Transcript of Peter Thiel on Trump, Elon, and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites

Today's episode is sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Fhir believes that a culture of free speech and open dialog is the bedrock of a free society, essential for scientific progress, artistic expression, justice, and democracy. As an organization, they defend those rights in the courtroom and on campus, but they also seek to promote these values in our culture. If you care about free speech, and I can't imagine if you listen to this show that you don't, FIRE is an organization that should be on your radar, go to thefire. Org to learn more about how you can support their efforts to protect free speech and free thought for everyone. From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weis.

President-elect Donald Trump announcing the appointments of additional members of his administration today. Tonight, Trump announcing that a Department of Government Efficiency will be led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk Musk and Vivek Ramiswami.

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, Vivek Ramiswami, will head a new department in the Trump administration. They're calling it the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Dogecoin is surging, as you might know, following the President-elect's victory, getting an extra boost following some headlines around Elon Musk. We saw DOGEcoin surge as much as 20% on Tuesday night, right after Donald Trump formally announced the Department of Government Efficiency, which he called DOGE in a hat tip to the dog-themed meme coin.

Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed in the White House, DOGE coin is a meme coin. If you don't understand what I just said, fear not. I'm sure Nelly will cover it in TGIF tomorrow. But what the announcement solidifies, if Trump's win hadn't already, is the triumph of the counter elite. In other words, a bunch of oddball outsiders pulled together, got behind Trump and ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood. And the oddballs won. And they're about to reshape not just the government, but also American culture in ways I don't think we can fully imagine. How they did that and why is a question that I've been thinking about pretty much nonstop since last Tuesday. And there was one person, more than any other, that I wanted to discuss it with. That is the Vanguard of those anti-establishment counterelites, Peter Thiel. People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms. He's been called the most successful tech investor in the world and also a political kingmaker. Others call him the boogie man of the left. But he is the center of gravity, at least in a certain part of Silicon Valley, and he's created a world around him.

There's the Tealverse, Tealbucks, and Teelis. To say he's an obsessive cult following would be an understatement. If you listen to my last conversation with Teal a year and a half ago on this show, you'll remember that Peter was the first person in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016.

I'm Peter Thiel. I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.

That year, he gave a memorable speech at the RNC.

Of course, every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

A speech that many in his orbit thought was a step too far. He lost business at the startup incubator Y Combinator, where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Saka, who called Thiel's endorsement of Trump one of the most dangerous things he had ever seen. Jason Calicanis, one of the hosts of the All In podcast, wrote at the time, If you are backing Trump, you are choosing the side of hate Racism and misogyny. There is no compromise on this issue, Calicanis wrote. It's not a difference of political opinion. It's about what human being you want to be. Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics, at least publicly. He didn't donate to Trump's campaign this time around, and there was no big RNC speech. But the bigger change, I'd argue, is a cultural one. Thiel is no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump. There's Bill Ackman, Mark Andreessen, David Sacks, Sean Maguire, and of course, Elon Musk, among many other tech Titans, some of whom used to support the Democrats who have join the Trump train.

On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions or at least paradoxes. He's a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolists families, and yet Trump's White House wants to break up big tech. He's a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and also the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but also, in this conversation at least, He seems to venerate the Ivy League. But perhaps that is the secret to his success. Peter Thiel's beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own. Why wouldn't you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the ePayment Behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir, which was used to find Osama bin Laden, to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel's investments in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few, have paid off big time. His most recent bet, helping his mentee, JD Vance, get elected Senator of Ohio, and then Vice President of the United States, seems to have also paid off. I guess the next four years will determine just how high Thiel's profit margin will be.

Today, Peter Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump, why he thinks Kamala, and liberalism more broadly, lost the election. He explains why he thinks Trump 2.0 will be better than the last time with anti-establishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. He said this just before Matt Gaiths was announced as attorney general. We talk about the Southern border, tariffs and trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism on the right, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what a dreaded World War III might look like. This is a conversation you will not want to miss. Stay with us. The Credit Card Competition Act would help small business owners like Raymond. We asked Raymond why the Credit Card Competition Act matters to him.

I'm Raymond Huff. I run Russell's Convenience in Denver, Colorado. I've ran this business for more than 30 years, but keeping it going is a challenge. One of the biggest reasons I found is a credit card, twice fees we're forced to pay. That's because the credit card companies fix prices. It goes against the free market that made our economy great. The Credit Card Competition Act would ensure we have basic competition. It's one of the few things in Washington that both sides agree on. Please ask your member of Congress to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Small businesses and my customers need it now.

For more information on how the Credit Card Competition Act will help American consumers save money, visit merchantspaymentscoalition. Com and contact your member of Congress today. Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee, merchantspaymentscoalition. Com. Hey, Honestly, listeners, I want to let you know about an amazing podcast called Unpacking Israeli History. If you read the headlines about what's going on in Israel, you're only getting a very tiny slice of a very long story. Shorn of depth and historical context, so much coverage of Israel can't even get the most basic fact straight. One of the things we try and do here on Honestly, and at the Press more generally, is to go deeper into the most important topics of the day as we try and get to the truth. That's the mission of Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Dr. Noam Weissmann. It offers listeners a journey through the events in Israel's past and its present. In a world where history is getting rewritten, the goal of unpacking Israeli history is to provide listeners with a nuanced, fact-based understanding of the state of Israel that's both informative and entertaining. The show delves deeply into the nuances and complexities of Israeli history and how it relates to the present, examining tough questions like, is Zionism a colonialist project?

Is Israel an Apartheid state? And are the settlements an obstacle to peace? You won't want to miss it. Learn the history behind the headlines and find Unpacking Israeli History wherever you get your podcast. Peter Thiel, welcome to Honestly.

Thanks for having me, Barry.

Thanks for making the time. We spoke, I don't know if you remember this, we were in Miami. It was May of 2023, and the world was a very different place. Joe Biden was the President, and he was the presumptive Democratic nominee. There was a Republican primary underway. You were supporting Ron DeSantis, but you weren't being very loud about it. And Trump was on the outs with a lot of people. The amount that has changed over the past year and a half is profound. Six months after our conversation, October seventh happened, and it felt like the world shifted on its axis. Then Trump won the GOP nomination. In July, Biden dropped out of the race. Kamala was coronated. Of course, Trump survived this wild assassination attempt near my hometown in Butler, Pennsylvania. Then last week was the election, and Trump not only won the White House, he won the popular vote. Now it looks like the Republicans are poised to control all three branches of government. I think it's an understatement to say that we're living in a changed world. I think, and the reason that I wanted to sit down with you today is that you saw so many of those changes coming, and you can make an argument that you maybe saw them even too early.

I want to start with a broad question, which is, how are you feeling about this political moment that we're in?

I wouldn't say I'm ecstatic, but I am relieved. I think I would be incredibly depressed if the election had gone the other way. It's probably a little bit asymmetric. I would have been less happy than I would be unhappy had it gone the other way. I never actually he supported DeSantis. I did meet with him a couple of times, maybe toyed with the idea a little bit. Desantis felt promising in early 2021 when he was the courageous COVID governor. And by early 2023, It felt like he was a little bit too locked in on these culture wars, and I didn't believe that that was... They're important, but they're not the most important thing. It already felt very, very off in early 2023 to me.

Were you surprised by what happened on Tuesday night? Because someone credited you for predicting it. You said it was going to be a blowout in one direction or the other.

I didn't think it was going to be that close. I didn't think that Harris was going to win by a big margin. If you combine those two things, it's a way of saying that I thought it was going to be a solid win for Trump. I mean, he was way behind in the polls in 2016 and 2020, and both of those were extremely close. If you just believe that the polls hadn't been fully adjusted, and they hadn't fully corrected whatever mistake they were making in the polling from four or eight years ago, and the polls were even, that suggests it was going to be a very, very solid win. Then on some level, I think it was just a collapse of liberalism. Say more. I mean.

Of liberalism or of the Democratic Party?

Of liberalism, the Democratic Party. I think it's too narrow to blame it on a somewhat senile Biden and a somewhat goofy Kamala. It was just a much broader collapse. It feels like a much more decisive election. In a way, you can say in 2016, Trump beat the Republicans, the Bush Republicans, and he maybe lucked out or snuck by Hillary, and she didn't take him seriously at all. You can't say that about 2024. Everyone knew it was going to be the Midwest states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. The Democrats gave it their all. They spent two or three times as much money as Trump spent the last three, four months. It just didn't work. The institutions tried to prosecute him, prosecute him criminally. They tried to take him off the ballot. They tried to stop him in every way possible. And so unlike 2016, this time it was Trump against the Democrats. The Democrats gave it their all, and it just collapsed. I think one other dimension of it that's so many different observations one can make, but one other dimension of it that I find striking is that if we talked about this in 2016, it would be the Republicans are this party of white voters and old voters, and they're going to die.

Eventually, they'll be replaced by younger and more diverse Democrats.

This is the whole demographics is destiny argument.

For Trump to be able in eight It is actually a long time. There are a lot of Republican voters from 2016 who are not alive anymore. For Trump to be able to win in 2024 and by a much more significant margin, at least in the popular vote than in 2016, it means you had to change the minds of millions of people. You had to do something that if you believe that demographic's destiny or identity politics means that people cannot listen to reason, and it's all subject to these subrational factors like your race or your gender or your sexual orientation or something like this, then nobody would ever be able to change their mind. You exploded the lie of identity politics that your identity matters more than the argument or the case. And Trump made an argument. J. D. Vance made an argument. They made a strong case. And I think there was no argument on the democratic side. It was free of substance, free of ideas. People say that Harris struggled in saying how she was different from Biden, how she was substantively different from Biden. But that's too narrow way of putting it. She had nothing to say of substance on anything.

I want to pick up on the idea of the Democratic Party, maybe even liberalism collapsed. There's so many striking visuals of this campaign. But I think one of them is when you look at the murderer's row of celebrities that were lined up behind the Democratic ticket, whether it's literally everyone. It's Oprah, it's Beyoncé, you name a Hollywood celebrity. On the other side, yes, you had a few dissidents from the elite like Elon Musk, but you had podcasters, you had My Pillow guy, you had not anyone that people would maybe choose if they were thinking about who to seek endorsements from, this Curry's popular favor. What does that say about where the culture is?

Well, look, these things are always very over-determined, but I would say it tells us that celebrity isn't what it used to be. And celebrity used to have a certain mystique, and it has been somewhat deconstructed. And we think of a lot of the Hollywood celebrities, a lot of the music celebrities as just these left wing ditto heads. And they may be smart people. They're not allowed to articulate smart things. They're not allowed to be individuals. And one of the striking thing is, I don't think there is room for individual thought left on the left. And it's certainly not in Hollywood. And I think Hollywood in the 1990s, it was liberal, but behind closed doors, you could say very transgressive things. And you realize it this liberal show you were putting on, and then there are parts of it you believed and parts of it that you could question. I don't think people are able to have conversations, even in small groups at dinners, behind closed doors in a liberal context. People are not allowed to think for themselves. Same thing for university professors. I know when I was at Stanford in the '80s, early '90s, it was overwhelmingly liberal, but you had a lot of thoughtful liberals.

There were still such a thing as an eccentric university professor, and that's a species that's basically gone extinct. Then we can go down the list of institutions. There were elder statesmen-type figures. People have been in the government for a long time and were very thoughtful and had a good nuanced perspective. There were all these ways this was more true on the left, on the democratic side, on the liberal side, than the Republican side. The progressives thought of themselves as more elite and the smarter people, but there's just no individuality left whatsoever. And then the story of people like Elon or Tulsi Gabbard or RFK Jr. Is at some point this strait jacket where you're just joining the Borg is not what you signed up when you started as a liberal. I've known Elon since 2000. He was never doctrineer, but for the first 20 years, he was left of center. Tesla was a clean energy, electric vehicle company. The Republicans were these people who didn't believe in climate change. It was naturally much more comfortable in deep blue, democratic California. Then at some point, Elon shifted, and it's over-determined why he shifted or why you shifted or some of these other people did.

I didn't shift, Peter. Everyone else just moved. I know.

But everyone feels that way, of course. But I know these things are overdetermined. But I keep thinking part of it is just this strait jacket is not what you all signed up for. This intellectual strait jacket where you're not allowed to have ideas. Even if you agree with 80%, it's never enough. You have to be 100%. One of the other metaphors I've used is that the left, the Democratic Party, it's like the Empire. They're all imperial stormtroopers. We're the Ragtag Rebel Alliance, and it's a uncomfortably diverse, heterogeneous group. You have, I don't know, a teenage Chewbacca and Princess Lea type character. Then we have an autistic C-3PO policy wonk person. It's a ragtag rebel alliance against the Empire.

I thought a lot about, I don't know if you were into the hunger games in the same way you're into Star Wars. But a lot of, to me, the people that I know that were reliable Democrats and liberals who either sat out this election or voted Trump for the first time did not do it because they liked Donald Trump. Most of them find him abhorrent. They did it because they wanted to give a middle finger to the Capitol, like in the hunger games analogy, because they felt all of the things you're describing. I think one of the things I'm thinking about in the aftermath of the election is, will the Democrats double down on all of the narratives and the myths that have landed them in this place? You can watch it right now on MSNBC, where they're still talking about... They're somehow finding a way to look at Black Black voters going to the right, Latino men, especially, going to the right. And somehow it's still a story of misogyny and white supremacy. Or are they going to spend their time in the wilderness regrouping in much of the way the Democrats did after Carter's loss?

And then, of course, you have Al Frum and James Carville, et cetera, building the Clinton machine.

Yeah, although that took 12 years. It did. It took a long time. I don't know, but I worry that the skill for introspection, reflection thought has just really, really atrophied.

But isn't losing a very good lesson in- It should be, but somehow the Democrat, it's a long history, but the Clintons in the '90s, it was triangulation, which was maybe a little bit nihilistic, moderate, compromise-seeking.

But behind closed doors, I think you had very smart people in the Clinton administration who had debates and were able to articulate things. Then you got to some centrist consensus view. There was a big shift with Obama in 2008. In a way, you could say there were only two people in the Obama administration, two individuals, him and her. Everybody else was just an NPC. You were just going with the Borg. You very quickly figured out what the consensus was, and then it was rigidly enforced. It had a certain power, but then there were all these ways It went very wrong. Then the Obama legacy was that you got Hillary Clinton in 2016. Probably Biden was their best candidate in 2020. He was almost blocked by Obama. Then in '24, you ended up with Harris, who was pushed by Obama, both as VP and then for President this last summer.

For my mom, who I know listens to this show, an NPC is a non-player character. It's like a zombie.

Like a zombie, yeah.

In retrospect, like when historians look back on this moment, I think in 2020, many people, even those who supported Trump, could tell themselves a story that his presidency was some anomaly. Now, I think with this overwhelming victory, historians are going to be telling themselves a very different story.

Well, the 2020 was the fluke.

Right. Explain that.

This is what seemed important to me about the 2024 election, because I think the Hollywood movie term is red conning, retroactive continuity. It's like you have a popular character who dies in an avalanche, but the people want him back, and then we somehow find a way for him to survive and make it back. Then you come up with a way to make it retroactively continuous. We have to tell a story of what happened the last eight years. If If we were to look at the story of how Harris had won, the story would have been, 2016 was a fluke. We can ignore it, and liberalism is basically fine, and we can go back to this somewhat brain dead, but comfortable Obama census. It seems to me that the straightforward, retroactively continuous story is that 2020 was the fluke, and it was one last time for this Ancien regime with an Ancien President, Biden to daughter over the finish line one last time. But it was not a sign of health at all. You were able to put it together. There were all these paradoxes. Maybe one of the crazy paradoxes of the diversity politics is that one of the lessons of the last three elections for Democrats is maybe they can only elect old straight white men.

The logic of it would be that If you go with a diverse person, you always have to go with a specific category. Let's say Kamal Harris is a Black woman, but maybe that doesn't mean that much for myself as a gay guy, or maybe it's alienating to Latinos or something like this. And so as soon as you concretize this abstract idea of a diverse person into a specific person, you lose way more people than you get. I mean, I don't know, it's maybe seven % of our population are Black women. And so maybe Harris helps with 7%, but then isn't the logic of identity politics that it should hurt you with the other 93 %? If you say you should vote for candidate X because candidate X shares your trait.

But I think one of the interesting things about this election, unlike the Hillary Clinton election, which was all about girl boss, lean in, female empowerment, Kamal Harris almost didn't talk about it.

No, it obviously didn't work anymore. I think the last time the identity politics worked for real was probably the 2008 election with Obama. It worked because in 2008, we were still in a pre-Internet world. A pre-Internet world meant you could tell one message to one group of people a different message to a different group of people. For Black voters, Obama could say he was a Black person and they should vote for him because he was Black like them. To White voters, Obama could say he was a post-racial person and they should vote for him because he was post-racial. By the time you get to 2016, it doesn't actually work. Yeah, Hillary can't tell women to vote for her because she's a woman and men to vote for her because she's a post-gender person or something like that. The this microtargeting Mark Penn political strategy from the '90s was way past its sell by date in 2016.

So, yes, somehow- Although I will say both presidential candidates, interestingly in this election, had one message for Arab Muslim voters, certainly in parts of Michigan, and a very different message for Jewish voters in the same state. So I'm just wondering if the rule always holds.

That one is complicated, I suppose, and we can analyze in a lot of ways, but I suppose it's evidence of just the total collapse of the Democratic Party if you lose ground among both Jews and Muslims. How do you do that? I can come up with all sorts of ways to explain it, but let's just say as a fact, it suggests you that, wow, if you can't even gain with one of those groups at the expense of the other, this whole identity politics thing has gone super haywire. But yeah, Kamala didn't know how to talk about it in the right way, and maybe there is no good way to do it. But I don't think this is a conversation they can have on the democratic side because Biden was the compromise. He was the old straight white male, and the promise was he's going to be the last one we'll ever have. We need him this one time to get through in 2020. So somehow they knew that this was the most electable person in 2020. Then, of course, we'll get a more diverse person after Biden, but then anybody post Biden is worse than Biden.

Then it's only when the senility really, really catches up that we have to do something. Then somehow the consensus shifted very quickly to, we don't have time for a primary, therefore we have to go with Kamal Harris, therefore we have to have this wishful thinking that she's the most wonderful candidate ever, even though that's not something we believe for the three and a half years before. Then it works for a few weeks, but then unravels pretty badly, as we all saw.

I guess I'm curious if you think the X factor in this election was Trump or Kamala's weakness. In other words, if Trump had been running against, let's say, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro or someone like a Westmore or perhaps even a Gavin Newsom, would it still have been a blowout?

It's always hard to do these counterfactuals, but my intuition is that it was a broader failing of the Democratic Party. It was not just Biden's fault. It was not just Harris's fault. I think all these people are not that impressive. If we go with elite credentialing, J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. If President Trump were here, he would tell you he went to Penn. It's an Ivy League school. Yes, he would. You can't be a dummy. They only take the smart as the smart people there. Only the best. He would tell you that. I don't know, in the '90s, Bill Clinton was Yale law, road scholar. Obama was Harvard law. Hillary Clinton was Yale law. They had impressive elite credentials. And there was a collapse with Biden. When Biden said he a transitional candidate. I think in retrospect, we can say it was a transition from smart to dumb or elite to non-elite. And it was University of Delaware. And then Kamala is Howard, UC Hastings, law school. Walsh, even dumber, even more mediocre. There is nothing elite left. I think Gavin Newsom was University of Santa Clara, not a very elite place at all.

Shapiro was a little bit smarter, but it's like Georgetown Law School, which is still a lot less elite than- But this is hilarious because you're someone who does not believe in the fact that these places should still hold the prestige that they do.

You think that they're corrupt and rotten. So square the paradox that's- Well, I Coming through here.

I can believe they're corrupt and rotten.

And that they still select for very smart people.

And find it amazing that the Democrats no longer believe in them and that they've come around to my point of view, or maybe that they are so rotten that they no longer good places to learn how to defend liberalism. Maybe there are good places for training Conservatives. If you go to Yale law school, if you're one of five people in the class of 170 who's still conservative at the end, you'll be pretty good at understanding what's wrong with liberalism. You'll have thought about it a lot, and you'll be a more thoughtful person. So it will actually train you well to be a conservative. We're right to value the small number of Conservatives who come out of that gauntlet as quite talented people. But if you're a liberal and you graduate from any of these places, I don't think you would do a better job defending liberalism. I don't know who the smartest young liberals are, Pete Buttijick. If you try to make him square the circle and defend the incredible deficits, the inflation, the out-of-control border, all the substantive policy that were wrong, it would be more embarrassing than Harris, because we expect Buttijick to be smart, and it would just show how incoherent it is.

If it's word salad coming out of Harris, Maybe we can blame it on Harris. If you had someone really smart, it would be more embarrassing. So maybe the liberals were correct to say that they could no longer pick someone from an elite school because it would blow up all of liberalism, whereas now we can still pretend that it was just the fault of Biden or Harris, although I think it was much broader than that. I think the whole thing is how you go bankrupt gradually then suddenly, and at some point it's just past the sell by date and it's over. It's somehow somehow, I don't know, the 20th century lasted. It went on in this zombie way for another 20 years, the 2000s and 2010s, and somehow 20th century is actually over. And this New Deal, liberalism, political correct leftism, this whole consolation of the progressive cult that is the university, these things have finally unraveled. And there are people like me who are in some ways oppositional to this or fighting this for a long time. It's often felt like, Man, this stuff never changes. I started the Teal Fellowship to encourage kids to drop out of college in 2010.

I remember 2019, nine years later, I was at this event at MIT, and the university president was talking. It was all these bromides. It was like it was 2005. It's, Man, we're never going to make progress. These institutions, they're unreformable, but they don't need to reform. Five years later, the collapse has been pretty big. I don't see how it recovers. They will figure something out, but it's not obvious how they will.

I mean, something I've been thinking about a lot since Tuesday night is, does Peter Thiel feel vindicated in this moment?

Sure.

But I think there are- Is that an embarrassing thing to answer yes to? Well, it's- You must feel vindicated. I mean, here's how I was thinking about it. In 2016, you were the boogie man, okay? I'm sure you were called that in a million articles, but that's what it was. You were alone as the, maybe the way I think about you is like the Vanguard of the counter elite. You made history, you were at the RNC, you were the first gay man to ever speak at the RNC, and it didn't lead to a cascade of other people, let's say, standing with you. And this election, you have Bill Ackman, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk. I want to talk in a little bit about what created that shift. But you were ahead, arguably, by eight years. In my view, there's no way you couldn't feel vindicated.

Well, I think the fantasy I had in 2016 was something like, there were all these deep substantive problems that I think exist in our society. I think our society is too stagnant. We're not making enough progress. There's a way the intergenerational compact has broken down and the younger generation is finding it much harder to get their footing. Yeah, there's all these ways that our society is no longer progressing. The economy is not doing as well. All sorts of different variations of this problem of stagnation or even outright decline that I had been talking about for a while. I think my fantasy in 2016 was that Trump was a way for us to force a conversation about the stagnation. Make America Great Again was the most pessimistic slogan that any Any presidential candidate, certainly any Republican candidate, had had in a hundred years because maybe you're going to make it great again, but you're going to start by saying, We are no longer a great country. And that's what the slogan meant. I felt it was a powerful political way of articulating this problem of stagnation. What do you do about it? Hard to say. First step is you talk about it.

How do we make our country great? Don't know. But probably first step is, We're not as great as we think we are, and then maybe we can become great again if we level set and admit where we are. That was my fantasy. Then I don't think the country was remotely ready for this, and certainly not the democratic part of the country. I don't know if the Democrats are ready for it. I think the country as a whole is. There is some admission that, man, there was a lot of stuff that Trump was right about. There's a lot of stuff where things sure feel like they're on the wrong track. I think that's where we are in a very, very different place.

Let's talk a little bit the shift that happened in Silicon Valley, okay? Because I think what happened is what's called a Preference Cascade. You probably know that term better than me, but it's essentially when several people, maybe a group of people, around the same time, realized they're not the only one. And in fact, maybe they represent, if not a majority, a powerful minority. And I remember it very clearly because it was the day our son was born. Our son was born, and a few hours later, Trump got shot at in Butler. I watched as people who had… All of the esthetics had been indicating to me that they were Trump supporters. But all of a sudden, with the picture of Trump and all of them retweeting it, it became, oh, my God, abundantly clear as one after the other. It started to basically endorse him with this picture. Yes. Explain that phenomenon to me, because like me, I'm sure you know lots of people who have one politics on Signal or WhatsApp and another politics in public. I It felt like over the course of basically from July to the election, the gap between those things radically narrowed.

What happened?

It's probably something like what you described. There was some degree to which it was safer for people to speak out when other people were speaking out. You know you're lying, and you know that everybody's lying, and you know that everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody's lying. At some point, it becomes pretty unstable, and it can just all of a sudden shift pretty fast into-Was Elon the critical ingredient?

Did he give people cover?

I think Elon was incredibly important to it. I think there were a lot of pieces that had built up in Silicon Valley. There was always a way Where for many years, people had been doubling down on the wokeness, the political correctness inside these companies. And then it's always an ambiguous thing. If something is not working, let's say wokeness isn't really working. It's not making your employees happier and more productive and more constructive, and it's instead deranging it. But the ambiguity is, does that mean you need to have more wokeness or do you need to cut it out altogether? And for a number of years, the intuition was, well, we just have to do a little bit more. We have to try a little bit harder and do a little bit more. And then there's some point where it just got exhausted. And certainly a lot of the top tech founders CEOs felt comfortable telling me this behind closed doors. Maybe they're just telling me things that I want to hear, but I tend to think they're telling me what they really think. I was very aware of this incredible disconnect. And it was in Silicon Valley, I think a lot of it was experienced as corporate governance, as how ridiculous it's gotten to manage these ideologically deranged millennial employees.

I'll try not to name names, but One of the bigger companies that was in San Francisco, people in 2017, the founders told me they weren't sure they could take any more money from me because I supported Trump, and it was difficult to explain to their employees. But it was about a 12-month period. By 2019, they hadn't shifted to being pro-Trump, but they really appreciated my courage. They organized their company where they had the hiring goals were to shift employees away from San Francisco Bay Area as fast as possible. So We have X % of people working in San Francisco, and we want to reduce that percentage as quickly as possible for a company as big as we are. And then if we build our employee workforce in any place other than San Francisco, it'll be less woke and less crazy and more productive. And so this was the just very prosaic conversation you had about how to manage a company. And then at some point, we got the preference cascade that was 2024. But yeah, obviously, Elon gave people a great deal of cover. It certainly seemed incredibly dangerous to me what he did, incredibly courageous, what would have happened to him if Trump would have lost.

Then certainly, it was Well, maybe all the rest of us can be a little bit more courageous than we otherwise were going to be. But he gave cover to everybody.

One of the things that was being said on both sides before the election by Oprah and Elon, and they sounded different saying it, but it was the same message, was that if their candidate didn't win, this was going to be the last American election. I thought that was totally nuts. But maybe you don't. Or maybe you hear it differently.

I didn't want to believe Elon when he said this. I texted him a few weeks before the election and told him, I hadn't believed you when you said this at first. But I think it's because psychologically, I don't want to believe that. I don't want believe that the country is so far gone that you have to leave the country or something. But the sense in which I felt that he was correct was that if Trump, with much better substance, much better on so many things, could not win in 2024 against the machine, the machine would always win. And if the machine always wins, you no longer have a democracy. You certainly no longer have a democratic process within the Democratic Party. We always debate the election shenanigans in November of 2020. The far more extraordinary thing was March of 2020, where Biden comes in fourth place, fifth place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and then somehow gets rammed through South Carolina. All the other candidates drop off. So this is the extremely nondemocratic primary in the Democratic Party in 2020, and then an even less democratic process by which Biden was replaced with Harris. If the machine could defeat Trump, I thought it was reasonable that it would gain even more power and somehow be unbeatable, and the country would become California, become a one-party state.

It would be far worse than California because the constraint on California is people can leave California. It's much harder to leave the US.

When you say the machine, explain what you mean by that.

Well, it's a question of what is actually going on in the Democratic Party or in this progressive cult that is the left. Again, maybe a cult is too kind a word because a cult normally has a cult leader. There's one person who's thinking inside a cult cult leader. And it is, again, it's a machine because there are no individuals. It's like you are just a small cog in the machine, and you're destined to become an ever smaller cog in this ever bigger machine. And that's the vibe of it. And ideas don't matter, debates don't matter, speech doesn't matter. It's just some fast consensus formation process. We get to an answer, and then we rigorously enforce it. It's always too extreme to describe it like the Communist Party or something like this, but it is this extremely regimened process that's somehow not very democratic, not very thoughtful, not very Republican, not very American.

One of the things that interested me about your role in this election cycle is when you look back at 2016, you were all in. You gave tens of millions of dollars between Trump and then, I think, 16 Republican candidates, including Senator, now VP-elect JD Vans, who we'll get to. But you sat this presidential election cycle out. You were at the Aspen Ideas Festival, not a place that I expect to see you. You said this, If you hold a gun to my head, I'll vote for Trump, but I'm not going to give any money to his super pack. Why?

Well, what I Aspen Ideas Festival, it's a 75% liberal audience.

So even in front of- It's way more than 75%.

If you take me literally and you held a gun to my head in front of a liberal audience, and I would say, I'm still voting for Trump, even if you hold a gun to my head in front of this very liberal audience, you better believe that I'm very, very pro-Trump. I also said that I didn't think the money would make that much of a difference, and it turned out really not to. Trump was insanely outspend, and it didn't matter.

I think what I mean is You're all in in 2016, and then it feels like you retreated. Other people stepped in in the breach, but you retreated. If I see a pattern to your life and the bets you make, you're often very early and very ahead. I guess I wonder what that pulling back indicates.

I articulated in various contexts why I thought Trump is going to win, why he should win. What I went on to discuss at the Aspendillas Festival. Probably the thing I said that was the most scandalous was just descriptively, he's going to win. He's going to win by a big margin because for that audience, it's always Hegelian. The actual is the ideal. And so if you say that Trump's going to win, that's the way of saying Trump should win and he deserves to win. The most scandalous thing I could have told those people was not, I'm going to work really hard for Trump and it may or may not succeed. The most scandalous thing I could tell them was, Trump is on the winning side of history, and he's going to crush it, whether I help him or not. That was the most shocking thing. There were like audible gasps when I said that to that audience.

You said in one interview in 2023 that the Trump administration was crazier and more dangerous than you expected. What do you mean by that?

It felt very unstable. It felt dangerous for the people who got involved. There were all sorts of people who got prosecuted. People went to jail. They probably did things that were wrong. They were also subject to crazy double standards. And so there were aspects of it that felt like a circular firing squad. There were all sorts of things where it felt like there was a lot of uncompensated volatility for the people that got involved at the time. I still have some worries that I'm certainly will be much improved this time. I still worry it will not be improved by enough. One of the paradoxes of our elections is the elections are always relativistic exercises. It's basically two candidates. Which one do you like more or which one do you hate less? Then once the election is over, we have just one president, and then that person gets put on this pedestal, and they are always found to fall way short of that standard. Elections are relativistic. After the elections. It's absolute. I have a worry in the back of my head that there are elements of that that will repeat, that on a relative basis, Trump was greatly to be referred to Harris on an absolute basis.

There are all these ways I expect him to fall short. In some ways, the problems are extremely difficult. They are harder than they were eight years ago. The border issue is out of control. So maybe you need to actually deport people instead of just building a wall. And that's a far more violent, far more drastic thing to do. And the foreign policy situation is, there's a crisis in Russia, Ukraine. The Iran problem is far worse than it was eight years ago, the China-Taiwan thing. There's all these ways that it feels like the world is sleepwalking to Armageddon. I think Trump is better than Harris. Is he good enough to stop us from Armageddon? I hope so. Not 100% sure that he's good enough.

One of the, I think, very proper fears of those that opposed Trump was the fact that in the first administration, he had a lot of people around him who, perhaps some on the right would view them as swamp creatures, but perhaps other people, me included, would view them as public servants that were trying to keep this thing on the rails, many of whom were burned or fired on Twitter or suffered, as you said, reputational damage, things like that. The idea is like he's burned through the A-list, the B-list, the C-list, and who's left. Do you share that fear? Do you think that's well-founded?

Not at all. Really? Okay. I don't know. I think they'll have a much stronger bench this time. I think a lot of the the, let's say, establishmentarian swamp creature people they ended up with were not that good. I don't know. I don't want to pick on too many individually, but someone like General Mattis as the Defense Secretary How bad your people skills have to be that you fall for the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos fraud and you're on the board of her company?

Well, George Shultz fell for that, too, to be fair. I don't think you consider him a- He was a lot shoulder.

I expect a general, in the probably ways they're too regimened, I expect them to have good skills at judging people and leading people. And there aren't that many frauds in Silicon Valley. That you fall for the biggest one in the last decade. I mean, maybe FDX.

I just don't know if that's the fair litmus. I mean, Rupert Murdoch fell for it, too.

He invested in. He was not on the board. But I think there were all these ways. I don't think these people were that good? And they were not good at rethinking some of the priorities. And there are ways that Trump does not have a overarching ideological agenda. It's not Reaganite. It's not a programmatic agenda. But there is a direction that the neocon interventionism went wrong. We need to rethink the failures of especially the Bush Republican era. There's a sense that the globalization project has gone very haywire. Again, it's not clear what you do instead. And there's a part of globalization in theory. It was a good thing, a borderless world, a world in which there are no boundaries to trade, the movement of goods, immigration, the movement of people, capital, the movement of finance, and the power of banks, and ideas, free flow of information, the internet. This was globalization in theory. Then in practice, so much of it somehow got hijacked by corrupt actors that are adversarial to the US. The WTO is a free trade organization that by 2001 was hijacked by communist China. Then there is some way this stuff needed to be rethought.

Again, Trump, I don't think had a great ideology on this, but directionally, I believe he was correct that we needed to somehow rethink these things. The place where the swamp preach were very unhelpful is they didn't want to rethink things. I do think this is where the second Trump administration will be in a different place.

But Trump's almost 80 years old. He's not going to change his character and who he is. If you're someone, let's say, who has a great life, maybe you're in Silicon Valley, maybe you're looking and thinking, Wait, wow, maybe I could make a big difference in this administration, and you just see the way that he churns through people, what's going to make you overcome this theoretical person to decide to move to Washington, DC, and give it a shot. I just don't see that aspect of it changing.

I don't think Trump is going to change his views that strongly. But again, I don't think he's that pro-I mean, his character, not his views, his character. But I think he was right to fire. They were wrong to hire a lot of the people they hired. They were right to fire a lot of them because they were not remotely aligned with the administration. There's some way to do it, and there's some way not to do it. I don't want to pick on too many individuals. Bolton has national security advisor, he was picked because he agreed with Trump on one thing, which was that Iran was a problem, and he disagreed with Trump on everything else.

China?

I think Bolton didn't have a terribly well-formed set of views on China, and it was not a priority. He probably disagreed with it as a priority, if nothing else. Then maybe Trump should have known this and should not have hired Bolton, or Bolton should have been aware of it and should have been able to figure out a way to work with in the rough direction that had been set by Trump, and it just blew up. So my hope is there will be way fewer firings, and they'll do a better job the first time around.

In 2016, you had a hand in suggesting candidates for Trump's administration. Vanity Fair, which I'm sure you don't read, called you the Shadow President. Who's in that role this time? Some people see Elon Musk camped out at Mar-a-Lago and saying it's him. Other people are watching as potential appointees like Bridge Kolby or making their way to Pilgrimage and Tucker Carlson's house in Maine. Is it him that's calling the shots? Who are the people that are most influential in Trump's here right now?

I think President Trump is calling the shots, and he's probably thought about it a lot more than he did when he came in in 2016. I'm not sure he'll get everything right, but I think he is going to be much more focused on bringing in people that are roughly in sync with the program, and I'm hopeful it'll be often a much better start. But I think at the end of the day, the buck stops with Trump. This is a way where it is very different from Biden or whatever the last four years we just had were.

After the break, we get into the border, foreign policy, the student debt crisis, and much more. Stay with us. I want to talk about some of Trump's policies. He campaigned on a few policies that seem very inconceivable to me. One of them is this 20% tariff on all goods from other countries and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Should we take him seriously, but not literally there? Is that going to happen? And if so, what does that look like?

Well, I don't know, Barry. There's so many levels. One can go through this.

There are- Well, then maybe let's start with this. Are those tariffs a good idea, in your view?

I think, directionally, they are a good idea. In practice, you probably want to be more nuanced. There's some things you want to tariff, some things you want to be more careful about. But there's a way free trade theory from the classical economics, the 19th century works. It's countries trade with each other, but it assumed was that you had comparable labor standards, comparable regulations. You had free flow of capital. So if you make money, you can invest it. And then the free trade theory, it implied that things would be near equilibrium, that you wouldn't have countries with chronic trade surpluses or chronic trade deficits. If you have a chronic trade deficit, as the United States has, it tells you that there's something incredibly off in the dynamics. There's a political way to think about this, too, which is there is a way that, and I'll use free trade in scare quotes. There is a way that free trade, as it currently operates, benefits certain parts of the US and hurts other parts. We have a very strong dollar. In some ways, it helps Silicon Valley. In some ways, it helps Wall Street and the financial system because the trade deficit, the current account deficit, gets recycled into the US.

If you have a multi-hundred billion dollar trade deficit and China ends up with hundreds of billions of dollars that it doesn't want to spend on US goods or services, it's only choice at the end of the day is to invest that money in the US. The money gets invested through the banking system, and the banks make money. So in a way, you can think of the Wall Street banks are long the trade deficit. The bigger the deficit, the more money they make. And when the deficits go down, the banks blow up. And something similar happened between 2006 and 2009. 2006, we had an $800 billion current account deficit. And basically, you had to have $800 billion of fake financial products that Wall Street had to sell, where it's like a triple A rated subprime mortgage bond that some clueless bank in Denmark buys up from the US. At some point, okay, we don't really want to buy these bonds, and maybe we don't want to sell goods to the US because there's nothing we can do with the dollars. The trade deficit, current account deficit collapsed, and then we had the 2008 global financial crisis, which again was at the time centered on the US banks.

So there's a way, maybe these deficits are good, but the sectoral effect in the US is that it really helps certain parts of the US economy at the expense of others. One of the sectors that's hurt the most are these swing states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. They were in the business of manufacturing, of building goods that in some sense had to be competitive in this global market. And politically, one way to analyze the elections in 2016 was that Trump in 2016 said, We're going to do something about this rust belt problem in the Midwest. And they failed to do much in the next four years. And then those states reverted to the Democrats. And then four years later, in a way, the Biden people did even less. And so Trump's been given another chance to do something. If you say what Trump needs to do or what J. D. Vance needs to do to get elected President in 2028 is to fix the rust belt problem in the Midwest. Maybe the tariffs are bad in some aggregate sense, but just for the Republicans to politically win, you have to do something for those parts of the country.

But other theory on this is there's a game theory to it as well, where if you have counterparts that are engaged in extremely unfair their trade, maybe you have to threaten tariffs as a way to get them to open up. If you're always saying, We're never going to do anything, you will end up with a very subpar free trade world. So this is where even if in theory, we believe in free trade, I never want free trade treaties negotiated by people who are ideological free traders because they will always think they don't need to negotiate anything. There's so many other points. Let me make one last point on this. If you did 60% across the board, tariffs on China, it probably would be very, very bad for Chinese companies and China. It would only be mildly bad for US consumers because an awful lot of stuff would get shifted away from China. Because trade is not... We always model it as between two countries. I think there's a lot of stuff that doesn't get shifted back to the US. I don't believe that's what happens. The iPhone, you can't build economically in the US. So it doesn't get shifted from China to the US.

If you put 60% tariffs on iPhones and it costs twice as much to make them in the US, then they just cost more. But what I think will happen is you shift the iPhones to Vietnam or India or places like that. Maybe our trade deficit doesn't go down, but we at least aren't helping our geopolitical rival. Vietnam is an evil Communist country, but it's not bent on world domination. If you shift manufacturing from China to Vietnam, that hurts China. It is maybe mildly negative for American consumers. It's really good for Vietnam. But in this geopolitical calculus, that seems very much in the American interest.

Trump has promised not just to close the border, which I think everyone can now acknowledge after the election has become extremely chaotic and dangerous, but he's promised to deport something like 11 million people. Do Do you think that's actually going to happen?

I don't think they're literally going to do that. Then at the same time, there is some big way these things need to be rethought a lot. Like trade, there's a theory of immigration where it somehow grows the GDP, it's grown the economy. I always think one of the differences in immigration debates between Europe and the US is in Europe, immigration is mainly a cultural issue. You end up with a lot of immigrants who maybe don't share European cultural values. Then Europe's societies are bad at culturally assimilating these people. There's a set of cultural challenges with immigration. I think the US is still pretty good at assimilating people culturally, even with a lot of the ways or public schools and other institutions aren't working as well as they used to. But I think the challenges with immigration are more of an economic nature in the US. And that even though there are ways that immigrants can grow the pie, it also has these effects of creating incredible skews, incredible winner-loser dynamics in the US. And I go through all these different variations of it. I myself am an immigrant. I was born in Germany. We immigrated to the US in 1968, the craziest year ever.

People thought my parents were out of their mind to leave Germany and come to the US the 1968, the year the country was self-destructing. I'm very fortunate they did. I can't be a categorical anti-immigrant person, or at least it would be weird pulling the ladder up behind me type of dynamic. But at the same time, I think one should somehow be able to talk about all the ways that it creates these incredible economic skews and distortions. I'll just go down one particular circular vertical that I think is pretty important, which is Henry George is this late 19th century economist who's considered quasi-socialist in the late 19th century. He's considered semi libertarian in the early 21st century, which maybe tells you something about how our society changed. But the basic Georgian obsession was real estate. It was if you weren't really careful, you would get runaway real estate prices, and the people who owned the real estate make all the gains in a society because there's something extremely inelastic about real estate, especially if you have strict zoning laws or things like this. The dynamic ends up being you add 10% to the population in a city, and maybe the house prices go up 50%, and maybe people's salaries go up, but they don't go up by 50%.

And so the GDP grows, but it's a giant windfall to the boomer homeowners and to the landlord lords, and it's a massive hit to the lower middle class and to young people who can never get on the housing ladder. There's the way I model what's happened in the US, in Britain, Canada, a lot of the Anglosphere countries is a Georgist real estate catastrophe, where basically, and there's ways I can describe this in Los Angeles, where we live, all sorts of places where the real estate prices, the rents have gone up more and more. If we talk about the inflation problem, it was inflation and immigration. There's a way you could talk about inflation in terms of the prices of eggs or groceries, but that's not that big a cost item, even for lower middle class people. The really big cost item is the rent. I think in some ways, Trump and JD Vance did manage to shift the conversation a little bit to this real estate problem. Again, I don't want to blame it all on immigration, but If you just add more people to the mix and you're not allowed to build new houses because of zoning laws, or it's too expensive, or it's too regulated and restricted, then the prices go up a lot.

It's this incredible wealth transfer from the young and the lower middle class to the upper middle class and the landlords and the old. There are reasons you might not want to do that. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to do it. That's a very... There's no invidious distinctions involved. This is just a basic econ one point we can't even make.

I think most Americans, though, when they're thinking about the border and immigration, are thinking about particular stories that were, I think, right made a big deal in this campaign. They're thinking about criminals and drug cartels and sex trafficking, things like that. They are not thinking, I don't think we should deport the Mexican grandmother living in West Hollywood or whatever. And is that what we're going to see?

Well, I would say that the incredibly open border has put an incredible stress on the social fabric in a lot of ways. And yeah, there's definitely the fentanyl crisis. There are the narco drug gangs. There are all these crazy extreme stories that shouldn't happen at all. But then I think there's also a general version where, I don't even know what the numbers are, but you have a Los Angeles public high school system in which you have to teach in 30 different languages or something like that, and in which the public schools aren't working. And then the amount people have to spend on rent in these places is so much higher than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago as a % of income. And that's a stress on immigrants. It's a stress on the people they're competing with directly. This is a sense in which if you say that, I don't know, lower middle class Mexican immigrants are competing with lower middle class Mexican people in LA, then as an economic matter, those are the people who should be the most anti it. If we go with identity politics, they should say, well, we want more Mexicans.

But if you actually think of it in Econ one terms, maybe you don't want more people competing for your two bedroom apartment and driving up the rent even more or even more people crowding in and paying money to the landlord. If you're a Bangladeshi Uber driver in New York City, do you want a lot more Bangladeshi. This is always the point I make about cloning, where we can have all sorts of ethical debates about cloning. But the Econ one intuition is if we came along with 100 clones of Barry Weiss with competing talk shows, you might say, Well, we can debate the ethics of this, but we should be talking about the economics. You would be right to say, I'm nervous about the economics of that. Ban cloning. I'm just saying we should at least be able to talk about the economics.

Let's talk about education, an issue you care a lot about. Trump has promised to get rid of the Department of Education, saying it's unnecessary and effective and a tool of the woke culture wars. He's also threatened to cut funding for higher education. I guess I want to ask you a first principles question, which is, should taxpayer dollars go to support private universities like Harvard? Do you think that getting rid of the Department of Education would be a good thing?

Yes, it would be a good thing. I think you have to pick the battles of what you can do and where you can change things. There are a lot of indirect ways you can shift things. The NIH gives research grants. A lot of those go to university scientists. Then there is a overhead budget, which is typically something like 40%. If you get a million dollar grant, maybe 40% of that or like 66% overcharge gets charged by the university in overhead. I believe that number can be arbitrarily reset, and you can reset that as a much, much lower number. And so a nuanced argument would be, I want more money to go to the scientists, and I want less money to go to the woke administration and diversity, and what we know is this bloated diversity machine overhead. And we won't defund the universities simply, but we're going to change the overhead expensing. And I believe that number can be unilaterally zeroed out by executive order or changed by executive order. I think the Department of Education is one of these weird departments where very little can be done and very little changed, but there are things like that that can be done that are quite dramatic.

There's obviously a student debt crisis that That's completely out of control. It was 300 billion in student debt in 2000. It's now approaching $2 trillion. There's a way that it's crept up on people that is subtle. I was looking at this the other day. If you look at it by cohort, if you graduated from college in 1997, 12 years later, 2009, you paid off most of your student debt. It took you a long time, so probably the student debt meant you were slower to start a family, to buy a house, It probably in some ways had this deleterious effect on your career, but there was some way that you took on all this debt and you could gradually get out of the hole. Then gradually, the debt grew faster than the value of the college degree grew economically. And by 2009, the graduates of 2009 are the first cohort where the median student with debt in 2009, when you look at them 12 years later in 2021, the debt's higher, which means that you can't even keep up with the interest payments on the student debt. It's so big, and the value of your college degree, for the most part, is so low.

You got an English PhD, you end up as a barista at Starbucks or something like this. And there are obviously some exceptions, like computer science, but most degrees had so little value. The debt was so big. But then it takes 12 years to realize that it's not working like it used to, because for a long time, the colleges can just say, well, it eventually pays off. It takes a while. And maybe that's true. But if it's no longer true, man, are you in a deep hole by the time you realize it? So there's something that's very off with it. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the Biden policy that maybe on some level you need to just forgive the student debt because people will never be able to pay it off and we need to have some realistic level setting. I don't think that should be bailed out by the taxpayers, and I think some of it has to be It has to be hit to the bondholders of the debt, and some of it has to be hit to the colleges. If the colleges were even partially liable for all these unpaid debts, most of them would be out of business.

There are a number of these things that they're coming to a head regardless. I don't think Trump needs to particularly do anything. It's an exponentially growing student debt problem. It's an exponentially growing debt problem, generally. We had for many years, you could kick the can down the road, but eventually, you end up with a pile of cans and no road. That's where we are with the student debt thing. I think this was a very strange 2024 election where there were all these big issues that I think were not being discussed. So one This is what I speculate was one of the really big issues, even bigger than just the student debt problem, is maybe the bankruptcy of a number of blue states and blue cities, Illinois, Chicago, probably the tri-state area, New York City, maybe even San Francisco, maybe Los Angeles. What we did in 2020 was we used COVID as a cover to bail all these places out. Then in 2021, they spent even more money in this runaway Biden spending. And part of it was a way to bail out all these failed blue cities and blue states. And we should not be throwing good money after bad.

And Trump doesn't need to do something heroic, like shutting down the Department of Education or getting Congress to reduce appropriations. All he has to do for the blue cities and blue states to blow up is sit on his hands and do nothing. There was a 1960 '70s history in the Ford administration, where New York City almost went broke, and Ford sat on his hands, and it was the most popular thing. Ford was down 30 points. He came back to almost winning re-election in 1976. It was very popular not to bail out New York City because people know we don't want to throw good money after bad. If you look at the possibilities of changing the system, there's a way the inertia seems so high that if we have to I don't get rid of the Department of Education, I don't think that will ever happen. Then I think the Democrats have nothing to worry about because Trump won't really do anything. But if actually for the system to continue, you need to get crazy new spending approved, and all that Trump has to do is not approve the new spending, that's where I think you're going to be able to force radical change in California, in New York, in Illinois, where these places have to reform themselves or go bankrupt.

I want to talk a little bit about JD Vance, whose name has come up a few times. You gave $15 million to help him get elected in the 2022 midterms. I think you introduced Trump to JD Vance in 2021 at Mar-a-Lago. Now, at this time, JD Vance was singing a very different tune. He had called Trump Reprehensible. He had talked about him as being America's Hitler. Obviously, we've come a long way in those three years. I guess I want to ask, what did you see in him that made you bet? Well, I first met him in 2011.

Met a group of people at Yale Law School and did a small lunch with the Federal Society Group there. He worked for one of my venture funds and we became friends over the years. He was a very thoughtful person who thought very deeply about a lot of these issues. I'm probably always a sucker for smart, thoughtful people.

But in 2011, when you meet a young JD Vance, were you thinking, future President of the United States?

I don't know. No, I don't think. But he made a great first impression, and then we worked together for a number of years, and I got to know him better over time. I do think there are probably all these different ways that JD would do a better job articulating his shift since 2016. I don't think he was saying things like that in 2018 or 2019. I think it was more in the 2016, around the time when he wrote the Hillbilly L. G. Book. He was, in some ways, became the way to explain Trump to liberals, liberal elites. There was a part of that that I think felt very good to JD. Then there was some part where at some point he felt like they weren't really interested in anything he had to say. Maybe it was just like a prop where if we bought his book, we understand. We don't need to read it, we don't need to actually think about anything in it. But if we bought his book, we've understood this as well as we need to. And so I think the personal version on the JD Vans story was on some level in 2016, he believed there was a way to convince liberals, to figure out a way to solve some of these deep problems, immigration, economics, the crisis of the Midwest.

And then at some point, he thought they weren't really interested in solving them at all, and that maybe Trump's somewhat more adversarial approach was actually more correct than he first thought.

One of the shifts that we're seeing inside the Republican Party is not just on doctrineer free trade, but is on foreign policy. There's a shift, I would say, from the neocon worldview that typified the Bush years to something that I don't think is quite isolationist, but is different. You have someone like JD Vance saying, I got to be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine. I wonder how you're making sense of that shift, because at the All-In summit a few months ago, and you referenced it already in this conversation, you said, We're sleepwalking into Armageddon. From my perspective, When I hear different versions of America is trying to do too much, America should not be the world's policeman, America needs to pull back from the world, focus inward, my visceral reaction is, Well, then someone's going to fill that vacuum. It worries me. I don't think that makes me some neocon warmonger to be concerned about that. I worry that there's a caricature of a debate happening right now where anyone that feels concerned about the decline of American power or defensive of American muscularity gets easily dunked on because it's not the cool thing right now to say on the right.

I would love for you to make sense of where you you think the right is shifting and how you think this administration is going to conduct foreign policy?

Well, I do think probably a lot of these things are more subtle and more nuanced. It's probably best to always talk about particular countries and particular situations. I don't exactly know what you're supposed to do about the Ukraine right now. I'm not sure that the Trump administration has a strongly set policy on that at all. There's definitely a historical thing where one could say that the relentless NATO expansion might not have been a good idea. There were ways that, I don't know, we don't want the Russians to have troops in Cuba or Mexico. Maybe if NATO has troops in the Ukraine, should we have thought a little bit about how far we pushed that envelope? Then at the same time, there's a part of it where we are where we are in 2024. You probably can't simply retreat from the Ukraine without it just becoming a route. I don't think President Trump wants a repeat of what happened with Biden in Afghanistan. I think in the Middle East context, I always think that you could say there's an isolationist approach, there is an idealistic, almost utopian, neocon approach as was articulated by Bush 43 in a second inaugural address in 2005, which was, I mean, it was just going to transform the whole world in a way that was fantastical and just you could tell was not going to end the way it was advertised.

And then there's again this in between messy dealing with the reality of the Middle East approach. And I don't think the US and Israel are perfectly in sync. But I do think that if we simply deferred to Israel and on things related to the Middle East, we'd have a far saner policy. We'd have a far more realistic policy. And the Israel, in a way, the neocons were pro-Israel. The Israelis didn't trust the neocons because Israel is a small country. It needs to be realistic. And the neocons were these crazy idealists. And so the Israeli view, if I can get us, it's complicated.

I thought about this so much.

The way I The way I would summarize the Israeli view is, what do you think about Syria? They're no good rebels. Everybody in Syria is bad. We don't like Ahmad, we don't like the ISIS people. Maybe you can be somewhat involved. You don't want to be that involved in Syria. The Saudis Yeah, it's a futile monarchy. It's better than the alternatives. The problem, the one problem is Iran, because if they get nuclear weapons, it changes the playing field in the whole region. So When I first met Netanyahu in January 2009, one month before he came back as Prime Minister, the only thing he wanted to talk about was Iran. That's the sense in which I think the Trump foreign policy with the Middle East will be pretty closely in sync with Israel, where you'll at least be focused on the same problem, the same question. The reason we don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons, maybe it's a crazy theocracy and it will use them. But even if Iran doesn't use them, just having them will somehow change the whole playing field. I think one of the international things a president was supposed to do post-1945 was stop nuclear proliferation, because if too many countries get nuclear weapons, that's one of the ways we sleep, walk to Armageddon, because eventually something, if you have 100 countries with the nuclear weapons, I don't think that's a stable game theory, equilibrium of the world.

One of the lessons I take of the mid-20th century was every time a country got a nuclear weapon, We got a regional war. The Soviet Union gets the bomb in 1949. The Korean War starts in 1950 because when the Soviet Union backs North Korea, we can't bomb Russia. Then they can back North Korea with impunity, and we get a massive, massive regional war. That's, in a way, the price for being asleep at the switch and letting the Soviets get the bomb. 1964, Communist China gets the bomb. Vietnam War explodes in 1965. And again, China can back North Vietnam with impunity. We can't reciprocate. And the way I understand why would an Iranian nuclear bomb be a catastrophe? Because the degree to which Iran can support this plethora of bad actors, the Houthis, the Moss people, and Hezbollah, and on and on throughout the Middle East, you could not retaliate against Iran. If they are a nuclear power, you can't retaliate against Iran. And then the degree to which they will support all the whole Middle East will explode. And so we don't have to go to the crazy theocracy that said they'd use the bomb and would use it.

I think it's just the nature of it. And I think there's a way that Israel understood this, and there's a way the neocons lost the forest for the trees. There were ways the Israelis and the Saudis probably had misgivings about the Iraq war because Iraq was the country that's blocking Iran. And if you weaken Iraq, aren't you strengthening Iran in the end? In some sense- That's what happened. In some sense, that's what happened over 20 years.

Trump, over the past 48 hours, has made a number of appointments on this score. It looks like Marco Rubio is going to be the Secretary of State. Michael Walls is going to be a National Security Advisor. Ali Stefanik is going to the UN. That's a pretty hauckish group.

I think they're all pretty hauckish on China. I think that is probably the other place where, I don't want to say things are coming to a head, where we have to really find a better balance than we found in the past few decades. I believe all of them, I wouldn't say that they will prioritize China at the expense of everything else, but I think they will prioritize China more than the Biden administration and more than the Europeans would.

There's a grotesque thing happening in certain precincts of the right, where, I guess the way to describe it would be a revival of Patrick Buchanon's view of things like World War II that felt pretty settled. Hitler's the villain, Churchill saved the West. I'm sure you've noticed some of this. I wonder where that historical revisionism is coming from and why you think it's so seductive to people in this moment.

Man, these things are always difficult to score culturally, but I'm tempted to say that you never want to defend the Nazis, and you never want to defend Hitler. It's just there are probably some fringe people who say they're on the right that do this. But isn't this 90% a left-wing sci-op of sorts? Where it's first rule of high school debate is whoever brings up Hitler first loses. This was in a way what- But a lot of people on the right are bringing up Hitler on their own. You don't see it. I don't see people doing it in a positive way.

Here's how I would put it.

Let me maybe- I want you to give me the actual quotes where- Okay, let me phrase it another way. I don't think even Buchanan would do this. I challenge you to come up with even a Buchanan quote. He wrote a lot over decades where- Let me phrase it another way.

There's a strain on the right right now. To go back to what you said about how make America great again was the ultimate... I've never heard that. That's really insightful, the ultimate pessimistic slogan. I think there is a group on the right that feels so, let's be generous, alienated in enraged, frustrated at the direction of the country, that they've given into a nihilistic, we deserve for everything to fail. We deserve for everything to burn it down, which is- I don't think that's correct.

Certainly, there's a way that's all that can be like a negative, self-fulfilling, New Age, bad prophecy, where if you're a white supremacist who thinks that the white people are all going to be losers, I don't know if you're correct. What I suspect you personally will do is you will eat a lot of donuts and move into a trailer. And so it's a self-fulfilling negative prophecy about what will happen in your life. And so, yes, I don't believe in doing anything like that at all. I think there are There are ways that the US is overstretched. There are ways that we have to, I'm not sure, prioritize, but there's some constraints. There's some way in which we don't have the money. There's no money left. There is the budget deficits. There are things like this. There are certain types of constraints. If I had to do the history, the 20th century history, and I don't think this is revisionist, but the way I would tell the history of the 20th century is that we had two world wars. The thing that's extremely confusing about the two world wars is that they teach diametrically opposite lessons. The lesson of World War II is you do not appease dictators And if you give an inch, they will take a mile.

And you let Hitler take the Sedate land, and then it was all of Czechoslovakia, and then Austria, and it just went on and on and on. But World War I teaches the opposite lesson, which is you don't want to have a network of secret alliances, entangling alliances with hair trigger, mobilization, and escalation schedules, where you have this Tinder box in Sarajevo, where the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand somehow triggers this four-year confligration that destroys Europe. And that in a way, the place where appeasement came from in the 1930s. In part, it was because it felt like there was no money, the Depression. Everybody was bankrupt. You couldn't spend money on the military. You couldn't spend money on anything. But part of it was, okay, this is the way we course correct for World War I. We're not going to have this hair trigger escalation. The difficult paradox is if we're going to avoid World War III, I think you somehow have to learn the lessons of both wars. Somehow, you can't have excessive appeasement, and you also can't go sleepwalking into Armageddon. They're in a way opposite lessons. I won't say that you should be 100% World War I and 0% World War II, but my contrarian intuition where I'd be maybe 60, 70% focused on World War I and 30 or 40% on World War II, is I think we always have a recency bias.

We're always fighting the last war, and the last world war was World War was World War II. That's the one we're obsessed with drawing the lessons from. And my contrarian intuition is that if we have a world war, it'll be more like World War I. It'll look like what's been happening the last few years, where it's this gradually escalating conflict migration, and it'll happen overnight. In World War II, people could see coming for a long time. World War I had this crazy feeling. The other thing that's more like World War I than World War II is World War I, the pre-World War I world, was one that was incredibly connected through globalization, through trade and finance. One of the books that I think is always a super interesting one to read is 1910. Norman Angel wrote this book, The Great Illusion. What was The Great Illusion? It was this best seller, sold books around the world, all the countries that would eventually fight World War I. He ends up getting a Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. But what was the thesis? The thesis, The Great Illusion, was that the great illusion was that there could be a world war, and there It would not be a world war because everybody would lose.

It would make as much sense, according to Norman Angel, for the UK to go to war with Germany as it would make sense for London to invade the county of Herfordshire, the adjacent county to London, because the stock market in London would go down more than the value of any property could grab in Herfordshire. In a world that was connected through finance and trade, and that felt very global like it was in 1913. It was obviously insane to have a world war, and then it nevertheless happened. Then I think there's a way that the globalization regime was deeply unhealthy, deeply unstable. I definitely think there are... You don't want to be Chamberlain. You don't want to be doing those mistakes from the 1930s at all. I also think it's worth thinking very hard about where was Norman Angel wrong? And why did the great illusion turn out not to be a great illusion at all?

Populism is in vogue right now, and populism is something that always makes me wary because populism leads to scapegoating, and scapegoating leads to blaming minority groups, and often Jews. And I see this sentiment, and you're seeing it playing out on Twitter all the time. People love this phrase, a lot of people on the right, Vox populi, Vox day. The voice of the people as the voice of God. I can't think of a wronger thing that has been said. I don't think the voice of the people is the voice of God. Yes. I wonder if you're someone who looks back to history, obviously, how do you contain populace energies and harness them in a productive way without them running roughshod over any number of minority groups?

Well, let me start in a slightly different way, and this is plagiarizing an idea that Eric Weinstein likes to popularize a lot, but it's this thing called a Russell Conjugate, which is two words that are synonyms but are emotional antonyms. Okay. And so a think and a whistleblower. Maybe it's the same thing, but a whistleblower is a good person and a think is a bad person. So they're emotional antonymms, even though they're the same thing, if you think about it. And I would submit that a Russell conjugate of sorts is populism and democracy. And democracy is good, populism is bad, and it's democracy when people vote the right way, and it's populism when they vote the wrong way. And what that tells us is that there's probably a lot in these concepts that needs to be really, really unpacked. And so I share your concerns about populism. I also have concerns about democracy for the exact same reason. If everyone just gets to vote on everything, that's just rampant majoritarianism. There obviously are all sorts of ways that minority rights get oppressed or the libertarian version is that wealthy people probably just have their property voted away from them.

So you respect property rights. Minorities get trampled on. So there are all sorts of ways in which we're not supposed to have rampant majoritarianism. And then the kinds of checks on that, it was Republicanism, is supposed to be a check on democracy, where the people don't vote on things directly. They vote on them indirectly, and you elect representatives. Then the Constitution is supposed to be a check on Republicanism, where even the legislature can't just do whatever it wants, and it has to still be compatible with the Constitution. Then that's the intuition I would have about society. Now, I do wonder if this is not that accurate as a description of the United States. I don't think we are too populist or too democratic because, yeah, maybe there's a mob of voters, but they don't really get to do all that much on a day-to-day basis. The problem, I would say, is maybe more that we're less of a constitutional republic than we used to be. It hasn't shifted from the constitutional republic Republic to this mob of voters. But it shifted from the constitutional republic to this unelected technocratic bureaucracy, the deep state, things like that.

Maybe that's what you need to have in a technologically advanced society, where you need experts, you need a central intelligence agency, you need to have secrets, secrets about nuclear weapons, secrets about other things. There are all kinds of ways that an advanced technological society, by its very nature, is far less populist or democratic than the US was even in its 18th century conception.

One of the things I've been thinking about since Tuesday, but really over the past few years, is this intramural fight between the elites, what you've called the Borg or the NPCs or the blob, the groupthink that controls so many of our institutions in the Democratic Party, and then what you've described as the Rebel Alliance. There's a debate, I think, happening inside the Rebel Alliance between people who are maybe on the more radical fringe of it who say, We don't need institutions, really. We don't need gatekeepers, or there's something about gatekeeping in and of itself that's corrupt. I think you can see this. I'll use this specific example. Part of this whole make America healthy again, Maha movement, RFK phenomenon, I think is very healthy. It's about a skepticism of big pharma and a skepticism, an idea that why should we go along with the fact that there's chemicals in all of our food? Why shouldn't we be skeptical of the fact that 35% or something crazy like that of American kids have prediabetes? These crazy health outcomes, so let's be skeptical. But then it can tip just so fast into vaccines cause autism territory. I guess I wonder how you think about the fine line between skepticism of maybe an elite who whose gatekeeping has been too strident or too zealous or too narrow, and falling into a rabbit hole or falling maybe off the map where you're in a place where there's no gatekeeping and no institutional authority at all.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, these are not... Man, you always ask really easy questions, Barry.

I've just been thinking about this one so much because I've watched the understandable emotional arc where people who were told, you're a conspiracy theorist, only to have their conspiracy, let's say, about the origins of COVID be proven right. But by that time, they've already fallen off into the deep end where they're trafficking and all kinds of things that seem truly crazy.

Yeah, well, there are all these different types of institutions. You can do this with intelligence agencies or with, I don't know, environmental institutions. But let me articulate maybe one institution where you can ask this question about is science as an institution. The way I always think of the history of science was that it started as a two-front war against both excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. And so if you are in the 17th and 18th century, a scientist was a heterodox thinker who didn't believe in, let's say, the decayed Aristotelian scolasticism of the Catholic Church, and you were maybe were empirical, and there were these dogmas that you were open to questioning. But you also couldn't be extremely skeptical. So if you can't trust your senses. And if I don't believe you're sitting there, extreme skepticism was also incompatible with science. So extreme dogmatism was incompatible. Extreme skepticism is incompatible. And the problem is, yeah, it's easy to be against one. But if you're always just against dogmatism, then maybe you're too skeptical of everything. And if you're always against skepticism, maybe you're too dogmatic. And so there's this very complicated balance where we need to be both antidogmatic and antiskeptical.

And probably my feel for it would be that in the 17th and 18th century, it was probably more antidogmatic than skeptical, but it was some of both. But if we fast forward to 2024 and you asked scientists, where is science too dogmatic and where are people too skeptical? Where are people being too dogmatic? And I think there are a whole long list of things where they say there are climate change skeptics, there are vaccine skeptics, there are Darwin skeptics, there are There are all these people who are too skeptical, and the skepticism is undercutting science. We're on war of skeptics of all sorts. Then if you asked the scientists, where are the scientists too dogmatic? I don't think they could tell you a single thing where science is too dogmatic. And doesn't that tell you that we have completely lost this sense of balance? And what has become science science, I'll use square quotes around science, is something that is more dogmatic than the Catholic Church was in the 17th century. And that at the margins, you can't go all out skepticism. And obviously, there's a slippery slope to nihilism, and that doesn't work. But directionally, that's where we have to course-correct.

And then you have to go through all these specific issues and think about it. I don't particularly think that vaccines vaccines lead to autism. If they did, I don't think our science is capable of figuring it out because the results would get suppressed because it would undercut the lobby for vaccinations. There obviously are a lot of good vaccines, too. If there was some truth to it, that would undercut it. I'm pretty sure that question isn't being investigated. There has been a dramatic increase in autism in recent decades. We don't have particularly good explanations for it. Surely it's something we should be thinking about more. Yeah. So again, I don't think vaccines lead to autism. I do think it's the question that it would be healthy if we were allowed to ask a little bit more than we are. And of course, we just went through this crazy exercise with the COVID epidemic where we somehow cut off skepticism so prematurely so many times where not only was the skepticism healthy, but the skeptics were right. So there were people who were skeptical of the eating the bat from the food market. And no, you needed not be so dogmatic about the eating bats theory.

And it was no, it was actually the Wolf and the Lamb.

Somehow the eating bats theory was the politically correct theory, which is unbelievable.

Maybe it's disgusting to be a bat. What a society is it where people are starving so much that they need to eat bats?

But I think the fear is if you go down the, Hey, maybe the vaccines cause autism, please, you can wind up very, very quickly in a place where polio is back and measles are back because you see what I mean? Yes. How do you know when you've gone too far in the skeptical direction?

Well, there's a point where you go too far But at the same time, my feel for it is that directionally, the science establishment is way too far on the dogmatic side, way too little on the skeptical side. Maybe we take climate change as an issue. Maybe there's some part of it that I believe is true, but there are a lot of parts that are open for debate. Maybe methane is a bigger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, in which case it's cows flatulating in the Amazon are worse than when cars running on oil. Then you have all sorts of layers of things that can't be discussed. My intuition is these institutions have gotten very, very unhealthy. There's always a culture wars rift I have on this, where those of us on the conservative side who are critics the universities often focus on the humanities as the part that's most corrupt and it's most transparently corrupt. But the sciences are more esoteric. If the cancer researchers haven't made any progress in curing cancer in 50 years, or the string theorists made even less progress in physics, but these things are so esoteric, isn't that hint that maybe the sciences are even more corrupt?

The government analogy I always use is, which is the most messed up agency in the government? Is it the post office, the DMV, or the NESA, the National Security Agency? I would submit it's obviously the NESA because you can go to the DMV and the post office, and you can see that people are sitting around loathing all day and not doing much work. It's obviously corrupt and non-functioning. It's so transparently corrupt that it's maybe not that bad. At the MSA, we have no clue what they're doing. Then my political intuition is that that's a clue, that it's probably more corrupt, more mismanaged than the post office or the DMV. The Harvard versus Stanford tale of the two university presidents that were fired. I went to Stanford. It was Claudine Gay at Harvard. It was the diversity woman who plagiarized all these things. Everybody could see that there was a lot that was ridiculous. It was transparent that she deserved to be fired. Same year, Mark Tessier-Levine, the neuro white male neuroscientist who, as far as I can tell- All of his research was-was a multi-decade fraud, stole tens of millions of dollars. But It's this complicated question of, are you going to go through all these papers and show that the photos were doctored in a certain way?

I'm not saying the sciences are necessarily worse than the humanities, but they both failed.

It's just harder to see what you're saying, if it was.

Then my intuition is that that has to be a really important part of the story of what's gone wrong with the universities, with our society. There's probably some part where we haven't asked enough questions. We haven't been skeptical enough. I don't know. I'm not sure RFK or Joe Rogan or any of these people are correct about everything, but it's so much fresher, so much healthier than this incredible echo chamber that is the consensus mainstream media or that is the groupthink of peer-reviewed science.

Even if that skepticism and the freshness is coming as it is right now with a lot of... There's a lot of ugliness that's attendant to that, flinging open of the gates. Let's just put it that way.

Yeah. Although I want to say maybe we're exposing the ugliness that is Unfortunately, part of these things not quite working as well as they're supposed to, and that maybe these institutions have been really, really broken for a while, and we need to somehow find a way to have this conversation.

Let's imagine 100 years from now and someone's looking back at the story of the late 20th century and then, of course, the 21st century that I think you would argue started late. If we boiled it all down, is it really just all the story of the technological revolution of the Internet that has fundamentally changed our politics, the tone of it, the language of it, that it led to Trump's rise, that it has brought the collapse of so many of our institutions? Is that the headline story that you think is going to be written?

I'm always a little bit hesitant to make it completely about tech because in a way, when you say that tech is omnipotent, omniscient, if it's It's not omnibenevolent, it's omnimolevolent, and it's turn it into the Judeo-Christian God or something like that. Then it's always my Girardian cut is, if you make something into God, you are making it into a scapegoat for all the problems, too. That's where I'm instinctively hesitant to do this. But with that qualification, yes, I think it's an incredibly important change. I think there are ways the internet made things transparent that were not transparent. And there are a lot of things that do not work as well when they're made transparent. Markets become more efficient as they're made more transparent. And then scapegoating probably works less well if it's transparent. If we think that we have a psychosocial problem, we need to pretend someone's a witch to solve it, it's probably we're going to be less motivated witchhunters, and it will not have the cathartic effect it might have still had in some medieval society. And the question is always, is politics like markets or is it like scapegoating? And the internet, in some ways, has deconstructed, exposed the politicians.

There's a way Trump was the first internet President. And this was a thought I had already in 2016, all the other people, they didn't realize how fake they looked. They don't realize how incredibly fake they are. And yeah, you can do this fakeness in this pre-Internet world. Even television was It was a deconstructive medium, which was hard for them to master. But the Internet, it really exposed the fakeness. And then there is a part of it that feels lossy because these institutions don't work as well anymore. I don't think we can do without them. And We haven't quite figured out how to get through to the other side. But I also have this. This is the place where I have a, I don't know, historicist or even progressive view. I don't think you can go back. You can't uninvent the internet. And so we have to find a way through it. But yeah, I think it changed things in very, very big ways. And certainly, one can focus on the economics and the incredible wealth creation. But I think it was also this thing was socially and culturally significant. There's always a science fiction rift I have on it.

I'm never quite sure this is completely correct, but I think in a way, there are all these science fiction books that are written, and there are books where they anticipate things like the internet, where you have like, you can go on your computer and you can read books on it. But this small packet modality of information was like 140 characters on Twitter. And the ways in which this would radically change the nature of society. I don't think it was anticipated by any science fiction novel to speak of. And so maybe the internet was the biggest invention that was not anticipated by any science fiction writer at all. And what I submit that might tell you is that it represents a change in the nature of human consciousness or the structure of a society that's more radical than we think because it was not anticipated by anybody.

But your famous line, of course, is we were promised flying cars, and all we got is 140 characters. But maybe what you're saying is the 140 characters are more revolutionary.

They are revolutionary on a social, cultural level. I always question how much they added to GDP, how much they add to economic growth. There's a way as human beings, I always think we're material, we're embedded in an atomic world. And so if you have a shiny surface on your iPhone and the screen you're addicted to and you don't notice you're in a subway in New York that's falling apart and you're in a decrepient apartment with lots of rats in it, this world of bits is not really a substitute for the world of atoms. And so there's a way in which I still stick with that concern. I would like us to be making progress on all these other fronts, but I don't want to minimize the way in which the internet was significant politically and culturally, even if it didn't make the millennials much wealthier than the boomers.

Given the fact that you were, I don't know if I would say, predicted this moment, but we're definitely, definitely early. And given how right you are and the bets that you make, I think people would love to know, what are maybe the books or the essays that you read that you think best either predicted this moment or explain the moment that we're living in?

Wow, I'm so bad at that.

I'll tell you mine. I think Martin Gurry's book, The Revolt of the Public, was extraordinary. Like, Trump's not mentioned in the book. It came out before the whole Trump phenomenon. He focuses on the Arab Spring and really just the way that the tension between the center and the periphery, or maybe what Neil Ferguson would call it the tower and the square, and the way that the center, the square, seised power. That's the book I'm recommending a lot to people right now.

Maybe I'll give a negative answer. The one that- Contrarian as always. The one that somehow, I think got it completely wrong, but I still don't know what it means, is the Fukuyama book, The End of History. History was supposed to end in this social democratic liberalism. It's unclear, and this seemed very correct in the 1990s. Then obviously, 9/11, have suggested that things can move in a somewhat retrograde direction. Then, of course, the rise of China. It didn't seem exactly liberal, but people had hopes that as China became wealthier, it would become more Western and more more liberal. And then I always say Xi comes to power in 2012, but 2017 is when he's made President for life. And in some sense, 2017 is maybe the year that the end of history comes to an end. And then it's Very confusing what this means because we do want to make sense of our history and where it's going. And if it's not over, if it's open, I always come back to it's... We can talk about trends and forces, but it does matter what people do. There's room for human agency, for individual agency, for thought.

I think part of what will shape it, I hope, are conversations like the one we had today.

Thanks for listening. If this is the first time you've heard of Peter Thiel, I imagine you are going to Google him. Do that and also go back and listen to the first conversation that I had with him. Whether you agree with him or not, I can't imagine that you won't think he's a fascinating person. Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press's website at thefp. Com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.