28: Maxwell Meyer - Starships & Road Trips

Welcome to Dialectic episode 28 with Maxwell Meyer. Max is the founder of Arena Magazine, a relatively new print and digital publication focused on what Max calls American propaganda. They release physical issues quarterly and are currently shipping issue number five, Mission Critical. Arena and Max are focused on American values, technology, progress, capitalism, and ultimately as the name of their first issue. The New Needs Friends points at defending and putting a spotlight on Americans taking bold, ambitious risks. Max is as thoughtful as he is patriotic, and I enjoyed talking to him about his philosophy around how we push America and ultimately civilization forward. As you'll notice through the conversation, and as I call out at the end, one of my favorite things about Max is his care and love for America, big and small. from our most ambitious technological and capitalistic endeavors to the open roads, mom-and-pop shops, and little places between places that fill and define America. As always, if you enjoy Dialectic, please give it a rating and share it with a friend. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Max. Max Meyer, we're here. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to do this. It was fun. We started talking as I walked in, and I wish we were recording, so that's probably a good sign. i suppose that's always uh some of the good stuff so it goes i'm going to open with something you wrote about spacex you start it's a piece about the starship launch you say here's a story my future grandchildren are going to hear from me more than once i was on south padre island on april 20th 2023 when spacex launched its starship for the very first time from boca chica beach it will be essential that they hear it from me though Because this is how it was reported by the press at the time. Was the SpaceX launch really a, quote, success? Elon Musk's explosive day. First, SpaceX blew up a rocket. Then Musk blew up Twitter's verification system. Elon Musk's wealth plunges $13 billion. As drama unfolds across empire in the span of 24 hours, Tesla's earnings disappointed. A SpaceX rocket imploded. Twitter purged legacy blue check marks. It's no surprise SpaceX blows up rockets in Texas. That's why I can't. So on.

So there's several more. I won't read all of them. If I'm honest, I have been very critical of Elon in a lot of ways over the past few years, sometimes getting probably overly frustrated. I've called him childish. I think he candidly can be childish. And then sometimes I see things usually related to SpaceX. And it's just like a wake up call of just like, oh, my gosh, how fortunate am I to be alive at the same time as this person? And I think reading these types of criticisms, particularly about SpaceX, or just hearing some people talk about Elon, it can be almost mind-boggling just how much of a gap there is. So I have kind of a multi-part question to kick us off, which is, why do you think it's so hard for us to hold multiple things at once, maybe about a controversial or a person who does many things? Obviously, I think that is especially the case if there's anything remotely political about that person. Is it just an innate need for heroes and villains? Is it something else? And then I guess maybe my main question is like, can you even conceive of a world where we could have a collective American celebration to the order of something like the moon landing again? Or is that just like a thing of the past? Well, I think the best way to summarize it would be this addiction to cliche. Cliches are the easiest way to tell stories. And so relying on the things that you've already said, is something that's very easy to do. And in the case of the media reacting to Starship, that was the cliche that was the easiest for them, which was that they saw the rocket explode, same as everyone else did, and they reached for the previous story, which was Musk being erratic or Musk being personally offensive to them, and they conflated those two things rather than go a layer deeper. As for the sort of idea of national celebrations, I don't know the answer to that. I think we do have national celebrations and sort of consensus areas still, but they might not be obvious to people in this highly polarized information sphere. It's almost the things that are outside of that sphere where there's a super consensus in the rest of the population who are not really paying attention to.

what the elite media or what's happening on on twitter that's where you know the last place where i would look for evidence of such a consensus um it would happen more on other types of uh other types of areas and you know we've had ups and downs for 249 years people coming together people pulling apart, super polarized times, very, very, very unpolarized times. You know, George Herbert Walker Bush won 49 states and then lost the next time in a three-way race where the vote was closely divided between Clinton, Bush, and what's his name? Perot? Perot. Things can change quite rapidly, and usually... These alleged one way trends turn out to not be turn out to not be true. That's a little. Yeah, that's optimistic. I would say it's it's neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It happens to be optimistic because in this instance, the alleged one way trend is a negative one. But, you know, we also had we had we had one way. I'll give a few other examples. The birth rate declined in the US. Right. You know, up until 1946, basically. And then the baby boom begins, this post-war sort of surge. You've never seen anything like it. And now we've had another decline since the end of the baby boom. Could it be that there are these one-way trends that never change? Maybe. The evidence does not suggest that that's the case. We had, even to go back to the Apollo example, we had a very sort of steep decline in the American space program from 1986 to... 2016, basically. You basically have this 30-year period. 1986, the Challenger explosion really marks the beginning of the end. This is a huge public humiliation for NASA, a catastrophe for the spirit of the program. You have these astronauts dying. And then 30 years later in 2015, that's when SpaceX first lands a rocket on a barge. And I tend to think...

that there will that there will still be a a celebratory atmosphere if and when americans are on mars but maybe not around elon himself as it would have been had he not ventured into some of the areas that he did yeah yeah it's interesting even to the back to the beginning of your your answer around the sort of the the lowest hanging fruit to reach for on the cliche front i suspect it would have been a different reaction if this had happened in 2017 with elon even compared to 2023, which is probably telling. I don't think that they would have been quite as vindictive about it, trying to connect the Twitter purchase to the SpaceX explosion. Which, in hindsight, is so ridiculous. I've been really critical of the Twitter stuff, and even that, it's so ridiculous. It was ridiculous. I mean, it was the, you know, Elon's very bad, no good, horrible day, basically. You know, one thing that people forget, from 2006 to 2008, during the first three attempted launches of the Falcon 1, All three of them blew up on the pad. And then the fourth one succeeded. And now they've launched hundreds and hundreds of Falcons. I think today, the consecutive number of successful launches is over 300. They've launched over 300 in a row without a single incident. And so imagine if the journalists in the financial press were the adjudicators of whether SpaceX should continue after three launches. Or imagine if a congressional committee were in charge of it. NASA, if it had three rockets explode on the pad, there would be a congressional hearing, there would be a circus in Washington. What was going on with NASA in the 70s? Why was it different? The 70s were the sort of end of the Apollo period. Or maybe the late 60s would be a better question. Yeah. They had a sort of dazzling fusion of... public support, which meant that no one was going to sit around in Washington and harangue them. They were incredibly daring. You had some very high risk things happen. Think of Apollo 13. Think of, frankly, all of the Apollo missions were very high risk at that time, but there was a daring nature. Some things start to slow down, I suppose.

The Congress is more questioning of what are the values that we're getting out of here as the Cold War starts to come to an end in the 80s. There's pressure to do other things. Yeah, part of it maybe was that there was novelty in it. It was like, wow, we can finally do this crazy ambitious thing. It's so new. Yeah, I suppose some of that maybe would have come up with SpaceX too, at least in the early days. And maybe that's true. Maybe the early SpaceX days had a little bit more novelty and a little bit more hope. And then when Elon became established, it was less. easier to pick off. Well, something has to be real and established in order for you to be able to criticize it. Otherwise, you're just sort of, you know, picking on David. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can only pick on Goliath. And it's only once something is sort of sufficiently real, sufficiently big that it becomes a proper object of criticism in the minds of the proverbial critic, the person who fancies him or herself a critic or an observer. Right. i want to talk a little bit about criticism you uh the first the first issue of the magazine arena is titled in defense of the new or excuse me it's the new needs the new needs friends thank you but it's ultimately a defense of the new you uh you reference and i think you referenced in the magazine too but in a conversation with jim o'shaughnessy you were talking about ratatouille the classic amazing quote, you say, if you go back to my old columns in the Stanford Review, some of them were brutal. I was tearing apart these different activist movements and thinking of funny jokes. And that's like a normal mode for someone who is talented at language, the word sell. The challenging thing is to reverse that and write the stuff that's really fun to read and also sort of reverent to the principles that we hold dear. I'd love for you to talk about, and I should be clear, you've framed Arena as American propaganda. I'm curious for, First off, maybe like why you're so interested and you spend so much time in media broadly. And then what your sort of like personal spectrum between propaganda and criticism looks like, at least in the arena context. Yeah. So. Our point about criticism is really is really a point about trust. And I'll go back to the SpaceX example, which is that like a lot of the journalists writing headlines that day thought that their witty criticisms were more valuable than the exploding rocket.

And so my very firm principle and our very firm principle is that the exploding rocket is a thousand times more valuable than one of those negative headlines could ever be. And so that's how we establish trust. American propaganda is the mission. American propaganda is not really a process or a rule. It's the idea. that there are some things that are so fundamental that we do just sort of take them for granted. We're on America's side. We're really excited about the country. And that that is like the primary thing that's actually missing from a lot of the media landscape. And the reason to do it in a way that emphasizes trust is that it doesn't need to be a... sort of low quality polarized rag, which is certainly an opportunity, maybe a very profitable one in some instances. But that is, you know, a temptation that people should resist in order to create things that are better. On that note of trust, then there are, and granted for a certain audience, maybe they would prefer this, but there is a difference between a puff piece and something that is high trust, high credibility and positive and optimistic. I think you. at least often toe that line in arena, but I'm curious how you think about like, is there a, can we go too far in our prey? Like, is that a dilemma? Well, I'll reference my very first answer to you, which is that it's very important to avoid cliche. That is both a negative and a positive phenomenon. In the case of the sort of sarcastic, witty criticisms, that was negative cliche. There is also positive cliche exemplified most perhaps by the the epic forbes cover with elizabeth holmes holding the the vial of blood where they're letting her dress up in the black turtleneck as steve jobs yes and that was a another sort of symptom of this addiction to cliche which is that she has to be steve jobs and you know

It's also not, back to the earlier point, it's not really about the new. It's about taking this new thing and saying, like, it's credible or it's worthwhile or it's meaningful because it resembles this older thing that we already valorize. Yes, and that is cliche in a phrase. Unable to describe things as they are. First principles, Marcus Aurelius, look at the thing. What is the thing in itself? Tell us what it is. Maybe the fifth grade example is show, don't tell. People are suspicious of declarations where as a writer, actually, if you're doing something really well, you can get to the thesis, you can get to the argument just by describing it. And so one of our very important rules is that it is sufficient to describe the work of entrepreneurs. You don't have to editorialize on it in order to make the reader. understand why we think that something is important. The thesis should speak for itself. And that is also, frankly, intended to avoid any egg on our faces, having overly praised certain behaviors or characters. And if you're really grounded in just discussing the work, discussing the missions, then I don't think that that would happen naturally. On the other hand, it's not a... It's not a concern if there are companies doing good work that we cover that go out of business. We're not putting money into these businesses. We're not investors. We're not fiduciaries. Although it must be said that one of the elements of American propaganda that I would say, one of these unique qualities about America that we're interested in defending is this high risk, high reward mindset. And in Silicon Valley especially. a high tolerance of risk. It may be the only place in the world where there are people who fail and where capital investments go to zero, and then they mount these big comebacks, and the capital allocators in the area really still believe in them. And so where a journalist may look at it and say, are you worried about speaking positively about businesses? No, unless we're lying. What we hate to see...

Is this sort of cheerleading for things to fail or for things to or for things to not work? And that just, you know, isn't part of the American spirit, although it has been a part of the like American discussion. There has always been this sort of there has always been this sort of element. And Teddy Roosevelt is the one who advised us to remember who really gets the credit. And that is, you know, it will surprise no one that that's where we get the name arena. is from the Roosevelt speech. I was just going to say, it is funny thinking about the Elon example. In some sense, there's nothing more American than launching the rocket, and there's also kind of nothing more American than the people whining about it. Yeah, yeah. There was a great tweet the other week that I, you know, I wish I had tweeted myself, which was, America is an aerospace republic. This was sort of the, you know, maybe that really is the thing that totally changed and that defines modern America compared to... pre-1903 America is the Wright Brothers flight. Because then were these innovators, the moon, the first flight, landing rockets, going to Mars, supersonics, you know, atomic bombs. And by the way, it was critically, I believe, at least an American writer who, whatever, two weeks before the Wright Brothers wrote the 1 million to 10 million. Well, it wasn't any writer. It was in the New York Times. It was six weeks before the flight. They estimated that it would be 1 to 10 million years. And they were writing about a gentleman, a professor who was... Who was working on this right before right. Who was working on this. Attempts at a flying machine in Virginia, who would eventually be the head of the Smithsonian Institution, actually. And the, like, description that they gave was plunk. They were making fun of the flying machine crashing in the river. And then literally six weeks later. And so, obviously, there's a through line. from those New York Times critics and the sort of witty headline writers the day of the SpaceX launch, 420. They delayed the launch until the morning of 420. Elon is distinctly himself. And the problem, it's not that I think that there's something extremely immoral about it. You have to have skepticism and criticism in any sort of information landscape.

was that they were so biased, so naive, and so wrong that if you had paid any attention to them, you would be misinformed about the facts in a way that was just totally unnecessary. There are biased media outlets where you can get an accurate reading of the facts. There are unbiased media areas where you can get a good reading of the facts. And being aware of what is fundamentally true... is much more important than, like, the relative bias of the institution that you're getting the information from. At least it's nice to know that we're dealing with the same things they were dealing with 100 years ago or more. Yeah. Everything has a season. Yes, yes, yes. I like to talk a bit about American ideology, which I think has a lot of different parts. But we'll start with, I'm keen towards this idea that sort of what you believe about America. can sort of be defined by the myths you believe about America. I'd be curious for you to riff on or express the kind of core American myths that you believe in. Well, I will say that I, you know, I would use the word myth as basically things that are stories and that I don't consider a myth to be an untrue story. They are complicated, but they're basically the truths that we share. And I don't think that there's anything better than the words written in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. And while that has come under scrutiny as a result of the details around the edges, I think it almost misses the point that that's been the thing that that American society, culture, government has been constantly reorienting itself around. And in this respect. It's not even useful to point out the times when it wasn't true. That's what makes the myth true. That's what makes the story important is all of these sort of every exception proves the rule. Times where it was tested in some sense. Yeah, every exception proves the rule. It's basically the idea there. There are all sorts of other elements of the American ideology that are unique, but that one is definitely right there at the beginning. And at that time,

Part of the reason why I associate with that one so fervently and why all of the criticism that it wasn't true or that we didn't live up to it is so half-baked is that nothing like that had ever existed. No government had ever written those things down. No government had ever declared itself based on those principles. It was such a rebellion against everything previously where, again, part of why excessive criticism is a lazy intellectual mode is that What was this great system before then? It's like capitalism is the worst thing ever. It's just the best of the ones we invented or whatever. Right. Now, frankly, the far left answer nowadays is to look at hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous societies of the Americas and suggest that there was something more liberal in a small L liberal sense, more freedom-loving or more American than the Declaration. And, you know, these are... revisionist lies, and I'm, you know, more than willing to stand by the myth instead of, you know, accept the revisionism and the, you know, political washing. Alexis, I'm going to butcher this, de Tocqueville? De Tocqueville. Thank you. You've referenced him many times, a few times. What is so inspiring about him and his thinking? So Tocqueville is this French nobleman who, in the 1810s, visits the United States. This is in the first 30 years of the Republic, basically. The Constitution is ratified in 1787. He's visiting in 1813, I think. And he's in New England. And what Tocqueville finds is that Americans are obsessed with these sort of communal enterprises and participating in local governments and councils. And in New England especially, I think that was, you know, New England was at that time the most sort of politically mature of the American states, densely packed. These villages that had existed for hundreds of years at that point, you know, Massachusetts always had this legislative tradition with a big house of burgesses. And what he finds is that Americans love enterprise and Americans love working together toward goals and that they were much more willing to organize small.

polities or enterprises or organizations between equal citizens than other groups that he had seen where, you know, rich and poor would work together or discuss things in the council. And that, again, is like, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. They believed it. And it was not a constant professing of the dogma. They didn't have to say it out loud. They just did it. They were honeybees building a hive. And Tocqueville, as a foreign observer, is sort of one of the first people to describe this in a third-person sense, to see the Americans. What is the American? Who are the Americans? And so his description of democracy in America, that's the name of the book, is like the first and greatest one. Wow, that's really cool. I'm eager to look into that more. you have a line americans are movers so many ways to kind of interpret this but i think like one one phrase i think from you is like seeking some kind of technological or elective edge obviously so much of this is tied to new frontiers this ties to the highway system just the immigrants yeah i'm curious how that frame of movers has kind of like shaped your view of america and americans yes i love explicating this point which is that the people who built america And the people who populated America for centuries afterward are all descended from people who left one place for another within the memory of 10 generations, say. Sometimes it's more like 15 or 20. I don't know who the oldest stock in America is. It might be getting up toward 20 generations. Everyone left for somewhere. And America is a younger society than most of the places in Europe or Asia. Japan and China have sort of thousands of years of continuity. The European states, while some of them are new, a lot of them have existed. And so that's sort of the spiritual point, is that everyone in America left somewhere for somewhere else. And that that defined the waves of immigrants who arrived, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Jews, the original settlers in New England were fleeing religious oppression in the United Kingdom.

the pilgrims, you have other sort of characters like that. And the practical observation is that Americans literally move around more than other people. This is a proven sociological phenomenon. Americans tend to grow up further away from where they were born compared to other countries. Sorry, they tend to move away further from where they were born. They're more likely to move in any given year. They're more likely to, you know, buy a new house or go somewhere else. Part of this is historically this open frontier in America. You know, when the Homestead Act gets going in 1860, they can go out further west than they ever had. They can go get land. There's this sort of adventure. So that was why it was literally possible to do that in 1860 in America. You could get a parcel of land in Nebraska or California. Think of it, getting free land in California. No one was there. It's funny. Literally, Mackenzie, who I just interviewed, the second time it's been brought up on this podcast, back to back, the Homestead Act is getting a lot of favor. And like, you know, there was no there was no extra land to go get for free in in Scotland or England or France or Spain. These were sort of, you know, existing places. And so things tend to lock in a little bit. And so, you know, the fact that Americans are descended from the movers and prove to be movers themselves. And even now. where officially the frontier closed when the last Homestead Act parcels were gobbled up. You know, the last time we added states was Hawaii and Alaska in 1959 and 1960. And so, you know, you have the last state added to the Union in 1960. We could have future states, but it's the most recent state to be admitted, Alaska, our biggest state. And what do we do? Three years later, we start the space program. We're like, all right, we can't go out anymore. We've got to go up. And that is sort of a tongue-in-cheek point, but it's a myth that I wish to propagate, which is that this is what we're constantly doing. Do you think most Americans still have that in them today? So the statistics say that it's true. The statistics say that we're still quite a mobile people. We still have social mobility, geographic mobility. In certain respects, this has changed, though,

In the 50s or 60s, one of the places that people were going to was California. You have a different group of people that are going to California these days, and it's a smaller group. You don't have nearly the amount of migration taking place to California. But my supposition is that Americans will find the next. Sometimes it can feel grandiose to call all of these frontiers, but they will find the next place to move. You have people that are moving to the South. You have these these public schools in the South that are taking off where kids from Massachusetts are going to Ole Miss and the University of Alabama and Auburn like they never have before. So, yes, I think it's still true in spite of the evidence in certain areas that it's declined. People are not a people are not able to, you know, pick up and be a hippie in San Francisco quite as easily anymore. You've got to. Is it would it be. Do you think that the people who are trying to do these like network cities and network states, in some sense, it's very American ideologically. And in some sense, it's literally not very American. Do you think that that's still capturing some of that? So obviously it captures the attention of a bunch of these Americans. But then I think what tends to happen is once you remind the American that in order to do this, he has to leave the sort of sphere of America. You know, all I will say is that, you know, If you want me to believe that you're going to go start a new civilization in the far reaches of the world, the place that you should not be currently living is New York City. Not this Lotus Eaters Island where no one ever leaves. Go to Oklahoma. Oklahoma is like the frontier compared to Manhattan. So I'm in favor of all of these things succeeding, but I... I'm a little bit skeptical. Yeah, that's fair. I'm a little bit skeptical. Where does your patriotism come from? I think I always had it, but I think in the last 10 years since I started reading more, it was more based on having thought through the arguments and read the stories. That's like the version of it that's thought out and that I can actually identify. But I mean, I also have the sort of sappy patriotism.

which is that when I, like, leave the country and see the signs at the airport on the way back, welcome to the United States of America, I get emotional. And when I see videos of, you know, on September 11th, they played the Star Spangled Banner at Buckingham Palace in London. And, you know, I'm a sucker for that. I'm a sucker for the Jefferson Monument. I was in D.C. recently for the first time in 10 years and was walking around, and it was emotional. It's a special place. Yeah. So I don't know how to give a good intellectual answer to it. I know that it moves me both in the front of my brain and in the back of my brain, though. And so my caveman answer is, yes, this one is good. Maybe that's a lead-in to an answer to my next question, which would be... I'm curious what you would say, maybe especially to young people, but maybe anyone who probably many of them who are pretty far from you on the political spectrum. Right. Who like, could you make a case for them for more patriotism? Oh, totally. Well, and for what it's worth, though, I am very outspoken in my views and have at various times been called a right wing lunatic or whatever it is. I spent my life growing up in left-wing circles, even when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, causing all sorts of right-wing mischief. I was living in, at one point, a vegetarian, socialist, cooperative house. I adore people who are on the left. You can't love America if you hate a half of the country. And I think that that's one of the big mistakes that has become, unfortunately, very prevalent online. is turning your patriotism into sort of a hatred of an ideology. Or a sports team. Like, could you hate William Jennings Bryan or whatnot, who's this sort of proto-socialist candidate who's running all the time in the 1910s and the 1920s? It is plain as day to me that there's always going to be a left in America. There's always going to be a right in America. And, you know, if you lose your mind every four or eight years, you're going to be in for a long road.

Another comment on what we were saying earlier about these one-way trends, can we come together as a nation again or whatnot? I'll just say it again. Bush won 49 states, and then you have this chaos. There were people after Barack Obama won re-election that thought that the Republican Party would never win another election again, and then who came knocking at the door? These things are unpredictable. There's a solid contingent of Americans who are not politically crazy or uh politically predictable and you have to you have to you have to you have to live with people and as for the like you know the actual case to make to left-wing people to be patriotic about america or objectively young people who don't necessarily feel connected to their country at a maybe basic level well objectively it it it it it achieves the the sort of the sort of goals of people across the spectrum better than any other system so in terms of We'll list a few left-wing values and a few conservative values. Left-wing values, you have health, relative sense of equality, welfare, safety. Maybe safety is more a right-leaning thing at this point. I think it's maybe pretty fundamental, though. And then on the right, you would have religious freedom and intact families. And, you know, what I would say to both groups is, despite some of the wrinkles, America is still better at achieving these ends than other systems. And if people are not interested in taking sort of high-risk approaches to life, then maybe America can be disappointing at certain times. The challenge is always in finding the energy to take advantage of the opportunity. You can be a teacher in France and make... a third of what an American gas station worker is making. We're here in Texas. If you've ever been to Bucky's, you know, the car wash manager at Bucky's makes $130,000, gets unlimited paid vacation, health care, 401k, everything. And I can't look at that and think anything other than, yes, there's opportunity out there, but the frontiers have changed. The opportunities have changed. And it's not,

going to be a sort of cushy corporate opportunity for every single person. Maybe to invert part of that last point, what do you think Americans could most stand to learn from the rest of the world and maybe more specifically Europe and China? So there's a very fascinating book by a Chinese intellectual called Wang Huning. He's a member of the Politburo in China. So one of the seven men. who run the Communist Party. Many see him as the sort of eminence gris, the great eminence, the intellectual advisor to Xi Jinping, and who has formulated a lot of the thought over there in the last 15 years. He was a professor and he spent two years traveling in America. Specifically, he spent most of the time in Iowa, actually, where I grew up. And he wrote this book called America Against America. And he was sort of describing the individualism and consumerism. And he's trying to paint this picture that, you know, the sort of the communist theory of history moving in one direction, that inevitably America would tear itself apart because of this, because of the consumerism, because of the individualism. On the other hand, his descriptions, especially of these rural Iowa towns, are amazing. He is absolutely floored to see these towns of five and six thousand people that have functioning public libraries. He can't believe that these people in the small towns don't feel the need to leave because they have this sort of abundance. In China at that time, this would have been the 90s, they were still sort of in the throes of this industrialization coming out of this disaster of the 60s and 70s. And at that time, the only prosperous places in China that you could imagine are the cities. The countryside's a total calamity. And of course, the calamity in the countryside is sort of one of the defining things of China since the 30s. You have the disaster of Japanese imperialism, just a total carnage. And eventually, you know, in the Chinese Civil War, this peasant revolt with the Communist Party eventually taking over. And then, you know, the villages falling apart during the Cultural Revolution, during the Great Leap Forward where they're smelting steel in backyards and turning farm implements into steel. It's this absolute craziness. 50 million people die in a famine.

And so, you know, Wong Huning, this intellectual who's now at the highest levels of the CCP, cannot believe that there's like rural prosperity in America and that people will send books to a library and take books from a library and put them back. So I give the long-winded example there because Wong Huning spent a decent effort to try to understand America. It was on his own terms. There are things about his history that are warped because of his ideology. But I don't think there's a correct answer for what you can learn from these societies. I think you just have to study them. You have to come to your own view at some point. But maybe my answer on China would be that I think there's this shared human story of people wanting to take their country into the spotlight and do great things. And I've never been to China. I've never been to Asia. I think... It's evident to me that there are a lot of great Chinese builders and characters who are really interested in earning their spot at the table, so to speak. And that doesn't have to be a source of conflict, even where we have obvious sources of conflict that can't be denied. I don't think people should hate the idea of... China wanting to be this prosperous commercial society. And there may even be a point that- It's a national ambition. It seems to be. Yeah. It seems to be. Whereas we nationally have ambition, but we have less national ambition probably. Yeah. The image of the furnaces in the backyard during the Great Leap Forward, the image of the Chinese going to the factories. Or the Charlie Munger comment about the South Koreans going to the auto factories for 90 hours a week. He said, you know, how couldn't you lose to these people? You know about the South Koreans melting all their gold, by the way, to pay back the debt? Another version that's crazy. I've never heard this one. A friend of mine is, he's South Korean, he was telling me, I think it's his parents' generation, maybe like, I'm sure I'm getting part of the facts wrong, but like maybe the late, like 90s-ish, they had so much debt.

from like a UNICEF loan or something. But they had so much national pride that all the people like took their jewelry and gave it to them. And they're the first country in history to pay off the UNICEF loan purely off of the like individual citizens pride. Right. The Chinese are among the biggest individual savers in the world. So Americans are constantly in debt. You know, think of it. It's one of the only countries in history where you have fixed rate long-term mortgages. provided by banks. The banks are backed up by the federal government. This is unprecedented. And so the American character is like, we're going to get a credit card. We're going to put some money on it. We're going to have a house. We're going to have a car. And the Chinese are like big savers. Yeah. Super spendthrifty. They do not want to like drop big amounts of money on stuff. You know, these behaviors are these behaviors can change. And if you think about, you know. 1941 to 1945, when America is fighting a two-front war, you have Liberty Gardens, you have the auto factories in Detroit turning into tank factories, you have a sort of society-wide mobilization, and then after the war, a society-wide mobilization that wasn't directed from the top to have children. The baby boom, again, it's one of the most sort of fascinating phenomena ever. And was it like a... a national identity or was it a personal identity that was like associated with the nation i don't know how to like decide the difference between these two things it's clear that any society can have like true mobilizations of the people and sometimes it doesn't yeah yeah yeah my suspicion is that the chinese ones tend to be more top-down and the american ones tend to be more bottom-up or emergent but and well and maybe and maybe the difference between American ideology and Chinese ideology is that, you know, the American ideology, if you believe it, you have to believe that the bottom up stuff is more powerful. Yes. Because otherwise, why not be China? Yes. Yes. Yes. Precisely. I think you and I are making some assumptions here, but you write a pretty amazing magazine about progress. I think you and I are technology adjacent or technologists who are very pro progress. And that's a very common meme. Progress studies that there's a lot of things in this in this broader vein.

I'm not sure that most Americans are actually that pro-progress, right? At least I'd be curious. Like, I think that's more of an open question. And so I guess partially my question would be like, what are your thoughts on that broadly? Do you agree? And then downstream that, if that's broadly right, how do we shift people towards more broadly? In many ways, we're like, I don't know if you've ever seen that wait, but why graph of like the arc of history and how much things change. And it's sort of like, at any given point it sort of feels like things are changing a lot but it actually if you zoom out it's kind of flat and he theorizes that we actually might be finally like at the bend in the curve where things are about to just go like totally vertical and the future 10 years from now is going to look nothing like the future um five years ago and so i guess with with that in mind this notion that actually we're about to rip up the progress curve it seems pretty important to me that like we get the average americans like buy-in on this Yeah, it's very open-ended, but I'm curious what you think. I would even say that to get the average American's buy-in to amazing technology is basically one of the founding purposes of ARENA. And part of that mission is to explain, let's go back to the New York Times, like making fun of the flying professor or the not flying professor, rather. He was trying, you know, the advent of air travel totally changed everything. And then we could just we could go down the line with air travel and I could give you a few great examples of it being totally upended. You know, first it did not exist. Then it existed. Then it goes into warfighting. Then it starts to get commercialized. One of the great stories of technological automation, United Airlines used to have literally thousands of ticket checkers. And these people were employed in big offices in Chicago and Houston. And before the. computer systems were invented, and this was not until the 2000s that these things were functioning properly, they would literally check the tickets after the flights had taken place in order to verify who had boarded the flights. Oh my gosh. So you have a pre-flight manifest and then you have the tickets. And so you're at the airport in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you've just sent a flight off to Denver. The ticket stubs that get ripped off the ticket get mailed from Santa Fe to Houston, where then these people check the tickets and they reconcile it. And so, you know.

There's a great column in the Wall Street Journal from, you know, 2010 or so explaining this phenomenon, how United became an airline. And when you stop checking tickets, then you can have more flight attendants and you can have more pilots and you can be bigger. And so, you know, that's a classic example of the type of automation worries that some people are worried about with regard to AI, which is one of the big sort of alleged changes that's coming up. than a giant divergence. But, you know, think of what humans were doing 10,000 years ago. We were, you know, face down in the dirt. Yeah, Sam Altman has a recent essay where he talks about, like, even 100 years ago, if they looked at our jobs now, they say they're all playing games. Like, it's totally make-believe. I encountered some activists while I was at Stanford who were hosting this activist from India. It's been six or seven years now. Her name escapes me. But she... is an anti-industrial agriculture activist. Okay. You know, we may have some romantic attachment to, you know, women and children tending the fields or doing homesteading or whatnot. I own a farm. I have a little apple orchard. There is a romantic quality to it. But what you're actually talking about if we're against industrial agriculture is forcing women and children to go work in fields all day, forcing them to break their backs. And this woman was an activist from India. In the global South, where you have, you know, almost 2 billion people who are trying to get above poverty and get into modernity, you know, who are we to say, you know, actually, there's something romantic, there's something sort of charming about, you know, farming by hand, so we're going to send you back to the fields and you're going to have to do that. You know, it's amazingly luxurious what we have. And so all of these... attachments to the way things were previously done can usually be overcome. Even if you ask people on the street, they may not be in favor of it. Their demonstrated preference is utterly clear. Is there ever a time for looking back or trying to actively slow down? There's always a time for some people to do that, which is dialectic, going back and forth.

You always need that in order to have progress. And so the wrong tack for the go, go, go people would be to just try to utterly discredit the slow down people based on their let's go faster assumptions. What you actually need to do is switch the assumptions around and then argue against the other position. You need to accept the other person's premises, which is that they're worried about They're worried about human meaning and they're worried about change. And so if you reject the premises, there's no hope of having an actual dialectic between the two disagreeing sides. If you can switch out your premises and understand the other person's, whether it's feelings or the values that they're sort of aiming toward or the type of future that they fear or that they want, then you can actually make an argument. And so, you know, yes, there's always a time for... for slowing down, but it's as part of a conversation. Maybe, I think I largely agree. The cynical view would say like, that's all neat and cute, but like the world isn't actually slowing down. So good luck. Well, I'm not sure that I agree. Technology seems often to be a runaway train. The AI stuff being a perfect example. There's so much AI safety discussion, yet everybody's just rampant like crazy. I think that there is a present times bias. to think that things are more crazy now than they were. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure. I think I like 2025 more than I like 1945 in a lot of respects. And I think that our ancestors would be curious to hear that we think that it's going faster now. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. I don't think that that is a... I don't think that is a sufficient argument for a slowdown position. It actually has to be based on facts. It has to be based on sort of concrete observations about what could happen rather than a sort of generic. Like we're living through the craziest times. Well, you know, think of the sort of post Hiroshima, post Nagasaki coalescence of these nuclear scientists who are warning the world.

That was not based on this idea that it's crazier than ever or these abstractions. It was actually based on super concrete facts and super concrete things. And so I think that all of these arguments, you know, if the argument is just that you need to listen to me because I know something about the future that you don't in some abstract way that like the present is moving faster than the past did, I don't think people are going to win arguments based on that. You need to remain very concrete. You need to explain how things affect. both in the macro and the micro sense, people's lives. With nuclear weapons, it's like the easiest argument in the world. This is why we need to restrict the development of nuclear energy and especially enriched uranium and plutonium to a certain group of states and have there be like a very strong relationship between the states where you have Russian and American military officers calling each other every single day throughout the Cold War. And you have, you know, Chinese nuclear officers who know all of the American nuclear officers. That was based on facts, not some abstraction. And so it worked. I think one of the mistakes that especially the, you know, whether it's the AI doomers or AI skeptics or whatever label they want for themselves, I'm not interested in labeling them in a derogatory way, is that if it's too abstract, they're never going to win the argument. And so I don't really care about justice for their argument in some, you know, universal sense. I want them to get to the right argument for their own sake so that we can have the proper discussion. And I would much rather have arguments based on concrete points than sort of abstract judgments that, like, the present is so different from the past that we have to throw away the things that made us prosperous in the past, which was, let's try it out. Hmm. Changing gears a little bit. Talk about, you've written in a few different places about sort of the bleeding together of tech culture and American culture. You have a line about sort of, at least in the 2010s, tech culture sort of aspiring to be above and without American culture. You go on to say, tech, like other institutions, decided to be disloyal to the country in the 2010s, control the population, censor them, not cooperate with the military, and build a bubble to ascend.

There's a lot more to go to, but is that specific bit a byproduct of tech's growing power in the 2010s across institutions or is it something else? I think it's something that naturally happens in both cultural bubbles and sort of ascendant areas is they think, again, it sort of goes back to this idea about one way trends, that things never change, which is like when Silicon Valley became this like takeoff thing, the idea that they were going to like. rule every other element of things. I happen to love Mark Zuckerberg, but like the tour right after 2016 to like tour the country was the most like naive thing in this regard, because even the like concession to the rest of the country, which is that, yes, you like totally slapped us across the face by putting Trump in the White House was this idea that like. that he was going to go tour around and whatnot, a trip to America, like he was a foreign exchange student or something. And so I think it's just a plain observation that every once in a while, these places, whether it's Wall Street in the 2000s or Silicon Valley in the 2010s, can do things that end up, you know. And for what it's worth, I'm very concerned that the backlashes to these things will be genuinely bad for the society that does them. So like... You know, you have some nonsense on Wall Street in the 2000s, no doubt. But there are a lot of cases that I've read that I'm persuaded by that Dodd-Frank, the reaction to it was genuinely bad in a way that we can't even comprehend because we don't know what would have happened. Opportunity cost and all these other things. And so my goal is to not have this sort of, you know. huge backlash to tech narcissism by basically saying, we're going to enjoin you from doing anything. And I think that that is the constant risk. And technology is full of people who are super talented and able to accomplish really dazzling things. There is a temptation to believe that they can do things like control public opinion or persuade people in like a lazy way.

That just never works. Like there is always the risk that someone else is making a better argument than you. And it doesn't matter how talented you are. And you have to actually, again, get on people's level, accept their premises, and then argue against the conclusions. Because if the premises are totally different, like we don't care at all about the American military or whatnot, then it's like there's no possibility of an argument. I think that that sentence in particular was sort of commenting about the idea that like, All we're going to do is build social media and we're absolutely never going to partner with the government, even if there's a demo. It's icky. Because it's sort of like not not exactly, but kind of. And it wasn't even some, you know, you know, crazy right wing government. This was the the Department of Defense of President Obama and Google declaring based on the the value judgments of its employees that they would absolutely never build software. so that our commander in chief could protect the country. And that was like a, it's a, I call it a cultural bubble because they believed that there was like no cost to that. They believed that that was something that was like, and where are we? Where were we nine years later? You have the sort of absurd spectacle of Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, all standing behind. the president-elect, Donald Trump, at his second inauguration. And that was like a crazy mirror image of the other version of it. That's a really great point. So like Bezos, and I don't think that Bezos was like particularly involved in this decision at the time, Amazon like not doing defense stuff. Or at that time, I guess Larry was still running Google. Google declaring that they're not going to help with the drone projects. And then literally nine years later, Sonar Pichai is like standing behind Trump at the inauguration. That may have been too aggressive a correction, but it was like, get out of your bubble quick. Yeah. Get out of it quickly. Yeah. This was, by the way, this is the cost of this. This was the cost of being in that crazy bubble. And same thing with this, you know, you know, there's this populist desire to say that like social media needs to be like regulated in some special way. I actually think that that's untrue.

The effects of, first of all, if not a single academic consensus can actually find damages in this area when they're extremely motivated to find them, then that's the first thing that people should look at. You have entire psychology departments, entire sociology departments at these left-wing universities where they're predisposed to hate entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg if they can't find a statistically significant effect in their own biased studies. trying to paint social media as being damaging to children and teens, then that's the first piece of sort of, wow, they can't even find it. What do you think? I don't want to go too far on a tangent here, but what do you think about all the kind of seeming, like, just all the evidence that young people are more depressed, more lonely, more blah, blah, blah, like? Yeah. So I think it's, again, I think it's one of these. I think it's one of these one-way trends that turns out to not be true when you look at things in the fullness of time. Also, just anecdotally, I and everyone I know feel this. We all are like, I want to be less. This thing doesn't make me happy. I want to be on it less, and I don't know what to do. Yeah. You know, we had a temperance movement in the United States. We banned alcohol as a constitutional amendment for a decade. Again, I think that there's a present-time bias. Yeah. And, you know. People were drafted to be sent to Vietnam in the 60s. Could it be that there is right now this bowling alone trend where there's more atomization? Yes, absolutely. And I think that we have to actually think about, like, you know, positivist, positive action-oriented solutions to it rather than trying to make... you know, technological restrictions. I think that that's questionable. Yeah. And I, you know, I love the Tyler Cowen cut on it, which is obviously for people that are interested in it, the internet can be like a, like a big connector. And the problem with any sort of rule is how do you write rules where it doesn't punish sort of the good actors and the people who can contain them, constrain themselves?

but that also protects the people with lack of impulse control or whatnot, which is why we have restrictions on gambling or alcohol or whatnot. It's like, how do you write the rule in such a way where it doesn't put down people that are strivers and that are really looking to excel? And I think that most of the restriction-based approaches fail in this regard. So there's a desire to get rid of standardized testing because it does not advantage the lower... 40% of the totem pole, basically. It's really, really good for undiscovered talent, especially in rural areas or poor families who can do well on a standardized test. And so, you know, there's a desire to restrict it or pretend like it's some sort of problem. I think we have to look at things in a really full way and consider the evidence. And with the social media thing in particular, the evidence is is mixed at best. And there are so many counter examples to it that all arise from things that are what I would call positive, meaning that they're like, they're like, they're things, they're reasons why people believe in things or whatnot. You know, there are all sorts of, there are all sorts of cultural things that are very interesting to people that they do gather around for and that you still have these like communal things. And you need people to be constantly like doing those things rather than trying to restrict the other things. That's, that's just my belief. Totally. But it's also like a, You know, China's like trying to like ban video games or whatnot. I just don't think that I just don't think that you can control behavior like this. I think you've got to give people better options. And that would be the real crisis that I see is like a lack of interest in starting these things rather than rather than pinning the blame on on on Facebook. I'd rather look at like, why don't we like do more of this? much of your the answer you just gave rhymes with the argument uh nadia makes in the in the piece she wrote for the first um issue of arena on comparing sort of smartphones and guns she makes this excellent point i think um she's talking about sort of like gun owners she says while the national debate likes to portray the use of firearms as fundamentally irresponsible the biggest safety gun advocates are in my experience gun enthusiasts themselves and she sort of makes this case for like

if silicon valley wants to by the way be at like the big boys table it needs to have it needs to be more accountable for its implications across a whole range of things meaning um it very well might be i don't want to over focus on the smartphone example in the smartphone example though it might be very that you're right we need more optimistic solutions it seems that most technologists are sort of like yeah i don't let my kid have an ipad but like otherwise not so concerned and there's almost a broader there's a broader silicon valley sort of thing that like hand waves, like the UBI stuff when Sam and Dario talk about you. Yeah, well, like this is going to be crazy and there's probably just going to be UBI at some point. Like there's almost a hand waving of the accountability on it. Yeah. I mean, when when they say things like that, it's like they should be they should be dragged to like a high school gym and I'll give them a lecture for like 14 hours about how to talk to normal people and not and not make yourself like the most hated person on the earth, which at any given time. Dario and Sam, both of whom I respect, could be based on the things that they're, yeah, they're flirting with. Yeah, just to, just to concretize this, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, like, I guess the root of my question is, like, it seems very important that technology leaders are going to have to figure out how to not say, not communicate, like, get on the train or it'll be left behind, and instead communicate, like, here's an outstretched hand. And, like, we are going to go somewhere together. Like, what, what is it going to take for them to be able to do that? It's our hope that, it's our hope that we can help. Because I happen to think it's true, actually, that like it's possible that it's possible to do this. Yeah, you have to you have to get out of the bubble. And, you know, I don't think they're going to be attending presidential inaugurations much more. But I think there's going to have to be a like I think that's where you get accountability from. You just have to go. You have to go find people. I don't think it's not what Mark did in 2016. Yes, he didn't listen to them that time was maybe the bigger issue, which is that like.

You had all these technology companies that are sort of hand-waving to the conservatives in 16, 17, 18, 19. They're still sort of like hostile. And then, you know, 2020, they like are like the arch censors during COVID, which was a time when it really like affected people. And the like the two classic stories being like censorship of the idea that it came out of like the lab and then like the stuff during the election. That was like what recollapsed the trust. If you actually believe that the other side has something to say, then you might actually be able to learn something. I think the problem is if you don't believe it and you're just hand-waving, then that would be the thing. As for like the gun enthusiast, the phone enthusiast or whatnot, I'm not in love with like five-year-olds on iPads at restaurants. This sort of goes back to the point, how do you write rules for a society in such a way where the people with who are not following the rules are not going to, like, cause a bunch of chaos. So, like, parents who give their kids iPads at the restaurant or whatnot, it's like, okay, maybe the expectation should be a little bit different because this is clearly causing some negative effects that are externalities. The kids not socializing properly or whatnot. Across the board, there's no macro evidence that these things that people are allegedly, you know, that are allegedly happening are actually happening in a statistically significant way. It could literally be anything. It could be, it could be what we call wokeness or political correctness. It could be the fact that we have political chaos. It could be, it could be some other thing. And it's really difficult to get to like, you know, specific answers in these overdetermined areas. Especially on a short time horizon. On a short time horizon, especially. But with like the, like the gun and phone thing, if we're so against the, you know. iPad kid at the restaurant booth, I'm not willing to take that and translate it into, I don't want to let a 19-year-old be discovered on the internet for programming talent or something. And there's clearly something hugely liberating and that flattens the field of opportunity. Greatest lever on agency ever. Exactly. And so you have to be able to see it.

Tyler was interviewing Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the It's the Phones book, basically. One of the funny things that he suggested, and I have no idea whether he's right about this, but it was like the type of out-of-the-box thinking that Tyler's great for and the totally confused Haidt was, you know, aren't the kids just going to have the AIs scroll TikTok for them at some point? And Haidt had never considered this. And it's like, maybe it's stupid, maybe it's genius, I don't know. And he compared it to, when the Aztecs learned how to nishtimalize corn. Nishtimal comes from the Nahuatl language. And when they added lime, the chemical to corn, that's how you can turn it into masa. And so like a corn tortilla has been nishtimalized. And so then it's purely, it's totally digestible. And so that's how you can turn corn into a staple food. And the Aztecs just figured this out. And it's like, oh, wow. These five-year-olds of tomorrow are going to be so much better equipped for the dopamine hijacking than we are. So it's like, again, to assume that, like, it's almost like, you know, this physics-based fallacy with history. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. That's not true at all with these historical things. And, you know, people assume that trends are always going to. And then they're shocked, utterly shocked when things turn around. I love the, like, you know, this great, this hilarious book from the mid-2000s, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which was literally the, like, demographic shifts are going to permanently enshrine the Democratic Party as, like, the majority party in the United States. And then, you know, oopsie doopsie, Trump wins every single border county in Texas, and they're all 80% Mexican-American. These one-way trends do not continue. You know, no kingdom lasts forever. And it's sort of the classic narcissistic flaw to believe that you are an object in motion. Yeah, you're special. Or not even that you're special, that something that you are associated with in some way is special. Yeah. But we're all narcissists. Yeah. And that's not necessarily like a... It's not like a...

a moral failing. It's sort of a classic human failing. Yes, yes, yes. But it's amazing how much this continues to come up in the conversation. It's a clarifying point. Part of the reason why I'm so obsessed with it is just because the political example is the one that has been the most top of mind for a lot of the people that I've known in my life. People who cannot cope with the idea that Trump became president or the fact that Trump lost in 2020 or the fact that he won again. And it's like, and it's like, pendulum, here it goes. And, and, and this is, and, you know, because America is so important to me, this one is very front of mind, which is that like, you know, I plan to, you know, hopefully live to 2100 or maybe a little bit beyond. There's going to be a lot of people who do a lot of things and things are going to change around a lot. And if you are like egg on your face every single time and making these like bold predictions or whatnot. It's not it's not going to be a sort of pleasant trajectory. I cut you off slightly as you were making this point. So I'd love to give you a chance to speak on it one more time would be if you were going to give advice to Sam and Dario or doing a lot of what you just described. Oh, my gosh, everything's going to be crazy. But yeah, what would you tell them? I would not communicate in any way that you're like somewhat open to humanity going away. That's the first one. So it's like, no ambivalence about existence. I think they've done a decent job of that. Maybe not. No, no, no, they have. Some of the others have it. This is like the number one piece of advice, though. Because I think the more... the more intellectualized one starts to get about these AI issues. Right, right. Like the more people have like written and thought about AI, it tends to approach that they're more ambivalent about existence. Yes. I mean, even Elon talks about how he thinks that, you know, maybe man evolved to get the silicon out of the earth to build the super intelligence or whatnot. Okay, that's the first one. No like freaky shit. But then the second one is that there shouldn't be

judgment about people's fear, you should actually turn it around and talk about, like, what are the things that are important to them that are not currently being considered? So I'll give sort of an out of the blue example, maybe, which is that, like, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Hillary Clinton's statements in 2016 that the coal mines did not need to be opened forever. I'm extremely in favor of maximal energy production, including fossil fuels, and I don't care at all about using natural gas and petroleum to power our society. I think that in the case of coal, there was like a pretty clear argument that, you know, it was really affecting people's health, especially the people who were mining the coal. And Hillary did a god-awful job of communicating it because her big message was like, we're putting you out of business. And that was like the exact wrong thing to do. And it backfired massively in these places that she needed to win. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, three big coal states. The argument could have been instead like, you know, and the two sort of opportunities that were being presented to the coal miners at various points were to go work on clean energy, windmills, which are also, you know. you know, it's better than coal in many respects for the air, but it's environmentally questionable in other ways and not like easy work compared to coal either, or that they were going to like be software engineers. And so it was like learn to code or go work on green energy. And both of these were sort of dismissive of the premises of these people's lives, which is that they had derived identity from being in the coal towns. On the other hand, like it was really damaging to their health. And so like there is a There's like an argument that there's a humane thing that we need to do, which is to like create better opportunities. It does not rhyme with, you know, we're going to send you to some other lofty project or whatnot. Or that you're going to learn to code, you idiot, basically. And so, you know, how I would communicate it is like, think of the opportunity. You know, what if we solved traffic?

What if you didn't have to spend an hour of your life or more in traffic in some of these cities? That's the promise of autonomy at scale. What if every child could have an amazing tutor? And what if we could have really positive medical discoveries or whatnot? I think one of the ways in which... In Sam's blogs or Dario's blogs, they're sort of always struggling to get to the concrete things that are good. And it's like, you know, Sam, you know, talking about like how the next GPTs will like influence like scientific discoveries or whatnot. That is itself sort of an abstraction that should be avoided. Right. You can just talk about things that are already good, things that are amazing. What about alpha school? What about, you know, what about these sort of, you know. opportunities for for kids or the self-driving thing and you know focusing on the things that already are is like a really good way to make people optimistic about the future not to promise things that are going to be difficult to falsify or difficult to recognize or just abstract your earlier point they're just like they're not concrete in any way yeah yeah so directional things are going to improve it's sort of the same it's sort of the same reason why like the climate like alarmist argument failed it was because like There were all these like crazy predictions or whatnot, and they did not really talk about people's lives. Yes. They failed to recognize like the like immense importance of energy in people's lives. And they lost the argument because ultimately we were going to want more energy regardless of the environmental stuff. And that it turned out that the demand for energy was going to push us into areas where we're going to look to cut costs. And so then we did things like like batteries. And and so it was the like rejection of the premise that like what you care about matters at all that prevented the people like Al Gore from making a sound argument. It will prevent like the AI people will not be able to make a sound argument unless they are willing to like deal with the actual premises of the other side. And I hate to call it the other side. It's not this. It doesn't need to be this like oppositional thing. The regular people out there. It's almost everyone else. It's almost everyone else. Yeah. There's a there's a world in which that's well, you know.

There are definitely some AI people who are like, you know, if you're doing anything else, like what? And that is, it reminds me of the old John Updike saying, which is that the mark of the true New Yorker is that he has to believe that anyone living anywhere else is in some sense kidding. It's just a joke if you don't live in Manhattan. I probably thought that more or less once or twice. It's a joke if you're not working on AI. It's like, oh, you must be kidding if you're like... working on any other thing. It's a deeply self-oriented frame, more than anything else, to your point. Like the true New Yorker. It's like the, you know, again, everything rhymes with history. Homer in the Odyssey thousands of years ago describing the island of the Lotus Eaters. This is the place where you go and you never want to leave. So, and then again, it's like... It's back to the story of assuming that trends always continue and that no one can stop you. And it's like, I don't know if you've read about the Waymo testing that's allegedly happening in Manhattan and Brooklyn next month. It's going to be eight Waymo cars with no passengers and a driver. So there's a driver and no... I thought we were getting Waymo soon. So there's a driver and no passengers. And it was like, you know, I don't think Google ever thought that like... you know the new york taxi union was going to be a big player in their like technological supremacy uh one of my big things that i've been saying and i'm saying it sort of tongue-in-cheek right now because i need to think a little bit more about the evidence but i've been saying that like i think the fbi director is more powerful than like the agi ceo the fbi director just like sends an agent to the to the agi ceo's house and nabs him and there are all these unexpected things that can happen and you know, that one is, again, it's sort of a joke, but like the New York taxi union is going to remain a very powerful factor in like our technological lives and rural congressmen and sort of vanity obsessed senators and teacher unions, like the areas in which like AI is like least likely to penetrate are these areas where there are these, you know, sort of political forces that are so powerful.

where it's just like a... And they're not even necessarily powerful in terms of what they can do, but they're definitely powerful in what they can stop from happening. Yeah, yeah. And so that's like a, you know, I think that we will have like total technological penetration in certain areas, and then there will be certain areas where it's like, I mean, I saw, you know, like the people in the Northeast might not realize that like there are hundreds and hundreds of Waymos operating in... most of the cities in texas and arizona and nevada this is a you know my house here in austin is a quiet little street and there are i saw one 20 30 waymos every single night and i can hear the i can hear the hum of the jaguar ev engine and it's all right there and so maybe it's the i forget who originally said this but you know the future is just sort of unevenly distributed yeah you've talked about sort of the export of Silicon Valley culture towards other parts of America, largely in the context of the Alex Karp book that came out earlier this year. A quote from you, tech culture is the city on a hill version of what the American culture broadly should be, which is empowered citizens who can take risks, be accountable to the risks, but get the outsized returns of the risk. And then in the Karp review, you say software dominance was grown in a culture that empowered individuals, not always to be their most individualistic self. but extremely effective individuals within collective enterprises. Silicon Valley lets talented people feel like empowered citizens in, quote, tiny nations. And there's one last bit of this also coming from the CARP ideas. Empiricism is most possible in an engineering culture. They reason, Alex and his co-writer, because of the concreteness of the work. It either functions or it doesn't. There's nowhere to hide. They zero in our connection between sensitivity results and the abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be the core value of pragmatism at Palantir. All right. We'll take one and two. The first is tiny nations. Yeah. And this is the Alexis de Tocqueville observation about America. There are a bunch of tiny nations, whether they're city councils or businesses, where you have these citizens who are uniquely engaged in these things. Yeah. And so there is this individualism. But the way that we channel the individualism is to like.

participate in these other things. So the example in Silicon Valley that is most classic is the description of first Shockley Semiconductor, then Fairchild Semiconductor, then Intel. These are like the sequence by which Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and the other sort of forefathers create this Silicon Valley culture. So in Intel... Robert Noyce, who'd grown up in a small town in the Midwest, insisted that everyone have the same size desk, that the executives not have office doors that closed. And this came from sort of a congregationalist outlook that he had gotten growing up. And this was all documented by Tom Wolfe in a great Esquire magazine piece about Noyce, the tinkerings of Robert Noyce, how the sun rose on the Silicon Valley. And you see the sort of the Silicon Valley. At that point, it was sort of still this like. strange phenomenon rather than something that we take for granted. And so Intel is like the classic example where Noyce had all of these like superheroes working for him. And you think about the cost if all of those people were in different places. Actually, how you get the uniquely valuable trillion dollar businesses is like all of these people in one place owning a slice of the company and, you know, relentlessly executing. Intel was one of the first, you know, enterprises to offer option-based stock compensation. You know, this is another Silicon Valley invention. And so, like, it's difficult to think of a more classic example of, like, the empowered— I think there was a legal thing. I think there was a regulatory thing, too, that actually enabled that around that time. It may very well have been. California is also the, like, one jurisdiction in the world that happened to outlaw— the enforcement of non-compete agreements. And this came out of all sorts of random things in like the early 1900s. It was a total coincidence. And so, you know, the idea of these companies as tiny nations, you have a leader who's like Noyce, who is like deeply enmeshed with the so-called citizenry of the country, his employees, where they can talk to one another, they can be frank with one another. Wolf describes

The meetings where everyone was expected to speak if he or she had something to say and Noyce would sit there. And when he spoke, everyone knew that he was in charge, but he would take anything from anyone. He would take criticism or whatnot. And there's something beautiful about that where everyone has a voice, everyone is a citizen, and then there's a leader. And so that's the CARP example of like, that's the like inspiring technology culture. And part of the reason why Silicon Valley is like flying high is because you have lots of these empowered citizens working in these enterprises. It's really inspiring to work for 30 years at NVIDIA. And also you're worth, you know, 80 million or a billion at the end of it. Is the Alex Karp or Jensen or the classic hero, amazing, unique, Zuck, Elon type? Like, is that absolutely foundationally important for this to be possible? I think that the cultures and institutions have a way of shaping the leaders, sometimes in an unexpected way. I'm not sure if people would have picked Noyce out of a crowd to be like one of the great leaders. I'm not sure that that would be the case either with Elon or Karp. Elon is like extremely autistic, extremely technical. Like, is he going to be like the person to like... do the right of the rehirem with like tens of thousands of engineers to work on the most difficult problems ever yeah like let's let's launch a rocket and let's have it do a backflip or land on land on a drone boat yes and so i don't think that these things are like set from the beginning daniel ak made this point a few years ago it was something i read he's like what if mark zuckerberg became mark zuckerberg by way of building facebook yeah like the causality is in the other direction just study his behavior as an undergraduate at Harvard, and then ask yourself, is this a person who's going to be a chief executive officer? Yeah. Nothing's set in stone. People change. There's obviously, there's something, some quality that they have. It's just like a mojo, though. It's not a, you know, they've had it from the beginning. They change, obviously. At the very least, what you're capturing in that is a...

founder orientation and i guess the root the root question i was going to ask is like how do we export more of this clearly people are thinking about exporting this to government yeah whether it be explicitly doge or other things you even referenced somewhere you were i think you were talking about kodak in the um yeah the brian shimp uh article and the ceo vanderolle he referenced he said like they forget how to do the basics yeah yeah what does it look like for some of this cultural silicon valley engineering culture to actually get exported if you can't there's no new founder of in the government there's no new founder of kodak or big dumb slow company how does it like people even say satya nadella refounded microsoft and that's when it's enabled him to be so yeah i mean you could maybe say that like microsoft is a bit of a theseus's ship that's been rebuilt yeah where what are they what are they still doing that they were doing back back then it's like okay they still make some You know, they make Windows. They make Excel. They make Excel. Excel is probably like the through line. And then it's like they have the cloud business. You know, they did the foray into phones. It totally blew up. It didn't work at all. By leaving that, the joke ended up being on Apple because Microsoft built this other huge business that Apple wasn't even paying attention to. So the point about like a Kodak or why government is different from... Silicon Valley and why some of the Silicon Valley people misapprehend how the government works is actually related to this idea of an engineering culture and of a sort of concrete things are easier to prove or disprove. Yes. This results. And so look at the data. So it sort of is tied in also with the idea of the frontier where you're really testing out whether things are or are not working. Joe Lonsdale and I have written about. the sort of this conception of the frontier in american history trying to connect and maybe some people will be skeptical of this connection but i'll try to persuade them of literal cowboy culture and this sort of spirit of technological experimentation so on the old frontier you know if you don't have your wits about you you get shot you get scalped you get eaten by hyenas there are lots of things that happen and so that's like a that's like a point that people who are

Adventurers, if they survive, they turn out stronger on the other end. And the ideas that they're sort of proving out on the frontier tend to be very resilient, tend to be very long lasting. They tend to be people or ideas that can like solve new types of problems. And so, you know, maybe there's a connection between the fact that California is this like Pacific frontier. It's over the mountains. There's these valleys. There's this coast. It's the energy of the West. It's the energy of the West. And then the other idea that Joe and I talk about is that the opposite of the frontier is the core. And so in any sort of empire or civilization, you have a core and a frontier. And it's a dialectic. They're both very important. You need the core to set the laws and give cohesiveness and unity. And you need the frontier to push it. It's like pace layers. Like the fashion and the culture or the nature layers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's a dialectic and they need to remain in balance. And a country or a civilization or a... some sort of other organization, can drift a little bit more toward the frontier, which is basically like the United States from, let's call it 1789, when Washington becomes president, all the way until like 1861 when the Civil War starts. It's just like expand, expand, expand, expand. And then it was like a little too frontier-y. And then we forgot all the, oh shit, like the Corps on Fire, Civil War, et cetera. I think one of the arguments that we'd say right now is that America has been a little too... heavy on the core. Washington, D.C. is now the richest place in the universe. Like the suburbs of Washington are the wealthiest place in the world. It's like the craziest thing. You have all these laws piling up, all these federal employees, all this bureaucracy. And like that is clearly not being like battle tested like things are at the frontier. There's no possible way for there to be like a natural way for government programs to go away. Like. There's no natural churn. Yeah. Where's the natural churn? They're not forced to fight for their survival. Now, there are some things that are different, obviously. But if you can apply these principles of like competition and the frontier and, you know, the Karl Popper idea of like falsifiability, if something's not falsifiable, it's not science. It's like we should be trying to be more scientific or have a more engineering mindset. And so for that reason, I'm very pro-doge. There are some things that...

were more just sort of political reforms rather than like trying to implement an engineering culture. But I think that one thing that the critics of Doge got wrong is that they were never going to accept any cuts. As soon as the cuts got concrete, then it was going to be on the attack. And, you know, the sort of conceit with Doge, which Karp does not talk about in the book. The book was actually written before 2024. It's obviously like the example of like, can we apply this mindset? You know, Joe Jebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, has just been announced as the chief design officer of the United States. And they're clearly going to, in a way that should be, it may not be, less offensive to political objectors, you know, implement these ideas in various areas of the government, which is like, is there objectively a better way to design a website? The government says, no, it's just like, let's pay someone to do it. Silicon Valley says, yes, there's an objective way to do it. And this is why we have $70 billion and you don't. Because there was something provably, falsifiably true about it. You would know if we were bullshitters because it wouldn't work. And it's like, in the government, there's no such competing pressure. There are no hyenas. There are no Comanches coming to rip your hair off. And so, you know. Yeah, you don't have the almost paranoia of the frontier. The paranoia of the frontier. And I think that there's something like, you know, maybe closely connected to Elon's erratic personality, which is that he's repeatedly taken these things to the utter limit, to the edge of the abyss. And that is where you can learn, call in the troops. That's where you can really learn. And it sort of goes back to the like, you know, blowing up the rocket was more valuable to Elon. then the people in the core could possibly know because he was testing something at the edges of what's possible, which is where you get to falsifiable results. Is this working? Is it not? That's the engineering culture. And, you know, there were some reasons politically why Elon was unpopular with some of these people. Like, could there have been a doge without, like, some of the more partisan elements? Yes. And maybe it would have worked better. But, like, part of the reason why there's such a hatred of doge...

And the idea of it and the hit pieces on the young men who are working on it in a very democratic fashion where it's, you know, the White House, which was democratically elected and Congress is doing these different things. There's always going to be a negative reaction to these things from the established set if it threatens them. And that's a natural human emotion. I'm not necessarily attacking that. You know, sometimes there's going to be a pendulum swing and, you know, people need to accept it. I read the New York Times profile on him. Right. Probably around this time last year, something like that. You wrote something that reminded me a bit of it. You wrote, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex thinker, I would call Karp a classical liberal and a left-line civic nationalist. It's that civic nationalist part that puts him at odds with the dominant activist part of the capital LF today. And to many ears would make him sound right wing. He insists quite credibly that he is not. A great few sentences, I have to say. Excellent. My reaction, I was blown away by that piece. And the most interesting part about it to me was that it was very clear that Alex Karp is the type of person that I could not tell you what his views on one topic were if I knew his views on another topic. I'm curious if you know other people like this and what types of traits are common among them. I mean, most important example in the world right now is probably Trump. Hmm. That's not what I was expecting. Yeah. I mean, just think about the 2016 election where, you know, nothing in like the Trump ideology could be classically mapped onto like one side. I see. The fact that he like the fact that he hates NAFTA. Can you then predict his opinion on the minimum wage or on tax cuts or on legal immigration or on illegal immigration or whatnot? It was all over the place. And so I think that that's like. by far the most important example of that. Maybe he's gotten a little more solidified within the right wing since, but he was genuinely, like, all over the place in 16. Yeah, I guess my critique there would be, like, I feel like he was just winging it. Karp feels a little bit more principled in his range. Trump is not principled, but he's, this is going to sound ironic, he's kind of steady in some of these views that have existed for a long time. He was clearly...

always pretty pro-choice. He was clearly always against mass immigration and especially against illegal immigration that sort of picked up in the 90s and 2000s. He was taking out a full page ad in the New York Times in the 80s, criticizing Reagan, liberalizing trade with the rest of the Americas. And so that was like a 30 year continuity of criticizing the trade deals where it wasn't just that was not winging it. There are obvious Trump's winging everything in certain respects, but there are some things that he said for a long time that are that are. classic examples of that like political unpredictability. Because if you had like, if you had told, if you had, if you had said that he hated NAFTA, that would also mean that he wants to raise taxes. No, it's like these things are bundled. What about amongst the people who are, who have this trait and are, at least as I seem to be assessing, CARB to be like quite principled? Because I think that very principled people maybe are. Maybe these go together, I'm not sure, but it seems that most people, even if they seem to be quite principled in some areas, the tidal wave just kind of carries them with the bundle of other associated views. I think about the way that the popes have discussed things like abortion. There's clearly been like a wave, especially in Catholic intelligentsia circles, like liberalizing on abortion or whatnot. And you hear someone like... the late Pope Francis, who extremely liberal on issues of of migration and even on certain parts of the sort of LGBT discussion, you know, talk about abortion in a way that would totally floor like the average Democratic voter or liberal or pro-choice person talking about it in more concrete terms than even some like right wing American politicians. So that would be like a classic example of like. an institution that, for obvious reasons, has the power to, like, assert its principles over some sort of societal shift. Yes, yes, yes. Not always the case. There are certainly times when the, when the, when the, when the, when the, when the papacy or the church or the, or the Vatican have fallen to these things or whatnot, but it definitely is, like, one of those areas. And if you can just sort of, like, pick out the Pope as an individual.

There's someone with like the power to assert principle over other things. And maybe other examples, you know, every once in a while, Gorbachev, you have certain characters. It requires a strong personality or temperament in order to do that. Even at the small scale, even at like, you know, saying something unpopular in like a dinnertime conversation. And then it's like, imagine like, you know, dissolving your country. Yeah, imagine that. That's the Gorbachev example. It's the type of person who can do that. That would maybe be like a support of the idea that there was always something in a Zuckerberg or a Musk or whatnot, this action-oriented thing. It's just that it might not reveal itself until the right time. Or it's getting amplified to an extreme degree. Or it only came out because of that necessity. Jimmy Carter could have stayed a peanut farmer. He managed to become the president. Like, you know, what is that that, like, turned it on? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's a really interesting question. You brought up Gorbachev. I wanted to ask a couple questions about capitalism. Yeah. Which I would say you are a big advocate of, to say the least. This is you. For me, my basic definition of capitalism, the one rule of capitalism, you're not allowed to kill your counterparty. And I think that this is the one thing that distinguishes it from all the other systems. And what capitalism... by saying the one rule is you can't kill your counterparty. You have to negotiate. Why is this such an important idea? Well, mostly to avoid mass killing. I happen to love this definition. I think it's one of the better things that I've come out with. I think you said that on Jim's podcast. I think it was. So I should write it down at some point because for millennia. If I want this other thing that you have, it's just like I go and kill and rape and pillage the village or whatnot. This is like the the way to advance your station in like a in like a in like warring societies or whatnot. And this is not to always defend like everything that happens in a certain system, which is usually what like.

the capital L left, meaning like the hardcore activist types, want to make the argument about like, do you defend every single thing that happens? Do you defend insurance companies denying claims? And it's like, yes, because I would much rather have that than the commissar deciding like, I'm going to kill you. The insurance company has to negotiate over it. They had to agree with you in advance about how this was going to play out. And if you disagree with them, then you can go to a court and... While a court is not like expressly part of capitalism, in practice it is. It's like capitalism can only emerge in a system where you can go to a judge. Think about like Hong Kong. Like all the judges in Hong Kong were trained in British style law schools. They all knew that like, even if like someone's pressuring you to do something, you have to rule according to the law. And that's like a blessing that people take for granted. So in capitalism, it's like, you know, you get to negotiate with the insurance company up front in a system where there's no such negotiation. It's just, you know, it's everything that eventually leads toward murder. It's the sort of derivatives of it. So it's like, if we, you know, have a dispute with this other group of people, we go to war. And if I don't like the price of your object that you're selling or good, we just we just threaten you. And it is a intentional simplification. Don't pay me back. I'm going to kill you. You don't pay me back. I'm going to kill you. It is an intentional simplification to say that, like, the one rule of capitalism is I'm not allowed to kill you. But that's ultimately what it comes down to, because if you believe that people are are free to negotiate, then you've then you have right there. The reason why it's bad to murder is because you can negotiate. If you don't have to negotiate, it's like if that person is just wrong, then like obviously third option. Yeah. It's like obviously if like if someone is like trying to like vote against communism, like if you don't have to negotiate with them, then of course you have to kill them because otherwise they're going to they're going to kill you. The last like, you know, circle of this is there's always inherent suspicion of like people making agreements with one another. And this is one of the things that like the capitalists always have to defend.

The like most devastating examples are like the person making the deal with the insurance company or whatnot or loans, banks and whatnot. Yes. And with a bank, like, just think about it. Like they have to negotiate with you. They have to like establish this rate or whatnot. Whereas like you have like some like Irish mafia bookie. It's like you get in debt to him. He kills you if you don't pay him back. And that is like. That is like the logic of all these non-capitalist systems is that violence can ultimately be an answer, whether it's expelling people from the country, putting them in concentration camps like they do in North Korea, taking away their liberty, taking away their right to make money on something. You must lose money on this. It's like sometimes it's metaphorical killing. They're all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I don't particularly care, you know, to argue with someone about whether the like great leap forward was mass murder. I think when there are like. x people alive here and then like x minus 50 million people alive 10 years later because of what you did like you know i'm not here to argue about the definition there can be like degrees of killing and uh the other you know the the system that we call socialism or marxism or communism tends to you know especially in the last century uh result in quite a lot of it You have an excellent piece on the grocery store in Gorbachev in Defending Capitalism. A few lines from that that I like. Deciding that the basics like, this might have actually been from somewhere else, but you say deciding that the basics like food and energy shouldn't be profitable is a certain recipe for a shortage of those basics, which is great. Some people are still very offended by the idea of people making decisions, which I think is wrapped up in a lot of what you just said. There's a lot more I could read. I think the root question I have is. I'd love to do a brief comment on that. Please, please. Like the sentence. So there's this idea that like, okay. If you're like a luxury car salesman, you should be able to make money on that. But for fundamentals that matter to people, let's not make money on those. Let's just do them as charities or whatnot. That is the thing that is the most wrong. If anything, my ideal world would be to have higher margins on grocery stores and higher luxury taxes on like Mercedes sales or whatnot.

Because you need to be more capitalistic. You need to be brutally capitalistic and brutally sort of orthodox about capitalism in the areas where it's like the least popular. Generators after a hurricane. Like, think of it. It's like it's considered the worst thing ever if you like raise the price of a generator during a hurricane. It's like let markets do what they're good at. Let markets do what they're good at. And one of my favorite pieces ever, I'll, you know, pitch a pitch of friends writing here, Leo Leibovitz. editor at Tablet. He wrote a piece in First Things, a magazine called A More Perfect Mediocracy. And he's sort of painting this picture of America as this sort of fundamentally average place. And the anecdote that he gives is that he's driving with his wife in Italy. They're looking for caffeine. It's the middle of the night. And like they can't find anything, miles and miles. And then like 30 minutes later, they finally find a place on the side of the highway. It's like one in the morning and they have the best espresso of their lives. In America, on highways where I grew up, every few miles, you have a 24 hour gas station with like pretty bad black coffee, but it'll get you caffeinated. It's open 24 hours a day. And it's like the fact that we have that is because we were willing to embrace the idea that people should be free to make decisions about price and that you should be able to make money on a black coffee at midnight in Iowa or what. There's a price someone will pay that you should be able to make money on gas. Exactly. And so it's like. You know, the easy position is like, yes, we're going to make money selling expensive things and have this sort of capitalism, but we're not going to have like profitable grocery stores. And this is Elizabeth Warren. This is Elizabeth Warren telling Kroger that they need to that they need to eliminate their cash margin because they're doing greedflation or whatnot. And I and so that is what I'm identifying as a degree of murder. She is she is legitimizing the idea that you shouldn't be able to make money on helping people. And this is the worst of all worlds, because that's the sort of idea that like, OK, you can make money on stupid stuff, but not on helping people. And so the whole the whole the whole idea with this definition of capitalism that you have to negotiate with people instead of kill them is that like you're allowed to make money on helping them. And the question should be like, how much money are you going to pay? How much is this person going to make? And markets and competition are what drive down prices and make these goods more accessible to all, which is why, you know.

You have power lines all over the U.S. It's because the person putting the power was allowed to make money on it. And it's why you have these gas stations all over the place where someone who's hungry or cold in the middle of the night can get coffee and hot food. It's because the person's allowed to make money on it. The, like, logical conclusion of you are not allowed to make money on this is ultimately I'm allowed to kill you. Because if you're not allowed to make money on it, there's only one way that we can stop you in the end if you keep trying. And it's murder. And so that is why it's important. Not to mention an intermediary step there is just like you don't get this. A bunch of preferences will not be served by the government or by some non-market feature if you don't have this. Right. Yeah. And the opportunity cost of that is so significant. And it's what you see happen in these sort of lethargic socialistic societies. North Korea being like one of the most acute examples. With all that said. at risk of maybe the very paternalism you just spent a bunch of time criticizing right there's a view that says sort of like capitalism is very good at giving people exactly what they want which in part is part of what you just said there's a few critiques that that's one of them um which is to say like again probably paternalistic like people don't always know what they want or people don't always know what's good for them i think there are a few others that are like I don't know if you've ever read Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch. It's a sort of commentary on... Broadly, it's like the tragedy of the comets. And just kind of an eventual race to the bottom. And then maybe the third would be probably, I think, the greatest real risk is just capitalism trending towards an extreme, extreme concentration of capital and leverage in a very, very small amount of people's hands. So that third one, I think, is... by far the least true of all, and that I am most interested in contesting. And I'll go back to an event that we've discussed a few times, which is the 2016 election. These alleged one-way trends are never true, and the concentration of wealth never persists. And even so, it doesn't provide the leverage that people think it does. Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a factor of 10 to 1 in the election. The peasants revolted. The American people revolted, whatever you want to call it.

There are always balancing mechanisms. And the idea of this sort of extreme inequality, it really is true in the classical libertarian sense that in order to pursue the level of equality that the Marxists or even the people who are earnestly concerned about equality are seeking, you have to suppress things that are good. And so the alleged remedies are always worse. And the American system, where Elon Musk is worth $450 billion, as of today, I think, is like by far more equal than the system that would violently take away his money, that would confiscate it. And, you know, there are too many societies to count where this experiment is played out. It's more about technological leverage than purely capital leverage. But I don't know what that even means, technological leverage. Like, you know, I have the same iPhone as people that make a lot less than I do. And I have the same iPhone as people who are worth billions or tens of billions of dollars. Clearly, technology is one of the least relevant categories for this concentration or ossification. What about Sam Altman's control over... There's certainly a possible world. I think you could make a strong case it's going to go the other way. There's a possible world where a very small amount of people are going to have access to a technology that could basically end the world. It's a little bit more like a corporation or an individual having a nuke. No, I love this. This is this goes back to my sort of tongue in cheek point. Now I'll take it more seriously. The FBI director is definitely more powerful than like the AGI CEO. You literally just go arrest the bastard like you just do. And again, it's like I'm sort of sort of half joking, but I just don't I just don't worry about these things because because I know that if like if the suggestion is that we're going to do like forced equality instead. that clearly presents a much more harmful opportunity for the corrupt concentration of power. That's how you get Stalin. That's how you get Kim Jong-un. That's how you get Franco. If it's based on singling out enemies, cutting the tall trees, that's the type of logic that, again, it's just murderous or whatnot. The technological leverage...

I mean, it sort of reminds me of what the Obama people were saying in 2014, which is that Obama was the first candidate to get on social media. He did it super well. They were using Facebook to mobilize. He wins 365 electoral votes the first time and a little bit less the second time. And again, who comes knocking in 2016? Who's like, I'm tweeting now. That was Trump. The best social media guy. These things are not ever set in stone. And it is only if people believe that like, classes are stagnant, that they can accept the logic of Marx, basically, which is that like this group is the same over this period of time. This group is the same over this period of time, which is how you could get to the idea that like the peasants or the poor are going to revolt against like the rich or whatnot. One of the reasons why it's very clear that like socialism never came to America is because of the social mobility and because the poor or the working class or the affluent are like a constantly changing group. And that is like the beauty of... And there's, by the way, I found, back to the beginning of your conversation, there's a foundational myth that is internalized in basically everyone here that there's nobody better than me. Yeah, yeah. People are very distrustful. And I mean, you know, Elon, bless his heart, he tried to spend like millions and millions of dollars in this like local Wisconsin election and it like, it had zero effect. It did not work at all. People way overestimate their leverage. Or they will overestimate other people's leverage in order to justify taking away their liberties or whatnot. So like one of the most sort of infamous recent Supreme Court cases of the last 20 years was the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court ruled that you could not restrict the ability of individuals or corporations to spend on political advertising, you know, on their own, with their own money. And that's like a super scary thing because there's all this money. Now, there are two reasons why it's sort of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, and you should move on to more important issues, which is A, that we've now proven over and over again that the money is not the end of the story, and B, the fundamental issue in the Citizens United case was whether or not the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, could ban the showing of a movie that was critical of Hillary Clinton because of who had paid for its production.

And so it was just like it always ends up justifying the most extreme thing if you're that concerned about it, which was like literal censorship. No, you can't show that movie. It's too critical of Hillary. That was like that was like that was like that was like a crazy thing. But it was based on this idea that like the institutions and the capital always stays always stays the same. And so it's like that is like it's like I mean, I've probably said it 20 times now. It's like it's the most false thing that has to be constantly disproved because it's like one of the. one of the most common, one of the most common fallacies that underlie all the disastrous ideas. It's just this time it's different. This time it's different. We can talk a little bit about Arena and the magazine specifically. What makes for good writing? I think good writing is fundamentally good description that makes you understand or see something. And usually good writing paired with a good reader. is two people thinking even though they've never met one another. And so someone gets to see how I think and I get to teach them how I think. And there's like a relationship across the words. What about editing? Good editing forces someone to question whether their first draft is like the best possible one. And that's usually quite a ridiculous question to ask someone. Like, is the first thing that you wrote down the best possible version of this? And so it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an iterative process and it's like a, it's a fundamental recognition of, you know, our own failings. It's just, editing is just humility. It's just like, am I the best? Am I the greatest? Am I always the best? Am I always the greatest? Do I have anything to learn? There's the like, you know, the David Foster Wallace, this is water where there are the fish swimming along and the, you know, how's the water? What the hell is water? If you've been swimming for too long, then you need to, you need to remember. where the water is. It's a reminder of the most obvious thing ever, which is that we can always improve. How have you gotten better at editing? I think that there are... Maybe the best way to get better at editing is to be more comfortable with being frank, is to be more direct. This is bad. This makes no sense. Shut the F up. Stop trying to be so florid. If you can't get to the truth easily, then there's no hope of it. Otherwise, I think it's just sort of a...

It's just sort of a thing that becomes more clear over time. The only way that you would not improve as an editor doing it over and over again is if you were like not saying what you actually think. And so it's like maybe this is like an engineering culture. It's like let's get concrete. Let's be specific. I'll give an example that I like to do in editing. This is more like a process thing rather than like a skill. I like to write a reverse outline of the piece that I'm reading. And it's pretty easy to do. You can just go paragraph by paragraph and write a sentence that sort of is like, this is the sentence from this paragraph. And if it doesn't make sense as like a list of sentences outlined, then it's probably not in the right order. You're probably not organizing your thoughts correctly. A lot of people are way too emphatic about grammar and syntax in like the first time that they're trying to edit something. Writing is a process of thinking. And so if your thoughts are in the wrong order, that's the first problem. And then you can go another level deeper. Are they in the wrong order in this paragraph? Are they in the wrong order in that paragraph? Are they in the wrong order here? How am I thinking? Think better. Reverse outline, meaning you're going literally paragraph backwards? Someone will send me a piece. Sorry, no, not reverse backwards. Just like instead of turning an outline into a piece, I'm turning a piece into an outline. And I never outline. This is a divisive subject. It's very useful to do the reverse outline. Yes. Because you can teach people. You're compressing almost. You can teach people. And if they've got their own outline, then showing them the difference between the reverse outline and the original outline can be very fun because it's like, you know, you did not accomplish this goal at all. Like, here's what you thought you were doing and here's what you actually did. And again, it's like, it's getting to honest criticisms because that can be very sobering. And then there's the other sort of phrase, which is. kill all your darlings which is any artist sort of faces which is that like and for me especially i am always obsessed with sentences i will start a piece with like a single sentence that i'm so convinced is like the best one and it's like you have to be most willing to move past that one because that was where you were like yeah the most wrong and the most set yeah it got you here but that doesn't mean you can't kill it or you shouldn't kill it yeah so being being more honest is like

you know always a useful tool in thinking and to the extent that writing is just thinking getting more honest getting more concrete is like the best possible thing whether you're writing for yourself or editing someone else arena is a magazine it's a it's a literal object it's also clear being in the room with you you also admire like large highly image-based books and just beautiful kind of reading objects unlike most of the texts people read today including a lot of books they're reading a kindle uh essays most written content Magazines in particular are distinctly not only physical, but textual and visual. What is it about that type of medium that is so appealing to you? Well, it's a challenge and a puzzle. I'm not a professionally trained artist or designer, but I've always had a strong sort of creative and mathematical intuition. And print design is one of those great sort of challenges. And it's something that's been... very underrated in america and the world writ large over the last several decades and the one area where it's really been strongly emphasized is in technology actually where like there's an objectively better way to present visual imagery and information in the form of text and your job is to like crack the code and find a better way to do it and so you know again writing is thinking and so it needs to be presented in like a in like a good way and that will make people enjoy it more and make people not hate it so the like physical object version of it is like a much more fun layer for me to add on top of it and it needs to be it needs to be done in concert with the editing because like you can edit something really well and then just like publish it as plain text and like that's you know that's sure that's a thing you know why not put it in paper what are you so afraid of that would be my sort of that's the question that everyone else is begging when they're not like adding a sort of special thing on top of it is it's like is this really worthy of like you know cutting down a tree turning the tree into paper and like asking people to to pay for it or open it in their homes and that's a big thing with the you know how do you make a magazine that like people actually want to possess and not just like buy yes you know you can buy a you know rolled up piece of glossy toilet paper known as a magazine at the grocery store you can get the atlantic or time which are sort of storied papers

With great writing in the Atlantic, what does it say about the great writing if it's being published on the cheapest paper that's ever been invented, where if it gets like a little drop of water on it, it's completely soiled, it's been stapled together, and it's so chock full of ugly ads that you don't even want to pay attention to it? What gives? So, you know, in everything that we do, we're trying to do the opposite of that. Be super well edited, as well edited as the best magazines in the world. but really taking design, production, art seriously in a way that people are like, oh, this is good. I like this. This is not expected either. Obviously related, but why is durability so important in kind of every sense of that word? You know, the like obsessive cost-cutting culture has just sort of like reminded people that there's a reason why making things properly the first time is worthwhile. I don't know that I have a good intellectual explanation for it. I could tell you that like with a book, I want to be able to like hand a book down to my son and his daughter and not like be having to having to replace it. I would say that quality goods can make everyone rich because there are things that last. And, you know, I have like tens of millions of. Carhartt duck jackets that are sold every year in the U.S. And yes, they're more expensive than like some crap jacket that's going to fall apart. And people are made rich by this phenomenon of like things that last. It's like another virtue of capitalism is like turning every person into an aristocrat. And one of the ways that you can do that is like, oh, wow, I own things that like will last a long time and that are high quality. And in many cases, it's not that much more expensive on the marginal level to make things better. It's not that much more expensive to do. a 100% cotton shirt instead of, you know, rayon, it requires more effort, but it creates more prosperity in the long run. It's, you know, things that last, maybe there's like a primitive reason why they're good. I don't know. I heard Reggie calls these universal luxuries, which is cool. The other thing about it too, especially for something that might be disposed, you're not only like literally will it last, but like you're less likely, you're more likely to keep it if it has that level of,

I mean, the classic thing with the rolled up toilet paper magazine, I call it glossy toilet paper because of how thin the paper is. That's the description there. Why would you want to display it on your coffee table? What does it say about you if you have the Atlantic sitting on the table or whatnot? These days, it's just not communicating much. And having something that's high quality actually is a status thing as well. Everyone should be proud of like the things that they're consuming, engaging with, participating in intellectually. And that's just rarer these days. Are there any magazines or other types of kind of like visual heavy books that were really influential to you? I used to love getting like popular mechanics when I was a kid and all the like mechanical children's books or whatnot. But I would say that I just became like a book obsessive at one point. you know, my dad used to join these book of the month clubs in the mail and he would like, you know, dine and ditch them basically where you sign up, you get the books in the mail and then you don't do anything. And so he'd have all these books, almost none of which he was reading, World War II and Catherine the Great and Russia and ancient civilizations or whatnot to fill the bookshelves because it was like, it was considered good without explanation that you have all these things or whatnot. So I would say that that is very influential to me is the idea of like, beautiful objects like that and the thing that i really dislike is just seeing the low quality all over the place yeah because it sort of represents you know this trend i guess to cheapify things that ultimately makes people not like them in the first place like you're less likely to be attached to like an ugly book you know you might find a love for books if you are introduced to beautiful books what does success look like for arena on a let's say five years Scale or timeline. You know, a nicely profitable media enterprise that can, you know, make a lot of money and make it possible to do this type of creative work long into the future to pay for writing and pay for art and make beautiful things and make money on it. I don't know that I have a good answer on like a civilizational scale. I think that sort of one of those score.

takes care of itself things, where if you just do things well, you know, the positive effects are borne by the people that we're affecting. It's not necessarily going to be like direct things that we do. We had a grandmother write in to the magazine shortly after the second issue went out. She wanted to buy four copies of the magazine for her grandsons before they went off to college. And she's 86 in North Carolina and said, you know, I'm probably not going to be around a lot longer, but I want them to know the sort of example of entrepreneurship. Could I have given you like an intellectual answer that was going to predict something like that? No. And so we focus on what we know, which is how to create the beautiful things, how to do the discussions that we want, how to do the things that we know well, and other people will pick up the torch for us. Is there anyone or anything you would be particularly excited to profile? We want to document all the sort of levels of the great American story of entrepreneurship. There's obviously a list. But the truth is, is that part of the great fun is doing this at the like very high levels and sort of quote unquote very low levels. In reality, it's more like the underappreciated levels. And there's no sort of. white whale that we're chasing, there's actually so much around us that we can't keep up. I have a grab bag of a few questions before we wrap up. Please. Actually, maybe since you just mentioned it, it's a slightly different idea, but I think it connects. You straddle what I would call a sort of American high and low, or maybe big and small would be more accurate. I don't mean to imply lowly. which is to say big dreams and capital ambition and technology and scale and all this type of stuff. And then also like the story you just told or like the little stories about mom and pop shops in little places or your little love letters to Ojai and to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Yeah. How do those coexist for you? How could they not? I'm an American and the like biggest, the biggest result of like getting out of a bubble is to realize that like,

To become a person that only sees like the bigger important things and not the little things around you is is the sort of is the peak of ignorance. Maybe it's like an antisocial streak that I have where I am not like as interested in like big social circles where I like random places and what have been called blue highways, the sort of unexpected roads. It's a personal fascination. And some of my favorite authors, maybe you could say this is it's like. talking about the cotidian things in life, the everyday. Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, the truth is that you see the big stories in all of the little ones if you look. And you'd probably end up missing out on some great stories if you're not paying attention at both levels. And that's ultimately what I am as a storyteller. I like attached to these things. On that note, maybe what have you learned or what comes to mind when you think about traveling across America? I think the most underreported story is just how prosperous random places in America are. One of the better pieces that I've ever published, I think, was a piece in the Free Press called Welcome to the MAGA Hamptons, which is sort of a piece about the Lake of the Ozarks, which is a man-made reservoir in central Missouri that was created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was like a flooded sort of valley in 1929, thereabouts. And as a result of the shape of the sort of river valleys and cricks and hollers in that area, the... coastline of the Lake of the Ozarks is longer than the entire Pacific coast of the United States. What? So it's like 80,000 miles of, or not 80,000, it's 80,000 houses. It's like 6,000 miles of coastline. Oh my gosh. Maybe it's like 3,000 or something. It's definitely longer than the Pacific coast because I calculated it out. But imagine like a 25,000 legged spider where it's just like so many inlets or whatnot. And so there are 80,000 houses along the shore of this lake. And you know. It's all in Missouri? It's in central Missouri. And it's like halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis. Columbia-ish or south? It's like half hour from Columbia. Okay. It is like the place where like the Midwestern elites go. And you've never heard of these people. They're car dealers and electricians or whatnot. And they have these lake houses and boats and they do not.

They don't care at all what the rest of the country thinks of them or whatnot. They're affluent. And so I called it the MAGA Hamptons because it's like they're voting for Trump and doing Trump boat parades. And it's like, think about what a Trump boat parade is. It means that there are these people that are all in one place and they all own expensive boats in order to do a boat parade. And so it's like, that is like the most underreported story and that I'm constantly finding. I mean, people have variously called it. mass affluence or, you know, whatever you want to, whatever you want to call it. That's like always hilarious to me is to find the sort of local maxima in these places, so to speak. And what's funny to me about him in some instances is just like the joy of telling people about places that they had never heard of before and listening to like New Yorkers and New Englanders read about the Lake of the Ozarks. It's like, oh my gosh, it's like, I know all of this stuff that you don't. And I like that. Or you learned from Joe Lonsdale? I definitely did not have like a very entrepreneurial sense about me when I started working with Joe. And I think that the like baseline case is that I probably would have never started a media company or learned how to hire and manage people or whatnot. And seeing Joe approach every problem through that lens of like, how do we do this in like a... a virtuous, profitable way where we're going to like employ people and elevate them and figure out how to solve it better than other people is an unavoidable conclusion. You have a, I think it's a piece, I can't remember when, about the Sri Lankan agriculture. Right. There's a line at the end where you say, the bottom line is that modern agronomy works. Are there ways to improve it? Are there negative environmental effects that we should address? What about unethical practices by agricultural corporations? Yes, on all accounts. But at a basic level, criticisms of modern agriculture are only possible in a country saturated with food. It is our material luxury in countries like this one created by the extreme efficiency of our agricultural practices that provides some of our most opinionated citizens with the requisite free time and sustenance to spend all day complaining about food systems. Oh my gosh. Obviously a little tongue in cheek. My question is, I'm just, I hadn't read that like paragraph in a while. It's like, this is great. My question is, we are moving.

Maybe your pendulum theory is true about truly everything, but it seems that we're moving towards a world of more and more abundance. In that world, we will have the luxury to criticize the sources of that abundance. What guidance do you have? Well, that's why the pendulum theory really is true is because all these critics are winning in certain places and like they almost ran out of rice in Sri Lanka. Like it's not at all a march toward the same thing over and over again. But this sort of goes back to the idea of like. The activists that I was confronting at Stanford who were promoting this woman who wants to go back to the land and have people farm by hand. It's like no one would take this seriously if you were industrializing, if you were just getting off the ground. Like, you know, it'd be it'd be a joke. It is it really is this like material situation that causes the like opposition to rise up. Like the only reason why they have any air is because of this this other thing. So I think that it tends to be a. pretty strong trend but like you know populations are gonna start to go down there's gonna be some like zero-sum games that various countries are playing there's not uh there's not worldwide progress on the on the on these areas the they have to be constantly protected think of it like the sri lanka example i don't think you know maybe i'll go back like 20 years when zimbabwe who's sort of forming as this country in the 80s. There's a great article about this in The Atlantic, actually, by Samantha Power, who was President Obama's ambassador to the United Nations and President Biden's head of USAID, which is the aid agency that Doge has sort of dismantled in the State Department. So she wrote an article about how Rhodesia, when the sort of white population stopped ruling Rhodesia and it became Zimbabwe, they had still the most prosperous, sort of agricultural economy in Africa. And they were the breadbasket of Africa because the British settlers in Central Africa had planted corn and wheat and they had done it in like an industrial fashion. And so the yields were much higher. And this was like a massively positive thing for the rest of Africa because they were this breadbasket. And Mugabe, the communist leader of the sort of black nationalists in Zimbabwe, starts confiscating the white farms one by one. And it went from being

the like breadbasket of Africa to like one of the most dependent countries on agricultural imports in the world. And that's like a very acute example. But the reason why it's important to talk about the acute examples, whether it's Zimbabwe, North Korea, Venezuela, where it used to be the richest country in the Americas except the United States, and now they're eating rats and it's crazy, is because, you know. Sanity, progress, civilization, order, capitalism are all so fragile that they have to be constantly defended from these new heresies and ideologies that, again, only exist because of the material abundance that have been created. Like, these professional activists have enough money and time to, like, constantly agitate against our system because we've empowered them so much. And the anti-agriculture people, you know. there's enough food in Sri Lanka to argue that like, maybe we should not do this agricultural thing. And then it's like, you totally ruined it. And that one was prevented because of political realism. But in societies where they don't have like an open discussion, like Zimbabwe, it was just like a one-way street to hell. It's funny. You could almost make the same point we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation in that like a sign of a healthy society might be that you have the time and bandwidth for people to be criticizing even the most basic things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, Americans are like so wealthy that like they're like tweeting at one another all the time or whatnot and then going out and buying F-150s and trucks and SUVs. Yeah, it's, you know, it has to be real in order to criticize it. That's one of the laws. On a totally unrelated note, there's a line somewhere you mentioned your brother Jackson was the athlete and you were the cook. And I've heard from a few of our friends that you... are particularly adept at bringing people together for meals. Yeah, what's special about... I can guess who that was. What's special about doing that? I've been cooking since I was very young. It is... Possibly I enjoy it because I'm super good at it. And so it's like an alpha that I have on other people. But it's a good way to bring people together because, you know, breaking bread has historically been a way to converse with people, especially people who are different from yourself. And so...

That's just one of those things where I don't have a better intellectual answer other than that seems true. Experientially, it's true. That's a good one. And I like flexing on people like this. That's an area where I'm not going to bring them together by playing six-on-six basketball or something. I have an excerpt from a very emotional piece you wrote by your brother. I didn't see it at the time, but wanting an expensive camera was Jackson's way of trying to commit himself to something he saw as big and real. This was bigger than competing with me, his brother. It was about his future. I know now that the stupid purchases are a privilege, no, a miracle. I know that behind every stupid purchase is a human being trying and maybe failing to find his way to declare his values to a world that doesn't always listen. In this place, I'm going to, and this is you referring to your farm that you purchased shortly after. In this place, I'm going to build my own world, a world big enough for all my memories. When people ask about it, I'll tell the story of how I learned that dreams shouldn't wait, that there is never as much time as we think, that sometimes making a stupid purchase is the only thing that makes any sense. What can we gain from foolish commitments? It is a half of our brain. And there is a dialectic between like the rational parts and the irrational parts. And if you are too extremist about one or the other, then you don't tend to move forward in interesting ways. And so that's sort of a commentary about understanding the back half of the brain. It's beautiful. My final question. You have... I think this is in one of the letters to America. You ran out of gas. Yeah. And you found yourself with this woman, Glenda, who was saving you. You say, as I sat in her front seat, she complimented my glasses and told me that she had been an optician. I told her that I was thinking of getting rid of my glasses and having laser surgery to correct my vision. Are you nervous? She asked me. I told her that I wasn't. The risk of surgery seems pretty low to me.

She grinned and said, no, I meant sitting here with me in my car in the middle of nowhere. I think it's later in that piece. It's a separate excerpt. You say, in On the Road, Jack Kerouac asked the question, what is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plane till you see their specks dispersing? It's the two huge world vaulting us and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. And then I think one last bit, driving through a place like Hope, Arkansas, is a poignant reminder that America, the Republic and the Empire, is a nation that doesn't need and doesn't have a Rome or London. In the places between places, things are happening. Bill Clinton became president. And love him or hate him, the story of the man from Hope is the one that compels love for America and its promise, and the promise of the places between places. How can places between places feel like home? Well, this was, I was telling the story of how I ran out of gas in Arkansas, and that was Glenda, and so I was sitting in the front seat of her car. It is a, you know, once you go to one of them, it is self-evident that it's Glenda's home, and Glenda had a life in, I forget what the name of that town even was, but Glenda's life was. clearly as big as anything and so only a fool would uh would would look at it and say that there's like there's something there's something there's something less there it's true there's no like you know there's no opera house uh there's no you know anthropic office or something there are all sorts of ways in which you can tell yourself a story that only one place matters it just doesn't turn out to be true and hope arkansas is where where bill clinton was from and it's uh you know tiny little town on the road you know turns out you you shouldn't underestimate such places and there's always new things out there as for the kerouac thing i think what kerouac was getting at that i very much feel is that like i spent like six minutes with this woman glenda in the front seat of her cadillac while we were waiting for her boyfriend to go get gas to fill up my suv on the side of the road in like the dark forest in arkansas late summer night and it's like

almost certain ever going to see Glenda again. Obviously, it's always possible, but you go to these next things with literally the image of the people behind you in the mirror. And what Kerouac is getting at is there is a richness in those people that, to a person who's not experienced it, would seem sort of fanciful, but to me is like the most true thing ever. And that's... That's America. Max thank you. Thank you.