Elite Human Capital and America's Future W/ Richard Hanania

Hey, Upstream listeners, Erik here. This week we're releasing a conversation I had with Richard Hanania on elite human capital, foreign policy, fertility, America's future, and more. Please enjoy the episode.

Richard, welcome back to the podcast.

Great to have you.

Yeah, glad to be here, Erik. Thanks.

So the last time we chatted about your book, The Origins of Woke, around February, I'm curious if you're working on a new book or if you were working on a new book, what topic would it be about? And that's mostly a way to ask, what are the big ideas you've been thinking about recently or that you've been proud of and think, you know, add value to the discourse?

Well, Erik, I'll break some news here.

Excellent.

And I'll tell you that I'm thinking about writing a book on the concept of elite human capital because it's a topic that has drawn me in. It is something that I keep talking about and I keep seeing. And when that happens, I usually, you know, the 2 books I've written, it's because I just wanted to get everything that I have to say about a topic out of my system. And then I get sort of bored with it. Like, I'm very bored with woke. Like, I'm just— I can't even read anything about it anymore. Because I got it out of my system. I had a bunch of stuff to say, and now I've moved on. And so Elite Human Capital, I just keep coming back to this idea that there is basically this kind of natural elite that tends to rule in modern developed societies and understanding this, this sort of this type of person, not just in ideological terms, but like things that people don't think of as ideological, like their approach to truth and their approach to knowledge and how they see themselves in relation to the rest of society. I think that's an important and powerful idea. So I'm going to probably get that EHC, just sort of scratch that itch, get that all out of my system, and then hopefully move on to something else.

And is the elite human capital idea similar to Jonathan Rauch's sort of idea of the reality-based community? Or why don't we unpack what is EHC here and what makes it different?

Yeah, so elite human capital is basically people who are smart, but it's not really— IQ is not the only distinguishing factor. part of it. There's a correlation between IQ and elite human capital. It's the people that are unusually idealistic. So these are the people who go into fields like journalism, they go into fields like academia, they go into nonprofits. They're interested in ideas, they're interested in changing the world. And sometimes people will disparage them and say, oh, these are like trust fund kids or whatever. In some cases, yeah. But in other cases, I know a lot of people who are journalists, who are aspiring academics, who could have made a lot more money, Doing something else, and they didn't come from the richest background. So that you know that's not that's not accurate. And so these are people who care about truth. They you know they they they tend towards certain ideological positions. It doesn't have to be liberal in the current American sense, but they do trend towards either leftist or classical liberal or libertarian. What you don't find them is like blood and soil nationalists. That's very rare. There are maybe exceptions to this. Maybe you know under wartime or something in Ukraine or something. These are these exceptions that I sort of have to have to. Think about, but I'm talking about developed societies. And basically, they have tension and they have a sort of identity that is distinguished from the rest of society, and they tend towards cosmopolitanism. I mean, this is— you go back in history, I mean, you go back to European royalty, the Russian rulers, the Russian aristocrats sometimes speak French, sometimes don't even speak the language of the people that they live with. So it's very common, they intermarry. It's very common for elites to have this sort of cosmopolitan attitude. We see it, it continues today. Now it's more merit-based rather than hereditary or aristocracy. And that introduces all these kind of complications and these subtleties in the differences between the past and the present. At the same time, and it's also becoming more important, I think, because it's strongly correlated with politics. Maybe 15, 20 years ago, elite human capital would be found across both political parties in America. And this is what I say about America is somewhat true for much of the rest of the world. Now elite human capital basically concentrates on the left side of the political spectrum, even if they don't agree on everything. There tends to be a human capital difference between people who support Trump and people who find Trump offensive. And so, yeah, this is the idea. I have a few Substacks on it. I'm going to bring those Substacks together. I'm going to refine the idea a little bit and maybe write a book. I'm not 100% sure, actually, I'm going to do this. I'm probably going to do it. But if I write a book soon, it's going to be that.

Let's dive in a little bit. Nassim Taleb has this idea of intellectuals yet idiots, right? Marc Andreessen likes to point out that World War II, a lot of intellectuals were communists or communist sympathetic. I'm curious if you were to think about the track record of who you would put in as lead human capital over the last decade on various different topics, I'm curious if you would think they had a good outcome. It's almost become a parody of trust the experts, but my guess is you actually think non-ironically, we should trust the experts. Maybe they're a bit more right than we give them credit for, or we need better experts or whatever. But I guess, how do you respond to some of this?

Yeah, I mean, people always have this bias where they sort of remember when elites got things wrong and they don't remember when elites got things right. Right. So, you know, you go back to communism, you go back to the mid-20th century, but European integration after the Second World War, that was an elite human capital project. They were right. I mean, the common market was a was a good idea. They kept the peace in Europe for 70 years. I think America with the rules-based international order after 1945 has been a remarkable success. Again, peace and prosperity, but this time on a global scale, eventually defeated communism. I think that the masses haven't wanted free trade, but I think free trade has been correct. And I think that that's something that's just been an elite project. This extension of the European common European project can be part of that. Women's rights, gay rights, a lot of these things, cosmopolitan ideas I think they've generally been correct about a lot of things. Now, elite human capital does not mean that they're always right. You know, they're often, they're often wrong. You know, communism was more of an elite human capital phenomenon, right? It's not that they're right. It's that they're idealistic and they're smart and they're interested in ideas that can go in bad, that can go in bad directions. I think that the, you know, the point is not whether elite human capital is necessarily good or bad. Although, I mean, that is important and worth considering. The idea is that their rule, some kind of elite human capital rule, is inevitable in the kind of— if you want a civilized society. Now, I think like in the Taliban case, the Taliban, like the xenophobes and the misogynists, you know, are in power and they can shut down everyone else. And North Korea, I don't think the leadership elite in North Korea is necessarily elite human capital. It's a 3rd-generation dictatorship with a Probably a bunch of yes men and toadies circling around the leader, but any kind of society we would want to live in, it's going to be ruled by elite human capital and understanding what elite human capital is and how to sort of influence. I mean, understanding it as part of the project is influencing it, influencing it in the in in a positive direction because you don't want them to be communists. You want to sort of you know present a present a vision of the world that is true and that that is that framework where you know you have an accurate. model an accurate representation of different groups. And then you could hope to hopefully influence elite human capital to be better so they won't be communists in future generations.

Why is it inevitable that society will be run by elite human capital? A good society will be run by elite human capital. And what is the way to, or what are examples of ways that they've been influenced in positive directions?

Yeah. So it ends up this way because there tends to be a trade-off. Between earning potential and influence in the world, right? If something is influ— you know, if something is— people want influence. So money and influence are sort of— you trade that, you trade off for them in the market. So that's why journalism is not the best paid profession. Government is usually not the best paid profession. You go and you open up a bunch of car dealerships, you can get very wealthy. I mean, a remarkable portion of millionaires in America are guys who own car dealerships. It's funny because they have some kind protectionist thing where they, you know, they, I don't know, I don't remember all the details, but basically owning a car dealership is a good way to get rich. It's not a good way to be influential or, you know, shape the culture or influence policy, except maybe on lobbying on issues related to car dealerships. But, you know, you get the idea. And so, yeah, I mean, so, and so like you have these institutions and a lot of them, I don't, you know, I don't know if they would necessarily pop up from scratch, but they're to a large extent their legacy institutions. So the universities, right? If Harvard and Yale and Columbia all were destroyed, I don't know if they would necessarily pop up in their current form. If the NBC and, you know, New York Times— I don't know if we get a new New York Times, right? But these are sort of brand-established names. There's a kind of path dependency in them. And they— because they have these norms, they're attractive to people who are competent and care about truth. Now, people— a lot of your audience are going to be rightists, and they're going to hate the Academy. They're going to hate the New York Times. But look, I want to know what's going on in Sudan, or I want to know, you know, what's the state of debate in some scientific field. New York Times is not, you know, perfect. They're going to often get things very wrong. But compared to, say, going on Twitter, and especially Twitter recently, and seeing what the kind of stuff that goes viral, the New York Times and NBC are, you know, infinitely superior to most, you know, you compare it to like— The norm throughout human history. People just hear things through word of mouth or through biased actors, you know, a hype man for a company who's going to say he solved every, you know, he solved aging or he solved, you know, cured cancer or whatever. That's the alternative to having something like the MSM, right? Just people just with either biased perspective or just people spreading rumors or people, you know, causing trouble or lying for whatever reason. And so, yeah, the fact that you have these institutions and, you know, their models, Other countries tend to develop similar institutions, right? And you know, it's it's sort of it's necessary to have like a functioning society. Like you need government that is at least somewhat neutral. You need ways to to innovate and to develop scientific understanding and just to understand you know just to understand the world. And so a lot of people in government who are doing or collecting economic statistics, the people in academia and science and biology who are doing the research and, you know, making these incremental improvements that the, you know, that is modern medicine. These, the, these are things that basically that those, these are institutions that are going to attract elite human capital. And, you know, you can have, again, you can have a society that doesn't have that, that doesn't have media institutions that anyone can trust, that doesn't have academic institutions or like research institutions that do all that much. That's usually not going to be a very nice place to live.

Right. And I think the, if I understand correctly, the blogger Spandrel, his theory around sort of why these people who always, who go into these fields are predominantly leftist is because the left has more of an idealistic streak to it, more of a clear path to change things and more of a path to change things that benefit the people who are in fact If the right is conservatism, by nature of conservating, there's less opportunity for change and thus less opportunity for status acquisition. And so the left has a more liquid status market that if you advocate for leftist interests, you also advocate for your own interests in trying to gain status in this kind of way. Does any of that resonate with you, or why are they always leftist?

Yeah, so I don't think they're always leftist. I mean, I think that during FDR's time, I think that that was kind of the masses rising up against a more classically liberal, in our terms, more conservative And you have to ask, what are these sort of— how do they understand interests? Because interests are not just material. Status is not sort of unidimensional. And so if someone thinks that your typical journalist, your typical, say, journalist, maybe not making that much money for New Yorker or something, or some kind of assistant professor, if you think they would be happy if they could acquire status, if they could run a local car dealership, I'm just going to use that example, because we're already on it. And they can make 3 times as much money. They can have status in their community. I mean, they can move out to small town Ohio and, you know, marry a wife and the people who know them will think they're, you know, the biggest thing in the world. If you think that they would take that or like they're just going into journalism or academia because they're incapable of, maybe they are incapable of doing that, but not because like they're not smart enough to run a car dealership or, or something like that. It's more along the lines of like they have this inherent value system that is not just focused on I, you know, I have a bigger house than you. I have a bigger car than you. I have more money than you. I mean, something like that works for Donald Trump and Trump's fans like that status sort of hierarchy, maybe, you know, because they're, they're not elite human capital. They're, they're the opposite. And he's sort of, he's the person who sort of reflects their values to the greater extent, greatest extent imaginable, just has gold toilets and helicopters and supermodel wives and so forth. But yeah, I don't, I think that these are, these are different values just to say interests. And they're trying to, you know, they're trying to push for their own interests by changing the value system. There's probably some of that, but I think the value system is sort of, you know, it comes, it sort of comes first. Like they can't, like they, they couldn't do the other thing, but it's not like, you know, an intelligence thing or something like that. It's the value thing. It's the, it's, there is some, there is a need for something more. There is a kind of need for meaning in a lot of people that other people don't have. Some people just want to drink beer and maybe bet on sports and, and barbecue and, you know, that's fine. And, you know, I don't, You know, it's not like they always have the highest status, right? It's not like just some guy who's just like a conservative, like instinctually conservative guy who likes, you know, the Green Bay Packers and Donald Trump. Not like he's content with society because he necessarily has the highest status. He might be a loser. But this is the status hierarchy. This is the only thing he can sort of get his head around. It might be an intelligence thing, but it's also an idealistic thing. And so, yeah, I think that talking about groups pushing their own interests. I mean, there's good reasons in Mancur Olson, his theory of groups, that usually there's a collective action problem when you start talking about large groups pushing their own interests. So I, I tend to emphasize values.

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I'm curious to think about the values, you know, between the differences between someone like Ezra Klein or, you know, Matt Yglesias on one hand and someone like Elon Musk on the other hand. And maybe, you know, Elon is an often quote tweeter of Cat Turd, an account that you, you know, show a little sympathy for. And maybe Maybe we can just start, we can trace your evolution of how you became someone who originally, to quote your own post, I hate pronoun people more than genocide, to now actually don't really mind about pronoun people, but can't stand cat turd.

I hate cat turd.

Yeah.

I hate cat turd more than genocide. Yes. I mean, I used to be on the side of a lot of, we talked about my TechRiot article a while ago, and I used to be, I think probably a lot of your listeners are, You know, of that orientation, and maybe they read my article at the time, and you know, I still hold on to a lot of the views. My values haven't changed. I have sort of been mugged by reality. Yeah, I mean, it was sort of like you have a revolution, and then the world changes, and then you're like, oh wait, the revolution had all kinds of problems. So social media, you know, under Elon Musk, I wrote an article one time where I said, you know, Elon Musk just buys Twitter. You know, our Caesar came along and and solved the problem. Great. It's good for me personally. I mean, if I was just about my own interest, I mean, Elon Musk, you know, follows me and retweets me sometimes and I get more engagement and I don't worry about getting banned from Twitter anymore, like, like I used to. But the free speech issue was solved and now it's my God. I mean, my God, these tweets, these, these, you know, all the disinformation people, I thought they were crazy. I thought like, we just need free speech, but we have free speech. And now you have 6-figure and 7-figure accounts who do nothing but make stuff up. Who just literally not like twist the news, not just biased, but literally breaking sources within the Kamala campaign. Oh, she's about to commit suicide because her internal polls, she's down by 10. I mean, it's just this freaking stupid. And this is, this is what the market wants. You know, Candace Owens, I think has, you know, is it 4 million, 5 million? It's something, some kind of 5, 6 million. I don't know what it is. I looked at recently the top podcasts in the country. They were Tucker. They were Rogan. And they were Candace Owens, right? And I think those were the top 3, or there might've been one more that was also very, very bad. But they fluctuate day to day, right? But this was, this is the audience. This is what people want in the podcast space. You see Alex Jones come back. You see Alex Jones sort of become like mainstream within the Republican Party. And it's like, this is human nature. This is human nature. This is what, like, if you put a bunch of third worlders and gave them Twitter and made it uncensored and like you went to the Middle East or something or you went to some sub-Saharan African country, this is what it would be like. People making stuff up, conspiracy Conspiracy theories, you know, just crude racism. Nobody knowing, like, any caring what's true or knowing what's going on. And that's conservatives. That is conservatives' space. Give conservatives an unrestrained space where they talk to one another. This is what they end up with. And you have to think about that. And you have to think about the fact that they've never built, you know, I'm an intellectual. Like, people are like, oh, you turn on the right. It's like, it's hard to be a right-wing intellectual because, like, I want to read about the world. Like, I want to read a story about the civil war in Burma. I keep bringing this up, this example of the civil war in Burma, because, like, there is In a world of conservatives, I literally don't know Burma exists. Like, I literally, I probably would have trouble finding like the population. I probably, you know, I couldn't probably wouldn't even have statistics on much less like a map of like what's going on in the civil war right now and like which group is controlling. Not that I'm a Burma, you know, Myanmar expert or anything, or this is like my biggest interest, but it's just, you know, trying to understand something about the world, right? Wanting something like an intellectual life. They don't have that. Elon, I mean, does great things. He gets to Mars, right? He's going to get us to Mars, hopefully. You know, he builds these reusable rockets. I think Nate Silver's book, you know, talks about the river and the village. And I think these are sort of, you know, it's a little bit broader. He could have done, I think, a more narrow book. And I think what he's really getting at is that basically there's like, it's basically the tech right versus the liberal establishment. I mean, I think that's probably like a sort of a related idea.

Yeah.

to what he's talking about. And I'm convinced we need a synthesis. We don't need Elon to crush the New York Times. We don't want New York Times to crush Elon either. We want some kind of synthesis where we take this kind of, you know, spirit that a lot of these right-wing people have, a lot of these people that come out of business, and take what's good out of these institutions, these established institutions. Know that there's no, like, Alex Jones or there's no conservative, like, version of this coming. And somehow that's That's where we need to be. We need this synthesis.

Going back to the Noah Smith, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias view of the world, of course they have differences between them, but sort of the liberal establishment or the best of that, and you take the best of the tech right, Elon, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, or whoever. What do you think are the main differences between those? What needs to be bridged?

Yeah. And so I can put myself I can put myself in the shoes of, you know, the tech right people because I think I was closest to them a couple years ago. And, you know, I think that they are— there's a tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Now, a lot of the discourse we're seeing, you know, we're sitting here and we're a few weeks before the election. So like, you know, I don't— when I see people saying things that are twisting the truth or not necessarily, you know, the fairest characterization of someone's position, I'm a little bit more forgiving because I know election season. People get crazy and people think they have an interest in saying things that necessarily aren't the fairest characterization of their opponents. But there's a tendency to just sort of take, I think, take a lot of things for granted that you shouldn't take for granted. Like Iglesias has an article today. So he talks about how Elon Musk at one point was tweeting about how no way SBF would get charged because he's a Democratic donor. And a lot of the tech right people took this line. SBF was charged. They did not update their worldview. Right. And he talks about how Democrats are getting charged under the Biden administration. Administration. Biden's son, his own son— nobody on Earth believes Donald Trump would ever let his own son get, get charged with something when he had the position to pardon him. And not a single Trump supporter in the world would say that. They all— the only way they can explain Hunter getting charged is they have to say, well, you know, it's a, it's a deep state distraction. I don't know, they just— they have to have some kind of, you know, theory because they can't make an equivalent with, with Trump, right? So these basic things that, like, when you're mad at leftists, when you see them being woke, when you see them, you know, especially if you're someone like Elon and fighting the regulatory state all day. And, you know, you moved your company out of California, out of California because of all the COVID restrictions. And you see sort of how crazy they are. A lot of people we know, they, they send their children to San Francisco schools and God knows what they're teaching in these San Francisco schools to little kids. They, they want to, they just, they, they put it all together and they say, this is the establishment. These people are wrong. We need to get, we need to get rid of them. Right. And then on the other side of the left, I mean, you do the best of the leftist establishment. I think they just sort of. You know, they first of all they see how they they see Trump with with clear eyes. People say it's Trump derangement syndrome. I don't think it's true. I think if you describe this man objectively, you come across as deranged because he is just I mean he is what he he is what he is, and they sort of see that like you know these things aren't necessarily things we should take for granted, right? These these these institute these institutional things. Now, you know, I I don't you know, and I and I and I think that they. You know, a lot of them are sort of, if you talk to them issue by issue, you might say, well, SpaceX, you might go to them and say SpaceX wants to do a rocket launch. And, you know, Elon was posting the other day that they have to, they have to take the seals and they have to kidnap the seals and see if it bothers them. I think if you showed them like that issue in isolation, they would, they would grant you. Okay. If you take them and say, oh, they were masking kids in California for 2 years after COVID, they'd probably say, okay, you're right on that. They can see the individual cases where sort of regulation has gone wrong or kind of the way our government and our system operates. They're not seeing necessarily the big picture that a lot of this stuff is baked in. And the Democratic Party, to a large extent, is captured by some of the worst interest groups out there. I was paying attention to the dockworkers, the longshoremen strike a couple of weeks ago. And some people told me on Twitter, like, if— we'll use the word Kamala— if she comes out against the longshoremen. And I said, Maybe because this is an interesting test because you have Kamala saying things that sound more moderate. She says, I'm going to take more input from business leaders, you know, and so forth. Could she challenge a union? Could she challenge an interest group on her own side? No, she just came out fully in support of the longshoremen. So did Biden. So, you know, when I go back to 2020 and 2021, like, you know, they wouldn't stand up to the teachers unions. I see the same thing. I see the same thing here. I think they're still sort of enthralled to the worst interest groups. And, you know, a lot of the best of the left will recognize when masking children or, you know, opposing automation at the ports, that the longshoremen are just, you know, Luddites. They're just completely— they just don't believe in technological progress. Noah Smith and Ezra Klein and Matthew Glazer, they're not going to support that. But I don't think they understand, like, the people on their side are just, you know, they can have their, like, little debating club about and their Substacks about what's good policy or not. Unfortunately, on the ground, it's that the worst people in the Democratic Party are often in control.

Yeah. And what do you say to the people on the right who might say something, you know, the smartest of them might say, hey, January 6th was really bad, you know, insanely bad. And Trump is, you know, a wrecking ball of, you know, he's very bad, but this election is about who's worse. And there's something about, you know, the Democrat Party in terms of, if you look at things like the Russiagate or the impeachments or the attempt to jail Trump or just things that go beyond what Trump himself or the Republican Party has done in terms of subverting some basic sort of— or they're more likely to back the core. Do you sympathize with that or do you think that's incorrect?

I generally think that's incorrect. Now, there is a pro-Trump argument that I sympathize with that I even make myself on some days, depending on how I'm feeling on that day. I might not believe my own argument, but I think it's respectable. That Trump is awful, but Democrats are, you know, are the anti-progress party. They're the people of high taxes, high regulation. They're the extreme safetyism, an oppressive regulatory state that doesn't let you do great things, that wants to ban prediction markets in most cases. And not, not the Democratic judge actually just legalized prediction markets, but in most cases, you know, and, you know, basically just has this extreme safetyism, this extreme sort of, you know, this worldview that will lead us to being a bureaucratized, stagnant kind of, kind of country, right? And so granted, Trump is bad. Here's all the things Democrats— Ben Shapiro just had a tweet where he said, you know, I don't care about the, you know, January 6th, whatever. I was in Los Angeles last night and my friend got mugged by a bunch of Black guys, and that's what people care. Now, I don't think Trump is like going to do something about Black guys mugging Ben Shapiro's friend. I think that we overrate crime as far as the issue in the presidential election, I mean, I don't think it, it has much influence. But that's, that's the idea, right? It's, it's not a— now any, any kind of— what I'm not— so I'm sympathetic towards that. What I'm not sympathetic towards is any argument that tries to excuse Trump. Anything that tries to make a comparison between Trump literally trying to overthrow the government in 2020 and Democrats impeaching him for trying to overthrow the government. That's the least they could have done, right? Impeaching him. I mean, the Ukraine thing.

Yeah.

He was— he's on tape. He's on tape saying he's bribing a foreign leader, saying, dig up dirt on my enemy. I don't think this is a close call. When he was on the phone with— go, people who haven't listened to his conversation on the phone with the Secretary of State of Georgia, just listen to it. The second I heard that, I was just done with any kind of apologetics for Trump. The way the conversation goes, you know, you're going to get in trouble. He's like threatening him. He's like, you know, you're going to get in trouble. If, you know, there's fraud, you're going to get in trouble. All I need is you find me 10,000 votes. It's like, what would it take to convince you people that, like, this guy, like, doesn't care about, like, election fraud? It's not like a good faith attempt to get to the bottom of the election. He just wants it overthrown and doesn't care how he's doing it and is willing to threaten people and use whatever tools he has. So this is very bad. And like Russiagate, okay, like there were some things that were leaked to the media. There was an investigation. The investigation, you know, didn't, didn't find that much. He wasn't charged. It was, you know, it was done through the legal processes. You know, and by the way, I mean, Trump appointed attorney general, attorney general, you know, they had a, they had a special counsel. So there was like, you know, a process to this, some kind of legality, some kind of, you know, logic. And by the way, 2019, I mean, Democrats don't talk about Russiagate anymore, right? After the Mueller report came out, while Republicans continue to deny elections, Trump now just still says. If I, you know, if Jesus counted the votes, he told Dr. Phil this, if Jesus counted the votes, I would win California. I mean, this guy is like, doesn't even pretend. He doesn't pretend to believe in democracy. He doesn't pretend to believe he believes in any system other than Trump wins. Right. And like, so it drives me crazy when people try to— it's like, imagine if Kamala Harris went around saying, I won Texas, I won Alabama. You would think she was a mental patient, right? Like, she's just so beyond. like anything that anyone else is like. So like, okay, you look all— you overlook all that. You want to get to Mars. Elon, you want Elon in control of the government, uh, rather than the Randy Weingart, the, the lady who runs the biggest teachers union. Like, okay, like, that is reasonable. Uh, weaponization, government, Trump, like comparing Trump favorably, like, like, no, I, I just don't think you could do that and be intellectually honest.

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If you had a few hours with Elon or kind of the broader tech right that I mentioned before, and you were trying to persuade them to come a little bit closer to your side on some of these broader, but most important topics, how might you try to persuade them? What arguments do you think they might be sympathetic towards?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I think that in the case of Elon, I think a lot of guys, these guys see themselves as it would be. I think it would be very hard because I think a lot of them see them see Trump now as a vessel for their own power and to convince them. Well, maybe you shouldn't have absolute power in society is probably like a hard thing to sell someone like Elon Musk on. And so, you know, it's it's it's difficult. You know, I don't know. Like I don't know how to like. Frame it in a way that like is especially geared towards that audience. If you have sort of a personal stake in in the outcome of all this, you know I would say that like you know maybe I would try something like okay like take the value system a lot a lot of the tech right people have. You want stable societies. You know you need the sort of underlying societal stability in order to do life extension or go to Mars or whatever the things you happen to be dreaming about. And I just would point out like how historically rare. An institution as good as, that is as good as the New York Times is. Like, just frankly, like there's something as good as the New York Times. Like you don't have that in the developing world. You don't have the conservative media. Like I would keep pointing out like how bad, now a lot of these guys are retweeting Qatar. So maybe they think that's like actually a great source of information and better than the New York Times. And if they're that far gone, I don't really know what to do. But I would, I would stress this, like you guys care about civilization. It's the precondition for the other things you care about. See what our society has gotten right and like fight these leftists in situations where you need to. But don't just, you know, don't give in to nihilism. Don't give in to nihilism or the idea that like Trump should just vegetate in front of the TV for 4 years and you should just run the government and that's all we need to fix the world.

Is it fair to say that over the past few years or so, the elite human capital view towards crime was, you know, closer to things like defund the police or closer to things like, hey, you know, crime is complicated and we need therapists and, you know, poverty, sort of multifactorial approach to solving it. Whereas the sort of common sense view is the Bukele view of, hey, just put criminals in jail and have very strong threats. And do you think that is a fair categorization of crime specifically versus the intellectual view versus sort of the common sense view? And do you think lots of issues are kind of like that where there's this intellectual view that's kind of divorced from how things actually work right now?

Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a good demonstration of a situation where elite human capital isn't always correct. I can't deny that the elite human capital position tends to be more— tends to be softer on crime, and I don't think that that's the correct position. I wrote some articles about Bukele and his success in El Salvador. I mean, I think the state of the American inner cities truly is disgraceful. And so, yeah, I mean, elite human capital, I think, is just Averse to sort of force and averse to violence, and sometimes that can be good. Like I don't think you know they're gonna you know I don't think they're gonna lock up and kill their enemies or or anything like that. I mean the white people who live in urban centers are the most you know least violent demographic you know anywhere. But the yeah but they have this sort of these sort of pie in the sky ideas about crime, and I don't think they've I don't think they've worked. I think you know being tough on crime works for obvious reasons. There's just You know, an incentive issue. I you know I don't think it's like inevitable that even human capital is going to go towards defund the police stuff because you know a couple decades ago New York City elected Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, and they came they came down hard on crime. I think that this is not an issue. I think that the masses are probably always going to be more vindictive than elite human capital who just you know human instinct just sort of just sort of just sort of is tilted in the direction of vengeance and to the degree to which elite human capital is sort of divorced from human nature. It can be reflective a little bit. It's going to be a little bit more understanding of criminals, you know, unless you have some ideological reason not to be, which elite human capital sometimes does. I mean, communist states are often, are often sometimes the human capital comes to power and they're very tough on crime because they have this larger vision of like the way society should be. But yeah, I think elite human capital is, is at this point in history wrong on crime, but You know, you can argue with it. You can argue with them about it. I mean, there, there are, have been like, even the, even the defund the police stuff. I mean, they've gotten far, pretty far away from that. If you look at local elections in some places, Karen Bass in LA who, who beat her opponent who was more anti-crime, but she's gone a little bit more in the anti-crime direction. A lot of these cities like Philadelphia, we're about to, I think in California or LA County, we're going to about to vote out our district attorney who's very soft on crime. He just survived a recall. And the San Francisco DA, what's his name? He was also recalled, wasn't he? I mean, did he, didn't he lose an election or he was recalled? So there, there is, yeah, there are some, there are some corrective mechanisms within elite human capital, but yes, I tend to think they're too soft on crime.

So if we were just tallying, you know, elite human capital, in your view, would you say they've been wrong on not just crime, but gender, race, you know, maybe sometimes a little too, too much government intervention? regulation or market intervention in general, but they've been right on things like immigration and trade and reproductive rights. I guess, what else would you add to the sort of tallying of what they've been wrong and right about?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it's like that useful to just have a list of like EHC is correct on this and wrong on that. I mean, we can come up with— I can come up with 5 things that they're right on and 5 things that they're wrong on. I'm sort of interested in the analysis. From the perspective of like, what kind of, what kind of people are inevitably going to rule and like, how can we influence them and what is their relationship to the rest of society? So like, even, you know, even the market stuff is not, is a little bit more complicated because like when, when Kamala Harris starts talking about price controls, they, you know, the media, the coverage in the media, the Washington, you go to the Washington Post and it's very hostile. It's like all the experts say this is wrong. Something like YIMBYism, nothing in left-wing ideology, you say, oh, this is, you know, right would maybe be more pro-housing, left is anti. Nothing in left-wing ideology would tell you to be a YIMBY. They're usually for restrictions and usually anti-market. But, you know, you are getting these reforms in California and elsewhere, and YIMBY has sort of become the mainstream position in elite media. And so, yeah, you know, I think there, I think even the, even the stuff where they're wrong, I think there's a tendency towards correction. There are some things that they're sort of systematically wrong about. And, you know, we have to think about all these things. You also have to think about like, what is the, what is the role of low human capital? What should they be doing rather than tweeting all day, tweeting fake news all day and getting millions of followers? Like, how can we channel them in a different direction? Not, not like give the censors, the disinformation experts all the power. We probably don't want to do that. But, you know, sort of thinking about like, what does it mean that like a lot of people are low human capital? I mean, I would prefer probably, I've thought about this a little bit, probably prefer A kind of depoliticization. I mean, I, I, I look back, there's different historical eras. I look back to my childhood. I can remember the 1990s when regular people didn't get too excited about politics. And if you did, you were weird. And I think that's probably the best thing we can hope for.

Yeah. The, I mean, after Trump, do you envision sort of the, the tech right gaining, gaining power, you know, like Elon types, you know, JD, you've written about JD Vance and whether He represents sort of this tech right or this status right. How do you think about how that could play out?

Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I mean, Elon is sort of in his own category. I mean, you talk about the tech right, but the fact that he owns Twitter, that's big. I mean, that's obviously a very big deal. And so it's going to be interesting. I mean, if Trump wins, like, so either way, Elon Musk is going to be there. He's going to own these companies. And he's either going to be like with a Trump administration trying to do all these things with influence or fighting a Harris administration on all these things and having sort of Twitter in his pocket and being able to sort of mobilize the right against, you know, anything that the government wants to do that is against his, you know, his perceived interests. And so, yeah, I think almost the Elon question is more interesting. I don't know, like the tech are like, you know, no offense to any of the other guys, but You know, I mean, I mean, Teal, I mean, made JD Vance. So it's, I mean, that's obviously a big deal. And, you know, almost got Blake Masters. That would have been the political miracle of a lifetime. And so, like, that's obviously a big deal. But, you know, to the extent that otherwise, like, these other guys, are they going to be, like, major, you know, major, like, cultural figures? Or are they just, because, you know, a lot of them were dissenters. Elon and Sex were both DeSantis. In the end, the low human capital cutters, the college-educated Republicans did vote for DeSantis or Nikki Haley. And the non-college, which was a lot more of them, voted for, I don't know about Trump primary voters actually, but whatever. Trump got a lot more of the non-college-educated voters and they ended up, you know, hitching to the Trump train.

Right.

And so, you know, the degree to which these guys are on the right now, but to the degree to which they can actually shape the right is yet to be seen. Now, maybe just Elon and Sacks can push anyone. They can push whoever they want once Trump is gone, because Trump is such a force that Elon and DeSantis and they all team up and they can't beat Trump. I mean, he just owns the right as long as he's there. And so what happens afterwards?

Yeah, I don't know.

They're going to be influential on the margins. It'll move the elites more towards pro-market positions. I think one good thing the tech right has done and the influence is there was a sort of more influence of these people, these kind of Catholic integralist types, these American Compass types who are more pro, you know, labor unions, more pro, you know, sort of friendly to redistribution and the administrative state. There's still, you know, these people are still around, but I think there's going to be less sympathy for that if the tech right guys are the major donors and they're sort of the cultural influence on the right. So I think on the margins, they'll move people. You know, I think the more interesting question is like, is there, after Trump, is there Do they get just like more better human capital into the right? I mean, it's it doesn't happen immediately. I mean, you know, Elon's retweeting Cat Turd and Libs of TikTok, and these are the people who've benefited most from the new order. But whether like it sort of becomes people see that oh, you can be a smart person, you can do great things, and be and be right wing. Does that change the culture? But that will take you know a little bit more time.

Imagine if you know if Trump. You know, pass away in the next few, right before 2028, let's say he either wins or doesn't win in 2024. And in 2028, sort of, you know, there's a new slate and, you know, JD Vance is running and Vivek is running, but also Nikki Haley's running and sort of, you know, more neocon folks. Like, I'm curious what you think happens then, but then also in terms of popularity, but also maybe let's go deeper on just JD Vance and what do you make of him? From your analysis of him and his future impacts on the Republican Party?

Yeah, I mean, I think if Trump wins, to me, it's very hard to— I think whoever's the nominee in 2028 probably loses the Republican nominee because Trump is— you can't imagine him being a popular president. He's going to be unpopular no matter what, and he's going to be very senile in 4 years, and that's going to make the party look really bad. And there's going to be one scandal after the And so, like, you know, and I think Democrats, like, their bench of, like, the next person they're going to nominate is pretty strong. I mean, it's going to be someone like Newsom or Shapiro or Whitmer. It's going to be a moderate white person who is— comes, you know, who in the case of Shapiro and Whitmer was a governor of a swing state, or Newsom, who I think has unusually high charisma and who comes across— all these people come across as moderate. They don't come across as crazy leftists. I think they're going to be very well positioned. So the unpopularity of Trump plus the fact that Democrats are probably going to have a very good candidate in 2028. I think, you know, if I could put money down on the 2028 election, I'd put money on Democrats, assuming Trump wins. If Kamala wins, then Republicans have more of a chance because she might be the unpopular president and then, you know, she's going to be running for reelection. And so, yeah, I mean, what happens, what happens in 2028, you know, I think it's going to be. It's going to be interesting because these people will probably get behind Vance. I assume J.D. Vance is going to have his own— I think J.D. Vance, I mean, it's probably too early to talk like this, but if it's a crowded field and Vance will— it's usually the VP who was the last time usually gets it. And so if it's a crowded field and Vance has all these guys, he might not be popular in the broad public. He might have an underwater approval rating, which he does right now. That might not change in four years. But yeah, I think it's you know he's probably in a very good position. I didn't think this like I didn't think this like a few weeks ago because it looked like Vance was a really bad pick. I mean, it looked like I still think he might be a might be a bad pick. You know, but like for a while, all anyone talked about was how weird he was and childless cat ladies. He's redeemed himself somewhat. I mean, he had a good debate performance. He you know he seems very articulate compared to Trump. And so I think even if he's not that popular in the broad public. I think conservatives aren't under the impression that he's just, you know, a horrible candidate who can't go anywhere. And so, yeah, he's very well positioned. And yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting. Vance is sort of like Trump in that he's singular and that he's like, you know, very sort of— it's a very weird thing because I've written about Vance and he's got these tech guys and I talked about how they're like a positive influence of like You know, being pushed, keeping conservatives in a pro-market direction. But you listen to Van's talk, and he doesn't talk like that. He talks like a kind of you know you know economic leftist sometimes. If you go to Congress, I mean he he votes against you know labor unions. He has like a you know perfectly poor rating. He you know he ends up supporting. You know you might just say this is just sort of he's like a smarter Trump, and that he just talks like a populist, but then governs like a. Like a, like a free marketer. Like maybe, maybe that's, maybe that's the end up being, it's like a, it's like a smarter Trump, but like, you know, just more the true strategy. But at the same time, I don't think Vance is, I don't think Vance is not genuine because that implies he's not genuine. And from knowing him and from seeing him, I think he's genuine. So it's sort of, it's sort of hard to know what to make of all that. Yeah.

So yeah, it's unclear whether he will represent sort of the rise of the tech right or just more of a statist.

Yeah. I mean, I think he'll somehow justify it. I think he's going to do the tech right stuff and somehow justify it in his mind. But I think JD is a sort of a complicated guy. So who knows? There was a, you know, there was, you know, there's, he seems genuine. He seems to genuinely go out of his way to like say nice things about like Elizabeth Warren, which I don't think has like any political benefit, but like, you know, if he's going to do stuff that makes Elizabeth Warren happy, you know, God help us. We don't want that to be the future of the Republican Party.

Right. Talk about the differences between a Kamala presidency and a Trump presidency in the next term. What are the counterfactuals or what are the outcomes that are most likely to be different depending who wins?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I'll start with things that I think are probably more certain and less certain. I mean, your taxes will go up under Kamala just because the original Trump tax cuts Are expiring, and so they'll have to negotiate something new. And probably, you know, the high earners like you, Eric, are probably going to have to pay a lot more, and maybe maybe some of the rest of the public too. And so that we could see that. I mean, the the sort of you'll probably get you know more deregulation under Trump. You'll get more conservative judges if you like what conservative judges have been doing in recent years. You'll get more of that if you don't like it. You'll get you know less of that. And so there's there's that. I mean, on foreign policy. I think on Israel, you're probably going to see some kind of Middle East. You're going to see a sort of a continuation of the Biden presidency. I think with Trump, I mean, Trump is just very, very pro-Israel. And I think the US is just going to go all in on Israel like they did during Trump's first term. So that's going to be a major difference. The Ukraine thing is interesting because Trump is surrounded by hawks in his party. His instincts are to cut off Ukraine and not care about what happens to them. So which which side sort of gets its way is going to be I guess a kind of an open an open question. I think that you know the the the Trump thing if you want entertainment if you just want to be entertained I mean something like 43 out of 46 of people he appointed like with you know for his cabinet like are not supporting him this time or like actively opposed to him and he noticed this and he's just gonna appoint people who are just gonna. Do what he wants. And this is going to create tension within the system because he's going to be increasingly senile but increasingly sure, like, of himself and, like, what he's going to be doing in the government. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be sort of crazy. I mean, you remember the first Trump administration, it was one scandal after another. Um, we're gonna get— we're gonna get— it's gonna be more of that again. I think he probably has a historically bad midterm. You know, first-term president— presidents always have a bad midterm after being elected. He's going to be no exception to that. I mean, you know, they did poorly in 2018 after Trump, and they've been doing poorly in midterm elections since Trump. So he's going to have a lot of sort of checks on his power. And his, you know, his unpopularity is going to trickle down to the rest of the ticket. And so, yeah, I might write about this. You know, he's going to be checked within the government. I don't think necessarily, like some people say, oh, wokeness will pop back up. Like we'll go back to 2019, 2020. money if Trump is elected again. I, I don't believe that. I think there's been a kind of burnout. I don't think that people can maintain sort of the level of frenzy, uh, we've had for like, you know, I think that just burned out anyway. I mean, I think it burned to 2021, 2022, uh, 2025, 2026. I think people are just going to sort of be over the Trump show. And he's got some kind of, you know, this kind of like Joe Rogan slash, you know, Theo Von sort of male influencer space where Trump is a little bit cool. I mean, he's not cool. Like, you know, it's not like the young, like hip thing to be, but like in certain subcultures he is. So it's not like this clear thing where like everyone elite and everyone young and everyone cool is, is anti-Trump. Some of them are pro-Trump. And so like, you don't have this sort of unified larger culture, this unified sort of youth culture and elite culture that is tilted against Trump. So I think, I think either way, politics becomes a less central part of our lives. You know, I think that that's That's probably a good thing and a reason to be optimistic.

Yeah, for sure. I want to focus on foreign policy for a second. It's my understanding that John Mearsheimer believes that on Ukraine-Russia, we helped instigate and accelerate that conflict more than it should have been. And if we had acted differently, a lot could have been prevented. And that also in the Israel sort of October 7th, et cetera. That's, you know, I think he believes that we are almost compromised in our ability to get to sort of correctly ascertain what we should do, because I think he believes Jews have too much like power in the U.S. government or something, or foreign policy establishment or something.

Or I don't think he puts it like that, but you can.

Yeah. Okay. So how would you add in his, the characterization of his view and how do you respond to it?

Yeah. I mean, I took a class with Mearsheimer back at the University of Chicago. I took a graduate course in great power. Politics, and I think some of his some of his critiques of the of the policy in Ukraine are are sensible. I mean, I've seen you know I've seen I've read and listened to interviews with people who were in the government, and you know they thought they knew Trump. They knew Putin was going to invade in early 2022, and you know they they for by all accounts they never took NATO off. Like you just try it. Just say NATO, you know, NATO is off the table, right? Maybe Putin invades anyway, maybe. But it was worth, it was worth a try. And they never tried it. They were connected. They were attached to this moral vision, like Putin has no right to tell Ukraine what kind of alliances it makes, which is, which is right, which is morally, you know, correct. I think that a lot of people have discomfort with sort of Mearsheimer and a lot of these other people who are more anti-interventionist is they think that they are too almost, if not rooting for the Russians, creating this kind of moral equivalence. Oh, US wants Ukraine to be like a free country and decide. Russia wants to just dominate it forever. Well, it's interests. Let's, you know, we each have our own sort of ideas. And I think most people are uncomfortable with that. And they don't think that's sort of a morally legitimate position to take in the world. And Mearsheimer will do— Mearsheimer will do this thing where he will be like, I'm a realist, you know, what does your morals have anything to do with it? Can do with it. But then he'll talk about, you know, what Israel is doing to Gaza and suddenly you realize, oh wait, this guy has like a moral sense too, right? He just has like, you know, if something supports his sort of theories or vision of the way the world works, you know, he'll, he'll use moralistic arguments. So like, I'm sure he would say that, you know, what's happening in Gaza is a disgrace. And, you know, we've, we've abetted something terrible over there. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's legit, there's legitimate point he makes about the run-up. To the war in Ukraine, I don't think that it necessarily follows that we do nothing now because there's a war going on and Ukraine is defending itself. And, you know, what, you know, you can, you can negotiate something, but I think Ukraine, it's gonna always— it's always going to be negotiating from a certain position, and it can negotiate from a position of strength or it can negotiate from a position of weakness. And if the US is not going to provide it with arms and it's not going to provide with aid, no matter where the front line is, Ukraine will always be in a weaker position, and it'll always have to give up more. So I think you have to negotiate. But like, you know, ideally, you would both negotiate and support Ukraine to the hilt. And but people who, people who want to negotiate often don't want to, they want to cut off Ukraine, they just want basically Ukraine to submit, to give up. That's the way, that's the easiest way to end the war. So I don't think that that's a That's acceptable. On the Israel thing, you know, I'm just a very big believer in civilization over barbarism. I don't think these— I don't think, you know, I don't think, you know, Gaza, I mean, is a society organized around, you know, Israel left. They could have tried to build a real society. They either didn't want that to a large extent. They didn't want that or they were— they're under the control of Islamists who will create no opportunity for that. And Israel has to in the end defend itself. And it needs to in the end, it needs to work to remake Palestinian culture. And that doesn't mean they like go in and like run the schools or something. It means they just keep killing people until they do something different. And I think that that's, I think that's where the, you know, the thing needs to go. You see that the Biden administration, these Jake Sullivan and these types, and they're like, We need to work with these, you know, the Israelis need to work with Palestinians to have a political solution, a new government. And it's like Hamas is there. You're fighting them. You're going to bring in a Palestinian from the West Bank or anywhere. And you're going to say, this is the government. You know, they'll be killed the first day. There's just, there's literally nothing that you could do. There's nothing you can do. There's no political solution as long as Hamas Is there, right? And so, yeah, I mean, Israel needs to keep fighting. The U.S. needs to keep supporting Israel. I mean, there came out a Wall Street Journal story about the killing of Yahya Sinwar, and basically he was citing American humanitarian pressure on Israel for the you know for the idea that you know the Palestinians should hold out, right? This is this is their strategy. Their strategy is to hide hide civilians, rely on sort of humanitarian impulse coming out from the West to try to pressure Israel, and that just creates bad. That just makes sure the Islamists are always in power. They're always able to regroup for the next war, and eventually, you know, they could they potentially you know threaten Israel's existence. I don't think we could take Israel's existence indefinitely in the future for granted. I don't see Iran having much of an appetite for any kind of major escalation. They have these very sort of you know managed strikes on Israel. You know, they'll send all these missiles, and like you know a few of them one of them will hit or something, and they'll. They'll shoot all of them down, and then they'll send a message, you know, through a third party to the U.S. saying, "Okay, that's enough." And so they seem to just be, you know, doing enough to sort of try to save face as much as possible. And so whether, you know, whether Israel should strike, I don't know. You would have to like they would. I would need to know what information they have about like the nuclear program and where if Iran really wants a nuclear program or if they're going to go for it. And what if Israeli strikes can even stop that? I mean, that's very sort of, you need that specific information to, to make any kind of decision like that. But yeah, I think that like what the Trump administration proved was like, you can build a broad, broad coalition against Iran, right? The Sunni Arab states don't like Iran. They fear Iran. And between them and Israel, you could have a broad coalition. You could even make peace between the, the Israelis and many of the Arab states. And, you know, the, the, one of the motivations behind October 7th was to head that off, to head off any kind of Israeli-Saudi peace deal. And the people on the left might say, well, that's a good reason to give the Palestinians a state. I don't think a Palestinian state is possible. I have an article, you know, why Palestine can't deliver, can't deliver peace. And so you have to sort of get the Palestinian situation under control. That's the best you can do. And hopefully try to make peace in the region. Based on mutual self-interest in this broad anti-Iran coalition.

You wrote a post about why Americans should support Ukraine, and my TLDR of the post is this idea that people need enemies. Enemies are what galvanize people and bring out the best in ourselves in terms of preparing for being our best. And if you're going to have enemies, you might as well make them autocratic dictators like Putin. How would you edit that characterization?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's that's right. I mean, the article was called Why Americans Should Die with for Ukraine, which is sort of you know a little bit tongue in cheek. Has a very funny AI generated image that I'm very proud of that people can go can go look at, which makes the which makes the entire article. Yeah, you look at like American history and just reading a book. It's called *The Conservative Futurist*, and his name is James Pethakoukas. And basically, you know, he talks about sort of these. Cycles of, you know, this sort of cycles of American history about how America was really optimistic about the future. That was like the 1950s and maybe early 1960s. By late 1960s, 1970s, we become very pessimistic. 1990s, we become optimistic again. And I was thinking about like, you know, what is sort of the through line here? And I just realized that like the first wave of optimism was because we won World War II. The second wave of optimism optimism was because we won the Cold War. And if you don't have these things, sort of the memories, the memories kind of fade. And I think you can characterize sort of tribes in politics by who they make the enemy. So the left, it's the white heterosexist male, blah, blah, blah, patriarchy, all that. On the right, it really is just this kind of, you know, anti-elite, just hating liberals or foreigners to a large And these are, I think, are not healthy outlooks. I think they're just bad. I think they're just bad models in the world. I mean, you have— I listed like the political, you know, the political tribes and, you know, they're all who their enemies are. And right, Trump is an enemy of like the anti-Trump people and Trump is the hero and everyone against Trump and the deep state are the enemy in the pro-Trump tribe. And, you know, if you're going to have— if that's what we need, you know, I think the best thing to do is give people an enemy who actually deserves to be hated that is actually like a threat to them. And I think that's what we need. Evil, right? It's like Kim Jong Un, right? Putin, Xi Jinping. You know, these are these are bad guys. Doesn't mean we go we go to war with all of them today. But if you're going to pick between like the different enemies, I think that's like you know that's that's at least a righteous cause. And to the extent that people like have a desire to be part of history, I mean history is being made in like you know Ukraine when Ukraine is fighting Russia. I would say we take Israel's side. Some people would say you know. They're uncivilized that we should take the you know the Palestinian side of the case of humanity. It's a longer conversation, but I think we should be on the pro-Israel side. And so, you know, if you need that like meaning, if you need that enemy, channel into that. Don't channel it into I don't know like election workers in Atlanta who who you know they just took Rudy Giuliani lost a kind of defamation suit and he's giving them his like Mercedes Benz and he's given them his condo. These just like random. Black election workers from from Atlanta, and it's like you know this is what people are sort of into. It's just become so stupid and fundamentally unhealthy. So you know to the extent that you need an enemy, yeah, I think foreign autocrats you know play a great role. Like Iran, like you know they're not that tough. Like they're very evil and hateable, but like you can kill them and nothing happens. Maybe they're maybe that's a that's a good enemy to have.

Yeah, it's interesting. We have these sort of you know natural instincts to to outcast the other, blame the other. Maybe we've overcorrected too much on going back to crime where people are sort of, lead human capitalists, probably afraid to call out sort of Black criminals because of our history around that in a way that leads us to sort of not solve the problem. But maybe you think we're the opposite on immigration where we're too likely to call out people or think negatively of people who come here legally or illegally. And I guess I'm curious what you think about in Europe. There, there are immigration challenges of, you know, the Muslim population coming sort of en masse in certain places. Do you think, you know, they're, they will correct it too much, like, like we've done with Black criminals? Or do you think they are sort of doing this, making the same mistakes that Americans are making when they're blaming, you know, immigration for their problems?

Yeah, I think in the case of Europe, I think there's, there's a more legitimate concern. So I did a big piece on immigrant crime, and immigrant crime is not a problem the United States. It's actually lower. Second generation of Hispanics, a little bit higher, but God, just worrying that like a group is going to be 10% more criminal one generation in the future is not something like the biggest, you know, possible thing you should be, you should be worried about. You look at Europe and like you look at like to this extent we have statistics on like North Africans and Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, crime rate, it's like 7, 8 times. I mean, it's just, it's just something like It's just an incredible gap. And a lot of these Muslim populations, they're hostile to the broader population. Part of it is the European labor market, which I think doesn't do a good job of facilitating integration. And so Europe, I think, has different immigration challenges. I haven't been keeping up that much with it. It seems to me in the case of Germany, it seems to me like they've really actually reduced immigration. It was the, the Merkel thing was, seems like it was a kind of like one-time flood that seems to not have been continuing. Although I haven't looked, I haven't looked too closely in the data, but a lot of these cases are like the, you know, the French guest workers, they came in like a wave and the Germans, they had, you know, they had this Syrian and these Afghan refugees that came in this wave. And so, yeah, it produces other challenges. I think Europe has these changing demographics and in the context of like just a very stagnant society. The Economist's latest issue is just very good on the strength of American economy compared to Europe. And you look at like the top companies in America, they're like Nvidia and Apple. And you look at Europe and they're like Nestlé and like Louis Vuitton. I mean, like 2 of the top 5. And it's like, this is not the future. Like these just, you know, chocolate and handbags. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the combination of changing demographics and just like a A society that's sort of turned against progress. I mean, it's like not just like one policy. I mean, the German stuff is insane. I mean, they shut down their nuclear power at the exact same time. You know, they lost the access of the gas to Russia, and their economy is actually supposed to shrink this year, right? Not not even grow. You know, zero point one percent. It's it's it's gonna it's gonna shrink while Russia, by the way, is is growing something like three four three four percent. And so yeah, this seems like a cultural rot. I mean, there seems just to be these forces that are just very, very anti-progress. And I don't know. I mean, it just might be a cultural problem at this point.

Speaking of demographics, you wrote about why East Asia has low fertility. Can you share your findings there? And does it portend anything for why we're having low fertility all over the world?

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing about East Asians, I mean, there's, they are, I think one thing that you can explain East Asians that I think covers a lot of ground and like actually just explains like tons and tons of data is that they are just outliers, human outliers on conformity. And East Asia, I'm talking about Japan, Korea, China mainly. And what does that mean? Rock bottom crime rates, rock bottom drug use, right? Like there are, I have all these charts of like different behaviors that are sort of proxies for risk-taking. And then like, you know, they're very smart and they have like a lot of patents and like these companies like Like Samsung and Sony and so forth. But like, you know, as far as like overall rates of entrepreneurship, not very high. And these, you know, these companies are just established corporations that people go to and they work, you know, they can do math and science, but they could, they, you know, they sit at these corporations for the rest of, you know, for the rest of their lives and their entire careers. And so fertility, I think, is sort of like that. It's sort of interesting. I mean, Japan, look at their TFR, they have just people who like babies produced to To married couples, I think it's about like equal to the U.S. If you just count married, if you don't count like out-of-wedlock births, because they have zero out-of-wedlock births, right? And the U.S. is like 30 or 40% out-of-wedlock births, and that makes up the difference between them and us. Now Korea is even lower. Korea, you know, it's like 0.7. So like even if you just look at look at married, but these these these states have no out-of-wedlock births, you know, at all. It's one two percent. And so for you know fertility is sort of a It's sort of non—it's sort of a nonconformist thing to do. Like in America, in the West, a lot of the people who have a lot of kids are nonconformists to society. They're—they're—you know—they're these evangelical Christians, or they're these Catholic trads, or they're Elon Musk impregnating—you know—every woman who comes who comes by him, right? There's just some kind of like you know unusual kind of kind of person or or community. And so they don't have this. And this is why, like I looked at some historical data, which is very. Which is that like these East Asian countries, they had the highest marriage rates and the you know the highest rates of women living with a partner. You know, in like the 1950s and 1960s, if you go back that far, and now they're like the lowest. And so what happened was when the conformist thing was to get married and have a lot of kids, they they tended to do that. And now when the sort of countercultural thing is to have a lot of kids, now they have rock bottom fertility. So I think Korean I mean Korean. East Asian conformity goes a long way to explaining things. Because these are things that require— I say when there's not a script, they tend to founder. East Asians are very good at going to school and graduating with a STEM degree and going to work for a corporation. Not so good at necessarily, given level of education and intelligence, going off to starting a company and doing their own thing. Although some people do that, obviously. And then it's the same thing with sort of, you know, when, when, when there's a kind of like standard script of how you date and how you meet people and like it's arranged marriage or it's very formalized, they will do that. When it's like find a partner and settle down and have kids, that's, there seems to be a lot more trouble with that. And well, what that implies for the West. Yeah. I don't know. I think they just, I don't know if it really necessarily applies much for those because we were so culturally distant. We're all sort of going in the same direction. We all have the same problems. They're just sort of an outlier. And explaining why they're such an outlier, I thought was an interesting question, which is why I wrote about it.

And it relates to another post you wrote about, which goes by the title of, Do We Need Sports Betting to Get to Mars? From which I took this idea of if you want the benefits that come with high-variance culture, you also have to accept the negatives too. For people to think that they can be the next Elon Musk, they have to be able to fall flat on their face and get addicted to opioids or something. Or maybe in order to get Elon Musk, we need Cat Tern.

Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk and Cat Tern, you're right. I mean, they would shut down Elon Musk and the sort of the safetyists would shut down Elon Musk and they would shut down Cat Tern. And do we want to remove both of their voices from the public square? That's the question. Yeah. I think this kind of high-variance culture is what have in America. Like we have like the most billionaires and the big corporations and the most murders and people. And some people, you know, people will say, this is ridiculous, you moron. You know, of course you could ban sports betting and you could crack down on the murder rate. And like, you know, you can still have like pro-business policies that lead to economic growth. That's, that's true. You know, that, that sounds true. At the same time, there is just sort of a vibe of society. Like, do we as a society, are we the kind of people who get into other people's businesses and tell them to stop doing things that are bad for them? Or bad for even for society, or do we just say go for it? Do we have a default for freedom? And like maybe ideally we'd get things like perfectly correct, but that's hard to do, right? It's just just society is sort of governed by vibes, and so if we have to pick vibes, like maybe it's not a coincidence that we have all these terrible outcomes, but all these great outcomes at the same same with wokeness too, right?

You know, trans or excessive sort of you know first principles thinking on gender race. You know, is also what it maybe enables for some people thinking.

And if you look at like the anti-wokeness, you know, wokeness takes over the world. You listen to the anti-woke in Europe. They're, they're using the exact same memes from, you know, Fox News and Trump. Right. And, you know, so it's like, yeah, we have all the variants. We have the, this thing and we have the resistance to this, you know, big thing that's taking over the world. You know, this third world socialists and, you know, they're, you know, they're kidding. They're, they're, they're getting their ideas from the, from the West. And so are, you know, Bukele and. You know, Castro is getting ideas from the West. Castro is dead, but, you know, Latin American leftists. And then Bukele and like Milei. Milei is, you know, reading Ludwig von Mises and these, you know, these, these radical libertarians and like influencing his policy. So yeah, we're the, we're the sort of, we're the fount of like all the, you know, basically everything. I don't want to say everything important happened in the world, but a lot that's important is happening in the world.

Maybe closing on this idea of elite human capital, I'm curious where you differ with With Burnham, um, in this, who also had this idea of sort of, you know, an oligarchy or, or technocracy. You wrote a blog post titled Why Burnham Is Wrong About Everything. So—

Yeah. Well, why Burnham? Did I, did I write Why Burnham Was Wrong? I was maybe a little bit too tough. Maybe that was just a, that was too punchy of a, of a headline. I, I don't remember the exact, the exact title. That sounds like something I could have written, but I'm not, I'm not sure. Yeah, I do remember the article though. Yeah. Burnham is not a thinker who focuses much on psychology or like differences between individuals. There's systems in Burnham. There's, you know, there's the businessman, there is the elite, you know, there's the managerial elite, and they're sort of struggling for power in these class struggles. It's sort of a Marxist kind of philosophy like that, where humans are sort of treated in, you know, interchangeably. My, my worldview is like heavy on human psychology and heavy on sort of differences between groups and sort of the norms and the culture that they, that they develop, right? And so Burnham, I, you know, I think that like this thing, this river versus village or this tech right versus establishment kind of thing that we're seeing, it really doesn't fit into that because Burnham would have predicted by now, 2024, my God, you know, the New Dealers or, you know, their descendants had totally crushed the private opposition. We don't see that. We see Elon Musk, one man can buy Twitter and totally change the conversation, right? So I think that there's, there's, you know, Burnham's, there are Burnham predictions, which I think he didn't necessarily get right. And then there's, I think, the lack of sort of psychology in the, in his theories that are, that are a weakness.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything we haven't covered that you think is important to, to get into as, as we're, you know, just going over some of the, the main ideas that you've had in the past few months?

Not really. I mean, everything that pops into my head, you'll find it on Twitter or you'll find it on On Substack, yeah, we're gonna have an election soon. I'm very excited. It's fun. I have no idea. I never had an election where I had such little idea of what was going to happen. I would not be surprised if Trump won by five. I wouldn't be surprised if Kamala won by five. I'd be a little bit more surprised if Kamala won by five, but I wouldn't be that shocked. You know, we had radical the polls radically underestimating Trump the two times he ran, but we had had the polls underestimating Democrats since the Dobbs decision. So now we have like, it's like these two like principles that like one has to be right and wrong. Is it the Dobbs? Is it the, is it the sort of the, the realignment that's going to make these, all these high, these high propensity voters come out? Will the low propensity voters that like Trump, will they come out or will like the Trump tsunami come in? And the polls show them, you know, exactly tied in pretty much every swing state. And there are reasons it can go in either direction. So I just want everyone to know that I'm very excited. I just, I enjoy myself. I enjoy. Watching this stuff. I don't have as much sort of emotional investment as a lot of people do. And other people, to the extent you can, just sort of enjoy the show.

Well, on that note, are you worried about the Biden judges as it affects civil rights laws, wealth taxes, regulatory power, death penalty? A mutual friend of ours said maybe you're underrating the potential harm or potential risk of enabling these judges.

Oh no, I think, I think it's bad policies. I mean, I've written about the kind of bad policies that will— I think some of our friends think that like Democrats are going to lock them all up or something like that. I think that they tend to be hysterical. But like, just like getting the, you know, anti-growth policies— like, do I worry about them shutting down free speech? Like, I feel pretty secure with Substack and with Elon owning Twitter. I feel pretty secure on that. There'll be certain cases, maybe the White House pressures This or that. I don't think they're gonna implement some kind of you know reign of terror on us. But yeah, I think a lot of the you know I think they're gonna have bad anti-growth policies, and that's a negative and reason to be you know hesitant about supporting Democrats.

Of course, is it fair to say that basically you know Elon Musk thinks that Kamala winning is sort of the end of the end of civilization, and Noah Smith thinks Trump winning you know protects you know risks the end of our democracy? That yours Kind of like it won't be that bad either way, basically.

Yeah, I mean, one election is not you know it's it's it's unlikely. I mean, everyone thinks that in an election year. I I think that they're they're right. I think the Noah Smith types and are right about Trump's intentions. They're as bad as can possibly be. But you know, I think that things will mostly things will mostly hold, and he's too you know the common reasons he's too stupid and scatterbrained. to, to follow through on all that much. And it's going to get, you know, he's declining over time. He's declining right before, right before our eyes. I don't even understand sort of the Elon Musk, this will be the last. I sort of think that's just hype and election year propaganda. This will be the last election ever. They're going to legalize all the immigrants. And then like within one election cycle, there will be so many of them. There will be no swing states left. This is what, this is what Elon says. Yeah. I mean, it's hard for me to even like understand, like they're not, first of all, they're not going to legalize all the immigrants that you need Congress. The Republicans are going to have the Senate. And so he can't, like, she can't unilaterally, like, legalize everyone. They take some while to get, like, registered and involved in politics once they are legalized. And so, and, you know, Hispanics often vote, you know, either we'll see, we'll see what Trump gets, but, you know, they sometimes vote Republican. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I think the threat of the left is something like Europe. I don't think it's reign of terror. I don't think it's Stalin or Pol Pot. You know, I think it's the, you know, I think it's these sort of anti-growth neurotic interest group, labor unions, you know, public sector controlled society. And that's a bad enough outcome. I mean, I think that that's something that's worth fighting to avoid.

You don't buy the sort of argument some people make that at age of 78, Trump has, you know, undergone a lot of spiritual growth and, you know, is just a more magnanimous and high integrity person than he used to be. I'm just kidding.

You just listen to him. Yeah, you could really see that in his videos, you know, talking about Arnold Palmer's junk and all that stuff. Yeah, he seems very, very, seems to have matured a lot.

Well, on that note, the next time we chat, we will have a new president in office and we'll talk about what that means. Richard, thanks so much for coming to the podcast. Always a pleasure.

Yeah, thank you, Erik.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg. is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution.

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