28: Maxwell Meyer - Starships & Road Trips

29:51that's like the you know that's like the version of it that's thought out and that i can actually identify but i mean i also have the sort of sappy patriotism which is that when i like leave the country and see the signs at the airport on the way back welcome to the united states of america i get emotional and when i see videos of uh you know on september 11th they played the Star Spangled Banner at Buckingham Palace in London. And, you know, I'm a sucker for that. I'm a sucker for the Jefferson Monument. I was in D.C. recently for the first time in 10 years and was walking around, and it was emotional.

30:31It's a special place. Yeah. So I don't know how to give a good intellectual answer to it. I know that it moves me both in the front of my brain and in the back of my brain, though. And so my caveman answer is, yes, this one is good. Maybe that's a lead into an answer to my next question, which would be, I'm curious what you would say, maybe especially to young people, but maybe anyone who, probably many of them who are pretty far from you on the political spectrum. Right. Who, like, could you make a case for them for more patriotism? Oh, totally. Well, and for what it's worth, though I am very outspoken in my views and have at various times been called a right-wing lunatic or whatever it is, I spent my life growing up in left-wing circles.

31:24Even when I was an undergraduate at Stanford causing all sorts of right-wing mischief, I was living in, at one point, a vegetarian socialist cooperative house. I adore people who are on the left. You can't love America if you hate, you know, a half of the country. And I think that that's one of the big mistakes that has become, you know, unfortunately very, very, very prevalent online is turning your patriotism into sort of a hatred of an ideology. Or a sports team. Like, could you hate William Jennings Bryan or whatnot, who's this sort of proto-socialist candidate who's running all the time in the 1910s and the 1920s?

32:03it is it is plain as day to me that there's always going to be a left in America. There's always going to be a right in America. And, you know, if you lose your mind every four or eight years, you're going to be in for a long road. And another comment on these, you know, what we were saying earlier about these these one way trends, you know, can we come together as a nation again or whatnot? You know, I'll just say it again. You know, Bush won 49 states and then you have this chaos. There were people after Barack Obama won re-election that thought that the Republican Party would never win another election again.

32:34And then who came knocking at the door? These things are unpredictable. There's a solid contingent of Americans who are not politically crazy or politically predictable. And you have to live with people. And as for the actual case to make to left-wing people to be patriotic about America. Objectively. Young people who don't necessarily feel connected to their country at a maybe basic level. Well, objectively, it achieves the sort of goals of people across the spectrum better than any other system. So in terms of we'll list a few left wing values and a few conservative values. left-wing values.

33:22You have health, relative sense of equality, welfare, safety. Maybe safety is more a right-leaning thing at this point. I think it's maybe a pretty fundamental though. And then on the right, you would have religious freedom and intact families. And what I would say to both groups is despite some of the wrinkles, America is still better at achieving these ends than other systems. And if people are not interested in taking sort of high risk approaches to life, then maybe America can be disappointing at certain times. The challenge is always in finding the energy to take advantage of the opportunity.

34:08You know, you can be a teacher in France and make a third of what an American gas station worker is making. um we're here in texas uh if you've ever been to bucky's you know the car wash manager at bucky's makes 130 000 gets unlimited paid vacation health care 401k everything and i can't look at that and and think anything other than yes there's opportunity out there but the the frontiers have changed, the opportunities have changed, and it's not going to be a sort of cushy corporate opportunity for every single person. Maybe to invert part of that last point, what do you think Americans could most stand to learn from the rest of the world, and maybe more specifically, Europe and China?

35:00So there's a very fascinating book by a Chinese intellectual called Wang Huning. he's a member of the Politburo in China. So one of the seven men who run the Communist Party. Many see him as the sort of eminence gris, the great eminence, the intellectual advisor to Xi Jinping, and who has formulated a lot of the thought over there in the last 15 years. He was a professor and he spent two years traveling in America. Specifically, he spent most of the time in Iowa, actually, where I grew up. And he wrote this book called America Against America. and he was sort of describing the individualism and consumerism.

35:40And he's trying to paint this picture that, you know, the sort of the communist theory of history moving in one direction, that inevitably America would tear itself apart because of this, because of the consumerism, because of the individualism. On the other hand, his descriptions, especially of these rural Iowa towns, are amazing. He is absolutely floored to see these towns of 5 ,000 and 6 ,000 people that have functioning public libraries. He can't believe that these people in the small towns don't feel the need to leave because they have this sort of abundance. In China at that time, this would have been the 90s, they were still sort of in the throes of this industrialization coming out of this disaster of the 60s and 70s.

36:25And at that time, the only prosperous places in China that you could imagine are the cities. The countryside's a total calamity. And of course, the calamity in the countryside is sort of one of the defining things of China. Since the 30s, you have the disaster of Japanese imperialism, just a total carnage. And eventually, in the Chinese Civil War, this peasant revolt with the Communist Party eventually taking over. and then, you know, the villages falling apart during the Cultural Revolution, during the Great Leap Forward where they're smelting steel in backyards and turning farm implements into steel.

37:02It's this absolute craziness. 50 million people die in a famine. And so, you know, Wong Ho Ning, this intellectual who's now at the highest levels of the CCP, cannot believe that there's like rural prosperity in America and that people will, you know, send books to a library and take books from a library and put them back. So I give the long-winded example there because Wang Huning spent a decent effort to try to understand America. It was on his own terms. There are things about his history that are warped because of his ideology. But I don't think there's a correct answer for what you can learn from these societies.

37:40I think you just have to study them. You have to come to your own view at some point. But maybe my answer on China would be that I think there's this shared human story of people wanting to take their country into the spotlight and do great things. And I've never been to China. I've never been to Asia. I think it's evident to me that there are a lot of great Chinese builders and characters who are really interested in earning their spot at the table, so to speak. And that doesn't have to be a source of conflict, even where we have obvious sources of conflict that can't be denied. I don't think people should hate the idea of China wanting to be this prosperous commercial society.

38:39And there may even be a point that - It's a national ambition. It seems to be. Yeah. It seems to be. Whereas we nationally have ambition, but we have less national ambition, probably. Yeah. The image of the furnaces in the backyard during the Great Leap Forward, the image of the Chinese going to the factories, or the Charlie Munger comment about the South Koreans going to the auto factories for 90 hours a week. He said, you know, how couldn't you lose to these people? uh uh there's uh you know about the south koreans melting all their gold by the way to pay back the debt another version that's crazy i've never heard this one they i a friend of mine is uh he's south korean he was telling me i think it's his parents generation maybe like i'm sure i'm getting part of the facts wrong but like maybe the late or like 90s ish they had so much debt uh from like a unicef loan or something but they had so much national pride that all the people like took their jewelry and gave it to them and they were the first country in history to pay off the unicef loan purely off of the like individual citizens pride right um the the chinese are among the biggest uh individual savers in the world so americans are constantly in debt you know think of it it's one of the only countries in history where you have fixed rate long-term mortgages provided by banks the banks are backed up by the federal government this is this is unprecedented And so the American character is like, we're going to get a credit card.

40:12We're going to put some money on it. We're going to have a house. We're going to have a car. And the Chinese are like big savers. Yeah. Super spendthrifty. They do not want to like drop big amounts of money on stuff. You know, these behaviors are, these behaviors can change. And if you think about, you know, 1941 to 1945, when America is fighting a two front war, you have Liberty Gardens, you have the auto factories in Detroit turning into tank factories, you have a sort of society-wide mobilization, and then after the war, a society-wide mobilization that wasn't directed from the top to have children.

40:50The baby boom, again, it's one of the most sort of fascinating phenomena ever. And was it like a national identity or was it a personal identity that was like associated with the nation. I don't know how to like decide the difference between these two things. It's clear that any society can have like true mobilizations of the people. And sometimes it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My suspicion is that the Chinese ones tend to be more top down and the American ones tend to be more bottom up or emergent, but and maybe the difference between American ideology and Chinese ideology is that, you know, the American ideology, if you believe it, you have to believe that the bottom up stuff is more powerful because otherwise, why not be China?

41:36Yes, yes, yes, precisely. I think you and I, I'm making some assumptions here, but you write a pretty amazing magazine about progress. I think you and I are technology adjacent or technologists who are very pro progress. And that's a very common meme. Progress studies, there's a lot of things in this broader vein. I'm not sure that most Americans are actually that pro-progress, right? At least I'd be curious. Like, I think that's more of an open question. And so I guess partially my question would be like, what are your thoughts on that broadly? Do you agree? And then downstream that, if that's broadly right, how do we shift people towards more broadly?

42:17In many ways, we're like, I don't know if you've ever seen that weight, but why graph of like the arc of history and how much things change. And it's sort of like, at any given point, it sort of feels like things are changing a lot, but actually if you zoom out, it's kind of flat. And he theorizes that we actually might be finally like at the bend in the curve where things are about to just go like totally vertical and the future 10 years from now is gonna look nothing like the future five years ago. And so I guess with that in mind, this notion that actually we're about to rip up the progress curve, it seems pretty important to me that like we get the average Americans like buy-in on this.

42:52Yeah, it's very open-ended, but I'm curious what you think. I would even say that to get the average American's buy-in to amazing technology is basically one of the founding purposes of ARENA. And part of that mission is to explain, let's go back to the New York Times, like making fun of the flying professor or the not flying professor, rather. He was trying, you know, the advent of air travel totally changed everything. And then we could just, we could go down the line with air travel And I could give you a few great examples of it being totally upended. You know, first it did not exist. Then it existed.

43:30Then it goes into warfighting. Then it starts to get commercialized. One of the great stories of technological automation, United Airlines used to have literally thousands of ticket checkers. And these people were employed in big offices in Chicago and Houston. And before the computer systems were invented, and this was not until the 2000s that these things were functioning properly, they would literally check the tickets after the flights had taken place in order to verify who had boarded the flights. Oh, my gosh. So you have a pre-flight manifest and then you have the tickets. And so you're at the airport in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you've just sent a flight off to Denver.

44:07The ticket stubs that get ripped off the ticket get mailed from Santa Fe to Houston, where then these people check the tickets and they reconcile it. And so, you know, there's a great column in the Wall Street Journal from, you know, 2010 or so explaining this phenomenon, how United became an airline. And when you stop checking tickets, then you can have more flight attendants and you can have more pilots and you can be bigger. And so, you know, that's a classic example of the type of automation worries that some people are worried about with regard to AI, which is one of the big sort of alleged changes that's coming up.

44:41I happen to think that it's more a rhyme of history than a giant divergence. But, you know, think of what humans were doing 10 ,000 years ago. We were, you know, face down in the dirt. Yeah, Sam Altman has a recent essay where he talks about, like, even 100 years ago, if they looked at our jobs now, they'd say they're all playing games. Like, it's totally make-believe. I encountered some activists while I was at Stanford who were hosting this activist from India. It's been six or seven years now. Her name escapes me. But she is an anti-industrial agriculture activist. Okay. You know, we may have some romantic attachment to, you know, women and children tending the fields or doing homesteading or whatnot.

45:27I own a farm. I have a little apple orchard. There is a romantic quality to it. But what you're actually talking about, if we're against industrial agriculture, is forcing women and children to go work in fields all day, forcing them to break their backs. And this woman was an activist from India. In the global south, where you have, you know, almost 2 billion people who are trying to get above poverty and get into modernity, you know, who are we to say, you know, actually, there's something romantic. There's something sort of charming about, you know, farming by hand. So we're going to send you back to the fields and you're going to have to do that.

46:07You know, it's amazingly luxurious what we have. And so all of these attachments to, you know, the way things were previously done can usually be overcome. Even if you ask people on the street, they may not be in favor of it. Their demonstrated preference is utterly clear. Is there ever a time for looking back or trying to actively slow down? There's always a time for some people to do that, which is dialectic, going back and forth. You always need that in order to have progress. And so the, you know, the wrong tack for the go, go, go people would be to just try to to to utterly discredit the the the slow down people based on their let's go faster assumptions.

46:59What you actually need to do is switch the assumptions around and then argue against the other position. You need to accept the other person's premises, which is that they're worried about human meaning and they're worried about change. And so if you reject the premises, there's no hope of having an actual dialectic between the two disagreeing sides. If you can switch out your premises and understand the other person's, whether it's feelings or the values that they're sort of aiming toward or the type of future that they fear or that they want, then you can actually make an argument. And so, you know, yes, there's always a time for slowing down, but it's as part of a conversation.

47:45Maybe I think I largely agree. The cynical view would say, like, that's all neat and cute, but like the world isn't actually slowing down. So good luck. Well, I'm not sure that I agree. Technology seems often to be a runaway train. The AI stuff being a perfect example. There's so much AI safety discussion, yet everybody's just rampant like crazy. I think that there is a present times bias to think that things are more crazy now than they were. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure. I think I like 2025 more than I like 1945. in a lot of respects. And I think that our ancestors would be curious to hear that we think that it's going faster now.

48:31Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't think that that is a sufficient argument for a slowdown position. It actually has to be based on facts. It has to be based on sort of concrete observations about what could happen rather than a sort of generic... Like we're living through the craziest times. Well, you know, think of the sort of post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki coalescence of these nuclear scientists who are warning the world. That was not based on this idea that it's crazier than ever or these abstractions. It was actually based on super concrete facts and super concrete things. And so I think that all of these arguments, you know, if the argument is just that you need to listen to me because I know something about the future that you don't in some abstract way that like the present is moving faster than the past did.

49:25I don't think people are going to win arguments based on that. You need to remain very concrete. You need to explain how things affect both in the macro and the micro sense people's lives. With nuclear weapons, it's like the easiest argument in the world. This is why we need to restrict the development of nuclear energy and especially enriched uranium and plutonium to a certain group of states and have there be like a very strong relationship between the states where you have Russian and American military officers calling each other every single day throughout the Cold War. And you have, you know, Chinese nuclear officers who know all of the American nuclear officers.

50:02That was based on facts, not some abstraction. And so it worked. I think one of the mistakes that especially the, you know, whether it's the AI doomers or AI skeptics or whatever label they want for themselves I'm not interested in labeling them in a derogatory way, is that if it's too abstract, they're never going to win the argument. And so I don't really care about justice for their argument in some universal sense. I want them to get to the right argument for their own sake so that we can have the proper discussion. And I would much rather have arguments based on concrete points than sort of abstract judgments that like the present is so different from the past that we have to throw away the things that made us prosperous in the past, which was let's try it out.

50:52Chaining gears a little bit, talk about, you've written in a few different places about sort of the bleeding together of tech culture and American culture. You have a line about sort of, at least in the 2010s, tech culture sort of aspiring to be above and without American culture. You go on to say tech, like other institutions, decided to be disloyal to the country in the 2010s, control the population, censor them, not cooperate with the military, and build a bubble to ascend. There's a lot more to go to, but is that specific bit a byproduct of tech's growing power in the 2010s across institutions, or is it something else?

51:32I think it's something that naturally happens in both cultural bubbles and sort of ascendant areas is they think, again, it sort of goes back to this idea about one way trends that things never change, which is like when Silicon Valley became this like takeoff thing, the idea that they were going to like rule every other element of things. I happen to love Mark Zuckerberg, but like the tour right after 2016 to like tour the country was the most like naive thing in this regard, because even the like concession to the rest of the country, which is that, yes, you like totally slapped us across the face by putting Trump in the White House was this idea that like that he was going to go tour around and whatnot, a trip to America like he was a foreign exchange student or something.

52:21And so I think it's just a plain observation that every once in a while, these places, whether it's Wall Street in the 2000s or Silicon Valley in the 2010s, can do things that end up, you know. And for what it's worth, I'm very concerned that the backlashes to these things will be genuinely bad for the society that does them. So like, you know, you have some nonsense on Wall Street in the 2000s, no doubt. But there are a lot of cases that I've read that I'm persuaded by that Dodd-Frank, the reaction to it was genuinely bad in a way that we can't even comprehend because we don't know what would have happened.

52:59Opportunity cost and all these other and all these other things. And so my goal is to not have this sort of, you know, huge backlash to tech narcissism by basically saying we're going to enjoin you from doing anything. And I think that that is the constant risk. And, you know, technology is full of people who are super talented and able to accomplish really dazzling things. There is a temptation to believe that they can do things like control public opinion or persuade people in like a lazy way that just never works. Like there is always the risk that someone else is making a better argument than you.

53:39And it doesn't matter how talented you are. And you have to actually, again, get on people's level, accept their premises, and then argue against the conclusions. because if the premises are totally different, like we don't care at all about the American military or whatnot, then it's like there's no possibility of an argument. I think that that sentence in particular was sort of commenting about the idea that like all we're going to do is build social media and we're absolutely never going to partner with the government even if there's a democracy. It's icky. Because it's sort of like not exactly, but kind of.

54:15And it wasn't even some, you know, crazy right wing government. This was the Department of Defense of President Obama and Google declaring based on the value judgments of its employees that they would absolutely never build software so that our commander in chief could protect the country. and that was like a it's a i call it a cultural bubble because they believed that there was like no cost to that they believed that that was something that was like and and almost where where are we where where where were you nine years later you have the sort of absurd spectacle of tim cook sundar pichai jeff bezos zuckerberg all standing behind the president-elect donald trump at his second inauguration.

55:05And that was like a crazy mirror image of the other version of it. That's a really great point. So like Bezos, and I don't think that Bezos was like particularly involved in this decision at the time, Amazon like not doing defense stuff. Or at that time, I guess Larry was still running Google. Google declaring that they're not going to help with the drone projects. And then literally nine years later, Sanabar Chai is like standing behind Trump at the inauguration. That may have been too aggressive a correction, but it was like, get out of your bubble quick. Yeah. Get out of it quickly. Yeah. This was, by the way, this is the cost of this.

55:38This was the cost of being in that crazy bubble. And same thing with this, you know, you know, there's this populist desire to say that like social media needs to be like regulated in some special way. I actually think that that's untrue. I think that the effects of, you know, first of all, if not a single like academic consensus can actually find like damages in this area when they're extremely motivated to find them, then that's the first thing that people should look at. You have entire psychology departments, entire sociology departments at these left-wing universities where they're predisposed to hate entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg.

56:17If they can't find a statistically significant effect in their own biased studies trying to paint social media as being damaging to children and teens, then that's the first piece of sort of, wow, they can't even find it. What do you think? I don't want to go too far on a tangent here, but what do you think about all the kind of seeming, like, just all the evidence that young people are more depressed, more lonely, more blah, blah, blah, like. Yeah. So I think it's, again, I think it's one of these, I think it's one of these one-way trends that turns out to not be true when you look at things in the fullness of time.

56:48Also, just anecdotally, I and everyone I know feel this. We, like, we all are like, I want to be less. This thing doesn't make me happy. I want to be on it less and I don't know what to do. Yeah. You know, we had a temperance movement in the United States. We banned alcohol as a constitutional amendment for a decade. Again, I think that there's a present-time bias. And, you know, people were drafted to be sent to Vietnam in the 60s. Could it be that there is right now this bowling alone trend where there's more atomization? Yes, absolutely. And I think that we have to actually think about like, you know, positivist, positive action oriented solutions to it rather than trying to trying to trying to trying to make, you know, technological restrictions.

57:43I think that's questionable. And I, you know, I love the Tyler Cowen cut on it, which is obviously for people that are interested in it, the internet can be like a big connector. and the problem with any sort of rule is how do you write rules where it doesn't punish sort of the good actors and the people who can contain them, constrain themselves, but that also protects the people with lack of impulse control or whatnot, which is why we have restrictions on gambling or alcohol or whatnot. It's like, how do you write the rule in such a way where it doesn't like put down people that are strivers and that are really looking to excel?

58:25And I think that most of the like restriction-based approaches fail in this regard. So, like, there's a desire to get rid of standardized testing because it does not advantage the lower 40 % of the totem pole, basically. It's really, really good for undiscovered talent, especially in rural areas or poor families, who can do well on a standardized test. And so, you know, there's a desire to restrict it or pretend like it's some sort of problem. I think we have to look at things in a really full way and consider the evidence. And with the social media thing in particular, the evidence is mixed at best.

59:08And there are so many counterexamples to it that all arise from things that are what I would call positive. Meaning that they're like, they're things, they're reasons why people believe in things or whatnot. There are all sorts of cultural things that are very interesting to people that they do gather around for and that you still have these communal things. And you need people to be constantly doing those things rather than trying to restrict the other things. That's just my belief. Totally. But it's also like China's trying to ban video games or whatnot. I just don't think that you can control behavior like this.

59:43I think you've got to give people better options. And that would be the real crisis that I see is like a lack of interest in starting these things, rather than pinning the blame on Facebook, I'd rather look at like, why don't we like do more of this? Much of the answer you just gave rhymes with the argument Nadia makes in the piece she wrote for the first issue of Arena on comparing sort of smartphones and guns. She makes this excellent point, I think. She's talking about sort of like gun owners. She says, while the national debate likes to portray the use of firearms as fundamentally irresponsible, the biggest safety gun advocates are, in my experience, gun enthusiasts themselves.

1:00:20And she sort of makes this case for like, if Silicon Valley wants to, by the way, be at like the big boys table, it needs to have, it needs to be more accountable for its implications across a whole range of things. Meaning it very well might be, I don't want to over-focus on the smartphone example. In the smartphone example, though, it might be that you're right. We need more optimistic solutions. It seems that most technologists are sort of like, yeah, I don't let my kid have an iPad, but like otherwise not so concerned. And there's almost a broader, there's a broader Silicon Valley sort of thing that like hand waves, like UBI stuff.

1:00:54When Sam and Dario talk about UBI, yeah, well, like this is going to be crazy and there's probably just going to be UBI at some point. Like there's almost a hand waving of the accountability on it. Yeah. I mean, when they say things like that, it's like they should be, they should be dragged to like a high school gym and I'll give them a lecture for like 14 hours about how to talk to normal people and not make yourself like the most hated person on the earth. Which at any given time, Dario and Sam, both of whom I respect, could be based on the things that they're flirting with. Yeah, just to concretize this, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, like I guess the root of my question is like, it seems very important that technology leaders are going to have to figure out how to not say, not communicate, like get on the train or it'll be left behind and instead communicate like, here's an outstretched hand and like we are going to go somewhere together.

1:01:41Like, what is it going to take for them to be able to do that? It's our hope that we can help, because I happen to think it's true, actually, that it's possible to do this. Yeah, you have to get out of the bubble. And, you know, I don't think that they're going to be attending presidential inaugurations much more. But I think there's going to have to be a, like, I think that that's where you get accountability from. You just have to go find people. I don't think it would be— Isn't that what Mark did in 2016?

1:02:12Yes. He didn't listen to them that time was maybe the bigger issue, which is that like you had all these technology companies that are sort of hand waving to the conservatives in 16, 17, 18, 19. they're still sort of like hostile and then you know 2020 they like are like the arch censors uh during covid which was a time when it really like affected people and the like the two classic stories being like censorship of the idea that it came out of like the lab and then like the stuff during the election uh that was like that was like what what re-collapsed the the the trust if you actually believe that the other side has something to say, then you might actually be able to learn something.

1:02:56I think the problem is if you don't believe it and you're just hand-waving, then that would be the thing. As for, like, the gun enthusiast, the phone enthusiast or whatnot, I'm not in love with, like, five-year-olds on iPads at restaurants. This sort of goes back to the point, how do you write rules for a society in such a way where the people who are not following the rules are not going to, like, cause a bunch of chaos? So like parents who give their kids iPads at the restaurant or whatnot, it's like, okay, maybe, maybe the expectation should be a little bit different because this is clearly causing some negative effects that are externalities.

1:03:31The kids not socializing properly or whatnot. Across the board, there's no macro evidence that, that, that these things that people are allegedly, you know, that are allegedly happening are actually happening in a statistical, statistically significant way. It could literally be anything. It could be what we call wokeness or political correctness. It could be the fact that we have political chaos. It could be some other thing. And it's really difficult to get to specific answers in these overdetermined areas. Especially on a short-time horizon. On a short-time horizon, especially. But with like the gun and phone thing, if we're so against the, you know, iPad kid at the restaurant booth, I'm not willing to take that and translate it into, I don't want to let a 19-year-old be discovered on the internet for programming talent or something.

1:04:28And there's clearly something hugely liberating and that flattens the field of opportunity. Greatest Leveron agency ever. Exactly. And so you have to be able to see it. When Tyler was interviewing Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the It's the Phones book, basically, one of the funny things that he suggested, and I have no idea whether he's right about this, but it was like the type of out-of-the-box thinking that Tyler's great for. And the totally confused Haidt was, you know, aren't the kids just going to have the AIs scroll TikTok for them at some point? and Haidt had never considered this. And it's like, maybe it's stupid, maybe it's genius, I don't know.

1:05:10And he compared it to when the Aztecs learned how to nishtimalize corn. Nishtimal comes from the Nahuatl language, and when they added lime, the chemical, to corn, that's how you can turn it into masa. And so like a corn tortilla has been nishtimalized, and so then it's purely, it's totally digestible. And so that's how you can turn corn into a staple food. and the aztecs just figured this out and it's like yeah these five-year-olds of tomorrow are going to be so much better equipped for the dopamine hijacking than we are so it's so it's like again to assume that like it's almost like uh you know this this physics-based fallacy with history uh an object in motion tends to stay in motion that's not true at all with these historical things and you know people assume that trends are always going to yeah and then they're shocked, utterly shocked when things turn around.

1:06:04I love the like, you know, this great, this, this hilarious book from the mid 2000s, the emerging democratic majority, which was literally the like demographic shifts are going to permanently enshrine the democratic party as like the majority party in the United States. And then, you know, oopsie doopsie Trump wins every single border County in Texas. And they're all 80 % Mexican American. These one way trends do not continue uh you know no no no kingdom lasts forever and it's sort of the it's sort of the the the classic narcissistic flaw to believe that you are an object in motion yeah you're special yeah or or not even that you're special that something that you are associated with in some way is special yeah um well we're all narcissists yeah and that's not necessarily like a it's not like a a moral failing it's sort of a classic human yes yes yes but it's it's amazing how much this continues to come up in the conversation and it's it's it's a it's a clarifying point what before part of the reason why i'm so obsessed with it is just because the like political example is the one that has been like the most top of mind for a lot of the people that i have known in my life yeah who people who cannot cope with the idea that like trump became president or the fact that trump lost in 2020 or the fact that he won again and it's like and it's like pendulum here it goes and and and this is and you know because america is so important to me this one is very front of mind which is that like you know i plan to you know hopefully live to 2100 or maybe a little bit beyond there's going to be a lot of people who do a lot of things and things are going to change around a lot and if you are like egg on your face every single time and making these like bold predictions or whatnot it's not it's not going to be a sort of pleasant uh you know trajectory I cut you off slightly as you were making this point, so I'd love to give you a chance to speak on it one more time, would be if you were going to give advice to Sam and Dario who are doing a lot of what you just described, oh my gosh, everything's going to be crazy.

1:08:06Yeah, what would you tell them? I would not communicate in any way that you're like somewhat open to humanity going away. That's the first one. So it's like no ambivalence about existence. um i think they've done a decent job of that maybe no no they have yeah this is some of the others have it but this is the like this is like the number one piece of advice though because i think the more the more intellectualized one starts to get about these ai issues right right like the more the more people have like written and thought about ai it tends to approach that they're that they're more ambivalent about existence yes i mean even even elon talks about how he thinks that, you know, maybe man evolved to get the silicon out of the earth to build the super intelligence or whatnot.

1:08:52Okay, that's the first one. No, like, freaky shit. But then the second one is that there shouldn't be judgment about people's fear. You should actually turn it around and talk about, like, what are the things that are important to them that are not currently being considered? So I'll give sort of an out of the blue example, maybe, which is that like. I'm somewhat sympathetic, sympathetic to Hillary Clinton's statements in 2016 that the coal mines did not need to be opened forever. I'm extremely in favor of maximal energy production, including fossil fuels. And I don't care at all about using natural gas and petroleum to power our society.

1:09:36I think that in the case of coal, there was like a pretty clear argument that, you know, it was really affecting people's health, especially the people who were mining the coal. And Hillary did a god-awful job of communicating it because her big message was like, we're putting you out of business. And that was like the exact wrong thing to do. And it backfired massively in these places that she needed to win, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, three big coal states. the argument could have been instead like you know and and and the two sort of opportunities that were being presented to the coal miners at various points were to go work on clean energy windmills which are also uh you know you know not not it's better than it's better than coal in many respects for the for the for the air but it's environmentally questionable in other ways and not like easy work compared to coal either or that they were going to like be software engineers And so it was like, learn to code or go work on green energy.

1:10:35And both of these were sort of dismissive of the premises of these people's lives, which is that they had derived identity from being in the coal towns. On the other hand, like, it was really damaging to their health. And so, like, there is a there's like an argument that there's a there's a humane thing that we need to do, which is to, like, create better opportunities. It does not rhyme with, you know, we're going to send you to some other lofty project or whatnot. Yeah. Or that you're going to learn to code, you idiot, basically. And so how I would communicate it is like, think of the opportunity.

1:11:12What if we solved traffic? What if you didn't have to spend an hour of your life or more in traffic in some of these cities? That's the promise of autonomy at scale. What if every child could have an amazing tutor? and what if we could have, you know, really positive medical discoveries or whatnot. I think one of the ways in which, you know, in Sam's blogs or Dario's blogs, they're sort of always struggling to get to the concrete things that are good. And it's like, you know, Sam, you know, talking about like how the next GPTs will like influence like scientific discoveries or whatnot. That is itself sort of an abstraction that should be avoided.

1:11:56Right. You can just talk about things that are already good, things that are amazing. What about alpha school? What about, you know, what about what about these sort of, you know, opportunities for for kids or the self-driving thing? And, you know, focusing on the things that already are is like a really good way to make people optimistic about the future, not to promise things that are going to be difficult to falsify or difficult to recognize. Or just abstract your earlier point. They're just like they're not concrete in any way. Yeah. So directional things are going to improve. It's sort of the same.

1:12:30It's sort of the same reason why, like, the climate, like, alarmist argument failed. It was because like there were all these like crazy predictions or whatnot and they did not really talk about people's lives. Yes. They failed to recognize like the like immense importance of energy in people's lives. And they lost the argument because ultimately we were going to want more energy regardless of the environmental stuff. And that it turned out that the demand for energy was going to push us into areas where we're going to look to cut costs. And so then we did things like like batteries. space and and so it was the like rejection of the premise that like what you care about matters at all that prevented the people like al gore from making a sound argument it will prevent like the ai people will not be able to make a sound argument unless they are willing to like deal with the actual premises of the other side and i hate to call it the other side it's not this it doesn't need to be this like oppositional thing the regular people out there it's almost everyone else it's almost everyone else yeah um there's a there's a world in which that's well and you know there are definitely some ai people who are like you know if you're doing anything else like what yeah and that is it reminds me of the old uh john updike saying which is that the the mark of the true new yorker is that he has to believe that anyone living anywhere else is in some sense kidding it's just it's just a joke if you don't live in manhattan uh it's like it's a joke if Got that more or less once or twice.

1:13:55It's a joke if you're not working on AI. It's like, oh, you must be kidding if you're like, you know, working on any other thing. It's a deeply self-oriented frame more than anything else to your point. Like the true New Yorker. It's like the, you know, again, everything rhymes with history. Homer in the Odyssey thousands of years ago describing the island of the Lotus Eaters. This is the place where you go and you never want to leave. So, and then again, it's like, It's back to the story of assuming that trends always continue and that no one can stop you. And it's like, I don't know if you've read about the Waymo testing that's allegedly happening in Manhattan and Brooklyn next month.

1:14:35It's going to be eight Waymo cars with no passengers and a driver. So there's a driver. I thought we were getting Waymo soon. So there's a driver and no passengers. And it was like, you know, I don't think I don't think Google ever thought that, like, you know, the New York taxi union was going to be a big player in their like technological supremacy. One of my big things that I've been saying, and I'm saying it sort of tongue in cheek right now because I need to think a little bit more about the evidence. But I've been saying that, like, I think the FBI director is more powerful than like the AGI CEO.

1:15:10The FBI director just like sends an agent to the to the AGI CEO's house and nabs him. And there are all these unexpected things that can happen. And, you know, that one is, again, it's sort of a joke. But, like, the New York Taxi Union is going to remain a very powerful factor in, like, our technological lives. And rural congressmen and sort of vanity-obsessed senators and teacher unions. Like, the areas in which, like, AI is, like, least likely to penetrate are these areas where there are these, you know, sort of political forces that are so powerful. where it's just like a... And they're not even necessarily powerful in terms of what they can do, but they're definitely powerful in what they can stop from happening.

1:15:52Yeah, yeah. And so that's like, you know, I think that we will have like total technological penetration in certain areas and then there will be certain areas where it's like, I mean, I saw, you know, I mean, like the people in the Northeast might not realize that like there are hundreds and hundreds of Waymos operating in most of the cities in Texas and Arizona and Nevada. This is a, you know, my house here in Austin is a quiet little street and there are 20, 30 Waymos every single night. And I can hear the, I can hear the hum of the Jaguar EV engine and it's all right there. And so maybe it's the, I forget who originally said this, but you know, the future is just sort of unevenly distributed.

1:16:36Yeah. You've talked about sort of the export of Silicon Valley culture towards other parts of America, largely in the context of the Alex Karp book that came out earlier this year. A quote from you, tech culture is the city on a hill version of what the American culture broadly should be, which is empowered citizens who can take risks, be accountable to the risk, but get the outsized returns of the risk. And then in the Karp review, you say, software dominance was grown in a culture that empowered individuals, not always to be their most individualistic self, but extremely effective individuals within in collective enterprises.

1:17:10Silicon Valley lets talented people feel like empowered citizens in, quote, tiny nations. And there's one last bit of this, also coming from the CARP ideas. Empiricism is most possible in an engineering culture. They reason, Alex and his co-writer, because of the concreteness of the work. It either functions or it doesn't. There's nowhere to hide. They zero in our connection between sensitivity results and the abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be the core value is pragmatism at Palantir. All right, we'll take one and two. The first is tiny nations. Yeah. And this is the Alexis de Tocqueville observation about America.

1:17:47There are a bunch of tiny nations, whether they're city councils or businesses, where you have these citizens who are uniquely engaged in these things. Yeah. And so there is this individualism, but the way that we channel the individualism is to like participate in these other things. Yes. So the example in Silicon Valley that is most classic is the description of first Shockley Semiconductor, then Fairchild Semiconductor, then Intel. These are like the sequence by which Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and the other sort of forefathers create this Silicon Valley culture. So in Intel, Robert Noyce, who'd grown up in a small town in the Midwest, insisted that everyone have the same size desk, that the executives not have office doors that closed.

1:18:37And this came from sort of a congregationalist outlook that he had gotten growing up. And this was all documented by Tom Wolfe in a great Esquire magazine piece about Noyce, the tinkerings of Robert Noyce, how the sun rose on the Silicon Valley. And you see the sort of the Silicon Valley. At that point, it was sort of still this like strange phenomenon rather than something that we take for granted. And so Intel is like the classic example where Noyce had all of these like superheroes working for him. And you think about the cost if all of those people were in different places. Actually, how you get the uniquely valuable trillion dollar businesses is like all of these people in one place owning a slice of the company and, you know, relentlessly executing.

1:19:28Intel was one of the first, you know, enterprises to offer option-based stock compensation. You know, this is another Silicon Valley invention. And so, like, it's difficult to think of a more classic example of, like, the empowered— I think there was a legal thing. I think there was a regulatory thing, too, that actually enabled that around that time. It may very well have been. California is also the like one jurisdiction in the world that happened to outlaw the enforcement of non-compete agreements. And this and this came out of all sorts of gangbusters. This came out of all sorts of random things in like the early 1900s.

1:20:06It was a total coincidence. Yeah. And so, you know, the the the idea of these companies as tiny nations, you have a leader who's like noise, who is like deeply enmeshed with the so-called citizenry of the country. his employees, where they can talk to one another, they can be frank with one another. Wolf describes the meetings where everyone was expected to speak if he or she had something to say, and Noyce would sit there. And when he spoke, everyone knew that he was in charge, but he would take anything from anyone. He would take criticism or whatnot. And there's something beautiful about that where everyone has a voice, everyone is a citizen, and then there's a leader.

1:20:45And so that's the CARP example of like, that's the like inspiring technology culture. And part of the reason why Silicon Valley is like flying high is because you have lots of these empowered citizens working in these enterprises. It's really inspiring to work for 30 years at NVIDIA. And also you're worth, you know, 80 million or a billion at the end of it. Is the Alex Karp or Jensen or the classic hero, amazing, unique, Zuck, Elon type, like, is that absolutely foundationally important for this to be possible? Well, I think that the cultures and institutions have a way of shaping the leaders, sometimes in an unexpected way.

1:21:27I'm not sure if people would have picked Noyce out of a crowd to be like one of the great leaders. Yeah, I'm not sure that I'm not sure that that would be the case either with Elon or Karp. Elon is like extremely autistic, extremely technical. Like, is he going to be like the person to like do the right of the reherem with like tens of thousands of engineers to work on the most difficult problems ever? Yeah, like let's let's launch a rocket and let's have it do a backflip or land on land on a drone boat. Yes. And so I don't think that these things are like set from the beginning. Daniel Ackman made this point a few years ago.

1:22:00It was something I read. He's like, what if Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg by way of building Facebook? Yeah. Like the causality is in the other direction. Just study his behavior as an undergraduate at Harvard and then like ask yourself, like, is this like a person who's going to be like a chief executive officer? Yeah. Yeah. Nothing is set in stone. People change. There's obviously there is something, some quality that they have. it's just like a mojo though it's not it's not it's not a you know they've had it from the beginning yes they change obviously at the very least what you're capturing in that is a founder orientation and i guess the root the root question i was going to ask is like how do we export more of this clearly people are thinking about exporting this to government yeah whether it be explicitly doge or other things you even referenced somewhere you were i think you were talking about kodak in the Brian Schimpf article, the CEO of Anderoll, he said, like, they forget how to do the basics.

1:22:59Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does it look like for some of this cultural, Silicon Valley engineering culture to actually get exported if you can't, there's no new founder in the government. There's no new founder of Kodak or big, dumb, slow company. How does it, like, people even say Satya Nadella refounded Microsoft and that's when it's enabled him to be so effective. Yeah, I mean, you could maybe say that, like, Microsoft is a bit of a theseus's ship that's been rebuilt yeah uh where what are they what are they still doing that they were doing back back then it's like okay they still make some you know they make they make windows uh like excel they make excel excel is probably like the through line and then it's like they have the cloud business you know they did the foray into phones it totally blew up it didn't work at all by leaving that the joke ended up being on apple because microsoft built this other huge business that Apple wasn't even paying attention to.

1:23:52So the point about like a Kodak or why government is different from Silicon Valley and why some of the Silicon Valley people misapprehend how the government works is actually related to this idea of an engineering culture and of a sort of concrete things are easier to prove or disprove its results. And so - Look at the data. So it sort of is tied in also with the idea of the frontier, where you're really testing out whether things are or are not working. Joe Lonsdale and I have written about the sort of this conception of the frontier in American history, trying to connect, and maybe some people will be skeptical of this connection, but I'll try to persuade them, of literal cowboy culture and this sort of spirit of technological experimentation.

1:24:43So on the old frontier, you know, if you don't have your wits about you, you get shot, you get scalped, you get eaten by hyenas. There are lots of things that happen. And so that's like a point that people who are adventurers, if they survive, they turn out stronger on the other end. And the ideas that they're sort of proving out on the frontier tend to be very resilient, tend to be very long lasting. They tend to be people or ideas that can solve new types of problems. And so, you know, maybe there's a connection between the fact that California is this Pacific frontier. It's over the mountains.

1:25:22There's these valleys. There's this coast. It's the energy of the West. It's the energy of the West. And then the other idea that Joe and I talk about is that the opposite of the frontier is the core. And so in any sort of empire or civilization, you have a core and a frontier. And it's a dialectic. They're both very important. You need the core to set the laws and give cohesiveness and unity. And you need the frontier to push. It's like pace layers, like the fashion and the culture or the nature layers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's a dialectic and they need to remain in balance.

1:25:53And a country or a civilization or some sort of other organization can drift a little bit more toward the frontier, which is basically like the United States from, let's call it 1789, when Washington becomes president all the way until like 1861 when the Civil War starts. It's just like expand, expand, expand, expand. And then it was like a little too frontier-y. And then we forgot all the, oh shit, like the core is on fire, Civil War, et cetera. I think one of the arguments that we'd say right now is that America has been a little too heavy on the core. Washington DC is now the richest place in the universe.

1:26:30Like the suburbs of Washington are the wealthiest place in the world. It's like the craziest thing. You have all these laws piling up, all these federal employees, all this bureaucracy. And like that is clearly not being like battle tested like things are at the frontier. There's no possible way for there to be like a natural way for government programs to go away. Like there's no natural churn. Yeah. Where's the natural churn? They're not forced to fight for their survival. Now there are some things that are different, obviously. But if you can apply these principles of like competition and the frontier and, you know, the Karl Popper idea of like falsifiability, if something's not falsifiable, it's not science.

1:27:11It's like we should be trying to be more scientific or have a more engineering mindset. And so for that reason, I'm very pro-Doge. There are some things that were more just sort of political reforms rather than like trying to implement an engineering culture. But I think that one thing that the critics of Doge got wrong is that they were never going to accept any cuts. As soon as the cuts got concrete, then it was going to be on the attack. And, you know, the sort of conceit with Doge, which Karp does not talk about in the book. The book was actually written before 2024. It's obviously like the example of like, can we apply this mindset?

1:27:50You know, Joe Jebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, has just been announced as the chief design officer of the United States. and they're clearly going to, in a way that should be, it may not be, less offensive to political objectors, you know, implement these ideas in various areas of the government, which is like, is there objectively a better way to design a website? The government says no. It's just like, let's pay someone to do it. Silicon Valley says yes, there's an objective way to do it and this is why we have$70 billion and you don't. Because there was something provably, falsifiably true about it.

1:28:23You would know if we were bullshitters because it wouldn't work. And it's like in the government, there's no such competing pressure. There are no hyenas. There are no Comanches coming to rip your hair off. Yes. And so, you know. Yeah, you don't have the almost paranoia of the frontier. The paranoia of the frontier. And I think that there's something like, you know, maybe closely connected to Elon's erratic personality, which is that he's repeatedly taken these things to the utter limit, to the edge of the abyss. and that is where you can learn, call in the troops. That's where you can really learn and it sort of goes back to the like, you know, blowing up the rocket was more valuable to Elon than the people in the core could possibly know because he was testing something at the edges of what's possible, which is where you get to falsifiable results.

1:29:13Is this working? Is it not? That's the engineering culture. And, you know, there were some reasons politically why Elon was unpopular with some of these people. Like, could there have been a doge without, like, some of the more partisan elements? Yes. And maybe it would have worked better. But, like, part of the reason why there's such a hatred of doge and the idea of it and the hit pieces on the young men who are working on it in a very democratic fashion where it's, you know, the White House, which was democratically elected and Congress is doing these different things. There's always going to be a negative reaction to these things from the established set if it threatens them.

1:29:50And that's a natural human emotion. I'm not necessarily attacking that. Sometimes there's going to be a pendulum swing and people need to accept it. Speaking of Karp, I read the New York Times profile on him probably around this time last year or something like that. You wrote something that reminded me a bit of it. You wrote, At the risk of oversimplifying a complex thinker, I would call Karp a classical liberal and a left-aligned civic nationalist. It's that civic nationalist part that puts him at odds with the dominant activist part of the capital LF today. And to many ears would make him sound right wing.

1:30:25He insists quite credibly that he is not. A great few sentences, I have to say. Excellent. My reaction, I was blown away by that piece. And the most interesting part about it to me was that it was very clear that Alex Karp is the type of person that I could not tell you what his views on one topic were if I knew his topics, his views on another topic. I'm curious if you know other people like this and what types of traits are common among them. I mean, most important example in the world right now is probably Trump. That's not what I was expecting. Yeah. I mean, just think about the 2016 election where, you know, nothing in like the Trump ideology could be classically mapped on to like one side.

1:31:11I see. The fact that he like the fact that he hates NAFTA. Can you then predict his opinion on the minimum wage or on tax cuts or on legal immigration or on illegal immigration or whatnot? It was all over the place. And so I think that that's like by far the most important example of that. Maybe he's gotten a little more solidified within the right wing since. But he was genuinely like all over the place in 16. yeah I guess my critique there would be like I feel like he was just winging it Karp feels a little bit more principled in his range but Trump is not principled but he's this is going to sound ironic he's kind of steady in in some of these views that have existed for a long time he was clearly always pretty pro-choice he was clearly always against mass immigration and especially against illegal immigration that sort of picked up in the 90s and 2000s, he was taking out a full page ad in the New York Times in the 80s, criticizing Reagan liberalizing trade with the rest of the Americas.

1:32:10And so that was like a 30 year continuity of criticizing the trade deals where it wasn't just that was not winging it. There are obvious Trump's winging everything in certain respects. But there are some things that he said for a long time that are that are classic examples of that, like political unpredictability. because if you had like, if you had told, if you had said that he hated NAFTA, that would also mean that he wants to raise taxes. Right. These things are bundled. What about amongst the people who are, who have this trait and are, at least as I seem to be assessing, CARB to be like quite principled.

1:32:47Because I think that very principled people maybe are, maybe these go together, I'm not sure, but it seems that most people, even if they seem to be quite principled in some areas, the tidal wave just kind of carries them with the bundle of other associated views? I think about the way that the popes have discussed things like abortion. There's clearly been like a wave, especially in Catholic intelligentsia circles, like liberalizing on abortion or whatnot. And you hear someone like the late Pope Francis, who extremely liberal on issues of of migration and even on certain parts of the sort of LGBT discussion, you know, talk about abortion in a way that would totally floor like the average Democratic voter or liberal or pro-choice person talking about it in more concrete terms than even some like right wing American politicians.

1:33:45So that would be like a classic example of like an institution that, for obvious reasons, has the power to, like, assert its principles over some sort of societal shift. Yes, yes, yes. Not always the case. There are certainly times when the papacy or the church or the Vatican have fallen to these things or whatnot, but it definitely is, like, one of those areas. And if you can just sort of, like, pick out the pope as an individual, there's someone with like the the power to assert principle over other things and maybe other examples you know every once in a while Gorbachev you have certain characters it requires a strong personality or temperament in order to in order to do that even at the small scale even at like you know saying something unpopular in like a dinnertime conversation yeah yeah and then it's like imagine like you know dissolving your country you know imagine that that's that's the gorbachev example it's the type of person who can do that that that would maybe be like a like a like a support of the idea that like there was always something in like a zuckerberg or like a musk or whatnot this like action-oriented thing it's just that it might not reveal itself until the right time or it's getting amplified to an extreme degree with or it only or it only came out because of that necessity or whatnot like you know jimmy carter could have stayed a peanut farmer.

1:35:13He managed to become the president. Like, you know, what is that that like turned it on? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's a really interesting question. You brought up Gorbachev. I wanted to ask a couple of questions about capitalism, which I would say you are a big advocate of, to say the least. This is you. For me, my basic definition of capitalism, the one rule of capitalism, you're not allowed to kill your counterparty. And I think that this is the one thing that distinguishes it from all the other systems about capitalism by saying the one rule is you can't kill your counterparty you have to negotiate yeah why is this such an important idea well um you know mostly to avoid mass killing uh that's the um i i happen to love this definition i think it's one of the better things i'd never that i've come out i think you said that on um jim's podcast i think it was so i should write it down at some point because you know for millennia if if i want this other thing that you have it's just like i go and you know kill and rape and pillage the village or whatnot this is like the the way to advance your station in like a in like a in like warring societies or whatnot and this is not to always defend like everything that happens in a certain system which is usually what like the capital l left meaning like the hardcore activist types want to make the argument about like do you defend every single thing that happens?

1:36:37Do you defend insurance companies denying claims? And it's like, yes, because I would much rather have that than the commissar deciding, like, I'm going to kill you. The insurance company has to negotiate over it. They had to agree with you in advance about how this was going to play out. And if you disagree with them, then you can go to a court. And while a court is not like expressly part of capitalism it is sort of practice it is yeah it's like it can capitalism can only emerge in a system where you can go to a judge yeah think about like um hong kong like all the all the all the judges in hong kong were trained in british style law schools they all knew that like even if like someone's pressuring you to do something you have to you know rule according to the law.

1:37:24And that's like a blessing that people take for granted. Um, so in capitalism, it's like, you know, you get to negotiate with the insurance company upfront in a system where there's no such negotiation. It's just, you know, it's every, it's everything that eventually leads toward murder. It's the sort of derivatives of it. So it's like, if we, you know, have a dispute with this other group of people, we go to war. And if I don't like the price of your object that you're selling, you're good, we just threaten you. And it is a intentional simplification. You don't pay me back, I'm gonna kill you.

1:38:05You don't pay me back, I'm gonna kill you. It is an intentional simplification to say that like the one rule of capitalism is I'm not allowed to kill you. But that's ultimately what it comes down to. Because if you believe that people are free to negotiate, then you've then then you have right there the reason why it's bad to murder is because you can negotiate if you don't have to negotiate ah it's like if that person is just wrong then like obviously third option yeah it's like obviously if like if someone is like trying to like vote against communism like if you don't have to negotiate with them then of course you have to kill them because otherwise they're going to they're going to kill you the last like you know circle of this is there's always inherent suspicion of like people making agreements with one another.

1:38:49And this is one of the things that like the capitalists always have to defend. The like most devastating examples are like the person making the deal with the insurance company or whatnot, or loans, uh, banks and whatnot. Yes. And with a bank, like, just think about it. Like they have to negotiate with you. They have to like establish this rate or whatnot. Whereas like you have like some like irish mafia bookie it's like you get in debt to him uh he kills you if you don't pay him back and that is like that is like the logic of all these non-capitalist systems is that violence can ultimately be an answer whether it's uh right expelling people from the country putting them in concentration camps like they do in north korea taking away their liberty taking away their right to make money on something you you must lose money on this it's like sometimes it's metaphorical killing they're all yeah yeah i mean like i don't particularly care you know to argue with someone about whether the like great leap forward was mass murder i think when there are like x people alive here and then like x minus 50 million people alive 10 years later because of what you did like you know i'm not here to argue about the definition there can be like degrees of killing and uh the other you know the the system that we call socialism or Marxism or communism tends to, you know, especially in the last century, result in quite a lot of it.

1:40:12You have an excellent piece on the grocery store and Gorbachev in defending capitalism. A few lines from that that I like. Deciding that the basics like this might have actually been from somewhere else, but you say deciding that the basics like food and energy shouldn't be profitable is a certain recipe for a shortage of those basics, which is great. Some people are still very offended by the idea of people making decisions, which I think is wrapped up in a lot of what you just said. There's a lot more I could read. I think the root question I have is... I'd love to do a brief comment on that.

1:40:38Please, please. So there's this idea that like, okay, if you're like a luxury car salesman, you should be able to make money on that. But for fundamentals that matter to people, let's not make money on those. Let's just do them as charities or whatnot. That is the thing that is the most wrong. If anything, my ideal world would be to have higher margins on grocery stores and higher luxury taxes on like Mercedes sales or whatnot. Because you need to be more capitalistic. You need to be brutally capitalistic and brutally sort of orthodox about capitalism in the areas where it's like the least popular generators after a hurricane.

1:41:14Like, think of it. It's like it's considered the worst thing ever if you like raise the price of a generator during a hurricane. It's like let markets do what they're good at. Let markets do what they're good at. And one of my favorite pieces ever, I'll, you know, pitch a pitch of friends writing here. uh leal liebovitz editor at tablet he wrote a piece in first things a magazine called uh the a more perfect mediocracy and he's sort of painting this picture of america as this sort of fundamentally average place and the anecdote that he gives is that he's driving with his wife in italy they're looking for caffeine it's the middle of the night and like they can't find anything miles and miles and then like 30 minutes later they finally find a place on the side of highway.

1:41:54It's like one in the morning and they have the best espresso of their lives. In America, on highways where I grew up, every few miles, you have a 24-hour gas station with like pretty bad black coffee, but it'll get you caffeinated. It's open 24 hours a day. And it's like the fact that we have that is because we were willing to embrace the idea that people should be free to make decisions about price and that you should be able to make money on a black coffee at midnight in Iowa or what. There's a price someone will pay that. You should be able to make money on gas. Exactly. And so it's like, you know, the easy position is like, yes, we're going to make money selling expensive things and have this sort of capitalism, but we're not going to have like profitable grocery stores.

1:42:37And this is Elizabeth Warren. This is Elizabeth Warren telling Kroger that they need to that they need to eliminate their cash margin because they're doing greedflation or whatnot. And so that is what I'm identifying as a degree of murder. She is legitimizing the idea that you shouldn't be able to make money on helping people. And this is the worst of all worlds because that's the sort of idea that like, okay, you can make money on stupid stuff, but not on helping people. And so the whole idea with this definition of capitalism that you have to negotiate with people instead of kill them is that like you're allowed to make money on helping them.

1:43:13and the question should be like how much money are you going to pay? How much is this person going to make? And markets and competition are what drive down prices and make these goods more accessible to all which is why, you know, you have power lines all over the U.S. It's because the person putting the power was allowed to make money on it and it's why you have these gas stations all over the place where someone who's hungry or cold in the middle of the night can get coffee and hot food. It's because the person's allowed to make money on it. The like logical conclusion of you are not allowed to make money on this is ultimately I'm allowed to kill you.

1:43:48Because if you're not allowed to make money on it, there's only one way that we can stop you in the end if you keep trying. And it's murder. And so that is why it's important. Not to mention, an intermediary step there is just like you don't get this. A bunch of preferences will not be served by the government or by some non-market feature if you don't have this, right? Yeah. And the opportunity cost of that is so significant. And it's what you see happen in these sort of lethargic, socialistic societies. North Korea being like one of the most acute examples. With all that said, at risk of maybe the very paternalism you just spent a bunch of time criticizing.

1:44:28Right. There's a view that says sort of like capitalism is very good at giving people exactly what they want, which in part is part of what you just said. there's a few critiques that that's one of them um which is to say like again probably paternalistic like people don't always know what they want or people don't always know what's good for them i think there are a few others that are like i don't know if you've ever read scott alexander's meditations on malik and it's a sort of um commentary on broadly it's like the tragedy of the comments um and just kind of an eventual race to the bottom and then maybe the third would be probably, I think, the greatest real risk is just capitalism trending towards an extreme, extreme concentration of capital and leverage in a very, very small amount of people's hands.

1:45:10Yeah. So that third one, I think, is by far the least true of all and that I am most interested in contesting. Okay. And I'll go back to an event that we've discussed a few times, which is the 2016 election. These alleged one-way trends are never true, and the concentration of wealth never persists. And even so, it doesn't provide the leverage that people think it does. Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a factor of 10 to 1 in the election. The peasants revolted. The American people revolted, whatever you want to call it. There are always balancing mechanisms. and the idea of this sort of extreme inequality, it really is true in the like classical libertarian sense that in order to pursue the level of equality that the Marxists or even the people who are earnestly concerned about equality are seeking, you have to suppress things that are good.

1:46:02And so the alleged remedies are always worse. And the American system where Elon Musk is worth$450 billion as of today, I think, is like by far more equal than the system that would violently take away his money, that would confiscate it. And, you know, there are too many societies to count where this experiment is played out. It's more about technological leverage than purely capital leverage, although I think - But I don't know what that even means, technological leverage. Like, you know, I have the same iPhone as people that make a lot less than I do, and I have the same iPhone as people who are worth billions or tens of billions of dollars.

1:46:41clearly technology is like one of the least relevant categories. Okay, what about concentration or ossification? What about Sam Altman's control over... There's certainly a possible world. I think you could make a strong case it's going to go the other way. But there's a possible world where a very small amount of people are going to have access to a technology that could basically end the world. It's a little bit more like a corporation or an individual having a nuke. No, I love this. This goes back to my sort of tongue-in-cheek point. Now I'll take it more seriously. The FBI director is definitely more powerful than like the AGI CEO.

1:47:15You literally just go arrest the bastard like you just do. And again, it's like I'm sort of sort of half joking, but I just don't I just don't worry about these things because because I know that if like if the suggestion is that we're going to do like forced equality instead, that clearly presents a much more harmful opportunity for like the corrupt concentration of power. that's how you get Stalin. That's how you get Kim Jong-un. That's how you get, yeah, Franco. It's like, if it's based on like singling out enemies, cutting the tall trees, it's like, that's the type of logic that again, it's like, it's just murderous or whatnot.

1:47:56The technological leverage, I mean, it sort of reminds me of what the like Obama people were saying in 2014, which is that like Obama was the first candidate to get on social media. He did it super well. They were using Facebook to mobilize. He wins 365 electoral votes the first time and a little bit less the second time. And again, who comes knocking in 2016? Who's like, I'm tweeting now. That was Trump. The best social media guy. These things are not ever set in stone. And it is only if people believe that like classes are stagnant that they can accept the logic of Marx, basically, which is that like this group is the same over this period of time.

1:48:34this group is the same over this period of time, which is how you could get to the idea that like the peasants or the poor are going to revolt against like the rich or whatnot. One of the reasons why it's very clear that like socialism never came to America is because of the social mobility and because the poor or the working class or the affluent are like a constantly changing group. And that is like the beauty of - And there's, by the way, I found, back to the beginning of your conversation, there's a foundational myth that is internalized in basically everyone here. There's nobody better than me.

1:49:07Yeah, yeah. People are very distrustful. And I mean, you know, Elon, bless his heart, he tried to spend like millions and millions of dollars in this like local Wisconsin election and it like, it had zero effect. It did not work at all. People way overestimate their leverage or they will overestimate other people's leverage in order to justify taking away their liberties or whatnot. So like one of the most sort of infamous recent Supreme Court cases of the last 20 years was the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court ruled that you could not restrict the ability of individuals or corporations to spend on political advertising, you know, on their own, with their own money.

1:49:46And that's like a super scary thing because there's all this money. Now, there are two reasons why it's sort of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, and you should move on to more important issues, which is A, that we've now proven over and over again that the money is not the end of the story, and B, fundamental issue in the Citizens United case was whether or not the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, could ban the showing of a movie that was critical of Hillary Clinton because of who had paid for its production. And so it was just like, it always ends up justifying the most extreme thing if you're that concerned about it, which was like literal censorship.

1:50:20No, you can't show that movie. It's too critical of Hillary. That was like a crazy thing, but it was based on this idea that like the institutions and the capital always stays, always stays the same. And so it's like, that is like, it's like, I mean, I've probably said it 20 times now. Like, it's the most false thing that has to be constantly disproved because it's like one of the, one of the most common, one of the most common fallacies that underlie all the disastrous ideas. It's just this time it's different. This time it's different. We can talk a little bit about Arena and the magazine specifically.

1:50:57What makes for good writing? I think good writing is fundamentally good description that makes you understand or see something. And usually good writing paired with a good reader is two people thinking even though they've never met one another. And so someone gets to see how I think and I get to teach them how I think. And there's like a relationship across the words. What about editing? good editing forces someone to question whether their first draft is like the best possible one and that's usually quite a ridiculous question to ask someone like is the first thing that you wrote down the best possible version of this and so it's a it's a it's a it's an iterative process and it's like a it's a fundamental recognition of you know our own failings it's just editing is just humility it's just like am i the best am i the greatest am i always the best am i always the greatest do i have anything to learn uh there's the like you know the david foster wallace this is water where there are the fish swimming along and the how's the water what the hell is water if you've been swimming for too long then you need to you need to remember where the water is it's a it's a reminder of uh of the most obvious thing ever which is that like we can always improve how have you gotten better at editing i think that there are maybe the best way to get better at editing is to be more comfortable with being frank uh is to be more direct this is bad this makes no sense shut the f up stop trying to be so florid uh if you can't get to the truth easily then there's no hope of it otherwise i think it's just sort of a it's just sort of a a thing that becomes more clear over time the only way that you would not improve as an editor doing it over and over again is if you were like not saying what you actually think And so it's like, maybe this is like an engineering culture.

1:52:51It's like, let's get concrete. Let's be specific. I'll give an example that I like to do in editing. This is more like a process thing rather than like a skill. I like to write a reverse outline of the piece that I'm reading. And it's pretty easy to do. You can just go paragraph by paragraph and write a sentence that sort of is like, this is the sentence from this paragraph. and if it doesn't make sense as like a list of sentences outlined, then it's probably not in the right order. You're probably not organizing your thoughts correctly. A lot of people are way too emphatic about grammar and syntax in like the first time that they're trying to edit something.

1:53:28Writing is a process of thinking. And so if your thoughts are in the wrong order, that's the first problem. And then you can go another level deeper. Are they in the wrong order in this paragraph? Are they in the wrong order in that paragraph? Are they in the wrong order here? How am I thinking? Think better. reverse outline meaning you're going literally like someone someone will send me a piece uh sorry no not reverse backwards just like instead of turning an outline into a piece i'm turning a piece into an outline yeah totally and i never outlined um this is a divisive subject but it's very useful to do the reverse outline yes because you can teach people you're compressing almost you can teach people and if they've gotten it there if they've got their own outline then showing them the difference between the reverse outline and the original outline can be very fun because it's like Like, you know, you did not accomplish this goal at all.

1:54:13Like, here's what you thought you were doing and here's what you actually did. And again, it's like it's getting to honest criticisms because that can be very sobering. And then there's the other sort of phrase, which is kill all your darlings, which is any artist sort of faces, which is that like. And for me especially, I am always obsessed with sentences. I will start a piece with like a single sentence that I'm so convinced is like the best one. And it's like you have to be most willing to move past that one because that was where you were like the most wrong and the most set. Yeah, it got you here, but that doesn't mean you can't kill it or you shouldn't kill it.

1:54:51Yeah, so being more honest is like, you know, always a useful tool in thinking. And to the extent that writing is just thinking, getting more honest, getting more concrete is like the best possible thing, whether you're writing for yourself or editing someone else. Arena is a magazine. It's a literal object. it's also clear being in the room with you, you also admire like large, highly image-based books and just beautiful kind of reading objects. Unlike most of the texts people read today, including a lot of books, the reading on Kindle, essays, most written content, magazines in particular are distinctly not only physical, but textual and visual.

1:55:30What is it about that type of medium that is so appealing to you? Well, it's a challenge and a puzzle. I'm not a professionally trained artist or designer, but I've always had a strong sort of creative and mathematical intuition. And print design is one of those great sort of challenges. And it's something that's been very underrated in America and the world writ large over the last several decades. And the one area where it's really been strongly emphasized is in technology, actually, where like there's an objectively better way to present visual imagery and information in the form of text and your job is to like crack the code and find a better way to do it and so you know again writing is thinking and so it needs to be presented in like a in like a good way and that will make people enjoy it more and make people not hate it so the like physical object version of it is like a much more fun layer for me to add on top of it and it needs to be it needs to be done in concert with the editing because like you can edit something really well and then just like publish it as plain text and like that's you know that's sure that's a thing you know why not put it in paper what are you so afraid of that would be my sort of that's the question that everyone else is begging when they're not like adding a sort of special thing on top of it is it's like is this really worthy of like you know cutting down a tree turning the tree into paper and like asking people to to pay for it or open it in their homes and that's a big thing with the you know how do you make a magazine that like people actually want to possess and not just like buy.

1:57:05You know, you can buy a, you know, rolled up piece of glossy toilet paper known as a magazine at the grocery store. You can get the Atlantic or Time, which are sort of storied papers with great writing in the Atlantic. What does it say about the great writing if it's being published on the cheapest paper that's ever been invented, where if it gets like a little drop of water on it. It's completely soiled. It's been stapled together. And it's so chock full of ugly ads that you don't even want to pay attention to it. What gives? So, you know, in everything that we do, we're trying to do the opposite of that.

1:57:41Be super well edited, as well edited as the best magazines in the world, but really taking design, production, art seriously in a way that people are like, oh, this is good. I like this. This is not expected either. Obviously related, but why is durability so important in kind of every sense of that word you know the like obsessive cost-cutting culture has just sort of like reminded people that there's a reason why making things properly the first time is is worthwhile i don't know that i have a good intellectual explanation for it i could tell you that like with a book i want to be able to like hand a book down to my son and his daughter and not like be having to having to replace it i would say that quality goods can make everyone rich because there are things that last and you know have like tens of millions of carhartt duck jackets that are sold every year in the u.s and yes they're more expensive than like some crap jacket that's going to fall apart and people are made rich by this phenomenon of like things that last you know it's it's like uh another virtue of capitalism is like turning every person into an aristocrat and one of the ways that you can do that is like oh wow i own things that like will last a long time and that are high quality and in many cases it's not that much more expensive on the marginal level to make things better it's not that much more expensive to do a 100 cotton shirt instead of you know rayon it requires more effort but it creates more prosperity in the long run it's you know things that things that last maybe there's like a a primitive reason why they're good i don't know my friend reggie calls these universal luxuries which is which is which is cool the other thing about it too especially for something that might be disposed you're not only like literally will it last but like you're less likely you're more likely to keep it if it has that level of i mean the classic like thing with like the rolled up toilet paper magazine.

1:59:41I call it glossy toilet paper because of how thin the paper is. That's the description there. Why would you want to display it on your coffee table? What does it say about you if you have like, you know, the Atlantic sitting on the table or whatnot? These days, it's just not communicating much. And having something that's like high quality actually is like a status thing as well. And everyone should be proud of like the things that they're consuming, engaging with, participating in intellectually, and that's just rarer these days. Are there any magazines or other types of kind of like visual heavy books that were really influential to you?

2:00:20I used to love getting like popular mechanics when I was a kid. and all the like mechanical children's books or whatnot. But I would say that I just became like a book obsessive at one point. And, you know, my dad used to join these book of the month clubs in the mail. And he would like, you know, dine and ditch them basically where you sign up, you get the books in the mail and then you don't do anything. And so he'd have all these books, almost none of which he was reading, World War II and Catherine the Great and Russia and ancient civilizations or whatnot to fill the bookshelves because it was like, it was considered good without explanation that you have all these things or whatnot.

2:00:58So I would say that that is very influential to me is the idea of like beautiful objects like that. And the thing that I really dislike is just seeing the low quality all over the place. Yeah. Because it sort of represents, you know, this trend, I guess, to cheapify things that ultimately makes people not like them in the first place. Like you're less likely to be attached to like an ugly book. You know, you might find a love for books if you are introduced to beautiful books. What does success look like for Reno on a, let's say, five-year scale or time-round? You know, a nicely profitable media enterprise that can, you know, make a lot of money and make it possible to do this type of creative work long into the future to pay for writing and pay for art and make beautiful things and make money on it.

2:01:52I don't know that I have a good answer on like a civilizational scale. I think that sort of one of those the score takes care of itself things, where if you just do things well, you know, the positive effects are borne by the people that we're affecting. It's not necessarily going to be like direct things that we do. We had a grandmother write into the magazine shortly after the second issue went out. She wanted to buy four copies of the magazine for her grandsons before they went off to college. and she's 86 in North Carolina and said, you know, I'm probably not going to be around a lot longer, but I want them to know the sort of example of entrepreneurship.

2:02:32Could I have given you like an intellectual answer that was going to predict something like that? No. And so we focus on what we know, which is how to create the beautiful things, how to do the discussions that we want, how to do the things that we know well, and other people will pick up the torch for us. is there anyone or anything you would be particularly excited to profile um we want to to document all the sort of levels of the you know great american story of entrepreneurship um there's obviously a list um but the truth is is that part of the great fun is doing this at the like very high levels and sort of quote unquote very low levels.

2:03:21In reality, it's more like the underappreciated levels. And there's no sort of white whale that we're chasing. There's actually so much around us that we can't keep up. I have a grab bag of a few questions before we wrap up. Please. Actually, maybe since you just mentioned it, it's a slightly different idea, but I think it connects. you straddle what I would call a sort of American high and low, or maybe big and small would be more accurate. I don't mean to imply lowly, which is to say big dreams and capital ambition and technology and scale and all this type of stuff. And then also like the story you just told or like the little stories about mom and pop shops in little places or your little love letters to Ojai and to Hot Springs, Arkansas.

2:04:07Yeah. Yeah. How do those coexist for you? how could they not um i'm an american and the like biggest the biggest result of like getting out of a bubble is to realize that like to become a person that only sees like the bigger important things and not the little things around you is is the sort of is the peak of ignorance maybe it's like an anti-social streak that i have where i am not like as interested in like big social circles where I like random places and what have been called blue highways, the sort of unexpected roads. It's a personal fascination. And some of my favorite authors, maybe you could say this, it's like talking about the cotidian things in life, the everyday.

2:04:56Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe. The truth is that you see the big stories in all of the little ones if you look. And you'd probably end up missing out on some great stories if you're not paying attention at both levels. And that's ultimately what I am as a storyteller. I like attached to these things. On that note, maybe what have you learned or what comes to mind when you think about traveling across America? I think the most underreported story is just how prosperous random places in America are. One of the better pieces that I've ever published, I think, was a piece in the Free Press called Welcome to the MAGA Hamptons, which is sort of a piece about the Lake of the Ozarks, which is a man-made reservoir in central Missouri that was created by the U.S.

2:05:36Army Corps of Engineers. It was like a flooded sort of valley in 1929, thereabouts. And as a result of the shape of the sort of river valleys and cricks and hollers in that area, the coastline of the Lake of the Ozarks is longer than the entire Pacific coast of the United States. So it's like 80 ,000 miles of, or not 80 ,000. It's 80 ,000 houses. It's like 6 ,000 miles of coastline. Oh my gosh. Maybe it's like 3 ,000 or something. It's definitely longer than the Pacific Coast because I calculated it out. But imagine like a 25 ,000-legged spider. Oh, my gosh. Where it's just like so many inlets or whatnot.

2:06:11And so there are 80 ,000 houses along the shore of this lake. And, you know. It's all in Missouri? It's in central Missouri. And it's like halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis. Columbia-ish or south? It's like half hour from Columbia. Okay. It is like the place where like the Midwestern elites go. And you've never heard of these people. They're car dealers and electricians or whatnot. And they have these lake houses and boats and they do not, they do not, they don't care at all what like the rest of the country thinks of them or whatnot. They're affluent. And so I called it the MAGA Hamptons because it's like they're voting for Trump and doing Trump boat parades.

2:06:44And it's like, think about what a Trump boat parade is. It means that there are these people that are all in one place and they all own expensive boats in order to do a boat parade. And so it's like that is like the most underreported story and that I'm constantly finding. I mean, people have variously called it mass affluence or, you know, whatever you want to call it. That's like always hilarious to me is to find the sort of local maxima in these places, so to speak. And what's funny to me about him in some instances is just like the joy of telling people about places that they had never heard of before.

2:07:21And listening to like New Yorkers and New Englanders read about the Lake of the Ozarks, it's like, oh my gosh, it's like, I know all of this stuff that you don't. And I like that. Or you learned from Joe Lonsdale. I definitely did not have like a very entrepreneurial sense about me when I started working with Joe. And I think that the like baseline case is that I probably would have never started a media company or learned how to hire and manage people or whatnot. and seeing Joe approach every problem through that lens of like, how do we do this in like a virtuous, profitable way where we're going to like employ people and elevate them and figure out how to solve it better than other people is an unavoidable conclusion.

2:08:05You have a, I think it's a piece, I can't remember when, about the Sri Lankan agriculture. Right. There's a line at the end where you say, the bottom line is that modern agronomy works. Are there ways to improve it? Are there negative environmental effects that we should address? What about unethical practices by agricultural corporations? Yes, on all accounts. But at a basic level, criticisms of modern agriculture are only possible in a country saturated with food. It is our material luxury in countries like this one, created by the extreme efficiency of our agricultural practices, that provides some of our most opinionated citizens with the requisite free time and sustenance to spend all day complaining about food systems.

2:08:45Oh my gosh. Obviously a little tongue-in-cheek. My question is, I'm just, I hadn't read that like paragraph in a while. It's like, this is great. My question is, we are moving, maybe your pendulum theory is true about truly everything, but it seems that we're moving towards a world of more and more abundance. In that world, we will have the luxury to criticize the sources of that abundance. What guidance do you have? Well, that's why the pendulum theory really is true is because all these critics are winning in certain places and like they almost ran out of rice in Sri Lanka. Like it's not at all a march toward the same thing over and over again.

2:09:22But this sort of goes back to the idea of like the activists that I was confronting at Stanford who were promoting this woman who wants to go back to the land and have people farm by hand. It's like no one would take this seriously if you were industrializing, if you were just getting off the ground. Like, you know, it'd be it'd be a joke. It really is this material situation that causes the opposition to rise up. The only reason why they have any air is because of this other thing. So I think that it tends to be a pretty strong trend, but populations are going to start to go down. There's going to be some zero-sum games that various countries are playing.

2:10:03There's not worldwide progress on these areas. They have to be constantly protected. think of it like the Sri Lanka example. I don't think, you know, maybe I'll go back like 20 years. When Zimbabwe is sort of forming as this country in the 80s, there's a great article about this in the Atlantic, actually, by Samantha Power, who was President Obama's ambassador to the United Nations and President Obama or President Biden's head of USAID, which is the aid agency that Doge has sort of dismantled in the State Department. So she wrote an article about how Rhodesia, when the sort of white population stopped ruling Rhodesia and it became Zimbabwe, they had still the most prosperous sort of agricultural economy in Africa.

2:10:50And they were the breadbasket of Africa because the British settlers in Central Africa had planted corn and wheat and they had done it in like an industrial fashion. And so the yields were much higher. And this was like a massively positive thing for the rest of Africa because they were this breadbasket. and Mugabe, the communist leader of the sort of black nationalists in Zimbabwe starts confiscating the white farms one by one. And it went from being the like breadbasket of Africa to like one of the most dependent countries on agricultural imports in the world. And that's like a very acute example.

2:11:25But the reason why it's important to talk about the acute examples, whether it's Zimbabwe, North Korea, Venezuela, where it used to be the richest country in the Americas except the United States. And now they're eating rats and it's crazy. is because, you know, sanity, progress, civilization, order, capitalism are all so fragile that they have to be constantly defended from these new heresies and ideologies that, again, only exist because of the material abundance that have been created. Like, these professional activists have enough money and time to, like, constantly agitate against our system because we've empowered them so much.

2:12:01And the anti-agriculture people, you know, there's enough food in Sri Lanka to argue that like maybe we should not do this agricultural thing and then it's like you totally ruined it and that one was prevented because of political realism but in societies where they don't have like an open discussion like Zimbabwe it was just like a one-way street to hell it's it's funny it you could almost make the same point we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation in that like a sign of a healthy society might be that you have the time and bandwidth for people to be criticizing even the most basic things Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:12:33It's like Americans are like so wealthy that like they're like tweeting at one another all the time or whatnot and then going out and buying F-150s and trucks and SUVs. Yeah, it's, you know, it has to be real in order to criticize it. That's one of the laws. On a totally unrelated note, there's a line somewhere you mentioned your brother Jackson was the athlete and you were the cook. and I've heard from a few of our friends that you are particularly adept at bringing people together for meals. Yeah, what's special about - I can guess who that was. What's special about doing that? I've been cooking since I was very young.

2:13:13It is, possibly I enjoy it because I'm super good at it. And so it's like an alpha that I have on other people, but it's a good way to bring people together because breaking bread has historically been a way to converse with people, especially people who are different from yourself. And so that's just one of those things where I don't have a better intellectual answer other than that seems true. Experientially, it's true. That's a good one. And I like flexing on people, I guess. And that's an area where I'm not gonna bring them together by playing six-on-six basketball or something. I have an excerpt from a very emotional piece you wrote by your brother.

2:13:58I didn't see it at the time, but wanting an expensive camera was Jackson's way of trying to commit himself to something he saw as big and real. This was bigger than competing with me, his brother. It was about his future. I know now that the stupid purchases are a privilege. No, a miracle. I know that behind every stupid purchase is a human being trying and maybe failing to find his way to declare his values to a world that doesn't always listen. in this place i'm going to this is you referring to your farm that you purchased shortly after in this place i'm going to build my own world a world big enough for all my memories when people ask about it i'll tell the story of how i learned that dreams shouldn't wait that there is never as much time as we think that sometimes making a stupid purchase is the only thing that makes any sense what can we gain from foolish commitments um it is it is it is a half of our brain and there is a dialectic between like the rational parts and the irrational parts and if you are too extremist about one or the other then you don't tend to move forward in interesting ways and so that's sort of a commentary about understanding the the the back half of the brain.

2:15:15It's beautiful. My final question. You have, I think this is in one of the letters to America. You ran out of gas and you found yourself with this woman, Glenda, who was saving you. You say, as I sat in her front seat, she complimented my glasses and told me that she had been an optician. I told her that I was thinking of getting rid of my glasses and having laser surgery to correct my vision. Are you nervous? She asked me. I told her that I wasn't. The risk of surgery seems pretty low to me. She grinned and said, no, I meant sitting here with me in my car in the middle of nowhere. I think it's later in that piece.

2:15:52It's a separate excerpt. You say, in On the Road, Jack Kerouac asked the question, what is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plane till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too huge world vaulting us and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. And then I think one last bit, driving through a place like Hope, Arkansas, is a poignant reminder that America, the Republic and the Empire, is a nation that doesn't need and doesn't have a Rome or London. In the places between places, things are happening. Bill Clinton became president and love him or hate him the story of the man from hope is the one that compels love for america and its promise and the promise of the places between places how can places between places feel like home well this was um i was telling the story of how i ran out of gas in arkansas and that was that was glenda and so i was sitting in the front seat of her car um it is a you know once you go to one of them, it is self-evident that it's, it's Glenda's home and Glenda had a life in, I forget what the name of that town even was, uh, but Glenda's life was clearly as big as anything.

2:17:09And so only a fool would, uh, would, would, would look at it and say that there's like, there's something, there's something, there's something less there. It's true. There's no, like, you know, there's no opera house. Uh, there's no, you know, anthropic office or something. There are all sorts of ways in which you can tell yourself a story that only one place matters. It just doesn't turn out to be true. And Hope, Arkansas is where Bill Clinton was from. And it's a, you know, tiny little town on the road. You know, turns out you shouldn't underestimate such places. And there's always new things out there.

2:17:47As for the Kerouac thing, I think what Kerouac was getting at that I very much feel is that, like, I spent like six minutes with this woman Glenda in the front seat of her Cadillac while we were waiting for her boyfriend to go get gas to fill up my SUV on the side of the road in like the dark forest in Arkansas late summer night. And it's like almost almost certain ever going to see Glenda again. Obviously, it's always possible. But you like you go to these next things with literally the image of the people behind you in the mirror. and what Kerouac is getting at is there is like a richness in those people that to a person who's not experienced it would seem sort of fanciful but to me is like the most true thing ever and that's that's America Max thank you thank you