David Sacks on his intellectual and political journey
In this Upstream interview, entrepreneur and investor David Sacks traces his intellectual and political evolution from a libertarian‑leaning PayPal executive to a self‑described populist defender of civil liberties. He argues that early Silicon Valley championed free speech, but over the past decade the industry has shifted toward censorship, often in partnership with left‑wing activist groups and government agencies. Sacks blames a professional‑class elite—largely college‑educated and wedded to “woke” ideology—for redefining social progress, hijacking institutions such as universities, media, and big‑tech platforms, and marginalizing the majority working‑class electorate. He critiques the collusion between big‑tech firms and the security state, the monopolistic practices of Google, Apple, and Facebook, and the inadequacy of current regulatory approaches like Section 230. Sacks calls for a multifaceted response: new institutions, reform of existing ones, democratic accountability, and targeted antitrust action, while noting the potential role of figures like Elon Musk and the need for a populist, working‑class‑oriented Republican party. The conversation also touches on his changing views on foreign policy, the futility of the “end of history” narrative, and the cultural war over universities and ESG. In the later segment, Sacks analyzes the GOP’s internal dynamics, describing “beer‑track” candidates (working‑class‑oriented) versus “wine‑track” candidates (elite‑oriented) and arguing that the party must marshal populist energy without the alienating style of Trump. He contends that a candidate who can build a broad majority coalition and hold elites accountable is essential for effective governance, emphasizing that elites will always exist but must be answerable to the electorate.
Chapters
Well, who defines social progress? That's up to democratic majorities to define. And so what that elitist view is that you've just described is the rationalization for a small number of elites who have institutional power to suppress the will of the majority and interfere in elections. And then of course, those very same people will puff out their chests and say, we're the protectors and defenders of democracy. No, if you truly believed in democracy, you would allow The people to have a voice and then let the chips fall where they may in terms of how they vote. The reason why I've become more populist is because it aligns with civil liberties. There's a natural alliance there between the people and people who want to protect civil liberties versus the elites who want to restrict those liberties so they can enforce more control.
I'm Erik Torenberg, and this is Upstream with Erik Torenberg. David Sacks is known as an operator and investor in multiple unicorns, and most recently as a media mogul with All-In. In this episode, we trace David's intellectual and political history from his days fighting student activism at Stanford to now. We cover the political changes the last 30 years of Silicon Valley How the real distinction today is between the college-educated and the not, and how even though 2/3 of the country didn't go to college, their views are not represented in our institutions today.
David, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining.
Yeah, good to be here.
Awesome. Let's start with PayPal. I feel like what's happened at PayPal has been a metaphor for what's happened in the Valley at large. It was started by free speech proponents like Thiel and Elon and yourself. some of the biggest free speech activists in the world today, in the tech world. And it's become run by people who, let's say, want to restrict free speech in the name of preventing harm, or that's what they would say. Take us back to 20-plus years ago when you were running PayPal. Could you have foreseen or predicted that as the tech industry matured, it would become more censorious or censorship would become more popular?
No, I mean, if you look at polling from, you know, say a decade ago, both parties, Democrats and Republicans, had a consensus in favor of free speech. And certainly if you go back 20 years to the founding of the web and all those original Web 1.0 companies, there was a real sense that all these companies were breaking down boundaries and borders and were democratizing access. to financial services, payment systems, and then eventually speech. And it seemed to be pretty much consensus in Silicon Valley this was a good thing. You know, even remember, it was only, what, roughly a decade or a dozen years ago where the then CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, said that we're the free speech wing of the free speech party.
Yes.
So it was pretty much conventional wisdom That opening up the world, connecting people, giving them access was a good thing. And you're right that in the last several years, it's really changed. And now the emphasis has been on restricting access, censorship, deplatforming, unpersoning. And, you know, I think what PayPal's doing is particularly nefarious because it's bad enough to take away someone's free speech rights, but What they're doing is trying to starve out the political opposition. They're trying to deny them the ability to transact, to accept payments, to pay people, to run a business, and they're encouraging other tech companies to follow suit. I mean, that's definitely part of the agenda here is they're kind of leading the vanguard on this. And the, so the, the, the collective effect of, of these policies, if they were implemented widely, would be, again, not just to restrict the free speech rights of Americans, but to restrict their ability to make a living. And I think that's even worse.
So this is— I mean, this was your baby. This was Elon's baby. This was Till's baby. Have you guys tried to communicate to management, or is it so far removed? Like, you know, how do you make sense of that?
It's pretty far removed at this point. You know, I don't think they're going to reverse course because one of us lobs on a phone call. I think the only thing they respond to really is public pressure. And so us saying what we think publicly is probably as much as we can do.
Yeah.
But look, if you look at the bios of the— it's interesting. If you go to the PayPal management page and you look at the bios of the leadership, and in particular the CEO, what you'll see is about one paragraph on professional credentials and then like 5 paragraphs on basically left-wing activism. The CEO's received every woke award you can get. The company is working with many of those same groups who've given him awards. These are the groups who are now defining the blacklist in cooperation with PayPal. It's groups like the ADL and SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, which historically did good work. I mean, to be sure, The original mission of these organizations was quite noble, which is to stand up to antisemitism or discrimination. The problem is that in recent years, these organizations have been kind of hijacked by a more conventional left-wing agenda, and they've gone very far afield of, of the mission they were originally created to support. And now they're kind of just standard left-wing groups. And so they're free to advocate on behalf of the cause they want, but they shouldn't be trusted to create blacklists of who should be allowed on the platform because they're simply highly partisan groups.
Right.
They just can't be trusted to make an honest assessment of anybody from the other side of the political spectrum. And yet, and yet, this is who PayPal is deferring to. And you have to wonder, is this part of, of this woke capitalism game where, you know, you, the executive, basically work with these groups. You basically give them the power to censor their political enemies. In exchange, they give you awards, and that advances your career up the woke corporate totem pole. And yeah, it's kind of a scary quid pro quo, but this appears to be the system that we're living in.
It's ironic in so many ways, the sort of the woke capital game that you described, because, you know, a decade ago plus, you know, A lot of tech, there was a libertarian streak, and they were worried that governments would be the one to kind of enforce a certain political monoculture. And it turns out that corporations just kind of did it on their own.
They did it on their own, but also, as we're learning, in collusion with government. So more and more is coming out about this, but the head of trust and safety, the euphemistically named censorship and thought police at Twitter, Yoel Roth, had all these recurring meetings with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and we're still finding out more about what that entailed. But it does appear that there's extensive cooperation between the various branches and agencies of the security state and these big tech companies. And so, you know, all of these, you know, all of these liberal apologists for big tech who were saying that, well, these are private companies, they should be able to do whatever they want. the most disingenuous argument ever because these very same people are supporting a bunch of bills running through Congress right now that are— that would regulate these companies in other ways.
Yeah.
But anyway, that's, that's the argument is they're private companies, they should be able to do whatever they want. But, but here's the thing is they're not acting alone. They're acting in concert with government officials. And actually, we heard this. Remember when Jen Psaki was the White House press secretary, she let the cat out of the bag saying that they were working with social networks to identify posts to be taken down. So I think more and more is going to come out about this. But yeah, it's a really scary alliance now between our largest tech companies and politicians, the political establishment, and then the— call it the permanent Washington establishment, the The security state.
Yeah.
And I mean, this is, this is approaching, you know, what is it? Elon called it like dark mirror territory or whatever.
Black mirror territory.
Black mirror territory. Yeah. I mean, this is— we're getting to the point now where it's looking more and more like the destination here is a Big Brother social credit-like system.
Yeah.
Well, they're, they're just trying to hold you accountable, whereas you do the same thing. You're trying to You're putting them in harm's way. Yeah.
Well, they live, they live in, they live in such a bubble where everybody agrees with them and they have so much entitlement. And it's such a closed loop that any— if you subject them to any criticism or public debate whatsoever, that's deemed to be harassment and again, is jeopardizing their safety. But of course, that same argument doesn't apply when they engage in criticism of the other side. I mean, look, it's not harassment. It's public debate. And these are people who are seeking to control the public debate, so they can't be immune from criticism.
Yeah. So you've been in the Valley, or you've been operating in tech the last 25-plus years. Let's trace the evolution a bit. for, you know, some of these topics? Like, when did the collusion start to, start to begin? Um, or when did kind of this monoculture, political monoculture, intellectual monoculture really start to, to take shape? Like, is it just in the last, you know, um, 5 years or, or 6 years? Or, or did there start to be cracks where, when even you were running Yammer, or so to speak, that you start to see, you saw this, uh, kind of monoculture?
Well, I think Silicon Valley has always been very liberal, and I I think that if you were to measure it by political party affiliation, it was 90-plus percent Democrat, so even back then. So that part of it hasn't changed. But I think that what changed is I think you probably have to trace it to the election of Trump in 2016, where all of a sudden all these liberal elites who thought that connecting people via social networks was a good thing. We're opening up the world. You saw this again during the Arab Spring that we're bringing about all this positive social change. We're allowing populist social movements to take rise. Now, all of a sudden, the narrative completely flipped where it's like, oh my God, what have we done? Social networking helped elect Trump. This was a little bit too much populism for them. Now, I believe that I think that story is largely nonsense. I think this idea that Facebook in particular or social networking more generally was the reason Trump got elected, I think is ridiculous. I think it's a scapegoating explanation.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of other explanations that you could point to, starting with the fact that Hillary Clinton just ran a really terrible campaign. But in any event, Silicon Valley, I'd say social networking in particular became the scapegoat for Trump's election. And I think that after that, you started to see a flip where, um, certainly the people running big tech start to question themselves. Um, the media similarly, which had been the champions of the First Amendment, now sort of bought into this censorship agenda and, uh, and abandoned the principles on which the entire media industry is based. Um, and so you had this big, um, flip, I think, and it all traces back to kind of, you know, Trump as the big disruptor.
I think it was certainly an accelerant, but I noticed things happening even before then. I was at Product Hunt, you know, in 2013 to 2015, and I noticed that there was this turn, at least between tech and media, and media started to become just much more hostile to tech. In the beginning, it was, you know, all these silly apps, and then it was, oh, these platforms are getting too big. I think Trump was an accelerant, but there seemed to be something in the water beforehand where either tech was getting too big for its britches, or maybe it was threatening media in the case of the media-tech debate, but just that these tools that people had seen as beneficiaries of things like the Arab Spring start to really be questioned.
Yeah. Well, I think part of what was happening during all of this time was that the big tech companies were getting bigger and bigger, and they're getting more valuable, and they were dominating the economy, and people began to realize how powerful they were and how wealthy they were. And there are, I think, very legitimate questions about the power of some of these monopolies and how they should be reined in. I think for the good of the startup ecosystem, I don't think we're going to have a healthy startup ecosystem if Google and Apple are allowed to do whatever they want. I mean, they basically have the most powerful tech monopoly ever, which is the mobile operating system duopoly. So I think there are real legitimate questions about that. But what we've seen over the last half-dozen years is that the party in power is not interested so much in limiting the power of these companies, but in co-opting it. They want to work with these companies to use that power to censor their political opponents and control the narrative and the political debate. That's what's scary is there's this cooperation that's developed. And you see it in the Senate hearings, you know, the Judiciary Committee, on the one hand, you'll hear the senators directly tell the leaders of these companies that we want you to take down more content. You know, even though those senators could not pass a bill to take down that content that would directly violate the First Amendment, they are telling these CEOs, we want you to take down more content. And then in virtually the next breath, they're saying that you guys have these monopolies that we need to take a look at. You know, we need to pass some legislation to rein you guys in. So they're hanging the sword of Damocles over their heads. and then saying, well, we want you to do this, this, and this. And it's been very effective. I think that it has, you know, it's created pressure from the top down for these companies to engage in, or to put their thumb on the scale of democracy and censor opponents of the people in power. And then on the other hand, you also have the problem of bottom-up pressure, which is coming from the activist employee base. And so I think the leaders of these companies have found themselves really in this, you know, in this sort of pressure cooker of, again, pressure coming from the top, but also pressure coming from the employees. And they haven't really been particularly courageous in standing up to it. They've pretty much just given in continuously, which is why what Elon's doing has been so noteworthy and striking.
Oh, yeah. No, we're going to get to Elon. Did you experience any of this activism when you were a COO or operating, or have you only experienced it as a VC with your companies?
Not really. I mean, back when we were doing PayPal, it was too early. The company had a strong libertarian culture. When I was doing Yammer, even though, which was 2008 to 2012, and then I was at Microsoft for a couple of years after that, this was a tool to allow the employees to communicate very freely in a company. It was basically like Slack 0.5 or something. And we didn't really have these problems of that Slack has of channels being hijacked to become a way for activist employees to, you know, kind of unionize and, and create, create problems for the company. So it was, it was, you know, it just wasn't happening yet. It feels like this started to happen Maybe a few years later. Yeah.
Maybe it was a cascading effect where they saw one set of activists be successful and then the rest just followed. If companies like Google let it happen, who are—
When was the Matthew Yglesias piece, The Great Awakening, written? That was the naming of the phenomenon that was happening.
I don't know if it was written in 2014 or if he wrote it about what was happening in 2014, but it was talking about this phenomenon where there was this surge of activism happening on college campuses, people, and the rest of the country saying, wow, this is really crazy. And then people on the left were saying, hey, it's just a couple of campuses, a few campuses. And it turns out that that activity spilled out to the rest of the corporate world. And what's fascinating is that you experienced this at Stanford in the '90s. I remember seeing a talk that Peter Thiel gave where he was talking about sort of the rise of this like anti-West rhetoric and stuff happening from professors, not only students, but professors. And it feels like it was prophetic, or it feels like it could have been today, but you guys saw this 30 years ago. So like, talk a bit about kind of like having that vantage point.
Yeah. Well, okay. So let's back up. So I think you're right. The interesting thing about this woke phenomenon is that it spans across corporate America. You have so-called woke capitalism. You've got ESG with boards of directors and all these global nonprofits, the NGOs. You've got the think tank world. You've got the media. You've got Hollywood. It's a phenomenon that spans across virtually every major institution in our society. And so the question is, how does something like that happen? And I think it can only happen as a result of a shift in attitudes of an entire class of people, which in this case is the professional class, the class of people who have college degrees. And the polling data really bears this out. If you look at polling data on virtually any sociocultural issue, the biggest divide in the country, it's not between race or gender. It's actually on the single variable of whether you have a college degree or not. So the political scientist who's done a lot of work on this is Roy Tusharay. He's written many blogs about it, but basically there's a 30-point gap roughly in voting patterns and political party affiliation based on whether you are professional class or working class. Professional class meaning you have at least one college degree, and working class means that you're high school educated but not a college degree. This is the single biggest divide in the electorate is that the attitudes and beliefs of people who have college degrees is just very different than those of the working class of the country. So how do you explain that? I mean, I think it's downstream of the fact that the universities got taken over a couple of generations ago by the far left. And so the, you know, the quid pro quo of our civilization is that if you want the economic and social advancement that a college degree grants you, you have to go to one of these schools and you submit to voluntary reeducation for 4 years. And you're basically indoctrinated in this ideology. I mean, it's the only way to explain why, you know, the people graduating the institutions come out with these far-left views, which are just very different than the rest of the country. So I tend to think that's, that's what's happening. And, you know, Andrew Sullivan has this line, we all live on campus now.
Yeah.
We all live on campus because the campuses indoctrinated 2 generations of Americans, and now they have these, these views. Now, it's not like every single person who goes to college believes in it. I tend to think that there's 3 groups. There's the true believers who are maybe 10%, and then like maybe 1% rebel against it and they become kind of either conservative journalists or founders, which is why I can stay in business with the views that I have. And then, you know, like roughly 89%, 90% become— are sort of the herd. They tend to go populate the ranks of the professional elite. They go get the well-paying corporate jobs. It's the McKinsey consultants and the bankers at Goldman Sachs and so on. And then the true believers go do the low-paying professional jobs. It's the think tanks and the foundation world and the HR police at corporations, the enforcers of the regime. And they staff the ranks of activist groups in the Democratic Party and things like that. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of how this works, and it's produced this broad phenomenon of all of our institutions going woke at the same time because they all— all of our college graduates have kind of, again, breathed in this ideology and they either support it or know not to oppose it. Yeah. I mean, and I do, just to finish the thought, I do think that this explains a huge amount of the sense of conflict and division in our society because just to go back to professional class versus working class, 2/3 of the country is working class. Only 1/3 of the country's professional class. So the professional class holds beliefs and values that are at odds with the working class, and they hold an ideology that is, It's very different to, and it's hostile to the beliefs of the working class in many cases. So you have a country, you have a democracy in which most of the people don't agree with the agenda that's being foisted on them by their institutions. But the people running these institutions, again, they have a very different ideology. So I tend to think this is the fundamental disconnect. Now, the people running these institutions, are always claiming that what they're doing is in the interest of democracy. But democracy is you let the majority of the population exercise its will and get its way. And that's not what's happening here. It's this Orwellian doublespeak where in the name of democracy, you're doing things like censoring one side of the debate, probably the side of the debate that has more— has the numbers, has more support. for most of the people. Certainly what you've seen is that, you know, in the most recent election, we're very close to being— it's a 50-50 country, but it's 50-50 with our big tech companies engaged in shadow banning and broad-scale censorship and putting their thumb on the scale. And you have to wonder if we had a completely fair and level playing field, if big tech wasn't engaging in censorship on behalf of the the sort of the elite, um, and the media wasn't constantly covering for the elite of which they're a part, you'd have to think that maybe these elections would go a little differently.
Yep.
Bology is a line that when people talk about, you know, fighting for democracy or fighting for journalism, what they really mean is fighting for Democrats and fighting for journalists. Like, it's a class-based thing rather than kind of a, you know, idea. Um, right.
Well, if you're, if you're, if you're in power You obviously want to perpetuate that power and you want to insulate yourself from accountability. And so like every ruling elite that's ever been in power, you're willing to use tactics of censorship. That's why— that's always the reason for censorship, is that the people with the power want to protect that power and they want to make themselves immune from criticism. And part of the way they do that is with this, like, again, Orwellian relabeling of terms where if you criticize them, that's harassment. They're allowed to criticize and attack you and deplatform you and take away your speech rights and starve you out. But that's just, you know, appropriate punishment for people who won't behave. But, but your criticism of them is harassment, right? And then that doesn't even include the banning. And now, as we've learned, the shadow banning.
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Well, what's ironic is that if the far left did take over academia, you'd expect that their views, that they would fight for the working class, or that they would be more sympathetic to the working class. And alternatively, I guess one irony is that, you know, you yourself are, you know, a Stanford graduate, a very successful, you know, entrepreneur, and yet you've gravitated or found yourself with more working-class views today on issues like trade, on issues like foreign policy, maybe even, you know, big tech regulation. So my question to you is like, have your views— how have your views evolved as well? Because when, you know, these are more working-class views today, But in the '90s, you know, like, were you— there were maybe left-wing views. Were you more on the left wing back in the '90s, or were you more of a kind of libertarian in the '90s, but then saw how the world changed and then changed your views, you know, as the facts changed, so to speak?
Well, some of it's been a change in my views, and some of it's just been the world changing around me and relabeling what used to be liberal views as some sort of, you know, conservative or far-right views. I mean, being a free speech advocate was a liberal position in the 1970s. I feel like I haven't— I've always believed in that. I haven't changed on that. But now somehow that's like a right-wing position. You know, for a long time now, I've been in favor of the liberal position on a number of what I call the old social issues, you know, like I don't know, gay marriage or cannabis legalization, or, you know, even on abortion. You know, I, I don't think that like abolition is going to fly in this country. I think we have to find more, more of a compromise. Then it's going to end up looking, I think, a lot like Europe. So, you know, on the old social issues, I, you know, I've always been pretty liberal. So I don't think I've changed that much, but I think that what's happened is that the elite in our country has kind of bought into these very illiberal ideas in terms of, you know, again, in terms of censorship and restrictions. And yeah, I just think it's deeply illiberal. And I also think that this collusion between, you know, it's not just on censorship, it's also the, They fully embrace the power of monopolies and fully embrace the collusion between big tech and our security state. So liberals who used to be quite skeptical of the power of the state or quite skeptical of the power of monopolies have now fully bought that idea, provided they can use that power and align it with their agenda. And I think that's, that's pretty scary.
Let's do foreign policy. Have you always been kind of a realist there? Or have you, like, in the '90s, were you against the Iraq War in early 2000s? Or like, how have your thoughts informed?
No, I mean, so, so this is one of those issues where I've just evolved by like watching what's been going on. I mean, like everybody else, when we got involved in the Iraq War, I supported it because I thought they were telling us the truth. I mean, they told us that— the Bush administration did— that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda. And they had WMD programs. And in fact, we knew where those programs were. That's literally what the administration told us. It was all lies. They lied us into that war. The war did nothing to improve American security. We destabilized the Middle East. We turned Iraq into an Iranian proxy state. We created a huge— again, destabilization, which created a huge— refugee problem that spilled over into Syria, which is another intervention that we, we bungled. We got involved in Afghanistan. I think the original motivation for going into Afghanistan was just because they actually did support al-Qaeda, which attacked us on 9/11. But then we stayed there in an open-ended occupation for 20 years, and the entire time we were told that we were winning. And the country was being transformed into a democracy, and everything turned out to be just a lie. And then of course, I could get to just the actual numbers around this. It cost us— all these foreign interventions in the Middle East cost us something like $8 trillion, and the number of deaths is just staggering. So almost a million direct deaths from all the wars that We launched, and I've seen excess mortality numbers as high as 5 million. So we unleashed staggering death and destruction. And so I don't know how you live through that over the past 20 years and not rethink American foreign policy, not recognize that American foreign policy has been overly activist and overly interventionist and has totally blown up and backfired on us. and blown up in our faces. The sad thing is the same people who got us involved in that foreign policy, they're still there. I mean, it's the foreign policy establishment, the blob. There's been very little accountability for all those people. In fact, most of them have moved to the Democratic Party. They're very comfortable with the idea of state power. But there was a small circle of— in in foreign policy who accurately predicted what would happen, and that's basically the realist camp. Of course, they're very out of favor with elites in Washington because they wanted to restrain American involvement, and that's not a popular message for anyone in Washington to hear.
Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, I guess I've become more realist over time, by virtue of just seeing the results of our policies.
In the same way that response to COVID became so politicized that once Trump expressed skepticism, then the other side just kind of ramped up the opposite take, is it because Trump and Putin were rumored to be— were friendly that the left became so anti-Russia that they would be pro-war, pro-involvement in a way that they never would've in the past? Is there another scenario where Trump accidentally tweeted or said something like, we should back out, or we should be isolationists, or sorry, we should get involved, and then everyone else would just say, no, we shouldn't? Is there some real logic or evolution in this sort of response to engagement in Ukraine, or is it really just like the other side thinks this, and thus it's put aside.
Well, I think one of the big things that happened during the Trump administration is you had the whole Russia collusion hoax where they basically invented— it wasn't even one hoax, it was like a series of hoaxes. You had the Alfa Bank hoax, you had the whole Mueller investigation, and it just went on and on for years. And basically what happened is that the left scapegoated not just social networking, but also Vladimir Putin for Trump's election. Presumably they were working together somehow, and this is what caused Trump's election. And then that led to the whole Russia collusion hoax. By the way, the whole thing started with the Steele dossier, which again, we know was a piece of phony opposition research that was commissioned by the Clinton campaign's law firm Perkins Coie paying a British spy, and it's kind of metastasized from there. The result of all of that has been this intense Russophobia that's developed in the US. Now, I mean, Putin was never a good guy. I mean, he's a thug. He has made Russia more authoritarian. But I think that what happened over the last several years is that Is that we came to view him as like this personification of evil. And, um, and I think that that has contributed to the way we perceive this, uh, Ukraine war for sure.
Yeah. And, and, and to be fair, on the right, there has been kind of, um, at least some factions of kind of like, uh, glamorizing, you know, uh, some elements of Russian culture or sympathizing at least. Like, for example, when this, um, you know, uh, criminal bout that got, um, released One of the first things he did, um, is he went on TV and he talked about how in America they have 72 genders. And, you know, if like, uh, he was kind of criticizing America's social issues, and some people on the right might, might sympathize with that.
So I think that's overblown. I mean, you know, I follow a lot of people on the right, and I've heard nobody, uh, really praising Vladimir Putin or holding him up as the kind of leader we want to emulate. Um, I feel like that's something that the, the left accuses the right of doing, which is— I mean, look, uh, we can get into my position on the Ukraine war, but I'm routinely accused of being pro-Putin.
Yeah.
Because my— because I don't want us to get in World War III over Ukraine. I want us to pursue America's vital interests. I don't— I'm not, uh, pro-Russian. I mean, there's nothing about the Russian regime that I want to emulate. This is precisely why I'm against censorship, and I'm concerned about the growing relationship between the security state and big tech, because I want to protect our civil liberties and freedoms. So there's nothing that, that I like about Putin's regime. So I, you know, I tend to think this idea that the right somehow has sympathy for him is just overblown. I think the point is just that, you know, we believe that— and this is actually even on the right, it's a pretty small group— that we should— that American foreign policy should be guided by what's in America's best interests. And that's the discussion we need to have. And, you know, the— and then that's just not the conversation we have on Ukraine.
Yeah. The—
I want to get to big tech because you've talked about Ukraine a lot on other shows. On big tech, one challenge I have— so you've been kind of vocal that there should be some form of regulation because these companies have gotten too powerful. You mentioned this, you know, duopoly or oligopoly. of the biggest companies. At the same time, you know, there's, you know, you said this in an old interview, there's no lobbyist for the social media company that doesn't exist yet, right? And there's always a risk with regulations that, you know, they entrench the existing, you know, power structure.
Right.
Or you don't get them quite right. And, you know, we saw with this sort of Microsoft that the answer maybe wasn't as much regulation as much as it was just new company innovation. So why couldn't that happen here? Or like, why are you still a fan of regulation?
Well, because I just— I think that these monopolies are incredibly powerful. And I do think that as the startup ecosystem matures or as the technology landscape matures, they will start to dominate. And as their business gets more mature, they will start to dominate all of the business opportunities that are downstream of their current monopoly. For example, just take Google Search for a minute. I mean, that business is a pretty mature business. If you look at the percentage of Google searches that now lead you offsite to a non-Google property, it's now less than 50%. And the reason is because what they do is they keep advancing their own properties in the Google Search. They rank them higher and they keep giving you reasons never to leave Google. And this is what Yelp's been complaining about for a long time. I think we're starting to see with Apple—
Yeah.
They said they would never get into the advertising business and compete with their apps. They're now starting to do that. They're always going to favor their own applications in their app store and on their operating system monopoly if they can. The problem with that is that there's no reason for VCs to keep funding innovation on these platforms if the platform owner eventually will just usurp that value for itself. I mean, if you prove out the idea, have it be successful, and then the operating system will just say, oh yeah, that looks good. We'll just copy it, cut off your distribution of, and push the fire hose to our own app. I mean, stuff like that. Like you just can't have a healthy tech ecosystem.
Right.
If that's allowed. Now, I actually think that you mentioned Microsoft. I actually think that the government intervention there did work. You know, what could have happened, we could be, we could have had an alternative future where Microsoft moves seamlessly from dominating the desktop operating system to then dominating the browser. And then from there, they could have realized pretty short— in pretty short order that having great search was kind of the key feature of the browser, then dominated search, and it kind of gone on from there. And you could have imagined a world in which Microsoft extended its desktop monopoly into controlling a vast part of the web, and the web would've been much less free. The thing that stopped them from doing that is the government's interference with Microsoft, the Netscape lawsuit and so on. It really crippled the company. I mean, I'm not saying that it was a model of effective regulation. I just think that it hamstrung the company so badly, and it bogged them down so much that it allowed other companies to innovate and then create their businesses. So I'm not saying, again, that it's like never-ending litigation is the role model here, but I do think that it's worth taking steps to restrain these monopolies because they will eventually end.
Yeah.
They will eventually become gatekeepers who favor themselves at the expense of innovative startups. And then Silicon Valley will look a lot more like Hollywood or something like that, where yes, there's some creativity and entrepreneurship, but it's very constrained and the studios control everything. The creators have to go hand in hand to the studios for distribution, and the studios capture the bulk of the value. I don't think we want the technology world to look like the entertainment world.
So what practice— like, if Chris Dixon were here, he would talk about, oh, we just need to advance, you know, Web3 and that kind of thing. But what regulations would you like? Would you have liked acquisitions blocked, you know, like Facebook and Instagram or WhatsApp? Or would you like— like, should Apple, you know, take down its 30% rate to something like— what more practically would you like to see?
I don't think the ban on acquisitions is necessarily the way to go because the question is what creates a healthy startup ecosystem. And There are so few good outcomes in the startup world that if you take away M&A— well, now, I mean, we used to have— there's IPOs, that window's been frozen. There are SPACs, that's gone away. There's M&A, which now, because the regime in Washington is really against M&A, it's very difficult. So you're foreclosing the good opportunity, the exit opportunities. Certainly, there's so many failed startups. We know that the vast majority fail, that you do need some good outcomes to justify the risk that you're taking on the front end. And so this is one of the problems is I think that if you are going to limit M&A, you want to do it in a very targeted way because I think right now acquirers aren't really clear on what's being stopped. Like, for example, that Facebook acquisition of a VR app that was blocked, or I mean, wasn't Amazon blocked, or maybe they're going to get blocked for acquiring the Roomba or something like that. So these acquisitions that don't seem problematic from an antitrust standpoint, because you're dealing with markets that are so nascent, you can't really claim that somebody has dominant market share in a market that you're not even sure exists yet. That's not where we should be interfering. Certainly, I could imagine acquisitions in mature, well-defined markets where it would just be so accretive to the market share of the dominant player that you'd want to stop it. But I don't think we should be interfering in, again, in nascent markets that you're not even sure will exist in the future. Let companies build the capabilities they need to even test whether there's something there. For example, VR. Facebook's being blocked from acquiring this VR company while on the other hand, Wall Street's questioning Facebook saying, is this even a thing? What should they be doing instead? Yeah, exactly. So what should the government be doing instead?
Yeah. Okay. So we're not going to block acquisitions.
Yeah. I think the— well, so not all monopolies are created equal. I think that the most dominant monopolies are the operating system monopolies. It's Google and Facebook and the mobile app stores. I think that there, the big picture should be they should not be able to impose rules on startups or apps that they themselves are not subject to. They cannot preference their own apps over third-party apps. I mean, that's the big picture. And I think there's probably a lot of ways of enforcing that. You know, there's sideloading and so forth. But I think that's the big picture. It's just not letting them do things that they themselves— that they exempt themselves from. They have to play by the same rules as everybody else.
And you probably like something around censorship too.
Well, the problem on censorship is that I don't think you can get a bipartisan majority to agree. You're not going to get 60 votes. I don't think you get 60 votes. We know that Section 230 is a problem because what's happening is that the tech companies are having their cake and eating it too, right? Where the whole idea of Section 230 is we're going to treat you as not as a publisher, but as a distributor. So you're not going to be liable for things the way a publisher would. But then at the same time, as we've discovered at Twitter, these companies have been exercising editorial control over what gets published on their platforms. That fundamentally doesn't make sense. That's irreconcilable. So that needs to be fixed. I mean, if you're going to act as an editor and publisher, you need to have publisher liability. Now, I think that it would be a mistake to, to get rid of 230 altogether. I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think it's performed a very important purpose. And if a social network is willing to act as a true distributor, then they should be able to keep that provision. So the problem there, I think that's the way it should get resolved. But the problem is that I don't know that Democrats, Republicans agree on that issue. They both agree that something should be done, but fundamentally, Democrats want more censorship. And Republicans want less. And I'm afraid that if the Republicans sign on to a Democrat bill, they're going to ultimately get hoodwinked and they're going to end up supporting something that promotes more censorship rather than less. So we'll see how that plays out. But I'm not, I'm not super optimistic about that yet. Maybe in 2024 there'll be a different majority and we might, might be able to get some Section 230 reform.
Yeah. I mean, let's zoom out for a quick thought experiment. Let's say you're talking to a Stanford student at the same time that you were at Stanford who was more on the left. But you both, you know, have seen what happened in the next 30 years. And he said something like, hey, you know, free speech was a great tool when it led to more social progress. But once we, you know, got more powerful and owned some of the cultural centers, now it turns out actually censorship is a great tool when it comes to social progress. And isn't the goal social progress? Like, look at the last— over the last 20 years, we've gotten so many other groups of people more involved, and we've made all this social progress. David, isn't that like the— are you missing the forest for the trees? Like, isn't that what it's all about? What would you say to that person?
Well, who defines social progress? That's up to democratic majorities to define. And so what that elitist view is that you've just described is the rationalization for a small number of elites who have institutional power to suppress the will of the majority and interfere in elections. And then of course, those very same people will puff out their chests and say, we're the protectors and defenders of democracy. No, if you truly believed in democracy, you would allow the people to have a voice and then let the chips fall where they may in terms of how they vote. The reason why I've become more populist is because it aligns with civil liberties.
Yeah.
The people, I think there's a natural alliance there between the people and people who want to protect civil liberties. Versus the elites who want to restrict those liberties so they can enforce more control. By the way, that's changed a little bit. I think in the '70s, civil libertarians would say, look to the courts or, you know, more elite opinion to protect speech from what might be popular majorities who want to restrict it. But anyway, it's flipped a little bit.
Yeah.
But the, you know, the person who I've heard made the— make the argument similar to what you've made, is Erdoğan in Turkey, who basically said, look, the thing that you guys, you, the West, America don't understand is that in the Middle East, democracy is just the bus that people take to get where they're going.
Yeah.
Once they get in power, once they have the reins, well, that's the end of the democracy, right? They've used it to get where they want to get to. That's kind of the argument you're making there, which is, oh, well, now that we have the power, we're going to define what social progress is. We're We don't need civil liberties anymore. We don't need free speech. Those are not people who really believed in free speech or democracy.
Well, what do you say to the more perhaps nuanced or subtle argument that this is kind of like the logical conclusion of liberalism? And, you know, I heard Peter Thiel once say something like, you know, the same way that, you know, communists say, you know, real communism has never been tried, it's almost like real liberalism has never been tried and we just need to go back to the way things were, you know, a couple decades ago. Do you think there's merit to the argument that, hey, this is just like the logical conclusion of, you know, kind of a confused movement that prioritizes both liberty and equality, and those things are at odds, and people like Bari Weiss who are, you know, doing great work, or Sam Harris, or etc., are just by trying to get back, they're just like a little bit confused that there is no going back?
Well, if so, If you go back to the '90s when the Fukuyama essay, The End of History, was very popular, and the idea was that we're reaching the end of history because there's nothing better than democratic capitalism. And so we're all going to converge on that. The whole world will, and our biggest problem is going to be boredom. That's what everyone thought, right? And there's a part of the argument that I think must be true, which is if we believe in democratic capitalism, then surely we believe that that must be an ideal end state for everyone in the world. I think the timeframe was way off. I think it turns out that cultures and civilizations are very stubborn things, and there's a lot of other cultures in the world which aren't embracing those things, and we can't force it on them. It's going to take time for it to evolve. But I think the other thing that was really wrong about that view of history was this boredom idea. See, I think that as we approached the end of history as Fukuyama defined it, our biggest problem was not boredom, it was hubris.
Yeah.
As exemplified by Fukuyama's thesis itself that, you know, that we're just— we're at the end of history. There's nothing new to learn. There'll be no other challenges. And in our hubris, in thinking we knew it all, we lost our tolerance because when you have all the answers, there's no reason to allow a debate or a free marketplace of ideas. And so it became acceptable to censor the part of the debate. And I mean, this is basically the woke theology, right? Is that we understand what virtue looks like, and if we can just enforce that result, you know, the only people who are against our agenda are— they're just bad people, and we just have to basically punish them and silence them and deplatform them, unperson them. So that's basically what we're living through is this— it's like this hubristic form of liberalism where we already know all the answers, there's nothing more to figure out, and we just need to enforce our will. And what is actually produced is not the kind of democratic capitalism that we thought we were getting at the end of history, but something that's much more repressive and nefarious. And it's not that it's not capitalist and it's not that it's not democracy, but it also doesn't feel like the free democratic capitalist society that we thought we were getting. It's sort of, you know, it's more of this like managerial capitalism, but, you know, kind of what Burnham predicted, where it's kind of ruled by experts and technocrats and mid-level managers. And they kind of control everything. And again, you have this collusion between the technology platforms and the media and the state, and what you're allowed to do and say is closely prescribed by, by all these folks. And so it's, it's a very weird form of democratic capitalism that again feels like it's much more oppressive than we thought it was going to be 30 years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of ironies. I want to talk about institutional reform. We briefly talked about, you know, how can you reform an institution? You can, you know, government can get involved. You can start, you know, new ones. I think for the last decade or so, you know, I mean, we've been talking about this kind of institutional capture by a non-democratic, i.e., not representing the majority view. And if you said, okay, how do you recapture those institutions? I think for the last decade, there's been this view that you can't. They're just too entrenched, whether it's— we talk about the foreign policy establishment or the deep state more broadly, or the school system, or even the media. These things are just too hard to recapture. Now, we're seeing it happen to some extent to media, and you're a part of it with what you're doing at All-In. But we have some people who go so far to say that you can't recapture them, Balaji was here, he would say, not only do you have to create new institutions, you have to create new countries, new governments, because they're just so far gone. But what we have in the last couple of months is we have Elon coming in and basically recapturing Twitter and kind of resetting it from the ground up in some ways. Now, I don't know how many— and he's the richest person on earth, and even he, plus, if you, him, Thiel said, we want to take over PayPal, we want to take— If maybe you could do one other, like, that's not probably a scalable solution, but has it made you kind of rethink what's possible when it comes to institutional reform?
Yeah, I think definitely. I mean, I think we need a multifaceted solution to this problem. Part of it is going to be creating new institutions and alternatives like we've seen in alternative media. Part of it though, I think has to be revitalizing and reforming existing institutions because some of them are just too important and too powerful just to completely concede. And then part of it as well is using democratic accountabilities. We're going to need to use state power to rein in some of these excesses. So for example, the power of these monopolies does need to be reined in. I don't think they can be allowed just to do whatever they want. You're starting to see this model where, you know, like with, with DeSantis in Florida, the way that He stood up to Disney, where conservatives, I think, are getting a little more comfortable with this idea of using elected officials to stand up to this sort of— to big corporations and not letting them run roughshod over the rights of ordinary citizens. And so I do think we're going to need to There needs to be some sort of democratic change if we're going to rein in these big tech companies, because I don't see a way ultimately to restore the free speech rights and the rights to make a living, like the PayPal problem, without some sort of government involvement. I mean, there's only one Elon and he doesn't have the means to buy every single tech company and reform it. Right.
About a decade ago, Charlie Rose was interviewing Larry Page, and he said, basically, or someone was interviewing and said, what's your approach to philanthropy? And Larry Page said, I would give all my money to Elon, actually. That would be better because what he could do with his companies is better than any money I could give to charity. And I say that to say that, you know, maybe there's a world where Larry Page has a, you know, heroic character arc and, you know, tries to retake over Google or something. But like, I wonder if Elon could inspire yet another set of billionaires who has ties to one of these existing companies and say, hey, let's just do what Twitter did.
One hopes so. I mean, and there's been others too. Remember when Brian Armstrong had that policy at Coinbase where he said, listen, we're going to leave our politics at the door when you come to work. We're only going to discuss politics if it's directly relevant to Coinbase. Otherwise, let's not engage in these divisive conversations, basically restoring the old etiquette of just not discussing politics at work. Of course, there was a total freakout. New York Times wrote a hit piece, but he stuck to his guns. He offered voluntary severance, kind of similar to what Elon's done if people didn't like the new policy. I think 5% took it. A year later, he says, the best thing we ever did. Everyone at the company is there, not because they're trying to institute some unrelated political agenda, but because they actually believe in the mission of the company. Yeah.
And I think Meta just released something similar to this. So I think it's becoming pretty normalized.
Right, exactly. So now Elon's showing what you can do. First of all, he's showing that you can run these companies with way fewer employees. I mean, I think he's now eliminated like 2/3 or 3/4 of the employees at Twitter. Site hasn't gone down yet. So, and by the way, this is one of the things I think that's deeply threatening to the laptop class is is Elon is showing that you can run these companies without having so many of these workers. I think they're deeply insecure about their economic value. He's demanding that they prove their economic value. So this era of these bloated tech companies being a jobs program for surplus elites, that may be coming to an end.
We saw the Apple thing come up a couple weeks ago. There's going to be pressures from employees at Apple or Google, et cetera, to censor. Do you think that in the next 2 years it's possible there will be a little bit of a tech civil war and Elon may, as his threat implied, try to go build a phone or something?
Well, Apple backed off that really quickly. I think they got brushed back from the plate. Tim Cook said that he was never contemplating kicking Twitter out of the App Store. That doesn't mean that there wasn't some, some apparatchik lower down in the App Store who was noodling over an enforcement action. And in fact, there was. I think there was somebody— remember, there was somebody, uh, I think the person running the App Store actually deleted their Twitter account or something. It seemed like a protest. So look, I think, you know, lower down in these organizations, as the Twitter Files show, there's always sort of more activist employees who are constantly looking for the next person or group or app to censor. This is what they live for. Do I believe Tim Cook was in on it? No. But do I believe that there were conversations happening? Yeah, I do. I think that by exposing that, I mean, I think they got brushed back from the plate. You saw it was very helpful that right away politicians like DeSantis were at a press conference saying that if Apple does this, it would be a blatant violation of their monopoly power and should be looked at. So I think these companies have to think a couple moves ahead now because if there's a chance that in 2024 you could have a President DeSantis or somebody like that, they have to start thinking about, well, wait, what's the next administration going to do? I can't just think about what the current administration wants. So it's a helpful check on monopoly abuse that you have politicians telegraphing that that would not be acceptable.
Yeah.
I mean, you mentioned Elon is proving that as a CEO, you don't have to get bullied internally by a small number of activist employees. You don't have to get bullied externally. Facebook or Uber, other companies which I admire, great companies, but they kind of either apologized or conceded the moral high ground, whereas Elon always takes the the moral high ground, so you could fight back externally. But then also, I mean, he's, you know, there was this, like, he's really taken sides. I'm not in sort of like partisan sides, but he's like, when he calls balls and strikes as he sees it, and, you know, some people are saying, hey, is that the most strategic move for him to be doing? Like, should he be a bit more reserved? So I'm curious at a high level, like, one, how you even describe the Elon character arc of like, has he always been a regime defier? Because in the last few months, it seemed to escalate significantly, right? Like he mentioned the Michael Brown thing, like that happened 6 years ago. You know, he's mentioning things that have happened over the past few years, but he's mentioning them all within the last like few weeks. So I'm curious, like what's escalated in that character arc? But then also, like, are there times where you look at a tweet or something and say, oh, is this the most strategic thing? you could be doing right now for your stated goals.
Well, I think you could quibble with this or that tweet, but I think the overall point of it is that Elon's going over the heads of the elite and he's appealing directly to the people. And that's basically what you have to do, I think, to win this battle. Like we said, the professional class is only a third of the country. The working class is two-thirds. They don't have the numbers, but they have all the institutional power. And a big part of that power is their control over the media and their ability to shape narratives. And, you know, if you're paying attention at all, you realize just how biased the media has become and how activist it's become. And they get caught in one lie and then they're on to the next one without even pausing to take a breath. The only way to fight that is to go over the heads of this elite and appeal directly to the people. And, and this is why they're so exercised over the fact that Elon is opening up Twitter and making it a true alternative to elite media like social media was supposed to be. You go back 15 years, the great hope was that, again, that social media would be democratizing and provide an alternative so the average person would have a voice and be able to compete with the elite media. And instead what happened is that the content moderation machinery got hijacked by elites who share the same opinions as, you know, as, as the elite media. And they allowed— and they basically turned, um, social networks like Twitter into an enforcement arm of traditional media.
Yeah.
And, um, and then that's the thing that's being overturned right now. And so this is why the elites are basically, um, you know, having a meltdown. And, uh, but the only— but, you know, I think that what Elon's doing is showing a path to fighting back. So again, you can quibble with this or that tweet, but he's showing that he's not going to put up with it. And then just look at all the insane things that the media has said. I mean, first they said that— they accused him of being a Thanos-like supervillain for snapping 50% of the employees out of existence.
Yeah.
Then they said that he was starving the employees because he was going to charge for lunch. Because no one was eating the food in the cafeteria. And then they predicted the imminent collapse of the company and the site would go down because he gave a generous voluntary severance package. He said that if you don't want to be here, if you don't want to return to the office and work hard, you can take 3 months severance. And so all these liberal elites were tearfully saying their goodbyes on Twitter, predicting the site was going to go down and say, I'll see you in the next life on whatever Mastodon. Mastodon or Megalodon or whatever. I mean, it was like this, you know, the usual theatrical histrionics. So it's been like one. And of course, this is— that was the week before Thanksgiving. And now, you know, we're now a month later and the site's running just fine. So he's proving that these people just aren't necessary for the running of a site, which again is striking fear into their hearts because The previous deal for these elites was that if you simply hold the right opinions, you associate with the right causes and the right people, then your continued advancement would occur. I mean, SBF himself explained this well. You just hold the right— this is the dumb game that we woke Westerners play.
Yes.
You basically you basically espouse the right shibboleths, and so everyone likes you. They thought that was the game, and that was the game. But what Elon is saying is the game has changed. Now you actually have to do something that creates economic value, and if you don't, I'm going to fire you.
Yeah.
So it's so deeply threatening to this elite laptop class in so many ways. It's ideological threatening, but it's also threatening to their to their, uh, economic interests.
Yeah, well, to that end, I mean, it seems like— is it fair to say that polarization is probably only going to get worse, or it's not going to get better? And so, like, do you think, you know, a few years out, we will just see kind of this, like, almost parallel economy, and that there'll be, like, you know, blue products and red products, you know, blue platforms, red platforms? You know, there'll be some common things, of course, but, like, do you think that that's the future?
Well, again, I think the division is caused by the fact that the majority of the country holds more populist working-class views, whereas the elite, the people running the institutions, hold these far-left cultural views. And that's just the fundamental tension. And the question is, who wins that battle? I think that in a democracy, ultimately, the numbers will carry the day, but the left-wing elite's going to be kicking and screaming the whole way. And this is the problem, is that the media becomes more hysterical and more biased and more activist as their grip on power is loosened. So it's going to be a rough ride, I think.
Yeah.
But now it would help a lot if the Republican Party could get their act together and give the people a choice that they want, because you can't get You can't get democratic progress in our society without having one of the parties embrace your agenda and actually present an alternative. And you saw that in these midterms, despite the fact that everything should have gone the Republicans' way, they didn't do very well. And I think it's just because they didn't do a very good job presenting an alternative.
And maybe there'll be an Elonification of the Republican Party at some point where there's just a really credible tech operator, or just operator, who tech can respect as a peer?
Well, I don't know if you're ever going to get tech to be on board, because if you look at the political contributions and the party affiliations of the workers at places like Twitter and so on, it's like 98%, 99% literally favors Democrats. But I think you do need a focused, disciplined operator to be the candidate of the Republican Party. Because if you give the media anything to work with, they'll, you know, they'll, they'll really go to town with it. And I mean, this is frankly the problem with Trump is he just gives his political enemies so much to work with. And anyway, I've been on the DeSantis train for a while on the pod. I think that's the type of disciplined, focused type candidate the Republican Party needs to align behind. And then they need to take on more of these working-class issues and causes and get And again, complete their transformation into more of a working-class party.
Yeah, let's go back to kind of recapturing the institutions, because it seems like there's a bit of a counter-elite forming both at the top and at the bottom. I mean, um, you know, Noah Smith recently tweeted that, you know, tech isn't as progressive as it used to be. And maybe it seems like over the last— before then, last 20 years, it was, you know, up into the right with— but like something around COVID, you know, something around maybe the bills come due and there's more more political diversity. Maybe let's just take that as given. Like, what is— what should the counter-elite do? Like, what, you know, um, like, I'm surprised that I haven't seen like a really credible like university competitor, um, come out that, that's like more moderate. You know, the Thiel Fellowship obviously is a great kind of innovation, but it's not really like a replacement because it's small scale to like a Stanford or a, um, you know, Harvard. And maybe those institutions are hard to recapture, but If you mentioned how the universities have just continued to indoctrinate like our most talented kids, why hasn't that been like a place of emphasis for the counter-elite, people like yourself, like Elon, et cetera?
Well, so Joe Lonsdale's actually done something, right? He's creating the University of Austin, and that's a credible effort to create a major new university that can compete. I think there's this bigger question of like, do universities still make sense? You know, it's a lot of money. It's very expensive. And you get all these graduates, they graduate from these institutions with mountains of debt that many of them can never repay. It's not even dischargeable in bankruptcy. That makes no sense. So no wonder they're not really enthusiastic about capitalism when they can never have a reasonable shot of accumulating capital. So I think maybe that whole model is broken and needs to be rethought.
Yeah.
The— but in any event, I think, you know, what should tech leaders do? I think that this upcoming recession that we're in provides an opportunity for them to do maybe some version of what Elon is doing, which is all these companies are now realizing that they're bloated. They have— they hired way too many people. They need to become more efficient. They need to do headcount reductions. I think I don't think it's ideological. I think it's just basically saying, listen, we need to really think about who at this company is creating economic value for us. It's not a political litmus test at all. It's just like, let's have people go back to the office.
Yeah.
I think this work from home thing was ridiculously unproductive. I mean, maybe not the whole company is in one headquarters location anymore, but I think you at least try to congregate around hubs.
Yeah.
So I think you got— you get people going back to the office at least 4 days a week. You do a top-to-bottom look at, again, who in your organization is really providing value. And the whole idea of having, you know, activist employees who are basically trying to turn the company into a— who are trying to further their political agenda at the company, I mean, that is extremely unproductive. And I think CEOs are Yeah, it's over. Yeah, that's over. And I think this whole idea of this super entitled mentality where it's almost like the company exists to serve the employees, I think that whole attitude's going to come to an end over the next year.
It was a 0% interest rate economy perhaps. But the hypothetical thought experiment, let's say that even at a higher level—
But I do think, just to finish that thought, I do think that if CEOs just get focused, there will be less of this political activism coming out of these companies for the simple reason that imagine writing a petition, signing a petition as the employees of Apple were constantly doing last year. Remember when they were instructed to go back to the office? They started to petition drive. It's like, who do you think you are? I mean, the company is going through a major headcount reduction and you're saying you don't want to work, you don't want to go back to the office. Instead, You want the company to take stances on a bunch of unrelated issues. That just feels to me like, again, something that should be in the past, and I think probably will be.
Totally. To take it a little bit further, let's say there was magically this $20 billion pool, or maybe it's $50 billion, some amount of a lot of money, but that is somewhat imaginable, and it was meant to cause institutional change based on the direction of diversifying the institutions such that they represent the people. Let's just say something like that. Where do you think would be the biggest bang for the buck? Is it taking over private equity, like what Elon is doing? Do you think it's trying to do that in politics in the same way that the left seems to effectively do it? Media, it's kind of happening on its own, perhaps. But like, what do you think are basically like the best bang for your buck levers of change?
I think that the program should be focused on accountability because what's basically happened is that we have this professional managerial class who are the mid-level managers. They're the hired guns who run these companies or run divisions of these companies or run these institutions. And I think what's— and then what's basically happened is that there's a principal-agent problem, right? The principals are the shareholders of these companies, or the principals are the voters, and the agents are the people who work for them. It's these— this sort of this managerial elite. And the managerial elite has tried to insulate themselves from accountability. They basically don't want to be held accountable or fireable for their mistakes. And so For example, on COVID, you know, you had this article in The Atlantic saying we need a COVID amnesty program. So basically you have all these elites, these, you know, health bureaucrats who say that we're the experts, we're the only ones who are allowed to have an opinion on COVID. And by the way, big tech's gonna enforce that. But yet when they get everything so horribly wrong, there's no accountability. No one gets fired.
Yeah.
They just kind of move on to the next thing. So I think there needs to be a restoration of accountability, democratic accountability in the political sphere. and economic accountability in the business. And I think if we do that, I don't think you're going to solve this with some sort of class war. A mature capitalist economy does need a managerial class. There's no way around that. It's not like we're going to get rid of the managerial class. What needs to happen though is that The managerial class's ability to usurp power away from the real underlying constituents, whether it's the shareholders or the people, that needs to be reined in.
Right.
So that's the larger program that we need is a program of accountability, both politically and economically.
Yeah.
Is that accountability coming in the form of lawsuits or Regulatory pressure? Or like, where would that money— how did that money help accountability?
I think it's going to have to be through some combination of— I mean, it's going to have to be— there's going to be a big legislative component to this. So I mean, none of this goes anywhere unless the Republicans get to get their act together, become a working-class party, and harness the numbers that they have in the country, or should have, to implement this agenda. So I think it has to— I think you do need that change. And then I think economically, you know, we need more people in the business sphere doing some portion of what Elon is doing, which is willing to stick their necks out to do the right thing. And, and, you know, if we could just get a few more people to do that kind of stuff, it could make a big difference.
Well, I do wonder if there's a chance that it happens in the Democratic Party as well, in the sense of You know, the far left stuff doesn't poll well, doesn't do well. You know, there's Roy Teixeira, who you turned me on to, and all these old school lefties like, you know, Greenwald or T.B. Like, I'm sure they'd be thrilled if there was like a working class Democrat, you know, leader who was able to do the things that you just talked about doing on the Republican Party, but in the Democrats.
The Democratic Party has always had this tension between what they called the wine track and the beer track.
Yeah.
And historically, it was the beer track candidate who generally got the nomination with the— I think the one exception was Obama as more of a wine track candidate. Biden's interesting because he sort of gives the— he comes across as a beer track candidate, but he's kind of more of a vessel for, again, the professional class. And I just think that the party can't help but continue to go in that direction of that elitist, effete, professional class sensibility. Again, it's just who runs the party now and all of the activist groups within the party. So I don't think they can help be anything other than who they are and what they believe. And I think the bigger question is just kind of, can the Republican Party marshal this populist energy Basically, with a candidate who doesn't unnecessarily alienate a large portion of the electorate. It's kind of populism without Trump.
Yeah.
Because I just think that Trump can't— I don't think he can get enough votes to effectuate this agenda. And even if he could, I mean, we'd just spend the next 4 years reacting to him tweeting outrages.
It's like, He would empower the left.
Yeah. It would just be this, like, I don't think we get anything done. So you need somebody who can build a majority coalition and then actually execute after, again, on this program of accountability for the elites. Because a society's always going to have these middle-level managers. It's always going to have these elites. It's always going to have institutions. We're not going to like get rid of them all. That's just— that's not going to happen. But I think that if they want the power and prerogatives that their elite status brings, they have to be accountable for the results.
Thanks so much, David, for coming on the podcast. It's been a great episode.
Yeah, good to be here. Thank you, Erik.
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