E34: Marc Andreessen on His Intellectual Journey

26:18Japan, you know, not only did we set up nukes in Japan, like, we firebombed all the cities and burned them to the ground, right? So, like, there really was very little, like, industrial capacity in the West, you know, as of, you know, circa 1945. Now, you know, Germany and Japan and other countries rebuilt and started doing, really well again in the 1970s, 1980s. But it was like a 30, 40-year journey to get those countries really back up in their feet as modern industrial economies. And so the US, we had a, you know, all of us trained in tech are trained to never use the word monopoly. But instead, we just say robust market share.

26:51The US had a robust market share of global manufacturing, I think in large part, because there just were not alternatives at the time. And so, you know, look, we had very high rates of economic growth during that period. We had very high rates of productivity growth. Um, you know, growth covers up a lot of sins. Um, you know, maybe we got away with a lot of dysfunction, um, because we were just growing so fast economically. Um, yeah, I don't know. Nobody really, I mean, you, you mentioned a handful of people who might pine for the fifties and sixties. I mean, almost nobody does, right. They either pine for like the thirties, right.

27:21Um, you know, they want to go back to the full new deal, right. Or they, you know, pine for an even earlier era, people on the right, you know, will sometimes pine for an earlier era of free enterprise, right? Like the heyday of free enterprise in America was probably something like 1870 to 1929, probably. So 1870s, 1880s, through the 1920s, it was what's called now the second industrial revolution. So it was the sort of incredibly transformative time in technology with the creation of everything, the electric power and, you know, all modern communication networks, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, you know, automobiles, you know, airplanes, right?

28:04And so it was this incredibly fertile time in terms of technological development. And then it was pre-New Deal, which means the national economic system was much more laissez-faire. You know, and this is sort of the fully realized kind of heyday of classical liberalism kind of in its full glory. you know, free market, free market, like libertarians would like to go back to that era. You know, most, most modern Americans, you know, would not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, Yasha, maybe you'd want to go back to the nineties or something. We're having a lot of social progress, but there's, you know, still free speech is popular.

28:37And there's a question as to whether you can take the good without the excess, you know? Well, then there's the other kicker on that, on that exact kind of argument, which is, yeah, but the nineties got you, you know, the 90s got you everything that followed the 90s, right? Like, so if everything was so great in the 90s, why did everything go so wrong in the 2000s and 2010s, right? It's the same question. This is when we go further back. If everything was so great in the 50s and 60s, why did you get the 70s and 80s, right? And so apparently, like, these prior, and look, the glory of America is its dynamism, right?

29:04You know, we change as a society and culture, like, way more than most. And so that's the strength. But, like, you know, every preceding historical period apparently was on very shaky footing because it didn't last very long. And in fact, it was not very long until there were lots and lots of people who thought it actually, in retrospect, whatever happened 20 years earlier was like very deeply evil. And so whatever preconditions, whatever conditions created whatever golden age you want to hold out there, they didn't last. And in fact, they presumably sparked reactions and changes that led to the worst environment we're in today.

29:39so it's you know i think it's hard to find stable it's hard to find stable ground and so and because it's hard to find stable ground it's also hard to have that much faith in the sort of so-called thermostatic model yeah it's hard to have you know because what a lot of people will say is oh find a good and there's these constant arguments and right left and this and that and interventionist and and isolationist and there's all these kinds of polls right nationalist and globalist and so forth there's all these kind of different axes of politics and social change um you know merit slash you know equality of you know opportunity versus quality outcome and so forth so you can you can kind of imagine like a graph that has all these different axes.

30:11And then basically the pendulum kind of swings all around the graph, but always comes back to the center somehow. It's like, well, maybe, right. Or maybe what we're just talking about is like, you know, massive survivorship bias, right. You know, a hundred other societies in the last 200 years, like went badly off track and horrible ways. Right. We're the one that didn't, right. The dice came up in the right order for us. Congratulations. You know, great. You know, we, we wanted the roulette table 30 times in a row, you know, the 31st spin of the dial is coming up. like, you know, just, you know, or it's, I wasn't, it seemed to laugh.

30:41It's like, you know, it's the, it's the guy who drowns in the, uh, you know, it's how do you, how do you drown in a lake that is on average four, four feet deep? Right. Uh, well it's cause you know, if most of the lake is 3.95 feet deep and then there's one part that's a hundred feet deep and you get stuck in that part, you're in real trouble. Right. And so, you know, maybe we're always about to wander into the, into that trench, um, and you know, fall out of view and die. I don't know. I think it's a really big important question like it's it's i think people can get too blasé about where things go because like i don't you know i don't and again the sweep of history right it's just like there are so many societies that thought they had things figured out and then everything went horribly wrong i think it's hard to just assume that everything will be okay just because it has been so far yeah you um you mentioned burnham uh let's get into burnham you mentioned the suicide of the west let's talk about his other book the uh managerial revolution because it's it's related you know to what's happening right now there's been this kind of you know underground idea for a while.

31:36I think Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institution complex or something like that. Some people call it the cathedral. This idea that the government, academia, media, some corporations work together in a decentralized way to achieve a certain political goal. How do we make sense of this? Yeah. So Burnham has a couple, two books that bear directly on this that provide at least an explanation that's made a lot of sense to me. Since I read these books, I feel like I understand the two examples you're talking about, why they play out the way that they do and see if this resonates with people. The first book is called The Managerial Revolution.

32:13It was written in 1940. It's actually interesting because it was written a couple of things historically about it. One is it was written shortly after Burnham had been an actual communist. He was trying to still work his way out of communism at that point. It was also written at the height of World War II. and it was actually written when it actually wasn't clear who was going to win. And so there's a bunch of sections in the book that are like, well, you know, if America wins, X. And if Germany wins, you know, boy, you know, they'll be a totally different set of things. So it's a good kind of recreation of what it must have been like when the answer to that actually was not clear.

32:45So his thesis in the book basically is as follows, which basically what he says is, look, world systems like governments and industries and human affairs you know basically up through the 19th century were basically small scale by by any by my modern standards they were small scale it's just like you know population levels were low states were small um and um you know businesses were small and even if you had like a car company or whatever like it just wasn't that big right when ford when henry ford had foot motor company like they just didn't make that many cars there weren't that many people who could afford cars um and so you sort of had this world of you know preceding forms of social order which is like monarchies or aristocracies or bourgeois, you know, capitalism, free market capitalism or whatever.

33:30You know, where basically there was always like a principle in charge, right? So like the king is in charge or like the, you know, Henry Ford, the owner of the company is in charge. Like, you know, the idea of like a business is in sole proprietorship. Like, you know, the owner of the corner store owns the corner store. The owner of the car company owns the car company, runs the car company. So sort of basically all in all of human history, you like had basically people in charge. Taleb would say like people with skin in the game, like people who had like direct like responsibility, authority, and accountability kind of all wrapped up in one.

33:59And then what Burnham says basically is in the 20th century, as a result actually of the second industrial revolution, basically the 20th century is a century of scale. And so all of a sudden, the countries get really big, the populations get really big, the companies get really big, the industries get really big, the technologies get really complicated, right? And he wrote right at the beginning of computerization, which of course was going to accelerate all these trends. and what he said basically is like the era of just a Henry Ford running his car company is basically over and he said instead what happens is all big companies are going to get run not by the owner of the company but by a professional class of managers and you know the literal form of that is literally people who have gone to like you know management school and gotten like MBAs or more broadly in his definition it's basically people with advanced technical skills you know sort of technical managerial skills people who are administrators who are capable of running large institutions.

34:52And so he says, basically, all the companies are going to get run by these managers. All governments are going to get run by managers. And, you know, this was the heyday. He saw this happening because this is the heyday of the New Deal. You know, FDR enormously expanded the scope of the federal government, right, for better or for worse, and then brought in this new class of person to kind of run the federal government, which were Burnham's managers. And then Burnham said, look, you've got like, you know, World War II is this like three-way fight basically between, you know, the three big political systems of the 20th century, which basically is like fascism, you know, in the form of Germany and Italy and Japan.

35:25You know, communism in the form of the Soviet Union, which was our ally, even though Stalin, you think, was actually kind of a bad guy. And then liberal democracy, right? Which is sort of its full flowering and sort of its progressive form under FDR. And he said, basically, those three systems obviously have big differences, but they have one big thing in common. They're all managerial in nature, right? The communists, the Soviet central planners are going to run the entire country for Moscow. the Nazi central planners are going to run the entire country, the entire economy from Berlin. And then in the US, FDR is going to run America with his managers.

36:02But the kicker he put on is, he said, look, this is not either, you could say this is good or bad. It doesn't even matter if it's good or bad. He says it's necessary. He says the reality is all these systems are too big to be run by the older model of the Henry Ford, the owner, whatever. These systems are all gigantic. Like they are all gigantic. Like all countries from here on out are going to be huge. All industries are going to be complicated. All businesses are going to be complicated. And so it's going to be a world of managers from here on out. And then he basically identifies what, you know, today we would call the principal agent problem, right?

36:30Which is basically what this means is, and you see this with companies, right? Which is basically if the owner of the company is not running the company, right? Then there's a separation of ownership and control, right? A separation of ownership and management. And then you're going to have basically the creation of what he called the managerial class, which will be the people who are basically going to be actually running the company. And then as a consequence of this, you know, ownership will tend to then get dispersed, right? And ownership will become very weak. And that's what's happening.

36:58Think of any public company today, right? How many owners are there? You know, take any of these companies, take General Motors. How many owners of General Motors are there? There are millions of owners of General Motors because there are millions of people who own General Motors stock. How many managers are there of General Motors? there's, you know, the top 10 executives that run the, you know, there's a CEO, the top 10 executives, the top 200 managers in that, in that company run the company. Like who's more in charge of General Motors, right? The owners or the managers. And the answer is clearly the managers, by the way, same thing politically, right?

37:27Who runs the United States, right? Who runs the United States government? Is it the voters or is it, you know, Congress and the white house? It's, you know, the voters are dispersed. There's, you know, whenever 300 million of us were dispersed, we individually, none of us have any basically influence or control at all. And so, you know, the handful of people who are our representatives basically, you know, run everything. And, you know, and this leads to this, you know, incredibly weird results where like, you know, Congress pulls it like 10 % overall, but like 90 % of us like our Congress person, right?

37:54It's like, you get these paradoxical kind of side effects of this. Anyway, it's the creationist managerial class. And then basically the principle, so therefore what he says, he doesn't use this term, I don't think, but the result is like, basically the principal agent problem becomes dominant in everything, right? And so it doesn't matter how well-intentioned people are, whatever. It's like the principal agent thing, the principal agent problem is right. The people, the principal who owns something delegates running it to somebody else. Those people have very different interests. And if your principals, your owners are dispersed and your managers are concentrated, then the managers are going to end up with all the power.

38:26And that's basically what's happened. Let me pause there and we'll keep going on this thread. Yeah, well, one thing I want to follow up real quick on that thread is this question of, you know, a decade ago or, you know, a period of time ago, you could have, you know, Republicans bought sneakers too, so to speak. You know, these elites who control these institutions catered to both sides and they maybe had a bit more, you know, political or intellectual diversity within them. but but something happened where first off you could also be apolitical there was a certain time but politics kind of infested every area of life and um now it it's it's less about catering to both sides and more about catering to one specific side and so i'm curious what what changed there what yeah so what bernam bernam would say two things so the first to build on managerialism what bernam would say basically is the managers get to the managers get to decide the politics to the company because they can't.

39:21Because the managers have all the control, even though they don't own the company, because they have all the control, if they decide they want to take the company in one political direction and against another political direction, they can just do that because who's going to stop them? Principal Asian problem. If you pulled all the owners and said, do you want the company to do this? The owners would probably say, no, this is a bad idea because to your point, we're going to cut off half the market. We're going to sell my sneakers as a result. The managers are like, I don't care. Why would the managers care?

39:48They don't care. The owners can't remove them. The owners are too dispersed. And so basically, the managers can get away with essentially exploiting the positions they've been put in for their own ideological or political ends. And they can just get away with it, and they can just do it because they can do it. And then the company example of this is very interesting, because what you actually have, the problem is even worse than we've been describing, right? Because the problem is you have the principal agent problem playing out at the level of the management of the company. you have the exact same problem playing out at the level of the actual ownership of the company in the sense of the big money management firms, in particular, the big index funds.

40:26So the sort of the BlackRock and its competitors, right? And so what you have with like the Fortune 500 today, just structurally is you have generally these sort of woke left-wing management teams, basically exploiting the principal agent problem to their benefit. And then you've got these woke progressive investment firms that are aggregating up huge amounts of money from, you know, millions of dispersed shareholders. And then, you know, it's actually really funny, right? Because it's like these index firms, their entire business is predicated on the idea that they do not have the competence to pick which companies to invest in.

41:02And so therefore, they're going to take your money as a, you know, future retiree, and they're going to invest it in the entire index companies. But yet somehow the managers at the index firm are so enlightened that they have that they're completely qualified to re-engineer society. to have a set of political views that may have nothing to do with your political views as an investor, but they are qualified to figure out how to re-engineer society. And this has led to ESG and all these other things. And so you've got basically these two actual classes of managers. You've got the corporate executives on the one hand, and you've got the professional investors on the other hand, who essentially have both basically just taken power from their dispersed owners just because they can.

41:40And I think that basically just continues as long as long as it continues. Like, I don't know what stops that. Well, yeah. Maybe Elon stops that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So then there's the Elon thing, right? So, yeah. So, basically, okay. So, what we've sort of described is sort of, again, back to Burnham, we've described sort of capitalism post-1940 or something like, basically, what Burnham basically says is there are two kinds, what Burnham says in the book, there are two kinds of capitalism. Everybody thinks it's the same, they're not. There's two very different kinds. There's what he called bourgeois capitalism, which was the Henry Ford kind, which is the owner of the company runs the company.

42:12That's sort of the classic, right? And then there's managerial capitalism, which is this thing where the principal agent problem kicks in and managers run the company, even against the wishes of the owners. I view what we do in Silicon Valley with startups, with, you know, venture. By the way, same private equity also we could talk about. Basically, what venture capital and private equity are is they're sort of the return of bourgeois capitalism into an economic system that's almost entirely managerial. managerial. And the reason it makes sense to have venture capital and startups in Burnham's framework to bring back some level of bourgeois capitalism is basically that managerial capitalism, it has its advantages.

42:54Remember, Burnham's point, it is necessary. You do need highly trained, professional, technical managers to run these giant enterprises. But it has its problems. We've identified one of the problems, which is this sort of political thing that happens. Another problem managerial capitalism, I would argue, is it doesn't innovate very well, right? And it doesn't innovate, you know, the companies run by professional managers don't tend to innovate very well. Why don't they innovate very well? Well, the kinds of people who become professional managers are not innovators, because if they were, they wouldn't do that.

43:23They would be off inventing products and starting their own companies, right? And so basically, the way I think about it is venture capital and private equity are sort of the older model of capitalism, that first model of bourgeois capitalism sort of coming back in the modern era and sort of harvesting this arbitrage opportunity that's created by the fact that the managerial companies can no longer invent new things. And so, you know, we do that, you know, we do that every day. You've done that in your career. You know, what do our companies all have in common? You know, it's basically there's somebody, you know, there's a person or a very small founding team of people who own, you know, on day one, 100 % of the business.

43:58But even after they, you know, get it fully financed, they still own a lot of the business. They often actually have voting control of the business. And they have direct, again, they have bundled accountability, responsibility, authority in the old model. Like Henry Ford, if you brought Henry Ford back, if you were able to teleport Henry Ford into our era, he would look at a modern high-tech startup and he would say, that's just like Ford Motor Company was when I ran it. That's the model. And then he would look at modern Ford Motor Company and say, holy Lord, I can't believe what happened. And Ford Motor company may be a very well-run managerial company, but it's not run anywhere close to how Henry Ford would have run it.

44:34So anyway, yeah, so that takes us to Elon. Of course, what Elon is, is he is the fully realized, you know, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, right? You know, one of these kind of, you know, peak bourgeois capitalists, you know, he is, you know, he is the best, you know, the best, you know, kind of example of this bourgeois capitalism model that we've had in our society for, I think, decades. And he's just, and you see it playing out with Twitter. He's just like, I own it, right? It's like, I bought the entire company. I own it. I am completely in charge. I am going to completely harvest the payoff, right, from my success if I make it work.

45:12And I'm going to lose all the money of my own money if it doesn't work. I'm attaching my money to it. I'm attaching my reputation to it, right? Like, I'm putting my time into it. Like, I'm not delegating. There's no professional class of managers at Twitter. He's running the company himself. And so it's bringing back this old model. It's bringing back into a world in which the companies he's competing with and many other companies generally just don't run like that anymore. So yeah, I think it's great. I think we should bring back as much bootstrap capitalism as we can. Now, Burnham would argue, fine, Mark, that's great, but you're just going to recreate the problem, right?

45:49Because you're going to birth all these companies, they're going to be run by the founders for a while. And then at some point, guess what? They're going to get big and complicated. The professional manager is going to take over and you're going to just recreate the problem. And I'm like, okay, my answer would be okay, fine. But like, that's a problem for 20 years from now. Better than we have now. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do what we can for now. I see Elon running a few experiments, you know, more experiments in the past few weeks have been started than maybe in the past few years. Some, you know, some of them include, you know, Elon showing that you as a company owner, you don't have to be kind of bullied or pressured by sort of activists within your company.

46:26You can actually fight back and maybe win. And that is showing a model to CEOs of what's possible. I think he's presenting a model of you don't have to be externally bullied either. I think we had an era in tech, you know, companies like Uber or other companies that kind of didn't necessarily apologize, or I guess they did apologize and kind of conceded the moral high ground, whereas Elon is fighting back on moral terms, actually saying, no, we are more pure than the people who are attacking us and winning to some extent. I also think he's presenting a model of institutional reform, whereas there's been this idea that these institutions that have been captured, you can't reform them.

47:05You just have to start new ones. And maybe the situation is so bad, actually, that if you fight, you kind of empower the winners anyways and you have to let's just wait until it's a better time to to push back and elon's not waiting uh obviously and so um we're gonna learn so much from these experiments yeah so i won't talk too much about twitter specifically because we're involved in it and i and i shouldn't but um yeah no i think look he's he is doing all that and by the way he's done all that in 45 days yes like like i mean and again this is the thing i mean i don't know if you've probably have these, it's like the parlor game thing, which is like, what would you do if you owned company X, right?

47:43And it's always this hypothetical kind of parlor game thing. It's always from a question I always ask, because I'm trying to get to what substantively is the right thing to be done. In Elon's case, he's just like, I am literally actually going to own it, right? And then I'm actually going to do all those things. And look, there's a lot, I'd say this, every other CEO who's at least conscious in the industry is looking at, is watching Elon very carefully right now. I just got an investor relations readout from a company that I won't name, but it's simply a readout of feedback from their investors.

48:18It's a public company. And so it's feedback from their investors. And there's a section in the readout, and this is just a reflection of what their investors are saying to them. It's a section of the readout called the Elon effect. And it's exactly what you think. It's like, okay, this guy seems to be able to run this company on like 20 % of the headcount. And so basically, what are you going to do? Right. And again, the significance here is, you know, that was that data is a little bit stale now. So that was probably 30 days in that they, you know, that they, that they had those meetings where somebody said, you know, the Elon effect.

48:47And so the shareholders, right. The shareholders are all watching. And so, yeah, there are a lot of people are watching, you know, I think honestly, I mean, at least in private conversations, a lot of both CEOs and investors I talked to, you know, are very much hoping that everything plays out great, because they're hoping that he's presenting a new playbook for how to run these companies. Totally. Yeah, and again, what Burnham would say is, yeah, congratulations, you have rediscovered the virtues of bourgeois capitalism. Like, yes, this is how things used to work. This is a way that it can be done.

49:20It does rely on having somebody actually having that level of power, right, who is in that level of control. And if he was having, you know, he hasn't, you know, he, and look, he's, you know, dealing with all the different constituents he's dealing with, but like, at least he's not dealing with like public, you know, he's not arguing with BlackRock. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, there's a whole set of people he normally would have to deal with, kind of the CEOs normally have to deal with who he just doesn't have to deal with because he literally owns the company. And so, yeah, look, maybe it's a model, like maybe if, you know, maybe if this, maybe this, maybe this works, you know, the way that, you know, he clearly intends it to work, you know, maybe a lot more people literally do what he's doing, which is to your point, they buy these companies and reboot them and kind of reform them.

50:01And that would be a big change. And then, you know, maybe just on the margin, maybe this changes how public companies are run, right? Maybe this is a little bit of the reinvention, you know, maybe this is a little bit of the rediscovery of this. We bring back some of the spirit of bourgeois capitalism, also retaining, you know, some of the advantages of managerialism. Yeah. You know, aspirationally, you could, you know, say maybe, maybe that's a possibility. Yeah. The, well, it's interesting. I remember Stripe laid off like 13 % of its workforce, you describe this incredible company of course and then a number of companies followed suit with kind of exactly the same amount of the workforce so it's just yeah you need one example and then and then others 13 this is not cracking on stripe just the general trend that i've observed yeah so the third it's always this funny thing it's like 13 why is it 13 well because it feels like it should be at least 10 um but like boy 15 sounds painful yeah but we do want to show that we're serious.

50:53And so, and we, well, it's me in the middle. And so it's probably going to be either 12 or 13%. And if, you know, 12 % might sound a little weak, so let's do 13%. Yeah, exactly. Whereas, you know, Elon's like, yeah, 80%. Yeah, exactly. Like the difference in magnitude between 13, I mean, you know this, but like 13 % to 80%, like there's a spread. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I know it all too well. Unfortunately, Absolutely. Moving away from Twitter, but still on Elon for a second, because he also presents a new model for how to be a billionaire. It's a common question we'll get is over the past decade, during some of the most excesses of what's been going on, people say, where have the billionaire has been?

51:36Why haven't they stepped up to stop it? And as it turns out, maybe some of them have been implicitly or explicitly supporting it. And it feels like there's this kind of monoculture for how billionaires are supposed to act and the views they're supposed to have and the work they're supposed to do and the way their organizations are supposed to set up and what they're supposed to do. These are your peer set. Talk a little bit, even in the abstract, about the pressures that face this class and why Elon or maybe something like Teal is just so different from how this group all acts. Why isn't there more diversity among this class?

52:16Yeah, so this goes to Bernard's third book. So we'll go to the third book, which is The Machiavellians, which is probably the most important of the bunch. So, you know, The Machiavellians is a book all about kind of, it's about the structure of politics in society. So it's not, you know, it's not partisan. It's not really arguing right versus left. It's a structural argument. And we'll maybe have a long discussion about this. But one of the key concepts that sort of pops right out of the Machiavellians is this sort of concept of oligarchy, right? Just to give a quick thumbnail sketch, you know, basically what Burnham and his predecessors, the Machiavellians, he talks about a lot of prior political thinkers and, you know, including Machiavelli, but a bunch of others.

52:56And he basically says, look, there are basically, there are fundamentally three forms of power. There are three forms of sort of political power. There's rule of one. There's rule of the few. And then there's rule of the many. and then what Machiavelli said actually is there's a good and a bad version of both of those. And so the good version in Machiavelli's formulation, the good form of the rule of the one, the good form is monarchy, the bad form is tyranny. For a rule of the few, the good form is aristocracy, the bad form is oligarchy. And then for a rule of the many, the good form is democracy and the bad form is anarchy.

53:30And this is sort of a general framework for political systems. And then historically, if you read like Machiavelli, historically, political systems basically go through this rotation. They actually rotate through the six and then they go back to the beginning. So they start out with monarchies. The king goes bad. That becomes a tyranny. The king is overthrown by the aristocracy. The aristocracy basically goes to seed because the oligarchy, the people ultimately decide they hate the oligarchy. They take over. They assert democracy. Democracy doesn't work because the people can't rule because they're dispersed.

54:01That then turns into anarchy and then therefore that's where you get a king. And so there's this sort of theory of sort of this timeless cycle of politics that plays out.

54:12If you kind of read this book and take it seriously, then you kind of say, okay, what is our political system? Like, what political system do we live under? And so you can kind of run a process of elimination and you can kind of say, well, it's clearly not rule of the one anymore because, like, there's no more kings, right? So it's not monarchy or tyranny. You know, hopefully it's not anarchy. So that sort of, you know, brings it down to sort of aristocracy, oligarchy or democracy. And then what you want to say is that it's democracy. We've all been trained from childhood to say it's democracy.

54:41But of course, A, it's technically not democracy because it's representative democracy, which is not the same thing as democracy. So we're not voting on every single issue. We're electing 435 congresspeople and 100 senators and so forth and a single president to figure this stuff out for us. So it's representative democracy. So it's basically rule of the few. and then is it rule of the few is it aristocracy or oligarchy and I think the short answer to that is it was aristocracy basically through about the 1960s and you know that was sort of the heyday of the wasp aristocracy and then these sort of super elite assimilated you know Catholic aristocrats, Jewish aristocrats you know kind of with the sort of dominant Protestant aristocratic class at the time that kind of ran the country I mean you know FDR himself was like a peak wasp you know Roosevelt like a peak wasp aristocrat you know, kind of of his era.

55:33And then basically, since the 1960s, you know, basically, the aristocracy basically, for a variety of reasons, either, you know, had power taken from it or just decided to give up power. And then our modern political form is oligarchy. And then there's this big difference between aristocracy and oligarchy. Aristocracy consists of what Machiavelli called lions, which are people who basically rule through basically force and basically assertion of command. Master morality. What's that? Master morality. Yeah, well, so the classical aristocratic rule is why am I in charge? Because I'm in charge. Like, I'm the aristocrat.

56:07I'm from the right family. I own the land. Screw you. Like, do what I tell you. What he calls the lion. And then the oligarchy, right, exactly. So the aristocrat is sort of representing the last messages of master morality. The oligarch who competes with the aristocrat basically says, oh, actually, I'm ruling on behalf of the people. So he's what Machiavelli calls the foxes. And basically the foxes rule through deceit, manipulation, and cunning. And their form of deceit, manipulation, and cunning is to claim that they are acting on behalf of the people when, of course, they're actually acting primarily for themselves.

56:40Because lo and behold, they are self-interested just like everybody else. And so anyway, Bert Burnham and Machiavelli and Cicero and all these guys, Aristotle would say, we're living in a classic oligarchy. Like that's the actual structure that we're in. um and and so basically our our ruling class is an oligarchy it's an it's an oligarchy elite and elite here is a is a term you know out of this book as well um and then and then basically so anyway long-winded way of getting to your question which is okay what happens to a high tech founder right regardless of background maybe they come from another country maybe they come from here maybe they come you know i come from the rural midwest um and they start a tech company and it works and they become successful and they become rich right and they become like high status all of a sudden what happens and the question of what happens is they get invited into the oligarchy right and literally what happens is you start getting invitations right and so you get invited to davos and you get invited to aspen and you get invited to you know since it's you know nantucket and you get invited to you know and before you know it you are spending your time with and by the way you show up right to these things you know you show up to the aspen institute for the first time or whatever and you're just like oh my god like i've arrived there's prince harry yeah there's prince harry and there's you know mike bloomberg and there's you know all these like there's all these and they're you know the movie stars and like you know tv stars and politicians and you know there's cory booker and there's kamala harris and like it's just like it's like wow like i am in like i am in i am in the in crowd right yeah and and you're invited in and by the way they're as nice as can be like they're incredibly sweet they're incredibly nice they're so happy to see you.

58:11It's so great to have you there. And, you know, dinners are great and the parties are great and it's all just so fantastic. And then at some point they're like, well, we have this project that we're raising funding for. And you're like, oh, wow, I would love to support your, you know, program to whatever reform, you know, whatever school, you know, and then all of a sudden you find yourself writing the checks and it's like, well, you know, actually I'm running for president next year. And boy, I'd love to. And you're like, wow, you're my friend. I'd love to support you. Like, this is all great.

58:33And so it's, it's a, so what is it? It's like a, it's a social circle, right um it's a political network uh it's a patronage network um it's a fundraising network um it's a pr campaign you know it's all of those things it's a power you know it's a whole it's a it's a government structure um you know these are the people who staff the senior positions at like all the big important institutions in the country you know university presidents and people who run media companies and editors and newspapers and you know as they say the bold face names like the you know the people who are um you know when they're written about in the newspaper their names in bold because everybody knows who they are um and it's just like wow i'm like in right Right.

59:06And, you know, if you're not like paying attention to it, you know, what you realize is, you know, it's not, you know, what you're not getting in that group is you're not getting like some broad representation of different like political views and different walks of life. What you're getting is basically this like basically abstracted elite oligarchic class where it actually it actually turns out like their politics are all just identical. Like they all believe exactly the same set of things. If they have arguments about anything, it's only on the margin. and you know primarily it's a it's an influence operation it's a you know there's a lot of what's called log rolling i support you you support me and it's a by the way it's distributed like there's no central node there's nobody in charge there's no wizard behind the curtain there's no secret boss is organizing the whole thing like it's happened you know these are literally like conferences with 400 people where somehow they all end up thinking the same thing like that you know that that is and so anyway what what what burnham would burnham describes this process in the book and he calls the it's the the technical term for it is called the circulation of elites um and so basically what if you read the machiavellians what you learn basically is because of the political structure stuff i was talking about any any modern any modern society is going to be an oligarchy basically um that oligarchy is going to have a a ruling elite at the top um the only way that that oligarchic elite can ever be displaced is with another elite taking its place right um which reasons for reasons we could talk about like populism is a total dead end.

1:00:25It would have to be a replacement by a different category of elite. And then basically, it's like, okay, if you were a self-optimizing oligarchic elite collective, how would you make sure that no new elite gets formed? The way that you would do that is you would recruit all of the new high capacity, high merit, high achieving people who rise up in the system. You would make sure to recruit them into your elite, right? Which is exactly the process. You would invite them in and then they become one of you. And so anyway, that's literally what happens. That's what happened. And by the way, and by the way, I've been in all, you know, I've been all these places, I've been all these conferences, like, you know, I know all these people, you know, and it's great.

1:01:01It's just like an incredibly exciting, you know, it's an incredible adventure. It's like the culmination of your life's work that you're like in this, in this, in this network. It's just like, okay, it's all great. As long as that's the political system that you think should rule the country for the next hundred years, as long as these are the people who should be in charge, as long as you agree with all their policies, it's all absolutely fantastic. And so you, and this is the irony of it is the people who, you know, most people who become billionaires in our society or become very successful, like, you know, in business, they're like super contrarian, right?

1:01:28So they've got like a thousand different, you know, every entrepreneur, every entrepreneur we know has been highly successful. Like they're these super disagreeable people who've got all these really contrary ideas on how to run companies and how to do things, which is why they're successful entrepreneurs. But they get, they get pulled into this world and all of a sudden they become like incredibly conformist, right? And they, they just, they no longer have any unique opinions on anything involving politics or social policy or the structure of society or anything. They just, they just adopt this sort of, sort of oligarchic elite view kind of wholesale.

1:01:55with exceptions. And then basically, to your question, what happens is every once in a while you get an exception. You get somebody who's basically like, look, I could go do that. I could be part of that, but like, I'm not going to do it. The guy I think who actually unlocked this in our era is actually not actually originally Elon, surprisingly. I actually think it was Larry Page. And I don't know if you recall, this is like a decade ago now. Larry, you know, there was all this pressure at the time. There was the billionaire pledge, right? So Buffett and Gates, who are kind of charter members of this, this old electric elite that we're talking about, the green's billionaire pledge, which again, is another form of this elite assimilation thing, right?

1:02:26To try to get everybody to kind of sign up for the whole program. and they're always trying to get Larry Bates to sign it. Larry's like, look, he's like, I don't think the right thing to do with all the money that I have from Google is to just give it away because who knows these nonprofits, who knows what they do. He's like, I think what I should do if I get hit by a truck, I think my money should just go to Elon Musk and he should just build more companies. If you remember at the time, the reporters were all just completely horrified because like, oh my God, you're not on the program. How can you not be on the program?

1:02:52Everybody knows what to do. Why don't you know what to do? And Larry's like, well, I just think that Elon building companies is having a bigger impact on the world, you know, than the Ford Foundation, like, you know, as contrarian ideas as that was at the time. Yeah. So Larry actually like kind of hung that out there. And then, and then to your point, like Elon's been living it, you know, Peter, you know, you know, Peter lives it. And the fact that there's like, you know, Elon and Peter and Larry and others who are a little bit more kind of off the beaten path now on some of these things, I think is opening up the aperture for the next generation.

1:03:21yeah what i'm a few observations first it was interesting is that the it's not like there's a new elite and old elite and it's a generational divide as much because like sbf is 30 years old and yet he's a davos elite you know as davos as they come perhaps full on yeah full on sam went from you know stanford math kid to like m.i.t math kid to like full charter member of the oligarchic elite that rules the world in like three years i mean it was pretty incredible by the way apparent and by the way apparently he's still in it because they all keep defending him so like apparently like apparently it worked yeah well let's talk about that for a second um effective altruism you know your um your partner your wife is in uh in philanthropy and and you guys talked about results driven philanthropy of who wouldn't be you know supportive of results driven philanthropy what's the sort of blind spot of uh you know effective altruism yeah some so my wife teaches Just for people to know, so my wife has taught for many years, actually at Stanford.

1:04:19Actually, she's taught philanthropy. She sort of helped develop one of the main people who developed philanthropy as an academic field. And she taught philanthropy at Stanford Business School, which she used to describe as sort of trying to divert the sharks out of the for-profit tank into the nonprofit tank. And her whole thrust was what she called strategic philanthropy, which basically you could think about it. I would think about it loosely as like a grounded version of effective altruism. which is, and so her critique, and she's given talks and she wrote a book, she wrote a book called Giving 2.0 where she talks about this if you want to read it, but what she says is, look, there's a critique of philanthropy that she believes that, by the way, Sam would also agree with, which is basically most philanthropy is emotional, right?

1:04:57Like I, you know, I or somebody I love goes through a health scare, I then donate money for that particular condition, right? Or I go on a trip, you know, I go, I don't know, I go to Hawaii or something and I discover the plight of the dolphins and I start to donate money to that, you know, because it tugs in my heartstrings, right? Or I see a TV commercial and there's some poor thing, you know, some poor person and I don't have money. So, so, so most philanthropy is, is emotional. And then you get this sort of massive reallocation of resources, like assuming that you actually have, like, let's assume everybody here has pure intent.

1:05:25They're trying to make the world better. You know, so this is like in medical research, for example, it's, it's like there are certain conditions that just get like dramatically overfunded. And there are certain other conditions that are even more serious that get dramatically underfunded just because of like who happens to get what condition. The classic example is actually the age effect of medical research. The stuff that old people suffer from gets much more funny than the stuff that young people suffer from. Of course, the reason is because young people who suffer from something don't have any money to donate yet.

1:05:52Whereas when you're old and you get sick, you maybe have some money and then you make your decision based on that. Anyway, my wife basically says, look, you should basically think of philanthropy. You should evaluate philanthropic basically gifts in the same way you evaluate business investments. You should think hard in terms of, you know, the actual effect that things are going to have and you should try to quantify it and so forth. And so, and yeah, look, we've, we've done that in our private philanthropy. So as an example, you know, we've, our, one of our big pushes has, you know, for years now has been, uh, Stanford hospital and in particular, the ER department of Stanford hospital.

1:06:20And a big reason for that is just, you know, any given day, I want to basically understand what impact our philanthropy is having. I can go sit in the waiting room at Stanford ER and I can see the patients come in and I can see them get treated. Like it's a very tactical, tangible, practical, you know kind of deterministic uh uh thing so so so there's that um you know effective altruism basically you could say takes that idea and then like scales it way up and basically says okay you should apply that same attitude and that same methodology to basically all of humanity right and and and you should basically right fully implement the philosophy of utilitarianism which is to say the greater good and you should basically be able to map the mathematically model and you should say okay if i do xyz today then it's going to have this impact not just you know next year, five years from now, but 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years ago, 100 years from now, by the way, maybe the entire future of civilization, right?

1:07:08Maybe I'm going to make an investment today that's going to result in humanity reaching the stars or humanity's curing all diseases or humanity achieving whatever desired result 100 years from now. You know, the critique of that has always been the same as the critique of utilitarianism, which is like you get into a level of abstraction where you basically start to play God, right? And you start to think that you can put things in a spreadsheet that extrapolate out, you know, know, 100 years in the future with huge numbers of variables, you start to think that you can re-engineer society, right?

1:07:37You start to think that you can kind of play this like really big game, right? Will you ever actually be able to prove any of your assertions? Will you ever actually see the results of your work? Will you ever actually, will there ever be a feedback loop back to what you're doing so that you can correct? Like, probably not, because you're now dealing in a level of abstraction and time horizon that's just like way beyond any individual human's ability to do anything. And so anyway, this is my critique of it. It's like, it's just, it leads you into this, like playing God's social engineering thing.

1:08:05And of course, if you ask, well, what kinds of political movements you support playing God and doing social engineering, I think we'd agree on the answers. And so it leads you down this kind of ideological path that has a shocking number of overlaps to other ideological paths that have ended very badly for reasons we've discussed already. So yeah, I, yeah. makes sense yeah and there's an interpretation right there's an interpretation i don't know if it's true right but there's there was a famous uh one of the famous sam bankman free interviews was an interview with tyler cowan uh where uh tyler asked him um you know because they're talking about all this stuff that the math involved in effective altruism and utilitarianism and probabilities and so forth and and uh tyler's like you know suppose you had a you could you know with a roll of the dice um you can roll the dice and with 50 percent with 51 percent odds you would get another earth like you would literally get another earth with like another eight billion people and like another like an entire like ecosystem and you'd like basically you double the footprint of humanity in the cosmos um but with 49 probability you would lose the one earth that you have right and and you know do you roll the dice and sam's like oh of course right right and and it gives the expected value like expected quote-unquote expected value you're more you know done it up right and and and and and then of course tyler's next question is you know do you roll the dice more than once, right?

1:09:24Like, suppose you win the first time, you know, it comes up, it comes up heads, and you get your two Earths, and you then get to make the same bet again, you know, double or nothing, right? And Sam's argument was, you keep actually making that argument over and over again. Because like, if you get it right 10 times in a row, then you've got 1000 Earths. And like, that would be like so much better than what we have today. Like, how could you not take that chance? Anyway, one of the theories about what happened in FTX was he applied that philosophy to running a financial services firm. He kept rolling the dice.

1:09:52Kept rolling the dice. And the dice came up, you know, positive, you know, a bunch of times in a row. And, you know, it got him into this incredible position. And so he just kept rolling the dice. And, you know, and so there's a theory that basically, like, what he was fundamentally doing was trying to optimize the future of all humanity by trying to roll the dice so that he would end up with a trillion dollars so that he would end up being able to solve all the problems. Now, there's an issue with that theory, which is he gave that interview to the reporter for Vox where he basically said, yeah, I was lying about all that stuff.

1:10:20It's a dumb game woke Westerners play to make people like us. Exactly. So he undermined his own defense there a little bit, but, you know, who knows? Yeah. I mean, another couple observations. One is Elon is acting as a lion, to use the language you mentioned, but he's a meritocratic lion. Not, you know, I rule because I'm the best, not because of my family. And what's interesting, Bobo's in Paradise, Dave Brooks' book chronicles how we moved from an aristocratic elite to a meritocratic elite, but that same meritocratic elite also became most critical of meritocracy itself. or most, you know, and maybe as a way to deflect or, you know, or maybe just kind of reconcile sort of this idea that, hey, you know, they're an inherited advantages to if you have better, we don't actually have a quality of opportunity and if you have better.

1:11:17And so anyways, that's one interesting observation. The other observation I'll mention is, you know, we mentioned how these billionaires who've been so successful, so contrarian in their private company lives. When it comes to the Davos elite, they have a lot of weird views, a lot of weird views about how people should live in their personal lives, but then also this global government ethos. I'm curious how you reconcile. You're a fan of immigration, you're a fan of trade, you're a fan of globally connected world, but you don't want global governance what is sort of the right um framing of thinking about that so a couple a bunch of big questions in there so let's start with remind me the first the first thing um the uh uh meritocratic elite that yeah yeah denies meritocracy let's talk about that for a moment so so there's this guy so there's a guy i kind of you can kind of trace this progression so there's this guy james conant c-o-n-a-n-t and so he was uh by the way he was an american he was an american you know wasp elite you know out of central casting he's a very important figure in 20th century american history So he became very, he was a chemist actually by background and actually worked on like chemical weapons in World War I as like one of these like really advanced kind of science guys.

1:12:29And then he was famously in the early 20th century. He was there for a long time. He was the president of Harvard, right? Which, you know, then and now Harvard was like the, you know, kind of the peak, you know, the highest status, you know, educational institution in the country. You know, kind of the, you know, Harvard, Harvard, you know, Harvard and a couple other places like, you know, create, you know, give us all the Supreme Court justices, right? And, you know, typically all the presidents and so forth. and so Conant ran Harvard and actually at Harvard I bring him up because he did exactly what you're describing he came out of a system of actually inherited aristocracy which was kind of the traditional American WASP aristocracy and he was very explicit about this he used Harvard as a vehicle to basically replace the inherited aristocracy with basically an aristocracy of merit or an oligarchy of merit which we'll come to but sort of a class of merit And he's the guy who basically opened up admissions at Harvard.

1:13:20And he basically says, we're not just going to have, it's not going to be all legacies and all people with the right last name and all people with families in the social register and their families came over in the Mayflower and all that stuff. You know, it's going to be the best and the brightest. And we're going to basically scour the country and we're going to basically go find the best and the brightest and we're going to recruit them in. And then we're going to basically have this aristocratic elite class of merit. And he actually did that, by the way. He did that. By the way, as a consequence of that, every other university basically did that.

1:13:46That led to the creation of, for example, the SAT, the ACT, like merit testing, right? You know, sort of emerged out of that. And so the goal literally was like, go scour the country every year, get the smartest kids from wherever they happen to be and like bring, and by the way, like again, circulation of elites, invite them in, right? Invite them in. Congratulations. Like it doesn't matter where you came from. Now you're at Harvard. Now you're a Harvard graduate. Now you're in the Harvard network. Like we're going to jump you up to this ability where you can have this giant impact on the world, but you're here because of merit.

1:14:15um funny thing happened um uh it did not uh result in equal representation by group um and so they ran this process for you know 20 or 30 years and let's just say there were some disparities um and there were some population groups that were like extremely unhappy and there were some other population groups that wanted to speak for the previous population groups and assert their moral superiority and say that that these are these are bad outcomes and so he came under sort of increasingly intense criticism later in his career and by the 1960s he was basically cancelled for saying bad things because he made comments at the time on race that basically even the 1960s would get you cancelled and so his career basically spanned all three phases it spanned the original basically inherited the inherited concept of aristocracy when he started and he was a product of that himself.

1:15:10He then implemented and essentially co-created the idea of an aristocracy of merit and fully implemented it. And then he ended his career basically on the other side, which was the birth of the modern system, right? The modern system of, you know, so the civil rights, affirmative action, and, you know, modern university admissions, you know, it's all, you know, coming full circle because Harvard, you know, the Harvard case is now in front of the Supreme Court. You know, it seems like Supreme Court is highly likely to use the Harvard case to strike down affirmative action in university admissions, which if they, the Supreme Court's intent, if they do that, would be to return Harvard back to where it was when James Conant was running it, you know, in like the 1930s, 1940s.

1:15:51Probably that's not what would actually happen. You know, anyway, this is, you know, this is all still a giant live issue. Anyway, so he like lived all three phases of this, and all three phases of this actually like played out quite quickly. It all played out in the span of one man's career. This is a little bit of the thing that you and I were talking about earlier, which is like, okay, if there was this moment, let's say there was this moment when James Conant was running Harvard, and let's say it's probably 1940 is a good midpoint for this or something, where they truly were admitting purely on the basis of merit.

1:16:20Again, you could create many different criticisms as to whether they were different advantages and all that stuff you could talk about, but let's just say they were doing it straight on the basis of SAT scores. and so it doesn't matter where you grew up, it doesn't matter whatever, ethnic background, immigration status none of that matters, it's just how do you score on the SAT they actually did that for a while and then that became, for whatever set of reasons, good or bad, that became untenable starting in the 1960s and they have been basically evolving in a very different direction ever since.

1:16:50So apparently at least in our culture, in our era that's not actually a stable that's not a stable state for people who would like that to be how these things work, like, sorry, like, probably it's not going to do it. Right? So if anybody's going to do that, it's going to be some sort of new institution. Like it's going to be, it's going to have to be somebody else. Anyway, I don't even mean to actually reach a conclusion based on that. It's just that you can actually see this whole thing playing out. And I actually think the kind of flow of events as people argue this stuff out, it's, these situations have unfolded often enough now where you can see the pattern and kind of predict where they go.

1:17:25Yeah. And the, yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, people like Michael Schellenberger, people like Thomas Soule, there are a number of people who've, you know, shown that there's a certain set of policies that people, the foxes promote that actually don't help the people that they're aiming to help. And they recommend alternative policies, but those alternative policies kind of break a fundamental assumption that, you know, all people are equal or some fundamental assumption that people are uncomfortable with and so they would rather have they would rather keep the fundamental assumption that kind of they think respects people's dignity or something then then get maybe the outcomes that they want and it feels like that that fundamental assumption is so core to so many things um well this goes to but in this ghost also you're i think sort of the same question earlier which is sometimes this oligarchic elite seems to end up with these somewhat crazy ideas like like like you will own nothing and be happy or you will eat bugs yes right Right.

1:18:27Exactly. You'll eat bugs. You will sleep in the pod. Well, look, so again, what Burnham would say here, what Burnham would say is very straightforward, which is this oligarchic elite has become a very disconnected class. Right. So it's become a very disconnected set of people. It's a very small set of people. They are sort of a whole bunch of things. So, first of all, they are actually often very high merit. They often actually are like quite smart. It's not that they're dumb. They have been educated at a relatively small number of institutions. generally, you see a very high correlation to a certain small number of like Ivy League universities and their international equivalents.

1:19:02They associate primarily with each other, like part of what you get when you join the oligarchic elite is you get like a set of friends and your new set of friends are like much cooler than your old set of friends. And so they associate with each other. They kind of by definition don't invite people in who don't fit, right? And so if you show up and you're like, wow, I really like that Tucker Carlson character, right? Isn't he great? You know, you don't get invited to Aspen next year, right? So they kind of box out. You know this is even before they classified all oppositional speech as hate speech and misinformation like even before that it was like look you're going to have a certain set of points of view here if you want to fit it like it's a social dynamic it's a social dynamic it's a social club like any social club people are expected to kind of all agree on things and to not not really argue about things and certainly not do anything that would offend or horrify anybody um and so it's like i don't know it's like the opposite it's like uh what's the joke it's a marketplace of idea there's no real dispute that happens right there's no truth seeking exercise it's like we're all going to basically agree on the same thing.

1:19:57And so, and then they just, they live in rarefied air. And then, you know, a lot of them, you know, they're either rich or they have a lot of rich friends. And so, you know, they tend to live behind high walls. You know, they tend to be guarded by men with guns. You know, they tend to not be subject to violent street crime. By the way, you know, another irony in Seoul and others have pointed this out, the other irony is they actually follow very bourgeois traditional life scripts on average. Like most, you know, the most of the, If they have kids, it's generally they're married. They're raising their kids in two-parent households.

1:20:29They have very stable family situations. They prize education. They teach their kids to work hard. They follow a very traditional, even aristocratic. By the way, mating, they have very strong opinions on who their kids should marry and reproduce with. One of the enormous, one of the reasons why there's so much focus on getting kids into these top colleges is because that's the marriage pool. That's where the good people to marry are. So there's a reproductive kind of component to it. And so they live in this rarefied... It's like anything. It's like the courtiers at Versailles or something. They live in this rarefied world.

1:21:08And so when something happens in the real world that is not as they predict it, they don't have skin in the game. They're not subject to the consequences. So let's just take a hypothetical example. if they decide that the correct social policy to achieve true equality is to let all the criminals out of jail, hypothetically, and the result is like a massive surge in street crime that is victimizing like huge numbers of, you know, poor and disadvantaged people, they're completely insulated from that, right? They have no risk. Actually, I mean, I won't name names as tempting as it is, but like I know people who are like, you know, big funders of all of the pro-crime district attorneys, and they really believe that they're going to like heal the nation and heal the world and achieve racial harmony if they let other criminals out of jail.

1:21:52And, you know, they are, in my view, responsible for like just this massive violent crime wave that's happening right now. And they are, then they literally have like SEAL teams protecting them. Right. So there was no like, you know, crackhead homeless person who's going to come get past your SEAL team six security guy. Right. Like you're, you're out, like you're out, like you're ruling a society, but with no accountability whatsoever for, you know, for the results. And so, yeah, so it's extremely easy. In fact, it would be shocking if people in those circumstances did not get like radically disengaged and disconnected from reality.

1:22:26And again, if you go back to your Machiavelli, that's where it's like oligarchy at some point. At some point, the people are just like, you know what, screw this, screw these people, you know, and they at some point, they show up with pitchforks and just kind of take care of the problem. Yeah. To finish the analogy around, or sort of the tension between nationalism and globalism, You know, in some ways, this is supposed to be the era of the sovereign individual. And yet it seems like, as we saw during COVID, you know, governments are adopting some of those technological advancements to, you know, control its people in tightening and, you know, increasingly tightening ways.

1:22:59And it seems like this idea of global governance, global coordination to solve those climate problems and nuclear proliferation or, you know, what's going to happen with AI. You know, it feels like that's that's becoming more and more vogue. And yet, you know, for people who are as you are excited about trade, excited about immigration, excited about global coordination. How do you kind of like reconcile those tensions or say, hey, you know, stop here? Yeah. So there's this idea that you've alluded to. It's like very deeply seated and call it, you know, you could call it modern global governance as they sometimes call it.

1:23:30It's, you know, it's like if you go to the World Economic Forum, like they'll teach you this. Or if you, you know, if you go to these parties, there's sort of this through line, which basically says, and it actually, and it actually, in a lot of ways, I mean, in some ways it's like tightly, it's baked into Judeo-Christianity generally. But like Hegel was the philosopher who kind of, you know, kind of fully articulated this in sort of modern philosophic terms. And then his thinking was carried forward by Marx and others. and so the sort of intellectual origin of this kind of through line of thinking is kind of in Hegel and his successors which basically is like look, the progress of human society is a progress and by the way, this sounds great and there's certainly some truth to it.

1:24:09The sort of flow of history is basically confronting problems and solving problems and so everything you know, life used to be nasty, brutish and short and everybody used to die of disease and everybody was hungry and da-da-da-da-da-da, so everybody was slaves, like all these problems. And then basically, there's what they call the sort of historical process, right? And the historical process plays out. And the way the historical process plays out is what Hegel called the dialectic. And the dialectic basically is, you know, you've got basically one theory for how things should work. Boy, they don't seem like they're working very well.

1:24:38You've got another theory on things you should do about it. You argue about that. And then you come up, you know, sort of thesis, antithesis, and then you come up with synthesis, and you kind of get to the answer, right? And then basically, you play out that answer. By the way, if it works, that's great. If it doesn't work, you repeat the process until you figure out the answer. But at some point, you figure out the answer, right? At some point, the right set of smart people, whether they're philosopher kings or, you know, democratic rulers or, you know, scientific experts, right? At some point, they're going to run the experiments on how to optimize society such that they will ultimately at some point figure out the right answers.

1:25:10Now, imagine that you ran that process for hundreds of years, right? And you ultimately figured out the right set of answers. And maybe at one point, you know, you thought that that was, you know, Stalinism. Maybe at one point you thought that whatever, whatever, but like, you've arrived at a point where like, it's like, okay, you know, this is the end of history thing, Fukuyama, like liberal democracy, like we figured it out, we figured it out, we've solved the answers, we have the playbook, we have it, you know, the Davos version of this is whatever global democracy thing that they have. If you really have all the answers, right, then you have the ultimate moral imperative to impose those answers on the entire world, because of course you do, because you have all the answers, right?

1:25:45Like, you can solve all the problems, right? If you had all the answers, let's suppose you had all the answers to out in organized society, how could you not impose those answers on the entire world? It's the only morally correct thing to do, because if you don't do it, all these poor people are going to be suffering in all these completely unnecessary ways. And so therefore, I have the answers, therefore I must impose them. And so, you know, look, and this was everything I just, this is the intellectual foundation underneath communism. Like this was the story at the time. This is the story behind the current Chinese form of communism.

1:26:13Like this, this is like a thing. This is like, this, this, this idea has had a big impact on history. and the strong forms of it are not doing as well right now, but the sort of, this sort of softer form of it, you know, it's less of a, of a, of a, of a hammer and a little bit more of a, I don't know, velvet fist or something, but you know, this impulse is very strong and this is the impulse of, you know, all of these, this is the impulse of the oligarchic elite. Like we have the answers, we have figured out the answers. And by the way, we just saw playing out in COVID, right? The answers are like super obvious.

1:26:44We're going to have lockdowns. We're going to have this we're going to have that and like we are not open like we have already figured out there's no more reason to discuss this like we have the answers anybody opposing us is clearly opposing us in bad faith because we are you know you know this is the thing where these guys look up there and they'll say things like you know to challenge me is to challenge challenge science right like i have the answers like stop bothering me and just do what i say right yeah and so anyway like this is a very deeply seated deeply rooted thing and these by the way these people like fully believe that they're doing the right thing like that in fact it's necessary to prosecute this kind of campaign, which is like they're completely convinced that they have the answers.

1:27:18And if they don't impose them, they're actually committing a great moral crime by not imposing them. Anyway, like this is very deeply rooted in the system. And then, yeah, look, people who oppose that, right? You know what they're called, right? You know, they're called nationalists, right? Because they don't want the quote unquote global governance that, you know, they're called, you know, fascists because they don't want, you know, right? You know, so you got along with the kind of dirty words. Yoram Hazoni wrote a book a couple years ago called The Virtue, the virtues of nationalism, which is a very kind of, um, uh, you know, kind of, uh, very provocative title in the, in the current environment.

1:27:52Um, and he was actually blocked from advertising the book on certain social media platforms. It sounded like it must be a fascist manifesto. Um, now he's Israeli, um, you know, it's a bit much to accuse him of being a Nazi. Um, although people have, um, and so he makes this argument in the book that you'll enjoy. Um, and it's, it's the kind of argument that never really works, but it is a fun argument to hear, which is he's like, actually, this sort of Hegelian global governance, world state kind of thing is anti-diversity. Yeah. Right? Because he's like, look, the advantage of having many, the way Sonny puts it is the advantage of having many countries, right, is you have many different systems of organizing society, and then you are actually able, you know, and you therefore have diversity of the forms of society.

1:28:34And so therefore, you can actually have real life experiments play out as to which things are better, which ones aren't. if everything is just globalist and everything is just a single global, you know, ultimately a single global state, which was like the Hegelian and, you know, kind of Marxist dream, you know, you will eliminate all forms of diversity of social organization and philosophic ideas, right? And so basically you will not achieve utopia, you will achieve dystopia, right? Because you will no longer have a process of evolutionary involvement of thinking. And so he says in the book, if you are pro-diversity, you should therefore be pro-nationalism.

1:29:06You should be pro the existence in many separate states. Of course, this argument does not work at all, right? Which is, you know, just because the same people who want universal world government also say they want diversity does not mean that they're going to buy his argument that you should therefore be nationalist. Just like the argument that if you're pro-diversity, you should have, you know, political diversity as well. Exactly. Yes, that's the yes. We can definitely not hate anybody from a different kind of ethnic background, but we can definitely hate the people on the other side of the political aisle with the theory of a thousand sons and tell our kids that they are definitely not allowed to marry any of those people.

1:29:37Yeah. Cause yeah, that's cause that, that, that, that form of hate is, is, is just fine now. Um, yeah. And so, but, but anyway, I, I go through all that cause like that to your question, like that, that is a massive, like that is a massive, you know, kind of underlying question underneath a lot of this, which is like, do we want the entire world to run the same way? Um, and if we really have all the answers, yes, we do. Um, if we believe that it is actually impossible for anybody to have all the answers and that it actually is a very, you know, terrible assumption to ever believe that and that reality is actually, like, super messy and, you know, that people actually deserve, you know, the freedom to, you know, not only try to figure out a better way to live but actually the freedom also to make mistakes, right?

1:30:20Then, you know, then this track that a lot of people are on is actually a very dystopia and, you know, kind of potentially, you know, leads to potentially hellish outcomes. You know, Thomas Sowell, if he were on this, he would say, yeah, this was precisely the debate around communism. You know, nothing, the same debate exists today, just under, under, uh, under different names and people are basically making the same mistakes they were making then. Yeah. Um, yeah. Anyway, so, you know, what am I, you know, I don't know, like somewhere, somewhere in the middle, like, you know, I'm sort of prime, you know, I'm a prime benefit.

1:30:46You have a prime beneficiary of globalization. You know, you and I work in a field in which there's no question, like our field is like spectacularly enriched, uh, you know, by the just enormous amounts of immigration that have happened in the U S over the last 50 years. We work with people who are, you know, I feel like I work with the United Nations every day. hey, I work with people from all these different backgrounds. It's just absolutely spectacular. I would not want to live in a system that would somehow decide that was a bad idea and send them all back to wherever. That would be horrible.

1:31:09That would be awful. Look, at the same time, do I think it's a good idea to have a single system of global governance where there's a set of experts that determine everything and everything is equal and everything is the same? No, that sounds like hell. What if they're experts and fact checkers? Yes, the missing link is the fact checkers because they can make sure the experts are on the straight and narrow. Yeah, exactly. Checks and balances. Let's get into this counter-elite. We alluded to it earlier that populism is a bit of a dead end. We alluded to Peter Thiel in 2016 when he endorsed Trump was a bit of a pariah.

1:31:45And now there's been more of a movement around. There's been more diversity within tech. And it seems like this counter-elite is forming. Elon obviously is potentially accelerating it massively. And that's on a macro level, on the billionaire level. But then also on a micro level, a lot of tech people are kind of politically homeless. They don't want to be on either side. They don't want to be in the far left, policies that sound good but don't work or dysfunction within organizations. But they don't want to be on the far right. They don't watch Fox News. They're pro-choice. They don't want to be Republicans.

1:32:19They don't want to be conservative. They want to be a centrist, but that won't hold for maybe reasons we've discussed. so so you know on kind of that level but on the building like what's play plays out the counter elite sort of new moral new philosophy among among people who've been homeless politically yeah so let's i'm going to focus you know more on the structural kind of aspect trying to be a little bit less on the partisan side but on the structural side so back to our burnham so um so what what burnham was i i did the throwaway comment saying populism is a dead end and so it's it's worth for a moment kind of addressing why that's the case like even if you think the current elite is terrible, like, let's even assume you're a full on whatever, you know, let's assume you fully believe the current elite is evil, and they must be torn down and must be replaced by a true democracy.

1:33:00Like, what Burnham would explain to you is like, that's not actually possible. And it's the exact same point that we discussed earlier on managerialism. Or another version of it is what Burnham calls the iron law of oligarchy, which basically is in every human system, no matter... But by the way, this also was true in communists, true in the Soviet Union, communism is true in China today under communism. Every human system always, there's always a minority of people ruling the majority of people. That's basically permanent. There's never actually democracy. It's always basically some minority ruling some majority.

1:33:34And you see this play out over thousands of years across many different kinds of societies. And the reason for that is it's mechanical. The argument has no bearing on how they rule. It's just that there will be an elite that rules. And it's a mechanical argument, and it's because the elite is concentrated, whereas the majority is dispersed. And so if you have 100 people who are highly concentrated and are organized up against 10 ,000 people who are a rabble and a mob and are just like a populist that's just out there doing their own thing every day, and they're just not organized, the organized elite is always going to end up in power over the disorganized masses.

1:34:09And this just happens over and over and over again. Again, the American system, why do we not have a pure democracy? We do not have a pure democracy because our founding fathers were well aware that, I mean, just imagine the horror show that would resolve if citizens got to vote on every individual issue as it came up, which, by the way, that's what happens in California. California is so screwed up now, right? We have direct democracy in California. It's obvious to everybody it doesn't work. Of course, we will continue it forever. But, you know, representative democracy is an expression of the fact that even in a system that was intended to be very egalitarian and very democratic, you're still going to have this organized elite in the form of literally Congress and the executive branch and the nine justices of the Supreme Court who are fundamentally going to run the country on behalf of the people.

1:34:52So anyway, this is what's called the iron law of oligarchy. There will always be a small number of people in charge of the large number of people. That small number of people is referred to in this framework as the elite, the oligarchic elite. And again, we talked about it before, like how do they rule? They rule by telling a story that legitimizes their rule. That story in our era is the story of egalitarianism. They are not ruling for themselves. They are ruling on behalf of the people. And, you know, they tell that story. They have policies that are intended to deliver on that, maybe a little bit in some ways, you know, sometimes, maybe not in other ways.

1:35:27But, like, that's the story that they tell. And so, and then as a consequence of that, like, they are the elite. They set the narrative. They have the dominant part. They have the sort of the the, the high, the sort of moral high ground in society. Um, and then, um, they have, and then they have these reinforcement mechanisms. They have a, you know, the credentialing system and they have their recruitment system to bring in, assimilate in the, the, you know, the new people and so forth. And then they, and then, you know, think about what else they have. They, they, by the way, they don't necessarily have all the money, but they have the power.

1:35:55Um, and then they have, um, they have the ability to perpetuate. Um, and then they have, um, uh, oh, they have the, sort of status high ground. So sort of status, prestige, fashion, like these are the fancy people. Like these are the people that when they do things and they say things, like people care. Right. And so anyway, if you read a Burnham, what he will tell you is basically like, if the people were to actually rise up, like suppose that people woke up one day and literally took pitchforks and, you know, and torches and went and stormed, you know, Donaldson Aspen and killed the oligarchic elite, the result would be anarchy.

1:36:28They're like, the result would be hell, right? It would just be a spiral into hell. It would be, you know, like, it'd be like Black Hog Down territory of just like, you know, madness and chaos. And so like that, that, that's not a route. So what you need is you, if you want to replace the elite that you have today, what you need to do is you need to have a better elite, right? And there's just the only one way out. If you don't like the current oligarchic elite, that doesn't result in just mass death, the only way out is a superior elite. So then, then, then you're a thought experiment territory, which is, okay, what would be a superior elite to the elite that we have today?

1:36:58Well, a bunch of things. So So one is they would presumably have a set of ideas that would be better ideas because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this. They would then need a story that is a superior story. Right. So sometimes called a political myth. Right. Which is they would need a moral claim. Right. That was able to achieve buy in. Right. That was able to legitimate their rule. They would need fashion status, prestige. Right. They would they would they would need they would need legitimately to be able to project. if you belong to our elite, you are a higher status, higher prestige person if you belong to that elite.

1:37:32And then they would need to build the kind of all these other things, the perpetuation method, the recruitment method, they would need funding. They would need an education system. They would need media organs. They would need the ability to get their message out. For people who want to change the system, that is the way to do it. So the good news is there's a roadmap. There's an answer to the question. There's a way to do this. It's been done before, and it could be done again. Having said that, it's the world's biggest challenge, because whatever you think of the current oligarchic elite, they are very powerful.

1:38:08They are very in charge. They have many resources. They are very cool people, and they're not so easy to just simply replace. To a similar extent, Teal has done this with the Teal Fellowship. you know, is higher status in some circles or many circles than even getting to Harvard or Stanford. That's one example of an organ. If people are pursuing this in earnest, like on the ideas and myth level, you know, let's brainstorm if you're open to it, you know, one track could be competence. Hey, as we saw during COVID, et cetera, this past elite has been incompetent. And putting intentions aside, you know, we're just a much more competent elite.

1:38:49You know, we're going to get rid of these or like we're going to focus on unifying instead of dividing being this cultural but i don't just kind of riffing here but what ideas and myth do you think are potentially compelling that you know a counter-elite could could get behind could advocate and and might resonate yeah so i think let's build on those two to start with yeah so yeah one is just like yeah competence like you know look like would you like your eight-year-old to be able to walk to school without getting like mugged or assaulted right you know it's like at some point there are some very basic like competence questions you know how did you feel about being locked up for three years right and you got covid anyway oh that's interesting right like right so yeah so like i think there's that and you know there's always this question of like you know when when do people finally get fed up i mean you know a a city level version of this was crime in new york city in the 1970s and then you know they at some point they did elect an anti-crime mayor and then he at some point you know he did bring crime down so like you know this this does play out at a micro level for sure um um and so you know maybe there's some larger version of it um now and again like A couple things on that.

1:39:48It'd have to be real. If you didn't deliver, people would get very upset. The same thing would happen to you. It would have to be real. Then you'd have to be able to recruit. You have a chicken and egg problem. You'd have to be able to recruit in the people who are actually capable of executing on it before they're actually in power. The key question always is, the way to think about this is, suppose you have an existing corrupt elite. Let's suppose hypothetically. you have an existing corrupt rotten incompetent oligarchic elite and you have a new fresh competent fired up you know meritocratic elite um and then put yourself in the shoes of like an aggressive ambitious young person right out of school who's like on the make and like wants to like optimize their position in society and wants like status and power and money right and it's so you so you have to have a recruitment like your story has to be really good and you have to have like a critical mass the ability to recruit those people because otherwise the existing elite is just going to get constantly reinforced by having, you know, new people kind of take it over, um, and carry it forward.

1:40:46So, um, yeah, so, so, so, so, so that could be, um, uh, that could be a really big one. What was your second one? Oh, um, we're going to focus on unifying people instead of unifying. That's a good example. Okay. So that's another thing. Yeah. So you might, yeah, for example, you might observe hypothetically that our current elite seems to be doing an awful lot of demonization of the other side. Um, you know, interestingly, the other side is, you know, basically it's, you know, arguably it's a sort of, you know, in our modern politics is class and race demarcated. Right. And so it's this, you know, there's nobody like, it's really fun.

1:41:18Like our current oligarchic elite is like heavily dominated by like, you know, heavily dominated by white people. Um, and, uh, you know, there's nothing more than they hate that they hate them, you know, than poorer white people than them. Right. Um, and so, um, you know, yeah, I mean, they're, they, they sell, you know, that you, you could argue they sell a story of division, um, and, you know, the deplorables. Right. And, and, and yeah, you could, you could have a, you know, you could, you could have more of a sort of a Julius Caesar kind of thing where you'd say, look like, no, I'm not gonna, um, I'm not gonna rule on behalf of 51 % of the country versus 49%.

1:41:47I'm going to rule on behalf of the entire country, right? I'm going to invite everybody in. Um, you know, and we're going to lift, we're going to lift, we're going to lift the whole thing. Now, you know, you are denying people the ability, you know, then to hate, right? Which is a huge attraction of the current system, right? Um, so, you know, you're taking a big motivator away, you're replacing it with something that, you know, I think probably a lot of people would find more attractive. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, look, you know, you'd have to, I think, you know, part of it would have to be look like, you know, these people have made you promises that they can't deliver.

1:42:16I mean, they've had time. Yeah. I mean, this is what you always kind of expect would happen in all these cities, right? Which is, it's like, okay, like if, if, you know, if the single party governance of all these cities is going so well, like why is the crime rates so high? Like, you know, at some point it's like, okay, they're not delivering. Yeah. So, you know, there's that, you know, look, you'd have to challenge some sacred cows, right? You'd have to say, look, like, you know, maybe we should not, you know, maybe we should not be trying to do the level of social engineering that's happening, right?

1:42:39Maybe it's a bad idea to have, you know, maybe it's a bad idea to have differential, you know, standards for different groups of people. You know, what the Supreme Court's about to do in the Harvard case, like, you know, maybe you'd have to revisit some of those things. Maybe people are ready for that, maybe they're not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, this is like the big macro, you know, historically, this is like the big, you know, this is like the biggest game of all. It's the creation of basically a new political story, right? It's, you know, it's the creation of a rationale to rule, you know, know, that actually results in the support necessary to actually get the position where you actually are ruling.

1:43:10Yeah. You know, people have done it. Recently, you've been tweeting out a series of white pills. And this, you know, reasons to be excited. And, you know, this is me projecting a little bit, but I feel like the last few years for you and others have been a bit more, you know, pessimistic times. And, and so I'm curious for what's inspiring to recent optimism and uh or white pills and maybe we can end with sort of the pessimistic case and the optimistic case you know some people have described the pessimistic case as like a very slow decay you know 100 years brazilification i think some people call it and uh i'm curious for what what the what the optimistic case is yeah i think the optimistic case i mean it's it's i kind of worded negatively but it's like one of my white pills is you know the current elite is actually really bad specifically being an elite yeah like who really like honestly like who who really wants to look up to some of the i mean maybe some of these people people look up to but like some of them it's just like a hard it's a hard sell like i mean god like it's difficult and by the way again this is not even a partisan i wouldn't say this is not even a partisan comment like you know you just look at a lot of the sort of national level people and it's just like oh like i'm supposed to get excited about that person that seems like a stretch um and then you know look, the results are like not great.

1:44:29Like, you know, you, you know, you can, like I said, you know, economic growth covers up a lot of, a lot of, a lot of sins, you know, the U S economy, you know, generally works pretty well. Um, but you know, you get in the situations like we've been in, you know, repeatedly for the last 20 years where you get in these weird, you know, foreign policy situations or these weird, um, you know, economic sort of downturns, you get these weird, you know, public health things or whatever. And you're just like, wow, like these people really don't seem to, I mean, it's like COVID COVID policy. I mean, look COVID policy, right?

1:44:55Like it's like two weeks to crush the curve, right? Okay, two weeks to crush the curve became two months, became two years, right? And nobody at any point, at least that I saw, ever like articulated, well, wait a minute. Why did we ever think two weeks was ever going to do anything? Did we know that two weeks was like, did we do two weeks knowing it was going to fail and it was going to be two months? So did you lie to us or were you incompetent, right? And so just like every element of this, I mean, the mask thing alone, we could do like a whole podcast just on mask, but the whole mask thing alone, it's like the exact same people who in February, of 2020 were saying there was no reason at all for any, you know, any normal civilian ever be wearing a mask, you know, who, you know, within two months had it be basically the new, you know, holy face, you know, covering for all right thinking people like, and then they were onto like, oh, maybe we should all double mask and triple mask.

1:45:40And then here we sit three years later and there are still, you know, schools that are forced masking their kids. Like, it's like, okay, like whatever this is, like whatever these people think they're doing, like it's not, and then everybody gets COVID anyway. Right. So, um, like apparently like these people do not actually know what they're doing. They're not actually good at their jobs. There seems to be zero accountability. They seem to never get fired. Whoever gets fired, it's just like all these things. Afghanistan. They say that we should forgive them. Yeah, right. It's like morality, because good intent covers sort of explains everything.

1:46:15But Afghanistan, whoever got fired for Afghanistan, right? Like 20 years of rule and leadership right of the whole afghanistan campaign and like you know we saw how it ended and the cut you know now we're countries back and you know it's like we were never there um and this massive exercise and thousands of americans dead and like lots of other people dead and all this like chaos and blood and the whole thing and stranded interpreters and like the whole thing and you know who got fired like yeah you know so yeah so anyway so not to get specifically on these issues but um yeah so anyway like but this way like if they're going to be the elites they got to be good at being elites.

1:46:51Like they got to at least be good at being elites. Right. Um, and at some point it's like, if they're not even good at that, like, what are they actually good at? Um, and so, you know, at some point, like I said, at some point, I think people just kind of get fed up. Um, and then, and then look, the internet, you know, it's become very fashionable. And of course, nobody does this more than our current elites, but like, it's very fashionable to dump on the internet for creating division and dissension and this and that misinformation and kind of on and on and on. And the people who tell that story the most forcefully are our current elites who just absolutely hate being challenged.

1:47:21And like, you know, look at the internet, the internet is, you know, as you all know, like the internet is subject to the constant censorship, censorship pressure at a level that would make Orwell blush. And notwithstanding that information is still more widely available today than it was before the internet, like by far, right, by far, right. And so, you know, even the, you know, the sensors have had a good, you know, eight years to do everything they can. And, you know, information is still flowing. It's not flowing as free as I would like it to flow, but it's flowing a lot more free than it used to.

1:47:46Yeah. And so anyway, yeah, I it's, yeah, I don't want to, yeah, I never want to get myself in a frame of mind that says the situation is hopeless. And I think there's, yeah, there's at least cracks. There's at least cracks in the system that are encouraging. To close, maybe that way, Paul relates to your tweet recently in terms of the theme of our era is uncashed checks suddenly popping up, absurd pretensions, wistful fantasies, and pretty ugly lies called by reality. Yeah, it's like, look, if you're in power, and you've got this story, right, and you can like sell these propositions and you can implement these policies, like at some point the results come in.

1:48:19Um, and you know, the longer conversation we could have about this another time, but like, you know, there are, I mean, look, just, just since the 1960s, 1970s, like there were a set of policies put in place in the 1960s, 1970s that made very specific promises. Um, and the results are in, we're 50 years later and like, not only did it not work, they were catastrophic in many ways. Um, and so like at some point the, the, the, the, the bill arrives, um, you know, it does feel like an awful lot of, you know, bills are arriving. A lot of, a lot of checks are, a lot of people are trying to cash a lot of these checks.

1:48:45They're not, they're not, I mean, we could have a long conversation about education, but I mean, even, even the, you know, even the, even the Gates Foundation, right, did this big report last year where they did, they did a retrospective study of 40 years, 40 years of philanthropic attempts to improve education in the U.S. And the result of the report is nothing worked. Yeah. Right. Like 40 years of promises, nothing worked. Budget per, you know, per student budget of education in the U.S., K through 12, rose 3x over the last 40 years in real dollars, results didn't budge, right? And so, like, the data's there.

1:49:14Like, the data's in. It doesn't work. The people running the system are terrible, you know, and for all the reasons that people already understand. I mean, it's become so obvious now, right, with, you know, some of the people in charge of these systems. And so, yeah, I mean, the bill comes due. Now, people, you know, it's like anything. People have to care about the results, right? They have to care about the results more than they care about the story. And it's always a question of like, well, they, you know, are people, it's always the thing, are people more enamored by their belief in the story and in their sort of social affiliations based on the story than they are in the actual tangible reality on the other end?

1:49:47You mentioned Thomas Sowell. I'll just recommend for anybody who hasn't read his books, like you want to definitely read like all of Thomas Sowell's books because maybe more than anybody else in the last 50 years, what he does is he tackles like all of these societal level questions, you know, directly. and then and he does it from the position of kind of you know it's very high level of kind of moral authority but then he's one of the world class economists and so he actually goes at the data and he addresses the data and he's just like okay this doesn't work this doesn't work this doesn't work this doesn't work and you come out the other end being like oh my god we're ruled by people who have no idea what they're doing so it's a very I find his books to be very inspiring other people find them to be very depressing let's wrap on that inspiring note the bill is coming due Mark thank you so much for coming on the podcast Good.

1:50:28Awesome. Eric, great to be with you.