We’ve Lost the Plot – Why Partisan Political Media Is Failing Everyone & How To Fix It David Pakman

The United States and China are locked in a highstakes cold war for global dominance. And the winner is going to shape the future of innovation, economic power, and geopolitical influence. America's internal divisions, however, the toxic tension between the left and the right are weakening our national unity and our ability to compete with them globally. To secure our position, we have to find a unified path forward. I asked political analyst and media expert David Pacman to join me. He's here to explore why our discourse has become so dangerously polarized. He breaks down echo chambers, tribalism, and the erosion of shared truths, revealing what he believes is really dividing us. We don't always agree, but my hope is that our disagreements will help us all triangulate on a more effective path forward. My question becomes, uh, why is it broken and deranged and what can we do to fix it? One of the things that I'm trying to kind of explain in the book is that sometimes the north star or the ideal for people is to eliminate bias, partisanship and whatever, right? To be these kind of like almost mathematical uh uh instantiations of objective analysis of every fact. I think that it's a waste of time to even really talk about that because the influence of our upbringing like I said in terms of economic class, the families, communities, rural versus um uh urban and all these different things, the effect is so significant that for me the north star is some kind of framework to recognize, oh, you know what I'm doing? I'm doing confirmation bias. You know what I'm doing? I'm applying like me as an immigrant. I'm applying my history as an immigrant somewhere where you could evaluate the situation differently. And so I think the awareness of these tendencies and a foundation in critical thinking and media literacy is actually the north star. I don't think it's even reasonable or realistic to say let's eliminate bias and partisanship. Yeah. I I don't think there's any conceivable way given the nature of the human mind that you could do that. Um the getting people to be able to think critically I think is very important. Uh educating people so that they understand how to navigate the modern world is clearly not happening. And so being able to do that I think would be wonderful. Um however as we start to look at like if I were going to go through your book chapter by chapter um one of the things you say at the very beginning that is just critically important is I this is not me quoting you though you did say this earlier in the interview. Um I don't think it is possible to define what is true in the realm of human perception. What is true is physics, cause and effect. What is human perception is basically everything else. So everybody has a frame of reference and I will certainly give you a chance to debate that and I come to this with man if you can improve my thinking I will take it all day long. Uh but for now the highest predictive validity way to think through it I have seen is this that figuring out what is true is next to impossible because so much of quote unquote truth is perception. We look at something and we see two different things. Like we're seeing the same thing we can explain it in the same way but yet we walk away with different conclusions about what it really is or the consequences of that thing. How do you want to see um people come to an agreement about what is true? I think there is more to objective truth that's good enough for figuring out a lot of policy. Now I think that you are right that physics provides a sort of truth that is different than economic theory, psychological theory. I do think that there is a difference there. But just like as an example to open the conversation a little bit, cutting taxes for the rich, stimulating the economy by trickling down. The reality and what I would love to be true with regard to tax rates don't seem to coincide. I would love to have a lower tax rate, right? That's my I would just I would love to keep more of my money. Why not, right? I mean, it would be a great thing. If I look at the last 150 years of looking at tax rates around the world, changes to GDP, you know, doing like what we would consider a re reasonably detailed analysis, I can't find any evidence that when you cut taxes for the rich, it trickles down the way some people believe. Now, is there an environment possible where that could happen? Yeah, I mean I think it's possible, but for the purposes of figuring out policy in 2025 in the United States, for example, I do think that 150 years of economic history gives us a good enough sense of the truth. It may not be physics. It might not be wave theory or chemistry. Like I I acknowledge that, but for the purposes of decision makers, I think it's probably good enough. It's interesting. So this is a case where we look at the same thing and we come away with something completely different. So when I look at that I'm like uh taxes. Yep. It's very interesting and I do think that it matters in terms of um certainly giving people the ability to decide what they want to spend their money on versus forcing them to you're going to spend your money on this. But by way of making the economy better for people in the long run, people are barking up the wrong tree with taxes up or taxes down. The thing that they need to be thinking about is money printing. Because here is one of my foundational beliefs. The average person does not understand the economy, nor will they ever understand the economy. They may not be intellectually capable, and they certainly aren't interested even if they can. Which is why I think it's 50% of people in America own assets and the rest don't, which is insane to me. Uh when you inflate somebody's money, you force them to buy an asset and it is the only way to keep up with inflation. Otherwise, they are going to lose their purchasing power and it is distressingly fast. So at whatever 2% inflation, you're losing 20% of your purchasing power in 10 years. It's crazy. So because it's a compounding effect. Uh so if that's true, now you've created a situation where people are disincentivized to save money. So don't save money. you need to get into assets, but they're not going to get into assets because it's too complicated. So then the government begins spinning a story and they say, "Hey, the American dream is to own a house. Go buy a house." But then to make good on that, they start deranging the marketplace by doing things from making it harder to build additional homes to government sponsored loans to too big to fail and going in and backstopping people when they do lose their money on a house. And you create a housing bubble. And now the people that already own the homes, the price is going up and the people below that just can't get on the property ladder. And when I look at that, I'm like, this problem is not going to be changed by taxes up, taxes down. This problem's going to be changed by economic policy that says you can't inflate the currency, which using my vernacular is to steal from the people and force them to gamble in assets. So that's where it's like, okay, we're both looking at the same problem. I honestly I think people do care about tax objectively. However, people would care about tax a lot less if when they got taxed they got the things out of that that they wanted. Not that everybody will agree. It's when you're getting taxed and not getting the things you want that I think people really get up in arms. So, we've got the tax code we've got and yet the wealth uh the wealthy continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer. But that has nothing to do with tax. Everything you mentioned about economic policy is true. Those are all different levers. But it doesn't change that there is a debate in the political system where there is discussion as to what should the top tax rate be and what should the next tax rate be. To the extent that that discussion continues to exist, all the other stuff you mentioned also exists. If there is a debate about what the tax rates should be, and there is, it is a political question. It would be awesome for you to come in and convince everybody it's the wrong debate. Awesome. But it it still is a debate. I for the purposes of saying can we know some truth. I do think that looking at 150 years of history and saying can we tie a tax cut for this group versus this group versus this group to growth GDP changes inflation changes etc and say has that worked before in order to inform whether we do it again as a concept as a heruristic I think it's acceptable. I'm not denying all the other things you said are also important. If you're taxing people, do they invest more or less into their companies? Now, I would say that there is a reason somebody like Jeff Bezos is like, I'm going to run Amazon at break even all the time, and the reason that I'm going to do it is the government is the world's worst capital allocator, and I am one of the best capital allocators of all time. So, this money is far better off in my hands so that I can reallocate this capital to things that the world wants. Now I don't have the data in front of me to be able to show you that other than to say again America and the companies and the value that they've created um seems correlated even if not positive. A lot of the things that work great about the American economy we are absolutely on the same page about. I think where we maybe disagree or there are people in your audience who disagree with me about is that given all of the things that work really well about this economy, the relative cost to instead of like do we need 50 bases for the military in Germany? Maybe we'd be okay with 20, right? But everybody has health care and nobody goes hungry and veterans have a place to live and food to eat. The relative cost of that is so small compared to the innovation that you and I agree exists and how market forces have generated so much of this innovation and wealth. I don't even know if we disagree, but my argument is that it's a relatively small ask and it's only political will that prevents those issues from being solved. It's not that we don't have the money. Um it it's really just a question of political will and logistics and a lot of the people in this country don't want to do it. And and so I see that as the problem. I think if if more folks better understood the relatively small lift that fix financially that fixing some of these issues would be. But also from a selfish standpoint, it is demandside stimulus. When you give more people security and money that they can then go and spend in communities, it's good for every business owner. It's demand side stimulus, which I'm a far bigger supporter of than the trickle down supply side stuff. But we saw in COVID that doesn't work. What ends up happening is you put money in people's pocket and they either gamble it. So they go in, oh my god, I'm flushed with cash. I'm going into crypto and I'm going to get rich overnight. Uh or they go buy tennis shoes, bracelets, etc. And they make the um asset holders more wealthy. This is one of those where I feel like it it is so brazenly obvious how COVID was the greatest theft from the poor and middle class to the wealthy ever. You're getting this from a wealthy guy. So, you've got to ask why the [ __ ] does he care? Why is he ratting everybody out? And the reason is if you do not have a thriving middle class, you are racing towards people getting behead beheaded in the streets. Uh, also, I just want to see people thrive. And if you want to get rich, sell to the middle class. There's just so I just don't know that I agree with the facts on that though, Tom, because yes, I mean, I know that the luxury watch market and luxury cars, it went crazy during co as money was pouring into that. Uh and and also you are true that some people gambled on crypto but savings rates for every quintile did go up and so yeah but if you want me to obliterate somebody have them save their money. What I'm saying is when you are saving your money in the modern monetary theory system that we live in you are [ __ ] You are dead in the water. You were doing the only thing you can't do. You're saying because of inflation 100%. Yeah. No, I mean listen, there are two different parallel conversations here. One is it's the same argument why you shouldn't give the rich a tax cut because their marginal propensity to consume is so much lower. They are also just saving the money and the economic multiplier is lower. On the other hand, when you're talking about financial irresponsibility, I'm not now arguing about the uh drag effect of inflation. I'm just saying your assertion that everybody gambled their money on, you know, watches and crypto just is not borne out by the fact. These are two different conversations and we can have either. If people understood exactly how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, I think people would be like, hold on a second. Most people do not understand that flywheel. They think the rich get richer because they're not paying taxes. That is not how the rich get richer. The rich get richer by the the price of their assets maintaining with inflation, just maintaining. And so everybody else, their net worth is going down. Even if you still see $100 in your bank account, now it's worth 90, now it's worth 80, 70, 60. But if you own assets, that price appears to be going up, but it's not. It's actually just keeping up with inflation. And so if your house used to cost $100,000, now it's 200,000. That's a commentary, barring you being in a very lucky neighborhood, that's a commentary on the dollar lowering in value through inflation. It is not your house actually going up in value. And so if people really could internalize that, then it's like, okay, hold on. The game that we're trying to play here, because I understand I get I don't want the rich getting richer and the poor getting poor. It is dangerous. Like even if you you're just trusting me to be selfish, we can't have it. We have to solve that problem. But when I hear people say tax the rich, I'm like it won't work. You could tax the rich at 100%. It is not going to get you where you want to go if you allow them to keep printing money. First solve the underlying problem. Money printing is the underlying problem. Then we can start talking about uh your ideas, which if your ideas bear out, I love it. If we could stop spending money on certain things, balance the budget so that we could start spending money on other um safety nets, I'm totally here for it. But when people want to do that by printing money, doesn't work. You just ratchet up the rate at which you steal from the poor and middle class. Yeah. I think we're now like at three tangents away from the original concept of truth, which is fine. But just even on the facts of some of what you're saying, I I think neither one of us has the data in front of us, but when you say I hope that during co people use their was it 1600 bucks or something to pay down debt. Consumer debt did go down during co and so I I I just think that a lot of these things did happen the way you're hoping they did rather than the way you're saying they did. But we I I just don't if you look at the data, the data will tell you this. I assure you asset prices skyrocketed uh and asset prices skyrocketing is not a function of people got richer. It is a function of the dollar got weaker. That much I'm confident the data could not possibly say anything else. Everybody um understands that when you have the same amount of goods fighting for an increased supply of dollars, the cost of that thing goes up. That is the equation of inflation. That is that that part is true. Going back to the book, one thing that um I wanted to talk to you about is and if you think I'm misreading this, now is the time. I'm very open to I just misinterpreted, but reading the book, it felt like you were saying that the echo machine is specifically the right. That there is something happening on the right that is not happening on the left. And that if we're really going to get ourselves out of this problem, we have to address the right. Yes. Um well, the proactive echo machine, not this passive echo chamber in which we must might be, but the proactive echo machine, uh I think is disproportionately on the right, but to a degree it's that way because they're just better at a bunch of this stuff. And and I explain that in the book. Um, a lot of the political shorthands for policy positions are way simpler, pathier, and more salient sounding from the right. I mean, good for them. They they've done that better, right? I mean prolife has inbuilt in it at a linguistic level something that is much clearer and pathier and more salient than what happens on the pro-choice side which is of course we have to understand fetal development and bodily autonomy we've lost. Okay. Right. Like we're we're already at a disadvantage. So number one, tax relief from the burden of taxes. On my side, I don't go I want the highest taxes possible. I actually I want the lowest taxes possible while being able to afford the basic services that I think that any well I've lo I'm we've lost. Right? So this is a structural thing. And so this is like part one of the echo machine that the right is just better at. Secondly, and we I talk about this in the book, but a lot of this happened kind of like after I turned in the manuscript, so it's sort of like an addendum, the right has become way better at building and funding media ecosystems than the left. And I understand that now I'm using the same shorthand, left and right, that I said doesn't work. But like we I I'm, you know, to have some way to still communicate w with the audience, I'm still using these these words. You know, when you saw during the election, Trump and Vance, they go and they talk to Lex Freriedman and they're hanging out with Rogan and they're talking to the Neelk boys and it's relaxed. It feels genuine. Even though I would argue I could fact check a hundred lies an hour that they tell. Doesn't matter. The point here is who's better at the game. That created an environment where it's like this seems relaxed and cool to some degree. And on the other side, we heard about how uh Kla Harris just couldn't make it work to appear on Rogan's show. I don't think that would have won her the election, right? But it's just kind of like representative of the problem. When she did the interview with Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy, it ended up where Alex Cooper had to fly to Harris to some contrived one-time use studio that wasn't even the normal studio and it was much shorter than the episodes and Right. So my point here is they are just better at a lot of this stuff. And then on the funding they've got Turning Point USA, they have Daily Wire, they have a lot of this infrastructure. We have nothing on the left. Like I'm audience funded and I have some advertisers and then you know we're part of like the YouTube system and I'm not complaining like we we do fine but we just don't have the machine that they have built. So, I know that you kind of opened this by saying, "Am I just saying the right is in the wrong for this stuff? They're succeeding with what they've built." And so, to a degree, it's like I I'm not I'm not envious, but I think that they've figured out something that the left just has not figured out yet. Is this a winnable game for the left? I I you know to some degree I hate to even buy into this winnable thing because really for me it's just like how can we improve the lives of as many people as possible. So that that's that's my goal. It's less about gamifying it. But to the extent that there is a competitive gamified aspect of it. The answer is we're going to find out in the next three and a half years. Um, the things that make me think it's winnable include since Harris lost in November, um, I was invited to go to the White House, met with top Biden advisers and Biden himself to talk about what they didn't do right with regard to how they deal with us. Calling us on October 15th. Tell me the what was your punchline? What did you tell them? Well, what I what I said is I've said all this stuff publicly. starting to engage with us on October 15th for 12minute interviews where someone is standing just off camera going pointing to their watch doesn't work like that. It's just not going to it's not going to create an environment or a community or an ecosystem like you can't that that certainly doesn't work. Um, I am cautiously optimistic because now they're they're engaging with me and with kind of our little circle of of people who do what I do significantly more than they were in the previous four years, just in the last two months. There seems to be a desire to get on message without five bullet point plans that are just sort of like, what are you even talking about? you know, if you start a business, you'll get a $5,000 deduction and then a credit. And people are like, "What's the difference between a deduction?" Like, it's this is a losers game, right? So, uh, you know, from my perspective, this is where my partisanship comes out. Where are we on Listen, they are offering you nothing. Trump promised a health care plan in August of 2020. That was two weeks away. We still don't have the damn health care plan. Their only plan is get rid of Obamacare. Elon Musk is here not out of the goodness of his heart to improve the lives of people in in Idaho and Ohio. He is here to turn the government into a tool for his gain for his business. Right? So we you don't have to agree with me on this stuff, but the point is there needs to be a more coherent message that is not about PowerPoint presentations and bullet points that go into the ether. And so I think it is winnable. I'm seeing some of the turnaround, but the proof will be, I guess, November of 26 will be the first test. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about the most valuable asset of any entrepreneur. Time. This is exactly why Shopify has become the backbone of over a million businesses. They've solved the speed to market problem once and for all. With Shopify, you can launch in days, not months. Their system is built for velocity with the planet's most powerful checkout experience that turns browsers into buyers. 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Now, depending on one's political leaning, you would see the problem in these areas differently, and I'm completely sensitive to that. In my book, I lay it out as I see it. But fundamentally the the big break and the big problem and what makes me hate politics as I write about in the book um is that we are a rich enough country with enough smart people to be able to agree on the facts and move on to figuring out the policy and solving the problems but but we get stuck without a shared understanding or agreement as to what the facts are or what the problem is. And it's a very difficult place to be if you want to fix problems. M so if the fundamental nature of this is that we can't agree on what is true um how do you navigate that in your life and do you see this as a scalable problem that can be solved or is this just the nature of people? Well, as I say in the book, by the time people are 25, 35, 45, 55, in a sense, it's kind of too late. And that doesn't mean as a as an individual thing, we wouldn't want to engage with whoever and try to get people on the same page. But at scale, a lot of what I talk about in the book relates to the lack of critical thinking and media literacy, which you really have to start at at age 8, 9, 10, just like really fundamental questions about how can you determine for yourself whether something you've been told is true. When you get a message from a media outlet, how can you ascertain what biases or inaccuracies they may be? It's like really structural stuff. And again, I I am both a partisan person and that I have an opinion like anybody else, but I also want to be as objective as possible. So like on the question of are Democrats or Republicans better at the media literacy aspect, the the data I found shows that Democrats are better, but barely, right? Like I'm not coming in here saying this is only a problem on the political right. Democrats have it all figured out. a bunch of the studies I looked at on are you good at identifying whether statements are statements a fact or opinion which is like a critical aspect to media literacy. Am I listening to an opinion or something that is presumably a report Democrats are a little bit better but like everybody's pretty bad at it. So this is not aside from my my personal leanings being on the left relatively moderately so I would argue and maybe maybe we'll get into that. This is an issue for across the political spectrum that we need to solve. Okay. So, uh, one thing that haunts me, I'm beginning to toy with a hypothesis that I find interesting. I don't, there's not enough data to back it up yet, but that Neanderthalss and humans existed at the same time. Neanderthalss had a bigger brain, conceivably, uh, higher intellect, uh, more sophisticated tools, uh, potentially earlier usage. I'm not as clear on that part, but that one possible hypothesis for how Homo sapiens out competed the potentially smarter Neanderthalss is that we used tribal thinking to be able to group up in much larger numbers to defeat uh superior intellect. The reason that freaks me out is I'm always looking for ideas that have high predictive validity. And you can use that looking backwards. And if I look backwards at exactly how humans have gotten here, I see uh a lot of tribalism. Do you worry that tribalism and tribalistic thinking is baked into the architecture of the human mind? It's more complicated than this. And so what the way I like to approach it in terms of the outco competing of Neanderls, which is a really interesting topic, is to look at someone like Robin Dunar's work. I don't know if you're familiar with Dunar's number, but it's this idea that once you get to groups of 150 people, those are that's kind of the natural limit to the number of relatively close relationships or acquaintances that we can manage how you can organize without some kind of centralization of control. So there's this idea, it's not a magical number of 150, but is it 120, is it 180? And so what we might say from one perspective is there's like an evolutionary adaptability to tribalism. The other side of it would be that there's just a natural physiological limit in terms of the relationships we can manage. And once you get beyond that 150, you need to specialize and centralize to some degree or the groups got to break down into subgroups. So where I think I do agree with you Tom is that there is something inherent to homo sapiens about once you get to certain group size you do have to in some sense break down into groups teams cohorts organizations. Now we can put a projorative label on it and say it simply leads to tribal thinking and it's bad. the science side of it might actually say it's a necessary way to actually grow as societies and develop technology and specialization. That's part of the debate. But so I do think that you are right to a degree if we agree that tribal thinking is innate to the human mind. That's just going to be that. And one additional thing that I'll add is that part of how this gets exacerbated and just turns into this flywheel is that we're all looking for heruristics, shortcuts. I don't want to think through all these problems. I'm just trying to raise my kids. I'm trying to have a nice life. Uh so just tell me, I know what team I'm on. Just tell me how that team thinks. And now it becomes very easy for the um oligarchs to use that in the way that it translates literally as in just the the few uh that lead. And so the leaders end up cramming down information into the masses that they can control through narrative. And so now we're living in a world where we have hyper velocity of information because of social media. uh we have teams and we have the shortorthhand that each team is feeding to the other team of like, hey, we think like this, they think like this. Uh we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. And so it sounds like we pretty much agree on that. And I'll add one more thing I haven't heard you say, but I think you'll agree that those two teams because of the setup of the modern world and that this is a populist moment, they're racing away from each other at at a rate that for me is quite terrifying. So when you think about that's the problem set, what becomes the way that we address that problem set? I don't think I agree with the last premise that these two groups are racing away from each other faster than ever. I think that there is that perception because of something called the narcissism of small differences which looks to focus in only in the areas where there is disagreement and it looks to exacerbate the disagreement and where I would pull in you know you use the term oligarchs we could use the robber baron billionaires the oligarchs the elites everybody has some shorthand for what we're talking about but there's a degree to which if we are talking about what was it bud Hudlight or if we are talking about the trans sports issue or we are talking about what I would consider the pime mostly contrived issues. We aren't talking about how the disproportionate amount of so many of the tax cuts go to the richest people. We aren't talking about how education is being deliberately made dysfunctional to justify its privatization, for example, or insert whatever is important to you. But the point I'm trying to make is I think we're a lot closer than the perception is. And your perspective about these two groups are rushing away as fast as possible. I think that that's a a deliberately contrived perspective meant to divide people when we are much more united on a lot of these issues than you might believe if you watch a little bit of Fox News or MSNBC. Okay. So, walk me through that because when I look at the world, I see both evidence of what I'm saying plus I it matches the foundational building blocks of my belief system. And so you get that onetwo punch of this is how I believe the world is which predicts that people will in a populist moment begin racing away from each other and I see we're actually again my perspective racing away from each other. So um walk me through like if what you're saying is true and it's a very hopeful message so I want it to be true. Um how would we show people no no you're you're falling for essentially propaganda. The reality is that there are very small differences between us and let's talk about them. How would you um go about messaging that? Well, one thing I would mention is what you just described as why you are reinforced in your initial belief by what you see. That's textbook confirmation bias. And we're all victims of it. Right? In other words, what you just said is the definition of confirmation bias. You have a belief about how the world works. And when you look around, all you see is stuff that makes you more secure that you are correct. Whereas someone who comes in with a different initial belief will say, "I only see things that reinforce what I already believe." That's textbook confirmation bias. That's one of the things I write about. I would say, and I I don't know how far we want to derail on this, but um confirmation bias from where I'm sitting is where you apply a greater likelihood of truth to something that you already believe. Um and I would say that's an emotional phenomena that ties back to heristics. your emotions give you a signal that you don't need to think any more deeply about this. It feels right, therefore it is right. Um, very much not how I approach the world. So for me, I'm always looking for disisconfirming evidence and I'm looking I'm basing the things that I believe on and still a heruristic, but does believing this thing give me a higher or less degree of ability to predict the outcome of my actions or somebody else's actions? Often, by the way, looking backwards. So, oh, if I adopt that belief, can I make sense of the last 50 years of history? So, I certainly understand that my mind is primed to give me a positive emotional reaction when I encounter something that I already believe. Um, but because my northstar is efficacy of prediction, um, I'm at least running things through that filter. Put aside the rhetoric for a while, you know, oh, Biden was a communist and Kla was a communist. Put put all of that aside for a second. For the most part, if this is the spectrum of economic ideas, and I'm holding my hand several feet apart, where the majority of the disagreement is, listen, just about everybody agrees the military should be socialized. We shouldn't have a variety of different militaries that the US will contract out to depending. We have the US military for the most part. Uh for the most part, we agree that firefighting and police should be socialized. We agree about the vast majority of this stuff. The difference over which people are, you know, at knives over socialism versus capitalism is like, should healthc care be a little more the purview of the government? We've got Medicare and Medicaid. Should we just put everybody in there? That's an example of how the debate is socialism and capitalism. And then we kind of get down to them. and go. Okay. So, it's like healthc care is one of the areas of disagreement, but for the most part, everybody agrees making cell phones should be part of the market economy. Uh the military should be socialized and under the umbrella of the government. And there's like three or maybe four areas in the middle which are really the disagreement. So, this is just an example to kind of illuminate how the rhetoric is of dramatically different perspectives. In reality, we're talking about mostly agreement on what shouldn't be socialized than what should with a little bit of disagreement in the middle. That's a lot closer to reality. It doesn't make for good television. Heard definitely understand that. I would say though, there is something else going on. Um, and I found this when I had multiple business partners and I would see these two very intelligent guys going at each other saying the other person was stupid. Like, it just very confusing to me. And I was like, okay, what does it mean when two highly intelligent, very sincere people look at the other person and go, "This guy's an idiot." Um, that's when I realized, oh, we're all writing on the back of base assumptions. And so, we have base assumptions, we have core values. Uh, base assumptions being a form of belief, and it seems like we're we're just a little bit off. But if you understand that your value systems are very different, you understand why within the scope of what humans believe, yes, you're you're going to be relatively uh close. Even somebody who's just a diehard communist, to me, I would say they simply violate some of my core beliefs about the way the human mind works, even if I I grant that rather than being a psychopath that they actually want good things for people, um it it violates one of my core beliefs about the physics of the human experience. And so now I'm gonna fight viciferously with anybody that even though like we're pretty close, but it's like the the value or the core belief upon which you base that we should do XYZ thing to me is so anathema to the reality that that cannot help but play out in a horrible way. And so that's where I think some of the things that despite how reasonable you sound right now, I know that there is this underlying belief having read your book, you and I have a a fundamentally different foundational block that because we have this very different foundational block around um where things go when you begin to socialize them that to you it seems morally self-evident that we should be um a social democracy and to me it seems morally self-evident that you want to avoid that not at all costs because you are very right that you I don't want no government I don't want no regulation you want light touch um but spilling over into that categorization as you define it in the book not me straw manning the way that you see it um now violates something I think is fundamentally true about the human mind and because that now just just as like a sanity check so we're on the same page. Your takeaway from reading the book is that I'm a capitalist or a socialist. Uh you're very careful in the book to say that you need a um wisely regulated capitalist system and we are not going to socialism. Right? In other words, I am not a social like I I am flat out not a socialist. Like I think that that for this conversation to make sense, we have to kind of start from that because I think that when I the examples I talk about in the book, which of course there's always the cliche of Sweden and Denmark, but in the book I talk about Portugal and I talk about Germany and I talk about Uruguay and and parts of India. I make super clear like what I'm talking about is a slightly more regulated form of capitalism where capitalism does make sense for the vast majority of our economy. I just don't want your audience that's not familiar with me to think that I'm here advocating for or a believer in socialism. The socialists hate me. They call into my show and they say, "Why aren't you a socialist?" And you know, we have that conversation. But I just think for the conversation to be fruitful, it's good to clarify that. I think a yes, that's very smart. And b uh given that we are now, without having expressly said it, we are already heading down the road of how we fix all of this. Um just to reorient everybody to that opening question set. um define for people. So you're not socialist. You you are very clear in the book. You've been very clear right now, but define social democracy for people because um my foundational block was tripped by your very careful and very reasonable measured definition of what social democracy is. Put as simply as possible, social democracy is an economic system where capitalism is regulated to ensure that nobody falls below a certain standard of living and that we are appropriately and of course appropriateness is in the eye of the beholder and we'll talk about it but appropriately regulating business in such a way that we maximize the innovation and fruits of entrepreneurship while at the same time protect those with less market power as the term may be to protect and defend themselves. So there's nothing in there about you know uh socializing means of production or shared ownership. Co-ops are welcome in social democracy but they are not mandated. I consider myself a small L li libertarian like I'm not a part of the libertarian party but on the spectrum of authoritarianism and libertarianism I want the government involved only when I can make a good case that it makes sense and so I think in the vast majority of industries yes we want some framework of regulation to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of people with no market power but I think only when it makes sense for government to be involved healthcare the military, police, administration of elections, etc. That's where I want the government involved. Now, if I were to extrapolate that out just to make sure that we're in agreement, and you say this in the book, so I don't think this will be controversial, but you hold up different European countries and some of the other countries that you just mentioned as examples of what this looks like when it's done well. And so, that's where I look at that and I say to me, that's exactly the thing that I'm trying to avoid. Okay? And the the building block for me that so much of my world view is predicated on is the belief that you're only going to get the level of innovation that we get here in America when you try to be far lighter touch that you really are a capitalist system with guard rails. There's no doubt I want to be very clear on my side. unchecked capitalism will create a bunch of winners who will ice out all of the losers and it will become tyrannical and horrible in monopolistic practices very fast and so uh the human mind for better or worse uh has good parts and bad parts and so I am well aware that there's pathology on both sides so for me the northstar is human flourishing for as many people as possible if I were going to really oversimplify and obviously we have long form here so We can get deeper into it as we go, but I oversimplify the thing that leads us there as innovation. And when you look at Europe and their ability to generate companies that you may or may not even like, but to me this is a very positive signal. Europe does not generate the number of companies that have a value of over 10 billion at anywhere near the rate of the US. the US remains by orders of magnitude the place that's able to output companies of that kind of size and scale. Now if like I you believe that things reach that scale because they are creating something of value that makes the world better which is why people would rather have that thing than the money. Um and that innovation is the very thing that pulls us forward. Uh and you look at China and how did China finally stop starving its citizens? have finally accepted, oh, we're going to have to let in capitalistic principles. Now, they do it in a very different way, which I'm happy to talk about, but um that ultimately it is the people that are able to produce these things, these innovations that the world wants that drive us forward with progress, innovation, and therefore lead us to the most human thriving. And that comparing Europe now, which protects people on the downside, but caps their upside, you just don't get that innovation. When I was younger, I used to be much more on economic issues. Wh which a person that would align with what you just said. I was always socially very much on the left and progressive libertarian. But on a lot of this economic stuff, I took a much more kind of traditional approach. And what changed my view was going out and looking at some of the talking points that are often repeated about the American economy as related to European economies and finding out that a lot of it isn't true. First of all, I'll give you a couple of examples. First of all, I don't think it's fair to compare the United States to Europe because what's going on in Serbia versus what's going on in Denmark or Belgium or Spain, these are completely different business environments, totally different systems in terms of uh how corrupt are governments or the expectation that a contract is going to be um upheld and enforced by courts. I mean, these are very different business environments. But let's just take the examples I use in the book which are Sweden and Denmark. One of the things that I often believed before I investigated was that you have significantly a larger share of your income taken to taxes in some of these countries. When you look into the detail and you account for the fact that college education and health care are paid for through taxation for people of average incomes and one standard deviation to either side, the tax rates are often identical or even lower than in the United States when you account for not having health care premiums and co-pays and co- insurance and paying for college etc. So like the first big awakening for me was wow it's not true that on balance you're just paying way higher effective tax rates. Now at the very top you are correct. It it is true that billionaires assuming you know that we're not taking advantage of very specific tax loopholes and mechanisms. Billionaires in Sweden and Denmark are going to pay more than in the United States. That is true. But for the average person you're really not. And with college and healthcare included it's not a bad deal. So then I went to the next level and I said okay there must be something that generates an environment that is better for entrepreneurship in the United States than in these countries. So I started looking into the business environment and entrepreneurship and sort of friendliness to startups. And it turns out that Denmark especially but Denmark and Sweden are considered as friendly to entrepreneurship as the United States. Now you might say how could that possibly be? They don't have as many many billionaires and and 10 billion dollar companies etc. You do have to scale that for their population. We are talking about populations in Denmark and Sweden that are like relatively small US states and when you compare on per capita basis it is a completely different story. But for the most part they're business environments which include how bureaucratic is it to start a business, how easy is it to raise capital and sort of other factors. Can you rely that the contractual system is going to uh uh support the the legal basis? It's really like fine. And and so I don't want to go on and on, but the the point was a lot of these things that get repeated aren't really true when you look into it. And I want I just want to say one other thing on this. In the United States, disproportionately, not even close, those 10 billion dollar companies you're talking about are coming out of the blue states whose governments are much more like Denmark and Sweden. And I think that that's also something we we shouldn't ignore when we say where in the United States is most of that innovation happening. It's California, it's New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, uh, etc. Um, and that mirrors much more the way that Denmark and Sweden are organized. The reason that I aggregated Europe was so that you wouldn't make that argument that you have to look at them on a per capita basis. Once you roll Europe up together, you're now approaching uh the same per capita, not per capita, the same number of people as you're getting in the US. You have an economy that's roughly the same size. So now the question, why would you do that? It just doesn't seem act it doesn't seem relevant. for the same reason that you're saying that, hey, there's a gotcha coming in and that the blue states are actually turnurning out better companies. So, you're asking me to look at the different states as if these are experiments in governance, but you're saying don't look at Europe as experiments in governance. No, I don't think it's I don't think it's systematically fair or unfair to either group or disagregate, but I think we would want to have specific reasons to do it. I think if you wanted in Europe for example, if you wanted to group the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, countries that are more similar in governance and you wanted to do the same thing in the United States, group the states that are more similar and look at per capita on both. That seems like the fairest thing to me. The entire United States has these sub uh uh states that in some cases do make sense to look at in total or not depending on what we're comparing. I would apply the same standard to Europe. I think it's just a details thing. It may or may not make sense to separate or or uh combine depending on what we're trying to say. When it comes to the innovation aspect, things are so different. Let me ask I don't understand how you can look at a group of call it 350 million people and say cool compare these 350 million people to these 350 million people and tell me what answer you get. And the answer is so overwhelming that it it's not like the US has 10% more or 50% more. It's hundreds of percent more. So this is not a minor difference. And I have a feeling though I have not run this data specifically, but I cannot imagine a universe in which you could literally pick any state or even any group of European states and compare them to the US as a whole and they're always going to lose. Just the sheer volume of companies. Again, my belief is companies get large by doing an innovation that people care about. So, America collecting the best and brightest from all over the world because they know this is the place that you can go for those entrepreneurial opportunities. Um, they flock here. And so the question becomes, well, the one thing we know, whatever hypothesis you come up with, has to say that whatever's going on in the US, whether it's draconian blue states or the mix of blue and red or whatever, but the US out innovates Europe by a lot. And so now I would say that it's pretty easy to address why that's happening. And you, I think, are very wise not to name the countries that I'm about to name, but like if you look at France and the way that they get bogged down 20% youth-based unemployment because a lot of the stuff that's going on where you hire somebody, you're not allowed to fire them. There's so many regulations that protect the employee that they become ownorous on the employer. Uh if you look at IKEA, IKEA fled Sweden, right? If I remember correct. So they're like, "Yeah, no. this the all the things that you do to make your average employee so expensive. We're going to take our headquarters somewhere else. And so you get all of these regulations that I think are they have taken too far a positive impulse. And so I agree with you. I don't want to live in Sparta. I don't want to live in a world where the weak among us are put up on a hill and let to die. That's not interesting to me. So at the same time though, I think you have to be so careful that my foundational brick is if you air on the side and you don't create enough regulations, you can always add them later. But when you start adding too many regulations now, this gets brutally difficult to unwind. I think of them as barnacles on a turtle. If you put enough barnacles on a turtle, the turtle drowns. So it's like any one barnacle, not a big deal. But you start overloading these things and you start seeing what we're seeing in the data which is America is exploding with all of this value creation for the world and then Europe is not. So that's where I'm like, okay, I like you, I don't want to see people un I don't want to see people left behind that we could have helped in a way that does not diminish innovation that does not confuse redistribution of wealth as the miracle for production as the miracle and I feel like I haven't seen that done in a way in real life where it plays out leading to the thing that I value which is innovation. So this actually may be more interesting because you're probably I'm not going to convince you. I understand that. So well let me just say one thing. Much of the what you're laying out I agree with completely. It's I I and again this goes to the earlier idea that I had which is that a lot of this is calibrating within a much narrower band than one might think from like 4minute cable news debates about this stuff and a lot of it is about the how do we get there and where do we draw the line but the what you're laying out does not sound crazy to me. Now, in practice, you may want to implement it in a way that I would say that doesn't make sense, but the principles you're laying out make a lot of sense to me as a social democrat regulated capitalism uh uh sort of supporter. Yeah, I love that. And so, for me, if I were going to put a simple sentence around how do we fix the problem, I'm a big believer you literally have to force people into the middle. Like you've got to find a way, and I don't mean literally forced, but you've got to find a way to create a sense that the only way that a nation can move forward sensibly together is to understand that I look at it through an evolutionary lens. There is an evolutionary reason why we have people that tend towards what we consider leftist personality traits. And there is an evolutionary reason why we have people that tend to what we would call right personality traits. And so I believe and I I see him losing you for anybody just listening. He's making faces that say he is not on board with this. Uh I believe it is only in the dynamic tension between the two of those that we can find a path forward. But that rides on a belief that I have that nobody should trust themselves in the way that people do because we are all blind. We we are all you talked about um the biases that people bring to the table earlier. Everybody has them. most people are either unintentionally or even willfully blind to them. So getting people to understand, oh yeah, the odds that I see the world perfectly is effectively zero. And so I want dynamic tension with the other side. I want people who disagree with me and I want to debate that. And then my thing about we're flying apart is just to what you said in the opening of the book, we're no longer having productive debates. And honestly, I'll be very curious to see if you agree with this. I'm not saying what I'm saying to convince you that I'm right. I'm saying what I'm saying so that anybody listening can step into my shoes, view the world through my lens, then step into your shoes, view the world through your lens, and go back and go, "Oh, interesting. Those are two very fascinating looks on this very hard to ascertain object, which is what we call the truth." And then hopefully they go get a whole bunch of more people that are thinking sincerely and then they come up with their own vision of what they believe to be true. Like that to me is the only way for this to work because I don't trust any one person no matter how smart they are to accurately see everything. No, I don't think there is any single source of truth. And you know that's why I cringe whenever Donald Trump says things like he knows more than the generals and the scientists and the immunologists. You know, we'll get back to that. But I used to believe what you said a couple minutes ago about the biological or evolutionary basis for some of our political beliefs. I used to believe that because that's what I thought the science pointed to. I I recently did a bunch more research into it based on a book I read and it seems that the the book is um how it's by two uh brothers whose last name is Lewis L E W I S. It's like the left and right is broken. Something like that. how left and right have broken America or something along these lines. And it disputes a lot of the kind of conventional wisdom around this stuff. And it found that if you really go to the original source studies on some of those physiological brain or evolutionary bases for our political beliefs, the effect sizes are tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, almost as to be insignificant. And very often the way that the questions are asked of the groups that are categorized as being on the left or right are slightly different. And it creates arguably some bias even in the way some of those studies are organized. So right now my view has changed on this where I used to think you know the the larger fear centers in the brain which has an evolutionary value but in modern day it doesn't work. I used to believe a lot of that and the latest scholarship I've seen on it really calls it into question. So at least for now it's a question mark for me. I don't know that that's really a good explanation. Okay. What do you put in its place? So any theory has to explain the world that we see. So we know that we have um a left and a right not just in America seems to rear its head basically everywhere. Yep. There is and maybe you're saying this is also being questioned but I certainly have not seen anything that questions this. The whole idea of the free writer problem that game theoretics tell you that if you have a system that takes care of people that people will take advantage of that system. Uh and so any organism that has survived as long as we have will have a self-correcting mechanism. And to me the self-correcting mechanism for the rights pathologies is the left and the self-correcting mechanism for the left's pathologies are the right. Um so do you have an explanation that shows us the same picture that we see today but just is higher fidelity than the one that I'm putting forward? It's it's a combination of urb This is in no particular order. Urban versus rural seems to be a major factor. Following your parents' beliefs highly correlated with our own beliefs. In other words, we are much more likely to follow the beliefs of our parents and the household we grew up in uh than we are uh to oppose that. Although of course, people end up going against their parents. But these are just these are associations, things we know are are associated. um meaning these are things that are more predictive of someone being on the right or left or uh so interesting. I don't know that I want to drag us down into that. I will say if that's what you're saying that does not necessarily mean that biology isn't driving that. No, my point is the biology studies show a very weak association. Whereas urban versus rural, economic class, your political environment you grew up in, these sorts of things show a much stronger association. Yep. That all makes sense to me in terms of culture. Everything's going to be downstream of culture. But to your earlier point, there is a finite number of things that we're talking about when we're talking about, you know, building out the government. Uh, humans have so much in common. I wouldn't expect these differences to be like wildly pronounced. Um, and look, we're we're definitely at the edges of something. I don't think either of us have the scholarship memorized here, but one thing that I see people do all the time is they'll be like, "Hey, listen. There's more difference uh between two women than there are between a man and a woman." And while that is statistically accurate, anybody whose takeaway from that is that men and women are basically interchangeable, will have no predictive validity as they try to navigate life. And so, um, I'd have to look at the studies and see how this all plays out. But from a I'm trying to get to predictive validity. If I look at the world and I say the world does break into left and right, maybe I'm wrong that it's from a biological reality, but honestly that just allows me to verbalize it. The truth is that I have a left and a right to contend with and mapping out what the left and right are important and contending with what do the left and right do from a um stability of a very large um an organism that cooperates in very large numbers. So why is that dichotomy so present from from a outcome perspective? Forget the progenitor of why we ended up here. just what does it do from an outcome perspective? Um, that stuff still feels like that would be the place to zone in. Like if you and I can't agree on how we get there, now that we're here, what does it tell us and what do we do about it? I I kind of feel the need to just a little bit challenge the notion that left and right is still a good shortorthhand for political beliefs. I mean, I think that in the last 10 years especially, that has really just broken. Um you know some examples would be it used to be sorry before you do that do you can you define very clearly Tom left and right is wrong it's establishment and populist I I think that one ruler that goes left to right is just not dynamic enough I think you know a better step and it's not perfect but a better step would be the sort of social spectrum and then authoritarian libertarian so then we imagine four quadrants now yep So you could be socially liberal authoritarian where you want a government enforcing a lot of this stuff or you could be socially liberal libertarian where you're kind of like get the let people do whatever they want by getting out of the way rather than by enforcing it. This is a little better. I mean like the the what we're up against is that this is actually pretty complicated stuff and left right especially now I argue is woefully kind of underpowered to really describe political beliefs. But just to give you one little example, it used to be the case that the right in the 80s, in the '9s, it started to shift somewhere in there. The the right was very much opposed to the rule of people like Putin, Kim Jong-un, Duterte, Erdogan, Bouetle, etc. Right now you see a very different perspective on that issue. Does left right really encompass why now all of a sudden it's the right that is much more friendly with the authoritarians and it's the left that is more skeptical of the authoritarians. Now no one example is going to fully kind of like illuminate a better approach which I'm trying to outline here. That's just like one example of how the shorthand of leftright is falling very short. Especially, I would argue for one reason that applies to what used to be the left and one reason that applies to what used to be the right. On the right, MAGA and Trumpism have completely upended our understanding of left right. You know, they had these populist claims and the the anti-war stuff. And at one point, Trump said he has no issue with LGBT, but then now he's doing a lot of the trans stuff. It's just kind of a mishmash of stuff. On the left, where I see the term starting to fall short is what I've criticized as kind of like exclusionary purity testing from the left that I find very authoritarian, which is not the kind of left of 10 to 15 years ago. So, I think both sides have not blame, but there are things that have changed on both sides that have made leftright kind of a faulty shortorthhand. It's interesting. I love that. Uh certainly a more nuanced take on uh what is going on. Yeah, anything that has higher predictive validity for me is a win. So uh that makes sense. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first tech's biggest secrets are now being shared. And here is how to listen in. 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In the book, you make a there's a chapter called Why Choose the Left? And I would say you you're making a moral case for choosing the left. What do you see if if you agree with that um assessment? What do you see as a moral case for the left? I don't agree with that. I I think really I'm making an empirical and economic case really, and it's a lot of the stuff we've already talked about, much of which we disagree with. I mean, I think the the the proof here is the tension you describe as important, I agree is important, and I advocate not for the rubber band coming off and flying all the way to the left. I advocate for something that is modestly to the left, to use that shortorthhand of where we are right now. And I, in the book, I point to examples around the world, some of which we've talked about. It's it's really primarily you know the the problem with making the moral case which I think you know you could make I guess but the problem with the moral case is morality can differ a lot more than I think uh economic metrics can differ and so my effort in the book and maybe I failed to do it if it came off as only a moral case is that when we look at the five or six examples I cite that there's a really good empirical and economic case for what I'm advocating for. It doesn't crush innovation. It doesn't stifle liberty or freedom. And I try to defend that in the book. I may fail to do it, but that that's that's the goal for me. The reason that people have such a hard time convincing people is you're going up against somebody's frame of reference, that frame of reference is going to be built around their biology, their beliefs, and their values. And it also has to describe the world as they see it. And so if you're giving them a piece that they look at and they're like, "That doesn't match what I believe to be true about the rest of the world. I can't shoehorn in this piece to a totally different world view. And so, um, this is something I found with every human I've ever encountered, myself included, piercing somebody's frame of reference is exceedingly difficult. And it's really interesting because reading your book um I and it's written word and so Lord knows I was obviously putting top spin on it but reading your book I felt like you were making a very aggressive um pitch to the left. The way that the book felt to me and you've been very careful and articulate here and so I will take that the way you're presenting yourself now is accurate and my read of the book was off. But what I took away from the book was uh the echo machine is a thing of the right and the right is especially um in this modern Donald Trump era like is really becoming unhinged and there is a reason that you should be choosing the left and you do break down the empirical arguments that that is for sure. Um giving countries all that stuff um in terms of this is the world that I want to live in. talked about that at the top of the show and but man, I literally am convinced if I did a search for your book that it actually says something along the lines of and it's more moral. And so I was like, wow. Like he's making a moral case that the the left is the right way, the right is um is wrong. They're, you know, racing off into madness. And if I watch your show, admittedly, entertainment value is a thing. And if you watch me on my show, um you and I are both meeting energy for energy. So neither of us is doing the escalatory. Like if one of us started like really going ham, I'm sure the other would too. Uh so I love that. Uh but I if you're watching your show, like there's a sense of urgency. Like there is a bad thing. That bad thing is happening right now and there's a thing that we need to do about it. And as you're laying that out, you will point to the book. I talk about this in my book. I illustrate this point. Um, I think you're you are acting what I'll say socially right in that um you're meeting me where I'm at and this is very cordial. It was cordial before we started it's cordial now and I love that. Um, which tenor though represents where you think we are as a country? Like do you think that hey we really are this is a I think in today's episode or yesterday's episode you're like the constitutional crisis is happening right now it is real um or the book which as I read it sort of in that vein of like yo this is this is bad this is happening right now we've got to do something about it left you got to learn from the right the right is manipulating people and we've got to get better at being on message and all that so we don't get steamrolled uh the show also has that urgency Yep. But here as we're talking, it feels more like, hey, we're okay. Like, this is going to be fine. Well, listen, here's the thing. This is really good. It's really good that you're framing it up this way. All of these things are true and the sorts of conversations we need to be having, I think depend on the environment. So, if I start ranting to you about how the Trump administration just ignored a specific and concrete court order and that it's not clear that the judiciary is really going to be able to enforce uh what I believe historically it has been able to enforce which are specific decrees. Uh this relates to the deportation uh to El Salvador of a bunch of people that a court said you got to you got to come back. This was done extrajudicially. uh the Alien Enemies Act doesn't apply. You haven't declared war. We're getting like into a very specific and punctual aspect on that issue. I think it it is literally a constitutional crisis in the sense that as designed, the judiciary is still supposed to be able to set some guidelines and say this is a court order. Do not do this. And if whoever the party is does the thing, the judiciary should have some way either by using criminal or civil contempt or other mechanisms to enforce what it decreed. The Trump administration, as we are taping this, is ignoring that. I do not know that the judiciary is going to have the teeth to actually enforce what it has decreed. The Trump administration may be able to get away with saying, "We don't care what a court has determined." Objectively, whatever you think about the deportation, if you care about the Constitution, I think you have to be concerned about that. Now, I have no idea what your opinion is about that, but I do think that that is an urgent thing where if even courts can be ignored, we are going against the rule of law in this country. I'm for the rule of law and law and order. So, I I'm I'm scared by that. And I don't say I'm cowering scared, but I'm scared in terms of like what it means. At the same time, I think a lot of the once Trump is gone, and I do believe he will leave. You know, I know people are talking now about he's going to never leave third term. I think he's going to leave or he's going to die, right? I mean, he's a very unhealthy close to 80year-old guy. um the broader conversation about values and ideas and how an economy should be organized. That is also an important conversation to be having with you. And the only way to have that conversation is in a sort of sane and calm way, not by kicking and screaming. And so I I think that they're both accurate if if I'm honest. And of course, we all know that on certain platforms you have to play certain games in order to get attention. And I would love it if I could call my videos a sober discussion of the constitutionality of judicial orders. I would have no audience and I would get zero views. And so the content of it is what I believe. But you know, we we are playing the game that you have to play if you want to build an audience. Yeah. No, I get it. Um looking at to answer your specific sort of question, I'm with you. If Trump starts ignoring executive orders, now I've got beef. My thing is whether judicial orders, judicial orders, not executive, executive are the ones he sign. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Judicial is what I meant. Um if you have a local judge that federal, but you know, obviously not at not on the Supreme Court. If you have a federal judge who's like, "Hey, you can't do this." And he does it anyway, that that is a huge red flag for me. Um I certainly do not consider myself Republican, so that's nice and easy. I just try to um always steer by what is going to lead me where I want to go and I love me some checks and balances. Uh very big believer in the constitution. So um that one sends up red flags. Now if there's if Trump believes that these are activist judges and they are problematic and we need to do something about it, then it's like well okay what does the constitution say you do when you say you appeal? Exactly. So it's like you follow that process. Uh, and so seeing him flirt so heavily with that stuff, um, that is deeply distressing for me. And I would like to think anybody who's not playing on a team, unless you're going, "Yeah, you know what? I think that the executive really should have the uh, supreme authority and they can overrule the other two branches of government and this is how I like it." Then it's like, "Cool, pass a constitutional amendment." And if you can't do that, uh, sit the [ __ ] down because that's crazy. So yeah, anyway, that stuff um is deeply troubling in terms of they they are red flags. Now, he has made mouth noises about we're not going to ignore the courts on this one. We believe that um we're in the right and that we're going to be able to prove that in a court. Playing pretty fast and loose for my money. So anyway, I agree with you that this could escalate into something. Um, I think I'm, you know, maybe five or 10 paces behind you in terms of where I think we're at in the danger zone, but there's no question that we're flirting with things that that I find really distressing. Um, going through your book, it you definitely um feel like somebody who's coaching the left on how to do this. Well, we've talked about your economic policies. Uh, we don't necessarily see eye to eye on how all this stuff plays out, but I think you're very cogent. Uh, you've explained your take, and so people can now do without what they will. Um what when you look at the declining popularity um in the most recent polls showing that the Democratic party went from like low 30s now to high 20 like 29%. How do you read that in terms of what are we going through as a nation whether we should be or not? I think you've even talked about this like I'm not going to argue with how people feel. I'm just going to address that that's what they feel. Like how how do you conceptualize what is the country feeling? Why is the left unhappy with itself? So the background is the country is as unhappy in general with our elected officials as it's been in a long time. So like Trump, if you right now March, you know, mid-March, late March of the first year of a presidential term, Trump has the lowest presidential approval of any president at this point in time other than himself in his first term. So Trump's approval for March, mid-March of year 1 is historically low. Democratic approval is low. The Democratic approval being low. And I just as a by the way, I'm not a Democrat. I the whole political party thing to me is just these are institution. They're almost like corporations that justify their own existence. And so to the extent that the better candidate is a Democrat, I'll vote for the Democrat, but I've never been a Democrat. I'm not part of the party or any of that stuff. Just as like a side note, when you've lost everything, it makes sense that people would look at your party and go, I don't approve of what's going on. Right? I mean, Harris lost, Democrats lost the House, Democrats lost the Senate, and Trump has just been sworn in, and people on the left are upset about what he's doing. It makes sense that approval would be absolutely rock bottom. Am I worried? I mean, I I'm generally worried that the party isn't going to figure out what the hell to do anytime soon. That's my concern, and that would be reflected in the approval. Um, but it does make sense to me that this is basically rock bottom for the Democratic party. And so it's logical to me that approval is extraordinarily low. And at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is not really doing anything right now. There's not that much they can do other than either obstruct or, you know, recently Democrats helped to keep government open. But yeah, I I think it is a concern for the party and it doesn't bode particularly well unless something turns around. It's interesting. I feel like the thing they can and should be doing is what Governor Nuome is doing. Um I I am shocked as a I've been in California now for over 30 years, mortified to my core about what has happened under Nuome's leadership. Uh and when you started the podcast, I was like, "Oh, damn. This guy is slick. He is charming." Like, I get why uh people like him. And that made me think, okay, if I were coaching the left, I'd be like, "Guys, listen. That's the playbook." Like, he's not bringing friends on. He's bringing the people that hate him. He's You know the problem though? You know the problem? His approval has collapsed since the podcast started because and this is me being the messenger here. uh the perspective from so many in the middle and on the left is he's playing too nice with what are perceived as extremists and that this is a calculated move to appeal to moderate Republicans in the middle to fix his image as being too far-left to set up a presidential run for 2028 and that it's been a miscalculation. This is this is not my analysis. I actually have only watched a couple clips of what he's done so far. But the analysis I'm getting from many is this is backfiring because you take the Charlie Kirk interview after Charlie Kirk got him to concede to a bunch of stuff. Charlie Kirk was interviewed by Alex Michlson and Charlie Kirk was like I think that this there's no one in the world that wants to be president more than Gavin Newsome. I think that's the reason he's doing this. He's not convincing the right that he actually is someone that they should consider. and the middle and the left also seem disgusted with the podcast. So, I think it's backfired from what I'm hearing. I totally respect and understand that you like it based on your sensibilities, but at scale it doesn't seem to be going super well. Man, that's interesting. Okay. Uh I love finding out that I was wrong. I like planting flags so that I can um watch my thinking to see if it has predictive validity. So, I'm going to plant a flag. Now, having heard that this is currently backfiring, I'm going to say this is going to be the win for him that he's expecting it to be because I could not have been more emotionally prone to dislike him. And when when I saw uh him during the fires, I really had like a negative emotional veilance towards him. I wanted to crawl through the TV and headbutt him and was just like, "Fuck this guy. He let a bunch of houses burn. Forget about the wealthy houses, dude. There were plenty of poor people that lost their [ __ ] houses. And his response really, really was enraging to me. And everything I found myself nitpicking the way he was doing that shimmy. And when you get down to like, I don't like the way you [ __ ] move. Like, you clearly are in an emotional space. And when somebody was like, yo, he launched a new podcast and he uh interviewed Charlie Kirk. I was like, what? So, I was like, "Okay, we got to check this out." Uh, that's interesting. And seeing it, I was like, "Damn, I want to hate this guy." And at the same time, I'm like, "That move is so gangster." And the way that he because he got my my sort of begrudging respect because he brought on Charlie Kirk. Charlie's not dumb. Charlie is very partisan. Charlie is going to go after you if he can. And he did a pretty good job of disarming Charlie in that Charlie even had to do his own not may a culpa but he was like listen you're about to watch this interview. You're going to wonder why I'm not attacking him and the reason is that you're in somebody else's house. You don't want to act like an unhinched fool. So he's like so I tried to get my oneliners in. But like I think he would admit that Newsome is very good at this game. And you also talk about the left eating their own through purity tests. If I'm coaching the left, I'm saying, "Guys, there's something here. You've got a guy that's willing to go into the lion's den in a way that your other candidates during the 2024 election cycle were not." And you were saying that there's this thing like it's relaxed. It's cool. He's the guy that can give you that when he like [ __ ] Matrix style dodged the French laundry question. And look, people are going to meme it, but like he didn't give you a thing to be remad about. He was just like, "Oh, no, man. I can't get you reservations. No, I know. All good. Biggest mistake of my life. Grow up, man. Move on." It was just like that slow bullet time. Like, I was like, "Damn." So, I think he's good. And people don't remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. And I have a feeling that this guy, he's going to have to push through his own party being grossed out, his own party railing against him. But when it comes down to the wire and it's like who are they going to have to beat right now? This probably won't play out like this. It's always path of most pain. But uh JD Vance, let's just say Trump really does go. JD Vance is the 2028 candidate. And now all of a sudden, unless they've got an Obama hiding in the wings, they're going to look to somebody like that who can do the thing, who can do the podcast, who can go out there, who can be slick and represent their side. And I think again, if I'm coaching, dear left, let go of the policies that are not winning you any friends. If you can let go of those policies, find your way back. And again, this is my bias. I want to see people move towards the middle. But if they can let go of some of the stuff that's, you know, more 7030, 8020, 9010, get to that stuff that's more in the middle, he's he's laying the groundwork, man. And again, I want him out of office in California. So I'm not a guy that's like, "Oh, I want to see him become the president." and do to the US what he did to California. But at the same time, if somebody's good, I'm not going to lie about it. I've always seen him as extremely skilled uh in it in political situations of all kinds. And he's very polarizing among Democrats. I mean, there are a lot of California Democrats that say he has ruined the state or they don't like how he's handled crime. At the same time, I think that he he brings a lot of important skills to the table. I'm terrible at predictions, so I have no prediction like you to make. But what I will say is is this. One of the huge mistakes that Democrats seem to make over and over again is having some vague idea of what the candidate should be like, picking someone who isn't like that and then bringing in consultants and doing focus groups to try to change that person. And and the example is Kla Harris. The Kla Harris I met in March of 24 when I went to the White House behind the scenes, okay? Extremely dynamic, warm, personable, spoke extemporaneously about AI, economics, education, China, Russia, Egypt, right? All this stuff. And I said, "This is somebody who really could be president." the first two weeks of her campaign, dynamic speeches, different speeches every day. They picked up on this these guys are really weird thing, which like it or not, was actually working very well because it turned Trump into a joke, which he hates being and it was triggering him. It lasted two weeks, maybe 12 days, and then all of a sudden, she was giving the exact same speech multiple times a day. The these guys are weird stuff ended. the hyperc controlled interviews like the Alex Cooper thing began and it was almost like the consultants and the focus group said this is this is what she's doing. This is what we need the candidate to do. Force her into this box. And so like what seems very clear is that the Democratic candidate needs to be chosen because they're the right thing without changing without being brought through the consultants and the modifying way that you talk and relate to people. I don't know who that is. Maybe it's Newsome, maybe it's not. But it you can't keep trying to change the candidate into what you believe voters want. they you have to pick them because they either are what voters want or don't pick them if they're not and leave it at that. That that's definitely something that needs to change. Okay. So, if we take your book as coaching to the left, what is it that you want to see them run as the policies um even now be they're not empowered. They're going to have a hard time getting stuff through. However, they can start messaging building that package up for people to really glom on to. Um, do you want to see them run a Trump is dumb strategy? Do you want to see them uh stand 10 toes down on universal health care? Like what do you think is that, you know, 7030 in their favor thing that they could be running on? Like you said, the policies don't matter. I agree with you. I mean, I'm sort of sort of being tongue and cheek, but to a great degree, I mean, listen, we know that there are issues that are not issues with which you win a national campaign if you're a Democrat, right? Gun safety regulations nationally are not going to win you a presidential campaign. We we just we just know it. Okay. So the the first thing would be identify what really shouldn't be the important aspects of the campaign. Second part of it I already mentioned is you need a candidate who is genuinely what people want rather than someone who needs to be molded. So let's assume that that's done. I think the key thing, and I was speaking today with Congressman Jamie Raskin about it, and he seemed to agree with me, is it's what I said earlier, which is there needs to be a unified explanation for why what has been going on isn't good. Right now, I'm leaning towards we don't argue about tax rates or deductions or Cubid, right? The qualified business income deduction. Personally, I care about it a lot, but it's not necessarily salient to to everybody. it. I think right now it has to be look at all the promises. Look at how they actually governed. They have nothing for you. It's about the cabinet with the most billionaires on it that we've ever seen and putting an unelected bureaucrat, their language, right, which now we turn against them. It they put an unelected bureaucrat, Elon Musk, in charge of just about everything. Trump sits slumped over in the Oval Office while Elon wearing a hat rants and raves as his kid picks boogers and puts him on the Resolute desk. The imagery is humiliating. Putin has them on hold for an hour. It's embarrassing and they've got nothing for you. Now, obviously, I'm not a political consultant. That's not fully fleshed out and it needs to be built upon and much smarter people than me should do it. But to me, that is way more salient than $5,000 tax deductions if you start a new small business, right? Which is sort of like, man, that's not getting you any traction. If I were advising them, this would be a sit and wait game. Never interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake. I don't yet know if Trump is making a mistake. And my audience already knows this, but for anybody joining us, I voted for Trump. I believe that he was looking at things economically in the right lens. Now, uh, it feels more and more like I'm asked to believe that he's playing Tessarak chess and I'm not not just 4 D, but like, woo, buddy, like this thing is folding in on itself. Uh, so I don't the tariffs though, Tom, you the tariff approach, you think economically it doesn't make sense. I think hokeyp pokey tariffs where you put your right tariff in, you take your right tariff out. Uh, that game is creating economic chaos. Now that economic chaos in the market is actually doing a good thing and that good thing is it's deflating asset values which means that people that previously couldn't afford some of these assets can now get them. Do I think he did that on purpose? No, I do not. So this is a um I believe and this is where now I have to start stacking my belief set otherwise what I say isn't going to make sense. Um so my belief set is the following. You're in a cold cold war with China. You have certainly the potential for a hot war with China, though I think it's certainly avoidable. Um, you will certainly have heard of the idea Thusidity's trap. I'm sure your audience has. For anybody that hasn't, Thusidity's trap was something uh that a Greek philosopher honed in on like 2,000 years ago. They said when you have a declining power, in this case the US, and a rising power, in this case, China, uh the declining power will not be able to accept that they are lower on the totem pole. And you can just look at the way that Trump reacted to Zalinsky not showing proper respect and you know exactly what it looks like. Uh and then the rising power won't accept to be acknowledged as a peer and maybe not just a peer but somebody that's beginning to pull away from you. And so historically they just end up colliding. They can't they can't avoid it and they end up historically anyway in a hot war. We at least have economic warfare that we can go through before we get there and and hopefully we do and we can sort of exhaust ourselves at that stage. But uh nonetheless, so you're doing that now. Trump starts banging on about tariffs and I'm like, "Yes, this is good because we need to return uh some, not all, but we need to return some manufacturing back to the United States because you cannot have a war with somebody who controls your manufacturing." And that is a position that we're in. I'm not saying war is good. I'm just saying we are in a position now where you can't pretend that that's not on the table of options. Uh Taiwan holds the key to your modern way of life. And if you believe like I believe in AI and innovation in general and that AI will be the progenerator of more innovation than anything else in human history at a speed the likes of which we have never seen before. So AI matters and now something like 85 or more% of the AI chips come out of Taiwan. China has said in no uncertain terms we will be reunifying with Taiwan. That doesn't mean that they instantly cut you off from that but it does mean that they can. And so now that puts you in a subservient position, which I do not see Trump for sure, no way he's going to allow that. So now you're in this position where I'm like, okay, he's doing the hokeyp pokey tariffs. I don't think he's doing it on purpose. He's causing massive disruptions in the um the asset market, the the stock market. And what we need is a set of actions that will return some manufacturing to the US that will ensure that countries are making big investments here. For sure, we need the um Taiwanese companies that are running the chips to make investments here. Apple talking about investing here. So, it's like he's got the business leaders saying the right things. Now, I don't know if they're actually just sort of saying what he needs to hear and then waiting to see if he implodes. Uh, that's certainly possible. And I'm sure they could drag their feet enough to at least get to midterms and then see is he still popular? And if he's still popular, cool. We're actually going to spend the money. And if he's not, then we're really going to back off. All of that's possible. So, I just know what he's doing will bring some manufacturing back. But, he's playing a game of chicken. And will he implode the economy before he does it? I don't know. Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, it's interesting you mentioned the Taiwan example because I've been thinking about that a lot when I talk to my audience about tariffs. First of all, I think that with Trump, what is said is almost irrelevant. And I think back to his big announcement on like the second week of his first term where he went to at this point, who was it? Indiana, was it Ohio to say, "Hey, you know what? the Carrier air conditioner plant is staying here. We just did a great deal. We're already winning. And what it was was they gave Carrier a bunch of money to stay there for a year and then Carrier still got up and went to Mexico. And it was sort of like what is said and what the truth is with Trump I think are two different things. The tariffs though I think are really interesting because the conversation as we talk about it often degrades and it's become are you for tariffs or are you against tariffs? And as I've said to my audience, it's a tool. If you have a bunch of nails that you need to nail in, a hammer is a fantastic tool. If you're trying to cut a cheesecake, the hammer is all of a sudden not a great tool, right? So, it's what are you trying to do? For me, when I think about how would I consider tariffs as a useful tool, I would say for national security and because of the future of AI and tech, I would love to bring chip manufacturing back to the United States. The way I would conceive of doing that would be a tariff on Taiwanese chips with an on-ramp as well as subsidies for companies that come and do it in the United States. Understanding that the time horizon has to be longer than one presidential term because that's really, you know, we have four-year presidential terms and two-year congressional terms when a lot of times the projects are decade projects. It took 40 50 years to get to the manufacturing status quo we have now through a series of cumulative decisions about offshoring. So that would be a specific use of a tariff that I would completely support 25 50 to 10% on Canada because of fentinil or actually because of the border or actually because of being taken advantage of economically or actually because he doesn't like Trudeau. That seems nuts to me. the the Taiwan example which you and I both sort of seem to have come across as there might be something here useful and so I think you know that this is not really the conversation that most people are having it's like tariffs good tariffs bad but I agree with you that the chaos it's causing is absolutely nuts yeah this to me is the team purity test if you long to be on a team and you want the heruristic the shorthand and you want the sense of belonging uh then tell me what my talking point is I'll find a way to get behind it um The thing that I am most interested in with the Trump presidency, and I think you and I are going to disagree about this, which hey, base assumptions, it's fine, but um I remain incredibly excited by the people that Trump has surrounded himself with. When I look at Scott Bessant as Secretary of the Treasury, knowing that he grew up under um Drunken Miller, uh one of the most successful capital allocators of all time, uh that he's been, you know, his entire adult life been saying, I'm going to understand the global uh economy and I'm going to make bets and obviously has done a phenomenal job of betting and winning. So certainly somebody that I would say understands the way that the global market works and what forces impact it. That's exciting. Um, my most controversial um, fantasy football pick is Elon, who oh boy, uh, he is not a super popular guy right now. And my team keeps telling me to stop talking about him, but the reality is I'm going to say what I believe. Uh, and time will age it like wine or or cheese. We'll find out. Um, but wine or milk, I think, would be a better analogy. So on that, um, I I just think it's incredible. He's got the greatest builders, the greatest capital allocators. Um, and while I think that this is an incredibly complicated thing, and I seriously doubt that he's the greatest dealmaker of all time, there is an element of the way that he's moving, the chaos that he's creating, if it doesn't destroy us, the economy, which it certainly could, could eviscerate our allies and make them just want to see us burn cuz [ __ ] you. That's very possible. Uh but if it doesn't, it could move the Overton window enough that he can actually get some of these things done and change the um economic balance of power around the world such that to your earlier point, we don't have to have 50 military bases in Germany because Europe is now taking care of their own defenses. Um, and I would love to see a world in which there's more uh we're less the world's policeman and more of a I don't know, big brother is probably the closest thing that I can get to right now because I don't want to lose our dominance, but the way that we've been treating it like an empire is just too expensive. It'll burn us out. Yeah, we completely disagree. I mean, listen, a lot of this is going to just be I've told my audience with this economic stuff. I'm simply going to be looking at data and I will share the data with you and you can fact check the data. We're 2 months in. So, right now it's been chaos. Is it conceivable that Bessant is going to take the skills you described and make America great again and the growth and all of this stuff? Sure. I I'm just going to look at the numbers and where I am skeptical is I think implicit in your analysis is that people from the business world are sort of naturally the good or best or right people to be making a lot of these government decisions and I just have not seen evidence of that if it was demonstrated to me business people in general are the best in these cabinet roles and as president right the whole argument with Romney was we need a business person If you go back in history, it's like it doesn't, you know, the record isn't so great of business people uh uh in in government necessarily. I just struggle to think that the cabinet with the most billionaires ever combined with Trump's I believe complete kind of lack of understanding of how even tariffs work. Like I think Trump still thinks China cuts a check for the tariffs. That's how disconnected I think he is. Um, I just don't see a reason to expect things to go super well, but I hope that they do. I mean, I I said on the day of Trump's inauguration, I hope he succeeds, not politically. I hope he succeeds in improving the lives of Americans in a way that we can empirically measure. And so, you know, there's eight or 10 metrics that I look at. I hope that you're right. I'm very skeptical about it, but I'm going to be completely upfront with my audience about where I ultimately come down. Yeah, know that makes sense. I hope that I'm right. I have my level of skepticism um watching what I see happening, but um when I look at the alternative and think about what does it look like if we were still in the place we were at with the Democrat party in control. uh that one from an authoritarian standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from an uh innovation standpoint, very specifically AI, that's where I am more afraid of the direction that the status quo was headed. But I'm certainly not blind to the fact that there is a breaking point and if you bring too much chaos down upon yourself, um yeah, you can really break alliances. But look, we have such a strong economy, people are going to want access to it. So, we've got tools that people aren't going to walk away from easily. Um, but yeah, I think these the the thing that's happening with the tariffs strikes me as what I call the shoot me in the ear, bro hypothesis. Like if people think that all of the chaos that he is creating is a well orchestrated uh plan, it would be like his assassination attempt, him being the one to orchestrate it and say, "Look, look, look, just just shoot me in the ear." Like, it's got to look real. Like, you got to get really close. as if that couldn't go so horrifically wrong that it would be the dumbest idea of all time. And I remember when that happened, people were like, I bet he said it up himself. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Do you know how close that bullet came to killing him? It's nuts. Uh so yeah, that would be absurd. So this that's how this feels to me. We may end up in a good place, but the odds that the way he's doing it is intentional and that he's got it mapped out is effectively zero. Now, Tom, on the $5 million the $5 million Trump gold cards for citizenship, we we agree that's nuts, right? No, I love that. Okay, so here's the thing. Here's my question for you. Here's my question for you on it, and we don't have to go deep into it. Aside from your opinion as to whether it's good or bad, you agree there's no way in hell that 10 million people sign up for that the way Trump is sure, right? Like, have you run the numbers on it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That like the most successful programs like this get a couple thousand people a year and they are far cheaper program. Like you agree the numbers are nuts. There's no way even a I don't think there's a I don't even think a hundred thousand people get one of these gold cards. Forget about 10 million. I think it's I think it won't even be 10,000. Yeah. Where the low-end number is, don't know. Haven't thought about that. But the high-end numbers are so absurd. Uh, but as I was telling my wife, hey, I'll take every $5 million donation that we can get from somebody that wants to come here if they're vetted. So, if we are vetting people and saying, "Yo, this is somebody that we'd want over here, somebody who's successful, somebody who's a builder, and they want to come over to America and continue building, I love that the most." Um, so given that we have the mahusive debt that we have, anything that's going to help us pay that down, I'm all for. Uh, so no, that one that one didn't hit me weird. Um, there are plenty of things that he does that that hit me with a tin ear, but not that one. Okay, fair. What's the thing that freaks you out the most? The one where you're like, "Oh my god." I I don't know that. I mean, I think it's more the approach of he knows more than everybody and also he's the ultimate authority on everything. I mean, similar to what you said, the court stuff and ignoring the judiciary from a constitutional standpoint, that is that is scary to me. I think that that big picture issue is the one that terrifies me. Yeah, that's fair. Um the thing that has always given me great comfort in the American experiment is that we say, "Hey, look, you can't trust people in power. You've got to have people that check each other." Um there's a certain amount of gridlock that you can expect. Um that to me when the early like when I started saying I think I'm going to be voting for Trump, like that was the big one. But like, oh my god, he's going to come in. he's going to take over. And I was like, "No, I think our our democracy is strong enough that it will hold up, but if he starts talking about wanting to be king or whatever, and then [ __ ] started talking about a third term." And I was like, "God damn it." Uh, see, it surprises me that that would drive you towards Trump because again, this goes to left right as shortorthhands and the kind of realignment that we've seen. The right Republicans used to be like very clearly about reducing the amount of presidential power, executive branch autonomy. That's what I'm saying. That's what I wanted. But Trump campaigned on the opposite. He didn't. What do you mean he campaigned on it? Well, Trump Trump openly said the Justice Department under him is going to be used to investigate and go after his political enemies. He's going to look at taking away broadcast licenses from media outlets that are adversarial to him. Ultimately, he is the top authority. Presidential immunity applies to everything, including nonofficial acts conducted while he is president. I mean, Trump wanted and implicit in his campaign was the greatest expansion of presidential power in at least 150 years. So, looking at the way that Trump was campaigning, it was certainly mixed messages, but he would say, "We've got to end this political persecution. Uh, we don't want to keep doing this." He would admittedly acknowledge there are people that we're going to have to investigate. You can't have people doing this, that, or the other. And when you look at it on its face, you cannot let crimes go unpunished. Like if people are committing crimes, you've got No, but hold on a second. You're Let me finish because I think I'm going to No, no, no. I think I'm going to get where you're going to be way more comfortable. I'll finish the thought and then if you think I'm crazy, by all means. Sounds good. So, my take has um been very consistent that Trump has absolutely got to like take the um the pen one. even if it was such that hey these have to be wet signatures letter of the law got to be um and now we're going to go after we're going to rebuke these um pardons and and they're null and void if even if that were the law which it is my understanding that it's not and you don't need a wet signature and it doesn't [ __ ] matter at all but even if it were I was like Trump would be asine to pursue that because now you're just perpetuating a cycle of violence and so If he does go after his political opponents, weaponize the DOJ against them, do all that stuff. That that would be forget bad for Trump, that's just bad for the presidency. That is us again going back to this um racing away from each other. You get into civil war territory at that point where now we're just trying to imprison our uh elected officials. So, I had one guy in my and I I would assume you see it differently, but in my view, what they did to Trump was that that you had not it's not like there wasn't smoke. They went after the smoke but turned it into a fire. And so I was like, "Okay, people actively doing it." And then this guy that god, like he flirts with it sometimes, but also sometimes says like, "You got to stop doing that and you can't do it." And so now I don't know. He he may absolutely listen to the devil and uh let it whisper in his ear and he becomes a sociopath. There's no doubt that's possible. Well, here here's what I would propose to you with peace and love and respect, which is something that I've seen happen to a lot of people. You can go as aggressive as you want. A lot of people that I know that I call into my show or voted for Trump, they tell me what's important to them and then they say they voted Trump and Trump promised the opposite. And so like I I just I'll give you my understanding of what you just said. You're in favor of reducing the power of the presidency. You want checks and balances. You want oversight. You said and then you said, "And I decided to vote for Trump." And when I hear that, this is me with my biases, right? Trump says, "I will use the DOJ to investigate this laundry list of people." Cash Patel, who he hired to be FBI director, had his own list of people that that he was going to do that with. He says he is the ultimate authority at the end of the day. And it doesn't matter what state attorneys general say about elections. It doesn't matter what courts say about initiatives. He is ultimately the authority. He made an argument for presidential immunity that goes above and beyond anything we've ever seen, which includes non-official acts conducted while he is president. And even after he is no longer president, he wanted immunity to cover things he did in July of 2021 when he was not even the president of the United States. As president now, so it's not just what he said, but it's what he did. the firing of independent agency commissioners, FTC, FCC, arguably not a power that the president has. You know, it's being legislated right now. I I could go on with the list, but so what I hear from you is, oh man, Tom has a principle that he says is important and he voted for the guy who violates that principle more than anyone else who has held this office. Is Tom confused or does Tom not really care about that principle? Yeah. So, reach into my soul. What do you think is going on? I think you're probably confused. I think you do care about the principle. I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. No, no, no. Yeah. I think so. That kind of thing I think is very good. It's what I always do is say if this person were a character, so for people that don't know me, my background is actually uh writing for film. And if this person were a character, I was writing for a film, what would have to be true about them for them to be in accordance with what they feel, believe, think, whatever uh and still act in this way? And you could always do, oh, they're a liar. And so this was like public positioning and they just that's what they want people to think. Um, the reality is to understand why I voted for Trump, you have to understand my perception of what happened in the Biden administration, which we're not going to agree. But I look at the Biden administration and I see a um blob, a deep state, which I think is the right word because it has ominous overtones, that ran a puppet president that was not a essentially not a real person. Certainly wasn't making decisions. They were hiding him from the American people. Uh Speaker Johnson was saying it took almost a year for him to get a meeting with the president. That's [ __ ] crazy. He's second in line for the presidency. So, it's I look at that and I say, "Oh my god." Like, I don't even know who actually is the president. Uh, also, they're going hard in the paint against free speech, that's crazy. Um, which for me, understanding that free speech is like my kill switch. Free speech for me is the one where I use the Second Amendment. So, that's the level that I'm at with free speech. Not a free speech absolutist. I love the Supreme Court and the decisions that they've made. Um, I think it's amazing. Then you've got uh the way that they're stifling innovation. So for all the things that we went through in the beginning, economically I think they're way worse. Um and then also some of the stance that they were taking specifically around AI telling um uh the Silicon Valley guys, Mark Andre being the one speaking most obviously around this idea of um hey dear Mark Andre don't even invest in AI companies because we're going to control it's going to be two or three companies we're going to control. They would never use the word regulatory capture but that's exactly what they were going to do. uh and we're going to really control this thing. And so that and to your point, I could keep going and list more, but all of my alarm bells were going off and screaming. On the other hand, I've got this guy who's a little wild. Uh definitely like he will joke with things like, I don't know, maybe I can run for a third term. And stuff like that that definitely I was like, oh god, I really hope he's joking. But also some of it being uh and if he does break bad, do I think that democracy is going to catch us? So I think low probability that he really like breaks and then high probability that um even if he does like that high probability he won't break and then even if he does that it's going to be guardrailed in and then the person I actually wanted to vote for was RFK which may lose me credibility with you. Um, but given the people that he was able to surround himself with, I was like, "Okay, I'm not a big Trump fan, but I like the people that he's got around him." Now, I'm a big believer, which I know we disagree on, but I'm a big believer that being one of the greatest living capital allocators puts you into a class that is so incredible and so few people fall into that category. the fact he was able to get so many of them to do things that are quite frankly detrimental to certainly their short-term financial interests, potentially even medium-term, probably not long-term. Uh that I was just like, I don't think these guys are doing it because they're secretly trying to get control of the government. Um, I think the optimist in me, because I felt the same thing, they're doing it because they know that there's a way to structure the government that allows for a thriving lower and middle class. And I want to see that play out. So, this was not me rushing towards Trump. It was more rushing towards his cabinet and then rushing away from what I thought was multiple steps down the authoritarian path. But at the time you voted for him, he hadn't said any of the names of the people that would be in his cabinet. So how how did you rush towards his cabinet in November? Of course he had. Literally his um RFK's VP was on my show when they broke the news that they were going to back out of uh the race because Trump had made them an offer. So he was already starting to talk about this stuff. Okay, that's true. That that one he did allude that RFK will have a position. I don't think we knew what it would be. I mean, listen, I do disagree with just about everything you said. I mean, I agree most of the words you used were English and I understood them. So, I feel like that's that's like our kind of shared basis of of understanding here. But, no, I just have one thing I do want to ask about. I know you said you don't totally know who was really in control. When you talk about the deep state and Biden being a puppet, who do you suspect are some of the puppet masters? Cuz when I asked like Vic Ramaswami this, he kind of had like no idea. The only name he came up with was Susan Rice, which I kind of laughed about. Honestly, I don't know the government apparatus prior to me launching the Tom Billy Show almost at all. So, I wouldn't know anybody by name. I've only been doing it for like three months. Uh, so I don't know any of them by name. I just know that it wasn't Biden. And if it wasn't Biden, whoever the punchline is is wildly unacceptable to me. Well, let me put it a different way then. Y if you're confident that a deep state exists, you must have some sense of the sorts of folks that are in it. Who are they? So by type, what I mean is this. You you very confidently said deep state and Biden was a puppet of the deep state. When I asked you who, you said you haven't been doing this long enough to have any idea, but it sounds like you've been doing this long enough to know that there was a deep or there is a deep state. So you're confident that there is a deep state, but you're kind of saying, "Well, I'm not really that experienced here." If Yeah. No. And so the me saying I'm not experienced does not mean I don't owe you an explanation. It means the explanation I'm going to give you just won't contain names. Okay. So um the way that I think the deep state plays out is really simple, which is why I understand why people say the managerial class. Um that's a vague phrase. So it's sounding like the vague I mean I'm not sarcastic. Bear bear with me. No, no, I don't mind. And I don't mind if at the end of this you're like, "Oh, this is the same beef that I have with Vake, and now you get a chance to push me harder." So, at a minimum, I get a chance to explain myself, but um James Burnham wrote two books, more than that, but the two that really jump forward. The managerial revolution, which is about what we would now call the deep state, and then uh the Makavevelians, which is about this idea that no matter what, you will never have a government uh swim team. You'll never have anything that isn't run by a small group, which is literally what oligarch means, just rule by the few. And he makes a very compelling case that the architecture of the human mind is such that every group always and forever will be run by a small group. um that he makes another case for that in the quest it to understand man as political animal you have to understand that they will lie spin uh position all to acquire and maintain power. So I think that any company, any uh political organization, any NGO, they all fall prey to the physics of the human mind. And so all of them are going to try to entrench and then try to grow and try to maintain power. So to me, very simply, and I do want people to hear wolves howling in the background, but it's not for a specific set of people. It's going to happen on both sides. But you're looking at the likelihood that somebody gets themselves into a position at the FBI, the CIA, the whatever, and that all of them have a frame of reference. There is a set of beliefs that they believe are correct. And in the government, the way that it works is you get the elected officials are constantly coming and going, especially the president. And so they know they can just put their head down for a few years. This person will lose power, could be as early as midterms, certainly by the time uh they get outvoted. and probably no one will ever notice that I'm the one that's slowing something down. And so it's a whole host of people that are they have an agenda of things and I'll just uh choose to believe that they are all acting with the world's best interests at heart. Now I may disagree with them but that they really are coming from a good place but in coming from a good place they styy the person that we all elected to get this thing across the finish line. Given how much people hate change, given that we make progress not one insight at a time but one funeral at a time, if you create an apparatus like we have done with the United States government where there are bureaucrats that are going to be there their entire careers, they have a frame of reference and they don't want to change that that becomes a portion. People are now calling it the fourth branch of government. That certainly is not a way I would have thought of on my own, but they become this thing that makes it very hard to steer. Now, as somebody who has grown companies and I've had 3,000 concurrent employees, I know how you can get stymied in the weirdest places and you cannot figure out why is this not getting done. Like, we've talked about it. We've got SOPs been articulated. Everybody signed a document. Everyone says they know what to do, but it's not happening. And so, figuring out why it's not happening becomes incredibly frustrating. So bringing all of that to bear when I look at um it's often times even if I gave you a set of five names they wouldn't be the real five names because it's going to be ah it's just way deeper into the problem it's it's so structural both for the organization and the human mind it is tough to get around. Yeah, I just, you know, call me old-fashioned. I kind of apply a sort of simple version of AAM's razor here. And I find just about everything you said kind of unnecessary because the explanation to me seems much more simple and kind of publicly knowable, which is the deep state to a degree is accountability in the sense of when we have a system and a check or a balance or there's a consequence or accountability to something that has been done. Usually in the first term when we started hearing so much about the deep state it was by someone in the Trump administration. It's that the checker balanced work then there was accountability and often I heard an analogy or an illusion to the deep state made when there was accountability. For me that's not really a secretive thing. It's a checker balance worked. The second thing you're either talking about two different things. Well you're talking about who's really in control. Yes. But are you saying that you want the checks and balances to happen at the level of a um unelected bureaucrat to use that now beaten to death term? You know, I so we're kind of derailing now. I think the problem with unelected bureaucrat as a term is that it can mean something extraordinarily benign. Like when I hear the term unelected bureaucrat, it might mean Elon Musk gets the keys to everything and gives them to 21 year olds. Okay? So like I I think that's bad. Okay? Or it might mean there are employees of the federal government who have personal political beliefs but function simply as bureaucrats. No matter who's president, fulfilling some role that we determined is a valuable role. And I think that unelected bureaucrat could mean either of those things. And the projorative that's been attached to it isn't necessarily accurate. The the only other thing I want to say, and we don't have to make this all about the deep state. I mean, I think I think who's really in control is relatively public. It's, you know, disproportionately rich people and corporations and boards of directors. I I I think that that that's kind of the answer. But a lot of the people that we've heard over the last number of years be pointed to as examples of the deep state are people that Trump appointed, right? Like Christopher Ray was part of the deep state, Bill Barr, John Bolton, Esper. And so to some degree, it just kind of becomes a catch-all for uh I I screwed up. Someone did something I don't like. There's a consequence for something I did. It it's never been like super interesting. And the fact that we never really figure out who's in it, it becomes kind of like with a lot of conspiracy theories, an absence of evidence becomes part of the conspiracy where you go to the conspiracy theorist and you go, you know, there's a total lack of evidence for what you're saying. And they go, "That's right." Because they've covered up the evidence. And either way, you hear a justification for what someone wants to believe. I just struggle to think that we need to even look to the deep state as described by some because who's really in power seems pretty obvious. It's interesting. I have a totally different take on that. Um, and this is coming from having run a large company. So, uh, good luck overcoming my lived experience, Mr. Pac-Man. Uh, to use a phrase the left loves. Uh my lived experience is the following that you get a large group of people even if they are well intended they make it very hard even if you're the CEO and you can fire everybody uh even just finding where the problem is becomes difficult and so given that reality when a government gets bigger and bigger and bigger and remember the thing you're really battling with in my mind is a map of the way that humans work when you're talking about political power can even be within a company getting your job, maintaining your job, make sure your organization grows, gets budget, um all of these things begin competing for resources, always want they want the dollar instead of the next person. Um they want to do the things that protect their job. They start managing up. Um and so you get into this thing where somebody can just slow roll something. And so even if you're watching them, you're like, "Is this the thing that's creating the problem? Are they doing that on purpose? So on and so forth. So knowing how hard it is, there's a concept in business called VMG, velocity made good. And if somebody doesn't know how to uh adjust the sails so that they can capture the direction of the wind, tack the ship back and forth so they can go in a direction that might not be the exact direction that the wind is blowing. That that is very hard to do. And if you have a government staff of people that don't know how to do that, it it will just bog everything down. And so not looking at that, not wanting to figure out, okay, we've got these ideas, we're trying to get them through. We only have, you were talking earlier, four years is very limited. Four years is even more limited if you've got people that are trying to trip you up at every turn. And so, um, finding ways to address that, and this all stem from if it wasn't Biden, who is it really? Uh, again, I don't need it to be ill-intentioned people. It's just I want the person I elected to have the appropriate amount of control. I don't want them to be able to override the other two branches. There should 100% be checks and balances, but I don't want them going up against an unnamed, unknowable fo that is just like a 100,000 people slowing things down, tripping things up, whatever, whatever, in a million directions. I know firsthand how much that can make progress next to impossible. Yeah. I mean, I I don't want to bel labor it. We certainly don't agree on this. I I think at some point I do want to know I I think it's reasonable to say, give me some of the names of the people that are really in control because I don't think it's valid to say it's a 100,000 bureaucrats that are in control because we know that once you get more than 150 people, it's very hard to act in a unified way by saying the 100,000 are all in control. Someone must be the figure head. Someone or a few people. Try one more analogy and if this doesn't work then we'll just leave it and say we we don't see eye to eye. Have you ever seen a complex algorithm uh for something like uh Facebook? Have I seen the algorithm like as a as a physical instantiation as lines of code? I mean I've seen lines of code. what how meaningful they are to me as a non-coder is minimal but sure but the the idea being you can have thousands tens of thousands of lines of code sure and they're written by a bunch of different people it's no one person and so often people will get very confused that the algorithm is outputting an output that you don't expect and so this happened a lot to us we were pretty early in YouTube not as early as some but early enough to where we We would have a YouTube rep tell us, "Go do this thing." Like, "Hey guys, we're really getting behind lives. Go do live." You'd do a live and it would tank your channel. And you'd be like, "Hold on guys, what the hell just happened?" They'd be like, "Oh, wow. That's crazy. We didn't expect that." So, we're like, "Hold on. You don't understand your own algorithm." And they're like, "There's like a thousand variables in that thing. We don't understand what they all are, how they interact. No one person here knows all the way that this stuff works." That's like the government where you just there's they are so complex from the the deep state perspective and to ease up the all the managers all the mid-level employees within the government. Each of them are a node on that algorithm. And when you start getting these outputs from the government that you are very confused by, it comes down to the fact that this is a whole bunch of humans each with their own slight different variation of what we should and shouldn't do, how things should be done, levels of competence, levels of just clarity on what they're supposed to do. And that bogs the machine down. And I I am saying given the likelihood of that getting bogged down approaches 100%. Um, we should as a government, we should want people going in and cleaning that out and coming up with a system that essentially um tidies up and simplifies that as much as we can. Yeah, I for me the analogy doesn't doesn't really hit, but I I do think on this issue we just disagree. Fair enough. Perfectly happy to uh move on. Okay. So, um what do you see as next steps? people read your book. Uh they take away the It's interesting how my takeaway from what your book is. I'm going to give you my takeaway and you can tidy up my um the where it breaks down. Okay. I'm going to try to quote you as much as possible so that this feels very grounded. Um the right isn't just better at messaging. The right has created an echo machine for itself. They are isolating themselves from diverse viewpoints. Uh the takeover of the modern Republican party started with um the civil rights act in the 1960s that the modern Republican party is largely defined as the group that wants to forstall racial progress. um that we need to learn their tactics of messaging and we need to act more in concert with each other. We need to convince people that being on the left is going to be the thing that's the best for them, the best for the country. That we want this to be social democracy. Uh as you very carefully define that will look something like Europe. I know that's very much shortorthhand uh but something like and I I don't mean that in a derogatory way. countries in Europe, like the highest performing countries in Europe. Fair. Because I'm certainly not trying to drag you down with Serbia or whatever. Um, and if we can do that, then we'll be able to outperform the right and get the country going in a direction that will be better for the vast majority of Americans. That's more or less accurate. The only issue I take with it is I don't say anything about the modern Republican party being a uh having as a driving force for stalling racial progress. The the only relevance of that is I talk about resentment over the direction of the civil rights movement starting in 58 as an influencing factor that started coalescing what ultimately became the modern Republican party. But I don't say anything in the book about right now that's one of the goals of the Republican party. So, but that mattered enough that you spent time on it. How do you want us as readers to understand that initial thing how it echoes today? It created a division politically that started to shape the way the parties aligned themselves in the late 50s and early 60s. But that's 60 years ago. That's so I don't say in the book that today part of the Republican party platform is for stalling racial progress. I think there's a lot we can say about race. It's not my primary topic, but I tell that only as there were people in 58 to 64 who didn't want the civil rights movement. They wanted segregation to remain legal, etc. They wanted schools to remain segregated. Those people became a group and that went through a number of iterations that got us to the modern Republican party. But I am not making the case in the book uh about any 2025 Republican platform being forestalling racial progress. So I just don't say that. So I don't want to include that in the analysis. Got it. Got it. Very fair. Uh I certainly do not want to misrepresent you. Um I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to take away from the schism started with that. Is it essentially you just picked a starting point to start clocking the modern Republican party and that just happened to be it, but there's no sort of remnant of that now or I don't listen I I'm feeling like you're trying to pull me into some kind of Republicans are inherently racist sort of thing. Not necessarily deliberately, but maybe because you have the sense that it might be something I believe. I didn't pick 1958 to start the story for any other reason. Then you had this huge schism of uh the Civil War. You then had reconstruction. You had the progressive era. You had World War II, the New Deal era. There were political shifts and realignments then, but it didn't seem to me in interpreting where the party is today that they were as relevant to go back to. It seemed as though the civil rights era started the dividing lines that reflect sort of the alignment of the parties today. It wasn't like a calculated thing to include or exclude anything. I could have started a little further back. I could have skipped and started at Reagan and the story would have been similar. Uh but it was there was nothing there was no subtuge in selecting that. It just is the case that one of the big political dividing lines in 58 was there was a movement that said we shouldn't segregate schools and have black only drinking fountains and this sort of thing and there was a movement that said we should have that. That division morphed into for and against the Vietnam War, for and against Reagan, not perfectly, but it sort of lays across that in a way that's relevant to where we are today. Okay, let me ask a question in a different way. um how would you characterize the Republican party now? Like what is the the platform? Because it's my understanding that you look at what's going on in mega Republican circles as like this is not good for the country. So what is that thing either belief system or action set that you would say characterizes somebody as mega Republican? Honestly, what characterizes someone as a MAGA Republican is they support Trump and they like the idea of what MAGA is doing and they believe that MAGA is making America great again. And the one of the problems is the specific policy beliefs have changed so many times since Trump, as he likes to say, came down the golden escalator. Um, so, so this is I deal with this in the book in the chapter about how to run against a party that doesn't really have policy that's fixed. And we don't have to rehash the entire content of that chapter, but I think the point here is right now the primary prism that I that defines MAGA Republicanism is a loyalty to Trump. If you look at someone like an Adam Kinzinger, a Republican but not a MAGAR Republican, he does have principles that he seems to believe about how government should be organized, how economies should be organized, how we should revere or not the Constitution. That seems relatively fixed or consistent. He's not a MAGA Republican. As I see it, and of course people are free to disagree, loyalty to whatever Trump's flavor of the day is, seems to be kind of the defining characteristic right now of being a MAGA Republican. Does Trump represent something that is so in the social zeitgeist right now that it makes sense that he rose to power? It makes sense that he rose to power in the sense that he was a charismatic individual, entertaining individual, made a very good interview and did coalesce people with some shared fears about the direction of the country and said I have the answers. And this now goes back to 2015 2016. He did a very good job of both he brought his celebrity and his comfort doing interviews and being on camera and combined it with some growing feelings that resonated with people. the feeling that if you're Americanborn, maybe you're being supplanted by someone from a different country, that China's taking advantage of us, that the media has turned into left-wing indoctrination, and he convinced people that he has the solutions to those problems. So, you don't hear me with a specific set of policies there because, you know, his his proposal on trade was he's an expert and he knows how to fix it. It wasn't exactly super clear what the policy was. So I would be more specific on the policy if there was more specific policy, but I do think that that's a big explanation as to how he ultimately rose to power. He did a very good job in a moment of coalescing people with certain fears, legitimate fears to a degree, right? I mean, they weren't all illegitimate fears and saying, "I'm the solution to this problem." Now, what do you think about his international movements? How do you uh make sense of what's going on in Russia Ukraine? What's going on in Israel, Gaza? Um how do you see that playing out? Couple things. Number one, um the trend is Trump's pretty enamored with authoritarian leaders. He doesn't like Justin, our, you know, the governor Justin Trudeau. Um he doesn't seem super impressed with Emanuel Mcron or, you know, kind of our traditional Western liberal allies. He is much more interested in talking about the love letters that he traded with Kim Jong-un. Uh he seems very differential to and he calls them love letters. That's not a pjorative. I mean I'm just quoting what Trump says. Um he's differential to to Putin and saying, you know, Russia's given up so much they've lost people. It's like well they did start the war, right? I mean to some degree. So, I think that that is a concerning direction because I myself as a libertarian small L anti- athoritarian, I don't like authoritarian leaders, you know, where you write something Putin doesn't like and you end up accidentally stabbing yourself in the back 10 times. That sort of stuff I don't like. So, I'm concerned about that. The second part of it is we were told and Trump told us and a bunch of people believed that the real anti-war candidate is Trump. And just so far we saw Trump uh okay the latest actions from Netanyahu in Gaza which led to 400 dead. And I say this as someone who is criticized for being a liberal Zionist, right? I mean I don't like Netanyahu but I'm called a liberal Zionist. So we saw that Trump authorizing an offensive against Houthis in Yemen. Uh Trump not ending the Russia Ukraine conflict. You know, his first promise was it would be over within a day of winning. Then it was within a day of inauguration. I think the latest is within a 100 days, but we're getting to that, right? That'll be April 20th. It's not it's not looking so good. So another takeaway big picture is the anti-war guy is definitely presiding over a bunch of continued and new conflicts which is counter to what he ran on. Now if you're looking at that and you were either advising him or if Kamala had won, how would you want them to handle um let's take them each one at a time. How would you want them to handle Russia Ukraine? Like do you feel like we should be invested in stopping it or should we be invested in making sure that Putin understands you cannot invade a sovereign nation? I am not someone who is always pushing for the US to be the policeman of the world and the arbiter in every conflict. I do believe that as members of NATO, given that this was an offensive war by Russia where Ukraine is defending itself, I think that it's reasonable that the US play a role in getting to a ceasefire. So, I don't fault Trump for saying, "I'm going to try to get a ceasefire." I mean, great. I fault him for the bluster of always saying he's going to do it better than everybody and faster than everybody and all of this stuff. I do fault him for playing koi and and just he seems so enamored with Putin and taken with Putin that his perspective, you know, he he didn't even want to say Putin is the aggressor here and so many people that work for him refuse to say that. They go, listen, we just need a solution. Um so I I fault him for that. But I think it's reasonable that the US would have a role to play uh given our membership in NATO, the implications in Europe for security and I I think it's reasonable that the US play a role with NATO countries going to Israel, Palestine, and the Houthies. I'll definitely throw in um where where are you at again? If we were not dealing with Trump, we were dealing with somebody else, how would you want to see this play out? Did somebody need to check uh Netanyahu and tell him, "Jesus Christ, man, you got to stop. like this is just plain and simple uh ethnic cleansing. Um how do we deal with Iran, the Houthis making international trade and international water so problematic? What's the what's the right way to handle that? Houthis and Iran I will sort of defer because it's just simply not my area of expertise. My interest in it is within 50 days of being sworn in, Donald Trump has a new military offensive which he told us he wouldn't do. So I I think that we could I I would want to do a deeper dive on the Houthis with the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I am on record for more than 10 years now in laying out super specific proposals of what I think is really the only way forward there. Um some people like it, some people don't. It is a two-state solution. It does involve concessions from both sides. It does involve both sides agreeing that this agreement that I have dreamed up is the resolution to the conflict and that you can't just kind of do what Netanyahu just did, which is say I don't feel like we're making enough progress. We're going back to the bombing. Uh so you need to have some some agreement that says this is the end of the conflict to this point and everything after this point is going to be uh considered a new conflict which we will evaluate and and deal with as a sort of new proposal. I go into detail even about who should control East and West Jerusalem. I go into detail about uh settlements and what should happen with the ones that can be dismantled and the ones that are not likely to be dismantled. This is such a big thing that it's not even about what should Trump do or what would I like Harris to do. It's a huge geopolitical cluster f that is worthy of its own discussion. Quite frankly, I don't believe that Harris would have solved it had she won. And I don't think Trump's going to solve it either. Remember, Trump told us in his first term that Jared would solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict during that first term. And that was of course crazy. That was laughable. I don't think either uh candidate would have solved it, but I've laid out in a lot of detail the framework I think would work. Um when you think about um some of the proposals coming out from Donald Trump about ah we're just going to clear them out and you know these poor long-suffering gazins we just got to get them out of there. They can't be a part of the rebuild. Uh which always strikes me as like say what um I I have to imagine I know that you don't respond positively but I'll I'll give you a chance to give me your own words. How does that hit you? The two-state solution that I envision acknowledges that both groups have historical claims to the land and it also acknowledges that the last 60 70 years are not even close to an acceptable status quo. And so I think the you know there's a lot of people that criticize me saying David you should be more about a one-state solution where it's only Israel or you should be about a one-state solution where there is no more Israel. I think inevitably it's going to have to be a two-state solution that includes that land for Israelis and part of that land as well for Palestinians. So I am first and foremost focused on what could realistically lead to peace and kicking all of the Palestinians out and turning it into resorts or whatever that Israel will will control. If history has taught us anything, it's that will not put an end to the conflict and therefore I'm against it. meaning that people will come in and bomb it and they'll do whatever they can to disrupt that. No doubt. Yeah. Yeah. This is uh the only thing I will say that's interesting with the way that Trump brings chaos and I heard Sam Harris talk about this and he's like look the the stalemate for lack of a better word that's been going on for whatever 70 80 years. Um nothing has moved the Overton window and we're stuck. And uh Sam was certainly not going to bat for Trump. I think everybody knows he is not a Trump fan. Uh but he was saying that the one thing that uh if you were going to say anything good had come out of this, it was the fact that he had moved the Overton window and he'd offered these solutions that were so crazy that at least it was changing the tenor of the conversation that people might start thinking of um different solutions. My thing with this has always been that what do you do like if he boots everybody out and certainly your point is well taken that will it really ever lead to peace? But um seems pretty self-evident to me that if Trump actually did what he said and completely cleared everybody out of the land so that they could rebuild, that is definitionally um ethnic cleansing. But what if it worked? And what do you do with something that yields an outcome that you like, meaning peace, uh but you absolutely despise the way that we got there? And so that I don't know what to do with because the um the status quo is is certainly very ugly. But it does seem like they are just going to keep going. The bombings will continue until morale improves. And so, uh, woo. Yeah, it doesn't seem like anyone's going to hit the brakes here. Like, do you see a termination point? Do you see like international pressure mounting? It felt like for a minute they sort of did everything they were going to be able to do and it just didn't work. Yeah, that's that's my view. And, you know, I've been following this since I was old enough to even understand that Israel existed. Um, I uh I I wish I could be more optimistic, but right now there's very little to be optimistic about. Yeah. Brutal. All right, man. Your book ends with this wonderful um sense of this is what we do going forward. What shall we do going forward? You and I have had a very reasonable conversation. We disagree on some fundamental things, but um you still remain one of the intelligent people that I think is sincere that I like to aim at my worldview to see if you can help tune me up. Uh so regardless of whether I or anybody listening would follow this step by step, paint that vision of uh how we move forward smartly. Well, I think fundamentally to departize it. Okay, this I think would apply to everybody. Number one, I think we got to get back to teaching critical thinking and media literacy probably by fifth grade to everybody. I think it can only improve our ability to have adult conversations by the time kids become adults if we give them these skills starting very early. Number two, I think it's important for people to understand how to engage with the political system. And so, yes, voting, the signing petitions online doesn't do very much. Let's figure out how to work in our local communities. let's figure out what sorts of change we want to affect. And very, you know, you can't fix everything. I can't get involved in the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the Ukraine war and healthcare and education and abortion rights. And so being informed is great, but then figure out what you really want to work on. And sometimes picking one or two things is much more effective than spreading yourself super thin. And then number three, this is like so cliche, but I do think that to the extent that we can have real world conversations rather than social media, you know, the things that people say to me on social media, disgusting, disgusting stuff. I think 90 98% of them, 2% of them maybe are that crazy. 98% of them, if we meet in the real world, go totally differently. I was recently in Vegas. I had an Uber driver who knew my show and was a Trump guy. And I was certain that if we had been talking on Twitter, the epithets would have been flying. But we had a completely reasonable conversation. He said, "I don't agree with communism." I said, "Great. Neither do I." And he said, "What are you talking about? You're a communist." And I said, "No, let's talk about it." Um, and so I do think that between the pandemic and everything else, a lot of stuff is happening online. And I I think it's clear that in-person communication uh bears significantly more fruit than kind of yelling at each other on social media. No, it makes sense. David Pac-Man, where can people follow you and get your new book? Uh search my name on Google. I We're on everything. Twitter, Blue Sky, YouTube, etc. Um, the books on Amazon, the books on Barnes & Noble, and then there's a limited number of signed copies at davidpacman.com/booksmith. I think there's about 150 left. I love it, man. The Echo Machine, brother, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. It was wonderful. Everybody at home, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Sunzu famously said, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." But in today's highstakes tensions between America, China, and Russia, what if the ultimate battlefield isn't military, it's economic? Today's guest, Edward