Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #454

So people need to go back and read the history of the first hundred days under fdr, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place. Right. We've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House. He was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats. He's passing legislation, but more importantly so he, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional, he tries even more. So what does America take away from that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it was, it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight, that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He's such an inspirational figure. I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of fdr. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment and I'm not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. So JFK is actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile crisis. And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. And I encourage people out there. This is, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read it in graduate school. The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I'm so thankful we did. It's one of the foundations of political science because it lays out the theories of how government works. People really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don't care about you. They don't even really care about the President. They have self perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who's actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country. But it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done. So the question around the Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile crisis of how Kennedy arrived at. At his decision. And there are various different schools of thought, but one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three. The organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the great man theory as well. So there's a. You know, you. And I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II and how he literally swam miles with, with a wounded man's life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the COVID of Life magazine and he was a war hero and he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called why England Slept, which to this day is considered a text which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy, one of my most prized possessions because from 1939, because this is a 23 year old kid. Who the fuck are you? John F. Kennedy? Turns out he's a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general. Right. Who will succeed him, 26 year old John F. Kennedy as a journalist. And all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that, that's the story of America right there. It's kind of amazing. I'm going to give you one of the most depressing quotes which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius. Shout out to the loudest voice in the room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too because it really made me understand the media. People don't want to be informed, they want to feel informed.

The following is a conversation with Sagar and Jetty, his second time in the podcast. Sagar is a political commentator, journalist, co host of Breaking Points with Crystal Ball and of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Kozlov. Sager is one of the most well read people I've ever met. His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world. In this podcast we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a large number of amazing books. We'll put a link to them in the description for those interested to learn more about each topic, this is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sagar and Jedi. So let's start with the obvious big question. What do you think Trump won? Let's break it down. Before the election you said that if Trump wins, it's going to be because of immigration. So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?

Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration. But without that multifaceted explanation, let's start with the easiest one. There has been a wave of anti incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart recently went viral showing so the first time I think since Russia, World War II, possibly since 1905. I need to look at the data set that all anti incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats. So that's a very, very high level analysis and we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump's victory in 2016 because there were similar like global precursors that individual level in the United States. There's a very simple explanation as well, which is that Joe Biden was very old, he was very unpopular, Inflation was high. Inflation is one of the highest determiners of, of people switching their votes and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box. So that's that. But I think it's actually much deeper at a psychological level for who America is and what it is. And fundamentally I think what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about today is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy and eventually the loss to Donald Trump in the popular vote where really is like an apotheosis of several social forces. So we're going to talk about the great awakening or so called awoken in which is very important to understanding all of this. There's also really Donald Trump himself who is really one of the most unique individual American politicians that we've seen in decades. At this point. Donald Trump's victory makes him the most important and transformative figure in American politics since FDR. And thought process for the audience is in 2028 there will be an 18 year old who's eligible to vote, who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the Central American figure. And there's stories in World War II where troops were on the front lines, some of their 18, 19 years old, FDR died and they literally said who's the president? And they said Harry Truman, you dumbass. And they go who they couldn't conceive of a universe where FDR was not the President of the United States. And you know, Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure. Joe Biden definitely hind his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man. Obviously he's failed. We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency. So I think at macro level, it's easy to understand. At a basic level, inflation, it's easy to understand. But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics really forever. I mean, in the white working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation really of a multi rate kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along a single individual question of did you attend a four year college degree institution or not? And this is a crazy thing to say. Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history. We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups, you know, really voted in blocks. Latinos, blacks, whites. There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white, white college educated white collar workers. But by and large you could pretty fairly say that Asians were Indians. Everyone, 80, 90% were going to vote for the Democratic Party, Latinos as well. I'm born, you know, here in Texas, in the state of Texas, George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40% of the Latino vote. Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men. So really fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment in American politics. And that's a really fundamental problem for the modern left. It's erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the Electoral College, the so called Electoral college bias towards Republicans really being able to win the popular vote for the first time since 2004 is shocking and landmark achievement by a Republican in 2008. I have a book on my shelf and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things can change. James Carville and it says 40 more years how Democrats will never lose an election again. 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama coalition and the landslide and something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time. I was born in 1992. I watched Red states go blue. I've seen blue states go red. I've seen swing states go red or blue. I'VE seen millions of people pick up and move the greatest internal migration in the United States since World War II. And it's really inspiring because it's a really dynamic, interesting place. And I love covering it, I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people. It's awesome.

One of the reasons I'm a big fan of yours is you're a student of history and so you've recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time, some don't. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people. Some are mass movements. And it's just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves maybe into the constraints of a two party system. And I'd love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?

Well, I won't go that far because to say it's a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines. And I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Although if, if that's your lane lens, you could get there. So there's a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more and Donald Trump won households under 100,000. So you could view that in an economic lens. The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four year college degree and for education. And so one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray. And that book really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in when they attend a four year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they move to who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to, their cultural what television shows that they watch. One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray, it's called a bubble quiz. I encourage people to go take it, by the way, which asks you a question, it's like what does the word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Richard Branson. Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination. Three is it means nothing. So you are less in a bubble if you say country music and you're very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that test for the first time I go, obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic, like, what? And then I was like, wait, I'm like, I'm in the bubble. And there are other things in there, like, can you name various different military ranks? I can because I'm a history nerd. But the vast majority of college educated people don't know anybody served in the United States military. They don't have family members who do. The most popular shows in America are like the Big Bang Theory and ncis, whereas people in our probably cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus, the Last of Us. This is prestige television. Right. With a very small audience, but high income, high education. So the point is, is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live. And rural, urban is one way to describe it. But honestly, with the work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural, suburban or areas they traditionally weren't able to commute in, that's changing. And so really the Internet is everything. The stuff that you consume on the Internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly, whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, you know, all the things that you value in your life, that is the real cultural divide in America. And I actually think that's what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering and of a general cultural feeling that these people don't understand me and my struggles in this life.

And so the trivial formulation is that is the wokeism, the anti wokeism movement.

Yeah.

So it's not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against wokeism, it was the broader anti elitism.

It's difficult to say because I wouldn't dismiss anti woke as, or wokeism as an explanation, but we need to understand like the electoral impacts of woke. So there's varying degrees of like, how you're going to encounter, quote, unquote, wokeism. And this is a very difficult thing to define. So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you're going to interact with on a cultural basis. And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show and just for some reason there's like two trans characters and it's never like particularly explained why they just are there or watching a commercial. And it's the same thing watching, I don't know I remember was watching, I think it was Dr. Strange in the multiverse of madness. And the main. It was a terrible movie, by the way. Don't recommend it. But one of the characters I think is her name was like America and she wore a gay pride flag. Right. Look, many left wingers would make fun of me for saying these things, but that is obviously a social agenda to the point, as in they believe it is, like, deeply acceptable, that is used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress, you know, in sexual orientation and others. And they really believe it's important to quote, unquote, showcase it for representation. So that's like one way that we may encounter, quote, unquote, wokeism. But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its roots in, you know, American society all the way going back to the 1960s and how those have manifested in our economy and in our understanding of quote, unquote, discrimination. So two books I can recommend. One is called the Origins of Woke. That's by Richard Henania. There's another one, the Age of Intellectual Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell. And they make a very strong case that Caldwell, in particular that he calls it like a new founding of America, was the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964, because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race in the American character and how the government was going to enforce that. And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about the Origins of Trump by Jim Webb and Senator Jim Webb. Incredible, incredible man. He's so underappreciated, intellectual. He was anti war and he was. People may remember him from the 2016 primary. And they asked him. They asked him a question I don't exactly remember about one of his enemies. And he's like, well, one of them was a guy shot in Vietnam and he was running against Hillary. And that guy, he wrote the book Born Fighting. I think it's what's History of the Scots Irish People, something like that. And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences that were playing out, you know, through the HR managerial elite, really turned a lot of people within the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against by the professional managerial class. And so there's a lot of roots to this, the Managerial Revolution by James Burnham. And in terms of the origin of kind of how we got here, but the crystallization of like, DEI and or affirmative action, I prefer to use the term affirmative action. In the higher s. High, highest echelons of business. And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered. And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids. And that's why it's not an accident. Donald J. Trump elected in 2016 at.

This point, do you think this election is a kind of statement that Wokeism as a movement is dead?

I don't know. I mean, it's very difficult to say because Wokeism itself is not a movement with a party leader. It's a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years. Years. I mean, it's effectively a religion. And part of the reason why it's difficult to find is it means 10 different things to different people. So, for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define, quote, unquote, woke. Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so called academic language? Yes, I do think they will. I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that. However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from quote, unquote, woke. But she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019. But a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me. And not only do not understand me, but have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding that would lead to a quote, unquote, equity mindset, you know, equal outcomes for everybody, as opposed to equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy. So I can't say I think it's way too early. And, you know, again, like, you can not use the word Latinx, but do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime, you know, in terms of how you would run your Department of Justice, in terms of how you view the world, in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are? Because I would say that's still actually kind of a Woke mindset. And that's part of the reason why the. The term itself doesn't really mean a whole lot. And we have to get actually, really specific about what it looks like in operations. In operation, it means affirmative action. It means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something, that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board. Like, this is a blatant and, you know, extraordinary look racialism that they've enshrined in their bylaws so you can get rid of esg. That's great, but, you know, you can get rid of dei. I think that's great. But it's really about a mindset and a view of the world, and I don't think that's going anywhere.

And you think the reason it doesn't work well in practice is because there's a big degree to which it's anti.

Meritocracy, it's anti American, really. I mean, you know, DEI and WOKE and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries, okay? And there are a lot of countries out there that are multiethnic and they're heterogeneous and they are run by basically quasi dictators. And the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims, and they get this guy and they get that guy, and everybody kind of shakes it. It's very explicit where they're like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians. We have 10 spots and they go to the Hindus. You know, I'm talking. India is a country I know pretty well. And this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect. But in America, you know, fundamentally, we really believe that no matter where you are from, that you come here. And basically, within a generation, especially if you migrate here legally and you integrate that, you leave a lot of that stuff behind. And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is one that really does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference, regime, or anything that's not meritocratic. And, I mean, I will give the left wingers some, you know, credit in the idea that meritocracy itself, you know, could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds. I think that's true. And so, you know, the way I would like to see it is to increase everybody's equality of opportunity, to make sure that they all have a chance at, quote, unquote, willing out the American dream. But that doesn't erase meritocracy, hard work and many of the other things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier. So these are two ideologies which are really at odds, like, in a lot of ways, like wokeism, racialism, and all. This is a third world ideology. It's one that's very prevalent in Europe and all across Asia. But it doesn't mix well here, and it shouldn't. And I'm really glad that America feels the same way.

Yeah, I gotta go back to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass. Fascinating book.

Oh, my God.

Born Fighting. Amazing how the Scots Irish shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree, first of all, how badass the Scots Irish are and the, to the degree, many of the things that kind of identify as American and part of the American spirit were defined by this relatively small group of people. As he describes, the motto could be summarized as fight, sing, drink and pray. So there's the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom up governance. Over 2,000 years of military tradition, they made up 40% of the revolutionary War army and produced numerous military leaders including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton and a bunch of presidents. Yeah, some of the more gangster presidents. Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Just the, the whole cultural legacy of country music.

We owe them so much and they really don't get their due. Unfortunately, a lot of, for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post, you know, mass immigration from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to New Irish, to Italians, to Slovenians. And you know, as you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty different. And it's not, not the different here in the United States. Scott Cyrus was some of the original settlers here in America and particularly in Appalachia and their contribution to the fighting spirit and their own culture and like who we are as individualists and some of the first people to ever settle the frontier and that frontier mindset really does come from them. We owe them just as much, we do, the Puritans, but they don't ever really get their due. And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand, then you know, how exactly could this group of white working class voters for go from 2012 voting for a man named Barack Hussein Obama to Donald J. Trump, you really seem to. It makes perfect sense if you combine it with a lot of the stuff I'm talking about here about affirmative action, about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you and specifically also not valuing, valuing your contribution to American history and in some cases actively looking down, you know, I'm glad you pointed out not only their role in the Revolutionary War, but in the Civil War as well. And you know, just how much of a contribution culturally really that we owe them for setting the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt some of their own ideas and their culture as our own. It's one of the things that makes America great.

Mark Twain.

Yeah.

I mean, so much of the culture, so much of the, yeah, the American spirit, the, the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy. So you. Would you trace the, the, that fierce individualism that we think of back to them?

Definitely. It's a huge part of them about who they were, about the screw you attitude. I mean, that book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hillbilly Elegy came out. I'm sure you remember this, which it's kind of weird to think that it's now the Vice President Elect of the United States. Kind of wild, honestly, to think about. But J.D. vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites who were like, how do these support people support Trump? Where does this shit come from that they're really. I mean, that if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump. And not just vote, he won the election. How does that happen? And that's. Hillbilly Elegy guided people in an understanding of what that's like on a lived, day to day basis. And JD to his credit, talks about Scott's Irish heritage, about Appalachia and the legacy of what that culture looks like today and how a lot of these people voted for Donald Trump. But we got to give credit to Jim Webb, who wrote the history of these people and taught me and you about, you know, their, their original fight against the, the oppressors in Scotland and in Ireland and, and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And, you know, they got their due in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald Trump, to where we are today.

Dude, it got me pumped. Excited to be an American.

Me too. I love that book.

It's crazy that JD the same guy, because that's Hillbilly Elegy is what I kind of thought of him as.

Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, for me, it's actually pretty surreal. I met J.D. vance in like 2017 in like a bar. I didn't ever think he would be the Vice President Elect of the United States. I mean, just kind of wild. One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, hey, do you want to meet up? And he was like, sure. You know, I was watching on television. I mean, the first time that it really hit me, I was like, whoa, it Was like name in a history book is whenever he became the vice presidential nominee, I was watching him on TV and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his wife and I was like, wow, like, that's it. You're in, you're in the history books now forever, Especially now. So as the literal vice president elect of the US but his own evolution is actually a fascinating, fascinating story for us too, because I think a lot of the time I've spent right now is kind of this. A lot of what I'm giving right now are like 2016 kind of takes about like why Trump won that time. But we just spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election and like how what happened, some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the great awokening. But also if you look at the evolution of J.D. vance, this is a person who wrote hillbilly elegy. And not a lot of people pay attention to this. But if you read hillbilly elegy, JD Was much more of a traditional conservative at that time. He was citing, you know, report. I think the famous passage is about like payday loans and why they're good or something like that. I don't know his position today, but I would assume that he's probably changed that. But the point is, is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class, then eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and bettering the United States, but specifically for working class Americans, really of all stripes. And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project, as an ideology. It's also one of the Republican Party, which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.

So let's talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What's your take on Biden?

Biden is I try to remove myself from it and I try not to give like, hit big history takes while you're in the moment. But it's really hard not to say that he's one of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I'm going to go with it is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do. So Joe Biden has been the same person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student who thinks he's an A student. The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate, through his entire career as United States Senator, where he always wanted to be the star and the center of attention and to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what he already was. And so book recommendation, it's called what It Takes and it was written in 1988, and there's actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. And one of the things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the center of attention. Now, the reason I'm laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden. The individual and his character is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a person who was elected in 2020, really, because of a feeling of chaos, of Donald Trump, of we need normalcy, decides to come into the office, portrays himself as a, quote, unquote, transitional president, slowly, you know, begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants, the same ones who have been around him for so long that he had no single input into his life to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly undeniable to the vast majority of the American people. And that's why I'm trying to keep it as like him as an individual, as a president, because we could separate him from some of his accomplishments and the things that happen. Some I support, some I don't. But generally, a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the CHIPS act. A lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the build back better bill or whatever, his Lena Khan antitrust policy. They're going to look back on him and they're going to remember high inflation. They're going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the job in the sense that one Again, book recommendation. Freedom From Fear by David Kennedy is about the Roosevelt years. And one of the most important things people don't understand is the New Deal didn't really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to, right? Like there was still high unemployment, there was Still a lot of suffering. But you know what changed? They felt that they had a vigorous commander in chief who was doing everything in his power to attack the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn't even materially change, the vigor, that's a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy at Vega, you know, in the Massachusetts accent. We had this young, vibrant president in 1960 and he was running around and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly. And we have an 80 year old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach while people's grocery prices and all this and go up by 25%. And we don't see the same vigor, we don't see the same action. The bias to action which is so important in the modern presidency. That is fundamentally why I think the Democrats part of the reason why the Democrats lost the election and also why I think that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way and he had the opportunity, he could have done it, you know, if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago. But the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall. And it's kind of amazing because again, if we, if we look back to his Original campaign speech, 2019, why I'm running for president, it was Charlottesville and he said, I want to defeat Donald Trump forever and I want to make sure that he never gets back in the White House again. So by his own metric, he did fail. That was his, it was the only thing he wanted to do and he failed. Failed.

You said a lot of interesting stuff. Well, so one fdr, that's really interesting. It's not about the specific policy, it's about like fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for a particular. This is the same with Bernie. Like maybe there's a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that still support him because like we just want.

Feels authentic. Yeah, that's it.

We just want somebody to fight authentically for us.

Yes, fdr people, really, FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ. Okay, in, in the US and it, some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. So people need to go back and read the history of the first hundred days under fdr, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heal and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know legislation takes a long time to put into place. Right. And we've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under, under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House. And he was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats. He's passing legislation, but more importantly so he, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional, he tries even more. So what does America take away from that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it was, it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight, that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He's such an inspirational figure. He really is. And I, I, people think of him for World War II. Of course, you know, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the, the early years are not studied enough. 33 to 37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history. We were not ruled by a president, we were ruled by a king, by a monarch, and people liked it. He was, he was a dictator and he was a good one.

Yeah. So to sort of push back against the implied thing that you said. So when saying Biden is the worst president.

No, second worst in modern history. That's what I said.

Second in modern history.

Who's the worst W with no question.

I see. Because of the horrible wars, probably.

I mean, Iraq is just so bad. Like. Yeah. One of my favorite authors is a guy, Gene Edward Smith. He's written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his But W biography, he's like, there's just no question. There's a single worst foreign policy mistake in all of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever. He had terrible judgment and got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster and it set us up for failure. By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald Trump than George W. Bush. But I could go off on Bush for a long time.

Oh, we will return there. So as part of the pushback, I'd like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism against Joe Biden, the same could be said about Donald Trump. You're absolutely of arrogance. So, And I think You've also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.

Absolutely. But sometimes to our benefit, you know, you have to be a pretty crazy person to be. To want to be president. I, you know, I had put out a tweet that got some controversy, and I think it was Joe Rogan, who I love, but he was like, I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being. And I was like, I'm actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all. It's like I've read too much about them to know I know who you are. If you spend your life. And because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would be politicians, I know what it takes to actually become the president. It's crazy. You have to give up everything. Everything. Every night. You're not spending it with your wife. You're spending it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect you. Every. Even after you get elected, that's even more so. Now you got to raise money, and now you're on to the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through. You're going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this. Your entire life revolves around your career. It's honestly, you need an insane level of narcissism to do it, because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self and everything around you. There's a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson. After Johnson becomes the president, he's talking to the White House butler, and she was like, everything in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever's left goes to the girls, her two children, and I'll take the scraps. So everything revolved around Johnson's political career and his daughters, when they're honest, because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but they didn't spend any time with him. Saturday. Saturday morning was for breakfast with, you know, Richard Russell. I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for, you know, for. For his kids. That's what it was. And by the way, he's one of the greatest politicians to ever live, but he also died from a massive heart attack. And he was a Deeply sad and depressed individual.

Yeah, I saw that tweet to go back to that.

Yeah.

And also I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on the realignment pod. And I have to side with Marshall. I think you're just wrong on this.

All right.

Because I think revealing the character of a person is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and full of.

Yeah, this gets to the judgment question the judgment. And that's, I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of fdr. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment. Judgment. And I'm not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. So JFK is actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile crisis and he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly was his character and we can go again though into his laundry list of that. But most, most was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he was also had a deeply inquisitive mind and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT109. So it is, Look, I, I get it. I, I actually could steal man and I could. The response to what I'm saying is judgment is not divisible from personal character. But just because I know a lot of politicians and I've read enough with the really great ones, the people who I, I, I revere the most. There's really bad personal stuff basically every single time.

But you're saying the judgment was good.

Oh, his judgment was great.

On missile crisis.

Yes.

Some of the best judgment and decision making in the history of America.

Yes. And we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there. This is a, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read it in graduate school. The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I'm so thankful we did. It's one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works. This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up, because people really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don't care about you. They don't even really care about the President. They have self perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who's actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country. But it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done. So the question around the essence of decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile crisis of how Kennedy arrived at. At his decision. And there are various different schools of thought. But one of the things I love about the book look is it presents a case for all three. The organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the great man theory as well. So there's a. You know, you. And I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II as this. I think he was like a first lieutenant or something like that. And how he literally swam miles with a wounded man's life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the COVID of Life magazine. And he was a war hero and he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book book in 1939 called why England Slept, which to this day is considered a. A text which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville. Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy. It's one of my most prized possessions because from 1939 because this is a 23 year old kid. Who the are you? John F. Kennedy. Turns out he's a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference, you know where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general. Right. Who will succeed him? 26 year old John F. Kennedy as a journalist. Some shithead journalist on the side. And all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that, that's the story of America right there. It's kind of amazing. I love people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power.

But are you announcing that you're running for.

No, absolutely not. Yeah. I don't have what it takes. I don't think so. I'm self aware. Yeah.

Well, maybe humility is necessary for greatness. Okay, so actually, can we just linger on that book?

Yeah.

So the book Essence of Decision Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Ellison it presents three different models of how government works. The rational act model. So seeing government as one entity trying to maximize the national interest, also seeing government is through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures. So this giant organization that's just doing things how it's always been done, and the government politics model of there's just these individual internal power struggles within government and all of that is like a different way to view. And they're probably all true to a degree of how decisions are made.

Yes.

Within this giant machinery of government.

That's why it's so important, is because you cannot read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is may more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one. This is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because. And I guess for the people out there don't think I've been up too obsequious, he'll be my criticism. Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast. Probably the most important thing that he ever said, which is he said, I like to have people like John Bolton in my administration. Well, because they scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational individual in the room. So at a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that and then they can rationalize. While there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House, people like Mike Waltz and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a quote, unquote, anti neocon, anti Liz Cheney agenda. Now, Trump's theory of this is that he likes to have, quote, unquote, like psychopaths like John Bolton in the room with him while he's sitting across from Kim Jong Un, because it gets scared. What I think Trump never understood when he was president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out, which are not about the rational interest, as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump, I don't think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reach the president's desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is by the time it gets to my desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don't have an answer. That's why I have to make the call. So the theory that Trump has that you can have people in there who are, let's say, warmongers, neocons or whatever, who don't necessarily agree with you is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I'll still be able to rein those people in as an influence. Here's the issue. Let's say for Mike Waltz, who's going to be the national Security advisor. The a lot of people don't really understand. You know, there's this theory of national Security advisor where you call me into your office and you're the president, you're like, hey, what do we think about Iran? I'm like, I think you should do X, Y and z. No, that's not how it works. The National Security advisor's job is to coordinate the interagency process. So his job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room. CIA, State Department, secdom, others, before the POTUS even walks in. We have options. So we're like, hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. We need a package of options. Those packages, options are going to concede of three things. We're gonna have one group. We're going to call it the dovish option. Two, we're going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package. Trump walks in. This is how it's supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do? Mr. President, we've prepared three options for you. We got one, two, and three. Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks 1, 2, or 3? Or is the man who decides what's even in option 1, 2, and 3? That is the part where Trump needs to really understand how these things happen. And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who is his national Security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least like this on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I would call an FBI coup, whatever, 33 days he's out as a National Security Advisor. HR Master, he's got a nice, nice shiny uniform, four star, all of this. Master doesn't agree with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan. I want to get out of Afghanistan. They're like, yeah, we'll get out of Afghanistan, but before we get out, we got to go back in, as in we need more troops in there. And he's like, oh, okay. You know, it's like all this and he approves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it's only till February 2020 that he gets to sign a deal, the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017. But the reason why that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory, where HR McMaster is able to guide the interagency process, bring the uniform recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say, we must put troops. Another example of this is a book called Obama's War by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage people to read this book book, because this book talks about how Obama comes into the White House in 2009, and he says, I want to get out of Iraq and I don't want to increase. I want to fight the good war in Afghanistan, right? And he's doing. Obama's a thoughtful guy. Too thoughtful, actually. And so he sits there and he's working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his narrow. His options begin to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we should do in Afghanistan. And pretty soon, David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security apparatus has Obama pegged, where he basically politically at the time decides to take the advantage, advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both ways, but by saying, but in two years, we're going to withdraw. That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with ones which you don't even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions. That's why when Trump says things like, I want to get out of Syria, that doesn't compute up here for the Pentagon. Because, first of all, you know, if I even asked you how many troops we have in Syria, and you go on the DoD website, it'll tell you a number. That number's. Because the way that they do it, it is if you're only there for 179 days, you don't count as active military contractors. The real numbers, let's say five times. And so Trump would be like, hey, I want to get out of Syria. Yeah, we'll do it six months, right? We need six months after six months ago. So, so are we out of Syria yet? And they're like, no, well, we got to wrap this up. We got this base, we got that. And we had this important mission. And, you know, next thing you know, you're not. You're out of office. And it's over. So that there's, there's all these things which I don't think he quite understands. I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do. Is the reason why these picks really matter is not only are the voices in the Situation Room for the really, really high profile stuff, it's for all the little things that never get to that president's desk of which can shape extraordinary policy. And I'll give you the best example. There was never a decision by FDR as president of the United States to oil embargo Japan, one which he thought about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision kind of made within the State Department. It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it. It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was. Understood the implications that by doing that we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think about, you know, what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire national security chain in the White House. Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration, which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is is that it may actually be second to inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win the presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the Scots, Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery and elitism and liberalism appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their, you know, ability to, quote, unquote, pursue the American dream. While the American dream is dying for the native born population. That is a huge reason why people are turning against mass immigration historically as well. My friend Reihan Salaam wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War. And one of the most important parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States. So if we think about the transition from Scots, Irish America to the opening of the of America to the Irish and to mass European immigration, we what a lot of people don't realize is it caused a ton of problems. There were mass movements at the time, the Know Nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism by as the religion of a lot of the new immigrants. But really what it was is about the changing of the American character by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native born population. And their understanding of what they're owed and their role in American society is very different from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was actually during the resolution of the immigration question where we had massive waves of foreign born population come to the United States. We had them, you know, integrated, luckily actually at the time with the industrial revolution, so we actually did have jobs for them. One of the problems is that today in the United States we have one of the highest levels of foreign born population than ever before, actually since that time in the early 1900s. But we have all of the same attendant problems. But even worse is we don't live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly service based economy that has long, you know, moved past manufacturing. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign born population, particularly unskilled and the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so under fraudulent purposes. They're doing so because they are economic migrants and they're abusing, you know, asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a process of application or of merit. And this has its, all of its traces back to 1965 where the Immigration Naturalization act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration in the United States. In my opinion it was one of the most important things that ever happened and one of the reasons why is it forced and caused integration. It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign born population, it redeveloped an American character and understanding that was more homogenous and was the ability for you and me to understand. Despite the difference in our background. If you accelerate and you continue this trend of the very high foreign born unskilled population, you unfortunately are basically creating a mass, you know, on. And it's basically it's a non citizen population of illegal immigrants, people who are not as skilled, you know, I think it was, I read 27 of the people who've come under Joe Biden Illegally don't even have a college degree. That means that we're lucky if they're even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about integrating that type of person. You know, even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial economy. Now imagine today, the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass citizenship happened, you know, to that population would be extraordinary. And even if we were to do so, I don't think it's a good idea. But even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don't think a lot of people understand the immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively they call it family based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the term which implies that, let's say you come over here and you get your green card, you can use sponsorship and others by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with that is who is your cousin? Like, is he a plumber? Is he, you know, does he have, is he a coder? You know, that doesn't actually matter because he's your cousin. So actually has probably reference. The way that it should work is it should be nobody cares if he's your cousin. What's, what does he do? You know, what does she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about, oh, they actually increased the GDP or whatever. It's like, we need a merit based immigration system. We are the largest country in the world and one of the only non western or one of the only western countries in the world that does not have a merit based, points based immigration system like Australia and, or Canada. And I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non merit based purposes. So they're really reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the immigration status quo and by basically just allowing, you know, tens of millions, potentially tens of millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the US under these pretenses of complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people's understanding and even like mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump's victory.

Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the border czar, Tom Holman?

Tom Holman is a very legit dude. Got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original, like true believer on enforcing immigration law as it is now, notice how I just said it, that that's a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out for my left wing critics in that, yeah, he really believes in the ability, the in the ability in the necessity of mass deportation. And he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings. And this will apply to Doge too. Czar has no statutory or constitutional authority. Czar has as much authority as the President of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it's fair to say even his critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times and he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel. So Czar, in and of itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House. And it's one that I really wish we would move away from. I understand why we do it. It's basically to do a national Security advisor, interagency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller, who will be in the White House, the deputy White House Chief of staff, who has well founded beliefs, experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, but I think would also give him the ability to work with Homan to pull that off. That said, a corollary to this, and frankly, this is the one I am the most mystified yet is Kirsty Noem as the Department of Homeland Security secretary. So let me just lay this out for people, because people don't know what this is, the Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time, the way you're gonna interact with them is tsa. You don't think about it, but people don't know. The Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest law enforcement, if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It's gigantic. You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have Border Patrol, ice, tsa, cbp, all these other agencies that report up to you. But most importantly for this, you will be the public face of mass deportation. So I was there in the White House briefing room last time around when Kirsten Nielsen, who was the DHS secretary under Donald Trump, and specifically the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time, she was a smart woman. She has long experience in government and honestly, she melted under the criticism. Kirsty Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that's great. You have a little bit of Executive experience. But to be honest, I mean, you have no law enforcement background. You have no ability to. You have no. Frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history. You have to go on television and defend that every single day. A literal job requirement under Donald Trump. And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high intellect. You have to have the ability to really break through. And, I mean, we all watch how she handled that situation with her dog and her interviews. And that does not give me confidence that she will be able to do all that well in the position.

What do you think is behind that? So crystal balls on Breaking point. Yeah. Is that there's some kind of interpersonal, like, I didn't know. I should know this, but I didn't know any of the. There was some cheating or whatever.

There's a rumor. Nobody knows if it's true that Corey Lewandowski and Kirsten Gnome had a previous relationship ongoing. Corey Lewandowski is a Trump official and that he maybe put her in front. I don't know.

Is this like the real housewives of.

D.C. yeah, kind of. Although, I mean, it was the most open secret in the world, allegedly. I don't know if it's true. Okay. All right. I mean, I don't like to traffic too much in personal theories, but, I mean, in this respect, it might actually be correct in terms of how it all came down. I have no idea what he's thinking to be. I truly don't. I mean, maybe it's like he was last time. He said, I want a woman who's, like, softer and, like, emotionally and the ability to be the face of my immigration program. I mean, again, like I said, I don't see it in terms of her experience and her media. It's just frankly, like, not very good.

So you think she needs to be able to articulate, not just be like, the softer face of this radical.

Yeah.

Policy, but also be able to articulate the. What's happening with the reasoning behind all.

Yes. You need to give justification for everything. Here's the thing. Under mass deportation, the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really, what the quasi thing is, that's why the program itself is bad and we should legalize everybody who's here illegally. Okay. So the thing is, is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need A great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say, you know, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law. The necessity, I mean, I just, I think, articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this country. But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this from a guy named Mark Krikorian who's the center for Immigration Studies, is we don't make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren. And that is an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it's a triumph of the American system that somebody whose parent family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here, my parents had PhDs, came here legally applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process, can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American citizens. I'm not talking about other Indians or, you know, other whatever. I'm talking about all of us. I care about everybody who is here in this country. But fundamentally that will mean that we are going to have to exclude some people from the US and another thing that the open borders people don't ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. So, for example, a common left wing talking point is that it's America's fault that El Salvador and Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to take all those people in because it's our fault. Or Haiti. Right. But you know, if you think about it, America is responsible, and I'm just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of countries. Do they? They just don't benefit from the geographic, like, ability to walk to the United States. So I mean, if we're doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come here than anybody from El Salvador who's talking about something that happened in 1982. So within its own logic, it doesn't make any sense. Even under the asylum process, you know, people, I mean, people don't even know this. You're literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence. Okay, there, I mean, imagine that. Like that's frankly, that is a local law enforcement and problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold hearted this sounds. But maybe, honestly it could be because I'm Indian. One of the things that whenever you visit India and you see a country with over a billion people, you're like, holy shit. You know, this, this is crazy. And you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved and also there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody. It's a very complex and dynamic problem and it's really nice to be bleeding heart and to say, oh well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that, but it doesn't work. It doesn't work with a nation state, it doesn't work with a sovereign nation. We're the luckiest people in the history of the world to live here in this country and it, you need to protect it. And protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not telling us stories like. Like what? There's a famous moment from the Trump White House where Jim Acosta, CNN White House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, the current, you know who, the current deputy chief. And he was like, what do you say? Something along the lines to people who say you're violating, you know that quote on the Statue of Liberty, like, give me, you're tired, you're poor, you're hungry, all of that. The Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen very logically was like, what level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote? Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million? And that's such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus quote. There is. When you start talking honestly, you're like, okay, we live in X, Y and Z society with X, Y and Z gdp. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us, not rely on welfare, not, not, you know, be people who we have to take, take care of after because we have our own problems here right now. And who are the population, the types of people that we can study and look at who will be able to benefit. And based on that, yeah, immigration is great, but there are a lot of economic, legal and societal reasons for why you, you definitely don't want the current level. But another thing is, even if we turn the switch and we still let in a million five people a year under the chain base, the chain family based migration, I think it would be a colossal mistake because it's not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It's doing so based on the familial connections of people who already gamed the immigration system to be able to come here. I have a lot of family in India and you know, I love them, but. And some of them are actually very talented and qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit. And that should have nothing to do with their familial status. Of the fact that I'm a US.

Citizen, like you mentioned the book Melting Potter Civil War by Raihan Salaam, he makes an argument against open borders. The thesis there is assimilation should be a big part. I guess there's some kind of optimal rate of immigration which allows for a simulation.

Yeah. And there are ebbs and flows. And that's kind of what I was talking about historically, where, you know, I mean, the truth is, is you could walk the streets of New York City in the early 1900s and late 1890s and you're not gonna hear any English. And I think that's bad. I mean, really what you had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically practicing their way of life just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their ethnic problems that they had and even some of their cultural, like, unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America. And then New York City police and others are figuring out like, what the hell do we do with all this? And it literally took shutting down immigration for an entire generation to do away with that. And there's actually still some. The point about assimilation is twofold. One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding of the American character that has nothing to do with race. And that's so unique that I can sit here as a child of people from India and has such a deep appreciation for the Scots Irish. I consider myself, you know, American first. And one of the things that I really love about that is that I have no historical relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War. But I feel such kinship with a lot of the people who did. And reading the memoirs and the ideas of those that did because that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were able to instill in the country for 150 years later gives me the ability to connect to them. And that's such an incredible victory on their part. And that's such a unique thing. In almost every other country in the world. In China, in India or wherever. You're kind of like what you're, what you are. You're a Hindu, you're a Jew. You're, you know, you're Han Chinese, you're a Uyghur or you're Tibetan, something like that. It's, you're born into it. But really here, it's the only, one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different people who come to America. And that is a celebration of immigration as an idea. But immigration is also a discrete policy, and that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in the U.S. our citizens, to actually be able to benefit. And look, it's going to be messy. And honestly, I still don't know yet if Trump will be able to pursue actual mass deportation, just because I think that I'm not sure the public is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don't know if the public is ready for it. I think. I don't know. I'll have to see. Because there's a lot of different ways that you can do it. There's mandatory you verify, which requires businesses to basically verify, or a US Citizen, or you're here legally whenever they employ you, which is not the law of the land currently, which is crazy, by the way. There's, you know, you can cut off or tax remittance payments, which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. Again, illustrating my economic migrant point, there are a lot of various different ways we can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the US So people will self deport. But, you know, if he does pursue, like real mass deportation, that will be, that will be a flashpoint in America.

Aren't you talking about things like what Tom Holman said, worksite raids, sort of increasing the rate of that?

Yeah, we used to do that, you.

Know, but, yeah, but there's a rate at which you can do that where it would lead to, I mean, radical social upheaval.

Yeah, it will. I mean, and I think some people need to be honest here. And this actually flies in the face of, I mean, one of the most common liberal critiques is this is going to raise prices. And yeah, I think it's true. I think it's worth it. But that's easy for me to say. I'm making a good living. If you care about inflation, you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries or whatever goes up because of this immigration policy. I think that needs to be extremely well articulated by the President. And of course he needs to think about it. The truth is, is America right now is built on cheap labor. It's not fair to the consumer, it's not fair to the, the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves. And it's not fair to the natural born citizen. The natural born citizen has his wages suppressed for competition by tens of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages, that compete for housing, for social services. I mean, just even, you know, like basic stuff at a societal level, it's not fair to them. It's definitely not fair to the other person. Because I mean, whenever people say like, who's going to build your houses or whatever, you're endorsing this quasi legal system where, you know, uninsured laborers from Mexico, they have no guarantee of wages, they're getting paid cash under the table, they are living, you know, 10 to a room, they're sending Mexican remittance payments back just so that their children can eat. I mean, that's not really fair to that person either. So that's the point. The point is, is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval. But this gets to my Kirsty Gnome point as well, is you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here because if you don't, it's going to go south real quick.

The way Vivek articulates this is that our immigration system is deeply dishonest. Like we don't acknowledge some of the things you just said.

Yeah, exactly.

And he wants to make it honest. So if we don't do mass deportation, at least you have to be really honest about the living conditions, about of illegal immigrants, about basically mistreatment of them.

Yes, it's true. I mean, you know, if you support mass illegal migration, you're basically supporting tens of millions who are living lives as second class citizens. That's not fair to them. I also think it's deeply paternalistic. So there's this idea that America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency whatsoever and they can never turn things around. What does that say about our confidence in them? You know, one of the things they always say, they're, oh, they're law abiding, they're great people and all that. I agree. Okay. By and large, I'm not saying these are bad people, but I am saying like if they're not bad and they're law abiding and they're citizens and thoughtful and all that, they can fix their own countries, and they did in El Salvador. That's the perfect example. Look at the dramatic drop in their crime rate. Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in all of South America. That is proof positive that you can change things around despite perhaps the legacy of US Intervention. So, you know, to just say this idea that, you know, because it's America's fault that they're screwed up, it takes agency away from. Then, you know, another really key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield and the whole Haitian thing, because everybody, you know, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge because when they're like, the Haitians are here legally, they need to actually think about the program. The program is called tps. So let me explain that. TPS is called Temporary Protected Status. Note. What's the first word in that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed under a regime in which, let's say that there was a catastrophic. I think this is a real example. I think there was like a volcano or an earthquake or something where people were granted TPS to come to the United States. And the idea was they were going to go back after it was safe. They just never went back. There are children born in the United States today who are literally the descent, who are adults, who are the descendants of people who are still living in the US under tps. That's a perfect example of what Vivek says is dishonest. You know, you can't mass de facto legalize people by saying that they're here temporarily because of a program or because of something that happened in their home country when. And the reality is, is that in. For all intents and purposes, we are acknowledging them as full legal migrants. So, you know, even the term migrant to these Haitians in Springfield makes no sense because they're supposed to be here under tps. That's not migrant implies permanency. So the language is all dishonest. And people don't want to tell you about the things I just said about chain migration. You know, the vast majority of Americans don't even know the immigration system works. They don't understand what I just said about tps. They don't really understand the insanity of asylum law, where you can just literally throw up your hands and say, I fear for my life. And you get to live here for four or five years before your court date even happens. And, you know, by that time get a work permit or whatever you can, you know, you know, get housing, like you just said, in substandard conditions and you can kind of just play the game and wait before a deportation order comes. And even if it does, you never have to leave because there's no ICE agent or whatever who's going to enforce it. It. So the whole system is nuts right now and we need complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground.

That said, sort of the image and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems deeply un American. Right.

Well, I mean, look, it gets okay, so, you know, I'm not going to defend it, but I'll just put it this way. Do you hate children? Yeah. See, this is what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see a drug addict who's put in prison and their child is put in protective services? Nobody in America thinks twice about that. Right, right. So, I mean, well, that's kind of screwed up. Well, we should think about why did we come to that conclusion. The conclusion was, is that these adults willingly broke the law and pursued a path of life which put them on a, you know, which put them on a trajectory where the state had to come in and determine that you are not allowed to be a parent basically to this child while you serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances in U.S. immigration law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was because there was no way to prosecute people for illegal entry without child separation. Because previous doctrine, I believe it's called the Flores Doctrine, under it's some asylum lie. People have to go check my work on this. But basically the whole reason this evolved as a legal regiment was because people figured out that if you bring a kid with you because of the so called Flores Doctrine or whatever, that you couldn't be prosecuted for illegal entry. So it was a de facto way of breaking the law. And in fact, a lot of people were bringing children here who weren't even theirs, who weren't, they weren't even related to or couldn't even, you know, prove it, were bringing them to get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So I'm not defending child separation. I think it was horrible or whatever. But, you know, if I give you the context, it does seem like a very tricky problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not? How are we able to do that? And the solution, honestly is what Donald Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete rewrite of the way that we have U.S. asylum law applied and of asylum adjudication and really just about enforcing our actual laws. So, so when I try to explain to people is the immigration system right now is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest, such a great word, deeply dishonest system in which you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the easiest things to do to accomplish immigration to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had to apply. It wasn't easy. Do you know in India there's a temple called the visa temple where you walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number. And if you do it when you're applying for a visa to the United States, all right, it costs a lot of money and it's hard. People get rejected all the time. There's billions of people across the world who would love to be able to come here and many of them want to do so legally and they should have to go through a process. The current way it works is it's easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that's fundamentally right. It's also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally.

Can you steal me on the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?

The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society. That these people, many of whom millions of here have been here for many years, have children, natural born citizens because of birthright citizenship. It would require something that's fundamentally inhumane and un American. As you said, the idea of separating families, you know, across different borders simply because of what is, quote unquote like small decision of coming here illegally. And the best case beyond any of this moral stuff for no mass deportation is it's good for business. Illegal immigration is great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the lowest prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation is a terrible idea.

But first of all, very convincing. And second of all, I mean, you can't just do mass deportation without also fixing the immigration system.

Yes, exactly. And I mean, there are, there's several pieces of legislation. HR2, that's something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It's a border bill. I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the US immigration system. I'm curious whether it'll actually pass or not. Remember, there's a very slim majority of the House of Representatives for Republicans this time around. In people vote for a lot of things when they're not in power, but when it's actually about to become the law, we'll see. There's A lot of swing state people out there who may think twice before casting that vote. So I'm definitely curious to see how that one plays out. The other thing is, is that like I just said, the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they're going to take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for everything that they have to keep their pool of cheap labor because it's great for them. You know, I think JD said a story, I think he was on Rogan about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was just, he was like, yeah, it's just terrible. You know, it's like they would take away our whole workforce. And he was like, do you hear yourself? You know, in terms of what you're talking, you're bragging about, but that's real. That's a real thing. And that, you know, Tyson's Foods and all these other people, like, you know, that's another really sad part. Part is what I mean by second class citizenship is this presumption, first of all, that Americans think it's too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for the right wage, first of all. But second is, you know, the conditions in a lot of those facilities are horrible and they're covered up for a reason. Not only in terms of the way that businesses, you know, like they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their illegal immigrant workforce. So honestly, I think it can make things better for everybody.

Everything you have studied, how government works, what are the chances mass deportation happens?

Well, it depends how you define it. So I mean, mass deportation could mean 1 million. I mean, nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million, it could be 30 million. I've seen estimates of up to 30 million, which is crazy. That's almost 1/11 of the entire US population.

What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? 1 million people.

A million people is a lot. I mean, that's a lot of people. It's a lot. I mean. But the crazy part is that's only one twelfth of what Joe Biden let in the country. So it's one of those that just to give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will happen? It depends on the definition. Will 1 million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively confident that anything over that, it's going to be tough to say. Like I said, probably the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory verify and to have processes in place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally. And then you will have mass self deportation and they will take the victory lap on that. But actual like rounding millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to God knows, all across the globe. That's a logistical nightmare. It also costs a lot of money. And don't forget Congress has to pay for all of this. So, you know, we can have DOGE or we can have, you know, mass deportation. So those two things are kind of irreconcilable. Actually. There's a lot of competing influences at play that people are not being real about at all.

Yeah, that was one of the tensions I had talking to Vivek is he's big on mass deportation and big on making government more efficient. And it really feels like there's a tension between those two in the short term term.

Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I've been wanting to talk about this. I am sympathetic to doge, to the whole Department of Government Efficiency.

How unreal is it that it's called doge?

Actually, with Elon, it's quite real. I guess I've just, you know, I've accepted Elon as a major political figure in the U.S. but the Doge Committee, the Department of Government Efficiency is a non statutory agency that has zero funding that Donald Trump says will advise omb, the Office of Management and Budget. Now, two things. Number one is, as I predicted, DOGE would become a quote, unquote, blue ribbon commission. So this is a non statutory blue ribbon commission that has been given authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk. Secondary, their recommendations to government should be complete by July of 2026, according to the press release released by Tromp. First of all, what that will mean is they're probably going to need private funding to even set all this up. That's great. Not a problem for Elon, but you're basically going to be able to have to commission GAO reports, Government Accountability Office and other reports and fact finding missions across the government, which, which is fantastic. Trump can even empower you to go through to every agency and to collect figures. None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives care what you have to say. Historically, they don't give a shit what the Executive Office has to say. So every year the President releases his own budget. It used to mean something, but in the last decade or so it's become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means Committee and the People's House are the ones who originate all appropriations and setup spending. So that's one is that Doge in and of itself has no power. It has no ability to compel or force people to do anything. Its entire case for being really, if you think about it mechanically, is to try and convince and provide a report to Republican legislators to be able to cut spending. So that's that. Now we all know how Congress takes to government reports and whether they get acted on or not. So that's number one. Number two is the figures that Elon is throwing out there. I again, I want to give them some advice because people do not understand federal government, government spending. The absolute vast majority of of government spending is entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and their most politically popular programs in the world. And military spending, discretionary non military spending. I don't have the exact figure in front of me is a very, very small part of the federal budget. Now within that small slice, about 90% of that 8 is bipartisan and is supported by like everybody, Noah, you know, the hurricane guys, like people like that, you know, people are flying into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government inspectors of X, Y and Z. The parts that are controversial that you're actually able to touch, things like welfare programs like food stamps is an extraordinary small slice. So there, what, what's the number you put out there? 5 trillion, something like that. There is only one way to do that and it realistically under the current thing, you have to radically change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I, I support that, but I just want to be very, very clear, but I haven't seen enough energy around that. There's a, there's this real belief in the US that we spend billions on all of these programs that are doing complete bullshit. But like the truth, the absolute vast majority of it is military spending and entitlements. Trump has made clear entitlements are off the table. It's not going to happen. So the way that you're going to be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade long period is to really change the way that the United States procures, you know, procures military equipment, hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have the background to be able to accomplish this because he has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that Boeing has been pulling for over a decade. But I really want everybody's expectations to be very set around this Just remember non statutory Blue Ribbon. So if he's serious about it, I just laid out all of these hurdles that he's going to have to overcome. And I'm not saying him and Vivek aren't serious dudes, but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this.

So you just laid out the reality of how Washington works. To give the counterpoint that I think you're probably also rooting for is that one is a statement. Like Peter Thiel said, don't bet against Elon.

Sure.

One of the things that you don't usually have with Blue Ribbon is the kind of megaphone that Elon has.

True.

And I would even set the financial aspects aside. Just the influence he has with the megaphone, but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can have real power when backed by sort of a populist movement.

I don't disagree with you, but let me give you a case where this just failed. So Elon endorsed who for Senate Majority Leader? Rick Scott. Right. Who got the least amount of votes in the U.S. senate for GOP leader Rick Scott? John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I'm bringing that up, one of my favorite books, Master of the Senate by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series. The Senate as an institution. It reveres independence. It reveres. I mean, the entire theory of the Senate is to cool down the mob that is in the House of Representatives and to deliberate. That's its entire body. They are set up to be immune from public pressure. Now, I'm not saying they can't be pressured, but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of you. He literally endorsed somebody for leader. So did Tucker Carlson, so did a lot of people online. And only 13 senators voted for Rick Scott. The truth is, is that they don't care. Like they're set up where they're marginally popular in their own home states. They'll be able to win their primaries and that's all they really need to do to get elected. And they have six year terms, not even up for four years. So will Elon still be interested in politics six years from now? That's a legitimate question for a Republican senator. So maybe he could get the House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his things, but there's no guarantee that the Senate is going to agree with any of that. There's a story that Kairos tells in the Master of the Senate book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the writing of the Constitution. And he asked Washington, he said, why did you put in a Senate, a bicameral legislature? And Washington said, why did you pour your tea into a saucer? And Jefferson goes to cool it. And Washington says, just so that's how to explain it. He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man.

Okay, so you actually outlined the most likely thing that's going to happen with Doge as it hits the wall of Washington. What is the sort of the most successful thing that can be pulled off?

The most successful thing they could do is right now, I think they're really obsessed with designing cuts. Right. And identifying cuts. I would redesign systems, systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that we have processes in place to dispense taxpayer dollars. Because the truth is, is that appropriations itself, again, are set by the United States Congress. But the way that those appropriations are spent by the government, the executive has some discretionary authority. So your ability as the executive to be a good steward of the taxpayer money and to redesign a system, which actually, Elon, could be good at this, and Vivek, too, in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit, is the entire Pentagon procurement thing. It needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it's bad for the Pentagon. It does. It gives them substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapon systems and programs and thinking that can be easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect example is all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare costs almost nothing, and yet drone swarms and hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to US Systems, which cost hundreds of more than hundreds of billions of dollars. So my point is that giving nimble procurement and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you actually could save the most amount of money in the long run. That's where I would really focus in on. The other one is, you know, counter to everything I just said is maybe they listen. Maybe the Republicans are like, yeah, okay, let's do it. The problem again, though, is swing state people who need to get reelected, they need to do one thing. They need to deliver for their district. They need to run on stuff. And nobody has ever run on cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing money to your state. And that's why earmarks and a lot of these other things are extraordinarily popular in Congress, is because it's such an easy way to show constituents how you're working for them whenever it does come reelection time. So it's a very difficult system. And I also want to tell people who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is designed to work this way. And for two centuries, the Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every popular change. And because of that, it's designed to make sure that it's so popular for long enough that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That's really, really frustrating, but you should take comfort in that. It's always been that way, so it's been okay.

Well, as I've. As I've learned from one of the recommendations of the Age of Acrimony, I feel embarrassed that I didn't know that senators used to not be elected.

What a crazy system, huh?

Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now as defining our democracy was, was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War, in the. In the sort of 50 years after the Civil War.

Absolutely correct. Age of Acrimony. Oh my God, I love that book. I cannot recommend it enough. It is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is that we study periods where greatness happened, but we don't often study periods where nothing happened or where really bad shit happens happen. You know, we don't spend nearly enough. Americans know about fdr. They don't really know anything about the Depression or how we got there, how, what was it like to be alive in the United States in 1840? Right. Nobody thinks about that really, because it's kind of an in between time in history. There are people who lived their entire lives, were born, who had to live through those times, who were just as conscientious and intelligent as you and I are. And we're just trying to figure out. And things felt really big. So the Age of Acrimony is a time where it's almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded Age aspect. But like you just said, it was a time where progressive reform of government and of the tension between civil rights, extraordinary wealth and democracy, and really the reigning in of big business, so many of our foundations happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that book because one of the things I learned from the book is that voter participation is highest when people are pissed off, not happy. And that's such a counterintuitive thing. But voter participation goes down when the system is working. So 2020, right, I think we can all agree was a very tense election. That's also why it had the highest voter participation ever. 2024 very high rates of participation, same thing. People are pissed off and that's actually what drives them to the vote. But something that I take comfort in that is that people being pissed off and people going out to vote, vote, it actually does have major impact on the system because otherwise the status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so yeah, like you just said, I mean direct election of senators was. I mean there are probably people alive today who are like, who could, who were born when there was no direct election of senators. Which is an insane thing to think about. I mean there'd be almost 100 or so. But the point is, is that at that time it was so deeply corrupt and it was one where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading into the Gilded Age were able to enforce their will upon the people. But you can take comfort in that. That was one of those areas where Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the Constitution and actually forced the aristocrats in power to give their own power. It's like our version of when they flipped power and took away the legislative power of the House of Lords in the uk. I just think that's amazing and such a cool thing about our country and the UK too.

No, it's the continued battle between the people and the elite. Right. And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of candidates for a party. Yes, that was also invented. It used to be that the quote unquote, party bosses. I say that with a half a chuckle. Chose the candidate.

Yeah, the whole system is nuts. The way that we currently experience politics is, is such a modern invention with.

A little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but.

Right, yeah, good point. But. Well, that was actually more of a mean reversion. Right. We're living in an extraordinarily new era where we actually have more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be. This is crazy. So the conventions have always taken place two months before. Right. Imagine a world where you did not know who the pro nominee was going to be before that convention. And the nominee literally was decided at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American politics where presidents did not directly campaign. They in fact did not even comment about the news or mention their opponents names. They were, they give speeches from their doorstep, but they, it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics.

You would not get a Bernie Sanders, you would not get a Donald Trump, Obama, Bill Clinton.

I mean basically every president from John F. Kennedy onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior to that has been much more of the older system. There was a in between period post FDR where things were really changing, but the primary system itself had its first true big win under John F. Kennedy.

I think the lesson from that is there's a collective wisdom to the people. Right?

I think so.

I think it works.

Yeah. I mean, well, okay, I'll steal, man. It's. We had some great presidents in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of coalitional politics. Of his ability, in fact, what really made him a genius was his ability to get this overthrow the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite Democrats to take part to take control in there at the convention and then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of power. Where he had the. He had the. He had the elites basically under his boot because he was the king. And he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce things up and down. I mean, you know, even in the party boss era, we would have. No, a lot of the. A lot of people we revere really came out of that. People like Abraham Lincoln. I mean, I don't think Abraham Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There's no chance he won. He won luck, thank God. From an insane process in the 1860 Republican Convention. People should go read about that because that was wild. I think we were this close to not having Lincoln as president. And yeah, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt. There's so many that I could point to who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way to still produce good stuff.

That was a kind of beautiful diversion from the DOGE discussion. If we're going to return briefly to doge. So you kind of talked about cost cutting, but there's also increasing the efficiency of government, which you also kind of talked about with procurement. So maybe we can throw into the pile the 400 plus federal agencies. So let's take another perspective on what success might look like. So like radically successful DOGE, would it basically cut a lot of federal agencies?

Probably combine.

Combine.

Okay. So I can give great examples of this because I have a great insight. Like for each agency will often use different, like payroll systems. They'll have different internal processes. Right. That makes no sense. And it's all because it's antiquated. Now everybody always talks about changing it, but there are a lot of like party interests about why certain people get certain things. The real problem with government, the People like us who are private and, like, for example, when you want to do something, you can just do it. So I was listening to a really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the story was that the military was assigned. Some National Guard guys were assigned to, like, help with the border. And they were trying to provide, I think it was translation services to people at border patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, hey, this has got to stop. According to US Code X, Y, and Z, the United States military cannot help with law enforcement, you know, abilities here. And so even though that makes absolutely no sense, because they're all work, there are literal legal statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason, we have to have a ton of Spanish speakers in Southcom, you know, in the. The US Command that is responsible for South America, who literally cannot help with a crisis at the border. Now, maybe you can find some legal chicanery to make that work, but, man, you got to have an attorney General who knows what he's doing. You need a White House counsel. You need to make sure that stands up in a court of law. I mean, it's not so simple. Whereas, let's say, you know, you have a software right here and you want to get a new software, you can just do it. You can. You hire whoever you want. When you're the government, there's a whole process you got to go through about bidding, and it just takes forever, and it is so inefficient. But unfortunately, the inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes. And that is something that, yeah, again, actually, you know, radically successful doge quote unquote, would be study the law and then change it. Like, figure instead of cost cutting, like, cut this program or whatever. Like I just said about why do different systems use payroll? Just say that you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let's say, after 90 days. You know, I've heard stories of people who work for the government who still have, like, IBM mainframe that they're still in 2024, that they're still working because those systems have never been updated. There's also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff. That's where a lot of inefficiency happens, because a lot of contractors can only work based upon previous clearance that they already got. Achieving a clearance is very expensive. It's very lengthy process. I'm not saying it shouldn't be talking about security clearance, but it does. Naturally, you Know, create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts. Fun. And I, I even mean stuff like, like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right? So clearance. So there's only like five people who are. Or he can even apply for that contract. Well, naturally, in an interim monopoly like that, he's going to jack his price up because he literally has a moat around his product. Whereas if you or I are hiring a gent, whatever, anybody for anything, that type of credentialism and legal regime, it doesn't matter at all. So there are a million problems like this that people in government run into. And that is what I would say is the most successful.

You know, paperwork slows everything down and it feels impossible to break through that in a sort of incremental way.

It's so hard.

It feels like the only way to do it is literally shut down agencies in some kind of radical way and then build up from, from scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that's going to be opposed by a lot of people within government.

Yeah, well, historically there's only one way to do it and it's a really bad answer answer. War.

War.

Yeah.

So I was gonna say basically you have the kind of consensus where, okay, all this stupid bureaucratic we've been doing, we need to like put that aside, get the out of here. We need to win a war. So like all the paperwork, you know, all the lawyers go, leave.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, but I want people to really understand that, you know, up until 1865 or 1860, what? I forget the exact year, we didn't even have national currency. And then we were like, well, we need a greenback. And prior to that, people would freak out if we were talking about having national currency greenback backed by the, you know, the US Government and all that. Not even a question passed in like two weeks in the US Congress, an income tax eventually went away, but not even in the realm of possibility. And they decided to pass it same thing after World War I. And you think about how World War II, I mean World War II just fundamentally changed the entire way the United States government works. Even the dhs, which I mentioned earlier, the Department of Homeland Security, it didn't even exist prior to 9 11. It was done as response to 911 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shit show networks. Even the dhs, which I mentioned earlier, the Department of Homeland Security, it didn't even exist prior to 9 11. It was done as response to 911 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shit show. Disaster war is the only thing that moves the. And throws the paperwork off the table. And I, I wish I wasn't such a downer, but I've just, I've both. I've read too much and I've had enough experience now in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn't that way. Disaster war is the only thing that moves the and throws the paperwork off the table. And I, I wish I wasn't such a downer, but I've just, I've both. I've read too much and I've had enough experience now in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn't that way. I mean, it's. It's a cool idea. And I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics to think that they can do something, but I want them to be realistic too. And I want them to know what they're signing up for whenever they do something like that. And the titanic amount of work it is going to take for you to be able to accomplish something.

Yeah, but I've also heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when.

I mean, it's, it's a cool idea. And I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics to think that they can do something, but I want them to be realistic too, and I want them to know what they're signing up for whenever they do something like that. And the titanic amount of work it is going to take for you to be able to accomplish something.

Yeah, but I've also heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter. Here's this guy, Elon Musk, you are absolutely correct, knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course you need all these servers. Of course you need all these employees.

Right?

And nevertheless, the service keeps running. He figured on, rolled in and fired 90 of Twitter. Here's this guy, Elon Musk, you are absolutely correct. Knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course you need all these servers. Of course you need all these employees.

Right?

And nevertheless, the service keeps running.

He figured it out and you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is, no, there was no law that he could fire him out and you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference Is no, there was no law that he could fire him. You know, there was no. There was no, you know, there was no, there was no. Like, like, at the end of the day, he owned the company. You know, he had total discretion of his ability to move. So I'm not even saying his ideas are bad. I'm saying that the ability, that's that what makes him such an incredible visionary entrepreneur. It's movement, it's deference at times to the right people, but also the knowledge of every individual piece of the machine and his ability to come in and to execute his full vision at any time and override any of the managers. So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few people who's ever built a multi billion dollar company who was not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution and against entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who can do it. Elon. Steve Jobs. But you know, what do we learn is that unfortunately, after Steve died, Apple basically did succumb to the managerial revolution and has become like the product. You know, they make all their money by printing services and making it impossible to leave this ecosystem as opposed to building the most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision Pro, don't get me wrong, I think.

You just admitted that you're part of a cult. I know.

I literally am. I am. I fully admit it.

Yeah, yeah.

I miss Steve.

The grass is green on the other side. Come, come join us. Okay, whether it's Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that would be possible?

Well, I wouldn't put it that way. I don't think slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people and its government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of our institutions. And I really encourage people. I don't think people can quite understand what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after FDR. Like 90% of the people trusted the government. That's crazy. Like when the President said something, they were like, okay, he's not lying. Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire fallout period of Vietnam, Vietnam in particular really broke the American character and its ability and its relationship with government. And we've never recovered faith in institutions ever since. That and it's really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful, at least this time, is anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics, which got him elected. You know, at this point, we can't deny it. McDonald's thing is hilarious. It's funny. It is. People love it. People like the podcasting, people like garbage truck. The garbage truck, yeah, exactly. They like the stunts. And he will always excel, and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other things that he can and should do, like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question and also really figuring out our economy the way that it currently runs and changing it so that the actual American dream is more achievable and housing is one of the chief problems that we have right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean, it's just true. Households under $100,000 voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn't do so for economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for. For economic. A lot of them did for immigration, for cultural. But you still owe them something. And there is, I would hope that they could carry something out in that respect that is not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the first time, where everything felt like it exploded any time with staffing, with. With even his policy or what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does come back to personnel. So I'm concerned in some respects. I'm like, you know, not thrilled in some respects. I'm happy in some respects. But it remains to be seen how he's going to do it.

To the degree it's possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology, what do you think are the central pillars of it?

MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That's what I would say. Cultural elitism, though, has many different categories. Immigration is one, right? Is that cultural elitism and cultural liberalism has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of itself is a natural good at any and all levels, that all immigrants are like replacement level, that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign policy context comes back to a lot of that human rights, democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier, which divorces American values from American interests and says that actually American values are American interests, cultural elitism and liberalism leads to the worship of the post civil rights era bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of dei, quote unquote, woke and of progressive social ideology. So it, I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA is. It is a screw you. I once drove past, it was in rural Nevada and I was driving and I drove past the biggest sign I've ever seen, political sign to this day. And it's just, it was in 2020 and just said, trump, fuck your feelings. And I still believe that is the most coherent MAGA thing I've ever seen. Because everyone's always like, how can a neocon and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist under the same umbrella? And I'm like, it's very simple. All of them have rejected the cultural elite in their own way, certainly, but they've arrived at the same place. It's an umbrella. And it's an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to do with the status quo and with the, you know, currently established cultural elite. That doesn't mean they're not elite and they're not rich in their own regards. That doesn't mean they don't disagree. But that's the one thing that unites the entire party. And so that's the way I would put it.

Anti cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions. Is elitism connected to institutions?

Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who runs our institutions. That said, anti establishment is really not the right word because there are a lot of left wingers who are anti establishment. Right, they are against that, but they're not anti cultural leftists. And that's the key distinction between MAGA and like left populism. Left populism basically does agree. They agree with like basic conceits. Like racism is one of the biggest problem facing America. They're like one of the ways that we would fix that is through class oriented economic programs in order to address that. But we believe in, I don't know, like reparations as a concept. It's just more about how we arrive there. Whereas in MAGA we would say, no, we actually don't think that at all. We think we've evolved past that and we think that the best way to fix it is actually similar policy prescription. But the mindset matters a lot. So the real distinction between MAGA and like left populism really is on culture trans in particular orientation about actually immigration may be the biggest one, because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders. You know, Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years. There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who's one of the hardcore immigration guys. And they agree with each other. And Lou is like, bernie's one of the only guys out there. Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left and it's changing attitudes on mass immigration. There's some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave where he started, I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian concept. Right. Because Bernie is a basically of a European welfare state tradition. European welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of immigration. Because we have high taxes and high services. We have a limited pool of people who can experience and take those services. He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude, dude. Bernie also, I will say, look, he's a courageous man and a courageous politician. You know, as late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro life candidate because he said that that pro life candidate was, you know, pro worker. And he's like, at the end of the day, I care about pro worker policy. He took a ton of for it and I don't think he's done it since. So the sad part that's really happened is that a lot of left populist, you know, agenda and other has become subsumed, you know, in the hysteria around cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. And that ultimately that cultural leftism was the thing that really united, you know, the two wings of that party. And that's really why MAGA is very opposed to that. They're really not the same. But the left populace can still be anti establishment. That's the key.

It's interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populace. So you think that's what happened?

That's what I would say.

What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible future where he would have won? You and Crystal wrote a book on populism in 2020. So from that perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time, by the way, that would be pretty gangster. During 2016, would he have? Because I think Hillary went towards the left more. Right. Am I remembering that correctly?

It was a very weird time. So yes and no, it wasn't full on BLM mania like it was in 2020. But the signs were all there. So the Great awokening was in 2014. I know, it's a ridiculous term.

I love it.

Please keep saying, just to give the origin. The Great Awakening is about the great religious revival in the United States. So people had, you know, because wokeism is a religion, you know, that's a common refrain. They were like, the Great Awokening is a really good term.

So thank you for explaining the joke. Yeah, yeah.

So the Great Awokening is basically when racial attitudes amongst college educated whites basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of reasons why this happened. I really believe that Ta Nehisi Coates's case for reparations in the Atlantic is one of those. It radicalized an entire generation of basically like white college educated women to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson and then it also happened immediately after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover of 2020. But fundamentally what they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst college educated elites to really think in a race first construct. And worse is that they were rejected in 2016 at the ballot box by the election of Donald Trump. And in response, they ramped it up because they believed that that was the framework to view the world, that people voted for Trump because he was racist and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did. And so the point around this, on question of whether Bernie could have won in 2016, I don't know. Crystal seems to think so. I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is honestly one of them. One of Trump's core issues in 2016 was immigration. And Bernie and him did not agree on immigration. And if immigration, you know, even if people did, you know, support Bernie Sanders and his vision for working class people, like the debates and the understanding about what it would look like, like a health care system which literally would pay for illegal immigrants. I think he would have gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong. I honestly, I will never know, you know, what that looked like.

Let me reference you from earlier in the conversation with fdr. It's not the policy. I think if he went more anti establishment and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the dnc.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I, I have a lot of love for the Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from 2016 called America. You should watch it. It's a great ad. That's another very interesting thing. It's unapologetically patriotic and that is not something that you see in a lot of left wing circles these days. So he understood politics at a base level that a lot of people did not. But you know, Bernie himself and then a lot of the Bernie movement was basically crushed by the elite Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. They hated them. You know, they basically, they attacked Joe Rogan for even having him on and for giving him a platform that was ridiculous. Obviously backfired in their face, which is really funny. There is, but there are a lot of million examples like that, you know, when they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro life politician, he never did it again. They attacked Bernie for run, for having Bernie bros. You know, people online, the bros who were super bro Bernie and it was his fault. His supporters would say nasty things about Elizabeth Warren and he would like defense straight himself and be like, yes, I'm sorry, you know, please, my bro is like, stop that.

That I think that his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. That he didn't go like he kept saying sorry.

Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. And actually in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the time. He would always do stuff like Joe Biden, my friend, and it's like, no, he's not your friend. He stands for everything that you disagree with everything. He'd be like, yeah, he's a nice guy, but he's not my friend. But he would always be like, Joe and I are great friends. But you know, you know, we have a small disagreement on this. But you know, like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn't trust anymore. That's what people really wanted. But the other side of this is that the democratic base in 2020 was very different than 2016 because by 2020 they full on had TDS and they were basically like, we need to defeat Trump at all costs. We don't give a shit what your name is, Bernie Biden, whatever, whichever of you is going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the nom. 2016 is different because they didn't full on have that like love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats have. Democrats just care about winning the current base of the party. All they want to do is win Republican base. They don't give a about winning. They just love Trump. So it's nice to win. But one of those where they will express their ID for what they really want. Now, it's worked out for them because it turns out that's a very palpable political force. But one of the reasons why, you know, you won't see me.