Abundance Agenda, The New Right, and 2008 Retrospective w/ Noah Smith

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're releasing a conversation I had on Turpentine's show Econ 102 with my friend Noah Smith. We cover Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's abundance agenda, the New Right, the 2008 recession, and more. Please enjoy.

I enjoyed our Abundance chat last week, and it's been cool to see, I guess, listen to Ezra and Derek on Lex and really see them on the circuit. Is your sense that this is sort of a set of ideas that is gaining a constituency on the left? Is your sense that it is getting— before we get to the new right, which you wrote about, I think it's fantastic. Let's just sort of close the loop on the left. Do you think— Has the reception surprised you? Do you think this is a niche sort of wonky set of ideas that, you know, doomed for the sort of small amount of reasonable people, you know, super sort of economically literate people? Or do you think, hey, this actually has a constituency here on the left?

So, you know, I do think it has a constituency and I do think it's getting lots and lots of excitement, you know, among Democrats, liberals, et cetera. You know, when people say the left, I automatically think of like, you know, Palestine protesters and Bernie fans. But if you mean like the more generalized left of America, like, you know, the Democrats, liberals, et cetera, that half of the country, then yes, I absolutely think it is gaining lots of currency. People are really excited. And I did not expect that because I thought, A, it's too wonky. You know, it's too like, and B, it's optimistic at a time when, you know, Trump is just smashing like lots of American things like You know, try try telling Donald Trump that like we need abundance, we need to build this and that when like Donald Trump is busy destroying the auto industry with tariffs. Like he who no like he's doing the exact opposite. And so so um you know obviously there may be people in Donald Trump's like you know administration buried somewhere in the administration who are like trying to fight NEPA or like you know make it easier to invest in America who really uh you know are hoping. Against hope that somehow tariffs restore American manufacturing through this magic that Trump thinks that they exert. You know, maybe they still would believe in something like abundance, but no, primarily it's like, it's something we know isn't going to happen soon. Maybe we can make it happen on like the state and local level. So maybe we can do like YIMBY stuff and, you know, maybe be more efficient with state government. All those things we can make happen. But then I think there's this general attitude of pessimism, like Trump is just destroying America. And so like, what, you know, what, what can we do with abundance, happy, sunny, blah, blah? This is what I expected. What I did not expect is that everyone is like, woohoo, this is awesome. And looking at that, looking at that enthusiasm that has materialized for Ezra and Derek's book and this whole notion in general, I have a few ideas of why that's true, of what's catching fire with people, but they're all sort of retroactive explanations that I didn't expect. And so, you know, you got to take those with a grain of salt.

Well, say more about them. Why do you, which parts are resonating the most, you think?

Right. So I think that, um, there are 2 things. Number one, uh, abundance represents sort of a, um, the idea of national unity, the idea of we're all in this together. Uh, because when you, when you, Ezra and Derek don't really say this. And one of my problems, uh, was that they didn't say this. In the book, but they, and they could have said it and it makes a lot of sense. And I think it's driving what a lot of people like about it is that it's, it's something that, you know, it's not going to unite the country, but it's, it's, um, it's something where you think in a nationalistic way. You, you think in terms of like, let's make our country better. You don't think of abundance for this group and disabundance for that other group. It's not a zero-sum thing. It's not, it's not class warfare. It's not, here are our class enemies, let's defeat them. Right? And I think that, or here are our racial enemies, let's defeat them. You know, let's elevate this race and, you know, disempower this race. Let's elevate this group and disempower this other group or this class, you know, et cetera. It's not any of that. It is a uniting, not a divisive kind of thing and provides I think that people really yearn for that after the 2010s and what the Democratic Party has sort of become and what the progressive movement has become. People yearn for something to unite us. And the last time we saw that was Obama's first term, you know, with the like hope and change and blah, blah, blah, like end the Iraq War, fix the Great Recession, and, you know, reform healthcare. That was like, that was this uniting mission of Obama. And He made pretty good progress on all 3, but that's a story for another day. Obama, underrated president because wokeness broke out in his second term. People remember that and get mad about that, but that wasn't really his fault.

What do you think he should get credit for?

Obama? Number one, stimulus bill was good. Yeah, it was expensive. It increased the debt, which we should have Gotten rid of some of later, paid back some of later, but it was the right thing to do at the time. Financial regulation, Dodd-Frank has some problems with it, but overall, like the derivative stuff in there was really good and made a 2008 crisis in the future. Basically, no one even talks about that anymore. There were some problems with it, with the way it handles, like, you know, what banks are allowed to do and, you know, bank profit and things. Anyway, we'll go into that later. Dodd-Frank, good thing. Get out of Iraq. Good. It didn't, you know, we weren't entirely out of Iraq forever because then ISIS popped up. We went back in Iraq, kicked their ass, and then got out for real. But certainly this whole idea where like Iraq is an American province and we have like, you know, the green zone and like all this stuff, which we had known during the Bush years, Obama got rid of that. And it didn't like Iraq didn't collapse into some like Islamic fundamentalist state. I mean, ISIS came and then they were defeated. Iraq didn't also didn't turn into like an Iranian proxy. Like Iran still has proxy militias there, but You know, we won the Iraq War. Okay. Like, I know people like to say we lost the Iraq War and it, you know, it's understandable to say that because it weakened our geopolitical position, divided our society and destroyed global norms and killed, got a lot of people killed. That's bad. The Iraq War was a bad thing and I wouldn't have done it, but we did win it. And Obama sort of like realized that and just got out. And that was, that was the right move. And so that was good. And then You know, Obamacare was pretty good. You know, like it's, I would have done a lot more cost control stuff there. But if you do, if you look at, you know, healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP around the time we did Obamacare, it starts to level off. So it's not like it did nothing, right? And some of that's due to Obamacare. Some of that's maybe due to saturation. People just deciding I can't spend any more money on fMRI, screw this crap. Yeah. You know, so, so. There's confounding factors here, but I think that Obama did a lot of stuff to address all the problems that we had, like, in 2008. Right? Also, Obama, um, was much tougher on immigration than George Bush had been and deported a lot more people. And under Obama, the number of illegal immigrants in the country shrank by about a million. The total number of illegal immigrants in America shrank by about a million. And even the independent estimates that say that the baseline number of illegal immigrants was higher than the public census numbers claim, which is realistic because illegal immigrants will hide from the census takers, right? Even those people say, well, according to us, it all— and they looked at like border crossing data, Mexican data, and all kinds of other sources and just collated all these other sources. Even they said that illegal immigrants, the number fell by like a million during Obama's term in office. So like, you know, That was, you know, I, you know, I don't think that like, um, any, any possible thing we could do to remove illegal immigrants would be good, right? But I think that, um, overall that was a good strategy. Like, you know, uh, we did, we did deport a million people. Um, so you want to call that a mass deportation? Sure. We deported almost entirely criminals.

Sure.

So the notion— so Obama didn't actually change the definition to say like, oh, we turn people back at the border, that's a deportation. Actually, well, we sort of did something like that, but it was under Bush. Obama deported— started a mass deportation of criminals program. And so that's one reason why arrest rates among illegal immigrants fell so much. And now you can have guys like the Cato Institute saying, look, illegal immigrants commit less crime. And people are like, what? It's because we took the criminal ones and we mass deported them during Obama. Like, we deported like a 10th of the illegal immigrant population, the criminal 10th, right? And I know this because my sister did that. My sister was a lawyer for the Justice Department whose job was deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, we did a lot of that. So anyway, Obama did a lot of stuff. It was reasonable. It was centrist. It was, you know, for the good of all Americans kind of stuff, right? Fix healthcare, fix the economy, you know, get out of Iraq, all this stuff. It was a message of hope and change. And then like this had nothing to do with like him being black. Like this is, you know, he was actually a fairly conservative black guy. He was like, Obama was basically like Captain Sisko from Deep Space Nine. You know, like we got a conservative black guy to like run the country. And just as Cisco got rid of the Dominion, Obama kicked out illegal immigrants. No, Cisco ended the war. Okay, now Obama was the real Cisco. That's a new post for the future.

Amazing. Okay, I guess the critiques that Obama gets is one, I guess the healthcare thing didn't work to the degree that he hoped. I guess the foreign policy stuff, people think that he sort of like conceded this kind of, you know, what do they call it, like measured decline of America and was too willing to sort of collaborate with our enemy, like not a friend to Israel or something, the countries in the Middle East. I think just people see him as weak on foreign policy and not really interested in like being a, I don't know, getting deals done, being a true politician as opposed to more of like an academic or a rallier.

So that's actually correct. That's, that's correct. Obama did fail to, of course, I mean, like Bush and Clinton also failed at this. So like, it was like everyone, everyone since the Cold War sort of had this delusion that China was going to be our buddy if we just opened our markets to them. And Obama shared this delusion and it didn't work out, but everybody else had that delusion too. And Bush was, was the worst letting, you know, letting all the deindustrialization happen under Bush, basically. Uh, if you look at the manufacturing employment under Bush, because China entered the WTO then. That's when China entered the WTO. That's what deindustrialized us. And then that was in 2001, right? The real 9/11. It fell right off a cliff, US manufacturing employment. But then Obama continued that and it was bad. And like, you know, he and Michelle Obama made this like wishy-washy documentary, American Factory, about how like, well, actually the Chinese are just good at making everything, naturally good at making everything. What can we do? And like, it was, it was very stupid, uh, you know, because of the military angle, they just did not recognize at all. They didn't recognize China as a threat. They didn't understand that stuff. And on Russia, they basically like sat there and scolded Russia as Russia took over Crimea and the Donbas and like didn't stand up to them then. They started arming Ukraine, which was good, by the way. Like Ukraine did not have the chops to stand up to Russia at that time. Like Ukraine can stand up to Russia now. Um, and increasingly without external weaponry. Ukraine is standing up to Russia. By the way, have you, have you heard about this? Like Ukraine just like went ham on drone manufacturing and now makes like a bazillion military drones a year and just like is increasingly replacing like artillery, riflemen, and like missiles with drones.

Do they have their own Anduril or something? Or how are they, uh, how are they doing?

Yeah, they have their own like a million little Andurils. They have, they have a whole ton of companies making drones. Yes, they do. And Anduril is like, recognizes this and is now like, hmm, we should make drones in Ukraine. And so Anduril is like, like learning from the Ukrainians right now, how to mass manufacture, right? Because Anduril doesn't know how to mass manufacture. They know how to prototype. They know how to invent shit. They don't know how to like make a million things of it and make it efficiently. And Ukraine is teaching them and they will be good because of this.

Nothing like existential crisis to, uh, you know, spur innovation, spur, uh, Right.

And so, and then like America withdrawing aid is, is, you know, we, we, we paused aid back in like '24, right? We stopped giving them as many like, you know, artillery things to shoot. And they were like, okay, well, what are we going to do instead of artillery? And they're running out of guys because like Ukraine, Russia just has a lot more guys than Ukraine, much bigger country. It's like 4 times the size. And like, um, so they're like, okay, we'll just use drones, drones, drones. That's what we got. And, um, Ukraine, by the way, has like the best like engineers, computer scientists, like programmers, engineers, programmers, and, um, and like innovators, like in all of the Soviet Union, right? If you look at where the people who made like all the great Soviet weapons came from, like a hugely disproportionate amount came from Ukraine. So like you basically, when, when Ukraine left, it was like, um, they are the, you know, they're the Iowa of the USSR because they, you know, they produced the grain and that's what everyone knows them for. And that's what their flag actually is. It's a field of grain, blue and then gold. But then, so it's like, it's a grain field, but they're also, it's also like the, like Silicon Valley and like Texas. Imagine like Silicon Valley and Texas and Iowa got together and seceded from America and like that was a country. And then the rest of America You know, it's just like, grr, we're coming after you, but like, can't get it past NEPA. Like, imagine that. That's basically like Ukraine fighting off Russia.

Um, okay, so looking back, so we started talking about Obama because we've been talking about abundance basically being a rallying, uh, cry, and we haven't seen rallying cries.

That's right. It's, it's something Americans can all get behind. And why do you do abundance? Because Americans deserve more. You deserve more because you're an American. You got a Confederate flag on your pickup truck. I don't give a shit. You deserve electricity. You deserve a house. You deserve it because you're American. Even if you have some beliefs I think are stupid, you know, and bad. Like, I don't like the Confederacy. It's a piece of shit. But like, you know, but you got a Confederate flag on your pickup truck. You're still getting a cheap house. You're still going to get electricity. It doesn't matter. Right? You're like, you know, uh, like, okay, you're, you're like a, a rich person who lives in a suburb.

Cool.

You get to have solar, cheap solar power. You get to have cheap batteries. You get to have cheaper electricity. Maybe you don't need it because you're rich. You get to have it and you get to have like, you know, maybe I should shill for Impulse. You get a cool stove. I don't know. But like you get that hasn't made it into the abundance agenda yet, unfortunately. But anyway, like, you know, rich people need the government to like work too. It would be nice if rich people could take a train like in Japan. You know, billionaires take trains. Why do they take trains? Because it's nice and clean and everything works and it's on time and it's like, it's great, you know? And a billionaire in New York will not take a train. They'll take a taxi. Train is for the middle class. And that's a problem. That's still, you know, enough people take the train in New York to sustain it. But like the rich people should have the ability to like take a train. The rich people shouldn't have to worry about where to park their cars. It's still annoying to like cruise around looking for parking or whatever, park at the garage and walk or whatever. If you're a rich person, you can have abundance too, like abundance for everybody. Obviously rich people are gonna have to pay higher taxes. That's just part of living in a country that works. But currently rich people pay higher taxes for a country that doesn't work. That's a little worse.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. There's a growing expense eating into your company's profits. It's your cloud computing bill. You may have gotten a deal to start, but now the spend is sky high and increasing every year. What if you could cut your cloud bill in half and improve performance at the same time? Well, if you act by May 31st, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you do just that. OCI is the next generation cloud designed for every workload, where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less. In fact, Oracle has a special promotion where you can cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. The savings are real. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. Join Modal, Skydance Animation, and today's innovative AI tech companies who upgraded to OCI and saved. Offer only for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify for half off at oracle.com/turpentine. That's oracle.com/turpentine. Every time I hop on the 101 freeway in SF, I look up at the various tech billboards and think, damn, Turpentine should definitely be up there. And I bet I'm not alone. In a world of endless scrolling and ad blockers, sometimes the most powerful way to reach people is in the real world. That's where AdQuick comes in. The easiest way to book out-of-home ads like billboards, vehicle wraps, and airport displays, the same way you would order an Uber. Started by Instacart alums, AdQuick was born from their own personal struggles to book and measure ad success. AdQuick's audience targeting, campaign management, and analytics bring the precision and efficiency of digital to the real world. Ready to get your brand the attention it deserves? Visit adquick.com today to start reaching your customers in the real world. Again, that's adquick.com.

Derek, in his book, he sort of, well, to echo what you were saying, we're now supply constrained because we've been restricting supply or regulating way too much. It's been so hard to build, but he makes the argument that at one point, you know, maybe around 2008, et cetera, we were more demand constrained and there were a set of sort of, you know, policies meant to stimulate demand. Can you explain that just from the kind of Econ 102 perspective? Like what was the need then and what policies helped there?

So 2008, we had this giant financial crisis. Lehman Brothers failed, Bear Stearns failed. And then like all these other giant banks were on the verge of failure. They got bailed out. Okay. Because they bought all the stupid, these stupid bonds that sucked and died and were based on housing. And, and, um, those bonds eventually made money, but it took them like 10 years to make money and ended up making money for the Fed because the Fed took it all off their hands. So, uh, at this time everyone was scared. Everyone was scared. Banks were scared to lend, so companies couldn't get money. Companies were scared to invest in the future because they didn't know what was happening. Consumers were scared to consume because their wealth was evaporating and because, you know, like banks weren't lending to their employers and their employers might fire them and unemployment was going up. So everyone was just scared as hell, not irrationally scared, but reasonably scared. You know, you had a coordination failure in the economy. The economy broke down. This is called in economics, we would call this a liquidity preference shock. What that means is liquidity is like cash. Preference is like, I want cash. Shock is like, suddenly I want cash. So look, I translated from economics ease, right? Econ, econ language. Liquidity, preference, shock. Suddenly everyone wants cash. And when everyone wants cash at once, no one's spending it. Everyone wants cash like in the bank account or preferably like under the mattress, right? Cash under the mattress. Give it to me. But what happens if everyone takes all their cash and sticks it under the mattress instead of spending it? Well, what happens then is companies can't get money, right? Like you're not spending money on like a new bed, a new washing machine, a new car, you know, like a bigger apartment. You're not spending money on anything, right? And when you're not spending money on anything, then companies can't invest, right? They can't, the companies are going to scale back. When companies scale back, what do they do? They fire people and they cut salaries. When you fire people and cut salaries, what do people do in response to that? Well, they stop spending. So as you can see, it's a little bit of a cycle there. This is called an aggregate demand shock. This is aggregate demand because nobody wants to spend. Aggregate demand shock, lower aggregate demand, that's just a fancy John Maynard Keynes term for nobody wants to spend. And if nobody wants to spend, nobody can like invest, nobody can build, you know, because no one wants to spend. So the government, Comes in and says, okay, I will spend. You know, so usually aggregate demand shocks are small. And what you do is you cut interest rates. And when you cut interest rates, that says, okay, well, now it's easier to spend. I didn't want to spend, but damn, look at these low interest rates. I better spend. You know, it's a little intervention, minor intervention. But then when you get something as big and catastrophic as the 2008 crash, especially when interest rates go to zero and you can't even cut them anymore. Right? The zero lower bound, they call that because interest rates can't go below zero. Like you can't charge people negative interest on bonds. Like, hey, take this bond that shrinks every year. No, no, I don't want it.

You know?

And so people do, you can't get people to take a bond that doesn't pay interest. And so like, like you'll just take cash instead because it pays zero interest or anyway. Anyway, point being that when all this happens and the economy seizes up, Interest rate cuts can't do the job. So you can do QE, which is basically the Fed like prints money and buys bonds from people and hopes that that does something. And then that probably does do something. And of course, you can also address the root cause of it by bank bailouts and especially by the Fed's sort of stealth bank bailout where they printed a bunch of money and bought all those shitty mortgage-backed bonds off of all the banks. Right. That was the real bailout, by the way. And it didn't cost the taxpayer a dime. In fact, it made money for the taxpayer because 10 years later when the housing market recovered, those bonds suddenly made money. Right. And so the Fed was just able to hold onto them for a long time because the Fed can't go bankrupt despite what Ron Paul and Rand Paul may tell you. Yeah. So anyway, point being that you need to get the government to spend money, borrow and spend money. And it's the spender of last resort. And so the government, what should it spend money on? The answer is infrastructure and payments to the states. So like the states do like, you know, Education, stuff like that. So you give some money to the states to like keep the teachers hired and whatever. But mainly you like, you build roads, right? You build bridges and you build power lines and you build all these things. You build, it's a time to build, right? And it's especially good as a time to build because in, remember, interest rates are really low during a depression. Like a recession where the interest rates hit zero is basically a depression. And so during a depression, you've got, you've got these low interest rates and then ZIRP basically happens. And then the government can borrow really, really cheaply. Okay. Borrow cheaply, build productive things. Okay. Build infrastructure. It may, you can get some effect just from having the government, like, take the money, bury it in a hole and have people come and dig it up. Right. That's like what Keynes talked about. You can get some effect from that. Right? It's not zero. And this is basically a tax, a temporary tax cut. That's exactly what a temporary tax cut is. Have people dig the money out of a hole. You know, you could just give the money to people. And so like, that's a temporary tax cut. And Obama did lots of that. And honestly, he did too much of that. Like more of it should have been in terms of building some productive thing, because if you pay people money to build you a road, then not only do you accomplish the objective of getting money into the economy, injecting money into the economy to sort of jumpstart the cycle of spending, But you also get a road on top of that. And we did that. The one problem was that because in the Great Recession, there was this imperative of like, get money into the economy, we weren't very efficient about getting roads for our money, right? We spent money on California high-speed rail and that money went to like consultants and shit. Yes. And that ends up being just like a very unfair kind of tax cut, right? Like a tax cut for consultants. It's lob money at their head. And so the way we did, the way we rushed money out the door, we did not make sure that like we got value for money. And this ended up having problems down the road because now, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson would tell you, we don't have good systems for making sure that stuff actually gets built. So by the way, remember I said Doge is mostly an ideological purge, but then actually they may, they may try to end cost-plus contracting, which which is something that would actually really get America building again more. And, uh, you know, Trump may take some action against NEPA and, um, that, so that, that may get America building more. So, so Trump may do a couple abundance things, um, through no fault of his own. Uh, but anyway, but, but those will not cancel out the tariffs. So, but anyway, that's another story. The story is that, uh, that was what Obama did that was good, but it was a, it was a problem of a different time and it, It created problems down the road. Like, like, you know, FDR solved a lot of problems of the Depression and a lot of the ways in which he solved that ended up setting us up for some problems down the road.

Sure.

But that's fine. That's how things work, right? Like our, in the Cold War, we solved the Cold War by allying, de facto allying with, with China against Russia, right? And that helped us win because it distracted the Russians and it, um, Yeah, basically just distracted the Russians and freed us up to like focus only on the Russians. Right. And so we won the Cold War. That was great, but it strengthened China in a way that would ultimately start building them up as a rival. The solution to one era's problems plant the seeds of the next era's problems.

And just close that loop. What was the FDR, uh, example you gave of what were the problems that it—

Oh, so like, um, FDR made, uh, unions. So FDR made this deal with the unions to basically allow people to unionize, but then he made it shop by shop. So essentially you have massive amounts of resources wasting on people fighting unions instead of just the whole sector getting together. Like in many countries, what they do is like the whole sector gets together and just like basically sets, sets wages, like all the fast food workers within like this one city. Right. We don't have that. We have every fast food joint in America has like a fight over whether you unionize. And so like, it's a giant waste of resources. And so that was, that was sort of, um, you know, an Social Security is not a fully funded pension system, right? It's a pay-it-forward system that was necessary then because, you know, we, it wasn't necessary. We could have borrowed a hell of a lot of money to fully fund an alternative to Social Security that was a fully funded system. But we, FDR was deep into austerity. He did not want to borrow the government to borrow money. And so he was, he was a very fiscally austerity-minded person. And, and because of that, we had Social Security be a pay-it-forward system, which is fine for a while until population growth slows, right? When you have a baby boom, when you have like a fertility rate above replacement, then a pay-it-forward system actually works really well. This is actually a very classic result in economics that when you have higher fertility rates, a pay-it-forward system is actually the most efficient thing you can do. So in a baby boom, it's the most efficient thing you can do. But when you get slow population growth, it's like, You don't have enough young people to pay. You need the old people to like pay for themselves instead of the young people to like pay for all the old people. And so, uh, pretty simple way of understanding that. And so, but because of, we didn't want to borrow a shit ton of money in the Depression, have our government go into a lot of debt. And we ended up doing that anyway in World War II, we borrowed money. But then we, uh, we didn't want to do it for the Depression because FDR didn't want it. We ended up making this pay it forward system that now is, you know, gonna, uh, gonna bite us a little bit and we're gonna have to cut benefits a lot more than if we had fully funded it.

And okay, so now let's, let's finish the loop on the sort of demand side policies that we enacted after post-2008 creating problems in the future. Is it just that we forgot about sort of the supply side or it somehow limited us on the supply side or we couldn't do both or what was sort of the—

And it built up debt. So now, like, as long as interest rates are low, you can carry debt. So, so we had, we came into the Obama administration with a debt of 60% of GDP and we left it with debt of 100% of GDP. And that was all in response to the Great Recession. That's a lot of debt. And that means the more of a stock of debt you have, the more sensitive you are to interest rate hikes. So that meant that if inflation ever returned, which spoiler, it did, then, and the Fed has to hike interest rates to control the inflation, what happens? The interest rates start going up on all the government debt as you roll it over, you have to roll it over at higher rates. And then the interest rate on government debt starts going up and government interest expenses go up and it starts crowding out the rest of the budget, which is exactly what you're seeing now.

On that point, is GDP, is the ratio going to be over 100% kind of indefinitely, or do you envision a point where we get it down? And if so, is that a combination of like a little bit of inflation, you know, some, uh, you know, higher GDP growth, um, like how do, uh, productivity, how do we—

Well, so inflation erodes that number. Because the debt is priced in dollars and inflation decreases the value of a dollar. So it decreases debt to GDP. Inflation basically adds fake GDP to our GDP, but then the number of dollars we owe, it's like a dollar matters less. So it's easy to pay back a dollar because our GDP is higher. And yes, it's with funny money, but that funny money really allows us to pay back debt more easily. So So inflation erodes debt. In fact, during Biden, you, the inflation during Biden was so high that you, despite the fact that Biden was borrowing and spending way too much money, um, you actually saw the debt to GDP go down over Biden's term.

So is that basically the answer? We're just going to have a little higher inflation?

It's, it's part of the answer. So it's, it's a third of the answer. A third of the answer is going to be a period of extended period of higher inflation. That's not going to be But actually we had that in like the, the, in like the '50s and '60s, our inflation was like higher than it is now, or than it was during like the '80s, '90s, and 2000s. Um, and it helped erode the debt of World War II, right? We lived with like 3% inflation during that era, or 4%, 3, 4% inflation. And you know what? It was fine. We, we were a happy country anyway. And so it's not, it's not the worst thing, but it's going to annoy people. And it's going to last for a while. You see like inflation at like persist, like inflation's going back up now because of tariffs. Inflation's going like inflation last month was like 4.5%. Welcome back.

It wasn't dead. It's back.

There's your cold open right there. So that will be one, I think maybe if historical precedent holds, that'll be a third of it or roughly one of the 3 pieces Let's say, uh, the other 2 pieces are tax cuts or spending cuts. We need to do that.

So will we get it down to a reason? Like what level could we get it down to? Or is it always just—

You get down as low as you like, 25% of GDP, if you like.

Wow.

25% of GDP would be fine. We wouldn't even notice it. Yeah, we can get that down. We could, um, realistically, like, you know, getting it down to 60% of GDP would probably, uh, You know, now it's at like 120-ish, I think.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Hey everyone, Erik here. In this environment, founders need to become profitable faster and do more with smaller teams, especially when it comes to engineering. That's why Sean Lanahan started Squad, a specialized global talent firm for top engineers that will seamlessly integrate with your org. Squad offers rigorously vetted top 1% talent that will actually work hard for you every day. Their engineers work in your time zone, follow your processes, and use your tools. Squad has frontend engineers excelling in TypeScript, React, and Next.js ready to onboard to your team today. For backend, Squad engineers are experts at Node.js, Python, Java, and a range of other languages and frameworks. While it may cost more than a freelancer on Upwork, Billing you for 40 hours, but working only 2. Squad offers premium quality at a fraction of the typical cost without the headache of assessing for skills and culture fit. Squad takes care of sourcing, legal compliance, and local HR for global talent. Increase your velocity without amping up burn. Visit choosquad.com and mention Turpentine to skip the waitlist.

It's basically like whichever president does that is going to be a hero, but probably not reelected or something like it's going to be a Bitter pill.

Yeah.

I mean, like, so Clinton was able to do it and be a hero because it came, there was this real growth boom that we got from like the computer revolution and from the end of the Cold War and all this stuff. And Clinton was able to do this and he was able to start on this path and Bush should have continued on this path, but Bush decided that, you know, to go back to like a pandering sort of thing where you just, a tax cut for you and a tax cut for you and blah, blah, blah. And to his credit, he did cut taxes more on the middle class than the rich. Like Bush was a compassionate conservative in that he cut taxes more for like the middle class, but it was fiscally responsible. Like many things that Bush did was like, you know, well-intentioned, but moronic is the hallmark of the Bush administration, completely moronic. Like he was not an evil guy, but he got a lot of people killed and he really He inadvertently wrecked America in certain ways. Trump is deliberately wrecking America for his insane ideology, whereas Bush inadvertently wrecked America for his incompetent stupidity.

That's called open. That's a good one. Um, and so why isn't growth in one of your 3, um, sort of, uh, answers? Just like growing our way out of it?

You can't control it, right? Growth could be a 4th part, and we hope that it is.

Right.

But like, I can't tell you that it will be like, I can't tell you that there'll be like a big technology boom, blah, blah, blah. Like fertility rates are going down. So investment's going to be limited. Decoupling is going to happen. You know, and then the other factors that we're going to need to do that, the austerity that we're going to need to do could act as a brake on growth. And so growth, you can't just say grow out of this debt. We can't depend on that. I hope it happens, but I can't tell you that it will. AI could just like supercharge the real economy. AI could just, you know, if AI actually made us grow 5% a year, like some of the people are saying, goodbye debt, bye, poof, solved. But it won't because Tyler's right. Tyler Cowen's right. And you have lots of little blockages in the thing. And so it may be, but I still think it could increase growth by like a modest amount. If it increases growth by 1% a year, that's going to Like 1% a year compounded over 20 years, right? Like that's more than 20% of our debt to GDP, right? That you get rid of, that'll get rid of like a significant amount. Add, add higher inflation to that, like that would get rid of a higher amount. And so then we could do, you know, if fiscal austerity, if we just balance the budget and let those 2 things and we had higher growth because of AI and then like slightly higher inflation for like 20 years. Like that could solve all the debt problem without us having to like run a surplus like Clinton did and actually pay anything back. Okay. That's the, like, that's kind of the best case scenario for debt. I honestly think we're going to have to run a surplus and pay some back. And that's going to be pretty painful. But hopefully AI will cushion the blow of that. And, you know, we will grow on like, and we'll, we'll get rid of artists' jobs. By the way, can we, I got to write a post about like all the fricking people who are like, AI art is evil and fascist and like you're turning everything into Miyazaki, you fucking fascist. And it's like, stop having fun, stop making things and having fun with it. You know, it's like this, this idea that like, you know, people who make art professionally are like owed a sinecure by the government. You are not. It's coming for developers. Everyone in America thinks they're owed a sinecure. You're owed, like your job is something that is owed to you. Your career is something that is owed to you. It's not owed to you. It is an expedient. It is a thing you did to make money. You found this niche. Now that niche won't always exist. It's just that is the way of the world. And the world sometimes throws you a curveball. And so like, that's it.

That's a, that's easy one. Um, or easy one to sort of be on the sort of, uh, right side of, I mean, um, the, um, yeah, it's interesting.

Okay.

So let's segue because you mentioned Trump's crazy ideology. It's a great segue into your other piece on the new right, which I thought was fascinating. Because we don't always think of the right as having an ideology, right? Even, you know, what do they say? The fusionism of sort of the old right was sort of, you know, just a sort of, you know, an alliance of convenience between 3 people, 3, you know, groups of people who had the same enemy, right? Sort of the enemy being communists. It was sort of the libertarian business people, the sort of, you know, sort of—

Religious right.

Yeah, the religious right. And then Trump, of course, people say, is a cult of personality. So people don't think, you know, and he was formerly a Democrat, so people don't think of him as having like an ingrained ideology. But sort of, you write about sort of, you know, the Vance-Trump sort of, it seems like the right has actually coalesced along some sort of ideology that explains some of the behavior that it's doing both internally and sort of foreign policy-wise, especially as it relates to Europe. Why don't you sort of, um, high level just explain a little bit of what you see as sort of this, uh, explain this coalescing. What is, what is the underlying ideology?

Um, so the underlying ideology is based around the idea of Western civilization. And I grew up thinking that Japan was part of Western civilization. I grew up thinking the free world, you know, like, uh, was like anything, anybody who was on our side during the Cold War was part of Western civilization. And that like, you know, even China had like its period of like Westernization, blah, blah, blah. Like you eat hamburgers, you're part of Western civilization. You have McDonald's, you go to see movies, you wear blue jeans, you like rock music, rap music, basketball, blah, blah, blah. That's Western civilization, right? I grew up thinking that. And that was what we told people during the Cold War. And that was what we told ourselves during the Cold War. And I honestly, I think that was a pretty good definition of Western civilization, but it's not what J.D. Vance and company think is Western civilization. They think of it as a much narrower thing. What defines Western civilization for them? Europe. Old Europe. The, the, not, not modern-day Europe of like the EU and like Eurocrats and, and, you know, socialized medicine and stuff, but the old traditional Europe of like, you know, Bach and conquistadors and the Catholic Church. And you know, the like electorate of the Palatinate and like, you know, the, uh, the, um, the House of, House of Bourbon and the House of Valois and that, you know, and the House of Hohenzollern and, you know, the House of Plantagenet. Although I think they, they went extinct, the House of Plantagenet, which is a shame because they had the best name of any of the houses. Plantagenet.

That's pretty good.

That's amazing. Please bring back the Plantagenets, England. Can you just call yourself Plant? Anyway, my family should have named changed their name from Kuznets to Plantagenet instead of Smith. You know, it's less accurate but more awesome. Anyway, the hell was I talking about? That that old Europe, you know, of of Christianity and like, you know, yes, white people, but like, this is not a racial nationalist movement. This is not like. Land of whites for the whites. Like, I mean, yes, white nationalists will support Trump, but like, I don't think J.D. Vance is a white nationalist. Look at his wife. Like, he's married to like an Indian American. He does not want to like kick her parents out and like, you know, trade her in for like, you know, a white tradwife. Like, he doesn't want that, right? Elon Musk certainly doesn't want that. Like, Elon Musk is like, I will go to war with you. Fuck yourself in the face. Like, Elon Musk You know, he, he's concerned for like white people being discriminated against in like South Africa, right? Or even, or in America, but not, you know, it doesn't mean he wants like a nation of whites for whites and by whites. Like he's not a white nationalist. He will fight for like Indian immigration, Asian immigration, or Nigerian immigration, whatever. Like as long as they're like, you know, tech people, like he'll, he'll, he, he lives in a diverse society, even Joe Rogan. So Joe Rogan said like, You know, and you hear this refrain from people on the new right all the time, though. He's like, why, why does Poland get to not get to choose to remain white? Well, I mean, honestly, it does, and no one cares. So like, it's, it's a bit of a bad question because like, yes, Poland is just white people. Like, they've got a few South Koreans, but like, Poland in general, like, keeps out immigrants that doesn't want. Like, no one notices this. But anyway, but the point is that. Joe Rogan lives in Austin. Joe Rogan lives in a town that's 40% white and is a bunch of libs. All right, that's where he lives. That's where he chooses to live. He does not— it's not about your neighbors. It's about the idea. It's about the idea of Western civilization out there. Descent from Europe, the old European stuff, the heritage, the history, the idea that Europe was a great civilization, should remain a great civilization along the same general lines with the same general characteristics, you know, like, and that's the idea of, of the new right. And this idea that Western civilization, which includes conservative values, includes traditional Christianity, includes those things, but it's not about living those things, right? The, the 1990s Christian right that I grew up with, they lived Christianity. They had a personal relationship with Jesus. They would pray at the flagpole every morning. They would tell you about their walk with God. They believed homosexuality was a sin and abortion was a sin and all those things, but they believed that in real life, they went to church and that, you know, the preacher at like the Church of Christ would like preach conservative values and they would live those at the local level. It was, you know, the new right is all online and it's all about the idea of not of Christ, but of Christendom. It's this idea of let me draw a map around Christianity. Let me draw a border. Here's the borders of Christianity as a civilization, you know, like Sam Huntington style. Like, it doesn't matter. They like Russia. It doesn't matter that Russians don't go to church and get divorced all the time. And like, Whatever, like it doesn't that doesn't matter that Russians aren't really Christian. It mattered the fact that the patriarch, like supports like Patriarch Kirill or whatever, supports Putin's regime. They have reverence, official reverence for Christendom. That's Western civilization to them. If you don't have the reverence for it, it's not civilization. You're like if you're just a bunch of like blue-haired genderqueer leftist whatever white people in an all-white town full of that, which is like basically like Eugene, Oregon. or like, you know, um, Arcadia, or like, or like Oberlin, let's say, you know, those are, those are places that's a bunch of white people and like they get together and like dye their hair blue and like, you know, say they're trans and whatever. And so like that, that's not Western civilization to them. Yes, it's white people. Yes, their ancestors were Christian. Right. But they, but it, it doesn't have the reverence for the European-ness of greatness that they, that they care about. So they don't have this coordinating mechanism saying, this is us. This is our team. This is our civilization, blah, blah. Here's what we stand for. Here's what we've always stood for. Here's our heritage, blah, blah. It's an online heritage indigeneity movement.

And for people unfamiliar with Sam Huntington's sort of thesis or contributions, can you briefly explain it and how it relates to the new right?

Yes. Sam Huntington drew a map around different civilizations, quote unquote. Japan was its own civilization, which I agree with. I kind of agree with Sam Huntington's idea of like civilizations drawing maps. You know, I disagree with him about what they are necessarily, but, um, but he's right that, you know, you can sort of identify local civilizations. I think that's, that's pretty, uh, pretty reasonable idea. But then, you know, he drew, he drew, um, a boundary at East Europe and said you have like Slavic civilization or, or whatever. And then, um, and then, uh, you know, West Europe as a civilization. He drew a Cold War boundary between civilizations. The new right thinks that, that Russia's part of us, right? They're on our side. They're white, they're Christian, they have reverence for the idea of Europe. They're no longer godless commies, right? They're, they're us. And they're, they're on our, they're on our civilization. So, so they draw the boundaries a little different than Huntington, but they basically think like, you know, Europe, sort of white or white-ish, you know, descended from Christians, Christendom, you know, blah, blah, blah. This was a civilization. And there's this idea of like, um, that, that all of, all of the Christian lands of Christendom used to be united during the Middle Ages. It is medieval in a deep way. It is, it is, you know, late Roman Empire, Crusader, you know, early modern sort of Baroque era stuff. It's, it's, it's got this through line. It's not a new idea of this civilization. This is not a new idea. What's new is that it's now it's all online and it's sort of about like the memes of it instead of like this civilization in real space, but we can get to that.

Well, what Huntington also said, right, is that, you know, he said the conflicts, he wrote in the '90s, right, his book Clash of Civilizations. He said the conflicts would be less about economic and political differences the way it was during the Cold War and more around cultural and religious differences, which somewhat predicted identity politics.

The problem was that, you know, on online, there are no boundaries and borders. And so Sam Huntington drew lines in meatspace because he thought that geography and who your neighbors were would always be the most important thing. He did not anticipate, even though it was already starting to coalesce in the early 2000s, you could already see the very beginnings of it, but it didn't really coalesce until social media. He believed, like, he thought it would all be space-wise, geometric, horizontal, where in fact, What the identity politics turned out to be vertical. It turned out identity politics is like some like Asian American person in like Novi, Michigan, sitting there and like vibing with some Asian Australians in like Brisbane over like their shared Asian heritage that like, you know, actual people in China wouldn't even give a shit about, but like they feel it's like their shared heritage because this club online of like, you know, Boba tea memes and, and like joking about getting higher grades on the SAT and stuff. If you hang out in those, those groups, that's what they talk about. And like, um, and then like then getting into K-pop and stuff like that. Like there's, it's, it's vertical. It's these verticals, you know, it's, it's people basically delocalized, what we call deracinated people. That means disconnected from land, people connecting in online space, online people, your neighbors now. I'm sitting in Tokyo. You are in San Francisco. We are connecting in online space now. And we're connecting with people who share our memes, who are not necessarily our neighbors. Obviously, some people in San Francisco listen to us, but like, you know, yes, we have things we do with our neighbors. Meatspace still matters, right? When we would do like a party or something, it will still, like, people will still take an Uber there and it's still our neighbors. But like, But, but identities went online. They went vertical. They are disconnected. They are, it's, it's no longer geometry. It's now network theory. Um, every mathematician is like, you can solve geometry problems with network. Yes. Okay. Uh, kill me. I've used a bad metaphor anyway. But the problem, but the point is it's now about like who's connected point to point instead of like the, um, you know, like this contiguous map of of a thing. And in some ways, this makes identity politics less scary because like identity politics 150 years ago meant you cleanse the interior and you police the perimeter, right? Like Serbia for the Serbs means if you're in Serbia and you're not a Serb, you're, you know, fuck you. At the best, you get expelled and at the worst, you get an early grave. And so that's what that meant. And then policing the perimeter meant Serbia would go to war with Croatia and like bomb them over like who gets this this town, right? Border wars, territory wars, and then ethnic cleansing and genocide was the hallmark of identity politics 150 years ago. Now identity politics has gone online. So basically it's whose notional identity group can, can get online status, who can dunk on who. Nobody ever really wins, right? It's like, can I make like white people unpopular on social media? That's, that's, you know, Decolonial politics in, in 1965, it would be like, you know, kill the white man, expel the white man from like wherever, I don't know, um, whatever town. But like now it's not that. It's like dunk on the white man and like, you know, get a lot of retweets for saying like white people suck. Like that's identity politics now. It's all a bunch of dunk wars. And, and I see the new right as using real life things to win online meme battles. Because online meme battles are what they care about. Like those Venezuelans they deported, right? They just grabbed some people off the street. I'm sure some of those guys were gangbangers. I'm sure some of those guys were not. There was just like, there was this like gay baker with like a tattoo saying like, I love my family or whatever. And they grabbed him. They're like, you're part of Senderagua, you know, wake up in a Salvadoran torture dungeon that he's there now. I shouldn't laugh about that. We just, we just tortured some random Hispanic dude because he had a tattoo for like his mom or some shit. Like, that's evil. That's an evil thing to do. But why did they do it? It wasn't because anyone knew that guy in real life. It wasn't because he was anyone's neighbor. It didn't matter where he was. They could have grabbed and deported him from like fucking Macau or anywhere. They could have grabbed and deported him from like some island in the Pacific and no one would have cared because it didn't matter where he was. It mattered who he was. It was the vertical that mattered. It was the fact that our gang, the MAGA, can grab you for just having a tattoo and send you to a Salvadoran torture dungeon if we feel like we have status, we have power, we, you know, our identity group strong. You know, it was for online dunk wars that they just tortured that guy.

I, for what it's worth, I agree that substance and optics of these deportations are retarded. So I'm in agreement with you. I do wonder if there's, if they're also trying to win some legal battles, maybe they already won that. But, you know, at least in the last few years, affirmative action, DEI, right? And I think they're fighting that too. And I, but that said, I think there's a big gap between being anti-DEI and being white nationalist. And I'm glad you sort of agree that these—

I mean, no one likes DEI. Like, do you notice how Trump is like, like, DEI is bad and we're going to do something to universities? And like, instead of like suing, they could have sued, sued, sued to keep their DEI programs and just like taking it all the way and like You know, sneakily change the names and doing all this stuff. And they're like, nope, bye, DEI's gone. We're firing all these people. Like, we're closing this office. University of California, University of Michigan, they all immediately folded. Oh, Trump is making us close DEI. Oh no, we certainly didn't want to do that. Wow, wow, fascist making us do this. You wanted to do this. They— everyone hated DEI. And it was this, um, it's a preference cascade. You know, Timur Kuran? Like, it's a preference cascade. Everyone freaking hated DEI and was waiting for like the first available excuse to get rid of it. And like, now they're getting rid of it. Yay. And like, you, the people who really love DEI will never, will not get rid of it. They will sneakily do it. Just like when you made laws against anti-Black discrimination or anti, uh, you know, female discrimination in the '70s. Some companies still sneakily practiced it and some governments and country clubs or whatever. They just kept it on the down low and said, I bet they won't sue us. We're below their radar. And they were right some of the time, right? There were relatively few lawsuits and relatively few of those lawsuits won. Just in the same way, you're going to get some anti-white discrimination, anti-male discrimination will remain in some companies and some nonprofits and some blah, blah, blah. But most people don't actually want that. They did that because they were bullied into it by social media. Universities, it was social media that bullied universities into doing DEI. And now that, I mean, you know, they don't care about like sit-ins or something. Just call the cops. Like, like eventually people will just get expelled from school. It's like, it's, you know, we, we learned how to deal with that shit in like the '80s when they were like, okay, enough of that. Bye. Like, guess who needs a job? You. Guess who needs you? Not us. We're, you're on financial aid, bitch. Bye. Like that's, but, but that's, um, but, but online they don't know how to deal with social media. Criticism online because it hurts their reputation.

Going back to the Vans argument for a second, I think it's like I agree that no one really cares. Poland is just you know keep continue to be Poland. No one cares. I think he's talking about more like hey you know England you know basically countries that have very high amounts of immigration from countries or sort of religions that they see as like hostile to the native sort of culture and population, and they see the native culture. As native people, as not, maybe that's not the right word, but basically the white, the net, you know, people in England not being able to stand up.

The white people in England can't stand up for themselves. And the more, but that's not even important. What's important is, yes, that's important. And when Vance talks about free speech, that's what he's talking about. He's saying, you know, you can't say bad things about Islam. You can't say shit like that. If you say racist stuff, you'll be put in jail, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, he's right. That is an abrogation of freedom of speech. That is illiberal. That is, you know, like, that is authoritarian and illiberal in Europe. You know, that you're— guess what? Europe is still less free than us in many ways, in many ways, right? So, so he's right, sure. Um, but, uh, here's the thing. What they really want is for the government to stand up and for it. They want the British government to, to protect notionally the idea, the, the, the interests of like Christians and whites and blah, blah, blah, the traditional people of Europe.

Whatever China does.

If you're in Britain and you have like, you know, Pakistani neighbors who are doing stuff you don't like, then yes, meatspace matters. There are people who don't want immigrants living near to them, but in America, we just don't see that. We're, I'm talking about America here. I'm not even talking about, when I say the new right, I'm not even talking about like like British guys who are rioting or whatever. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about JD Vance. I'm talking about like, yes, maybe they say like someday if we have that much like immigration, we could, like they could come to our community, but come on, it's America. They're already there. Like, like you want Muslims, go to Dearborn, Michigan. Like America is a big country where there's room to spread out and nobody's Muslim neighbors are bothering them. You know, like, We are a big country that's spread out. We live online. It's, for them, it's all memes. It's all like, who gets to say that they're the sons of the soil? Who gets to say that they're the people who, like, the privileged people for whom this country is really for? And like, if you think about it, like a lot of decolonial leftist, like, quote unquote, anti-racist stuff, which is, which is against racism in the sense that antimatter is against matter. It's simply matter with the opposite charge, right? It's like a lot of anti-racist stuff is about privileging BIPOC people, you know, and then, um, and then, and then, you know, deprivileging whites and basically saying like, whites, you are Untermenschen, you are, you are the, the interlopers, you are colonialists, colonizers, you are sort of lower, lesser people within the nation. It's memetic. It's who gets to get called on first in class and stuff like that. It's a bunch of like memetic dunking on white people. And yes, there may be like some meatspace dunking on white people too. Like you may kick white people out of your stupid little club at university, or like some lefty professor may not call on white students because they think that's racist to call on white students. That's a real thing that happened, by the way. Yes, you can have stuff in meatspace. It's— I'm not saying it doesn't matter at all, but ultimately it's about like who gets bragging rights online, who gets to say this is my country. And when, when, you know, the, the leftist people say like, uh, you know, slavery built this country. It was slaves who built this country. Well, it's factually wrong. I mean, they built like a bit of this country, like some of the country was built by slaves, but like most of it was not because slaves were only like ever like, you know, 10% of the population, whatever. Like you can't have 10% of the population building the whole thing. Like most of the country, especially because like a lot of, much of the country didn't have slaves in it. For most, for a lot of the time. And like, so no, it wasn't, you know, mostly not slaves who built the country. But when you say slavery built this country, you're looking for dunks. You're looking for group status dunks, right? And that's what, that's what the new right is doing. They're looking for group status dunks in the name of Western civilization. That's why Pete Hegseth has a deus vult tattoo, I think. I think he has a deus vult tattoo. And it's like, it's, it's meme crusades. It's the meme crusades. Like, you know, like in, in the actual crusades, it's like, well, the, the, the Saracens, the heathens came and took some of the whole, some of our lands. Those were Christian lands and now Christendom will fight back. We're going to send a bunch of, you know, French guys who don't even know how to take a shower and have an IQ of 70 to retake this, you know, holy land through like the sheer Religious fervor, blah blah blah. It didn't work. Preview: it did not work. It worked in a small area for a small amount of time. You had some Crusader states involved, but like mostly that didn't work. But like it was like me. It was a meatspace crusade, right? It was a real life crusade. Deus vult! You got some guys with swords and you know battle axes and like with the big helmets and stuff that you can't even see out of, and like they were like. going and fighting some Turks and like, ah, fight. And like, um, how'd that work out? But like the meme crusades now, now it's online. It's about like, you know, we're not reclaiming the Holy Land. We're reclaiming X. That's the Holy Land that was reclaimed by the meme crusade. You know, it's, it's, it's digital online territory. It's, it's reclaiming respect space. And I don't see how those wars ever get won because nobody's going away. And unless you make the Great Firewall of America, like to imitate China, unless you do that, you're going to spend all your, all your entire life right next to foreigners, talking to foreigners all day long on social media. You cannot, like, unless you build a China-style Great Firewall, foreigners will always be your neighbors in digital space. Like, you're always like, Eurocrat liberals, European liberals are always going to be yelling right in your face. The libs will be right there. And like all the, like, you know, you're like, expel the Muslims, blah, blah, blah. Well, they're still going to be right there. They're just going to be in your feed where you live. Like, and if you live on X, if you're just shitposting on X or Reddit or wherever all day, like there's going to be a shit ton of like Pakistanis there posting at you. There's going to be Saudis and like, like Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysian will be posting at you all day. You're going to be taking your cues from like a fricking Malaysian. Or Captive Dreamer, some Canadian guy. Like, this is where you live now. You live on social media, you know, especially if you're in politics. Like, I think normies are getting off social media. Normies are going to group chats. They're going to like, or just real life hangouts or just texting again. But like all the politics-brained fucking brain-fried people of the new right and the new left and the woke left, all those people live on social media because all they want to do is have these meme wars all day. Right? Most people are dropping out of the meme wars and going to live their goddamn life and going to a fucking party. But then, you know, everybody, like all the the ten percent of the population that's absolutely politics-brained is still there on X posting, ha ha ha ratioed, you know, and like, um, and those wars never get won. But it's a shrinking segment of the population, and unfortunately, that segment is now doing bad things to us in meatspace through tariffs and through like grabbing random. Like guys with like, I love mom tattoos and sending them to Salvadoran torture dungeons, but also tariffs. Most importantly, tariffs will wreck your life for stupid memes, online status dunks for Western civilization that like most people don't give a shit about.

Yeah, it's, um, it's funny. It's like, uh, we close on this, you know, in the, um, in the Abundance book, Derek talks about how, or Derek and Ezra talk about how at sort of these local meetups, You know, the NIMBYs just have more time on their hands, and so they go to the meetings and block things, and sort of the policymakers think that they represent the population, but in fact they don't. And similarly, on social media, you know, the craziest people are the most active, and so, you know, policymakers think that they're getting a representative sample set, but in fact they're getting an extreme sort of view.

Right, exactly right. And That's right. So, so Martin Gurri wrote about this in Revolt of the Public, and it was exactly right. He said the, the masses, the populace is not the public, right? The, uh, you know, the public is a tiny sliver. It is a small sliver of the populace that's politically engaged. And those are the people that yell. They do all the yelling. And social media gave them a tool to yell at anyone and everyone. And that's why every institution went woke. Because this tiny woke fringe was able to just wag the dog. They were able to control universities and NGOs and corporations stuff by yelling at them on social media because you had a small percent of the population who was really engaged on Twitter and also Reddit and Facebook, but like mostly Twitter, who was able to just yell at you, yell in your face, make your reputation bad or whatever. And that tiny public was able to control the larger populace and all the institutions and organizations thereof. Through yelling online. And Elon has helped the situation by taking over X and turning it into like a right-wing space and making all the, you know, all the lefty chuds leave for Bluesky and the righty chuds congregate on X. But like, it hasn't, it fundamentally hasn't solved the problem that like there's this vast silent majority and it's bigger than the silent majority ever was during Nixon's time when he coined that term. Right? It was, it's much, the silent majority is much bigger because the silent majority is in group chats. And they're texting and they're going to real life hangouts and they're hanging out in real life because they, you know, the, the, like 1% of the population that's on Twitter, the Twitter shouters of which you and I are part, we are part of the ruling class. You know, like I want to disempower our class, but I want to disempower not you and me specifically, but the entire class that we're part of. The shouting class rules us and the shouting class must be disempowered. And Like it or not, old media monopolies did disempower the shouting class. Like Dan Rather, say what you and Peter Jennings and the old editorial board of the old New York Times, you know, they disempowered the crazies in America because they wouldn't let them talk. The crazies weren't able to talk. And of course, many normal people weren't able to talk too. And whoever opposed the Iraq War wasn't able to talk and da da da. So obviously this leads to elitist. Media leads to problems. But at the same time, the crazies, like, how, as a crazy, how could you scream and shout at someone important? You could protest in real life and no, everyone would ignore you. You could write a letter to the editor and it wouldn't even be accepted. You know, you could do, you could pass out pamphlets. You were, as a crazy, you were disempowered. Now the crazies rule our civilization. Every civilization is ruled by these few fucking crazies. The platform is the enemy. Because every organization is afraid of getting yelled at on X or whatever.

There's a quote you said like 5 years ago. I had you on my podcast and you said something like, when you give everyone a voice, don't be surprised when they all say fuck you.

Yes. When they give everyone a voice, right? And so that's what happened. Thank you, technologists. Thank you, you know, liberal, like engineers living in San Francisco in 2005 who dreamed of like Giving the voiceless a voice. Thank you, Jack Dorsey. Thank you for opening the floodgates of hell. Anyway, that's where we are now. And we're just starting to come back from that. Maybe if we can just get everyone off X and we can shrink the power and Bluesky and shrink the power of these platforms to irrelevance, maybe we can get out of this by having it just be a, you know, a rubber room where the crazies shout in. But where are we going to get our information? Podcasts, YouTube. We're still going to get our information online, maybe just not from the very craziest sliver. We'll get it from like slightly less crazy people who have like the ability, who have like the chops to make like nice videos on YouTube.

Maybe our curation will just get better in terms of like maybe things like prediction markets or, uh, we'll just be able to filter the signal from the noise better perhaps.

Yeah, I'm hoping AI. We'll do this. I'm hoping that we get AI Dan Rather to curate our shit for us. I don't know that it's going to be better than like real Dan Rather, but it's certainly better than what we got. Like AI Dan Rather, save us.

Thesis, you know, antithesis, synthesis. Maybe that's the— Noah, as always, it's a great conversation on the new left and the new right. As always, until next time.

Until next time.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers, like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erikaturpin@gmail.com. That's erik@turpentine.co, and let's partner together.