Lex Fridman Podcast: #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism

The following is a conversation with David Pakman, a left-wing progressive political

commentator and host of the David Pakman show.

I hope to continue to have many conversations on politics with prominent, insightful, and

sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum.

David and I have been planning to speak for a long time, and I'm sure we'll speak many

more times.

This conversation was challenging, eye-opening, and fun.

And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.

Check them out in the description.

It's the best way to support this podcast.

We've got Aidsleep, Furnabs, Shopify for e-commerce, and ExpressVPN for security and privacy on

the internet.

Choose wisely, my friends.

Also, if you want to work with our team, with our amazing team, we're always hiring,

go to lexfreedman.com slash hiring.

And now, onto the full ad reads.

Never adds in the middle.

Try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors.

I enjoy their stuff.

Maybe you will, too.

This episode is brought to you by Aidsleep and its new Pod 3 mattress.

One of the things in the darkest of times for me that's the source of happiness is naps.

It's kind of miraculous how you can go to this world and return a new human being.

And you are, in some sense, a new human being.

From a physics, from a chemistry perspective, even from a biological perspective.

But what I'm trying to say is from a psychological perspective, you're also a new human being.

Because in some sense, the chemistry that makes up your brain, the dopamine, all the

different chemicals that control mood and motivation and energy, mental and physical,

all of that define a human being.

Together, that is the underlying dynamics of personality is really fueled, is catalyzed

and fueled and structured by the chemicals in your brain.

And so whatever the hell naps do, and there's obviously a lot of good science on this, but

early science, I don't think the science of sleep is solved.

The only thing we know is sleep is kind of good for you.

But the full dynamics of that is hard to understand.

The point is, empirically speaking, for you, for me, naps, or at least a good night's sleep

works.

And so you should use the best bed for that.

What I use is A.Sleep, cold mattress, warm blanket, it's heaven.

Check it out and get special savings when you go to atesleep.com slash Lex.

This show is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell stuff.

They make, create, put love into, and share that love with the world, and make money while

doing it.

Speaking of which, I need to do the same for different kinds of merch that folks been asking.

It's not a way to make money, it's a way to share love.

I love wearing shirts that represent the stuff.

I listen to the stuff I consume, the creators, I'm a fan of so many people, and I love celebrating

with so many people, and wearing merch or owning merch is a way to once celebrate those

people, but two, if it's a thing you can wear, then you can meet other people, and it starts

a conversation, you're like, holy crap, we both like the same thing, or holy crap, what

is that?

I don't know anything about it.

Tell me about it, and you get to share the things you love with others.

It's so awesome, and obviously Shopify is a place you can do that really effectively,

and make that part of your income a part of your life, a part of your lifestyle, a part

of your career, so it's awesome that they've created this kind of platform.

Sign up for $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex, that's all lowercase, go to Shopify.com

slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.

This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, a VPN provider I've used for many years

way, way, way before there was a podcast, way before there was a sponsor, there was

a source of happiness, a source of security, a source of a kind of blanket protection and

help ensure that to whatever degree at the very basic level my privacy is protected on

the internet, everybody should be using a VPN.

In the digital space, it's the first layer of protection, you should definitely be using

it, and the one I recommend, the one I've always used is ExpressVPN.

There's a lot of other features, like you can watch different shows that are geo-constrained

on Netflix and other services, but honestly, to me, the security and the privacy that comes

with the VPN is the big plus, and the other point is with ExpressVPN, it's fast and it

works everywhere, works on Linux, I don't know why that's such an awesome thing for

me.

Maybe now it's obvious, but in the early days when they worked on Linux, like early, early

days, I don't know how many years ago, but I was like, holy crap, this is so awesome,

this is so awesome that they care about this operating system that I love so much.

So yeah, it works anywhere, Android, your iPhone, all of that.

By the way, I should mention that the peer pressure I have to switch to an iPhone, I

do have an iPhone, I just don't use it.

The peer pressure is immense, but I remain with the Android, it is the phone of the people,

I still like the customization, I like developing for the Android as well, and I have several

Android phones, and I love them very much, the customization, the freedom, actually the

principles that's behind it.

But of course, I also love beautiful design, Johnny Ives is one of, if not the greatest

tech designers of all time, and he's a hero of mine, he's somebody that inspires me as

a human being as a designer, so all of that combined, I don't know, I should be using

both actively and giving both love and developing for both.

Let's see what the future holds.

The point is ExpressVPN works across all of those, no matter what choice I make.

Go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free.

This is the Lex Rudman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the

description, and now, dear friends, here's David Backman.

Are there interesting differences to you between terms like liberal, Democrat, left-wing,

leftist, progressive, socialist, communist, Marxist, far left, center left, all of these

labels?

Is there interesting distinctions between them?

Yeah, there's two sets of distinctions.

One is if you just want to say let's define each of these as political terms, they're

all different terms.

You can be a progressive ideologically, but not be a member of the Democratic Party.

Many say the Democratic Party isn't even really very progressive, so these are certainly terms

that we could define in order to have a conversation about the next thing, kind of as a precursor

to a conversation.

Sometimes the terms are used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not

really linked to policy or any particular political question, but they can be used positively

or negatively to just kind of say, here's the image of this individual that I have in

my mind.

So like Marxist is right now very popularly being used by some on the right to attack Democrats.

There's very few actual Marxists, certainly not in positions of power in the United States,

but even among the general population.

So I think it's important to distinguish, are we defining these terms because we want

to compare and contrast the ideas that a particular group might bring to the discussion, or are

we using them as insults or to stifle conversation?

They're terms that can be used to start conversation or to stop it.

And the use of those terms is evolving rapidly month by month.

So the term leftist I think is a relatively popular term now to use in the negative context

to describe what an outraged left wing commentator.

I think what you're kind of grasping onto is that there's probably some set of ideas

that would apply to most of those who consider themselves to be on the left.

The discussion of how that term is mostly being used is not about policy ideas.

You're accurately kind of identifying that.

And it does seem like progressive is no longer being used as a smear, and leftist is being

used as a smear more at this point.

But sometimes some of these terms are useful, like can we try to pick the terms that are

useful like liberal and progressive and Democrat, liberal and progressive.

Is there an interesting definable distinction between liberal and progressive to you?

That's maybe one of the most interesting ones.

Ten years ago, liberal often meant what now we mean by progressive.

More recently, the progressive socialist leaning part of the political spectrum has started

to use liberal to mean Joe Biden, to mean someone who is not really left enough.

So liberal is very interesting because I remember talking with my audience years ago, maybe

eight years ago or something like that, where I identified.

I'm going to now use the term progressive more commonly to describe my own beliefs because

liberal has now been made a smear, it's being shifted into something else, and it also means

more of like a center left politics.

So it's changed in some sense by necessity, by force, and also because the spectrum has

shifted to some degree.

So the term liberal has evolved.

Now, liberal meaning some kind of embodiment of the mainstream Democratic Party, almost.

To some degree, sometimes I'm written off by, within my space, there are all sorts of

shades of gray, which I'm sure we can talk about, about where I am versus should be,

could be, or am wrongly placed.

And sometimes an attack on me is he's just a lib, meaning I'm not left enough.

I'm not progressive, socialist, wherever else you want to go.

So yeah, the problem with a lot of these terms, and they're used very casually by people who

call into my show, is that unless we actually define them each time, they very often mean

very different things to different people and often come with an agenda attached to

them.

And so I find that they often stifle meaningful conversation rather than encourage it.

Do you sense that there's a drifting of what is the threshold to be a progressive?

Or is there, should be used progressive synonymously with Democratic Socialists?

I think we should not use it synonymously with Democratic Socialists.

And this is where there's another linguistic confusion and a political confusion.

So we'll first talk about the linguistic one.

Social democracy versus Democratic Socialism.

Very similar words in a different order.

My, the way I operate is Democratic Socialism is actually a form of socialism where one

would seek to socialize ownership of the means of production as an example.

Social democracy is a very highly regulated form of capitalism, the likes of which we

would see in Northern Europe, Denmark, et cetera.

These are very different things.

I associate progressivism in 2023 with social democracy and would consider Democratic Socialism

a form of actual socialism that is different.

We're no longer talking about a capitalist organization of society.

So transition from one to the other is a fundamental shift in how society operates then?

Absolutely.

And when you talk about social democracy, you're talking about socializing a couple

more things than we socialize in most modern capitalist countries.

I had this conversation with Patrick Bette David recently.

Social democracy is, okay, we've socialized the military already in the United States.

We've socialized some healthcare in the sense of like the VA and Medicaid, et cetera.

We're talking about socializing a couple more things still in a capitalist country.

Democratic Socialism would be something beyond that.

And as someone who is not a Democratic Socialist myself, I'm maybe not the best advocate for

explaining exactly how that system would function, but it would have some version of socializing

ownership of the means of production, businesses, et cetera.

So you mentioned you appeared on the PBD podcast with Patrick Bette David.

The debate was pretty intense.

I should say, I personally enjoyed it.

I thought, actually, you did well and I thought Patrick did well.

It was a good conversation.

I thought it was.

There was a little bit of tension.

Yeah.

And I thought that Patrick actually, so I disagreed with the internet, I thought Patrick

just took on a kind of devil's advocate, like he was purposely being stubborn to bring

out the best than you, but the internet thought that he's being stubborn, not being open to

your ideas.

I thought the tension between ideas, I think a lot of the tension had to do probably with

Donald Trump and Trump supporters.

That certainly could be the case.

And people wrote to me the full gamut of everything you can imagine from this was your best thing

you've ever done in public to you got humiliated and your mother should have aborted you.

And everything in between.

Yeah.

But the most interesting feedback I got was from people who asked me after was it incredibly

tense and awkward and because it seemed so combative.

And I think I'm so used to those types of tensions in the discussions that I have that

it's very comfortable to me.

It's not like afterwards, there's a grudge or it's tense or whatever the case may be.

I'm very comfortable, just I disagree with people and that's it.

So I did not find anything that happened inappropriate.

I disagreed with a lot of the things he said, certainly.

So you've also spoken to Michael Knowles, I think about the idea of what is a woman.

Do you, can you speak broadly about your conversations with the people you disagree

with?

You know, some of the cases, it feels like it's gone wrong.

The conversations have gone wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think there's a couple of different things.

And I'm the first to tell you that depending on who I'm talking to, I go in with a different

attitude about how, quote, seriously I'm taking it in the sense of whether I think it's going

to be a deep policy discussion versus whether it's going to be more of a performance for

an audience that is expecting a certain thing.

And I think there's different types of shows.

When I was interviewed by this guy, Jesse Lee Peterson in Los Angeles, it's very different,

for example, than when I'm talking to Patrick Bet David, just to give two examples.

I think the reason I stopped doing the Michael Knowles show was the number of threats I would

get after the fact.

That's really the reason.

I was glad to engage with him to the extent that the interviews were interesting and we

could organize it reasonably efficiently.

But the reason I stepped away was sort of the aftermath.

But I did find him to be someone who was abundantly clear about his view and where he comes from.

And while I could not possibly disagree more with him in terms of politics and culture and

our backgrounds, everything is just so different, I found it easy to engage in the conversation

just because of how upfront and clear he was about what his beliefs were.

But the number of threats was too much.

Yeah, it was just too much.

And I don't know how much you saw about this recent Twitter dustup I was involved in that

peaked with Donald Trump Jr. tweeting about me and then declining from there.

Let's talk through it.

I didn't see it.

I have to understand.

The way you study Shakespeare, I have to study your Twitter.

I have to understand how much of its sarcasm.

Mostly sarcasm.

I mean, here's the thing.

And I know that there are people who will say, David, you're dealing with such serious

issues.

It's really not OK not to take everything you do completely seriously.

But my view is it's so incredible that I've between chance and timing and so different

things fallen into a position where this is what I do professionally and it's a career

and it's financially sustainable and all these different things.

I don't want to end up taking myself too seriously because I recognize the timing and lock in

all of these other things and this could have gone a completely different way.

So my approach to a lot of this is let's not take ourselves too seriously and in particular

on Twitter, a platform that the degree to which it should be taken very seriously maybe

has changed over time.

I'm always sort of thinking a little bit tongue in cheek on Twitter.

So what happened with Donald Trump Jr. or the full arc of it?

Yeah, to make give you a one minute arc and then we can pick whichever parts we want after

a mass shooting.

Now you might say there's like two or three a day, you're correct.

After the Nashville mass shooting at a Christian school, I tweeted snarkily tongue in cheek

to point that thoughts and prayers not only aren't particularly useful after a shooting,

they also don't prevent shootings, that there's some confusion about how there would be a shooting

at a Christian school, given that it is a place where prayer is taking place.

I think I jokingly said something like, were they not praying enough or correctly?

In my deep journalistic integrity.

You have it.

I have your tweet.

Beautiful, beautiful.

This is the only display of journalistic integrity I will show today.

Okay.

And I have a couple of responses.

Beautiful.

I have tweeted the tweet since then.

Which I regret.

Oh, interesting.

And we can talk about that.

I would love to, because it's such an interesting decision.

Because when you tweet something, one of the things I've also learned is you don't often

understand how it's going to be read.

It's going to be analyzed, like I mentioned Shakespeare, like there's certain, the use

of certain words that you regret saying in a certain kind of way, maybe just because

it wasn't as eloquent as powerful, didn't actually convey the thing, or is the distraction

to the main message, all that kind of stuff.

Okay.

The actual tweet is very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school,

given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events.

Is it possible they weren't praying enough or correctly, despite being a Christian school?

And a lot of people quote retweeted that, which I'm assuming was the criticism.

So Colin Wright wrote, I used to consider you a reasonable progressive, but you clearly

devolved into partisan hackery.

I'm an atheist.

You cannot begin to fathom using the murder of children and adults at a Christian school

as an opportunity to dunk on the concept of prayer.

And you responded, I'm dunking on the people who send thoughts and prayers and do nothing

else.

And the shootings continue.

Okay.

I'm sure there's a lot of other interactions with this.

There's a few other hundred thousand interactions.

So do you want the arc leading to the leading?

Yes, please.

Sorry.

I just wanted to display the depth.

Do you know what time of day I tweeted the original one?

I feel like it was in the afternoon or evening of on a Monday.

3.42 PM on 27th, March 27th.

Which was a Monday.

Okay.

So basically I tweet that, and then I finish the day.

So you tweet, and then you go on with your day.

I might have looked once at Twitter and it had 2,000 likes and a few people saying, eh,

this might have missed the mark, but it's sort of like it's one of my 20,000 tweets.

I don't know.

I wake up the next morning.

My baby daughter did not sleep till 7.30 the way I would like.

So she's up at 6 AM and I get up and I'm just there starting to make breakfast.

And I glance at my phone and I'm starting to, this was when verified meant a different

thing than it means now.

I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are quote tweeting it and demanding a retraction

and whatever.

And I go, uh-oh.

Okay.

This looks like it's getting some attention.

I then continue about my day.

Around noon, I hear from my dad that he got 100 messages from you should have aborted

your son to we're going to find all of you to whatever else.

My dad has no idea what's going on.

He's like, I don't know what this is, but I have a hundred DMs to everything else you

can imagine.

And I start to get emails about, you know, we, you know, your Jewish faith, this and

that and the other thing.

And so at that point to me, I thought this is just going to get worse and worse and worse.

And so I deleted the tweet.

And I really regret doing that because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks

escalated.

It went through Candice Owens and then at foxnews.com, Newsmax kind of peaking with

Donald Trump Jr.

And it was horrible.

I mean, thousands and thousands of the, okay.

But once I told my audience about what happened, I got thousands of messages from people saying,

David, only someone who doesn't know you and is determined to interpret this in the worst

possible faith would think you're blaming kids who died for getting shot.

Of course you weren't doing that.

I wish you hadn't deleted it so that it would still be up and you would now see the tide

kind of turning on it.

This was not a fun three days, regardless, but I do regret having deleted it because

it was, I wanted to do the quickest thing I thought I could to get people to stop trying

to find family members and send them threats.

And so around noon, that's what I did.

And the truth is the threats didn't stop anyway because everybody had screenshoted it.

And I do wish I'd left it up.

Is there some degree, maybe stepping outside yourself, do you regret tweeting that?

In that it feeds the mockery engine that fuels Twitter.

So like, does that tweet really represent what you believe?

It absolutely represents the disgust with a politics that includes saying, we can't

touch guns.

We just, we can't, but we're willing to point to mental health or say we need more prayer

in schools or whatever 1000 percent.

It represents that view.

Is it the type of snark and sarcasm that I would use if given an hour to discuss the

topic rather than whatever the number of characters is now on Twitter?

No, definitely not.

And so I am very cognizant of the fact that it was unnecessarily provocative how it was

written.

I think I asked a similar question to Ben Shapiro.

Do you worry that this style of presentation can turn you from being, you know, a deeply

thoughtful, objective political thinker to somebody who is just a partisan hack or partisan,

what's a good word, talking head?

Do you mean with regard to Twitter or the format of my show in general?

So Twitter for now, let's start with Twitter for now.

And can you silo your style of communication on Twitter from being a virus that affects

your mind?

Right.

I don't have deep thoughts about the Twitter component beyond, I think, across all sorts

of disciplines.

This is not the best way to most effectively solve problems and figure out solutions to

complex issues.

You're talking about Twitter.

Right now, I'm talking about Twitter.

That being said, I think all of us, to some degree, have to adapt our content to the platform

that we're using in the same way that what I post to YouTube is different than what I

post to TikTok.

What I post to Twitter is also different.

Do I think Twitter has been an unmitigated good for society?

No.

Have I chosen to step into Twitter as one of the ways in which I get my message out with

the good and the bad?

Yes.

And I think that there is a deep conversation to be had there.

I think zooming out a little bit in terms of what I do, and I was hoping this would come

up because I think it's really interesting.

I will often get emails from people who say two things.

You would have such a bigger audience if you did X-type emails, and usually they are plays

to sensationalism, salacious and titillating content, more pop culture stuff, et cetera.

On the other hand, it's folks who say, listen, what you're doing really isn't as serious

as it could be, and it seems like you could do something more serious, and you should

consider doing deep dives.

Once it was do a deep dive into Calvin Coolidge, and I was like, nobody will watch that.

It's not by accident that my show is the way it is.

In an hour, I'm thinking of all the platforms I'm on, and I'm saying, okay, I want to do

a relatively deep dive on the federal budget, and I want to talk about some of the political

tumfoolery going on within the post office, and I'm going to do a segment about the wacky

rally where Trump said crazy things and made up three words and said he endorsed a candidate

who's named ... I'm crafting that in total to find a balance between, let's build this

audience as much as I can in order to have a bigger base to get my message out there,

and include the more serious stuff with the hope that there's a little bit of something

for everyone, and I'm finding a balance between those two sides of the spectrum.

It's a deliberate thing, and I'm aware that if I were producing my show 50 years ago,

the balance would probably be different, and it would probably change again if the show

was audio only rather than having all these video platforms.

It would also be different, but it's a decision that's proactively made to try to get the

best and most out of the hour that I'm creating every day.

It just feels like there's an entire machine fed by Twitter and journalism that wants to

divide people, and the drama of that division, highlighting the partisan division.

The drama of that division feels like it's a tension with objective clear thinking sometimes.

That's the ... I worry that there's a drug to it.

There's too much fun to mock ridiculous people on the other side.

I think you're right about that.

The fact that that is true to me supports ... I've talked with my audience about the

old food pyramid, which I guess was wrong, but let's imagine that there was a pyramid

that made sense.

What's at the bottom, bread?

I think whole grains, maybe?

I don't remember.

It's been a while since I saw it.

Junk food is at the very top.

I'm very open with my audience.

The vast majority of what I do is the top of that pyramid.

I tell people very openly, I don't consume a lot of the type of content I produce.

I think it's really important to, as a base, be doing critical thinking, epistemology,

how do we believe the things we believe, basics about the world.

After that, reading history, economics, philosophy, etc.

Now we're getting into current events, I would mostly be looking at consuming primary

source reporting, things like associated press, whatever.

I know everybody will have a different list of what counts there.

After that is when I'd say indulge in some of the commentary type stuff that I do.

If you find that I'm thoughtful enough to make it into that, but I'm very open and really

what I try to do on my show often is, in being that at the top of the pyramid, tell people

there's all this other stuff that should be forming your foundation that I hope you're

consuming in addition to just watching me.

I'm very open with my audience about that.

What about the shape, the dynamics, the characteristics of your audience?

Is there some degree to which you're through mocking maybe Republicans that there's a lean

to that audience and then you become captured by the audience?

Do you worry about the audience capture?

I worry about it.

I'm relatively comfortable that it's not shaping the program to a great degree

in the sense that at this point, I have a pretty good sense of the things I can say

that will upset what I might call my core audience.

One of the interesting things just to briefly go back to the Twitter thing was

those people who were furious with me on Twitter and they contacted my advertisers

and some advertisers dropped me and on and on and on.

None of them are actually in my audience.

None of them are regular consumers of my audience.

They were kind of weaponized against me by people who said,

hey, look at this, the people who follow Candace Owens on Twitter,

other than for their kind of shock value, they're not in my audience.

And with my core audience, I know there are things I can talk about that will generate

displeasure, I guess you could say with my audience.

Sometimes when I touch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that will happen.

Sometimes on vaccines, there's a portion of my audience

that is more generally skeptical of vaccines.

Sometimes on some foreign policy issues.

Or I'm not a big fan of Marianne Williamson nor Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s challenges to Joe Biden,

not because I love Joe Biden, but because I don't consider them

to be the most serious challengers.

I know there's people in my audience who don't like that.

They get mad at me about that.

And I'm totally okay with that and that tension with my core audience.

So in that sense, I don't feel as though I've had that audience capture take place.

But I know it can happen and I'm very open to being told ways

in which it may be happening without me noticing.

So I've made a call for questions on Reddit for this conversation.

There's a lot of good questions that I'll probably bring up.

But one of them was about Marianne Williamson asking why David thinks

she is a garbage candidate, which of course-

I've never said.

But perhaps you have more eloquently criticized.

So let's go there to the 2024 election.

Okay.

So Joe Biden officially announced that he's running again.

Donald Trump officially announced that he's running again.

If that's the matchup, who do you think wins?

If the election's held today, I think Biden.

Why?

Well, first of all, I believe he won last time.

And if I start with the results from 2020 and I think to myself,

what has happened since then that would push or pull voters one way or the other,

I have a hard time making a case that Trump is in a better position today than he was

in November of 2020.

So that's kind of my starting point, which is it's a rematch of an election with a known outcome.

What has changed?

And I can't make a case for circumstances having changed in Trump's favor.

To give a couple of state-level examples, Florida seems to be kind of moving more

to the Republican side since 2020, but Trump won that state already in 2020.

So it wouldn't really change the outcome.

Arizona was close.

I think Arizona has moved to the left since 2020.

So I don't see Trump taking that one.

Wisconsin, I think the same sort of thing applies.

So being very practical, that would be kind of the start of my reasoning.

Do you think Joe Biden is a better candidate now than he was in 2020?

I think he's a worse candidate.

This is going to sound agist, but I think he's a worse candidate in that he's even older and

there already seems to be an appetite for younger candidates, particularly on the Democratic

voting side.

So he's going to be four years older and, in a sense, that could be a liability.

However, he also is going to have four years of accomplishments.

Now, you might not like the things he's done, in which case that would hurt him.

But he has started to accumulate a not insignificant number of accomplishments,

some of the big things that are known, Inflation Reduction Act and COVID stimulus,

but also less well-known things like a bunch of little tweaks to healthcare,

a bunch of little tweaks to student lending.

There's been a lot of little things.

At the macro level, I don't actually think Joe Biden has that much to do with this.

The same way I didn't credit or attack Trump for a lot of the macroeconomic stuff,

but Inflation has started to come down significantly.

The stock market's quite steady, these sort of things.

I think looking historically, it's a pretty okay environment for Joe Biden,

with the exception that he was already the oldest president to be inaugurated in 2021,

and he would beat his own record in January of 2025.

And I just don't know how voters are going to see that.

So in terms of just a public human being, how would you compare Trump and Biden?

So if I were to give criticism towards Trump, it would be that he's chaotic,

maybe to the point of being disrespectful to a lot of different groups,

to a lot of different ideas, to a lot of different nations and leaders and all that kind of stuff.

And then the criticism towards Biden would be that he,

maybe perhaps because of age or any other kind of cognitive capabilities,

is not really there mentally, in the way that perhaps you could say that Barack Obama was there.

Just mentally being able to handle all kinds of aspects of being a public

representative of a nation to the world and to the people of that nation.

So in the competition of personality flaws, which do you think is more powerful?

You've laid out fair and I believe accurate assessments of elements of both of those men.

You haven't weighed in on to what degree you value each of those assessments,

which is where I think the kind of meat of this question really is.

I don't see, and I know that Biden's going to get us into World War III,

World War III doesn't seem to be happening, I don't see the Biden deficits you listed,

which I agree with you on. I don't see them as dangerous or threatening to the standing of the

United States in this kind of environment with our traditional Western allies and geopolitics,

et cetera, in the way that the sort of unhinged personality of Trump, combined with his lack

of knowledge about most issues, is a threat. So for me, if those two are the candidates,

Biden would be my choice. Now, are there people I would rather see on the Democratic side?

Yes. If I knew the president would be a Republican, can I think of better options than Trump?

Absolutely. It's so funny, when in 2012 it was Obama versus Romney, the difference seemed

so significant between them. Thinking back, I'm sure I would disagree with Mitt Romney about

tax rates and his views on LGBT, or I know are different than mine, but it seems without looking

at him with rose-colored glasses, so comparatively benign given the four years of Trump. So that's

kind of where I come down. Even McCain and Obama, the differences seemed quite drastic.

Yeah. McCain was interesting because Palin, as his running mate, opened the door to the sort of

cartoonish stuff that we've started to see on the Republican side. Palin, Trump, Marjorie, Taylor

Green, it started going in that direction, which has made the party a bit of a joke. Aside from

what you believe the tax rate would be, you can say taxes are too high, but Jewish space

lasers come on. But I agree with you on McCain also.

So going back to the political terms we talked about, where in that spectrum do you place yourself

today? Which of the label do you think captures your political views?

Progressive Social Democrat, which again is a capitalist. I own my own business. I pay the

taxes I'm legally required to pay and not a penny more and all those things. That's where I place

myself. Would you place yourself to the left of Joe Biden? Yes. Where does the AOC fit into that?

That's a good question. What do you think about AOC as a candidate? Do you think she eventually

runs? I think that if she doesn't run into some kind of scandal, and I don't mean scandal in the

sense of some personal impropriety, but I mean some kind of major political problem,

it seems that she has the staying power to be an American elected politics for a long time.

Whether she would even want to be president versus maybe going to the Senate or being governor or

whatever the case may be, I have no idea what her ambitions are in that sense. But certainly,

policy aside, she has this combination of charisma, likability to some, but also something about

her personality that angers the people who don't like her in a way that only fuels her sort of

presence, which I think applies to Trump as well, that I do think that she has the potential to be,

to have significant staying power in American politics. President, I don't know.

Do you think that's the future of political elections and politics in general,

is people who are able to skillfully piss off the other side, like AOC and Trump did?

I think it's an aspect of it. I think it's also understanding how to communicate policy ideas.

Trump, I have things I can praise Trump about if we want to get to that segment at some point.

You let me know when that is, but I do think that there are some things Trump is very good at,

and this is why it's very hard for me to believe that Ron DeSantis has what it takes

to actually fight Trump in a national primary. And one of those things is Trump has a,

even though he often says very strange things, that if you transcribe them, you go,

that's what language is that that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. In the moment,

the way he relates to adversaries on stage, et cetera, is very good in that he is very much

aware of how it is going to be seen by the audience. And so that's why a lot of times it's

more about, doesn't matter that a word salad came out of his mouth, how he immediately responded

and related to the person, very good. So I think that knowing how to be good when clips are shared

all the time, often out of context, is extraordinarily important. Knowing how to use social media,

which every election cycle, that means something different. But understanding how to use social

media, very important. Those things are absolutely so important. And whether you're able to do a

deep dive on the deficit, it's certainly useful, but I would say it's a bad thing. It's becoming

less important in terms of figuring out who we want to represent us. So just lingering on the AOC,

and then maybe let's throw in Bernie Sanders on that. Yeah. So where do you place yourself and

how do you do the layout of the land of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Joe Biden, and David Pakman?

My instinct is, and I'm going to answer it, the thing that makes this tough is,

Bernie says, he's a democratic socialist. He ran as a social democrat. He didn't run

on anything that was really socialism. So I'm going by their public facing platforms.

I've been listening to him for many, many years and all the way back to the Tom Hartman show.

And I think using the terms as you've been using them, he has, I don't think, ever been a democratic

socialist. I haven't heard him speak about socialism. I think I've heard him speak about

social programs and the value of social programs throughout the history of the United States and

how they've been beneficial. My understanding is very similar to yours,

although there may be stuff from the 70s where he really was talking about-

We've walled this shit in the 70s. Yeah, you and I even who weren't around,

we were doing stuff in the 70s. I feel like we did, yeah.

My sense would be Biden is like center left, and then I'm to the left of that.

But maybe just inside of where AOC and Bernie are, very, very similar to Bernie. I mean,

I identify with a lot of Bernie's ideas. Maybe their implementation I'm more flexible on.

I'll give you one example. Medicare for all. One way of trying to get healthcare to everybody,

which Bernie's very big on, is you take the current Medicare program, you just eliminate

the age limit, make it available to everybody, pay for it through taxation. Interesting. However,

I'm open to other models if they get everybody healthcare that is good quality and affordable.

Singapore has an interesting model. Germany has an interesting model.

I am more agnostic about how we do it than just saying, let's expand Medicare. Whether that puts

me to the right of Bernie, I don't know, but I'm not exactly right there on it has to be Medicare

for all. Yeah, that's more of just flexibility versus dogmatism. So I don't know if that puts

you to the left or to the right. I don't either. What do you think about the,

the term manipulation or the corruption in the DNC that perhaps tipped the scales against Bernie

in the election? Do you think there was such a thing? 2016 or 2020?

Both, I would say. In different, the dynamics there were different with Hillary Clinton and

the pressure from Hillary Clinton as a candidate and so on. Yeah, what, I mean, was there,

why didn't Bernie win? I guess there's one, one way to ask.

Okay. I think there's a couple of things here. First, the DNC, I'm not a Democrat, just your

audience may not know. I'm just a independent. I mostly vote for candidates that end up being

Democrats in local elections. Often there's no party designation. So okay, I'm obviously on the

left. I'm not denying that, but the Democratic party as an institution has never really been

interesting to me. You're still a rebel that resists belonging to any institution.

Exactly right. Exactly right. And whether it matters, I don't know.

The DNC and the RNC really are organizations that to some degree exist to justify their own

existence because if they were no longer necessary, they would go away. And so they have to assert

their value and their importance. They do this in a number of different ways,

organizing the way that the nominee is chosen, the convention, working with states on everything

from redistricting to whatever else the case may be, setting the order of primaries and having

some involvement in how that's all going to happen. And also coordinating behind the scenes,

I guess they would describe it as making sure our candidates don't get in each other's ways.

We might see it and say they're picking the winner. There's nothing illegal about them being

involved in picking the winner, but we might say it's not in people's interests. I think the 2020

primary was really interesting. Bernie supporter, myself, I started telling my audience after a

couple primaries and even before based on polling and different things, I see a real uphill battle

here for Bernie. And it's really important. People in my audience are not the average union

worker in Michigan who is mostly working and raising a family and then goes to vote on primary day

and goes to vote on election day. If you spend a lot of time on Reddit and Twitter, you're going

to have an inflated sense of Bernie's popularity within the Democratic Party. That was my sense.

And to some degree, we saw that in certain states. I don't have the exact primary order

and results in front of me or in my head, but the big turning point was South Carolina. South

Carolina was when Joe Biden, one in one handily, understood to be because of the larger African

American population in South Carolina. And right around that exact same time, I actually don't

remember now, whether it was the day after or the day before, some of the smaller Democratic

candidates, smaller in terms of support, got out and said, I'm endorsing Joe Biden. And to some

degree, of course, it was all organized and timed to help Joe Biden. There's no doubt about that.

This is what the DNC does. It's hard for me to be mad at the DNC because this is sort of like,

if we believed they were there to be unbiased arbiters and to stay as much on the side as

possible, it would make sense to be furious that they've gone against their stated mandate.

But we know that the DNC negotiates and is it working behind the scenes and has a favorite,

that favorite was Hillary in 2016, 2020. So I share the frustration about the power that the

DNC has, but for people who were saying they did something illegal or whatever else the case may

be, that doesn't seem to be the case. But this is part of why, I mean, I would love

there not to be this duopoly of Republicans and Democrats. And there's probably four major changes

that have to happen in order to make that a reality. But I share the frustration of folks

while recognizing that Reddit was not accurately representing Bernie's level of popularity.

Still, I wish that the bias wasn't towards what could be negatively termed a deep state,

towards the bureaucracy, towards the momentum of the past, which I think Joe Biden kind of

represents versus new ideas, which is funny to say that Bernie Sanders somehow represents

new ideas because he's also an older gentleman. Well, it's a lot of framing. And the other aspect

to that is on paper, Joe Biden's platform was arguably the most progressive of any Democratic

candidate who won the nomination. Now, of course, there were people who challenged the

nominations who were to Joe Biden's left. A lot of this is perspective. And that's how you end up

saying the guy who's a couple of years older than Biden is actually the guy with the fresh

perspective, which is interesting because I don't disagree with you.

Yeah. And then you also have to say the perspective doesn't always align with the policies.

You're right. The actual policies of Joe Biden are different than maybe the perception of Joe Biden.

Or what he ran on. I mean, just two examples that I would give are

during his campaign, he played up a little bit his interest in doing student loan forgiveness

and something on cannabis. I never bought it. I told my audience, I think he's saying this stuff

because this is the way the tide is kind of, the wind is blowing and he's being advised to

say this stuff. I don't think he's going to do very much on either of these things. He did actually

do some student loan stuff. But that would be two examples, I think.

Okay. Let's go to the, something you alluded to, which is the pros and cons of a particular

candidate. Well, what do you, as a critic of Trump, what do you are the pros, the strengths

of Donald Trump? And what do you are as big as weaknesses?

The strengths of Trump. See how I can frame them in a way that is both accurate and accurately

assesses my feeling about it. It could be taken out of context most masterfully through the

clipping process. Yes. Trump's strengths are mostly superficial and in terms of presentation.

Trump was able to, I call it a grift, some on the right say he's just so good at relating to

different types of people. Trump as a rich guy from New York City was able to convince people

that he spent most of his life trying to be kept isolated from, that he had their best interests

in mind, that he knew why they weren't doing well in the 2016 economy, and that he had solutions

that he was going to bring forward. The truth is, he never really liked those people. And as

soon as they weren't useful to him for a brief period of time, he, you know, that love affair

with his followers stopped, and then now it's back that he needs them again, he didn't really

understand the causes of the problems that those folks were experiencing. And his solutions were

laughable, right? Like Jared was going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in year one.

He was going to replace Obamacare in 2017. Things that were never going anywhere, anywhere.

But what he did really well was, he put up a united front of, I know what is ailing you.

I know how to fix it. And I know how to fix it, I guess, because he's a businessman,

and he's been above the fray of politics for so long, knowing how to use political donations to

his advantage, he called that smart, etc. I think that's his greatest strength.

Why do you say that the Jared plan for Israel-Palestine and the plan for healthcare to improve

Obamacare, why do you say that's laughable? Well, only someone, I would include the North

Korea plan as well, which I'm glad to talk about. Only someone who doesn't know anything about the

size and scope of these issues could so arrogantly say that they could solve them in that way and

on that time frame. I'm all for optimism and bringing a new face to things, absolutely,

without a doubt. But a wall with Mexico that Mexico will pay for at the end of my first term.

I know there are people who believed it because they would call into my show and say,

I'm voting for Trump because of it. But it's hard to believe that anybody serious would fall for that

unless you were deliberately wanting to just believe whatever was being fed to you, or you just

hadn't ever thought about these issues before. The healthcare plan, in 2017, they proposed one

would have led to 24 million or so people ending up without healthcare, didn't go anywhere because

it was so terrible. And then in August of 2020, Trump said, in two weeks, I'm going to finally

have my healthcare proposal. It's 2023. We still never got it. With all of these things,

when you think them through, it was just sort of arrogance. And I get the perspective of,

I want optimism and I liked that optimism. It worked. I mean, fair. A lot of people saw it

and liked it. As someone who followed a lot of those issues closely, they seemed, of course,

impossible promises. Well, it's a double-edged sword to push back a little bit. If you look at

the things I have a little bit more knowledge about, which is the space of artificial intelligence,

there's a company called DeepMind and there's a company called OpenAI

that will laugh at for a long time when they were talking about that they're going to solve

intelligence. And now they've made, especially DeepMind, and now most recently OpenAI with GPT,

they've made progress that most of the community would not have imagined they'd be able to make.

Everything from AlphaGo beating the World Go champion, just all the different

steps in progress they can get into were surprised to everybody and they are legitimately

fearlessly pursuing the task of solving intelligence. The other aspect, he gets a lot of

criticism now, but another example is Elon Musk. I can say a lot of things like SpaceX,

so commercial space flight. He was laughed at for a long time that that's possible.

Same thing with autopilot in Tesla, autonomous vehicles. His approach was

harshly criticized by all the experts and still criticized, to this day, deeply criticized.

And I as a person that I believe objectively can look at the progress of autopilot as a

semi-autonomous vehicle system has been incredibly surprising. So the reason I mention that is

sometimes it feels like you need the guy or the gal who makes those preposterous, ambitious

statements like, we're going to solve health care this year. And then there's experts

yourself that are looking, thinking, have you read anything about the history of Israel? Palestine

is a good example of that. Do you know there's a history there? Do you realize how complicated,

how many people have tried, how many people have failed, how many millions of people hate

each other in this little place in this land? Sometimes the expertise can really weigh you

down. So to push back, sometimes you have to have the almost be naive and stupid and just rush in

with an optimism in order to actually make some progress. I agree with you 100%. I think it's

interesting that all of the examples you gave of successes are from the technology space.

Not politics, yes. Not from politics, which I mean, listen, I would love to be able to make

headway on some of these issues more quickly without a doubt. I do think at some point though,

when it comes down to voting and saying, one of these people is going to be ostensibly in charge

for four years through all of the departments and secretaries and choices that they make,

we do want to apply some level of realism with the understanding that your examples are from

the tech space and they're good examples. There's no question about it. One thing I'll add to this,

I recently read Bradley Hope's new book about North Korea. And it's really about an activist

who doesn't even really matter. But in the background of the book,

it's written much of what is written about happens during the Trump era. And when Trump did the first

and then the second, I guess you'd call them summits with Kim Jong-un. And it actually did seem

like to some degree, Trump's, we're going to handle this like I do a business deal approach to Kim

Jong-un. In some sense, it actually was logical because of Kim Jong-un and the way that it was

so ego driven and they both as sort of authoritarian strong men types to different degrees wanted

that there was actually a kernel where I actually thought, as I read it, Trump's initial idea wasn't

crazy. The problem was he knew nothing about the backstory of the relationship. He fell for all

sorts of lies from Kim Jong-un and he made offers that didn't make any sense to me. It fell apart.

Fine. But that's an example where I think Trump's personality was not actually at its base, the problem

when it came to North Korea. Well, there's other things of this nature that could go and some

people argue goes into the strengths and pros of Donald Trump, for China, for example, terrorism,

China. Can you make the case that there's some positive outcomes of the way Donald Trump acted

with China? It's really tough. And I'll give you a couple reasons why. Okay. Then also cons. I'll

give you a, it's tough to make. So the China thing is really, so just very recently to when

we're recording this, Trump was on Fox News interviewed by a guy named Mark Levin and Trump

proposed a new, I call it a conspiracy theory, maybe it will strike you as something different,

about China, COVID and tariffs. And Trump's suggestion was that the tariffs cost China so

much money. China sent the US so much money in tariffs that they released COVID as punishment.

Now there's a couple problems with that. One, American companies pay the tariffs.

Trump still doesn't seem to know this. Trump seems to believe that when he puts a tariff on Chinese

imports, someone in China is cutting a check to the United States. American companies buy the

stuff from China. And then American companies cut a check to the United States for the tariff.

Trump doesn't seem to get that. But it still has the sting to the Chinese economy.

You can make the argument that if there is a suitable alternative domestically or from a

different country, that it will reduce imports, but it didn't happen. And we actually have reports

now that the tariffs on China cost about a quarter million American jobs. The other problem with that

idea is China created and released a virus in order to hurt you. But as of today, 5.7 of the 6.8

million deaths were in other countries. It's a very indirect way. You're mostly killing people

in other countries to hurt Trump. Maybe there was a... This is the sort of thing where when I think

about how Trump dealt with China, it's very scary. Because given another four years,

who knows what he might do if he still doesn't understand how tariffs work?

So geopolitics operates in complicated ways with carrots and sticks. And Henry Kissinger has

written quite a lot about this. And in some sense, the positive aspect here that Donald Trump is

willing to take big risks in the game of geopolitics with this giant superpower

that is China. And a lot of others are too afraid, too afraid to call them out, to come to the table

and criticize. I certainly think that's an argument that can be made. My question would be what tangible

positive outcomes did it lead to? And it's tough to identify any. But I think it's a great thing.

I mean, listen, one of the things you're kind of getting at maybe indirectly is that there's been

this sense that politics has been done very similarly for a long time. And even between

Democrats and Republicans, still, even with some policy differences, there's still the kind of feeling

that it's disconnected folks in DC mostly dealing with issues that don't directly affect... I get

that. I'm with you on that. I think the question is to whether Trump's bluster was positive rather

than extraordinarily humiliating in many ways. I just come down on it was an absolute and total

humiliation. But I understand that you can recognize Trump doesn't know a lot of stuff,

but his attitude was refreshing in some way. That's a reasonable position for someone to take.

I disagree with it, but I understand it. But it's trying and feeling better than not trying.

This goes well beyond politics. Wayne Gretzky is waiting about this. Michael Jordan is waiting

about... I mean, is it better to have tried and failed than never... Is it better to have loved

and lost than never to have loved? I don't know. I mean, listen, we lived through four years of

Trump. We know what that four-year term was like, and it's very hard for me to say that the things

he tried were overwhelmingly reasonable. But I get the point you're trying to make, and I appreciate

it. And if we don't do any of it, then where do we end up? Sure. We know where we ended up with

Trump, and it was pretty embarrassing. Okay, let's linger on some more strengths. We didn't

start any new wars. Is there something to that? Yeah, it's interesting. There's a few different

approaches to dealing with that. First, it's really important to remember that the counterpoint to that

from the folks who like to say that was that Hillary Clinton was going to start three wars.

Sometimes they say four wars. Sometimes they say five wars. Okay. The geopolitical situation during

the four years that Trump was in office, I don't know that they obviously lent themselves to wars

that Trump just barely was able to keep us out of. I think the Russia thing is interesting,

because now it's very popular to go back and say, you know, the reason Putin didn't do the Ukraine

thing when Trump, right, and to somehow give Trump credit for that. There's a counterpoint to it,

which is Putin under Trump, particularly if Trump got four more years, would have been able to maybe

consolidate power in other ways because of his relationship with Trump. I'm not coming down

around one side or the other. It's not my area of expertise, but it's not the open shut slam dunk

that, you know, Trump likes to say it is. Putin didn't invade because he knew I would crush

him. Okay. So it's not obvious to me that there were imminently wars that would have started

during that time. That being said, you know, for all the criticism of Obama during Crimea,

Trump seemed to just kind of forget about that after all the criticism and say,

I'm not actually going to do anything about that. And so there are foreign policy

criticisms that could be made, but it is true. No new wars were started under Trump.

And I like that. I don't like wars. What do you think about his handling of COVID?

Can you say what are the pros and cons of his handling of COVID?

The con for him is he'd be president right now if he had handled it differently.

I think it's abundantly clear. Early on, and there's now a lot of really good reporting about

the conversations he was having with Jared Kushner and others, he became convinced either

because of things he was being told or because he decided this is the way it's going to be,

this is going to go away. Fine. It's in China. Okay. It's in China and Italy. Okay. We have

15 cases, but it'll soon be zero. We'll be opened by Easter of 2020. None of it happened.

If he had handled it in the following way, and I've said this to Rogan and I've said this to

Patrick Bette David, and they tend to all see my side of this. If Trump had said, listen,

we don't know how bad this is going to be, but I care too much about the American people to take

a shot. So it's not going to be two weeks. It's going to be a little bit, but I need your help.

We're going to bring everybody together. I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. We're

going to have MAGA masks, and he could have kept 50 cents on the dollar to pay off Stormy or whoever.

Right. But it would have been, I think he wins reelection because the perception was and reality

is a version of that. The perception was that he was way too cavalier about it early on. People

died who didn't need to die. And I think that it was arguably the one area where he could have

all but guaranteed that he was going to get himself reelected.

To push back on that, I mean, because you mentioned sort of masks and lockdowns kind of a

solution to COVID. I didn't mention lockdowns, but I'm glad to talk about policy.

There's several solutions to a pandemic, broadly speaking, and one of them is vaccine.

And so you didn't mention that. He'd fast-tracked the development. His administration fast-tracked

the development of the vaccine, which, surprising, he didn't really take much credit for.

I think he did. I think he tried. There's a couple, there's a lot there.

Well, to me, it seems like you could make the case with the Trump hand gestures that

his decisions for fast-tracking the development of the vaccine saved tens of millions of lives.

You could, in the Trumpian way, make that case.

So a couple different things. I know you don't necessarily follow Trump's rallies as closely

as I do, and I'm jealous of you for that. But he did tout the vaccine stuff hugely for a while

until his audience turned against him. And then he had to draw this line where he was going,

I made the vaccines, which none of you have to take, by the way,

freedom. You don't have to take them. But it's fantastic. And nobody else could have done it.

But don't worry, nobody's going to make you take the vaccine. And he actually got booed

at a couple of his own rallies when talking about the vaccines. But let's back up a little bit.

Fast-tracking. My understanding of what he did is he did what any president in his situation would

do and what many world leaders elsewhere did as well, which is he agreed to pre-purchase supply

of vaccine in order to provide money to pharmaceutical companies to scale up the

manufacturing, which is absolutely fine. But he wants, one of the stories he tells is,

it usually takes 12 years to develop a vaccine. We did it in nine months, thanks to me.

Decades of mRNA technology being developed created the platform in which you can make

a particular vaccine in nine months. Didn't have anything to do with Trump.

He did pre-fund and say, we will buy huge supply, and that provided liquidity

to the pharmaceutical companies. But he also delegated control to people,

to experts that enable that kind of fast-tracking of vaccines.

He was very eager for the FDA to approve it because he saw that there would be a political

benefit. And he didn't get in the way, I guess. He didn't get in the way. Fair. I think now we're

on the same page. He did not get in the way of vaccines being developed, which is good.

Presidents and bureaucracies have a way of getting in the way.

I don't disagree with that. I'm not aware of really any governments that got in the way.

I mean, it seemed given the global situation, everybody, European countries were pre-purchasing

vaccine. African countries who were going to be later to receive vaccines were partnering

with the European countries that had pre-purchased. But the most interesting thing about all of this

is Trump did play up the vaccines for a long time until his crowd didn't want to hear about it

anymore, which was crazy. It was sort of like he became a victim of the monster he created to some

degree. One of the effects of all this that makes me truly sad is this division over the

vaccines has created distrust in science. And also what makes me sad is the scientific

leaders, Anthony Fauci, being one of the representatives of that community,

I would say completely dropped the ball. They spoke with arrogance. They spoke down to people.

They spoke in a way that a great scientist does not speak, which is they spoke with certainty

without humility. They have all the wisdom and all of us are too dumb to understand it,

but they're going to be the parent that tells us exactly what to do versus speaking to the

immensity of the problem, the deep core of the problem being the uncertainty. We don't know what

to do. The terrifying thing about the pandemic, we don't know anything about it as it's happening.

And so you have to make decisions. You have to take risks about, well, maybe you have to overreact

in order to protect the populace, but it's in the face of uncertainty. They have to do that, not

powered, empowered by science somehow, and the deep expertise that somebody like Anthony Fauci

claims to have. I'm really troubled by the distress in science that resulted from that,

and that you have to blame the leaders to the degree. Leaders take responsibility,

and I think Anthony Fauci was the scientific leader behind the American response to the pandemic,

and I think he failed as a scientist, as a representative of science.

I'm less, I don't know if interested is the right word, but the Fauci review

is less interesting to me in terms of what comes next than the first part you mentioned,

which is the distrust in science. And sometimes I'll get voicemails or emails from people in my

audience who say that I have had to backpedal on certain things related to this. And one of the

things I tried to do from the beginning was not speak in certain terms when we really didn't

have complete information. So there was this period where hydroxychloroquine was first sort of

mentioned as a possible treatment, prophylactic or proactive treatment for COVID or active treatment

for COVID, along with a bunch of other stuff. There was ivermectin, there was vitamin D,

all sorts of different things. And I tried to be careful to say, right now, we don't have

rigorous science that tells us that some of these things work. It doesn't mean that won't come in

the future, at which point, if there was something as cheap as hydroxychloroquine that treated COVID

effectively, unbelievable, fantastic. It's not there's no way it ever will be determined. We

don't have that information right now. So it's not super wise right now to go and start taking this

stuff. We eventually learned, like with vitamin D, having an appropriate vitamin D level does seem

to be, based on what I most recently read, generally protective and a good thing when it comes to

infections of different, great. Okay, so that one we figured out. One of the really difficult things

is that the quote truth about the vaccines did change. And the original, again, this is all,

I don't pretend to be an expert, but just someone who's synthesizing the medical

data and writing about it. Originally, the first vaccine related to the wild type strain did seem

to be very effective, not only at preventing death and serious illness, but also transmission.

There were people then saying it doesn't prevent transmission. Over time, as the variants came

forward, the vaccine became less effective at that. At that point, I started telling my audience

something different because as far as I was concerned, the reality on the ground had changed.

In my mind, that's how science works. It's not backpedaling. We're adjusting our beliefs

to what is taking place in the real world. Well, to be fair, the scientists, many of whom are my

friends, virologists and biologists, they have way more humility than people like Anthony Fauci

who was speaking about this, or the CEO of Pfizer who was speaking about this. This is the fundamental

problem here is the way science works is there's usually a lot more humility and a lot more

transparency about what we know and what we don't know. People like Anthony Fauci thought it would

be beneficial for the world if he speaks with more certainty. But because of the political

division that formed around that, that certainty resulted and became completely counterproductive

that people didn't trust anything about the vaccine, didn't trust any institutions that contained

the experts that actually knew what they were doing, and basically didn't trust anything that

was coming out of the mouths of scientists. Some large percent of the population. That made you

completely ineffective at scale as a society trying to respond to a terrible pandemic.

And that's where I put a lot of blame on leaders. So political leaders and scientific leaders are

the ones that should inspire us to all get together and respond. That should be the case for the

pandemic. That should be the case in the time of war, all this kind of stuff.

I generally agree with you. And for me, it's really about shared blame. And there were a

lot of different reasons why that the early communication wasn't good. Part of it was,

I mean, for me, I prefer accuracy rather than overconfidence. I would prefer, listen, we don't

really know right now whether masks do X or Y. What we do know is the supply is really limited of

this type of mask. We're going to try to keep them for the frontline workers. I love that.

That's the way I want to be communicated to. A call was made to do it differently,

which was to say, the masks don't actually help. But the real reason is they want to

keep them for healthcare workers. And then later, the masks are what's going to solve.

I'm with you 100%. I think the other layer to it is you can't ignore the political situation

at the time. If Trump had one reelection and the vaccine distribution had taken place while

Trump was president rather than Biden, my belief is that the same number of Democrats would have

gotten vaccinated, but way more Republicans would have as well because they were following

not science, but political leaders. And when it was Biden in DC instead of Trump,

a lot of those people said, I don't trust the vaccine. But wait, it's Trump's vaccine, I thought.

Yeah, but something about the way Biden's distributing it. So I do think you can't

ignore that political layer. I agree with you. The communication was a disaster.

Well, let me ask you about Joe Biden. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Joe Biden?

Weaknesses, I think, are some of the things you've identified. He is not seen as high energy.

He is not the same Joe Biden that debated Paul Ryan in 2012 and ran circles around him in just

an incredible debate performance. He is not inspiring in the way that someone like a Barack

Obama was to people coming up and starting to get interested in politics. I think a lot of those

are fair criticisms. I think on policy, he's not interested in a lot of the things that younger

voters are interested in. I mentioned cannabis reform. I mentioned student loans. So I think that

that's a deficit for Biden. I think the upside to Biden is when it comes to foreign policy,

diplomacy, high-level negotiations, knowing how to engage with allies in a productive way,

it's tough to find someone with more experience than Biden. I know that there are counterpoints

to what I'm saying, and those include that was the old Biden, the new Biden doesn't have it.

That includes that's just a sign of rot because he's been around for so long. Nobody should be

around that long in politics. Perfectly reasonable criticisms to talk about, but I do see that as

one of his strengths. He also is good at knowing when he can work with Republicans and when he can't

and not wasting more time than is expected for posturing reasons. I think that that's a good

thing. Do you think he's actually there in day-to-day operational government given his cognitive

capabilities? Do you think he is an active and practicing executive? I don't know that I can

say that it's because of what may be going on cognitively, but my sense from the people I talk

to is that he's very much involved in the highest-level geopolitical and big domestic economic

stuff, but that a lot of the smaller issues that presidents might or might not be in sort of plugged

into that he's not plugged into the details of a lot of the lower-level stuff. You could probably

apply the same exact criticism even more so towards the Donald Trump administration in terms of being

a practicing active executive who's paying attention. For example, Vladimir Putin is somebody

who loves the role of the executive, has a huge amount of meetings, has constantly tracking

information about agriculture and all the different subsystems of government. Stalin,

funny enough, was also extremely good at this. Certain people just love the job of being an

executive and I'm not sure if Donald Trump did and I'm not sure if Joe Biden in his current

state has the cognitive capability to. It's a good question. Kim Jong-un is another one,

by the way. There's videos of him examining a factory where they make plates and making very

specific comments about how the plates should be made. I think that in that case, there's a lot of

propaganda value to it. With Trump, I think you're probably right. He did get involved in the minutia

of things. I mean, once he pulled out a weather map and with a Sharpie drew a different hurricane

path that was more politically convenient to him. That's pretty micro saying the weather channel's

wrong. I see what you did there. Okay. So that's a micro. He went to Puerto Rico

and he gave out paper towels after a hurricane. Now he was shooting them like free throws,

which didn't look very good. So he will get involved in the micro when it's advantageous.

You know what I mean? But I do agree with you that he wants to just kind of make it so. Build

the wall. I don't know. Just build it. Figure it out. Get it done. Quick pause. Bath and break?

Sure. You're hilarious. And just for the sake of completeness, I should mention the subreddit,

what Biden has done. There's also what Trump has done, but it's not as active. And it has like

this master list of all the accomplishments. I recommend people look at it because there's a

it's kind of rigorous and interesting with links, a list of all the things he's done. Just list some

of them restored daily press briefings, cancel the Keystone pipeline, reverse Trump's Muslim ban,

required masks on federal property, rejoins the Paris climate agreement, extends student loan

payment freeze, extend eviction freeze, historic stimulus bill, as you mentioned, ends funding

for border wall, and so on and so forth DACA, border strengthening of DACA, rejoins the World

Health Organization. And the timing of this, of course, is important. Yeah, several historic

stimulus bills, which of course, you could criticize or support, raise the minimum wage for

federal contractors and federal employees for $15. There's a lot. There's a lot. It makes you

realize, with both Trump and Biden, that there's a bunch of small details that matter. Yeah. Like

that matter on people's lives, like actual little policies. Trump did a lot of stuff as far as I

heard for the military, like not big stuff, but small stuff. Yeah, I'd be curious what you're

thinking of. I know one of the big things under Trump was we're going to get trans people out of

the military. That's not what I was referring to. You weren't referring to that. Trump's hilarious

with these stories that he tells, and one of the stories, and you get to know them if you follow

him at all, he tells the story, when I came into office, the generals came to me and they said,

sir, the cupboards are bare. We have no bullets. And so I rebuilt the military. The cupboards were

bare when Obama left it, and it was just terrible. But I rebuilt it. And the generals, I've got the

best generals. They said, sir, it's incredible what you were able to do. You look into it, and it's

like, yeah, that's not really true. It is true that there are armaments that just on a schedule do

get replaced, and that's part of the military industrial complex. But there's nothing special

Trump really did. But these stories become, they take on a life of their own. And it's interesting

to sometimes try to dig down and figure out, was there any policy connected to that, or is that

just a story? Do you think it's possible to have a good conversation with each of them?

Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a podcast context or in a debate context?

Absolutely. Yeah, you're saying like, could I with either of them? Oh, 100%. Joe Biden too?

Sure. Yeah. But can you dig into that a little more? Well, I mean, I don't know what,

I think there's maybe something implicit in your question, but

that's deeper about the nature of politics and politicians. Yes.

I think with either of them, I mean, the political differences wouldn't be an impediment

to having a good conversation with either of them. I think one of the things that's really

tough in my experience when talking to elected officials is they could be super interesting

about 100 different topics, but handlers decide or try to get you to talk about

something you don't really care about and something really narrow, which doesn't bring

out your best nor their best. And that's a frustration. But I think that given an

unstructured three-hour conversation, I think it would be interesting to talk to both.

I mean, listen, with Biden, aside from his view on cannabis or whatever, his background and the

incredible, unimaginable family tragedy that he had in his first wife and multiple kids dying,

I mean, it's just incredible. And with Trump, I think also you could have

an interesting conversation. Yeah, those are the human beings with a life story.

Yes. And they're some of the most successful humans who I've ever lived to have

rose to this highest office in interesting, complex ways.

Yes. I mean, one of the things I'm troubled by, maybe you can speak to is why we're so negative

towards presidential candidates and presidents. Why? It's just they go through this shit storm,

no matter who they are. Yeah. They're like, hate it. Like all the conspiracy theories and just

just the dynamics of how we talk about them is vicious. If you just look at reply,

Steven Barack Obama on Twitter, it's like, what is going on here? Why? Because we look at other

leaders and other spaces and we're generally positive about it.

Yeah. There's a couple of different things. There's this dynamic, which is really unfortunate,

which is you ask people, do you approve of the job a particular president is doing?

And very often, if at any point while they were in office, they did something you don't like,

people will say, I don't approve. And so by its nature, what that means is just like,

the longer you're in office, the lower your approval rating is going to be. And very often,

that's the way it works. I mean, there's major events like 9-11, Spike George W. Bush's approval

to an incredible level. Then it came back down with the Iraq War. But there's this unfortunate

thing that when people are just asked, you think Biden's doing a good job? If four months ago,

Biden did something on healthcare that somebody didn't like, even if you like most of it,

a lot of people from that point forward will say, I don't approve. They might still vote for

him because they like him better than the alternative or whatever. It's just the dynamic

of politics. And I agree, it's very... Does it have to be that way? I don't think it has to be

that way. But to unwind it, so many things would have to change. I think our election system is

part of why politics is the way it is, where you have two choices and it's first past the post.

And we have this electoral college so that depending on which state you vote in, the kind

of meaning and significance of your vote is different. If you vote in Montana, it's the

Republican candidate's going to win and that changes the dynamics. I think that's part of it.

I think that at a personal level, I've experienced this in my life a lot. We've become, and by we,

I mean people in the United States to some degree who talk about this stuff, we've become uncomfortable

when there is disagreement and it bleeds over into now we can't have a normal interpersonal

relationship anymore. I'm from Argentina and in Argentina, it's really common even in my family.

There are incredibly heated political debates at the start, the middle, the end of some kind of

gathering. But then everybody just goes back to like, okay, we disagree on some things, but

that's okay. And we can now go and finish cooking the beef or whatever it is that we're doing.

And I experienced this even with people who come up to me on the street and they go,

just earlier today, a guy came up to me and he said, RFK all the way, baby, talking about Bobby

Kennedy Jr. And I just kind of said, oh, all right, let's see what happens. And then there was

another moment where the guy ended up standing next to me for maybe longer than he thought.

And I could tell this guy's getting so awkward because it was an utterance he thought that would

just be on the fly and he'd be gone. But now we're standing next to each other waiting for our

sandwiches. It's like no big deal. It's just, oh, okay, you like Bobby Kennedy Jr. I don't plan

to vote for it. It's fine. And that's like a sociocultural thing. I think there's lots of other

countries. I've spent time in Italy. I have relatives in Israel where like shouting at each

other is sort of like normal. And then you just go back and finish them. It sounds like shouting.

I'm sort of exaggerating, but very animated, what seemed like big disagreements. And then

everybody's cool. I wish it were more normal. So maybe the mechanism of going from shouting to

being cool again, needs to improve. Because maybe we can't solve the shouting at each other.

Maybe not. So maybe we need to somehow figure out the de-escalation,

like making up. I've had a few recent fights with friends like that.

Really? For politics?

No. But political style, emotionally drenched stuff. And it was interesting to go through

that full process and then make up at the end. But it was a process. And it was a process that

required being in person, talking through it. And it was stressful, the whole thing.

And then maybe because most of our interactions are online, we don't get a chance to do that in

person, making up again. I don't know. But do you think it's a feature or a bug of the system

that we're so... We just hate the powerful?

You mentioned the online part. I think you mentioned it earlier perfectly, which is you take

contentious political issues, you create a platform that rewards controversy and

disagreement and limits the number of characters you can use to express yourself.

You kind of throw it into a baking dish and mix the entire thing up. It's complete and total

chaos. And one of the things that I've talked before about all the angry emails and threats

and stuff that I get, I'm acutely aware that if I had in-person conversations with most of these

people, the conversations would basically be like, oh, we have different views about how to solve

some of the problems we're facing. We probably agree about what the problem is. And we probably

share many values. But on these particular four issues, we may have very different views.

But that's okay. Online, that's not the case. And it leads to the mess that we get ourselves in.

But I think that it's a feature of a lot of the systems that are being used to disseminate

information. Again, let me linger on that. Do you regret some of the mockery

in the snark you use on Twitter and even in your show that kind of feeds that division?

I don't regret it in the sense that it's a calculated part or tool that I use in addition to

figuring out how to simplify complicated concepts and choosing stories that I think are

underrepresented. It's all part of the package of what I'm doing. I recognize that my show is not

the audio visual version of a peer reviewed, randomized controlled trial about views on abortion

or whatever the case. I'm very much aware of that. But I don't regret including it as a tool

that I've used to build the community in some total that I've built over the last more than 10

years. I guess I could ask about the different trajectories you think your show might take.

So the dynamic you had with Donald Trump Jr. and maybe Candice Owens is the more

appropriate comparison. Are you okay having that dance for the next few years between you and Candice

Owens and just kind of the mockery, the derision that's a part of that process and taking part in

that? I'm fine with it in the sense of personally I tolerate it well until it crosses the line

and people pull my family in. If you set the family stuff aside, if I set that aside,

just in the digital space, you're okay with it. I'm glad to mix it up. Now the truth is Candice

Owens has had me blocked for years up until this incident. She unblocked you. She unblocked me just

to tweet about what I tweeted about. I don't know the backstory of that genuinely. I have no idea.

So I don't have a sense that she's super interested in engaging with me on that. But all of these

people, Candice Owens is welcome on my show anytime. Don Jr. is welcome on my show anytime.

It's been a decade since I had Ben Shapiro on. He's welcome at any time. I'm glad to have these

conversations and I think it's an important thing and also I wish that everybody was willing to

have the conversations in good faith rather than as performance, it's not even really performance

art, rather than being simply performative for an audience that you have. In terms of your

motivations, do you worry about the effects of something you spoke about offline or like the

YouTube algorithm? Are you driven by the number of views your videos get or are you driven by

something else? In my world, I guess I would say, the number of views that any platform

generates is a metric that I can choose how to interpret. I can choose to interpret it as

I've created content that's interesting to people or I've created content that's really

angering people and that's why they're showing up. They don't actually like it. It's because

they're angry or whatever else the case may be. But it is true that there are algorithmic changes

that can take place. Something happened in early January that affected us on YouTube or

there are periods on TikTok where you can tell we're doing all the same things,

something has happened and then you never usually figure out what it is. For me, it's

sort of just like a general tool to see what is the level of interest in what I'm doing and are

the numbers so out of whack with what I would expect that I should look into whether something

deeper is happening. Has there been some change to an algorithm or whatever the case may be?

I had a debate once with someone who accused me of using clickbait to generate views and we had

a really interesting conversation where I said, tell me really what you mean by that. Is your

argument that I'm using titles that don't actually represent what's in the video? No, what's in the

title is in the video. I go, okay, so it's not that the title is dishonest. Are you saying,

saying I'm deliberately picking titles that will garner a larger audience? And they said,

yeah, that's kind of what I mean. And I said, isn't that kind of what we're all doing? The

alternative would be choosing titles to generate a smaller audience, which seems like a real kind

of waste of time. So I'm trying to navigate and play the game in a way that's comfortable,

but use the metrics more as a tool than as something to obsess over. Nevertheless, the

metrics are what they are and that they are able to affect your psyche. It's very difficult,

which is why I have a Chrome extension that hides all the views and all that on YouTube for me.

It's difficult not to let it affect how you think about ideas. So maybe your extensive

exploration of a particular topic like healthcare generated very few views. It's difficult for you

to still care about healthcare. There's some aspect of the human mind that starts being

affected by those views. And I think that's a really dangerous thing. Mostly it's probably

beneficial because it probably makes you a better presenter. If you do care about a topic

a lot, you become more charismatic, more you learn sort of in a Jimmy Mr. Beast way how to

present the idea better. But it also can affect which topics you choose to cover, what you choose

to think about those topics, the audience capture those topics. And that's a really scary effect.

I'm really worried about my own mind and that. So I run from that aggressively.

One of the things that I include in my overall approaches, I don't think about any one clip.

I think about an entire show or a week of shows or a month of shows. And so it's less about does

any one clip do well. My view going in is I'm going to do stuff that won't do that well,

but I think it's really important to do. And I want to make it part of my show.

And so when I did a clip with 10 ideas for reducing gun violence, I know that that's not

going to get 500,000 or a million views. I know it's just not going to. And the first day it'll

get 12,000 and I'll go, I don't care. That's that's fine. There's a group of people in my

audience that values this stuff. And I want to keep doing this stuff. I'll end up surprised

sometime. And two weeks later, has 150,000 views because it started being shared. Great.

But I don't go into it thinking these all need to be home runs by that metric. I always go in

saying I want to put out a diversity of content, including stuff that is less titillating and

salacious, but is important to do. It's more researched, et cetera. And so that's the way

I try to resist exactly what you're talking about. And I think you have to probably know

yourself. Like for me, metrics, I just like numbers too much. And for me, metrics do affect me.

That's just why I don't pay attention at all. I would love to hire somebody in the team who

cares because we currently have folks who all of us just don't care because he probably is good

to care enough to kind of just do good thumbnails and this kind of stuff to pay attention. But to

me personally, I just find inner peace and focus if I don't think about the numbers at all.

Because I find myself... I just remember a long time ago when I started a podcast, I would

think that I failed if it didn't do well. Like if I didn't celebrate the person well enough,

I didn't do a good job enough of a conversation. Well, that's not necessarily at all what that

means. It's hard not to... This is tough stuff. I mean, yeah, I know exactly what you're saying.

And part of it is... I mean, it starts... You have a little bit of a different situation than me

because you're doing long form conversations with people and the prep is a little bit different.

One of the things in my space, because I'm reacting mostly to what's going on in the news and then

also picking topics to dive into a little bit more deeply, is I have very little control over the

news cycle. And there is a metametric or a macro metric that affects me that will quadruple my

audience and then take 75% of it away, which is the seasonality of election cycles.

And the first few election cycles, it's very tough because I go... It's October. I'm like,

at this rate, we're gonna have 20 million subscribers by next... These numbers are

unbelievable. And then it's January 30th, the inauguration's over, the debate is about the debt

ceiling and nothing's going on. And I go, nobody's watching my content. I must have forgot

to upload it. Something must be wrong. It's completely beyond my control. So I just... And

I think part of what you're saying is, I try to focus on the things I can control and understand

those that I really have no control over whatsoever and try not to worry about them.

And try to do the things that make you happy at the end of the day. You mentioned RFK,

the guy you met. What do you think about some of the other candidates outside of Joe Biden in

the Democratic Party, RFK Jr. What do you think of him as a candidate?

I've met him. We once had dinner and we have a number of friends in common, which is what makes

this a little more awkward. But I think his campaign is basically sort of like a chaos candidacy

to raise awareness and maybe raise money either for his book or his anti-vaccine organization,

Children's Defense Fund, I believe it's called. I think there's some reporting that Steve Bannon

really liked the idea of him running as a Democrat, again, to just generate chaos.

I don't find it super interesting. I don't find it worthy of that much discussion.

Smart guy, nice guy, has been doing anti-vaccine work that I don't find particularly inspiring.

So it's not just anti-COVID vaccine? It's more broader than that?

He's been in that space long before the COVID vaccines. Yeah. Yeah, I don't find it super

interesting. Well, he also wrote the book The Real Anthony Fauci. Is that the name of the book?

Did he write that? That's interesting. I don't know. I'm not sure about that.

I'm aware of that book. I didn't know he wrote it. I think, but it's been on my reading list

to get, I've been trying to get a good balanced reading list about the COVID pandemic to understand

what the hell happened. And anytime I start to try to go into that place, I'm exhausted by it.

Well, it's interesting to me that you wouldn't wait longer before delving into those books to have

maybe a more clear hindsight. But I think this is a pretty good time. You don't think so. It depends

on your goals. If you're thinking of it as a historical event, yes, you should probably wait

longer. But if you're thinking about understanding what is broken about our system that we respond

to so poorly, that there was so much division, what is broken about our political system that

it didn't unite us, it divided us, who's to blame? There's probably a lot of different

narratives. But I feel like the more you learn about this, the better you can understand. I read

on just Vladimir Putin, I read like five biographies already, maybe more.

Just it helps to really understand the people involved, the organizations evolved, I don't know,

everything from the scientists to the political leaders. It felt like the blog posts and the tweets

didn't quite capture the story. They didn't quite capture. No, one of the things I read a ton, I

don't read any like modern political books. So I don't read the memoirs of elected officials,

I don't read any, I just feel like I get enough of it in my job. So my reading list is just other

things. It's history, it's narrative nonfiction, economics, etc. And that's my bias, because I'm

so overloaded with a lot of the stuff you're talking about. I haven't read any of Obama's books.

I didn't read John Bolton's book, or I don't read any of that stuff, although I'm sure there is value

to be gleaned from it. What about the other candidate that, according to the subreddit,

and as you mentioned, you've criticized a little bit, Marianne Williamson, do you think,

what are the pros and cons of her as a candidate? This is another area where many in my audience

really are angry with me. I don't find her candidacy super interesting. I'll tell you the pros and

the cons as I see them. I do think that we have elected officials in the US, particularly presidents,

from a really narrow range of backgrounds. So it's lawyers and sometimes business people,

very, very often lawyers, I think we would benefit from a much greater diversity of backgrounds.

And I once said, and that would include people from education, people from the science world,

people with backgrounds maybe running nonprofits, etc. Now, Marianne Williamson did, I guess,

at one point run some kind of small nonprofit, and some in my audience thought

that credential alone would make me fall head over heels in love with the idea of a Marianne

candidacy. I've interviewed for her. It's just not for me is the way I like to say it. The

background of the woo-woo type stuff is a bit off-putting to me. I understand that someone

with literal Christian Bible beliefs that also I don't like, maybe I'm more willing to accept

as most of our presidents, of course, have had those views because they're otherwise more qualified.

But some of the things that she says just strike me as, I just don't know. I'll give you an example.

When she was on with Russell Brand, she said, there's no such thing as clinical depression.

It just means someone in a clinic told you you have depression. I don't believe that to be the

case. I think we have an understanding there's two types of depression. There's like a genetic

predisposition depression. There's like a acute something's happening in my life, temporary

depression. When she was asked about it recently, she said, I didn't mean it. I was just trying to

impress Russell Brand. I don't know if I'm more bothered by the things she first said or by the

fact that she wanted to impress Russell Brand, but it's just like, it's just really not for me.

And I agree with her on we need to take the climate more seriously. We need to expand access to

I'm with all of that stuff. Now, I want to say one other thing about this.

Anybody who wants to run should run. I am not suggesting there should be an uncontested primary

for Joe Biden. Absolutely. So you think it should be contested? Well, what I mean by contested is,

so there's two parts to what we mean by contested. Will the DNC organize debates and we'll get that

in a second. But should anybody who's on the left get out of the way because Joe Biden is

president and he's running for re-election? Absolutely not. The question about should there

be debates, I would like there to be debates. The DNC pretty clearly isn't going to organize them.

I think if you did them, you would have to say at what polling level do you qualify?

And I don't know exactly where you put that number. But I think it would be a great thing

to put Joe Biden on a stage with if you can get what, 6% 8% I'm not really sure what the

number would be. I'm totally all for that. Why is a set of candidates, at least from my perspective,

so weak? Do you have an understanding of this? There's a lot of different answers to this.

One aspect to this, which I think is more of a socio-cultural thing, which I've recently

read about to some degree, is the job actually turns off the people who would be best at it

because of what you need to do to become president. And it includes

all but completely abandoning your existing day-to-day life job, which you may depend on,

and family to some degree. It's horribly negative, as we already talked about.

And at the end of all of that, you either lose and then have to rebuild. And maybe

you're not in a position to be able to do that, or you win. And then now you've got four years of

being one of the most hated people, no matter how good a job you do. So I think by its nature,

it turns off a lot of people that would otherwise be good. I also think that there's a lot of

posturing from within the parties about, well, you might be good, but it's not your time yet,

so you should wait. And then let's talk about maybe a Senate seat here and there. So it's like

a company, essentially, and they're figuring out where they want to place people. I think all of

these things make it so we end up with candidates most people aren't super thrilled with.

So it's difficult for somebody who's young or an outsider to quickly become a candidate.

I think that that's true. And I think also, in a lot of ways, it's just not, I mean,

would you want to be president? No. I mean, I can't because I wasn't born in the U.S.,

so it's easy for me to say, but... If everyone says no, then we'll get the people that we have.

No, I understand that. So I would love to help somehow.

Sure. And I feel like there's not even a mechanism for helping,

except through the democratic, through the voting process. But I'm just

annoyed how little technology there is in the whole process, how little innovation there is in

the whole process, all of this. The sad thing is this is written about a lot, which is there's

this thing called political hobbyism. And I think there's a good chance that some of the people

in my audience are political hobbyists in the sense that they follow this stuff

as entertainment, to some degree. And I've written a lot about how... I've read a lot and

talked a lot about how, okay, we vote every two years or every four years in our local elections,

et cetera. And then we think about politics all the time. Neil Postman wrote about this in his

book, I'm Using Ourselves to Death. But what are you actually going to do about the kids starving

in this country and the nuclear buildup in that country? It's okay. If everybody refocused their

attention on their immediate communities, and that could mean any number, it could mean the town or

city you live in, or it might mean an athletic club or whatever. If everybody, this time they

spent on political hobbyism, they moved somewhere else, which might put me out of a job, that's

okay. I'm willing to lose my job because I think it would be so beneficial. Then our communities

would just be that much better. Because you can actually affect change in a much more tangible

way locally, whether it's, people talk about potholes, but other things as well.

Yeah. And I wish our system was more amenable to that kind of contribution,

hopefully through the digital space it would be. Let me ask you about, on the Republican side,

Ron DeSantis, what do you think of him as a candidate, running against Donald Trump?

I think in the couple of weeks before our discussion today, his campaign, which hasn't

even started, has sort of started to implode. And this was something that I started thinking about

in September, October. He really doesn't seem ready for prime time, in the sense that just

being confronted, and confronted is not even the right word, just being asked about some topics he

didn't really seem to want to talk about, he responded in such a sort of disproportionate,

unhinged way. During his recent trip to Asia, he was asked about, why aren't you or why are you

responding? But in this weird way to Trump's attacks on you. And he went into this weird

bobblehead thing with a weird smile. And something came out that didn't make any sense. And he sort

of got mad at the reporter. And it was just like, if you can't handle that, you can't be on a debate

stage with Donald Trump. And again, for all my criticisms of Trump, the guy gets you on a debate

stage, he can make you look pretty silly. He was recently asked about his role at Guantanamo Bay

when he was an officer in, I forget, which branch of the armed forces. And he just sort of attacked

the journalist asking the question. And it just looked very bad. And there are increasingly

big Republican donors who are not fans of Trump and were sort of hoping to put their eggs in the

Ron DeSantis basket, who are saying, this guy just doesn't have what it takes. I don't think he can

do it. So I don't know if DeSantis will be able to get away. Once you're polling 20 something

like he is, and you haven't even announced, it's very attractive. And he probably to some degree

is thinking, if I wait till 2028, I might not have this opportunity again. But Trump's polling 52-53,

which means even if DeSantis gets all of the current non-Trump vote, he has to figure out

how to take something more from Trump. I just don't know how he does it.

First of all, the implosion aspect, that's part of the process, isn't it? You kind of implode

a bunch of times. And then rebuild yourself. And rebuild them because the new cycle kind of

forgets. It's possible. The problem is, the first debate is in August. So that's only a few months

away. And the decision is going to have to be made pretty soon. And unless he can get a new

momentum going, I just don't know how he gets what he needs in order to really have a shot.

So would anyone else running against Donald Trump?

It's very tough right now. I mean, there are other people running. There's this guy, Vivek

Ramaswamy, who's running. Nikki Haley is running. Her campaign basically dead on arrival.

Trump actually does better in polls the more people run. When it's just him and DeSantis,

that's the best scenario for DeSantis. It's not great for DeSantis, but it's certainly better.

But I think the difficulty is, this is a question for Republicans to figure out.

The people who rightly recognized in 2016 that this guy is not good for their party

still believe this guy is not good for their party. But many of them recognize that most

of the voters are still behind him. You can always say it's early. His polling doesn't really mean

anything. Anything could happen. Something major would have to happen for Trump to lose that lead.

If he got more, if he was arrested two more times and had more indictments, and it just

became like, this guy can't even campaign because he's so busy going from court to court,

maybe that would make a difference. It's really tough to imagine.

You said that there are three categories of people who vote Republican, and that Trump

introduced the fourth one. Can you go through the four categories?

Sure. So you've got your pro-business low tax Republicans. These are mostly people like Mitt

Romney. Mitt Romney has a bit of the social conservatism as well. He's Mormon, and that's

there. But Mitt Romney primarily, particularly as a Northeast sort of Republican, I mean,

I know Utah, but Governor of Massachusetts, he is like a low tax pro-business type guy.

You've got your libertarian type Republicans who are primarily about freedom and liberty.

Often they are actually more socially liberal where they go, I don't care about gay marriage,

I don't care so much about abortion. And that overlapped a little bit with the Tea Party

movement in 2010, although Tea Party did have a religious component, but sort of like the

libertarian freedom-minded folks, and then the religious conservatives, people that support

candidates like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, et cetera, where their big thing are social issues.

Often they actually want Christianity being civil government. They don't want separation

of church and state. Those are traditionally the three Republican groups. The one that Trump

introduced was people who just didn't really pay attention to politics, but either followed

celebrity or had grievances that they didn't yet have a scapegoat for, and were sort of right

leaning culturally, even though they didn't attribute that to Republicanism. And Trump was

able to bring them into politics often for the first time as voters. They could be part of any

of those three groups if they get more into politics or kind of be their own thing. But

they're more kind of like cult of personality, I'm here for Trump types.

Did it have to do anything about the culture wars and the identity politics, all that kind of stuff?

Yeah. I mean, so in 2016, when Trump mobilized them, those weren't really issues the way they

are now. So I think at that time, it certainly was not a factor.

What was the mobilizing issue? It was just anti-Hillary in 2016?

He did a good job on anti-Hillary, but a lot of it was identifying real economic problems,

wage depression, lack of jobs in parts of the country, Ohio and Indiana. Trump rightly identified.

Like we have an issue here. We don't have enough entrepreneurship, et cetera.

But there was also a lot of scapegoating that was China and people coming through the US-Mexico

border were popular scapegoats for a lot of those problems. This gets us kind of to populism.

Populism is a rhetoric and populism as a rhetoric doesn't necessarily come with

particular policies. You can be a populist, a user of populist rhetoric and propose solutions

that would be more aligned with Bernie or Tucker Carlson. Populists will often identify the plight

of the middle class. The difference would be Bernie will say, we've got to put some restrictions

on how much billionaires can make and we've got to reinvest in these social programs.

Tucker will say, BLM taking your house and a brown person from Mexico taking your job

are what we need to deal with. The populist rhetoric can lend itself to very different

policy. Trump used that very effectively in 2016. Why do you think Hillary Clinton was

hated as intensely as she was by a certain percent of the population? It feels like

that's the first election I witnessed where there's a lot of hate. Maybe I'm misremembering.

I don't remember Obama. I don't remember the degree of hate. There was a conspiracy theory

that he wasn't born in this country, but I don't remember hate towards Obama.

Record death threats under Obama more than any previous president.

Towards him. Do you mean more hate between voters?

Between voters, between voters, but that's I guess what I was speaking to,

but that hate was directed towards the narrative, the thread that connected all of that in 2016

was Hillary Clinton. Few different things. I'm not ranking these. These are just all things

that come to mind. One is Hillary Clinton had been around in the political space for a long time,

from her time as First Lady, through a senator, secretary of state, etc. I think that there was

enough time for different groups to develop an antipathy towards her for different reasons. Time.

Secondly, Trump's branding of her as crooked was very effective, where there were so many

people demanding that she be imprisoned. If you ask them what is the crime, they don't know,

but she should definitely be locked up. That became a very big thing. The email story, as it were,

and James Comey doing a second public event about that investigation, even though there wasn't any

actual news about it, just doing a second event about it at the last minute, I think hurt her

and also generated some hate. I don't find Hillary Clinton to be particularly likable,

although I voted for her. I thought she was the better candidate. I think that there are others

who also didn't find her particularly likable. Those are a lot of impediments to becoming president.

I was trying to understand why there's so many conspiracy theories about Clintons,

in general, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. Maybe I'm not researched well enough.

Of the why of it? The why of it, actually, the extent of the conspiracy theories,

the conspiracy theories that they've killed a lot of people, this kind of stuff.

It's hard for me to speak to them because I'm aware that they exist, but I'm not an expert

in them because they seem so obviously baseless to the degree that I've researched them a little bit

and then I move on. It's been years since I've looked at this stuff. I know there's the Seth Rich

one and there's the Clinton body count one. I think there's one connected to Epstein,

if I recall correctly. There's all sorts of these different ones. Without speaking to any of them

specifically because I'm not the expert on Clinton conspiracies, it does seem as though

this stuff for so long has generated an audience. I remember in the supermarket,

when Bill Clinton was president, at the checkout, seeing the tabloids and there were stuff about

Hillary birthing alien baby. It seems like it's been titillating to people for a very long time.

Well, another question from Reddit speaking of aliens. I would be curious to hear David's views

on conspiracies and conspiracy theories, the extent to which real conspiracies happen,

and why conspiracies that have little evidence behind them managed to be

so compelling to people regardless. Also, please bring up aliens and UAPs.

Where do we start? The conspiracy. What in general, as a person who thinks about politics,

thinks about this world, where do conspiracy theories fit in for you?

I think there have been conspiracies and by conspiracies, I'm using a colloquial definition,

which is basically individuals working together to, in a clandestine way,

impact or affect some kind of event or phenomenon very, very broadly. Certainly,

that those things have happened. To jump around to some of the things that were in there,

I think the reason that conspiracy theories are so compelling is that it's really tough

for a lot of people to accept there are random events, not predictable specifically,

at a stochastic level, we might be able to predict them, but specifically unpredictable,

bad events in many ways. I could be the victim of one or you could or my family could. That's

really scary to a lot of people, understandably so. For some people, it's less scary and more

soothing in a way to say there aren't really random events like this. Somebody planned it

and if we had just known who planned it, it just could have been stopped because we would have

known exactly when. That's just a psychological level easier to accept for people. I get that

to some degree because, listen, it's not the most exciting thing that everything can just be going

fine and something absolutely horrible happens and kills who knows, some number of people.

I think that's the biggest attractor to a lot of these conspiracy theories. It doesn't apply

to all of them though. Yeah, but there's still a basic understanding of human nature where

some people are greedy and want power and are corrupted by power. There's these compelling

narratives that stick that, I don't know, the vaccine is an opportunity for a powerful

billionaire to implant chips into you so you can control you further. Right. It doesn't seem,

what do I want to say? It's like, for some reason, that doesn't seem as crazy as it should

because you think maybe Hollywood contributes to that, but you think, yeah, you could imagine an

evil person, a person that wants more control, more power and is also at the same time able to

convince themselves, as history shows, that they're actually have the best interest of the populace

in mind, that they're trying to do good for the world. They do evil while trying to do good.

You can kind of imagine it. So it's like, why not? And you listen to people in power,

authorities, they kind of look and sound shady. The transparency, especially the older ones,

I think younger folks are better at being real and transparent and just revealing their flaws

in the basic humanity. But people that are a little bit older in the positions of power,

they're more polished. It feels like they're presenting a narrative where the truth is hidden

in the shadows. I don't think there's anything wrong with suspecting. Maybe a public figure

isn't giving me the full story, totally reasonable thing to question.

I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring a lot of these different things. I think the

problem becomes, and I know you've talked about this in so many different ways with other guests,

the problem becomes when we lose a shared understanding of how we would assess whether

any of these things are true. And then both alleged evidence and an absence of evidence

both become supportive of the conspiracy theory. Because if there's bad evidence,

you manipulate it and say it's good evidence. If there's no evidence, you say the evidence was

obviously hidden by the people who carried out the thing or whatever. So unless we can have

a shared understanding of how we would determine what's true, these are common conversations

often between atheists and religious folks. Is my faith in something or my desire for something

to be true a good way to evaluate whether it is true? They're really similar questions.

Well, let me ask you about Trump on that front. About the election, 2020 election,

maybe the better question is about January 6th. Do you think January 6th was a big deal?

I do. How big of a deal? Compared to what?

Civil War. I think it was less of a big deal than the Civil War.

It's a very interesting thing, though, because we have not only the event, that's clever,

actually. It's not only the event, but it's what led up to it and what has happened since,

and did it change what is considered on the table that citizens can, should, or might do

if they disagree with the results of an election? So I think that there are further

reaching consequences than just the six-hour period on January 6th, a bigger or smaller

deal than the Civil War, and there's so much wrapped up into it. Many conspiracy theories

flowed from January 6th as well. 60 Minutes recently featured a guy named Ray Epps, who was

targeted by some on the right, claiming that he was an instigator or an agent of the FBI or

something along those lines. There were people claiming that no real, it was like a no true

Scotsman sort of thing. Trump supporters wouldn't riot, so by definition, it must have been Antifa,

police let him in or police, all these different things. I think it was a big deal in a lot of

ways because it completely made us have to go back to the top to say, okay, what are the parameters

of valid discussion and activism in the United States? But what aspect of the January 6th

was bad for you? Well, I mean... If you're thinking from a big philosophical political

perspective, so presumably the number of people hurt and the number of people who died

is not the only metric to consider here. Absolutely. I think the sum total of what it means

about how the United States operates is what's most concerning, and I'll kind of just like

flesh it out a little bit. So, summer of 2020, Trump's already saying they're going to cheat.

Now, the polling is close, but it shows that Biden's in a good position. People aren't happy with

Trump. Any reasonable person would look and say, it's going to be close, but Biden certainly wouldn't

be a crazy thing if Biden won. Trump's already saying they're going to cheat with mail-in ballots,

or they're going to cheat with early voting, or they're going to cheat with machines,

or we should do only in person, or whatever else the case may be. We have the election.

We knew in certain states how the vote count was going to go. Some states stopped counting at 10

p.m. Some states count all of the mail-in stuff up front, some don't. Everything was completely

predictable. At 2 a.m., Trump comes out and says, I won. Okay, but where are you getting that,

as he claims people always refer to him? Where are you getting that?

With that statement, immediately we see that there is a large portion of this country

that either is unable or unwilling to say, wait a second, the polling all said this was a real

possibility. The counting schedules are all being adhered to, but Trump won. That doesn't make any

sense. That doesn't happen. It builds. People are donating millions to Trump for supposed

audits which nobody can define, and lawsuits which go nowhere, and it builds and builds and builds,

and we have a total separation from a factual reality. There's no reason to think, by December

1, right, give three weeks to look through some of this stuff. By December 1, there's no reasonable

case to be made that Trump actually won, but it doesn't end there. It goes into, maybe we can

send different electors, even though Biden won Arizona. Let's just send, I don't remember how

many electors it is in Arizona. Let's just send Republican electors to say, we vote for Trump,

but that's not democracy. That's not the way the system works. Let's make sure we're ready,

ready for what exactly, and then it builds to maybe Mike Pence can just prevent Biden from

being president, or maybe we can just interfere in this other way, and then it gets to let's break

into the Capitol. It's the height of saying we no longer comport ourselves attached to what is

a verifiable factual reality, and when we no longer do that, we're also willing to commit crimes,

property crimes, violent crimes, okay, different degrees, in order to try to have something other

than democracy. It wouldn't be democracy if any of those things had happened.

Yeah, I think it's not the height of it. I think there's still a case to be made that that

did not leave the realm of protest versus a violation of the principles of democracy.

So to me, the height of what could happen on January 6th is if Donald Trump was much better

executive, he could take control of the military. If it had succeeded. No, not even succeeded,

the attempt would have been more empowered. I understand. So like the way not to bring up

Hitler every other word, which is something your subreddit also told me not to do. Okay.

It's kind of an important figure. It's interesting to study that moment in history,

because it reveals so much about human nature, and that all of us are capable of good and evil.

But thank you to your subredditor or redditor for your contribution to the conversation.

I will keep bringing up Hitler and the Third Reich, and I'll keep bringing up Stalin.

There's so much to learn from that. Anyway, an effective practice authoritarian

could roll the tanks out into the city streets to establish order, and in so doing pause the

process of democracy, as opposed to a few protesters breaking into a questionably protected

building. I agree that what you're saying would be worse. I don't want to use it to minimize

what the protesters were intent on doing. They failed, fortunately.

To you, the intention was there. Well, the intention was Trump should remain president.

That's the intention. And to what lengths they would have been willing to go if

by the early evening they were sort of forced out, I don't know. I agree with you that Trump

trying to use the military would absolutely be worse. There's these reports that he tried to

seize voting machines, which is kind of funny, because it's like, once you get the machine

at Mar-a-Lago, what do you do with it exactly? I don't know. There's a comedic element to Trump

sitting around with voting machines. But he did float trying to do some other things.

I don't believe there's reporting that he actually tried to use the military.

I wanted to what degree this opened the door to further things like this with other

candidates in the Democratic Party also. Do you think there would be more and more

questioning of the election results? There has been already. It's very clearly the playbook.

Kerry Lake lost. She ran for governor in Arizona, 2022. She lost. What I mean by that is her

opponent received more votes. It's very clear what it means that she lost. She insists to this

day that she won, to this day. She did the same grift Trump did about donate. We've got a case.

We won in the case. You didn't win. They just set a court date. Lies upon grift upon lies.

So they did it then. It's extraordinarily saddening, but it seems like this is now going

to be part of the playbook. Do you think people on the left will start doing it?

I don't have a reason to believe that that is going to happen, but I'm not going to say it

never could. It certainly could. People on the left could start using it as a tactic.

Right now, there's not a sign that that's going to happen, but it's certainly good.

My expectation is, and I'm not a betting man, but I would bet money. If Joe Biden loses in

November of 2024, he will say I lost. He will call the winner. He will concede and he will

leave the White House in an orderly fashion. You don't think there will be claims of a

hacked election? The ability to hack elections is becoming more and more effective with the

developments on the artificial intelligence side. The difficulty is you're basically saying,

will something happen without me knowing anything about the election? Imagine there really was

evidence of a hacked election. Then I would want those claims to be made, but the way elections

have gone in the past, I don't expect that that's a claim that would be made. No.

Speaking of evidence of things that were claimed, what do you think about the Hunter Biden laptop,

or as you tweeted, the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell TM. Right.

To what degree was this laptop story important and to what degree was it not?

At this point, I have said many times, if there is any reason to believe that Hunter Biden,

Joe Biden, Naomi Biden, Jill Biden, Hillary, Obama, Doug, and if there's any evidence any of

them committed a crime, they should be investigated, they should be charged, and they should be tried.

Period. The Hunter Biden laptop thing has been floating around for so long,

and we still have zero actual pieces of evidence of any crime, particularly involving Joe Biden.

There's the claim from some that references to the big guy are about Joe Biden getting 10% for

some illicit. It's been years they've been saying this, they've not been able to bring forward any

evidence on it. My assessment of the Hunter Biden laptop is it seems to mostly be a story

about nude images released without someone's consent, which is illegal in most states and

violates Twitter's own policies. That's the main story to me. Beyond that, I don't know how many

people have a copy of this hard drive at this point. Rudy had it. Tucker, do you remember when

Tucker, this is unbelievable, Tucker said that he mailed himself a copy, a USB stick,

and it got lost in the mail. You have the mother load proving the criminality of Joe and Hunter

Biden, and you just dropped it off with a stamp, and it got lost in the mail. You don't have a

backup copy. I'm ready for the evidence to come forward. Hunter Biden has nothing to do with

Joe Biden's administration, but as a person who, if he committed a crime, charge him, investigate

him, whatever. It's almost getting satirical, the degree to which they're talking about the

Hunter Biden laptop. What do you think about the social media aspect of this, that story got

censored? What do you think about censorship in general on social media? That that story,

during an important time in the electoral process, got censored?

As a matter of principle, I think we have to define what we mean by censorship, but I'm against

censorship short of illegal content, I guess is the way I would put it. I do respect a company's

right to have terms of service and to enforce them, as long as they're not illegal. If Twitter

were to say, we don't publish content from Jewish people, okay, now we've got a problem

on our hands. But what is dubious to me is the claim that had people been able to see Hunter

Biden's genitals, they would have voted for Trump, which I know it's like, David, you're making light

of. But at the end of the day, what exactly is the claim that if you had known more about Hunter

Biden, I guess, allegedly hiring prostitutes and having a drug problem and seeing pictures,

you wouldn't have voted for Joe Biden? I mean, I know me as a voter, I don't feel that way.

I think it's less about the content of the story and about the actions of a social media company

to control what you see and what you don't see. So you could imagine a social media company like

Facebook and Twitter making the same kind of decision about a more impactful story than

a few dick pics on a laptop. Well, I think if that happened, then my view might be different,

right? But my general view, though, on the Hunter Biden story is,

had the articles not contained those images that were illegal in many states and violated

Twitter's policies, I would say publish it, absolutely. I don't think it would have had an

impact, but I would be in favor of it being of the links being allowed 100%.

Okay. You mentioned Tucker. What do you think about Tucker getting fired from Fox?

You're a media person that works independently. Yes.

Tucker was a media person who doesn't work independently. Right.

Yeah. What do you think about that particular situation? Is it representative of some big

shift that's happening in mainstream media? What would the shift be?

Basically, mainstream media freaking out because the funding is getting less and less and less

and less and there's going to give more power to individual commentators. Basically, Tucker

Carlson just starting a podcast in a YouTube channel. I think that's what he should do.

I think that's the most profitable path rather than maybe going to work for Newsmax or whatever

the case may be. But the firing fundamentally was not a politically oriented firing that suggests

Fox News is changing its tune politically in any way. There's no evidence of that whatsoever.

Tucker Carlson basically became a legal problem for Fox News. There's really four

points to it. One is the $787.5 million settlement with Dominion partially was because of the

claims that went out on Tucker Carlson's program. To some degree, Tucker's program was a prominent

node of the problematic claims that became the subject of the lawsuit. That's number one.

Number two, Smartmatic, which is another voting machine company,

still has a similarly sized lawsuit against Fox News based on the exact same sorts of claims.

It may cost Fox News again. So this is now two problems that Tucker's a big contributor to.

Number three, former Tucker staffer has brought a lawsuit and I don't remember the exact claims,

but I know that there are claims of different types of discrimination. It seems like it has legs

and that may be a third payout related to Tucker Carlson. And based on the 60 minutes piece from

a few weeks ago, Ray Epps saying Tucker ruined his life by fomenting conspiracies about him around

January 6th. That's ripe for another lawsuit. So to me, Tucker's firing was a risk mitigation

strategy of many that will be employed as these lawsuits come forward. There's no evidence that

it's because Fox didn't like. And what we mean by that, are we talking about Rupert Murdoch doesn't

like or the, I don't know, but I don't have any reason to believe it's because Tucker's ideas

were no longer welcome on Fox. Certainly the audience liked them.

So interesting. It's not even about the ratings. It's about just the legal costs.

Fox is interesting. The ratings question is interesting because Fox, unlike most other or

every other cable news channel, they negotiate a fee from every cable subscriber. If you have Fox

News as a channel, even if you don't watch it, Fox gets a little bit of money. They are dramatically

less dependent on ad revenue than CNN and MSNBC. So the ratings question is an interesting one,

but Fox's position is different on that. Another question from Reddit.

Both sides are the same in quotes. Is a meme notion that has spread far and wide in American

political discourse on the internet? To what extent do you agree or disagree with this notion?

And why do you think it is so popular? Now, this Reddit comment also says that podcasts like Russell

Brand and Joe Rogan or the legendary comic George Carlin are examples of big proponents of this

notion, all of which I kind of disagree with. Russell Brand, Joe Rogan and George Carlin

claim that both sides are the same and use that, you know, all politicians are crooked and they

suck and this kind of thing. I don't know if they're, I don't know if that's true. Maybe George

Carlin. Anyway, let's leave that aside. To what degree do you think I do agree with this notion

that both sides are the same? Left and right, the crooked corrupt politicians, they do what

politicians do. I don't agree that it's the same. I think there are different factions that like to

say that for different reasons. There are some individuals who want to present themselves as

kind of being above the fray of partisan politics. And so I call it enlightened centrism.

Do you mean that positively or negatively? No, I mean it negatively. Yeah, it's a bit of a pejorative.

The idea that I am not going to fall for being a Democrat or a Republican, I can see that these

are just two sides of the same coin, equally bad, lying to every, okay, so that's one, it's

popular at dinner parties in some circles to go, both all these politicians left and right.

So that's one side of it. The other side of it is that it's often used when your side has really

stepped in it. It's a popular way to acknowledge that your side has done something wrong, but while

framing it as it's not uniquely wrong and it's not worse than what anybody else does.

And I find that it's one of the lamest and most kind of cringe inducing things to hear

because of what comes next. And usually what comes next is not a good, accurate criticism

of something that took place and a discussion of how to solve a real problem that we have.

I find it a conversation stifler. It also is used to kind of suppress voter turnout,

not actively. It's not that the people who say that go around saying, don't vote.

But the idea, of course, is the more people that believe that it doesn't really make a difference

who you vote for, it's going to suppress voter turnout. And I want voter turnout to be as high as

possible, not as low as possible, so I also dislike it for that reason. So is it possible to say

that one side is worse than the other in modern current political climate? Listen, I'm a person

on the left. I'm not pretending to come here as not knowing that my view is biased because I'm

a person of the left. If you ask Ben Shapiro, he'll tell you something different. I think in 2023,

some total, the influence of the American right wing, if the American right wing were to get

everything it wants, it would be a horrifying reality. If the left were to get everything

it wants, we'd have to figure out a few things, including exactly how we pay for certain programs.

But they're mostly noble goals. And I believe that they are more supportive of an individual

self-determining what they want to do in life and how they want to live and is more in line

with the idea of freedom and liberty than what the right is currently proposing. That's my view.

And of course, people will disagree with me all day. No, we get to freedom and liberty the way that

the right wants to do it. Okay, well, we can have that conversation. So I think you've implied in

your answer, it was focused on policy. It felt like it was focused on policy. There's other

stuff that people worry about, particularly with the left, what maybe termed the woke mind virus.

Where have I heard? Who's using that term a lot now? I'm trying to think.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure where it comes up. But the cultural aspect of this, that

if you give a lot of power to people on the left, as you gave us an example, there would be a lot of

censorship and suppression of speech and a kind of dividing up of a society of who's allowed to

basically get a reallocation of resources not based on merit, but based on some kind of

high ethical notions of what is right. And only a very small percent of the population gets to

decide what is what is fair, what is right, which is, you know, we already have a small portion

of the population is deciding fair. Okay. But I don't know. I don't know how many different

ways I can say kind of a negative characterization of folks on the left when we're now comparing it,

just as to play devil's advocate. So is that something that you worry about? So setting

policies aside, wokeism, how big of a problem is it? This is a great conversation. So two sides

of it. Okay. We have new polling that seems to suggest so-called wokeism is kind of more popular

in the United States than anti-wokeism. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. This is the

less interesting part. We'll go to the more interesting part second. Sometimes what people

mean by wokeism is an overreaction to a perceived injustice that goes beyond what would be fair

and equitable. There was this really interesting poll and it asks questions like, for example,

do you believe society has gone too far, not far enough, or just about the right amount in

dealing with issues affecting the trans community? The woke position, which is society hasn't gone

far enough, was far more popular than we've gone too far. Now, the right wing media narrative is

we've gone way too far. This is out of control. And there are lots of other similar answers. It's not

a huge margin. A lot of these are like 58 to 42, 60 to 40. It's not like 90 to 10. But by a small

margin, the so-called woke perspective of we actually haven't yet done enough to fix some of

these issues is a little bit more popular. So if we went back to DeSantis, this is part of why I

think DeSantis' anti-woke agenda may just be a political misstep. That's a really interesting

result. I wonder how the questions are framed. But it's still interesting, nevertheless, no

matter what, to hear that people are majority of people in America are woke, and not in the

negative sense of the word. The poll didn't use the term woke, right? This is a critical thing.

Let's use the term woke positively. The term has kind of been perverted.

Four years ago, when the term was started to be used, I would have said, oh yeah,

woke just means like I have become aware of problems that are bigger than any one person

can fix for themselves that relate to the system. And we might disagree on which problems fall

into that category, but it was kind of benign. I think now it just means like outrageously

left-wing, maybe even with socialist or Marxist undertones. It's becoming a pejorative at this.

But also like bullies. Sure, censors. Yeah, but people that go around calling others racist,

sometimes oftentimes without any proof of or justification. But that's a few folks on Twitter

you're saying, like the polling is starting to show that like no, they're still,

most Americans still care about these issues and want to improve, want to make progress.

I think that's the case and they want to do it in a genuine way that doesn't suppress or oppress

anybody. But now let me get to like to what degree do I think that actual when it goes too far is a

problem. It absolutely exists. We can find instances of where this exists on the left.

I've been told many times that as a Jewish, Argentinian immigrant to the United States,

I actually don't qualify as oppressed enough because Jews are privileged now in the U.S.

and my family had just enough money to leave Argentina. So there's this kind of like oppression

Olympics thing where I've been told you don't get to comment, for example, like a topic in the

Latino community now is, are you familiar with Latin X? Okay. In Spanish, there's an analogous

movement where words by their nature sort of like have a gender. So like the word for friend is

amigo. But if it's a woman, you would say amiga. So right from there, you can tell the gender

that we're talking about. And if it's a mixed group, you say amigos, it's the male with an S,

but it could include both. There's a movement now which wants to do away with that and put the

letter E in. It's a new word. Okay. It's a gender neutral word. Amigos, totally new. I don't like

that. And I don't know anyone. No one in my family uses it. And I think it's kind of like a strange

imposition from someone kind of with a solution in search of a problem. I've been told you moved

to the U.S. long ago and like your English is good and like you look wide and said like you

don't get to weigh in on that. That, I think, is an example, if I understand correctly, of the

type of thing you're talking about. I'm kind of being bullied. I'm fine. I'm surviving fine, but

I'm being bullied over it and disqualified and saying you don't get to speak on this issue.

All of those examples, all of that stuff, I am completely against and I tell people on the left,

we're actually hurting our own movement with this stuff. I just don't think it's as big

as some others believe. You don't think it's an existential threat to our civilization in

the West? No, I don't. And I mean, look, we've got a Biden administration. I see Biden as center

left. Those who see Biden as extreme far left, this stuff has played almost no role whatsoever

in the first two plus years of his administration. Were there people that see him far left as far

left? There's people on the right who, I mean, Trump says Biden's a Marxist socialist communist.

I haven't heard that because I don't think that would stick very much. He says it at every rally.

Which I'm so jealous that you don't watch these things. I love how deeply

researched you are in Trump. I can only imagine how good your Trump impression is at this point.

It's not very, sadly, it's not good. It's not, all right. No, but, and I'll say one other thing

on that. You know, take trans because just to talk about it a little bit, we haven't dealt with it

much. The trans issue has become huge, I believe, because the right is obsessed with it. The right

is very much not concerned with gay men anymore. It used to be that gay men is like, oh, we have to

stop gay men from adopting and unnatural and pedophiles. Now it's trans. It's drag shows,

et cetera. I do think that there is a fair question to say, how do we deal with trans women

in a very small short list of sports? That's real. My view, though, is I go, okay, we have

all issues. We have issues related to gender and sexual orientation. We have issues related

to trans. Within that, we have specifically sports. You can eliminate from that trans men.

Nobody's worried, right, about women, biological women who are trans men. And then when you say,

it's only in certain sports that it matters. Hey, I'm right there. I think it's a complicated

question. I don't know how we deal with it. I would ask leagues that have experienced with

this already and whatever. The problem I have is pretending that the vanguard of left-wing

politics right now is trying to force trans women into sports. It's just not the big issue that the

right is reacting as if it were. But perhaps because of the right, it's forcing the left

to continue discussing it. I mean, I feel like even in institutions, even at universities,

it feels like these ideas of diversity, inclusion, and equity are taking some of the air out of the

room of what a university should also care about, which is merit. And it feels like

reprioritization is going a little too far the other way, meaning prioritizing this kind of amorphous

concept of diversity is moving away, is giving power to people that don't care about merit,

and it just want to bully people with a big stick that says racism or sexism or

anti-diversity. And it kind of suffocates the people that care about merit, about meritocracy,

about inspiring people from all kinds of backgrounds to succeed. And it's just you kind of observe

that. I'm sure that happens in all kinds of institutions. And the concern I think the people

that are concerned about wokeism are concerned about at scale what impact does that have on a

society when there's so much conversation about racism and oppression, not to talk about merit,

like who's the actual good person in the room, the best person in the room.

Generically, that's a concern to me. The degree to which it's happening at different institutions,

I think is worthy of exploration. I know people who work in academia that are getting out of

academia because they don't like the environment on their campuses for exactly the reason you're

saying. So it exists. There is no question about it. I also think that the idea of a perfect

meritocracy is maybe not necessarily the goal in the sense that when you talk about perfect

meritocracy, someone wrote a book about this who I interviewed about a year and a half ago,

and whose name escapes me. There are problems with a perfect meritocracy. I think what we want to do

is generate roughly equal opportunity for people, understanding that there is going to be an outcome

on a gradient or a bell curve, allowing people, generally speaking, to determine the path that

they want to take and giving them, if it's possible, the ability to pursue that without

suppressing limit. I mean, this is like relatively uncontroversial stuff among,

I would argue 95% of the left with the caveats of what you're talking about, which I agree exist.

It would be nice to know the actual data. Sometimes people blow stuff out of proportion.

It's hard to measure how much self-censorship happens at university campuses.

That's true. I think also it's sort of like the pit bull bite stories thing, where when a pit bull

bites a person, it's more likely to be reported on because it fits a certain narrative. There are

right-wing publications that are very interested in making this seem as if it is an epidemic.

I'm the first to say it is happening to a degree. I don't know the degree that it's happening to.

I know a lot of people in academia, only a couple of them say that it's an issue.

Would they say it though if they believed it?

I think they would say it to me. These are just personal contacts. It's not like I'm going to go

blabbing. To push back, I kind of agree with you, but at the same time, most, I mean, I'm deeply

connected in academia of a huge number of colleagues. Most people self-censor by not

thinking about it at all. They're like, screw it. That's deeper. Whatever. I'm just going to focus

on the thing I love doing, which is the work. They basically remove themselves from

politics and social issues. They just say, I'm going to do my engineering. I'm going to do my

mathematics. Sure. The problem with that is you can't go anywhere further to figure it out. It's

sort of like there's this funny clip where Jordan Peterson says, even atheists are actually religious.

They just don't know it. It's hard to test that. I don't know. Okay. I mean, I don't,

but it's a fair point. I mean, there may be some people, if it has become so toxic for some people,

they may have repressed it way down into their subconscious, but I don't know how we would

know that. But you know symptoms of it because when certain people speak up, kind of lightly,

and then a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old responds and is outraged, the fact that the administration

listens to that 19- and 20-year-old and then reprimands whoever spoke up a little bit,

that's a really dangerous sign to me. And I don't really care about these. I'm more with you. I don't

think it's a big issue, but then I notice it. I wonder, wait a minute. Would this kind of environment

allow a young Noam Chowsky to be around? Would this environment allow, I don't know, what tenure

was designed for, which is to have controversial thinkers and not kind of weird, controversial

things, but really people that challenge things that should be challenged. Yeah. I sympathize

with that significantly. I always try to look at specific examples. And sometimes I'll look at people,

I'll ask for them and people will send me five. And one of them is a legit bona fide example of

what we're talking about. And four are kind of like, there was a complaint and it was investigated,

but the teacher's tenure was never in jeopardy. And I don't know that I chalk this up to a big

woke event. What do you think the kind of apparatus of the four-year degree in college

is going to look like in 20 years? Oh, that's, I mean, day by day, that seems to be changing with

GPT. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to interact with chat GPT. Absolutely. My entire

show now is written by chat GPT. I mean, that's partially a joke. It is only because it stopped

looking at the internet in 2021. If it was current, I could completely just tune it out.

No, I'm kidding, but it's a fascinating tool. And it's changing the nature of how we

do homework assignments. It's changing the nature of how we learn, how we look up new

information, how we explore information, how we care about things we're interested in. I think

I don't think we'll have value for a university degree in 20 years the way we do now. I just think

it changes everything. I think language models, I mean, Google search has already, Wikipedia has

already transformed, I would say, our civilization, but it's, there was still a value for basic

education. I don't, I think that starts to dissipate with chat GPT. So I don't, I don't know.

Yeah. I really don't think there's a university the way we think of a university in 20,

20, 30 years. I mean, I have a personal interest in it in that my daughter is 10 months old.

And I'm doing the 529 account. I'm going through the motions as if, but I also recognize, if she

went to the schools I went to, just with the rate of tuition increase, you're talking 200k a year

by the time she's 18. And what happens with wages relative to that, this is like separate from the

technological thing. And in my mind, I'm thinking, is this going to continue being the right path?

What I would love to see is so many people that I interact with just by virtue of what I do

have no foundation in critical thinking, epistemology, philosophy, or media literacy.

And if there were some way to make that the core of some basic education that everybody's receiving,

which goes beyond, you know, chat GPT can do so many things, but I've not yet seen good examples

of how it can teach you to think. Maybe you have a different view on how chat GPT can teach a user

to think. But those skills seem to be so lacking in so many of the people I interact with. If there's

any positive change to come from a changing dynamic with higher education, I wish it would be to go in

that direction. Well, no, chat GPT is actually much better at helping me think than any educator,

even books that I've encountered, because it's very good at presenting the full picture,

even better than a lot of Wikipedia articles, you know, on questions like, did the virus leak from

a lab? Did the COVID leak from a lab? This just presents to you all the different hypotheses,

the amount of evidence available to it. It's like, it's like a full, calm, objective picture of it.

There's no partisanship. It's like a really nice list of things that's available.

But I guess what I mean is, does it tell you how as a thinking human, you should evaluate

the strength of each of the paragraphs it presents to you?

You can literally ask.

You can ask it to do it. Oh, fair. Okay. Yeah.

And then it's actually a fun, it's fun to ask chat GPT that question, because you get good answers.

And so you basically have a kind of Socratic, like a deep, intimate, like great podcast style

conversation with an AI system every single day, for as many hours as you want, as a, especially as

it improves as, and as the interfaces by which you communicate with a thing improves. So yeah,

I think, I think it will do exactly that, which is teach you how to think, because you will offload

the memory effects and equations and whatever else school teaches you, you'll offload that to AI.

And instead, you'll be using your human mind, which is what it for now is uniquely good at,

which is asking good questions, thinking through the complexities of issues when there's multiple

perspectives on it, all of that. Well, then I stand corrected. Maybe then I don't know what

college is going to be in 20 years. Well, but you were sort of commenting, I see, to the financial

aspect of it, like, why does it even make sense at this point? Yeah. I'm thinking about the

transformative effects of AI and what it starts to ask, what is the, what is even education?

Right. What are you supposed, what is the purpose of education? So one is to give you kind of a

background knowledge on a bunch of different topics, but the other is to discover the thing

you're truly passionate about and the thing you're really good at, such that you can make money

and you can contribute to society and have a fulfilling life. Yeah. And also learning to

interact with other people with that relationships are built, socializing and so many other things

as well. But is that, you know, that is the big value of university. Yeah. And maybe you should

be called something else. Can you get that for less than 200K a year somewhere else? Yeah,

no, it's a fair question. Kind of a social club. And you know, one of the things I think about

also is people who are well connected, I mean, this has always been, this isn't new, right? But

if you're well connected and you have a sort of drive towards entrepreneurship and doing your

own thing and you're not pursuing a field that is very licensing dependent like medicine or law,

getting started four years earlier with some internships can be a privilege in some cases.

But again, that path is available to the people that would likely do well regardless

of whether they went to college. And so it's a very privileged self-selected group anyway.

Another question from Reddit. Ask David to explain why American-style libertarianism

is an unserious philosophy. I don't know what they mean by American-style libertarianism.

I've talked before about these kind of utopian libertarians where, you know, we have,

we don't have police, you just kind of like hire a for-profit company if you want protection.

And if there's a conflict between two of these private security companies, then I don't know,

you figure it out somehow. So it's almost like anarchism. So take it to that.

If by, I don't know what the question means by that American-style libertarianism,

but in general, my problems with libertarianism as it is often presented come from

the work of sociology as well as human psychology, which is the reality that once you get a group

that's bigger than 150 people, you really have to start centralizing some decisions

unless you're going to subdivide the 150 endlessly into 275s that now no longer have

contact, but then that's not really one society. Now it's two. I've not seen good evidence,

and I've read a fair bit about this, that once you get beyond 150, you can keep all decisions

decentralized. And once you say some things need to be centralized, then it's a matter of how you

do it. And it's going to be some version of government that conflicts with aspects of libertarianism.

Well, it could be companies, right? It could be more market-driven,

which is the idea of anarchism, that you don't give any centralized entity a monopoly over violence.

And then if you think that the markets are efficient at delivering, especially in this

21st century and beyond, where a market could have perfect information about people.

So one of the issues is that you can manipulate markets because there's not perfect information,

but now in the digital age, we can be higher bandwidth participants in the market. So if

you're choosing between different security companies, or you're choosing between different

providers of different services, you could do so more efficiently and more effectively in the

digital space. So you could kind of imagine it, but we haven't successfully done it without

governments. Yeah. And I think there's a practical once you get beyond 150, you also

start specializing. It just is a matter of fact. You don't have everybody isn't growing their own

food. Some people grow the food and other people do other things. And you come across a lot of the

problems that started at the agricultural revolution. And whether you say that it's a company that's

solving it or a government, the problems are going to be very similar. And I've not read

anything that to my satisfaction explains how you deal with that.

Well, there's underlying principles of libertarianism, which is putting priority at the

freedom of the individual, right? And that's a compelling notion.

Yeah. Whenever I do these various political compass things that put you on two axes,

on the authoritarian libertarian axis, I am way down on the libertarian side as a left

libertarian. So my tendencies are always anti-authoritarian and towards that option

when it makes sense. So I sympathize with that a lot.

Another question from Reddit asks David what issues he disagrees with you on.

Is there something? I have no idea.

Okay, that's great. There you go. There's no issues. Perfect agreement.

What's your view on Tesla? That's a good opportunity to ask. What do you think is

strengths and weaknesses of Elon Musk? You mentioned Twitter. Have you paid your $8?

I have not paid my $8. I don't see the point in paying for it. I have no problem paying for

services. I use a ton of services. I'll try the free. I'll go to the paid. Right now, so the way I

used to use the verified feed was I would post a tweet and then the next day when I review what's

going on on my social media, I would look at the replies to the tweet, which would give me a mix

of replies from verified and unverified people. But then I would also look at the verified and see

who that are verified public folks have responded to me or maybe I want to engage with whatever

the case may be. I don't even understand why I would look at the verified feed anymore,

so I never do because it's random folks who I don't know. It sort of lost its utility to me.

Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but the idea is if everybody who's human pays the $8,

it shows to you that it's not bots. It's at least humans.

From the reports about the number of people that have bought the blue check mark,

I think we may be a thousand years from enough signups in order to make that sort of like a

reality. That was the idea. That was the idea. It's an interesting idea. Honestly,

from my experience, obviously, I was seeing all sorts of attack comments, some of which were,

I'm sure, from bots. But I'm ignoring all of those comments anyway, so it really didn't affect my

experience that much. I mean, here's the thing about Elon. And I say this, people sometimes

are like, David, you obviously hate Elon or you obviously love Elon. I was an investor in Tesla

starting in 2015. I've since sold all my shares. Great run. I'm on my second Tesla right now.

I probably won't get a third one because I think that electric vehicle technology

is now maturing such that when my lease is up, I'm going to have many more options with the

range and charging network that's important to me. But I could be wrong. Maybe, I don't know.

I have no, the cults of personality around people, they mean nothing to me. So for me,

it's just like people are people. Nobody has only good ideas. Fine. I think that what Elon Musk did

accelerating and pushing forward the battery and electric vehicle technology is unbelievable.

It's a one person wrecking ball in the best sense of saying, we're not going to slow play this and

do, okay, now Toyota hasn't actually entered, but now whoever, we've got a 90 mile range car.

And next year, it'll be 110. And it's just like, we're doing this right now. You can compete or

you can opt out and look at what's happened. Fantastic. On the Twitter side of things, I don't

really get the whole plan. I don't know if it started maybe as kind of a goof of some kind.

And it developed into, I guess I have to buy it. And I think something about it ended up with,

there was a clause invoked where I think he did try to get out of buying it, but then was forced

to to some degree. Yeah, he was forced. The way Twitter used to work was you followed people.

And when you looked at your feed, you either saw the posts from the people you were following

in reverse chronological order or posts from the people you followed algorithmically tailored

to what you're most likely to want to see. And if you didn't follow someone, you generally wouldn't

see their posts unless it was like a sponsored tweet or someone you follow quoted or retweeted

them. Fine. The for you feed, TikTok, I believe first had a so-called for you feed. The idea is

this is stuff you might like based on, I don't know what, either demographic data about you,

your other habits, whatever. And so it's useless to me. It's just, it's just basically mostly

right wing content that is not interesting. Why do you think that is? I mean, so the signals that

are used to generate the for you page is looking at all your likes, all your comments, all your

blocks and mutes and all that. I mean, I don't know what it's looking at. Okay.

So it's supposed to be very pleasant for you. I'm sure other people go, wow, this for you

thing is awesome. And like if you had insert some right wing or sitting here, they would go,

Twitter used to suppress right wing voices. And now finally, they're getting the fair shake that

they deserve in the for you feed. Okay. I mean, I wonder if there's left wing folks

setting their feelings of Elon aside that are enjoying the for you page. That's a really

important question because it's supposed to be people on the left and people on the right should

be enjoying the for you page. Sure. Yeah. I mean, so for me, my thought on Elon is some incredible

successes. I don't know about Twitter. I do think that I don't believe Elon is a right winger. And

when you see interviews with him, certainly at least socially and in many ways culturally,

seems very moderate or even somewhat on the left in my experience. So I don't think it's

Elon's a right winger. I don't that's not an interesting critique. It does seem though

that throughout the Twitter escapade, he certainly ended up closer to some voices that may be

influencing him in a particular way. That's giving some people that impression, you know,

but as far as like the Elon hate or the Elon love, it's just it's just a person who's done

some interesting things, some of which I like and some of which I could kind of leave leave aside.

I have seen folks drift towards the right more in response to just the viciousness of attacks

from the left. So you do think he's drifted towards the right?

So I don't think at the core, but I think on the surface. I think Joe Rogan has as well

on the surface because maybe you can correct me, but it feels like people on the left attack

more viciously. That has not been my experience.

Let me know because my sense was that they attack people on the left viciously as well.

Left attacks its own because you're not progressive enough. It's just this kind of

bullying that happens very intensely. No, you're 100% right that when the left has attacked me,

it's almost as vicious as when the right attacks me. The difference in my experience is

it's a smaller contingent on the left that's willing to levy those attacks against me,

but I'm on the left. So to some degree, you could say, well, that's to be expected.

There is toxicity on the left. But it's intense, isn't it? And that's what I mean,

like the attacks on people who are on the left, just you're not left enough.

Yeah, that's no. And it is a small number of people.

I can't deny that that is absolutely a real phenomenon. And depending on what sort of

topics you take on publicly, you are going to suffer the wrath of that to a greater or lesser

degree. But with all of these things, what I always go back to is, I probably would have

more disagreements with Rogan today than the last time I was on his show, which was at the

beginning of the pandemic. And I've done clips critical of things that he has said, substantive,

of course. To me, it's sort of like, oh, yeah, I could sit down with him and do a podcast. And it

would be zero big deal. And I would tell him, I stand by everything I said about what you said,

and I would say it to you right now. There are people who write to me and go, oh, man,

things must be really, really tense now. If you were to, Rogan would never have you on because

you disagreed. I'm sure he's just not thinking of me. I'm not the most important thing to Joe

Rogan. I think both of us would be able to sit down and talk about every one of my criticisms.

It would not be taken personally. And then we would move on and it would be the next day.

You get attacked a lot. How do you not let that break you mentally?

I don't know. So let's see. I try to, I mean, I'm in a toxic space. The news and politics,

partisan news and politics, partisan news and politics on the internet with a social

media component, just completely and totally toxic. From a personal perspective, when I'm

done producing my last show of the week until Monday, I try to completely tune out from news

and politics altogether and also make an effort to just not look at feedback and what's going on.

I also really limit my visibility. I don't need to read every comment. I don't need to

look at every email or every tweet. I have 15 minutes each day where I go through my social

media platforms, look at generally what has the reaction been, maybe include that in my assessment

of how I want to tackle a certain issue if I missed a good point or something like that and

basically try to move on. When something like we talked about at the beginning happens,

it becomes obsessive. I mean, it's unhealthy, right? Where I'm going, oh my god, who's attacking me

now and scrolling? I'm sweating. It's horrible. But I think just limiting exposure to that

and remembering that it is impossible to please everybody. I'd really rather have

fresh, genuine views each day rather than views that are restricted and flattened by

what I perceive to be people's preferences. Can you speak a little more to the full process

of creating the David Pakman show? Do you wake up because you're doing five shows a week?

I have the Letterman schedule, which means I do five shows in four days. I shoot Monday to

Thursday, but we're doing five episodes. Basically, our guests we schedule in advance.

I'm picking six to eight stories each day that are like I said, a blend of stuff I think will be

interesting, things I want to talk about, and things where it's being discussed at one layer

and I want to go deeper on it. And I feel like I'm able to do that. I choose those stories in

the morning, record in the early afternoon, and we put the show out by that afternoon.

What's the preparation? What's the, how do you take notes? Are you on a sheet of paper?

No sheets of paper anymore. I used to do sheets of paper. I found something about it,

like it worked, the tactile nature of it. It became inconvenient for sharing the notes with my team.

But basically, we use a wiki type system. It's called Media Wiki, which is basically like a

Wikipedia clone. Old school. Yeah, old school. So we can have pages for every guest, every topic.

Oh, that's interesting. I haven't heard that. Yeah, I don't know anyone else who's using it.

It works really well. It's so fast and it takes up almost no space. So it just is a really good tool.

When my team, you know, when we book a guest and they have notes from the publicist, they'll put

it in there and then I can access it. So I'm basically working off of notes rather than a script.

I'll pull any audio, visual stuff that I want so that that's available. And it's, I mean, it's really

a very seamless, you know, we're doing this every day, four days a week. And so we have it down to

a well-oiled machine. Where do you get ideas from? Everywhere. I have a bunch of subreddits that I

follow that I think are talking about interesting things. I have a curated list for which I still

use Twitter. And it is very good for this. It's a curated private list of journalists that I think

are doing interesting work. So I'll see what's there. Look at the sort of standard news reporting

wire services, AP and Reuters, glance at what everything from Drudge to CNN to whoever is

covering that day. Look at Google News. How do you try to fact check stuff on your show? So like

is there sources or is there a process? I always try to get to a primary source first and foremost

for the facts of the story. And then I'll use other tools for background research. Oftentimes

Wikipedia's footnotes, I find to be useful tools. Chat GPT is a good one. You really have to fact

check it. But it'll give you ideas of where to do the fact checking, which I think is fantastic.

Sometimes it gives me information that's flat out wrong. And when you ask for the source,

it's like, oh, yeah, that actually is not real. Which is, hey, it's part of the process.

And then when there's like an expertise type of thing, if it's a breaking legal matter,

I'll just call like a friend who's a lawyer or call a friend who's a doctor or something like that.

If it lends itself to that. Let me ask you about the nature of truth. Do you think it's

becoming more and more difficult to know what is true and will become continuously

continue to get more difficult, especially with GPT? I think the big difficulty

is in getting people to agree as to what is a statement of fact and what is a statement of

opinion. I think once we can do that, reasonable people can more or less agree on how to get to

the truth. Or if we can't get to it, at least figure out how we would if the information

were available. But the bigger challenge I'm having is someone will call in with an opinion,

but say they want to talk about fact. And I have to explain to them, you're talking about

an opinion and not a fact. And this goes back to the lack of critical thinking and lack of

media literacy. But that's the bigger challenge for me right now. But I mean, I think the big

statements are always going to be somewhat opinions. Like was the 2020 election fair?

I think any answer to that is an opinion. I disagree. If we define fair.

Well, yes. So then I don't think it's possible to define fair in a way that's not several paragraphs

where each sentence now has facts, right? So what do you mean by fair? Is it who can show up

to vote? What was the process of how easy it is to vote? Was there actual cheating going on?

And different like what is the evidence of that cheating? You have to actually get to the actual

like details of a thing. High level, you know, everything is just going to be an opinion, it

feels like. And you can approximate that to be like, it's a well-founded opinion. Well,

most of science is an opinion, even physics is an opinion. So like, I think there's a threshold

beyond which an opinion becomes like, uh, this is a pretty reliable thing to assume for now

that this is true. Okay. So let me revise. So I think maybe better said, I think that the difficulty

I mean, the process you described is probably the right process and it's exhausting for mundane

things. And that causes major problems. If we were to say, is it better for the economy to have

a tax rate on people making over a million dollars? That's 20% or 50%. Okay. What do we mean by

better for the economy? It's not an overwhelming task to decide on that. We could say, well,

we'll say it's better for the economy by looking at what was the unemployment rate based on the

tax rate on million, you know, people earning a million a year and what was GDP and whatever.

Okay. We've, we've agreed. This is a statement. We are now in the realm of just determining

what is given the parameters that we've established. I think that that's, that's relatively doable.

The issue is with the bigger ones like you're talking about where what do we mean by a fair

election and fair in whose eyes and but I am with you that it often devolves into a conversation

about opinions about what is fair rather than an ascertainment of the facts.

Yeah. And it feels like maybe avoiding some of these big, maybe there's some trigger words too,

maybe avoiding them allows you to actually talk about the facts and through that educate yourself

and learn about like whether the virus leaked from a lab or not. To me, it was always a super

interesting question. I don't know why everybody got super touchy about it. Mostly people I know

colleagues, biologists thought it's pretty good likelihood that it leaked from a lab,

given everything. The evidence is not there for either one. And so like you should be able to

just openly talk about it unless you're in a high political office where there could be

geopolitical consequences to your statements. But in general, it's an interesting question.

You should be able to talk about it. But there's no, first of all, there's not many facts around

there, unfortunately. And a lot of very conclusive statements about especially in the early days

were just opinions. And so you have to the idea of what is true and not becomes a little

even mentioning the word truth in that context. It feels

divisive. Yeah, I completely agree with you, which is strange. You think it shouldn't.

One of the really good opening questions that I've had work to my advantage when talking

with people who I know disagree with me about a contentious topic is how do you think we would

figure out X? And it often gets people thinking first collaboratively. And obviously, we might

have very different opinions. But with something like the COVID lab leak, I think it's an

interesting one. Because if you say, okay, maybe it leaked, maybe it didn't. How would we figure

that out? Who would we trust to weigh in on that? What evidence would count? Now we're kind of on

the same team. And then if we can establish that, then we're on a search for capital T truth together

or whatever. It's kind of pie in the sky. But in some conversations, I've actually had success

with that. And then you can kind of realize if there's no amount of evidence that's going to prove

a show to you that you're wrong in your current opinion, that that's probably a really bad sign

for you. It's a waste. It may be a waste to pursue the conversation further at that point.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, so okay, you think Trump was a good president. How do you determine that?

And what evidence might exist that would change your mind? There is no evidence.

Trump was the best president ever. I think the conversation is probably done.

Except Abraham Lincoln. You mentioned Israel and Palestine. Well,

what do you think about the situation in Israel and Palestine? Something you've

thought about, spoken about for quite a time. Do you think we'll ever see peace in this part of

the world? I don't know. I mean, I could say yes. It's another answer. I could say yes.

You know, one of the problems is, and I'll give, you may not know that

there are people on the left of my audience who call me a Netanyahu shill, even though I've never

been a supporter of Netanyahu and I'm on the left. I just don't think that some of the

kind of black and white characterizations about Israel are even remotely accurate.

And I think most people, it's become a sort of litmus test. Are you criticizing Israel enough?

Are you showing us that you're actually left-wing? I don't do any of that stuff. I should

really look at the situation for what it is. That's become a litmus test in American politics,

in the spectrum of American politics. Yes. My view, big picture, is that I don't think

we're going to really get anywhere until some pre-negotiated terms are set and the parties

to do the negotiating are all good faith parties. For example, I don't think Israel's right-wing

party, Likud, is a particularly good faith arbiter of peace because I think Likud benefits from

there not being peace and the threat of violence. And there is violence. It's not just the threat

of violence. I don't think Hamas is going to be an arbiter of peace for the Palestinian people

either. I think the Palestinian Authority is a question mark. I'm not sure. So I think that

there need to be some preconditions that would need to be set with regard to everything from

settlements to a lot of this minutia. Big picture, though, if I imagine what the most likely solution

looks like, it doesn't mean it's a perfect solution. And obviously, it's a solution many people will

say it's not going to happen. I think it's a solution where the borders are similar to what

was being discussed in the Clinton era to some degree. As many of the settlements as possible

have to go, understanding that some of the bigger ones are just not going to go and there's going

to have to be meaningful land swaps with which Yasser Arafat seemed to be amenable to when he

weighed in on it. I believe it was in the 90s. The topic of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem, etc.,

is a complicated one. But I think that almost certainly East Jerusalem is going to have to

be part of an eventual Palestinian state. We can go as far as we want to with a lot of this stuff.

What role does U.S. have to play in this coming to the table with good faith parties?

I don't know whether I go back and forth between believing that the U.S. should play a big role

to the U.S. should play essentially no role whatsoever. Because, of course, of the funding

of Israel that the U.S. provides, it's not that I have a personal problem with American involvement

and somebody like Bill Clinton was arguably relatively well positioned to try to make something

happen. It's more just, will it be seen as credible on the global stage? And that's,

I think, the most important thing. Because at the end of whatever negotiation takes place,

both sides need to agree that this is where we are renouncing all past claims. And in the future,

if there's a disagreement, we can't go back to that thing from the 80s or the 90s. That's just

like a critical piece of this. Yeah. It has to be stable and materialized into something stable

over years. Yes. Another difficult conflict going on in the world is the war in Ukraine.

What do you think about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022?

I don't pretend to be an expert on this issue. I think you probably know more about this than I

do just from the brief conversation we had before we started filming. My view as a general observer

of geopolitics and the way that this area, this part of the world is related to American presidents

over the last several cycles is I don't think it's controversial to say that this was a war of

aggression, an invasion of aggression and active aggression by Vladimir Putin. I do believe that

if Trump had been reelected, Putin may have seen himself as having other tools with which to try to

expand influence that may have been different than geographic pursuits, geographic pursuits.

But we don't know that for sure. I also have a really hard time imagining what the end of

this looks like. That's very scary because sometimes the most benign end seems to be that Putin ends

up out of power either through no longer being alive or deposed in some way. It doesn't feel

like that latter is super likely. The former, there's reports about his health. I don't know

accurate they are. It's just hard to imagine a face-saving exit that is going to be even remotely,

what's the word? It's not even a question of acceptable. It's not satisfying either, just

not tragic, I guess is what I'm looking for. In terms of Putin speaking to the Russian people

and being able to figure out what to say, what kind of narrative to say why this war made sense.

The same with the Ukrainian side to figure out how to exit this war.

To some degree, it requires Russian troops leaving Ukraine and that is somewhat under

the control. Of course, it's not up to Ukraine whether the initiative continues, but what I am

not thrilled with are some of the reflexive. If Trump had been in power instead of Joe Biden,

a lot of the reflexive comments about, oh, if you say Ukraine is just acting defensively,

you're supporting neo-Nazis or some of these things that have come out of the American

Republican Party seem both wacky and they would be saying completely different things

if Trump happened to be in the Oval Office. They're really proxy attacks on Joe Biden.

Well, that, in some sense, Ukraine is also kind of political litmus test

of how you speak about it, I think, because of the huge amount of funding that's going

from US to Ukraine. Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this

topic has become politicized already. 100%. There are people like Marjorie Taylor-Green

and others saying we should be doing nothing for Ukraine, Zelensky is a comedian,

and we're supporting neo-Nazis. That's it, full stop. You either subscribe to that

or you don't, and it very quickly becomes as partisan as so many other issues. The most

disappointing thing is that some of these issues become incredibly divisive, but they're simple,

like, for example, a conspiracy theory that we know isn't true. It shouldn't be divisive

because it's so simple. Other issues become divisive, and they are simplified, but in reality,

they're extraordinarily complex, and you lose the ability to talk about the complexity

because they're becoming partisan. Do you think there will always be war in the world?

As a bunch of folks on the subreddit that were interested in your different complex

perspectives on foreign policy. So let's talk about war. When you look at the war in Ukraine,

you look at what's going on in Israel in Palestine, you look at the wars across the world. Do you

think there will always be war? As the redditor put it, is it a necessary evil in the game of

geopolitics? I used to have what I now believe is an extremely naive perspective, which is that

if we somehow, if intelligent aliens arrived here, it would be so momentous for homo sapiens

that all of our differences would immediately be exposed to so insignificant, we would never fight

again, and we would realize that intelligent life. Then I spoke to people who deal in space

exploration and other scientists, and they all said, David, that's extraordinarily naive.

There would be a period during which this was as momentous as you're imagining,

and then it would become normal, and then we would go back to many of the same conflicts that we

have now, sectarian, et cetera. I think that in all likelihood, there will always be conflict

between factions, whether it's what we currently think of as war, probably not. I mean, it seems

as though the tactics will evolve and it will be less about missiles and I don't know where it's

going to go. I don't know whether it's going to become more biological or cyber or certainly

something we haven't even considered yet, but I think there will always be conflicts we would

refer to in that way. Do you agree with Chomsky on his general harsh criticism of US foreign policy

in war, that many actions, military actions in the United States are criminal in nature,

almost terrorist in nature? I am not, it's been a decade or more since I've read any Chomsky,

and I don't keep up with everything that he has recently said, so I don't want to mischaracterize

any of it. In general, Americans are sold the view that we're the good guys spreading freedom

across the world, and Chomsky takes a perspective that, yeah, but if you look at the number of

civilians you kill while doing it, it's incomparable to any other military actions across the world.

So I very much disagree with those who take the view that the US is this

wonderful global police force that's spreading democracy and fixing problems very, very much

wrong. I think where I've had disagreements with Chomsky in the past is more he seems to frame the

US as a uniquely bad actor in some of these cases, and I think it's more an outcropping

of the size and wealth of the US and less about uniquely negative intentions, and so I think that

would be my general disagreement with Chomsky based on stuff I read a decade ago.

Well, he says that he lives in the United States, he's an American, and so he feels his focus of

criticism should be in America, and I think that's one of the great things about being an American

and being in America is the freedom to criticize harshly, while being a university professor,

by the way. He's basically the embodiment of why 10 years are a really valuable thing.

I agree. Whether you agree with him or not. Question from Reddit. Ask David what he plans

for his garden this year. Is this a joke or is this a nothing? It's not a joke. I got into gardening

a few years ago. Honestly, I'm with the baby, I can't do a garden this year, and I have a lot

of travel coming up, so everything would die, but I did start to try to figure out gardening.

If you're stressed by the toxicity of the social media world, gardening is a great hobby. It really

is, but it is extraordinarily time consuming, so I have no garden planned this year.

Other books or maybe movies in your life that had a big impact on you, that you're thinking about

that diet. Has there been stuff you read? Forget about even just books, like blogs or

writers or just sources of information that molded you into the intellectual, into the

political thing that you are. It's so hard. This is sort of like you win an Oscar and you want

to make sure you thank all the right people. I read so much and have been reading for so long

that it's really hard to say, but I think certainly, for me, narrative nonfiction has been a fantastic

genre to learn not only about history, but also about people and psychology. Very often when people

say, I don't really read, what can you recommend to me that might be interesting? Depending on

knowing them to some degree, I'll give recommendations there. In terms of just

things I picked up recently that I think are interesting, I've been reading a bunch of Neil

Postman. I read a Jenny O'Dell has a new book on time and the concept of saving time, spending

time, et cetera. She just published it. Super interesting. I just read Lansing's book about

the Shackleton voyage in Antarctica in 1914, 15 and 16. Super interesting. I'm really all

over the map. I have that one on audiobook. I've been meaning to listen to it. It's very interesting

and it seems inconceivable how these guys survived. It's completely inconceivable and yet they did.

It kind of inspires you to think of space exploration and taking on similar kinds of

risky and dangerous journeys. In narrative nonfiction, I grew with you very much. I've been

reading a lot of 20th century history about Stalin and about Hitler. Risenfall, the third

Reich, I've read twice now and I recommend. What did you get out of reading at the second time?

So, the second time I listened to the audiobook as I ran, I get the same thing from it

as I get maybe reading Man's Search for Meaning, which is all the troubles of day to day in the

modern world kind of fade away and dissipate when I'm thinking about the, you know, basically the

embodiment of evil at scale at that recent time in human history. So, it makes me sort of appreciate

all the, it fills me with gratitude to have all the freedoms, all the just simple joys of life

that we have today. And I think the second time I was, as I was reading it, because William Shire

was there, he's the author, he was there through the whole thing, you start to pick up little

details as opposed to like big things, you start to pick up the little quirks of how history turns

and just like these little events, you notice of the dynamics between people in a room during

a meeting with Hitler, you just notice these little things that are mentioned, because he

was either there directly or hurted the next day. So, you get, that's why to me, Risenfall,

the third Reich is interesting, is because it's by a guy who was there, who's reporting on it,

versus a sort of a more distant, displaced retelling. And I also like biographies,

I've been a big fan of biographies. And Walter Isaacson has written some incredible ones,

that's Steve Jobs and Einstein, all that kind of stuff.

Victor Frankel's book is one I've read a bunch of times. And it's so short. And you know,

reading in general, I know a lot of people who read way more than I do. And I also know a lot

of people who don't read at all. I mean, they haven't read a book since college, essentially.

To me, it's almost like the amount I get from it, it's almost like a secret weapon,

where when I think, you know, in two or three or 400 pages, which I can read in whatever,

10 days or however long it takes reading 30 pages a day, the amount of information,

insights into so many aspects of the human psyche that I can get, it's sort of like,

it's not like I'm in a competition for anything in particular with anybody, I just do my show.

But it's sort of like, if I'm reading dozens of books a year, and you're reading zero,

I'm exposed to so many different things and ideas that are not even in your universe. It just

seems like the power of reading just seems overwhelming. I had speaking or getting attacked,

I had a fun time getting attacked a few months ago for publishing a reading list. So I'm reading

at least a book a week, read 18 or 19 books from the beginning of the year. You got attacked for

the books you chose or for this? I don't know for what, but it became quite viral. Attacked for

reading, that's something. So basically what happened is that people, I actually don't,

it's not worth folks who know, know, fair, folks who don't, don't even worry about it.

It's the, what I really loved about being attacked for it is it shows that you can get attacked for

anything, apparently. So it's not like I did something wrong. It was kind of a beautiful thing.

And it was just the most intensely beautiful display of absurdity of Twitter and the internet,

that there would be, there were articles written about me with the book list.

There's no bad books on it. The thing I was being mocked for is reading Dostoevsky,

reading stuff that sounds like a high school reading list. Oh, I see. Or all these kinds of

aspects of the reading list, which doesn't stand up to any sort of legitimate kind of criticism.

But the fact that people are just looking for single words or single aspects of a tweet and so

on to criticize, it actually forced me to, because I released a video about, you know,

summarizing my takeaway from one of the books and I've been meaning to do more and more,

but every time I start to like, want to record it, I have this negative feeling.

They kind of ruin the fun of sharing with others. I know exactly what you're talking about.

My advice on that is don't do it. Just don't record it. Yeah. Because, and, and is that what

you basically, yeah. But I, I think time cures it, but for now I decided not to. Yes. It's just

until, until I feel joy when I do it. Yeah. We are in such a privileged position to even

be able to do this sort of thing, right? I have taken on projects and then it sort of sounds good

or I end up doing it because there's some third party that brings the idea and I feel like I can't

really say no or whatever. And then when I get in front of the camera or I have to write something

for a while, I did a newspaper column that I hated doing. I realized that I'm ruining the exact

thing that I have worked to build, which is that I can just do whatever I want. Why am I doing this?

And sometimes it takes me a week to realize it. Sometimes it takes me a year, but just don't do

it. That's the, in this case, in particular, it's also the, there's a private thing I enjoy,

which is reading. Right. And if sharing that private thing you enjoy is not fun, then just don't

share it. That that's, um, yeah, there's certain things, there's certain private things that should

remain private. That's like, which is one of the first things ever. I'm the same person privately

as I am publicly, but the books, it's like, man, I don't get to share, I guess through these conversations

I can share some of the stuff I'm reading and enjoying it because it sucks. It sucks to get

attacked for stuff and it sucks to get attacked for stuff you love. Yeah, especially reading. I mean,

it's, you know, that's the bottom of the barrel. I have these ideas where I'll go, you know,

maybe for my next thing, I'll go from politics, which is so toxic. I'll go to travel blogging

because I, there's so many travel bloggers I follow and there's so many interesting places.

And then I go, wait a second, I like traveling and just hanging out. Now traveling is going to

be my job and now I've got to bring two cameras with me and I've got to get shots and I've got to

film my food and I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to do what I'm doing, but then I'll

travel when I want to take a vacation. And of course, some of it could be fun. I mean, I have

to say when I did the one video on a book in 1984, I really enjoyed it. The whole process was fun. It

was, um, I don't think I've ever thought as hard about a book when I had to make a video about it

because I had to like, you know, I read 1984, I don't know how many times, probably five,

10 times. I don't remember. I read Animal Farm way more. But I don't think I was like, what do I

think about? Like what are the key takeaways for me? I didn't really know. Like if you asked me

what I think about, even Animal Farm, because I haven't done that one. And I've read that one,

I don't know, over 50 times. It's probably my favorite book. It's like, I would have to struggle

and making a video about it, basically a little mini lecture forced me to actually have an opinion

about the details of it and to do enough research to think like, okay, what is the historical context

of this book? I mean, it allowed me to say interesting and to think interesting stuff

about the book. I found it to be really rewarding to basically, the old Feynman thing,

one of the best ways to learn is to teach. Yeah. I can't think of one thing I would say

about Animal Farm. And I read it again, not that long ago, but I don't know what comments

there are. You kind of have a generic comment. Yeah. Like authoritarianism and so on, whatever.

But there could be interesting quirks of the book and the characters and how corruption happens.

You could say all kinds of stuff that it may be contrasting it. Like even when 1984 allowed

me to contrast with Brave New World and how 1984 was politicized and how it's used by the

Republican Party of today. You could say a lot of interesting stuff if you like to think about it

and write it down or sheet of paper. Maybe you don't need to make a video about it.

So I found it to be really rewarding in general. So I probably will do more of it,

but not always. That doesn't mean professionally, just like with the travel blogging. I agree with

that. I mean, you get threatened a lot. You get attacked a lot online. Do you think about your

mortality? Well, the other day I went to the doctor and he said, you know, next physical,

we're going to be talking about a lot of new things. And so I was thinking about it a lot

that day. No, I mean, it's funny. I recently did a bunch of estate stuff. And when you have

intellectual property, there's a question of like, okay, I have my assets, but also

if I died tomorrow, especially in a particularly fiery death, my YouTube channel would probably,

for a while, generate more money because it would be like, oh my goodness, this person died in a

terrible... What happens with a future revenue stream and all these different things? And it got

me thinking about legacy and about the fact that people who do this sort of thing, it's kind of a

new thing in a sense. And so, you know, if you work at ABC News, at some point you just retire

and someone else fills in for you. How does my career wind down given like, I don't actually

know the answer. I'm not sure. What is it? I just one day stopped posting videos,

but all my content stays up, getting fewer and fewer views. Or do I delete everything? Do I?

I don't know. What is the legacy? If you die, I mean, so my trip to Ukraine, because I knew I was

going to the front, is the first time I did, I recorded a video if I die. And I posted it and

I give instructions to folks what to do. So like, there's a closure. But it's an interesting process

what happens to your... At which point does GPT take over and continue tweeting for David

Parfait? Well, the tweeting I care less about right now, unless blue becomes something unbelievable,

I'm less worried about Twitter. But some of my audience members have been saying,

you know, some of these tools, David, are getting good enough that we could clone your voice and

also make it match video. And with scripts, you could just keep pumping out content even if you

were gone. And I said, now that I'm interested in, that I want to learn more about. Boy, it's

going to be a weird future. What advice do you have to young folks that are facing this future?

Almost always, it's some version of start right away. And that applies in so many different ways.

So if you're thinking about, oftentimes the context is people want to do what I do.

And I always say, do not sit around for a year thinking about lighting. This is how you never

do anything. And I dozens of people who I felt obligated to talk to on the phone because of a

personal connection, I go through all the advice and I can tell they're not going to do it. It's

already sounding too complicated. And so instead, they'll sort of say, well, I got to get the right

lighting and the right room and blah, blah, blah. The best thing you can do no matter what you're

doing is just start right away. And that applies in this business. And in whatever else you're

doing, if you want to learn a new thing, find a new hobby, the ability to get data right away

about what's working, what's not working and whether you even like this approach that you're

taking is so valuable and it will allow you to iterate. And the sooner you do it, the cost to

a change of direction will also be lower. If there's any, I don't do like self-help or generic

advice type stuff, but the one thing that applies in so many situations is just try it right away

and iterate from there. Yeah, start today and then do it every day. Or decide, hey, you know what,

I figured out I don't actually want to do it. Yeah, hence iterate. Yeah. Well, usually you'll

discover you do. Do you think we'll make it out of the century? Humanity? Human civilization?

Out of the select to 2100? Yeah, how much we got, 80 years?

Yeah, 77. I think we're gonna make it. You think so? Yeah. What are the biggest threats facing

our civilization? If not wokeism? If it's not wokeism, it's hard to say. I actually think that

if you believe that we are on an inflection point of sorts in changes to society and acceleration

of technology, et cetera, I think it's really tough to know in 2090 what will actually be

the biggest threat. So I don't know. It's so cliche to say nuclear and climate change and

another pandemic. Technologically, our world might look so different that it's almost

unimaginable. What it means to be human is unimaginable. And also, the degree that we make

progress out into space is also unimaginable. I think space is super interesting. And there's

people on both the left and right who for different reasons are kind of not into the whole space

exploration thing. The people I hear from the ones on the right think it's just kind of dumb.

The ones on the left think it's an excuse not to fix problems here.

And also, they say it's the plaything of billionaires, which is another funny kind of concept.

Yeah. I mean, someone's got to pay for it. Why not be people who have a lot of money to?

It could either be billionaires or governments that are trillionaires. Somebody has to pay

for big ambitious moonshot projects. To me, the most interesting thing is that

in getting closer to the next step of space exploration, we may well learn things that can

then be used to improve circumstances here. For me, it's not one or the other. And I recently

read a long piece about why not Mars? Because it's terrible in every way for supporting life.

Okay. So that's one perspective. But still, in so exploring, who knows what we might end up learning?

So I'm big on it. I don't share the view of some on the left about it.

So I guess to add to your advice, young people, if a thing seems terrible,

you still might want to consider doing it. I would say so. Yeah.

How many things have seen? I mean, listen, there are so many trips where the day before

I say, why am I doing this? The jet lag? I've got to do this and that. And now who,

if my guest host falls through, I should just stay and work. And I go, hold on.

You do this every time. Just go. You never regret it. You learn something. You try something.

I never regret the trip.

This hopefully applies to the conversation we had today. David, I'm a big fan of yours.

Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being patient with me. We tried to talk earlier.

Please continue doing what you're doing. Please continue being objective and thoughtful

and fearless on the internet. Thank you. Big fan of yours as well. I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Pakman. To support this podcast,

please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from

Mahatma Gandhi. What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,

whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism

or in the holy name of liberty or democracy? Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.