way. Was Donald Trump up
against the titanic forces of billionaires, tech censorship, and elite institutions who
all did absolute damnedest to defeat him in 2020? Yes, that is true. And, in a sense, the galaxy brain case
is the only one of those which I think is truly legitimate. And I'm not gonna put it off the table, but this is the problem, that's not what Trump means. You know, Trump, he, Trump, by the way, will never tell you what
I just told you, right? JD will. If you go and you ask any of
these Republican politicians when they're challenged on it and they don't wanna say that
Trump a loss of 2020 election, they'll give the the galaxy
brain case that I just gave. And again, I don't think it's wrong, but it's like, guys, that's not what he means when he says it. And that's the important
parsing of the case, right? - So first at a high
level Trump or otherwise, I don't like anyone who
whines when they lose, period. - Yeah, although he did tell
you he lost, you notice that? That's the only time
he's ever said it, ever. You're famous, you're
in history for that one. - Lost by the whisker.
- Yeah, yeah. - "I lost by a whisker." - I mean, there is a case to
be made that he was joking, I don't know.
- Yeah. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with humor where sometimes the
sarcasm, sometimes not, much easier to showcase in a
three-hour interview, I'll say. - Good call, go ahead. - I couldn't even like play with that when you have 40 minutes. - I know, bro.
- You're like, you know, I could do just
40 minutes on weaving alone. - For your style, it doesn't work. And I can tell you how the
way I interview politicians is I just do pure policy. So when I, the first
time I interviewed Trump, I compiled a list of 15 subjects. Me and my editor, Vince
Coglianese, shout out to Vince, and the two of us sat in an office and then we had questions by
priority in each category. And if we felt like we
were running short on time, we would move around those different ones. But that was purely, he's the president, we're asking him for his opinions on an immigration bill or whatever. For what you do, it's impossible to do in 40 minutes.
- Yeah, I just wanna say that thank you for everybody involved, for making my conversation
with Donald Trump possible, but I've learned a lot
from that, that I just, if I'm told that all I have is 40 minutes, I'm very politely sparing, in that case, Donald Trump the 40 minutes
and just walking away 'cause I don't think I could do a good job in 40 minutes.
- I think that is the correct decision on your part. - [Lex] Yeah. - And also would encourage you to have the confidence at this point that you are in a position of something that we call in the business, the ability to compel the interview. And by to compel means to be able to bring somebody else to you and
not the other way around. - Yeah.
- And, I think that you and Rogan and a few others are in
that very unique position. And I would really encourage
you guys to stick to your guns on things that make you feel comfortable. Because, you know, those of us in news, we will always negotiate. We'll all, we're willing to do short form 'cause we're asking about policy. But for the style that you help popularize and I think that you're
uniquely talented and good at, that's very important
not to compromise on so. - Thank you for saying those words. And that's not just in
the interest of journalism and the interest of conversation, it's the interest of the guest as well. Right?
- Yeah, absolutely. - [Lex] To bring out the best in them. - Yeah, I mean, I would
feel really at a disservice and I would feel like people
would not get a unique understanding of like
my own thought process and my backstory if I
was not able to sit here for literally hours and
to explain in deep detail like how I think about the world. Not that anyone cares that much, but, you know, it's just like, I hope, all I can do,
is I hope it's helpful. I wanna help people think because when I was growing, I was growing up not far from here, 90 minutes from here in College Station, I felt very uniquely
closed off from the world. And I found the world through books. And books saved my life. They've been many, so
many different times. And I hope to encourage
that in other people. I really, no matter where you
are, no matter who you are, no matter how busy you
are, you have some time to either sit down with a
book or put on an audiobook and you can transport yourself
into a different world. It's so important. And that's something that your show really helps me with too. I love listening to your show whenever, sometimes when I'm too into politics and I need to listen to something, I'll listen to that Mayan historian guy. I love stuff like that. Absolutely.
- I've been a deep dive on Genghis Kahn. Reading "Genghis Kahn and the
Making of the Modern World." - Yeah, Jack Weatherford. Fantastic.
- Yeah, he's coming on. - Is he? - Yeah.
- Amazing. And again, shout out to Dan Carlin. - The goat, the OG, Dan, I've never met you before. I would love to have
correspondence at some point. I love you so much. You changed my life, man. - I met him once before and it felt I mean I was,
- I listened in your interview with him, it was amazing.
- I was starstruck. Very, very starstruck. And his, I mean there's so much "Painfotainment" that I've listened to many times.
- You know, I think his best series, one of his best
series he gets no credit for, "Ghost of the Ostfront." Nobody gives him credit for that one. That's OG, this is 2011 series. But his "Ghost of the
Ostfront" on the eastern front of the Nazi war against
Russia fundamentally changed my view of warfare forever. And also, at that time I was very young, and to me, World War II
was "Saving Private Ryan." I wasn't as well read as I am now. And I was like, oh, shit,
this entire thing happened, which actually decided
the Second World War and I don't know anything about this. So shout out to Dan, God bless you, man. - And his quote unquote "short episodes," I think on slavery in general
throughout human history- - That was an awesome episode. I actually bought a bunch
of Hugh Thomas books because of that episode. I'd never really read
about African slavery or the slave trade outside
of the Civil War context. So again, shout out to him for that one. That was an amazing episode. His Japan series too. I'm going to Japan in a few days. - Yeah.
- And I keep thinking of what
he always talked about in his "Supernova in the East," "The Japanese are like everyone
else, but only more so." And, God, I love that quote. - Okay, he's great. And we, ironically arrived at this tangent while talking about the 2020 election. - Yeah, yeah. That's why podcasting is fun. - 'Cause you said lost by a whisker. - [Saagar] Yeah. - And now we're dragging us screaming back to the topic. One of the things I was
bothered by is Trump claiming that there's widespread, as
you're saying, low IQ theory. - Yeah.
- The widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of
that that he provided. And all right, well that's,
let's put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled by that maybe you can comfort
me in the context of history, how easily the base ate that up. - Yeah.
- That they were able to believe the election
was truly rigged based on no clear evidence that I saw. And they just love the story. And there is something
compelling to this story that, you know, like this
DNC type, like with Bernie, the establishments just, they're corrupt, and they steal the will of the people. And like the lack of desire from the base or from people
to see any evidence of that, what's really troubled me. - Yeah, I'm gonna give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to "The Loudest Voice in the
Room" by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too because it really made
me understand media. "People don't wanna be informed,
they wanna feel informed." That is one of the most fundamental media insights of all time.
- What the fuck, what a line. - Roger Ailes. A genius. A genius in his own right. Who, you know, he changed the world. He certainly did. He, you know, he's the one
who kind of gets credit for one of the greatest
debate lines of all time 'cause he was an advisor
to President Reagan. Whenever he broke in, he was like, "Mr. President, people wanna know if you're too damn old
for this job or not." And he inspired that joke that Reagan made where he was like, "I will
not use age in this campaign. I will not hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him." That was Ailes, man. You got, he did the Nixon Town Halls. He did it all, he's a fucking genius. And I'm not advocating necessarily for the world he created for us, but he did it and people
should study him more. If you're interested
in media in particular, that book is one of the
most important books you'll ever read. - Yeah, you know what, that quote just really connected with me. - Yes.
- 'Cause, you know, there's all
this talk about truth and I think what people wanna, they want to feel like they're
in possession of the truth. - Correct.
- Not actually being in the possession of the truth. - Yeah, I know. It's one
of the, it hit me too. Actually, Russell Crowe
does an amazing job of delivering that line in
the Showtime miniseries. So if you have the chance,
you should watch it. And look, this is the problem. Liberals will be like, "Yeah,
see these idiot Republicans." I'm like, yeah, you guys have bought a lot of crazy stupid shit too, okay? And if actually I would say
"liberal misinformation," quote unquote, is worse than
Republican disinformation because it pervades the entire
elite media like Russiagate or Cambridge Analytica or
any of these other hoaxes that have been foisted
on the American people. The people who listen to The Daily and from the New York Times
are just as brainwashed, lack of informed, wanna feel informed as people who watch Fox News. So let me just say that out there, it's an equal opportunity
cancer in the American people. - Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking about bubbles. What's your advice about how to figure out if you're in a bubble
and how to get out of it? - Oh, that's such a fantastic question. Unfortunately, I think
it comes really naturally to someone like me because
I'm the child of immigrants and I was raised in
College Station, Texas, so I was always on the outside. And when you're on the outside,
this isn't a sob story. It's a deeply useful skill because when you're on the outside, you're forced to kind of observe. And you're like, "Oh." So like where I was
raised was the Bible Belt and people really, you know, people were hardcore
evangelical Christians. And I could tell, I'm like,
they really believe this stuff and, you know, they, you know, were always trying
to proselytize and all of that. And then the other gift
that my parents gave me is I got to travel the entire world. I probably visited 25, 30
countries by the time I was 18. And one of the things that
that gave me was the ability to just put yourself in the
brain of another person. So one of the reasons I'm
really excited to go to Japan, and I picked it as a spot
for my honeymoon, was because Japan is a first world developed country where the vast majority of
them don't speak English. It's distinguishably non-Western and they just do shit their own way. So they have a subway, but
it's not the same as ours. They have restaurants, things
don't work the same way. They have, you know, I
could go a laundry list. Their entire philosophy of
life, of the daily rhythm, even though it merges with service-based managerial capitalism and
they're fucking good at it too, they do it their own way. So exposure to other countries
in the world gave me, and also just being an outsider myself, gave me a more detached view of the world. So if you don't have that, what I would encourage you
is to flex that muscle. So go somewhere that
makes you uncomfortable. This will be a very boomer take, but I hate the fact that you
have 5G everywhere you go in the world. Because some of the best experiences I've ever had in my life is
walking around Warsaw, Poland, trying to find a bus station to get my ass to Lithuania
with a printed out bus ticket. I have no idea where the street is. I'm in a country where not
that many people speak English. We're pointing and gesturing, right, and I figured it out. And it was really used, I got to meet a lot of cool Polish people. Same in Thailand. I've been in rural like
bumfuck, Thailand, Colombia, places where people speak zero English. And your ability to gesture and use pigeon really connects you and
gives you like the ability to get an exposure to others. And so, I know this is a very like wanderlust like travel thing, but unironically, if you're
raised in a bubble, pierce it. Like that's the answer
is seek something out that makes you uncomfortable. So if you're raised rich, you need to go spend some
time with poor people. - And consider that they
might actually understand the world better than you. - Well, in some respects. So I think a lot of rich people have really
screwed up personal lives. So if you're poor and
you really value family, you say, "Oh, that's interesting." There seems to be a fundamental trade off between extraordinary wealth
and something that I value. But what can I take away from that person? Oh, put my money in index funds. Make sure that I am
conscientious about my budgeting, common sense shit, right? And say vice versa. People who are very
wealthy get so caught up in the rat race about their
kids going to private school and all of this. And then, you know, they
very rarely engage with, there's that famous study where they ask people on their deathbed like what they valued in life. And every single one of them was like, "I wish I'd spend more
time with my children," I think about that every time that I am thinking about
pursuing a new work endeavor or something that's gonna
have me spend significant time away from my wife. And almost always these days, now that I've achieved a
certain level of success, the answer is I'm not doing it
unless you can come with me. - One of the bubbles I'm really concerned about is San Francisco bubble. I visited there recently 'cause there's, I have so many friends
there that I respect deeply. There's so many brilliant people- - Absolutely, absolutely.
- In San Francisco. The Silicon Valley. But there's just this, I don't even want to criticize it, but there's definitely a bubble. - Yeah.
- Of thought. - I'm with you. I'm friends with some SV,
Silicon Valley people as well. I'm similarly struck by
that every time I go. And honestly, I do admire them, because they, what I respect
the most amongst entrepreneurs, business and political
thinkers is systems thinking. Nobody thinks systems better than people who are in tech.
- Yeah. - Because they deal
with global shit, right? Not even just America. They have to think about the whole world, about the human being and his
relationship with technology And coding in some ways is an
expression of the human mind and about how that person
wants to achieve this thing. And how you mechanically can
type that into a keyboard or even code something to code for you to be able to achieve that. That's a remarkable accomplishment. I do think those people, and people like that too,
who think very linearly through math and they're,
the geniuses are the ones who can take their creativity and merge it with linear thinking, but I do think that that
actually, those are the people who probably most need
to get out of the bubble, check themselves a little bit. And, look, it's really hard, you know, once you achieve a certain
level of economic success and others, like what
do most rich people do? They close themselves off
from the world, right? The vast majority of the time, what do you do? Economy is annoying, flying,
they fly first class. Living a small house is annoying. They buy a bigger house. Dealing with a lot of these inconveniences of life is annoying. You pay a little bit more to make sure you don't have to do that. There's a deep insidious
thing within that. Each one of those individual choices, where the more and more
removed that you get from that, the more in the bubble that you are. So you should actually
seek out those experiences or create them in a concerted way. - Speaking of bubbles, Sam Harris. - Oh. - He has continued to criticize me directly and indirectly, I think unfairly, but I love Sam. I deeply respect him. Everybody should listen to
the "Making Sense" podcast. It always makes me think. It's definitely in the rotation for me. - That's a very admirable view. - I mean, he's, I think,
one of the sharpest minds of our generation. And for a long time I looked up to him, it was one of the weird
moments for me to meet him 'cause you listen to somebody
for such a long time. - I feel that way with you. (Lex laughing) I'm serious. - Yeah, it was, it's a beautiful moment. I mean, same with Joe and stuff like this.
- Oh, absolutely. - It's-
- It is one of the most surreal moments of your life to be able to meet somebody who you spend like hours listening to. I actually think about that
when people come up to me. Because I'm like, oh,
they're feeling what I felt whenever I...
- Yeah, uh-huh. Yeah.
- Yeah. - And you have to like,
you see it, you feel it, and you have to celebrate that because there's an intimacy to it. - [Saagar] Uh-huh. - I think it's real that
people really do form a real connection, a real friendship. It happens to be one way, but I think it actually can upgrade to a two-way pretty easily. It happens with me like in a
matter of like five minutes when I meet somebody at an
airport or something like that. Anyway, Sam took a pretty
strong position on Trump. - And has for a long time. - Yeah, he has been
consistent and unwavering. So he thinks that Trump is
a truly dangerous person for a democracy, for maybe for the world. Can you steel man his position? - Well, you see, I think a lot of this podcast has been steelmanning it because Sam is a big
character matters guy. Like, he focuses a lot
on Trump's personality. By the way, I'm like you, I've listened to Sam Harris for years. I bought his meditation app. So nobody's gonna accuse me of
being some Sam Harris hater. I listened to him for way before, long before even Donald Trump was elected. That's how far back I go
with the Sam Harris podcast. I have a lot of respect for the dude. I enjoy a lot of his older interviews. I do think after Trump, he
did succumb a little bit, in my opinion, to the
elite liberalism view, both of the impetus behind Donald Trump and why he was able to be successful. So in some ways, very
denigrating to the Trump voter, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the American presidency. Because like I said, he really
is the one who believes that that narcissism, that character, and all of that that makes Trump
tick itself will eventually override any potential benefit
that he could have in office. And I just think that's a really
wrong way of looking at it. And I mean, for example, I
had this debate with Krystal, and this gets to the
whole Trump, you know, talking about the enemy from within. And she was like, "He wants to prosecute
his political opponents. Do you disagree with that?" And I was like, "No, I don't." And she was like, "So you're
not worried about it?" And I go, "No, I'm not." And she's like, "Well,
how do you square that?" And I was like, "Well, I
actually unironically believe in the American system of institutional checks and balances," which kept him quote unquote
"in check" last time around. I also believe in democracy where, you know, this is really interesting. But you know, in 2022,
a lot of the Republicans who were the most vociferous
about "Stop the Steal," they got their asses
kicked at the ballot box. You know, Americans also
then in 2024 decided to forgive some of that from Donald Trump. It's definitely didn't help, right? But they were able to oversee
that for their own interests. As in democratically,
people are able to weigh in terms of checks and balances what they should and should
not challenge a politician by. But also, we have the
American legal system, and I also know the way
that the institutions in Washington themselves work that, you know, fundamentally, the
way that certain processes and other things could
play out will not play out to some Hitlerian fantasy. And this gets to the whole like Kamala and them calling him a fascist and Hitler, you know, you and I probably
spent hours of our lives, maybe more, thinking and
reading about Adolf Hitler, Weimar, Germany and a certain, and I just find it so insulting, you know, because it becomes this moniker
of like fascist, you know, I say these terms have meaning beyond just the dictionary definition, the circumstances through
which Hitler is able to rise to power are not the same as today. It's like, stop denigrating
America to the point where you think like, really
you should flip it around. Why do you think America
is Weimar, Germany? That's a ridiculous thing to say. Do you unironically believe that? No, you don't believe that. So that is personally what
drives me a little bit crazy. And I think that Sam has
found in a mental framework where he's not willing, he's not able to look past the man and his quote unquote "danger." And at the end of the day,
his worldview was rejected wholly by the American people. And that, 'cause the character argument, the fascist argument, the Hitler argument, he's uniquely bad argument
has been run twice before 2016 and in 2000, actually, all three times, I guess it won in 2020. But two out of the three times Donald Trump has won the presidency. And in his latest one, where that argument has
never been made before for a longer period of time and more in strength by
a political candidate, was rejected completely. And I would ask him to reconcile himself to the America that he lives in. - I think one thing maybe to partially steel man his case, but also just to steel man, the way the world works is
that there is some probability that Kamala Harris will institute a communist state. And there is some probability
that Donald Trump will indeed, that like will fly a swastika. - Right.
- With and deport, I don't know everybody
who's not Scot-Irish. Like, I don't know. - Yeah. You and I are screwed then. - Maybe is there a spirit test? Okay. Like, but that probability
is small and you have to, if you allow yourself to focus
on a particular trajectory with a small probability, it can become all encompassing 'cause you could see it,
you could see a path. There's certain character
qualities to Trump. - [Saagar] Yes. - Where he wants to hold onto power. First of all, every politician
wants to hold onto power. Joe Biden, maybe because
he's part of the machine, can't even conceive of the
notion of a third term. But he has the arrogance
to want to hold onto power, do everything he can. - Absolutely. - And like with Trump, I could see that if it was very popular for
him to have a third term, I think he would not be the kind of person who doesn't advocate for a third term. - So what? That would require the Senate and the House or 70, what is
it, 75% of the states to pass and change the Constitution. Do you think that's gonna happen? No, I don't think it's gonna happen. So I'm not that worried about it. Now, you can make a norms argument, and I actually think that's kind of fair, is that he's the norms buster. But you know, with
extraordinary candidates and people like Trump, you get the good and the bad. There is the true duality, like the norms he busts
around foreign policy, I love. The norms he busts around
the economy, I love. The norms he busts around just so much of the
American political system, saying it, how it's et
cetera, I love that. You know what I hate? This 2020 election bullshit. You know what else I hate, you know, this, I don't know, just the lack of discipline that I would want to think that a great leader could have. Like when he was president and tweeting about Mika
Brzezinski's facelift, that was objectively ridiculous. Like it was crazy. Okay. Was it funny? Yeah, but it was crazy. Like, and it's not how I would conceive and have conceived of some
of my favorite presidents. I wouldn't think that they would do that, but that's what you get. You know, you, everyone
should be clear-eyed about who this man is. And that's another problem. The deification of politicians is sick. It's sickening like about
Trump, around Obama, around like, these people are just people. Like the idea that they
are God-like creatures with extraordinary judgment. You know, one of the really cool things about you and I's job is
we actually get to meet very important people. After you meet a few billionaires, you're like, yeah, there's
definitely something there. But you know, some of them get lucky. Like after you meet a few
politicians, you're like, oh, they're like, they're not that smart. That was a rude awakening
for me, by the way, being here in Texas,
reading about these people. And pretty soon I was on Capitol Hill, I was like 19 years old, I was an intern. I'm actually interacting
and I see them behave in ridiculous manners and, you know, whatever,
treat people badly or say something stupid. And I was like, oh, I'm like,
this is not "The West Wing." I'm like, this is not like a book. These people are just,
this is just reality. And the weirdest part of
my life is I've now been in Washington long enough. I know some of the people personally, the vice president of the United States, literally, the vice president-elect, future cabinet secretaries,
future, you know, these people I literally
have met, had dinner with, had a drink with whatever,
that's a wild thing. And that's even more
bringing you down to earth. You're like, oh shit, you're actually gonna have a lot of power. That's kind of scary. But you're just a person. And so even though you don't have to say, I have my same life experience, take it from me or anybody else who's ever met really famous people, rich, successful, powerful people, they're just people. There's nothing that, there's some things that
are unique about them, but they have just as many
human qualities as you or anybody else who's
listening to this right now. - Yeah, there's, for each candidate, Trump is probably the
extreme version of that. There's a distribution of
the possible trajectories that administration might result in. - Yes.
- And like, the range of possible trajectories is just much wider with Trump. - Yeah, you're describing
like a Bayesian theory, right? Like, and I think that's actually
a really useful framework for the world is that people
are really too binary. So like you said, you know, there's a theoretical possibility, I guess, of a communist
takeover of government and of a fascist takeover of government under Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. You know, the realistic
probability I would give it 0.05% probably in both directions. But there are, you know,
there are a lot of things that can happen that are bad, that are not Hitlerian and or fascist. There are a lot of things that
happen that are really good, that are not FDR New Deal style. One of the worst things
politicians do is they describe themselves in false historical ways. So in Washington, one of the most overused
phrases is made history. And I'm like, you know, if
you actually read history, most of these things are just,
they're not even footnotes. They're the stuff that
the historians flip past. And they're like, what
a stupid bucking thing. I mean, and I'm talking
about things that will, that ruled American politics. Like what if I told you that the Panama Canal Treaty was one
of the most important fights in modern American politics? Nobody thinks about that today. It ruled American politics
at that time, you know, it genuinely is a footnote, but that's not how it felt at the time. So that's another thing I
want people to take away. - You tragically missed the UFO hearings. - Oh man, my brothers, I'm really sad. - My brothers. (chuckles) - Let me tell you. - Yeah.
- I love them so much. The UFO community are
some of the best people I've ever met in my life. Shout out to my brother Jeremy Corbell, to George Knapp, the OG, to all of the people who fly
from all around the world to come to these hearings. It was so fun. I got to meet so many of them last time. Just walk the rope line like as people were
coming in, the excitement, I truly love the UFO community. Shout out to all of us. - This is the second one, I guess. - This is the second one. - Do you hope they continue happening? - It's gonna be a slow burn. So one of the things
I always tell the guys and everybody is consider how long it took to understand the sheer insanity of the CIA in the 1950s and '60s. So if we think back to
the church committee. I forget the exact year
of the church committee. I think it was in the '70s, the entire church committee
and knowledge of why this, of how the CIA and the FBI were up to all of this insane shit
throughout the '50s and '60s is because some people
broke into a warehouse, discovered some documents, got the names of programs
which were able to be FOIA'd and we were able to break open that case. It would never have happened
with real transparency, like in the official process. So we owe those people a great debt. I guess I could say now the statute of limitations has passed. My point about the UFOs is I
don't know what is real or not. I have absolute confidence and absolute ton is being
hid from the American people and that all of the official
explanations are bullshit. I have had the opportunity to interface with some of the whistleblowers
and other of the activists and the community people who I trust, people who have great credentials, who have no reason to lie, who have assured us that
there is a lot going on behind the scenes. There has been too much misinformation and effort by the deep state
to cover up this topic. So I would ask people to keep the faith. It's 2024 and we still don't
have all the JFK files, okay? Everyone involved is dead. There's no reason to let it go. And even though we basically
know what happened, we don't know. If you read that fantastic book, the Tom O'Neill book
about the Manson murders. I mean, again, you know, it
took him 20 years to write that book and he still
didn't get the full story. So sometimes it takes
an extraordinarily long agonizing period of time. And I know how deeply frustrating that is. But when you think about a secret, a program and knowledge of this magnitude, it would only make sense that it would require a titanic effort to reveal a titanic secret. - You think Trump might
be able to push further, like aggressively break
through the secrecy, let's say even on the JFK files? - I hope so, I have moderate confidence. You know, RFK Junior
has pushed him to do so. I would like to think so. At the same time I saw
him got rolled last time. So I'm, you know, I'll hold my breath. - Why do you think that happens? Why do you think it gets- - Remember that whole interagency
thing I told you about? That's how it happens. That's another thing. You're presuming that the
president has the power to declassify this stuff. I'm saying that I'm not
even sure we're there. Like in terms of- - So it's basic like stability.
- Yeah. - He basically says like, "I would like to declassify JFK files." And they say, "Yes, sir, we'll get that to you in three months." And three months comes by. And then they're like, "Well,
there's these hurdles." - Well, the way you get around it is go, "Let's release some. But these in particular, there's
national security secrets. There's a good case for not
releasing them X, Y and Z." You know, it's like you get around that, you go, "Oh, okay." You know, that makes sense, you know. And again, he's a busy guy. He's the president, he got way
bigger shit to worry about. So this is the, that's the problem is that unless you have that true urgency, I mean, look, people of
immense power have tried, everyone forgets this. John Podesta was the White
House Chief of Staff. He's a UFO true believer in his heart. He tried, he's talked about it. He tried at the top level, the number two to the White
House to get the Pentagon and others to tell him what was going on and they stonewalled him. So people need to understand
what you're up against. And you know, I would, and people are like, how
is that even possible? It's like, well, go read
about the terror that LBJ and the Kennedys and
others had in confronting J. Edgar Hoover, go and read how terrified,
you know, Eisenhower, and some of them were
of the Dulles brothers. They were scared. Like they knew where the power lies. So, you know, the presidency, look, government, deep state, et cetera, they've been there a long time and they know what's happening
and presidents come and go, but they stay forever. And so that's the paradigm that you're gonna have to fight against. - Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a meme, but I wonder how deep the deep state is. - Much deeper than
anyone can even imagine. And the worst part is with the deep state is
it's not even individuals. It's actually an ideology. And ideology is the most power. You know, people often think that if we took money out of politics, that it would change everything. I'm not saying it wouldn't
change everything, but it wouldn't change a lot. But people are like, "Oh, so-and-so's only
against universal healthcare 'cause they're getting paid." I'm like, no, no, no. That's not why they actually believe it. Or it's like, "Oh, so-and-so's
only wants to advocate for war with Iran because
they're on the payroll of APAC." And it's like, well, yeah, the APAC trips and the money helps, but they think that,
actually, the system itself, this is a very Chomsky as
systemic critique, is that, any journalist worth their salt
would never have the ability to get hired in a mainstream. So he's like, it's not that you're bad in the mainstream media, it's that anyone good is
not allowed to be elevated to your position because
they have an ideology. And so, you know, that is
the most self-reinforcing, pernicious mechanism of them all. And that's really
Washington in a nutshell. - It's again, a bubble, but a bubble that has a lot of power. - Yes.
- Who do you think is the future of the
Republican party after Trump? What happens to Trumpism after Trump? - Like you just said, Bayesian,
let's take various theories. - Yes.
- Right? So let's say it's '04, it's Bush Cheney. In 2004, the day after the election, I would've told you this, we live in a Bible belt,
Jesus land America, this America wants to protect America, a war on terror against Iraq and the axis of evil and American people just
voted for George W. Bush. And so I would've predicted that it would've been
somebody in that vein. And they tried that. His name was John McCann got
blown the out by Barack Obama. So I cannot sit here and confidently say, - What year would you be
able to predict Obama? It was just his first
time he gave the speech, - The 2004 speech at the DNC. That was his, we don't
live in Black America, white America, the John Kerry, DNC speech. You honestly could not
have predicted it until '07 whenever he actually
announced his campaign and activated a lot of anti-war energy. I mean, maybe '06, actually, I could have said
in '06 if I was, you know, kind of the contrarian man now I'm like, yeah, there's
a lot of anti-war energy. I think the next
president will be somebody who's able to vote. You know, the explosion of
Keith Olbermann and MSNBC that, it makes logical sense in hindsight, but you know, at the same
time you're going up against the Clinton machine who's
never lost an election. So I would've been afraid. I cannot confidently say, so I'll say if things go
in different directions, if Trump is a net positive president, then I think it'll be JD Vance, his vice president who believes in the, a lot of the things that
I've talked about here today about foreign policy restraint,
about the working class, about changing Republican
attitudes to the economy. And he would be able to
build upon that legacy in the way that George H.W Bush was able to get elected off the back of Reagan. But H.W Bush was
fundamentally his own man. He's a very misunderstood figure. Very different than Ronald Reagan, didn't end up working out
for him, but you know, he did get himself elected once. So that's one path. That's if you have a net
positive Trump presidency. The other path is the '04
path that I just laid out. If George W. Bush, if
Trump does what Bush does, misinterprets his mandate,
screws things up, creates chaos, and it makes it just generally annoying to live in American society, then you will see somebody
in the Republican party. I mean still it could even be JD Vance. 'cause he could say JD is my natural and my chosen successor, but then he would lose an election and then he would no longer
be the so-called leader of the Republican Party. So I could see it swing
in the other direction. I could see, you know,
Republicans or others, let's say if it's a total disaster and we'd get down like
20% approval ratings and the economy is bad
and stuff like that. Glenn Youngkin or somebody like that who's very diametrically
opposed to Donald Trump, or at least you know,
aesthetically is somebody like that who could rise from the ashes. And I'm just saying like
in terms of his aesthetic, not him per se. So there's a variety of
different directions. It's a big question about
the Republican base. I mean, a shit ton of
people voted Republican now for the first time ever. So are they gonna vote in party primaries? I don't know. You know, the traditional
party primary voter is like a white boomer is like 58, 59, is the Latino guy in California who turned out to vote
for Trump with a MAGA hat and rolling around, you know, suburban Los Angeles with that. Is he gonna vote in the Republican party? That could change, so the type of candidate
themselves could come. So this just, it's way too
early to say, you know, we have so many variety
paths that we go down. - Yeah, I think Trump is a singular figure in terms of like, if
you support Trump there, I just, there's a vibe. I know Kamala has a vibe, but there's definitely
a vibe to Trump and MAGA and I just, I think even with JD, that that's no longer going to be there. So if JD runs and wins, that would be on principles and he's a very different human being. - He is so different than Trump, right? You can see his empathy, right? Remember in the VP debate when he was like, "Christ, have mercy" when Tim Wallace was
talking about his son. I mean, that's not something
Donald Trump's saying, okay, he's just not like in terms of, I mean, you know, and this, by the way, this
is my own bubble test. I have no idea how
somebody listens to Trump and JD Vance is like, Trump is the guy who should
be the president over him. I honestly, I don't get it. That's my own cards on the table. I am in too much of a bubble where I am, my bias is to, you know, being well-spoken and being empathetic or at least being able to play empathetic and being extremely well-read
about the world and thoughtful and somebody who's, you know, somebody like him who's engaged
in the political process, but also has been able
to retain his values and be extremely
well-articulate his worldview. That's my bias. That's who I would want
to be the president. But you know, that's a big country. People think differently - By the way. I Sure you're bias. - Yeah.
- And I sometimes try to take myself out of that bubble. Like it's maybe it's not
important to have read a book or multiples of books on history. - I'm not saying everybody
should be like me, but that's my point. I'm checking myself by being
like, because of who I am, that's how I see the world, and that's how I would choose a leader. But that is not how people vote, period. And I've, nothing has taught me that more than this election. - I wish they did, I mean,
I don't know if that, I don't know if that's the
lesson to take away, I think. - Yeah, but who are we to
say people are allowed to do what they want. You know, I'm not gonna
tell somebody how to vote. - No, what I'm saying is
you take everything Trump, everything Trump is doing,
everything, the whole, the dance, all of it, and add occasional saga like references to history books. I think that's just a better candidate. - I agree with you. I mean, listen, you know, it's my bias. - Yeah. I don't know.
- Yeah. - I don't think that's bias. I think that's not
bubble thinking, I think. - It's amazing to me, right? Like listen to the JD
interview with Rogan. I mean JD, I mean, he'll
drop obscure references to studies to like papers that have come out, essays, books. Like this is a very well-read high IQ, well-thought out individual
who also, you know, has given his life to the
political process, right? And decided to like deal
with all the bullshit that this entire system
is gonna throw at you whenever you start to engage. That's who I would wanna be president. But you know, I'm biased,
so what can I say? - I like how you keep
saying you're biased. - Yeah.
- As if there's some percent of the population doesn't
like people to read at all. Okay. What about the future? You kind of hinted at it the
future of the Democratic Party. - Yeah.
- Did you see any talent out there that's promising? Is it gonna be Obama-like figure that just rolls out of nowhere? - Clinton is the better example because the Democratic Party
was destroyed for 12 years, from 1980, the 1980 election to 1992. They're 12 years out of power in periods of that long of an era, it takes somebody literally
brand new who is not tainted by the previous to convince
the base that you can won and convince the country that you're going in a new direction. So I would not put my
money on anybody tainted by the Great Awokening by TDS, by the insanity of the Trump era that has to be somebody post that and/or somebody who is
able to reform themselves. It will, in my opinion, it will likely not be any
establishment politician of today who will emerge for the future. Like I said, my dark horse is Dean, I think the Democratic
base is gonna give Dean a shit ton of credit, and they
should, for him being out. - Interesting.
- And look, let's be honest, he is a no-name
congressman from Minnesota. Nobody cared who Dean Phillips was, but just like Obama, he
had courage and he came out and spoke early when it mattered. And by doing that, he showed good judgment and he showed that he's
willing to take risks. So I would hope in
America's political system that we award something like that. And I do think the
Democrats will reward him, but I'm not saying it'll be him per se, but it will be a figure like that who is not nationally known, who has read the tea leaves correctly, who took guesses and did things differently
than everybody else. And most of all, I'm hoping
that heterodox attitudes, ideas, behaviors, by
definition after a blowout, those will likely be the
ones that are rewarded. So I cannot give a name, but I can just describe the circumstances for what it will look like. - Can you imagine an amorphous figure that's a progressive populist? - It would be very difficult at this point just because a huge portion of the multiracial working
class has shifted to the right. But I could see it, I mean, look, people change
their minds all the time. Like there are people out there
who voted for Barack Obama who've now voted for
Donald Trump three times. So, you know, a lot can
change in this country. If you make a credible case,
you've got a track record, you speak authentically, and you can try to divide
the country along class lines and be authentic and real about it. Maybe I think you have a shot. I still think you're probably
gonna get dinged on culture, just because I think this
election has really showed us how important immigration and culture is. But you know, actually, what the left populist should pray for, and they won't admit this, is that Trump actually solves immigration. Like in terms of changing the status quo. You know how, in the way that
the Supreme Court just ended the conversation around gay marriage. So all Republicans were
like, yeah, whatever. We support gay marriage. Because they're like,
that's the law of the land. It is what it is. They should just hope that their unpopular issue
is resolved by the president and thus they just don't have
to talk about it anymore. And now the battleground is
actually favorable for them. They get to talk about
the economy and abortion. So their least popular issue gets solved by the president by
consensus from his mandate. And then they can run
on a brand new platform for the new issues that
are facing America. - All right, let's put
our historian hat back on. - Okay.
- Will the American Empire collapse one day? And if it does, when it does,
what would be the reason? - Statistically likely, (Lex laughing)
the, (laughs) statistically yes. You know, it's the
famous Fight Club quote. It's like, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for
everything drops to zero." And you know... - I like for all the books you've quoted. - Yeah.
- You went to Fight Club. - Okay.
- I guess the movie, right? - The book's good though,
people should read that too, in terms of why, again, statistically the
answer's quite simple. It usually comes back to a
series of unpopular wars, which are pursued because
of the elite's interests. Then it usually leads to a miscalculation and a not a catastrophic defeat normally, it comes gradually. And most of the times
when these things end, the crazy part is most
people who are living through end of empire have no idea that they're living through
the end of the empire. And I actually think about
that a lot from, you know, "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire" by Edward Gibbon. Actually, your episode
on Rome was fantastic. People should go listen to that. So there you go. Another really good one. I like to think a lot
about the British Empire and if what eventually
led to that collapse, and nobody in 1919 said the
British Empires just collapsed, basically, nobody still thought that. They were like, yeah, the
first World War is horrible. But actually, we came out of
this okay, we still have India, you know, we still have
all these African colonies and all that, but you know,
long periods of servitude of debt to the United
States of degradation, of social upheaval, of bolshevism, of American industrial might. And next thing you know, you find yourself at Potsdam and Churchill's like, "Holy shit, I have barely any power
in this room," right? So it revolutions happened
slowly and then all at once. And so could you really put a, you know, a real like pin in the
end of the British Empire? It took almost 40 years for it to end. So America's empire will eventually end either from rising
geopolitical competition, likely China, could be
India, nobody knows. It will likely be because
of being overstretched of an elite capture is
usually the reason why. And a misreading of what made
your original society work, you know, in the first place. And that is one where I honestly, like all three of those things
will happen all at once. And it will happen over an
extremely long period of time. And it's very difficult to predict. I would not bet against America right now. I think we have a lot of
fundamental strengths. It's such a unique and dynamic country. It really is fucking crazy. Every time I travel the world, as much as I love all these
different places I go, man, I just, I love the
United States so much. You'll love it more when you leave. I really, I really believe that so. - Yeah, and it's nice to remember how quickly the public opinion shifts. Like we're very dynamic and
adaptable, which, and annoys me. I understand that's part
of the political discourse, saying like, if Trump wins,
it's the end of America. If Kamala wins, it's the end of America. - So stupid. Yeah.
- But I, I understand that the radical nature of that discourse is necessary to, like who mentioned- - Yeah, to drive out votes.
- To drive up votes. - I like to think about Americans in 1866. I cannot imagine going through
a war where some x percent, I think it was like 2 or 3% or whatever, the entire population was just killed. Our president, who was
this visionary genius who were blessed to have, is assassinated at Forks Theater immediately after the surrender of Lee. Andrew Johnson, who's a bumbling, like fucktard is the one who is in charge. And you know, we are having
all these insane crises over like internal management while we're also trying to decide like this new order in the South and whether to bring these people, how to bring these people
back into the union. I mean, I would've
despaired like in that year, I've like, it's over, this is it. You know the war, I'd be
like, was it worth anything? You know, if Andrew Johnson
is gonna be doing this, or even in the South, I
mean, I can't even imagine for what they were going through too. You know, they have to go home and their entire cities
are burned to the ground and they're trying to readjust and you know, their entire, economy and way of life is
overthrown in five years. I mean, that's an insane time to be alive. And what do we know? It worked out, you know, by 1890s or so, there were people shaking
hands, you know, union. And there's a cool video
on YouTube actually of FDR who is addressing some of
the last Gettysburg veterans, I think it was like the 75th
anniversary or whatever. And you can literally see these old men who are shaking hands
across the stone wall. It gives me hope. Yeah. - Let's linger on that hope. What is the source of optimism you have for the 21st century, for the century beyond that, for human civilization
in general is, you know, it's easy to learn cynical
lessons from history, right? That shit eventually goes wrong, but sometimes it doesn't. So what gives you hope? - I think that the fundamentals of what makes humanity great and has for a long time are best expressed in the American character. And that despite all of our problems, that as a country with our ethos, a lot of the stuff we talked about today, individualism, the frontier mindset, the blessings of geography, the blessings of our economy, of the way that we're
able to just incorporate different cultures and the best of each and put them all together, give us the best opportunity to succeed and to accomplish awesome things. We're the country that
put a man on the moon, which is the epitome of the human spirit. I hope to see more of that. And you know, I think last
time I was here I shouted out, and I love Antarctic exploration. I've read basically every book that there is on the
exploration of Antarctica. And one of the reasons I
love to do so is because there is no reason to
care about Antarctica. None, there's nothing down there. Zero. Going to the South Pole is
a truly useless exercise. And yet, we went, we went twice, actually
two people went there in the span of five weeks
and they competed to do so. - Yeah.
- And the spirit that propelled Amundsen
and Scott's expedition and people like Shackleton who's like, if you were to ask me
my hero of all heroes, it's Ernest Shackleton
is because his spirit, I think lives on in the United States. It unfortunately died in Great Britain. And interestingly enough, the
Brits even understand that. They're like, "It's very interesting how popular Shackleton is in America." And even though he was Irish and he was a British subject, to me, he's a spiritual American. And I think that his
spirit lives on within us and has always been here
to a certain extent. And everywhere else, I think it's dying. But here, I love it here, there's so many cool things about America. People move around all the time. They buy new houses, they start families. There's no other place you
can just reset your whole life in the same country, it's wild. You can reinvent yourself. You can go broke, you can get rich, you can go back and forth multiple times and there's nobody there and there's nowhere else
where you have enough freedom and opportunity to pursue that. I definitely have a lot of problems, but I've traveled enough
of the world now to know that it's a special place and
that gives me a lot of hope. - I wish I could do a Bostonian accent of we do these things. - Yeah.
- Not because they're easy, but 'cause they're hard. - Because they're hard.
- Thank you. - Yeah.
(Lex laughs) - That's so true. The Scot-Irish guts.
- Yeah. - Well, listen, I'm a
huge fan of yours, Saagar. I hope to see you in the White House
interviewing the president. - Yeah, there you go. That's right. That's the only situation you're gonna see me in the White House. - Yeah. (chuckles)
- Yeah. - Front row and just talking free. I would just, I would love to live in
a country and in a world where it's you who gets to talk to the press secretary, to the president, 'cause I think you're real, you're one of the good ones
as far as journalists goes, as far as human beings. So I hope to see you in there and I hope you get to ask a question that- - It ends up in a book. - It ends up in a good history book. - Absolutely, well, likewise, I'm a huge fan of yours. For anybody out there who's interested, I compiled a list and I will
go and retroactively edit it. Just go to SaagarEnjeti.io. I created a newsletter with a
website that has all the links to all the books I'm
gonna talk about here. - Beautiful, the hundreds of
books that were mentioned here. All right, brother, thank you
so much for talking today. - Thank you. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Saagar Enjeti. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you
with some words from Voltaire, "History is the study
of the world's crime." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.