How Trump and Elon Could Rebuild the US Government | Samo Burja

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today on Upstream, we're releasing a conversation I had with Sam Oburia on Turpentine Show: Live Players, unpacking the results of the presidential election. We discussed how this election is different from previous ones, demographic shifts, how the politics of tech have changed, and more. Please enjoy.

Hello, Samo.

Hey, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Excited to, excited to be chatting with you. Timely. First off, just the election results themselves. Was that a surprise for you? Were you predicting? You know, I thought Trump was going to win, but I didn't think it would be sort of this big of a landslide.

Well, I think that people have been consistently underestimating the number of people who basically Would vote for Trump, but would not say so. The social desirability bias is very strong, where someone that's not a conventional politician, you know, usually their support is undercounted. However, it might just be even the completely wrong lens to think of this in terms of electioneering, in statistics, or almost a sabermetrics approach, right? Nate Silver's, you know, simulations when you. know, he ran all those simulations and it came perfectly 50/50. I don't believe that. That's propaganda. And that's sort of admitting that he gives up on the prediction game. Every single election, the rules of the game are renegotiated. It's not just the same game of basketball or baseball or chess or Go that is played over and over again. The parameters, honestly, of the country change slightly. The parameters of what's constitutional, the parameters of what's legal, The parameters of what's appropriate, the parameters of what can and cannot be said culturally, these all shift. So I think that, you know, arguably when this works well, this is an aid to American dynamism. It's an opportunity for live players to sort of on, you know, practically live, renegotiate, practically live TV, renegotiate America's social contract on the fly. When it doesn't work very well, it's just this sort of like big distraction from the more fundamental and structural issues. So I would say that the strongest, you know, the strongest reason I'm not surprised is that while there were interesting moves coming out of the Biden administration in terms of their branding or marketing or electioneering, even a year ago, right? Do you remember the sort of Dark Brandon memes? Like those were quite popular. And I think those were basically things that broke script. They showed an internet native literacy. And then you could argue maybe that the Kamala thing, the brat thing was similar, but I just didn't see it.

Yeah, it didn't stick. It felt manufactured.

It felt like very classical mass media, right? It was like a synchronized chorus of the original legacy mass media. Saying vote for Kamala. It was very strong. It changed the vibe a little bit for about 2 or 3 weeks. It seemed that Kamala was suddenly a very strong candidate, but then it wore off. They didn't have more than that exact strong endorsement script, right? And they couldn't go off it. And then whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, clearly he's a live player. Elon Musk is a live player. And, you know, if they're working together, that's like ignoring all the other interesting people that were brought into the mix, like RFK and Tulsi, and, you know, in some small way at the end, Joe Rogan. Do I think— I think Joe Rogan's role is overstated because he was very slow with his endorsement, right? His, his late— the lateness of his endorsement was notable. He was probably actually trying to get the Kamala interview, would be my read from afar, and he might have thought he would get it, uh, up until the moment he didn't. So I think this is sort of like a victory of like online media. It's like a win for X. It's a win for the podcasting world. And I think it is also just a demonstration that, you know, if you're, if you're going up against a live player, you, you need one on your side too. And the Democratic Party mostly selects against them, unfortunately.

If you can't sit down for an interview because you're, you know, you're worried that you won't have something good to say, or you'll say the wrong thing. You know, you can't really be a live player if you can't even, you know, come, come to play.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if it's a hostile interviewer, you might not do it, but you will do something else. And, you know, that actually poses an interesting question. Where is the, where's the left-wing culture? Where is progressive, you know, the progressive version of a podcast that could interview them? Like The View? Like that's dated, right? Like that's dated by, at this point, decades. It's probably like 15 years dated, 10 years dated in terms of format. And I think that, you know, perhaps media saturation is not even the best way how we should select presidents or heads of state. But it seems to be how we operate. So you have to optimize for that and you have to move and change with the media landscape. Like there are a few politicians that do. The social media game well on the left. You know, I think—

AOC?

Yeah, everyone thinks of AOC. Let's put it this way. I think an AOC-Gavin Newsom ticket would just win 4 years from now if Gavin Newsom uses the time to sort of clean up California and runs as a tough-on-crime Democrat. And to be a tough-on-crime Democrat, you would kind of have to be a live player because you have to walk back this like massive media operation that was BLM. You have to walk all of that back, defund the police, et cetera, et cetera. Right? All of that is now four years in the past. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but four years from now, the voters will have totally forgotten about BLM, and they'll see no contradiction. You know, if I was a smart Democratic Party operative, and I was you know a bit of a live player, I would you know I'd say, you know it's un-American to see say. That she cleaned up San Francisco. I cleaned up San Francisco for the Pacific meeting, and I could do it because I had federal funding. And you know, once I'm president of America, we're going to have all our cities are going to be clean. We're going to use federal powers to clean up all our cities. Like that's how you can reframe stuff like that. But it requires you to anger some of your ideological ostensible allies. Like I'm talking here, like if I was from the Dem. Left perspective, but you know what? They're still going to vote for you. What else they're going to do? Like this is a formula that you see in French politics all the time, right? You have a left candidate, and then up until the election they go to the line of being very right, and then the left still votes for them because the alternative has been declared to be like a fascist. I mean, they had that going for them. They had declared Trump to be a fascist, so. Why did they stay so much on that side? Why did they not go in new media strategies? Why did they pick Kamala and not Gavin Newsom? Even now, Gavin Newsom would not be the best candidate because he, he would have too little time, right? The very fact that there was a power struggle in the Biden administration and that the campaign became, in my opinion, less credible, less interesting, less like ideologically unambiguous. If Kamala had run as Cop Kamala, that would have really thrown a wrench. That would have really thrown a wrench in the Dem campaign.

Yeah.

Or had, or had instead this folksy white guy, would you have Shark Gavin Newsom be your VP? Like Gavin Newsom could have probably defeated JD. Like JD is super, you know, he's a smart guy, very good at debate, has improved his media presence massively. But Gavin just has so many years of experience as a politician, right?

Yeah, it is interesting. You know, the critique people have on the Republicans, or some people make on the left, is that it's a cult of personality. But the critique made on the, on the, about the left is that it's, it's machine. It's a, you know, you could just replace, you know, Kamala for Biden and, you know.

And they think this doesn't matter, right? It, I think it mattered to the voters. I think Biden would have gotten more votes.

People vote for people.

Yep.

You know, we're in social media. We're in the era of personality. Like, you gotta break, you know, Obama was a personality, right?

Exactly.

Bill Clinton was a personality. Exactly.

Yeah. I liked Shapiro. I thought, I thought he was pretty impressive. It would be interesting to see, you know, Bernie was a personality, right? Like Bernie really galvanized people. And so, you know, it'll be interesting to see what the Democrat rebound strategy is, both from a sort of personality perspective, you know, rhetoric perspective, from a policy perspective. I wonder if they go back to more protect— protectionist on immigration, like, like Bernie was to some degree. I wonder if this is the end, you know, for, of wokeness, at least for a while. It feels like this is, you know, a strong vote against it. I mean, they lost basically in every single demographic or almost every demographic, right?

I would say that on the question of immigration, this might cause them to let off on it. A little bit because it didn't work well enough for them as a strategy. The sort of observation that this is a way to import voters and escape democratic accountability, like this is universal in the Western world. You don't actually have to please your citizens. You can just create new citizens that are already pleased with you because they got to come in. So you are freed from the burden of actually needing to govern well, and you can repackage any policy failures, policy success, and And the new voters like sort of back it up with their votes. And even if the new voters tire of you, that's okay. There's like an infinite supply of them, at least until we see a planetary demographic crunch, which we will sometime late in the 21st century. For now, we're still reaping sort of these political consequences of the 20th century population explosion, which probably continued in much of the world until like. 2010, 2012, like the poor world still used to have lots of babies in the 2010s. That's changed in the 2020s, as we discussed on other episodes. So I think the politics of immigration are going to change fundamentally regardless of what the Democratic Party does. Now, I think that notably the Hispanic vote went much more for Trump than for any US president so far, like in the last 30 years, I think much more so than for George W. Bush, right? Where the argument was like, you know, compassionate conservatism, et cetera, et cetera, uh, 20 years ago. So the statistics at least seem to suggest that, you know, maybe the open borders thing is like not even as good as for the Democratic Party as they thought it was. So, so because of that, they might go back to like a bit more Restrictionism, but honestly, I think what they're going to emphasize is just increasing the number of legal immigrants. And here's the reason why: I think that despite everything, the educated and well-off classes in the United States are Democratic Party voters. So on the you know actually while probably getting educated people is good for the country, you know maybe it's the educated voters. Or, you know, my right-wing friends would say the brainwashed voters, the reliable ones. Maybe you want people who studied and had degrees, you know, maybe studied in Europe or studied in like prestigious Indian universities or studied in Chinese universities. And you want them to come in and you want them to come to the blue cities and to some of the other cities as well. I think the reason the, the reason why I think the tough on crime Democratic Party approach could work is because America is still undergoing urbanization. So the macro trend favors whichever party answers questions about what to do in an urban context. And usually, you know, the Republicans have some policies that are good in this space, but they don't tend to want to make cities livable, right? They're not friends of things like public transport, city parks, investing in the, in the city's airport, from the municipal budget, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of the only deep weakness the Democrats— Democratic Party has is that the cities are just dirty and unpleasant and sometimes dangerous to live in. And that they basically, you know, directionally, I'm not talking here about the absolute crime rate, but directionally voting for them results in more crime. Right. It might be that for other reasons the crime is dropping anyway, such as like aging or Or maybe, you know, drops in testosterone. Maybe it's just like we're, we're habituating to a new equilibrium that's different than the more violent equilibrium of a few centuries ago. And these cultural changes are baked in no matter who is president. Like, there's still all sorts of reasons that overall crime might be dropping. But I think directionally, people correctly sense that, you know, if they want storefronts to not be smashed in, the Democratic Party will not reliably do that. a city like San Francisco where I live.

Yeah. What did you think about sort of the theory that Elon was sort of promoting that the left was trying to move illegals to swing states and then, you know, grant amnesty so that they would have sort of a permanent, you know, majority? Is there any credence to, is this even plausible or is this kind of—

I think it's very plausible. I think it's very plausible because we have leaked documents from Britain's Labour Party in the early 2000s. Under the Blair administration, that sort of had literally documents with lines like we're going to rub the right's nose in diversity, right? And that the increase in immigration results in more Labour voters. So this is discussed explicitly, not implicitly. And I don't know if you do remember hearing about the large number of advisors from the Labour Party that were brought in for the U.S. election. So. Even if we argue that the Democratic Party has no such document, which is really strange because it's brought up in speeches, right? Like diversity and progressivism are considered almost like the same thing. It's not just because a diverse multicultural society is supposed to be the end state of a more enlightened progressive society. It's also because the diversity itself is a means to it, right? That's where you hear this like, know, anti-white male, sometimes anti-white rhetoric pretty directly. It's because the view is that, okay, if you're a good progressive of any background, you know, white American, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, you actually want to diversify the country because you consider that in aggregate, the white voters are a problem. And I think this is, you know, just plainly restating this, even though it's said in plain language and speeches and shows and so on. I think that would have been extremely risky even 8 years ago. And I think that Elon did change norms back to what, what let's say were probably pre-2012 norms of speech online. I think it's a reversion to that. It's not quite as free as the internet of like the very early 2000s and 1990s, just because it's bigger, it matters more, but it seems like about as free as 2013. And again, you socially, it still feels risky. It just still feels risky. And, you know, talking about politics plainly, I think is very important in a society if it can, if it, if it can have the ability to reflect on itself. Insofar as you give that up, you're, you're kind of giving up the advantages, the theoretical advantages of a free society over an autocratic one.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, to that end, Elon's activity on Twitter, what he did, I mean, not just buying X, but of course his sort of activism, you know, in this election, he presented a path where center-right or people who have right sympathies but want to be in good standing in their, you know, careers and families could support Trump and say, yeah, of course, I don't agree with everything Trump says, or I don't think he's the most moral person in the world, but Elon is going to have some influence in this administration. This is going to be incredible. This is going to be different than the first term because Elon signals competence, signals eliteness, signals pro-tech optimism. And it also forced the Democrats to be sort of anti, you know, or come off as anti that. And, you know, there are, I mean, so many own goals or, you know, mistakes in terms of their targeting of crypto.

I mean, partially the Democratic Party had just been attacking tech for a while, even when tech was like really solidly on their side. Like 2016, tech was very strongly on the Hillary Clinton side. It wasn't on the Trump side. Even 2020, there were only a few dissident voices like, okay, 2016, It's literally just Peter Thiel. 2020, just like a little bit of a podcaster. Like, I'm not quite enthusiastic about this, like, like circle. And by 2024, it's like, it's just look at the big corporate holdouts. It's like, if you're at Google, if you're at Microsoft, if you're at OpenAI, then you tend to be, or, you know, you tend to be more in that way. And almost everywhere else, if you look at like defense tech, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the like default now is something vaguely Republican coded, but it's definitely patriotism coded. And that's like a world of difference from 2008, right? Where Google engineers would quit in resignation at the thought of doing some work for the U.S. defense establishment.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. Palmer Luckey and Founders Fund really changed the end pounds here. It's a, you know, sort of, they changed the narrative on that. I remember when Anduril was raising money for their seed round and it was too controversial for our firm at the time to invest in many other firms. And it's just crazy to think about that because it was positioned as the border wall company, or at least that's how people thought about it.

Now it's important to remember that, right? It's important to remember that how the feeling of acceptable speech shifts, because I think one of the biggest ways in which we lose our own recollection, like as individuals, our own ability to navigate the political world is that we, for the sake of fitting in, forget what we felt safe or not safe to say. We always want to flatter ourselves. Oh, I was always free. I was never quiet. I was never cowardly. I never felt pressure. I certainly never buckled under pressure. But those are precisely the things that eliminate understanding of political future, because if you don't know the political past in your own life let alone, you know, actually reading a wide variety of sources to have something beyond your lifetime that's like historical ground. How in the world do you know? How in the world do you even know what could happen next, right? And so I think it's like, it's important that you bring up an example such as you just did about what was not okay to do in the Valley a few short years back.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

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I, I do want to get into the tech right, but before, so before that, I just want to talk about the left for a second because, you know, we didn't see riots last night, or at least as many as I, I would've expected. There were, you know, in 2016, you know, the resistance emerged right away and people were losing their, their, their minds. And even in 2020, it felt existential. It felt last night, like, relative to 2016, 2020, that they kind of just like conceded or just kind of like, where is that energy, the anti-Trump energy that seemed existential for so many people? Did those people just get older and grow out of activism? Did, is it just that the social media landscape changed so that now they're just crying alone on Threads and Bluesky or?

I think Twitter shifting and changing hands was a big deal. But also, you know, I don't know, maybe Alex Soros is much less strategic than George Soros was. So I think some of the funding probably just got stolen where it used to go pretty efficiently towards operations like this. At the end of the day, maybe Maybe there are just elements of the U.S., like civil service or intelligence community, that at the end of the day decided, you know what? The previous Trump administration wasn't that bad for U.S. interests. I think in 2016, it was like, oh no! This might just crash the American empire. This might just crash the world order. Right? That was just discussed in in publications, and I believe people believed this behind closed doors. And I think today it's sort of like, well. Maybe Trump will like negotiate something with Putin that's not quite a Russian victory in Ukraine, but certainly not a Russian defeat. And maybe it's good that we do a few things economically. And you know, maybe we're not actually ready for war with China just yet. So you know, it's it's sort of like perhaps the sort of geopolitical establishment itself. Has recognized some of the limits. Not to say it's not an extremely strong position, but some of the limits of the U.S. positioning. And I think the foreign policy explanations are underrated in where do the civil servants stand? Because one of the you know one of the only things you can sort of argue if you're working in government to yourself is that this is disastrous and against national interest. And this guy sure might be the president, but we're going to do our best to get away with doing what's actually good for the country. And if you don't quite believe that as strongly, and if you feel like maybe this sort of foreign policy is sensible and like Trump kind of moderated it and like, you know, in a way our European allies seem less useful than they did in 2016, right? In 2016, any sort of NATO skepticism was like, you know, this immediately like seemed an awful thing, but Europe in 2016 also just seemed richer. And more relevant, and there seemed to be stronger democratic norms or something. It seemed like decorum itself is important, but, you know, it, it turned out there was no great tyranny from 2016 to 2020. So the election, in fact, is not existential. This is not regime change. And by the way, yeah, but, but Erik, and this goes to the other way. It's not regime change, but I don't, I'm not convinced it's going to be reform either. To my friends who are very optimistic, I'm just sort of like, well, you know, I have, you know, never bet, the Peter Thiel line, never bet against Elon. However, you know, I think the Hydra of bureaucracy for a major government requires decades of the lives of even very competent statesmen. To really clear out, America is not Argentina, right? Argentina is basically one city, and Malay is a live player, sure, and Malay is making decent progress. But in the U.S., like you can't actually—I don't think it's possible to split your attention between running several vast companies and clearing out more than let's see like one government bureau, which would be a great achievement. So so if they let Elon. change Department of Energy and, you know, they go boldly to Mars, that already is a massive political win. That's already a great political success. That's like good for the country, right? Like if NASA embarks to go to Mars and they hire SpaceX to do it, you know, if one were cynical, you could also say that's a corporate handout, but who cares if the rockets go to Mars, right? I don't care as long as they work, right? Like my, my core problem with Boeing was never that it's cushy. With the government. My problem is that their planes and rockets stopped working, right? Like they're stranding astronauts in low Earth orbit and flights getting delayed and flights endangering passengers.

Yeah, totally.

So, so, so, so that's kind of like my skepticism. Maybe the civil service correctly perceives that Elon plus Trump plus RFK are not an existential threat to them. But in 2016, they were worried they might be. Though back then it wasn't Elon plus Trump, it was just Trump plus, I guess, Bannon. Bannon was singled out. As the mastermind for a little bit before that collaboration broke down.

And so what's the failure case here that despite Elon and co.'s best efforts, the system is just so permanent, so sclerotic, so difficult to maneuver that they either lose interest or just can't, can't get everything, not to mention just internal implosion. You know, Trump is not the paragon of, you know, stability or reliability.

I don't know. I sort of feel like I don't expect Trump to, like, implode. I think he's been— he seems awfully serene since the assassination.

Yeah.

Right? He seems like— I'm not gonna say quieter, but, like, dare I say wiser or something?

Yeah. I mean, he's forgiving his enemies, you know, Megyn Kelly. Sorry. Oh, yeah. It's, it's, it is pretty fascinating.

It's very different than 2016 Trump.

Oh, yeah. Totally. I mean, He does say crazy things on Truth Social, but the benefit of that is that they're seen less on Twitter. So even the mistakes that he is making aren't amplified as much as they, and we're also, there's more used to it at this point. That's, yeah, it's fascinating.

I mean, look, I think people on the American, let's call it broadly the American right, underestimate institutional power. What they want to do is to shrink government, you know, so when libertarians come in power, the first thing they always do is like You know, at least they give up all the power the position has because that moves society closer to the libertarian direction. But in the long run, that means that, like, you know, every time the left wins power, it builds some institutional momentum. Every time, see, a more libertarian option wins power, it at best slows down the growth of this apparatus. And now maybe we can reset it. Maybe we can reset— one could reset the administrative state. Back to, I don't know, the like 2010s, right? But it would be very, very difficult in a society that already has a significantly planned economy to roll it back to something like a pre-New Deal society or even a pre-Great Society society, 1960s, right? It's actually in some ways easier to do something like welfare reform From the center left, like again the Clinton era, right? Had what immigration restriction, welfare reform, etc. Like if I list these things today, they sound almost conservative, right? So I think that the problem is you need you need a higher quality of staff than what the right wing options have available. And here I'm talking both about the online dissident right and the sort of like. Established GOP. I think they both greatly underinvest in careers of people who are capable of doing a good job, right? Because it's not supposed to be glamorous here. You're supposed to be like, you know, an entrepreneur doing something productive. You're not supposed to be, you know, lazy bones working in government or whatever, right? Like, what do you want to hand out? It sounds, it sounds in a way like it doesn't quite fit the self-concept, right? You can sort of have alternatives where it's like, oh, it's about national security. And then it's okay to work for government. And like that has some respect and it has some funding. But really, if you fire 1,000 people in a, like a significant part of the US government, I claim you will struggle, genuinely struggle to find 100 people you could hire. So even if you're achieving 90% efficiency, I mean, sorry, 90% reduction. In personnel and employing, let's say, I don't know, you're deploying software, you're cutting unnecessary functions, you're doing all of that. Where are you going to find 100 people? I bet if you try to, if you fire 1,000 government officials at a random American bureau and you try to hire 100 qualified people, of those people, 60 of them are still going to be Democrats, though they might have started pretending that they're Republicans. 20 of them are going to be really incompetent GOP Republicans. Maybe 5 of them will be software engineers who have like earned a lot of money and now feel like happy enough and they want to retire and they don't feel FOMO over the booming crypto market or over the revolution in AI. So isn't that actually kind of funny? Strong belief in an imminent technological revolution makes you much less likely to leave tech to go do something like government, right? And then maybe you'll have like 5 people of those 100 that you hired who are sort of like, I don't know, like ideologically committed, strange people who have been writing on the internet. You know, I don't know, maybe analyzing, maybe analyzing the government or the economy. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know. I'm joking here, but it's like, and it's an extremely rare talent. And I know because I sought it out. And even when I'm doing all, you know, and I actually try to be very impartial in my analysis. But when I try to find good sources that aren't just propaganda, that are trying to understand the world, it's like nominally Democratic Party affiliated or Democratic affiliated with more steps or university affiliated with more steps. That's like 90% of the sources, right? It's like almost inevitable. And I don't know, how do you overcome that talent disparity? I think that's a multi-year effort. Maybe that's an effort that begins now. Like, if I was a right-wing— I, I gave the left-wing strategy, right? The Democratic Party strategy. If I was a Republican strategist, I'd be like, okay, we're gonna have a Donald Trump presidency and we're gonna start— we're gonna cut what we can, but we're gonna start developing a deeper bench of talent. And by the next time, we're gonna have junior people who understand that it's a good career track to go into civil service. And reform government. This is a good career choice. Maybe one solution is to radically increase the salaries of the top performers. Something that I think Elon could argue to the American public. Like that's another one, right? Like usually the assumption is that, and we've talked about this in the show before, right? I made the argument that actually you should fire many, many employees, but maybe the remaining government employees are better compensated, right? That's sort of kind of the social contract in like a place like Singapore. and causes top talent in Singapore to go into government and then do a very good job. I think that, you know, Elon could argue this to the American public. Honestly, Trump could argue it to the American public. And I think the base would understand it. It just goes again contrary to some of these like default assumptions where, let's put it this way, efficiency is not the same thing as austerity. And this nuance is important. You can be very efficient. You can buy for 12 cents what previously cost a dollar. You cannot buy the same thing for 1 cent that previously cost a dollar. And knowing exactly where you are on that radical increase or radical decrease in cost and radical increase in efficiency before you start hitting like really terrible negative returns, right? That's super important. And I think that The strategy should be this Trump term is about developing talent and about embedding people in the civil service, not just the legal system, the civil service, and unshackling them from the ideological clichés of the right. Because most of Trump and most of the institutional power on the right is this sort of weird complex of DC NGOs. That has very little to do with either Trump's agenda or Elon's agenda, right? Like the ideology that comes out of it is like by default kind of strange. And it's kind of this like, it's, it's kind of like stuck to a GOP that is electorally as dead as the, you know, old school Democratic Party, I think is now dead electorally, even if it lives on the mind of Substack pundits left and right. So I, I think the strategy then is like, it has to be for a JD, 8 years of JD, or I don't know, maybe, maybe 8 years of Ivanka or something like that. Some sort of like deeply Trump-endorsed continuity. Because what you're building is a replacement, not just for the civil service, you're building a replacement for a GOP that did not want Trump, that did not want Elon, that did not want live players.

Where the talent is going to come for the right is a fascinating question. And there's sort of this almost like question as to how much of it is farmed, you know, sort of a, you know, more of a, you know, long game, you know, play at the university level, et cetera, try to diversify, you know, some of, some of that politically. But there's also this question of how many people can be converted from the existing sort of talent pool.

How genuine is the conversion? Right.

Right. That's true.

I mean, again, if I was playing a left-wing strategy, I would say, oh, actually it's a good idea to play entryism on the Trump administration because you can pull it far more left than you could pull a Democratic Party administration. Like, you know, I don't know, maybe there's some effective altruist working on that utilitarian argument right now. I hear some of them were very depressed yesterday at various parties in the East Bay.

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It's interesting, you know, this segues a little bit to HereticCon, which is a conference we both attended last week. The sort of the Founders Fund puts on, it's the second one they've done it. And my read of it was that it sort of, you know, coincided with this broader evolution that where the first Hereticon was actually about heretical ideas. And now the culture has moved so much that this is just the tech right, or conference for the tech right and tech right adjacent. And some of the people that attended are not the same diehards that were attending the first year. Like the tent has expanded.

Yes.

I don't even think everyone there was a Trump supporter necessarily. You know, maybe it was 80%, whatever, maybe, you know, a high majority. But I think It is the tent expanding. And, you know, Elon is one of the best recruiters in the world. So, you know, it's, it's, and Thiel is pretty good too. And, you know, it, there's open question as to what will be the actual impact or influence of the tech right on this administration.

I think one of the biggest positive developments that I think will happen just because the incentives point that way is the replacement of the legacy dysfunctional large corporations that the US government is used to doing business with, with a new crop of companies, which hopefully can deliver the goods. Like, I think that if you replaced a lot of the contracting that, you know, Boeing used to do with a drone startup, with Honesty, why, why not replace it? What function Does Boeing provide the US government that cannot be replaced by Anduril plus SpaceX?

Exactly. Right.

Right? I mean, it would change the narrative of SpaceX. So maybe Elon wants to like spin off something off SpaceX and say, you know, these rockets are aiming for Mars. These rockets are aiming for Moscow. Totally different rockets. Look, they have a different paint job and a different name and a different brand. So maybe that's what he would want to do. Or someone in SpaceX is delegated to do that. And of course, there's the problem of this conflict of interest, right? Because if you have an official position in the administration, then it's hard to compete for government contracts. And I'm sure there are legal workarounds, but that's a problem. So I think we'll see a flourishing of defense tech because the sort of tech right owes nothing to Raytheon, nothing to Lockheed Martin, nothing to Boeing. The normal GOP might hate this though. So a lot of the Republican lawmakers will not like this because this used to be Part of their portfolio and part of their base. So in a very fundamental way, what's happening with the tech right? It's a bid. Hey, let us use this technology we developed in civilian sector. Let's use it for government. The government should pay us to do this. Like, look, the government probably you know needs websites that work right? Like that would be neat, right? Websites that work. Something like Estonia's digital citizenship system. If we You know, we might have talked about Estonia or not. If not, we'll talk about it in a future episode. And I think that there's potentially both a lot of money to make there, a lot of good to do because the service the citizens have is better. And finally, from a national security standpoint, America's like actually underplaying its power where the US could have a 21st century military. But you know, as soon as you start pushing To actually hire companies like Palantir, Anduril, or hypothetical SpaceX spinoffs, or Boom Supersonic, for example. Maybe they'll maybe they'll pivot from producing just planes to producing like supersonic drones, right? Or maybe there'll be dozens of other defense companies. I'm sure you have like a long list of them. This is kind of like a booming thing here in town. As soon as this happens. You're going to start having wars with the Pentagon careerists who are not necessarily culturally all left. Not at all culturally. A lot of them are conservative politically. Some of them are Democrat at the Democratic at the highest level because that's just how the appointments have been made over time. Now, the military is not only a very apolitical institution, but the Pentagon is a great power center and it sort of is making plans in the same broken way that NASA made its plans. What the goal of a proposed space plan is to satisfy all the constituencies within NASA. So you need the International Space Station, you need the Lunar Gateway, you need a moon program, you need Mars robots, because this is all the stuff we were already working on. So we have to save it, right? We have to save these teams. And the Pentagon, it's like, well, the F-35 is going to be the backbone of the US Air Force until 2088. Which is like honestly the most science fiction sounding thing I've heard about the future of the 21st century. But it's also just America's official air superiority strategy. So it's like super funny to me that, but how are you going to do that? You're going to really upset all the Air Force guys. They really want to just be able to fly these really fast, fun things. And they enjoy it to see other younger men fly them. And it's like almost a hobby. So. I don't know what I would do. I would maybe create like a special wing of the Air Force where it's purely ceremonial, like the guys on horses that ride next to Queen Elizabeth II. There'd just be a special squad of F-35s just maintained to do air shows and to fly with Air Force One. It's like an honor guard, and that's going to be their role. And other than that, we're not going to have men fight by 2040. That would be my— that would be how I would do it. And you let all the flyboys retire and have a good time. And a new generation, a much smaller generation of very skilled flyboys can do their thing. And I don't want to be dismissive, but I'm just, I'm just pointing out, you have to like actually offend a lot of people, right? To do some of these things that would require transitioning away from a 20th century military to a 21st century military. And like, again, you know, there's actually massive growth. In Space Force, which is actually a great idea by by by by Trump. Like there's going to be so much stuff that Space Force can do, and in addition to this, energy startups—a strong push to enable every single energy startup we can in the U.S. It's not quite true that we need nuclear reactors for AI. I think that's very clever, but clever attempt to redirect some of that energy. In reality, we could just burn a lot more natural gas and achieve basically the same energy result for the AI training models. But narratively, using new technologies to solve the problem of another new technology, I think technologists love this, right? So ideologically, if you said, you know, America's going to the— we're going to Mars and we're going to be achieving 50% of our national power From nuclear, like by 20, like, and make it ambitious. Say we are going to build 40 nuclear reactors over the next 4 years. And then people say that's impossible. Nothing. And then you say nothing is impossible for America that China can do. Everything that China can do, we can do better. And then what are they going to say? That we're inherently more incompetent? But make it like very concrete like that. And then the story is we're going nuclear. Great news. It's going to save the planet. You don't even need green communism for that. We're going to build a lot of AI. That's great. We're still going to make sure it's safe, but we're going to get a lot of data centers here and we're going to make as many chips. You know, we're going to make a chip fab and China is going to pay for it. It's going to pay for it through the tariffs. You know, you could say we're going to, et cetera. And then you add some space exploration. And then suddenly you have a very positive narrative that's not alienating to the American public because they feel included in it. They're not being farmed for ad money anymore. They're going to Mars. Their electricity bill is lower. The planet's not going to be on fire if you're like someone, you know, and a lot of people, Republican voters also believe in climate change, right? They may not think it's the end of the world, but they believe it. So, you know, I think there's just a lot that can be done here where the tech, like the tech right can provide something that GOP was missing and something that can't just be bolted on top of the old GOP. It has to be this kind of like new approach to we are rethinking the systems of the US government, of US society, and of US technology. And we're doing this in the pursuit of like greatness, like not greatness in this like petty parochial sense, but this like almost civilizational sense. And I think if they, if they nail that narrative and you can see JD Vance experimenting it with, with it a little bit, but did you see his like tweets about space travel?

No, I didn't see them.

Yeah. He basically tweeted it as like a man's national priority and its national destiny. I was like, great. Manifest destiny. Just call it. It's America's destiny to go to Mars. Just keep saying that. Just keep saying that.

Biden used to put Elon down for trying to go to space or something, or like say, "Hey, don't you have to go to space?" Yeah, it's a different tune.

The interesting thing is that people forget that the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was good for the U.S. because the Soviet Union spent a lot of money trying to keep up and ultimately didn't succeed. In a way, in a very serious sense, if the competition with China is about who goes to Mars first rather than who builds God, I think that's actually a way better competition to focus the political energies of both America and China on, even if in the background the AI is advancing or whatever, right? Don't make the existential race about AI. We don't know whether we can have an existential race about AI without nuclear war. Fun fact, data centers are very vulnerable to EMP strikes. Therefore, you can nuke them. So if you think the opponent is about to build God, that's one of the few reasons why you should launch nukes right now. So let's not do that arms race. Let's not play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Let's instead play the known game of, well, it turned out the Soviet Union and US could compete for going to the moon without destroying the world. So maybe let's now compete about going to Mars. And this way we can, you know, demonstrate, hopefully enact and show an actual inherent better functioning, an actual superiority of this system that we think of as a high freedom architecture, right? We think of it as freer than China. So let it actually be freer and let it actually work better and let the people actually experience growth. And let it actually be environmentally friendlier, right? Let's not plaster over it with propaganda. Let's just actually make it true because in purely physical terms, it's not that hard. And maybe that means a much smaller government headcount. Maybe that means Elon Musk is even richer. And like, but I think even people on the left would be okay. At least people on the moderate left would be very okay with Elon Musk or Bezos becoming the world's first trillionaires. If it meant global warming was truly solved, right? And you know, I'm totally okay with like multi many trillions of multi trillionaires if there's a human society on Mars, right? Or if we if we actually like make our transition off of fossil fuels to even richer sources of energy, so not a downward transition which would necessarily crush our societal complexity, but either nuclear or fusion or mass geothermal. I think that would be great. Yeah.

Yeah, that's an inspiring notion. And one thing we also haven't alluded to, by the way, is the idea that the right, it might be a clean sweep or, you know, the, on all acts. And so the right might be sitting on an opportunity to really get things done in a way that, you know, hasn't happened in a while. And so what do you see? Do you see it happening? You know, I mean, like, if Trump continues to trust Elon to the extent that, that he has or has been implied, is it possible that Trump could do for the government anything close to what he's done for Twitter? Or would it just be—

He can do, he can do a portion of it. Like, look, I think if he directed his full energies as much as he has to Twitter, now X, for 3 to 4 years, which, by the way, let's remember, it took Several years to get Twitter like really going, and to really overcome the intense opposition of the advertisers who formed a political, not an economic cartel versus Twitter versus the former. You know, the the company formerly known as Twitter now known as X. The opposition you would face. Okay, you know, Eric, like let's be real. This might be even scary to say here on a podcast. Let's say Elon spends the next year. try, gets top security clearance, spends the next year trying to make the CIA more efficient. The opposition he encountered reforming Twitter, like, like he would see 100x that. He might still succeed if he works super hard for the next 4 years. And then the result will be, okay, the CIA is reformed and works super well. It's a really good, it's an even better intelligence agency, excuse me. You know, I love my— love all the intelligence community friends. You know, you're already doing a great job. We just want you to do an even better job. But, you know, please, please, you know, no polonium in my soup. The— no, no, but for real, like, because I think we have seen— we have seen the US has so many competent people working on the wrong problems, right? So I think it, in some ways, even there's certainly parts of the US state where it's sort of like, it's not even that you can just go and like fire all the incompetent people because a lot of the people are super competent, right? But you're going to go to a bureau and say, this entire bureau is not needed. You should expect a severe legal, political, and administrative fight from that department because even if the people there are like, Republican, or if they're Democratic and they love Elon, or they're nonpartisan and they've never had an opinion in their life, you have made yourself their existential political enemy, right? So it's like even if 20% of them are like, great, this department was bullshit, it's not great for me, but I'll find another good job, 80% will not think that way and they will firmly believe in the mission. And you know, sometimes they'll be right. And sometimes they'll be wrong. Just because things have been done a certain way in government does not mean that they always have to be done that way. But where I part with my most libertarian friends is, you know, it doesn't mean they have to be done the same way, but I think for a lot of things you do actually need the government to do them. And, you know, many things can be privatized, but, you know, once you privatize something too, like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin demonstrate that on a long enough timescale, Mere privatization is not the same as efficiency, especially if the government's your only customer. A monopsony is the kind of the opposite of a monopoly, right? It's when there's only one buyer instead of just one seller. That's like not really a market, right? So, so merely it being private, it's just one of the ways to do it well. You can do it well in government too. And I think Singapore demonstrates this. Estonia demonstrates this. Other countries demonstrate this, like Japan actually. Does a lot of things very efficiently, including trade policy and even in some aspects of industrial planning.

Yeah. Well, with that, you know, gearing towards the close here, I want to be sensitive to time. Any sort of last either reflections or perhaps advice to either the tech right or the right or any other things you want to leave us with pertinent to this conversation?

Let me, let me say with advice to the left and the right try to compete in making this country better.

Yeah.

Like, let's be less spite motivated. And this way, maybe Trump has already achieved the Buddha nature. I think maybe the left can now achieve the Buddha nature or the Jesus nature or whatever. And, you know, it'll— just because someone was at some point an existential political enemy or what seemed existential does not mean they will be that in 3, 4, 5, or 6 years. Politics is the art of the possible. There's so much that is possible. Let's like actualize it.

That's great. That's great notes to end on. Sam, it was a great conversation.

Until next time. Until next time.

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Wow.