what what you need is you if you want to replace the elite that you have today what you need to do is you need to have a better Elite and there's the only one way out if you don't like the kernel look after delete um that doesn't result at just Mass def the only way out is a superior Elite okay what would be a superior Elite to the elite that we have today well a bunch of things so one is they would presumably have a set of ideas that would be better ideas because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this um they would then need a story that is a superior story right so sometimes called a political myth right um which is they would need a moral claim right that was able to legitimate their rule um they would need um fashion status Prestige if you belong to our Elite you are a higher status higher Prestige person than if people have the bad Elite right um and then and then they would and then they would need to build the kind of all these other things the perpetuation method the recruitment method fund you know they would need funding right they would need you know they would need they would need an education system like you know they would need and they would need media organs right they would need the ability to get their message out um you know for people who want to change the system like that that that is the way to do it no it's been done before um and uh it could be done again [Music] I'm Eric tornberg and this is Upstream with Eric tornberg [Music] welcome to the first episode of Upstream today's guest is Mark Andreessen the story of Mark's entrepreneurial investor Journey has been told in many podcasts so in this podcast we explore Mark's political and intellectual Journey his education in the mid-2010s everything started to change so mark re-examined his understanding of how the world Works through reading the history of the left and the right in this episode we talked about what changed in 2010s what Mark learned from reading the history of the left and the right and what that means for where everything is going we talk about how our modern Elites function how and why they all have the same opinions and advice for counter Elites looking to replace them this was recorded a couple months ago when SBF and Elon Twitter file Saga were at their Peak but the content is timeless you could replace SBF with AI doomers and it would sound like it just came out without further Ado here's mark welcome to the show thanks for being the first guest hey awesome hey Eric uh great to be here great you uh you recently tweeted about how uh 2015 uh shook your concept of how the world Works uh and you tune in about a a reading Journey uh that you went on to understand uh what what had changed so we're gonna get into some of those those books that you read but first I want to summarize so that the audience understands what exactly changed is it is a fair summary something like that uh you know some of our major institutions whether schools media government institutions Fortune 500 kind of all went hard left in unison um and uh kind of indoctrinating and enumerality and you know censoring people who disagreed is that a fair summary or what would be your editor or summary of what really changed because this is before Trump right like what really changed 2015. yeah so you know the hardest thing with this kind of question always is right how much does the world change versus how much do you change right um and so you always kind of Wonder it's like okay if I were the person I was today and I relived you know 1980 again or 1996 again or you know 2008 again or whatever would I have a totally different view on things and I think that's you know that's an individual question it's also very interesting it's a silent question right because you know we live in a specific kind of media environment today um I often wonder like what would it have been like to live through the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis right or Iran Contra or you know um you know the FDR Administration or whatever um or World War II you know imagine living through World War II with modern social media right and the level and the level of second guessing that would have taken place you know every every step of the way right would the United States have ever entered World War II in an era of social media like if you read the history of World War II a very large percentage of the country was opposed to entering World War II you know in up up through the late 30s so basically up until Pearl Harbor and like you know would we would we have ever gotten involved I don't know um and so anyway so it's really hard to you know it's really hard to kind of reconstruct I think these things historically um you know my lived experience as the kids say um is that uh you know things started changing pretty dramatically from at least the way I understood how the world worked probably in 2012. um just a lot of people in Authority started saying things it just didn't make any sense to me um and people started acting in ways that I didn't think were um you know that I that I certainly didn't didn't predict and didn't think would happen um and then you know look I I think that um you know I think that you know I live the same the same the same sequence of events as everybody else but I think Trump winning the I think there have been like basically like four big events it's like Trump winning the nomination um of um in 2015 and then winning the general election in 2016 and then there was like you know Charlottesville um and then there was um you know the George Floyd moment and then there was January 6th like there was like three four five six things in there you know that kind of caused I think both sides of the political Spectrum both halves of the American population to really start to act in really fundamentally different ways than at least I was used to um and so anyway I I lost uh I I sort of basically I lost all faith in my own ability to understand what was going on um and just realized that basically all of my assumptions around how people behave at least in politics and current events and social Dynamics basically are just wrong um and so when when I when you know people react to that sort of you know sort of soul shattering moment in different ways I suppose um you know my approach to deal with it is to try to then kind of go back and kind of trace the ideas back and try to figure out kind of where I went wrong um and that led me on this journey that you're referring to that basically I I basically the way I do that is I basically read my way back um and I sort of read my way back in time and try to figure out when things actually started um and then that that led me to kind of do that so there's a big historical kind of aspect of that and then it also caused me to kind of I basically decided that I didn't understand it to the left or the right like I didn't understand how Democrats were acting I didn't understand how Republicans were acting and so I decided to kind of read my way out in both directions both all the way out all the way out to the left all the way to like when and Mark some communism on the one hand and then all the way out to the right um uh on the other hand and see if I could at least reconstruct a a world view for for you know at least some sense of context for what's happening today I I heard there was this kind of critique of the of the left which is hey you can read your your way back but actually it's really just excuses for people want stuff uh uh and you know we have this debate with uh Richard hanania of about um hey you know how much do ideas matter um versus just group you know groups of people and tribalism and and um and of course the left and right changes their ideas over time too um what's your what's your reaction um and take on that yeah so the cynical well a couple kind of things in there so um yeah so I mean there's a big overall kind of question of sort of theory of mind right which is how well does the right ever understand the left how well does the right the leftover understand the right you know there is some evidence if you like read political science there's some evidence that people on the right tend to understand people on the left better than vice versa and the theory there basically is like a lot of right-wing people used to be left-wing people yeah uh right people tend to remove right as they go through their lives um and so um you know you maybe have a memory like a lot of neoconservatives or former Marxist Marxist as an example and so they they've actually fully understood Marxism inside out uh we'll talk about James Burnham who's like a classic example of this who actually was was a very active Marxist in the 20s and 30s communist um so so anyway they're they're um uh there you know there's always kind of that question um you know the question of whether ideas matter you know this is something this is one of the things I've been trying to kind of figure out and understand which is like you've got and there's kind of you know a lot of this happened around Trump which is you've kind of got you've kind of got two things that kind of seem to run at parallel one seem to kind of affect each other but it's not clear which is the dog and which is the tail so one is like the sort of big mass movements of basically broad-based popular opinion um and I don't know if you've noticed this but like when Broadway's popular opinion moves it's usually not the result of it you know some sort of detailed intellectual argument uh right it's not that you have 300 million you know people who read a you know a journal article uh you know an academic Journal article and then I'll you know decide to change your mind on things like it's it's basically like it's you know it's a big it's an emotional surge yeah uh right of some form it's a price it's a primal it's a primal thing it's it's um you know it's not it's not particularly logical or rational but it but it's very deeply felt and very deeply believed and you know and by the way maybe very real um and then there's this second Channel which is like the intellectuals right and so then there's like the intellectual superstructure on top of the movement and you know for for communism that was you know obviously Marx and then Lenin you know all of their writings um and then you know there's corresponding you know stuff on the on the um you know on the right where people have written you know very important books over time um and then there's like this question like okay is it like the intellectuals is it like the intellectual Elite basically driving the popular change because basically the population is responding to ideas um you know or is it the other way around it's like no the people move and then intellectuals are like well you know the people are moving I am their leader I must therefore get ahead of them I must basically you know articulate a story as to why they're moving so people you know down the road will think that it was it was I who caused it um you know um Eric Hoffer talks about this so the Eric Hoffer the sociologist in his book The True Believer he talks a lot about this and so the the True Believer is about this sort of mass this sort of mass movement of crowds um and so Hoffer's argument is interesting one offer Hoffer argues that basically that the the driver is mass popular sentiment that mass popular sentiment moves kind of as a beast in and of itself and he he uses the term the True Believer to kind of refer to somebody who's become part of a crowd part of a mob um you know part of a part of a mass movement um you know on either side by the way this is true communism true of fascism and so forth so it's not a political observation it's a psychological observation um and then what Hoffer says is basically whenever there's a big Surge and popular movement there's always sort of the evolution or development of a set of intellectual ideas on top of that that basically serve to describe what's happened and sort of rationalize it and try to put it into an intellectual framework and he said the reason you get those ideas um the reason that happens is because the movement needs to recruit the intellectuals um and so to recruit the intellectuals you need to have ideas um and so you've got this like thin layer of intellectual content on the top that serves to recruit the intellectuals from the movement and then you've got the demagoguery and kind of the mass movement underneath that's sort of not non-rational and more emotional you know maybe that's the case I think Richard if you were here would probably agree with us um you know Richard Richard you know General take as I understand it is that you know basically people respond to interests more than ideas and so if you know people in the crowd think that they're going to be better off as a result of you know uh action X or if their enemies are going to suffer because of action X that's a that's a direct incentive and they respond to that and the ideas are kind of these abstractions that intellectuals just kind of chase their tails on you know maybe that's the best explanation having said that look like Marx you know wrote you know merch wrote these things right I mean Marx wrote you know does capital and the Communist Manifesto and so forth and he wrote those like you know 150 years ago and like China still uses them today right and Xi Jinping still talks about them all the time and so you know she didn't think presumably if this stage wouldn't have to talk about that stuff if it wasn't important and yet he does um and you know boy like it certainly seems like Mark said a big impact on the world and by the way those same materials are taught in you know university colleges and universities today and are you know you would seem like they're having a pretty big impact on the world um and so you know that's a pretty strong argument that they're that they're a driver so you know truth probably somewhere in the middle totally yeah oppressor and oppressed language still uh still still lives on today for sure the um so you read you know a few dozen books about you know understanding the left understanding the right um what sort of um mental model on either side uh kind of filled in the gap or helped you get a better sense for you know either what's happened or or what's likely to happen in in either in either movement yeah so I mean look it's the same not I'm hardly an expert on this but I'll just kind of get my kind of composite sense and maybe set people down the road they can they can think about for themselves so I think the the sort of over like if you go far back enough in history basically if you go back and forth back and if you go far back enough in history basically everybody was like super right wing as compared to today um and I used to joke that you know this is sort of like different things if you go back 2500 Years everybody was super right when compared to today you know to the Greeks um if you go back to the Romans if you go back to you know the the you know Florence in the 1500s it was like super right wing by the way if you go back to 2015 it was super real it's super right weak as compared to today and in fact there are things that two weeks ago you know would strike us the super right wing and so so you know generally speaking everything in the past was much more further to the right than it is today uh you know basically why why is that um you know why is that is because sort of the the the long run kind of foundation of human civilization has been hierarchy in order um and uh you know if you go back to sort of any previous you know Society you know they they you know they all have some conception of natural order they all have some conception of you know you know rulers and ruled they have some conception of you know aristocracy and and proletariat or so forth and you know hierarchy and Order are sort of inherently right-wing ideas um and then you know if you believe that then basically the left is a reaction to the right right so the the lap the the sort of right is the original original thing and then the left sort of emerged over time in a reaction to it and you know starting with maybe you know college Judaism and Christianity and then sort of flowing forward into you know kind of liberal democracy and then ultimately socialism and communism you know there's sort of all being sort of left wing movements over the last two thousand years had this sort of you know critique and it's a critique of the right and it's a critique of hierarchy it's a critique of unfairness right it's a critique of you know some people have more than other people you know some people have more power than other people some people have more money than other people and that there's an unfairness to that um and you know there's some Ultra you know there's some altruism Instinct in the human spirit that doesn't like that um and so as a consequence you know the left basically says the existing order the existing hierarchy is unfair and so therefore we are going to tear it down and replace it with something that's more egalitarian uh something that has more more fair outcomes um you know Christianity did that from a morality standpoint um and then you know um uh and then you know socialism basically attempted to do that from from an economic standpoint and we kind of live in the shadow you know maybe of of those two great movements secure frame is the leading all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance get sock 2 audit ready in weeks not months I believe in Secure frame so much that I invested in it and I recommend it to all my portfolio companies sign up for a free demo and mention Upstream during your demo to get 20 off your first year now more than ever startup Founders need a safe place to put their cash Mercury protects your money and also provides the streamlined user experience that great Founders expect through partner Banks and their sweep networks Mercury offers up to 5 million and FDIC insurance which is 20 times the per Bank limit they also make it easy to invest any cash above the FDIC insured amount in a money market fund a hundred thousand startups trust Mercury with their finances I've been a happy Mercury customer and have found their team incredibly helpful and responsive they even got an important wire out of purgatory on Christmas Eve after all your Christmas is my opportunity visit mercury.com to get started Mercury is a financial technology company not a bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC marketer hire is one of my favorite resources for startups looking to hire marketers with thousands of pre-vetted marketers across a dozen roles Market or hire matches you to your perfect marketer in 48 hours whether you need help with growth marketing SEO lifecycle content or any other aspect of your marketing strategy marketer hire has you covered so if you're a Founder looking for top-notch marketing talent to help grow your startup head over to marketerhire.com to find your perfect match sign up with roll code upstream and you'll get one thousand dollars credit on your first hire and um there's a certain kind of person who says hey um yes this movement you know starting 2015 let's say it's gone too far but it has good intentions and there's been some some good things that have come from it and and it's an important kind of it's it's an important Direction and history has a direction and you want to be on the right right side of history is uh what is the counter to that that you know hey good intentions have led to some horrible things or that it doesn't even you know Help the People it aims to help like because that's a very common position let's say even even in Tech right yeah so there's a bunch of things so one is like so good interior there's a cliche for a reason which is the the road to hell is paved with good intentions right and so that and this again is like a reading a history thing like if you're you know if you read accounts of like even really horrible people in history like they I think they thought they were doing the right thing yeah right you know another cliche that I'll use a lot is you know everybody's the hero of Their Own Story um and so like you know I have a world view and then psychologists will tell you this like everybody's really good at manufacturing an internal narrative for why they're the good guide everybody else is the bad guy um and so I have an internal narrative that says I'm doing the right thing for my people I'm doing the right thing for all of humanity right I mean I mean you see it playing out today in the sort of FTX thing like I'm you know I I say I'm doing you know the right thing for the future of humanity um right like you know it's it's it's the thing like the you know these the horrible people who they thought they were doing the right thing like in their framework of morality as as they as inside their head as they understood it they're motivating force they're feeling I think more often than not was they were doing the right thing so clear so clearly it's not it's not enough right to for somebody to feel that way um yeah then then there's the unattended side effects you know kind of aspect to it which is you know it's just it's really hard to establish cause and effect I am going to change society in the following ways it is going to generate deterministically the good outcomes that I hope for and it is not going to demonstrate the unintentional you know bad consequences that that you know that I that I would have been horrified about it had I found out about them ahead of time and you know just in general right a big problem with social engineering broadly um is that it's it's very easy to both you know kind of blow it on the positive side and then also have a lot of negative consequences and you know history is full of those um look and then maybe I take your teeth equation not all the way back so like you know the the the the the picture that that Nisha tells the story that Nisha tells I think is you know pretty pretty good on this um you know so the the term meat you use this is what we're talking about is sort of he just says there are two kinds of morality fundamentally they're sort of Master morality and slave morality um and and when he says that he doesn't mean it you know there's a form of that it's like literally morality of the Master's morality of the slaves but he actually means when he uses those terms he actually means the concept more broadly he means uh the morality of the Masters as taken by people who aren't even literal slave masters but like people generally who who have sort of inherited the morality of the of the master even if even if they don't literally have slaves and then similarly he says slave morality is the morality of the slave carried forward by people who are no longer slaves um and so he says like you know the original form of order right this is true right the original form of social order was Masters and slaves like that that is kind of how everything was structured you know you go back four thousand years that's how everything worked um and then um uh and so like that that sort of set this sort of fundamental World battle in place um you know Master morality is very unnatural for those of us in a Christian you know judeo-christian world because the Judo Christian world according in each is the world of slave morality um you know need to ask us you know to sort of imagine that we lived in the you know pre-christian times um you know we lived in a much more difficult World um in which you know basic survival was at stake you know basically every day um you know what he basically says is in in the pre-christian world morality basically was strong equals good um and so if you were strong if you were in charge if you won right if you were the Victor that was good um and if you were weak if you were the slave if you lost right if your people got destroyed that was bad and so that that's the master reality framework um you know we moderns don't accept that we have a totally different view right um which is which which nature refers to as slave morality which is basically no um you know most people in life are not Masters most people you know if it's a choice between master and slave most people are slaves historically most people were slaves um and actually you know the majority of people are slaves they're abused by the Masters and we should be on the side of the slaves and that you know that is basically the Judea Christian ethic we should be on the side of the week the downtrodden the disadvantaged right the you know the marginalized right you know you hear you hear these exact same Concepts you know playing playing out today you know look if you you know if you object to living in the world that we live in and you're like wow I wish I could go back to the Roman Empire or go back to the Greek Empire go back to you know the Egyptians or whatever it's like well boy like life really sucked for most people then too right like that was you know you you definitely did not want to be a slave in Roman times like that was bad um and so it's hard to kind of say like go all the way back to to Roman times at the same time you do have to ask the question of like okay do you want to live in a world of like pure slave morality you know do you want to reach the point where basically all you're venerating is weakness right we're basically all you're doing is basically trying to achieve you know full equality of outcome full egalitarianism and you're trying to basically you know basically rank the week all the way up the totem pole and rank the strong all the way down the other end and you know historically that you know that that's where communism goes wrong right um you know that's communism is sort of slave morality fully realized as a system and of course that you know that that leads to catastrophe and so I think you kind of want to say you know that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle you probably want some bland you probably want like you know basically the one hand respect for like merits and and sort of um you know achievement and success um on the one hand but you also want like some sense of fairness and sharing on the other hand you know and maybe the right way to have like a society is to kind of balance those two you know do they balance are they like in thermostatic equilibrium and do they kind of swing back and forth but they kind of come around to some sort of Middle Ground you know or you know do they go pathological um and a society that tries to reclaim Master morality ends up being the Nazis in a society that goes all the way to slave morality ends up being the Soviet Union and they aren't actually thermostatic and you actually have to make a choice at the end of the day you know which one is worse and you have to steer Society in the other direction and I you know I don't know the answer um I think the question is a very Live question because there are a lot of forces at work at least in the west right now that want to push us much harder in the direction of slave morality and you know like I said we've we've like generally that experiment ends poorly um we we seem determined to repeat it yeah it was interesting I mean if we're trying to reconcile the two it seems that we have strong brake pedals uh or a strong Immunity on the on the master morality side um you know ability to hold back strong men um everybody to you know take care of them whereas we have less Immunity on people kind of um you know being manipulative on the on the slave morality side to get what they want because we do care about compassion and and kindness good intentions so so much and um you know it you mentioned it's a Live question I mean earlier today um Elon just tweeted that you know uh wokeness is a is a mind virus and it's the it's the most important problem and and obviously you know we can't speak real but if I was to parse that or steal man that I I would say it's like it's almost this meta Problem by which you can't uh solve other problems uh you know if you have a kind of excess slave morality uh making our institutions dysfunctional making us turn on each other uh Etc yeah it's like you know can you ever be too fair right can you ever be too Fair can you ever be too nice can you ever be too nice you know to the downtrodden can you ever be you know too determined to address Injustice like is that possible and a lot of people say no you can't you you can always do more you can always be more fairy you can always you know have more quality you know again you know that that was the story of the Communists like that was the proposition of Communism in the economic realm and you know like we you know we saw how that ended um I just by the way if you saw I just um I just asked uh I've just been running experiments which chat GDP G sorry chat GPT the the open a I think the chat bot and um you know it actually does it actually gives a pretty fair up description you ask it about fascism and it actually does kind of a really good description of fascism and you know kind of notes that it like doesn't end well yeah um and then you ask me to describe communism and it does this very interesting thing where it describes communism and then it sends it in it says and then it says now In fairness communism uh has been implemented to varying levels of success it's like well you know like uh okay you know any of course once that's what that's reflecting is like you know you know nobody in open AI decided that that would be the answer I don't think you know what would happen was open AI is trained on the Corpus of written human knowledge and generally speaking a lot of people have written about politics for the last hundred years have been a little bit soft on communism um and that kind of reflects its way through the uh the training data um so um yeah so I I look the the the book that are the biggest impact you know you mentioned the Elon saying I'd abstract that out a little bit the book They're the biggest impact uh for this question on me this question of like can you have sort of the the slave morality or the sort of a morality of compassion let's say a morality of compassion and redressing and Justice and achieving equality like with you know it's called you know egalitarianism as an ethic um you know whether it's it's you know religious in the form of Christianity or whether it's economic in the form of you know uh let's call progressivism um uh you know does that always become pathological so you know the strong arguments if that becomes pathological is James James Burnham uh who we'll talk about it probably fair amount um but uh Jason wrote three you know I think really important books the third book he wrote which has a very aggressive title called suicide of the West which kind of gives away his answer um is basically a full undressing of what we call it liberalism and progressivism you know sort of as you sort of a pseudonyms um or uh synonyms um and you know he makes us stronger he wrote this the book in 1964. uh he wrote the book having been a such a committed communist in the 20s and 30s that he actually was a personal friend of Leon Trotsky and worked with Trotsky for years and like argued with Trotsky at Great length for a very long time so you know he's a guy who definitely knew the left and new communism and socialism really well um and you know he he wrote this book uh in 64 when he was the chair of the NYU philosophy Department which it's basically right inconceivable that a character like this would be in a position like that anymore um but uh he was at the time and of course he wrote the book in 64 which is like right before the big social upheavals of the 1960s that resulted in you know the world we live in today and what he basically said in the book was he said actually sort of the left has a fatal flaw and the Fatal flaw to your exactly to your point the Fatal flaws there's no Governor right there there's no limiter on how much the passion you can have there's no limiter to how much you can try to achieve equality there's no limiter to how much you know you can try to overthrow hierarchy in order uh and get to you know full egalitarianism and so and so he basically says in the book um is a consequence liberalism will always become Progressive as and progressivism will always become socialism socialism will always become communism and you will always end up you know basically you know in pursuit of Utopia you will always create you know hell on Earth you know um you know the 20th century like you know there's I don't know what it's like 80 Societies or whatever the course of 20th century tried different versions of Communism and kind of all got the same result that was standing open AI um or uh chat vpt um you know you know the counter argument the Steel Man counter argument would be you know look most European economies today in the American you know system are you know they're they're left-wing in a lot of ways you know from a historical standpoint but you know they're they're hardly you know we're not we're not in fact the Soviet Union it's not full communism um and so you know at least over the last you know since he read the book that has literally played out in the West yeah you know there are people in national office who you know you definitely seem to have that Vision so um you know I would say the jury's still up there if uh if Eric Weinstein or Sam Harris or Josh among were here they would say hey no post World War II we had this Golden Era of of liberalism um where uh we were able to to keep things in check um and um and we just need to get back to that and and it's better too we're here he would say that's like uh you know the Communist saying you know real liberalism real communism has never been tried um and it's a it's a pipe dream um is is that time period uh an anomaly or or how do we how do we make make sense of it why is uh was you know going back a uh a pipe dream or is it well I think any modern leftists would say that was also the era of peak you know racism sexism homophobia right like you know that was the madness era right um and so that was the era in which like you know basically white men were running around doing whatever they wanted and you know women were oppressed and gay people were oppressed and black people were oppressed and you know you know all these all these things so you know it I always find it interesting whenever anybody in the left argues that we should go back to the 1950s 1960s because that does not seem to be a prevailing view on the on the left um you know then there's the economic explanation of the sort of American kind of you know ascendance um in the second half of the 20th century and I think the economic explanation is very simple which is you know World War II you know the every other industrialized Society on the face of the planet was bombed into Rubble right in World War II either you know because they you know started a war that they shouldn't have um like the Germans or because they you know were on the receiving end of it like the Brits uh and the French um and you know the Japanese you know as well um uh you know and so uh you know these societies got like you know Germany just got you know very nearly physically obliterated Japan you know not only did we set off nukes in Japan like we firebombed all the cities and burned them to the ground right so like there really was very little like industrial capacity in the west you know as of you know Circa 1945 now you know Germany and Japan and other countries rebuilt and started doing you know really well again in the 1970s 1980s but like it was like a 30 40 year journey to get those countries really back up in their feet as modern industrial economies and so the US you know we had a you know safe you know it's almost training attack or trained to never use the word monopoly but um you know instead we just say robust market share uh we had a uh you know the US had a robust market share of like Global manufacturing I I think in large part because there just were not Alternatives at the time um and so you know look we had very high rates of economic growth during that period we had very high rates of productivity growth um you know growth covers up a lot of sins um you know maybe we got away with a lot of dysfunction uh because we were just growing so fast economically um yeah I don't know nobody really I mean you mentioned a handful of people who might Pine for the 50s and 60s I mean almost nobody does right they either Pine for like the 30s right um you know they want to go back to the full new deal right or they you know Pine foreign or even earlier era people on the right you know will sometimes Pine for an earlier era of free enterprise right like 300 like the hey they have free enterprise in America was probably right you know probably something like 1870 to 19 you know 29 probably say 1870s 1880s through the 1920s um it was the what's called now the second the Second Industrial Revolution so it was the the sort of incredibly transformative time in technology with the you know creation of everything you know the electric power and um you know all modern communication networks Telegraph telephone radio television you know automobiles um you know airplanes um right um and so it was this incredibly fertile time in terms of technological development and then it was pre-new deal which means the national economic system was much more laissez-faire uh you know this is sort of the hate this is sort of you know the fully realized kind of hey they have Classical liberalism kind of in its in in its full Glory um you know free free market like Libertarians would like to go back to that era um you know most most modern Americans you know would not um yeah yeah um yeah maybe yeah maybe you'd want to go back to the 90s or something we're having a lot of social progress but it there's um you know still free speech is popular and this question as to whether you can take the the good without the excess you know although there's the other kicker on that on that exact kind of argument which is yeah but the 90s got you you know the 90s got you everything that followed the 90s right like so if everything was so great in the 90s why did everything go so wrong in the 2000s 2010s right it's the same question whether they go further back if everything was so great in the 50s and 60s why did you get the 70s and 80s yeah right and so so apparently like these prior and look the the glory of America is its dynamism right it you know we change as the society and culture like way more way more than most um and so that's that's the strength but like you know every preceding historical period apparently was on very take a footing because it didn't last very long um right and in fact it was not very long until there were lots and lots of people who thought it actually in retrospect whatever happened 20 years earlier was like very deeply evil um and so you know whatever preconditions you know what whatever conditions created whatever Golden Age you want to hang you hold out there they didn't last yeah right and in fact you know they they presumably sparked reactions and changes that led to the you know the worst environment we're in today so it's you know I think it's hard to find it's hard to find stable ground and so it's and it because it's hard to find stable ground it's also hard to have that much faith in the sort of so-called thermostatic model yeah it's hard to you know because what a lot of people will say is oh find a good there's these constant arguments and right left and this and that and interventionist and isolationist and there's all these kinds of polls right nationalized and globalists and so forth there's all these kind of different axes of politics and social change um you know Merit slash you know equality of you know opportunity for Quality outcome and so forth so you can you can kind of Imagine like a graph that has all these different axes and then basically the pendulum kind of swings all around the graph but always comes back to the center somehow and it's like well maybe right or maybe what we're just talking about is like you know massive survivorship bias right you know 100 other societies in the last 200 years like went badly off track in horrible ways right um we're the one that didn't right the dice came up in the right order for us congratulations you know great you know we wanted through let table 30 times in a row you know the 31st spin of the dial is coming up like you know just you know or it's I wasn't it seem to love it's like you know that's the it's the the guy who drowns in the uh you know it's how do you how do you drown in a lake that is on average four four feet deep right uh well it's because you know if most of the lake is 3.95 feet deep and then there's one part that's 100 feet deep and you get stuck on that part you're in real trouble right and so you know maybe we're always about to wander into the into that trench um and you know fall out of you and die I don't know I think it's a really big important question like it's it's I think people can get too blase about where things go because like I don't you know I don't and again the sweep of History right it's just like there are so many societies that thought they had things figured out and then everything went horribly wrong I think it's hard to just assume that everything will be okay just because it has been so far yeah you um you mentioned Burnham uh let's get into Burnham you mentioned the suicide of the West uh let's talk about this other book the uh managerial Revolution because it's it's related you know to what's happening right now there's been this kind of you know underground idea for a while uh you know some uh I think Eric Weinstein calls it the Gated institution complex or or something like that uh you know some people called the cathedral Sandia that uh you know the sort of the government uh Academia media um some some corporations work together in in kind of um you know in a decentralized way to achieve a certain political goal um so so how do we make sense of this yeah so Bruno has a couple you know two books that bear directly on this they provide it at least an explanation that's made a lot of sense to me like since I read these books like I feel like I understand like the two examples you're talking about like kind of why they play out the way that they do and see see if this resonates with people so yeah so the first web is called the managerial Revolution um and it was written in the early 40s written like 1940 and it's actually interesting because it was written a couple things historically about it so one is it was written shortly after Burnham had been a national communist um and so he was trying to actually still work his way out of Communism at that point um it was also written at the height of World War II and it was actually written when it actually wasn't clear who was going to win um and so there's a bunch of sections in the book that are like well you know if America wins X and if Germany wins you know boy you know they'll be a totally different set of things um so it's a good it's a good kind of recreation of what it must have been like when the answer to that actually was not clear um but the the so his thesis in the book basically is as follows which basically it's it basically what he says is look um world systems like governments and industries and human Affairs you know basically up through the 19th century were basically small scale by any my mind understands there were small scale it's just like you know population levels were low states were small um and um you know businesses were small and even if you had like a car company or whatever like it just wasn't that big right when Ford when Henry Ford had footwater company like they just didn't make that many cars there weren't that many people who could afford cars um and so you sort of had this world of you know preceding forms of social order which is like monarchies or aristocracies or Bourgeois you know capitalism free market capitalism or whatever um you know we're basically there was always like a principle in charge right so like the king is in charge or like the you know Henry Ford the owner of the company is in charge like you know the idea of like a business is a sole proprietorship like you know the owner of the corner store owns the corner store the owner of the car company owns owns the car company uh runs the car company so sort of basically all in all human history you like had basically people in charge until I would say like people with skin in the game like people who had like direct like responsibility authority authority and accountability kind of all wrapped up in one and then what Burnham says basically is in the 20th century as a result actually of the Second Industrial Revolution basically the 20th century is a century of scale um and so all of a sudden the countries get really big the populations get really big um the um the companies get really big the industries get really big the Technologies get really complicated right and he wrote right at the beginning with computerization which of course was going to accelerate all these Trends um and what he said basically is like the era of just a Henry Ford running his car company is basically over and he said instead what happens is all big companies are going to get run not by the owner of the company but by a professional class of managers um and and you know the literal form of that is literally people who have gone to like you know management school and gotten like mbas or more broadly in his definition it's basically people with Advanced technical skills you know sort of technical managerial skills um people who are administrators who are capable of running large institutions and so he says basically all the companies are going to get run by these managers um all governments are going to get run by managers and you know this was the Heyday he saw happening because this is the Heyday of the new deal you know FDR enormously expanded the scope of the federal government right for for better for worse and then brought in this this new class of person to kind of run the federal government which were Burnham's managers and then Burnham said look you've got like you know World War II is this like three-way fight basically between you know the three big political systems of the 20th century which basically is like fascism you know in the form of of Germany and Italy and and Japan um you know communism in the form of the Soviet Union which was our Ally even though Stalin you think was actually kind of a bad guy um and then liberal democracy right which is sort of it's full flowering and sort of this Progressive form under under FDR and he said basically those three systems obviously have big differences but they have one big thing in common they're they're all managerial in nature right the the Communists the Soviet Central planners are going to run the entire country from Moscow the you know Nazi Central planners are going to run you know the entire country the entire entire economy you know from from the uh you know from Berlin and then in the US you know FDR is going to run in America right with his with his managers and and but but the kickery put on this he said look this is not either you know you could say this is good or bad it doesn't it doesn't even matter if it's good or bad he says it's necessary he says the reality is all these systems are too big to be run by you know the older model of you know the Henry Ford the owner or whatever like oh these systems are all gigantic like they are all gigantic like all countries from here on that are going to be huge all Industries are going to be complicated all businesses are going to be complicated um and so it's going to be a world of Managers from here on out and then he basically identifies what you know today we would call the principal agent problem right which is um basically what this means is and you see this with companies right um which is basically um if the owner of the company is not running the company right then there's a separation of ownership and control right a separation of ownership and management and then you're going to have basically the creation of what he called the managerial class which will be the people who are basically going to be actually running the company and then as a consequence of this you know ownership will tend to then get dispersed right and ownership will become very weak and that's that's what's happening I think of any public company today right how many owners are there you know take up you know take any of these companies take General Motors um how many owners of General Motors are there there are millions of owners or General Motors because there are millions of people who own General Motor stock how many managers are there General Motors there's you know the top 10 Executives that run you know there's the CEO of the top 10 Executives the top 200 managers in that in the company around the company like who's more in charge of General Motors right the owners or the managers and the answer is clearly the managers by the way same thing politically right who runs the United States right who runs the United States government is it the voters or is it you know Congress in the white house it's you know the voters are dispersed there's you know whatever 300 million of us were dispersed we individually none of us have any basic influencer control at all um and so you know the handful of people who are our Representatives basically you know run everything and you know and this leads to this you know incredibly weird results where like you know Congress pulls it like 10 overall but like 90 of us like our Congress person right it's like you get these paradoxical kind of side effects of this anyway so the Creations managerial class and then basically the prince so therefore what he says he doesn't use this term I don't think but the result is like basically the principal agent problem becomes dominant in everything right and so it doesn't matter how like well-intentioned people are whatever it's like the the principal agent thing the principal agent problem is right the people you know the principal who owns something delegates you know running it to somebody else those people have very different interests and if your principals your owners are dispersed and your managers are concentrated then the managers are going to end up with all the power and that's and that's and that that's basically what what's happened let me pause there and we'll we'll keep going on this thread yeah well one thing I want to follow up real quick on that thread is this this question of you know a decade ago or you know a period a time ago you could have you know uh Republicans bought sneakers too so to speak of uh you know these Elites who control these institutions catered to both sides and and and they maybe had a bit more you know political or intellectual diversity within them but but something happened where first off you can also be apolitical there was a certain time but politics kind of infested every area of life and um now it's it's less about catering to both sides and more about catering to one specific side and so I'm curious what what changed there right absolutely what burner would say two things so the first to build a managerialism what Burnham would say basically is the managers get to the managers get to decide the politics of the company because they can right like because the managers have all the control even though they don't own the company because they have all the control if they decide they want to take the company in one political Direction and and against another political Direction they can just do that because who's going to stop them right right principal Asian problem if you like pulled all the owners right and said do you want the company to do this the owners would probably say no this is a bad idea because to your point like we're going to cut off half the market right we're going to sell those sneakers as a result the managers are like I don't care like why would the managers care they don't care the owners can't remove them um you know the owners are too dispersed and so um so basically the managers can get away with you know essentially exploiting the the positions they've been put in you know for their own ideological political ends um and they can just get away with it and they can just do it because they can do it um and then and then the the company example of this is very interesting because what you actually have the problem is even worse than we've been describing right because the problem is you have the principal agent problem playing out at the level of the management of the company you have the exact same problem playing out at the level of the actual ownership of the company in the sense of um uh the the big money management firms in particular the big index funds um you know so the you know the the sort of the BlackRock and its competitors right um and so what you have with like the Fortune 500 today you know just structurally is you have you know generally these sort of woke left-wing management teams you know basically exploiting the principal agent problem to their benefit um and then you've got these woke Progressive um investment firms um that are aggregating up huge amounts of money from you know millions of dispersed shareholders and then you know it's actually really funny right because it's like these these index these index firms um they they their entire business is predicated on the idea that they do not have the competence to pick which companies to invest in um and so therefore they're going to take your money as a you know know future retiree and they're going to invest it in the entire index companies but yet somehow the managers at the index firm are so enlightened that they have that they're completely qualified to re-engineer society um and to have a set of political views that may have nothing to do with your political views as an investor but they are qualified to figure out how to re-engineer society and you know this is this has led to you know ESG and all these other things um and and so you've got basically these two actual classes of managers you've got the corporate Executives on the one hand and you've got the professional investors on the other hand you know who essentially are have have both basically just taken power from their dispersed owners just because they can um and you know that you know that basically well I you know I think that basically just continues as long as it continues like I don't know what what stops that well um yeah maybe Elon stops that or yeah okay so then there's the Elon thing right so yeah so so so basically okay so what we've sort of described is sort of again back back to Burnham we've described sort of capitalism post 1940 or something like basically what Burnham basically says is there are two kinds what Burnham says in the book there are two kinds of capitalism everyone he thinks it's the same they're not there's two very different kinds there's what he called Bourgeois capitalism which was the Henry Ford kind which is the owner of the company runs the company that's sort of the classic right and then there's managerial capitalism which is this thing where the principal agent problem kicks in and managers run the company even against the wishes of the owners um I view what we do in Silicon Valley with startups with you know Venture um by the way same private Equity also we could talk about basically what Venture Capital private Equity are is they're sort of the return of Bourgeois capitalism into an economic system that's almost entirely managerial and and and the reason it makes sense to have like Venture capitalized startups in Burnham's framework to bring back some level of Bourgeois capitalism right um is basically that managerial capitalism it has its it has its advantages like there you know remember burner's Point like it is necessary like you do need like highly trained professional technical you know managers to run these giant Enterprises right um but you know it has its problems we've identified one of the problems which is the sort of political thing that happens another problem managerial capitalism I would argue is it doesn't innovate very well right and it doesn't innovate you know the companies run by professional managers don't don't tend to innovate very well why don't they innovate very well well the kinds of people who become professional managers are not innovators because if they were they wouldn't do that they would be off inventing products and starting their own companies right and so so basically the way I think about it is venture capital and private Equity are sort of the older model of capitalism that first model of Bourgeois capitalism sort of coming back in the modern era and sort of harvesting this Arbitrage opportunity that's created by the fact that the managerial companies can no longer invent new things um and so you know we do that you know we do we do that every day you you've done that in your career um you know where you know our one of our companies I'll have in common you know it's basically there's somebody you know there's a person or a very small founding team of people who own you know when on day one 100 of the business but even even after they you know get it fully financed they still own a lot of the business they often actually have you know voting control um of the business and you know they have direct you know again they have bundled accountability responsibility Authority in the old model like Henry Ford you know if you brought Henry Ford back you know if you if you were able to teleport Henry Ford into our era you know he would look at a modern high-tech startup and he would say that's just like Ford Motor Company was when I ran it like that's the model and then he would look at modern you know for a motor company he'd say holy Lord like yeah I can't believe like what what happened right like I I you know in Ford Motor Company may be a very well-run managerial company but it's not run anywhere close to how Henry Ford right would have run it so anyway yeah so that takes us to Elon of course what Elon is is he is he is the fully realized you know Henry Ford Howard Hughes right you know one of these kind of you know Peak Bourgeois capitalists you know he he is you know he's you know he is the best you know the best you know kind of uh example of this Bourgeois capitalism model that we've had in in our you know Society for for I think decades um and he's just and you see it playing out with Twitter he's just like I own it right it's like I bought the entire company um I own it um I am completely in charge um I am going to completely harvest the payoff right from My Success if I make it work and I'm going to lose all the money of my own money if it doesn't work um I am attaching my money to it I'm attaching my reputation to it right like I'm putting my time into it like I'm not delegating like there's no professional class of managers at Twitter like he's like he's running he's running the company himself right um and so it's it's it's this it's it's it's bringing back it's bringing back this whole model it's bringing back into a world in which the company sees competing with and many other companies like generally just like don't run like that anymore so yeah I think it's great like I think we should bring back as much Bourgeois capitalism as we can now Brennan would argue fine Mark that's great but you're just going to recreate the problem right which is because you're gonna you're gonna birth all these companies they're going to be run by the founders for a while and then at some point guess what they're going to get big and complicated the professional manager is going to take over and you're going to just recreate the problem and I'm like okay my answer would be okay fine but like that's a problem for 20 years from now better than we have now yeah let's let's do it let's see what we can for now I see Elon running um a few experiments uh you know more experiments in the past few weeks have been started than maybe in the past few years uh some you know some of them include um in Elon showing that you as a company uh owner you don't have to be kind of bullied or pressured um by sort of activists within your company you can actually fight back and and maybe win um and that is showing a model to to CEOs of of what's possible I think he's presenting a model of you don't have to be externally bullied either I think we had an era in Tech you know with companies like Uber or other companies that kind of um didn't necessarily apologize or I guess they did apologize and kind of conceded the moral High Ground whereas Elon is fighting back on on a more on moral terms actually saying you know we are more pure than the people who are attacking us and and winning to some extent um I also think he's presenting a model of institutional reform whereas there's been this idea that you these institutions that have been captured you can't reform them you just have to start start new ones and maybe the situation is so bad actually that you have if you fight you kind of empower the winners anyways and you have to let's just wait until it's a better time to to push back and elon's not waiting uh obviously and so um we're gonna learn so much for from these experiments yeah so I won't talk too much about Twitter specifically because we're involved in it and I and I shouldn't but um yeah no I think look he's he is doing all that and by the way he's done all that in 45 days yes it's like like I mean and again this is the thing I mean yeah I don't think ever you know probably have these it's like the parallel game thing which is like what would you do if you owned a company X right and it's always this like hypothetical kind of you know probably game thing it's not even from a question I always ask because I'm trying to get to like what what substantively is the right thing to be done you know anyone's case he's just like f you know I I am literally actually going to own it right and then I'm actually going to do all those things so um and you know look there's a lot of say I say this you know every other CEO who's at least you know conscious uh in the industry is looking at um you know is watching Elon very carefully right now uh I was just I just got a uh I just got an investor relations readout from a company um that I won't name but um it's just it's simply a red ring it up because it's a readout of feedback from their investors it's a public company and so it's feedback from their investors um and there's there's a section of the readout and this is just a reflection of what their investors are saying to them it's a section of the readout called the Elon effect right uh right and it's exactly what you think is it's like okay this guy seems to be able to run this company on like 20 of the head count right and so basically what are you gonna do right and again the significance here is you know that was that data's a little bit stale now um so that was probably 30 days in to say you know that they that they have those meetings where somebody said you know the Elon effect um and so the shareholders right the shareholders are all watching um and so yeah there a lot of people are watching uh you know I think honestly I mean at least in private conversations a lot of both uh CEOs and investors I talk to you know are very uh you know much hoping um that everything plays out great um because they're hoping that he's presenting a new playbook for how to run these companies totally um yeah and and again what Brandon would say is yeah you're you're you have you know congratulations you have rediscovered the virtues of Bourgeois capitalism like yes this is how things used to work uh this is a way that it could be done it you know it it it does rely on having somebody actually having that level of power right who is in that level of control um and you know if he was having you know he he has you know he and look he's you know dealing with all the different constituents he's dealing with but like at least he's not dealing with like public you know he's not arguing with BlackRock yeah right like you know there's a whole set of people he normally would have to deal with uh kind of the CEOs normally have to deal with who he just doesn't have to deal with because he literally owns the company um and so yeah look maybe it's a model like maybe if you know maybe if this maybe this maybe if this works you know the way that you know he clearly intends it to work um you know maybe a lot more people literally do what he's doing which is to your point they buy these companies and reboot them and we we kind of Reform them um and that would be a big change um and then you know maybe just on the margin maybe this changes how public companies are run right maybe this is a little bit of the reinvention you know maybe this is a little bit of the rediscovery of this if we bring back some of the spirit of Bourgeois capitalism while still retaining you know some of the advantages of managerialism yeah you know aspirationally you could you know say maybe maybe that's a possibility yeah the um well it's interesting I remember stripe laid off like uh 13 of its Workforce uh you described this incredible company of course and then a number of companies followed suit with kind of exactly the same amount of their Workforce so it's just yeah you need one example and then uh and then 13 this is not cracking on stripe just the general Trend that I've observed yeah so the third it's always this funny thing it's like 13 why is it 13 well because it feels like it should be at least 10 percent um but like Boy 50 sounds painful yeah but we do want to show that we're serious um and so and we want to meet in the middle and so it's probably going to be either 12 or 13 and if you know 12 might sound a little weak so let's do 13 yeah exactly so but yeah whereas you know elon's like yeah 80 yeah exactly right like the difference in magnitude between third I mean you know this but like 13 to 80 like there's a spread yes yes um yeah I know it all too well uh unfortunately uh I'm moving away from um from Twitter but still on Elon for a second because he also presents a new model for how to be a billionaire um you know it's a common question we'll get is uh over the past decade you know um during some of the most excesses of what's been going on people say where have the billionaires been why haven't they stepped up to stop it and as it turns out maybe some of them have been uh implicitly uh or explicitly uh supporting it and it feels like there's this kind of uh monoculture for or uh for how billionaires are supposed to act um and and the views they're supposed to have and the work they're supposed to do and the way their organizations are supposed to set up and what they're supposed to do um you know these are your your peer set talk a little bit even the abstract about kind of the pressures that that face this class and and why you know Elon or everybody's not like teal is just so different um from from how this group all acts why isn't there more diversity among this class yeah so this goes to Burnham's third book so we'll now we'll go to the third book which is uh the machiavellians um which is probably the you know the the most important of the bunch so you know the vacavillions is a book all about kind of it's about the structure of politics of society so it's it's not you know it's not part it's not partisan it's not really arguing right versus left it's it's a structural argument and we can have we'll maybe have a long discussion about this but the the the the the sort of one of the key Concepts that sort of Pops right out of the machiavellians is this sort of concept of oligarchy um right and just to give a quick thumbnail sketch um you know basically what what Burnham and his predecessors the machiavellians he talks about a lot of Prior political thinkers and you know including Machiavelli but but a bunch of others um and he basically says look they're they're basically they're fundamentally three forms of power there are three forms of sort of political power there's rule of one um there's rule of the few and then there's rule of the many um and then but Machiavelli said actually is there's there's a good and a bad version of both of those um and so the good version in Machiavelli's formulation um the good form of my the rule of the one the good form is monarchy the bad form is tyranny um for a rule of review the good form is aristocracy the bad forms oligarchy and then for rule of the many the good form is democracy and the bad forms is anarchy and so and this is sort of a general framework for political systems and then historically if you read like Machiavelli historically political systems basically go through this rotation they actually rotate through the six and then they go back to the beginning so they start out with monarchies the King goes bad that becomes a tyranny the king is overthrown by the aristocracy the aristocracy basically goes to seed because the oligarchy um the people ultimately decide the hate the oligarchy they take over they assert democracy democracy doesn't work because the people can't rule um because they're dispersed that then turns in Anarchy and then therefore that's where you get a king and so there's this sort of theory of sort of this Timeless cycle of a politics that plays out um uh the if you kind of read this book and take it seriously then you kind of say okay what what is our political system like what what political system do we live under and so you can kind of run a process of elimination you can kind of say well it's clearly not rule of the one anymore because like there's no more Kings right so it's not monarchy or tyranny um you know hopefully it's not Anarchy so that sort of you know brings it down to sort of aristocracy oligarchy or democracy um and then what you what you want to say right is that it's it's Oliver it's democracy right we've all been trained from from childhood to say as it is democracy but of course you know a is technically not democracy because it's representative democracy which is not the same thing as democracy right so we're we're not like voting on every single issue we're electing you know 435 Congress people and 100 senators and so forth and a single president to figure this stuff out for us so it's representative democracy so it's basically rule of the few um and then is it arist and if it's rule of the few is an aristocracy or oligarchy and I think the short answer to that is it was aristocracy basically through about the 1960s um and you know that was sort of the Heyday of the WASP aristocracy and then the sort of super Elite assimilated you know uh Catholic Aristocrats Jewish Aristocrats you know kind of with the with the sort of dominant Protestant aristocratic class at the time they kind of ran the country I mean you know FDR himself was like a peak wasp you know originally Roosevelt like a peak was after the Aristocrat uh you know kind of of his era um and then basically since the 1960s you know basically the aristocracy basically for a variety of reasons either you know had power taken from it or just decided to give up power and then within our modern political form is is oligarchy um and and um and and then there's this big difference between aristocracy and oligarchy um aristocracy consists of what Machiavelli called Lions which are people who basically rule through basically force and um basically assertion of command Mastermind Mastermind yeah Mastermind yeah well so to classical aristocratic rule is why am I in charge because I'm in charge like I'm the Aristocrat I'm from the right family I own the land screw you like do what I tell you Aristocrat is sort of representing the last messages of Master morality the oligarch who competes with the Aristocrat basically says oh actually I'm ruling on behalf of the people is it so here's what Machiavelli calls the foxes um and basically the foxes rule through deceit manipulation and cunning and their form of Deceit manipulation accounting is to claim that they are acting on behalf of the people when of course they're actually acting primarily for themselves because lo and behold they are self-interested just like everybody else um and so anyway Bert Burnham and Machiavelli and Cicero and all these guys Aristotle would say we're we're living we're living in a classical oligarchy like that that's the actual structure that we're in um and and so basically our our ruling classes in oligarchy it's an it's an oligarchic elite an elite here is a is a term you know out of this book as well um and then and then basically so anyway long-winded way of getting to your question which is okay what happens to a high-tech founder right regardless of background maybe they come from another country maybe they come from here maybe they come you know like I've come from the rural Midwest um and they start a tech company and it works and they become successful and they become rich right and they become like high status all of a sudden what happens and and the question what happens is they get invited into the oligarchy right yeah and literally what happens is you start getting invitations right and so you get invited to Davos and you get invited to Aspen and you get invited to you know since it's you know Nantucket and you get invited to you know and before you know it you are spending your time with and by the way you show up right to these things you know you show up to the Aspen Institute for the first time or whatever and you're just like oh my God like I've arrived yeah there's Prince Harry and there's you know Mike Bloomberg and there's you know all these like there's all these and they're you know the movie stars and like you know TV stars and politicians and you know there's Corey Booker and there's Kamala Harris and like it's just like it's like wow like I am in like I am in I am in The In Crowd right yeah and and you're invited in and by the way they're as nice as can be like they're incredibly sweet they're incredibly nice they're so happy to see you it's so great to have you there um and you know dinners are great and the parties are great and it's all just so fantastic and then at some point they're like well we have this project that we're raising funding for and you're like oh wow I would love to support your you know program to whatever reform you know whatever school you know and then all the sudden you find yourself writing the checks and it's like well you know actually I'm running for president next year and boy I'd love to and you're like wow you're my friend I'd love to support you like this is all great and so it's it's a so what is it it's like a it's a Social Circle right um it's a political network uh it's a patronage Network um it's a fundraising Network um it's a PR campaign you know it's all of those things it's a power you know it's a hope it's a governance structure um you know these are the people who staff the senior positions that like all the big important institutions in the country you know University presidents and people who run media companies and editors and newspapers and you know as they say the bold face names like the the you know the people who are um you know when they're written about the newspaper their names in bold because everybody knows who they are um and it's just like wow I'm like in right um and you know if you're not like paying attention to it um you know what you realize is you know it's not you know that you're what you're you're not getting in that group is you're not getting like some broad representation of different like political views and different walks of life what you're getting is basically this like basically abstracted Elite oligarchy holographic class where it actually it actually turns out like their politics are all just identical like they all believe exactly the same set of things if they have arguments about anything it's only on the margin um and you know primarily it's a it's an influence operation it's a you know there's a lot of what's called log rolling I support you you support me and it's a it by the way it's distributed like there's no Central node there's nobody in charge there's no wizard behind the curtain there's no secret bosses organizing the whole thing like it's happening you know these are literally like conferences with 400 people where somehow they'll end up thinking the same thing like that you know that that is and so anyway what what Burnham Burnham describes this process in the book and he calls the it's the the technical term for it it's called the circulation of Elites um and so basically what if you read the machiavellians what you learn basically is because of the political structure stuff I was talking about in any any modern any modern society is going to be in the oligarchy basically um that oligarchy is going to have a a ruling Elite at the top um the only way that that oligarchic Elite can ever be displaced is with another Elite taking its place right um which reasons for eight reasons we could talk about like populism is a total dead end it would have to be replacement by a different category of elite um and then basically it's like okay if you were a self-optimizing oligarchic elite Collective like how would you make sure that no new Elite gets formed the way that you would do that is you would recruit all of the new high capacity High Merit High achieving people who rise up in the system you would make sure to recruit them into your Elite right which is exactly the process you wouldn't you would invite them in and then you and then they become one of you and so anyway that's the that's literally what happens that's what happened and by the way and by the way like I've been in all you know I've been to all these places I've been all these conferences like I've you know I know all these people um you know and it's great it's just like an incredibly exciting you know it's an incredible Adventure it's like the culmination of your life's work that you're like in this in this in this network it's just like okay it's all great as long as that's the political system that you think should rule the country for the next hundred years as long as these are the people who should be in charge as long as you agree with other policies it's all absolutely fantastic um and so even and this is the irony of it is the people who be you know most people who become billionaires in our society or become very successful like you know in business they're like super contrarian right so they've got like a thousand different you know every every entrepreneur we know has been highly successful like they're these super disagreeable people who've got all these really contrary ideas on how to run companies and how to do things which is why they're successful entrepreneurs but they get they get pulled into this world and all of a sudden they become like incredibly conformist right and they they just they no longer have any unique opinions on anything involving politics or social policy or the structure of society or anything they just they just adopt this sort of this sort of oligarchic elite View kind of wholesale with exceptions and then and then basically to your question what happens is everyone so you get an exception you get somebody who's basically like look I could go do that it could be part of that but like I'm not going to do it the guy I think who actually unlocked this in our era is actually not actually originally Elon uh surprisingly I actually think it was Larry Page um and um I don't know if you recall this is like a decade ago now uh Larry you know there was all this pressure at the time there was the billionaire pledge right so Buffett and Gates who are kind of charter members of this this we're talking about the Credence billionaire pledge which again is another form of this Elite assimilation thing right to try to get everybody to kind of sign up for the whole program um and uh they're always trying to get Larry Page to sign it Larry's like look he's like I don't think that I should I don't think the right thing to do with all the money that I have from Google is to just give it away because who knows these nonprofits who knows what they do he's like I think what I should do is if I get hit by a truck I think my money should just go to Elon Musk and he should just build new company you know build more companies right if you remember at the time the reporters were all just like completely horrified because like oh my God that's not you're not on the program like how can you not be on the program like everybody knows what to do why don't you know what to do right and Larry's like well I just think that Elon building companies is having a bigger impact on the world you know than the Ford Foundation like you know yes yes contributing an idea as as that was at the time yeah so Larry actually like kind of hung that out there and then and then to your point like elon's been living it you know Peter you know uh you know Peter lives it um and and the fact that there's like you know Elon and Peter and Larry and others who are a little bit more kind of off the beaten path now with some of these things I think is opening up the aperture for the Next Generation yeah but on a few observations first it what's interesting is that the it's not like there's a new Elite and an old Elite and it's a generational divide as much because like SBF is 30 years old and yet he's a Davos Elite you know as a Davos as they come perhaps full on yeah hold on Sam went from you know Stanford math kid to lawyer MIT math kid too like full charter member of Lee oligarchy the late that rules the world in like three years I mean it was pretty incredible by the way apparent and by the way apparently he's still in it because they all keep defending him so like apparently like apparently it worked yeah well let's say you talk about that for a second um effective altruism you know you're um your partner your wife is in uh in philanthropy and and you guys talked about results driven philanthropy of who wouldn't be you know supportive of results driven philanthropy what's the sort of blind spot of uh you know effective altruism yeah some so my wife teaches her people don't know so my wife has taught for many years actually at Stanford um uh foreign people who developed philanthropy as an academic field and if she taught philanthropy at Stanford Business School which she used to describe as sort of trying to divert the Sharks out of the for-profit tank into the non-profit tank um so um and and her whole thrust was what she called strategic philanthropy which which basically you could you could think about it I would think about it Loosely as like a grounded version of effective altruism which is and and so her critique all and she's she's given talks that she wrote a book she wrote a book called giving 2.0 where she talks about this if you want to read it but what she says is look there's a critical philanthropy that she believes that by the way Sam would also agree with which is basically most philanthropy is emotional right like I you know I or somebody I love goes through a health scare I then donate money for that particular condition um right or I go on a trip you know I go and I don't know I go to Hawaii or something and I discover the plight of the Dolphins and I start to donate money to that you know because it talks to my heartstrings right or I see a TV commercial and there's some poor thing you know some poor person and I don't know I donate money so so most philanthropy is is emotional and then you get this sort of massive reallocation of resources like assuming that you actually have like let's assume everybody here has pure intent they're trying to make the world better um you know so this is like in medical research for example it's it's like there are certain conditions that just get like dramatically overfunded and there are certain other conditions that are even more serious they get dramatic underfunded just because of like who happens to get what conditions uh the classic example is actually the age effect of medical research right so the stuff that old people suffer from gets like much more funny than the stuff that young people suffer from and of course the reason is because young people who suffer from something don't have any money to donate yet right whereas when you're old and you get sick and you maybe have some money and then that's you may hear your decision based on that so anyway so my wife basically says look you should take you should basically think of philanthropy at you should evaluate philanthropic basically gifts the same way you evaluate business Investments like you should think hard in terms of yes you know the actual effect that things are going to have and you should try to quantify it and so forth and so anyhow look we've done that in our private philanthropy so as an example you know we are one of our big pushes as you know for years now has been uh Stanford Hospital in particular the ER Department of Stanford hospital and a big reason for that is just you know any given day I want to basically understand what impact our philanthropy is having I can go sit in the waiting room at Stanford ER and I can see the patients come in and I can see them get treated like it's a very tactical tangible practical you know kind of deterministic uh uh thing so so there's that um you know effective altruism basically you could say takes that idea and then like scales it way up and basically says okay you should apply that same attitude and that same methodology to basically all of humanity right and and you should basically right fully implement the philosophy of utilitarianism which is to say the greater good and you should basically be able to map the mathematically model and you should say okay if I do x y z today then it's going to have this impact not just you know next year and five years from now but 10 years from now 50 years from now 100 years ago 100 years from now by the way maybe the entire future civilization right maybe I'm going to make an investment today that's going to result in humanity reaching the stars or Humanities curing all diseases or Humanity achieving whatever desired result 100 years from now um you know the critique of that has always been the same as the critique of utilitarianism which is like you get into a level of abstraction where you basically start to play God right and you start to think that you can put things in a spreadsheet that extrapolate out you know 100 years in the future with huge numbers of variables you start to think that you can re-engine your Society right you start to think that you can kind of play this like really big game right will you ever actually be able to prove any of your assertions will you ever actually see the results of your work will you ever actually will there ever be a feedback loop back to what you're doing so that you can correct like probably not because you're now dealing in a level of abstraction and time Horizon that's just like Way Beyond any any in the individual human's ability to do anything and so anyway this is my critique of it it's like it's just it it leads you into this like playing God's social engineering thing and of course if you ask well what kinds of political movements you support playing God and doing social engineering I think we'd agree on the answers um and so it leads you down this kind of ideological path that has a shocking number of of overlaps to other ideological paths yeah have and then very badly uh for reasons we've discussed already um so uh yeah I yeah makes sense yeah and then there's an interpretation right there's an interpretation I don't know if it's true right but there's there was a famous uh one of the famous Sam mcfreed interviews was an interview with Tyler Collin uh where uh Tyler asked him uh you know because they're talking about all this stuff that the math involved in effective altruism and utilitarianism and probabilities and so forth and and uh Tyler's like you know suppose you had a you could you know with the roll the dice um you could roll the dice and with 50 with 51 odds you would get another Earth like you would literally get another earth with like another eight billion people and like another like an entire like ecosystem and you'd like basically you double the footprint of humanity in the cosmos um but with 49 probability you would lose the one Earth that you have right and and you know do you roll the dice and Sam's like oh of course right because he expected value like expected quote unquote expected value you're more you know right and and and and and and then of course Tyler's next question is you know do you roll the dice more than once right like suppose you win the first time you you know it comes up it comes up heads um and you get your tourists and you you you then get to make the same bet again you know double or nothing right and and and it sounds like so you you keep actually making the argument over and over again because like if you get it right ten times in a row then you've got a thousand Earths and like that would be like so much better than what we have today like how could you not take that chance anyway one of the theories about what happened at FTX was he he applied that philosophy to running a financial services firm yeah instead of rolling the dice and the dice came up you know positive it worked you know a bunch of times in a row and you know it got him into this incredible position and so he just kept rolling the dice and you know and so so there's a theory that basically like what he was fundamentally doing was trying to optimize the future of all Humanity by trying to roll the dice so that he would end up with a trillion dollars so that he would end up being able to solve all the all the problems now there's an issue with that theory which is he gave that interview to the reporter for Vox where he basically said yeah I was like the dumb game westerners play to make people like us exactly so he undermined his own defense there a little bit but you know who knows yeah um I mean again another couple observations one is Elon is is acting as a lion to use the language you mentioned but he's um a meritocratic lion not uh you know I I roll because I'm the best not because of my family and what's interesting you know Bobo's in Paradise Dave Brooks book uh you know Chronicles how we moved from an aristocratic Elite to a meritocratic elite but to that same meritocratic Elite also became most critical of meritocracy itself uh or most uh yes and and maybe as a way to deflect or you know or maybe just kind of reconcile um sort of this uh this idea that hey um you know they're inherited advantages to if you have better we don't actually have a quality of opportunity and if you're better and so anyways that's one interesting observations the other observational mention is um you know we mentioned how these billionaires who've been so successful so contrarian in their uh private company lives um you know when it comes to the Davos Elite they have a lot of weird views uh a lot of weird views about how people should live in their you know personal lives but then also um you know kind of this uh Global government um kind of kind of ethos um and I'm curious how you um kind of reconcile you know you're you're a fan of immigration you're a fan of trade you're a fan of globally Collective work you know World um but but you don't want Global governance what is sort of the right um framing of think thinking about that so a couple there's a bunch of big questions in there so let's start with remember the first the first thing um the uh uh meritocratic Elite that yeah yeah denies meritocracy let's talk about that so so there's this guy so there's a guy I kind of you can kind of trace this progression so it's this guy James Conant c-o-n-a-m-t and so he was uh he was an American he was American you know wasp Elite you know out of Central Casting this is a very important figure in 20th century American history so he he became very he was a chemist actually in my background and actually worked on like chemical weapons and we're like World War one is like one of these like really Advanced kind of science guys um and then he he was famously in the early 20th century he was the for a long time he was the president of Harvard right which you know then and now Harvard was like the you know kind of the peak you know the highest status you know educational institution in the country you know kind of the you know Harvard you know Harvard and a couple other places like you know create you know give us all the Supreme Court Justices right and you know typically all the presidents and so forth um and so uh component ran Harvard and actually at Harvard I I bring him up because he did exactly what you're describing right he came out of a system of actually inherited aristocracy which was done at the traditional American wasp aristocracy um and he he transfer he basically he was very explicit about this he he used Harvard as a vehicle to basically replace the inherited aristocracy um with basically an aristocracy of Merit uh or or an oligarchy Merit which we'll come to but but a sort of a a class of Merit and he and he's the guy who basically opened up uh admissions at Harvard and he basically says we're not just going to have it's not going to be all legacies and all people with the right last name and all people with families in the social register and their families came over in the Mayflower and all that stuff you know it's going to be the best of the brightest um and we're going to basically scour the country and we're going to basically go find the best the brightest we're going to recruit them in and then we're gonna we're gonna basically have this this aristocratic Elite Class of of Merit and and he actually did that by the way he did that by the way as a consequence of that um that all every other university basically did that that led to the creation of for example the s.a.t the act like Merit testing right um you know sort of emerge out of that um and and so the the goal literally was like go Skyward the country every year get the smartest kids from wherever they happen to be and like bring in basically and by the way like again circulation of Elites invite them in right invite them in congratulations like it doesn't matter where you came from now you're at Harvard now you're a Harvard graduate now you're in the Harvard Network like we're going to jump you up to this ability where you can have this giant impact on the world but you're here because of Merit um funny thing happened um uh it did not result in equal representation by group um and so they ran this process for you know 20 or 30 years and let's just say there were some disparities um and there were some population groups that were like extremely unhappy and there were some other population groups that wanted to speak for the previous population groups and assert their moral superiority and say that that these are these are bad outcomes um and so he he came under and you know sort of increasingly intense criticism later in his career and by the 1960s he was basically canceled um you know for saying uh uh you know bad things um you know because he made comments at the time on race that you know basically you know even the 1960s would get you canceled um and so his career I bring him up because like his career basically spanned all three phases it spanned the original basically inherited the inherited concept of aristocracy when he started um and he was a product of that himself um he then implemented and essentially co-created the idea of an aristocracy of Merit and fully implemented it um and then he ended his career basically on the other side which was the birth of the modern system right uh the modern system of of um you know so the Civil Rights affirmative action um and you know modern University admissions you know it's all you know coming full circle because Harvard you know the the Harvard case is now in front of the Supreme Court um you know they it seems like Supreme Court is highly likely to use the Harvard case to strike down affirmative action in University admissions which if they the Supreme Court's intent if they do that would be to return Harvard back to where it was when James Conant was running it you know in like the 1930s 1940s probably that's not what would actually happen you know anyway this is you know this is all still a giant live issue anyway so so so he he like lived all three faces of this and all three faces of this actually like played out like quite quickly like they don't play Down In the span of one man's career um and so this is a little bit of the thing that you and I were talking about earlier which is like okay if there was this moment let's say there was this moment where Jason was running Harvard and let's say it's 19 probably 1940 is like a good midpoint for this or something where like they truly were uh admitting purely on the basis of Merit and again you could you could create many different critics criticisms as to whether they were you know different advantages and all that stuff you could talk about but let's just say they were doing it straight on the base of this of SAT scores um and so it doesn't matter where you grew up it doesn't matter what you know whatever ethnic background immigration status none of that gender none of that matters it's just how do you score on the SAT they actually did that for a while right and then that became for whatever set of reasons good or bad that became untenable starting the 1960s and they have been basically evolving in a very different Direction ever since so apparently at least in our culture in our era like that's not actually a stable yeah that's not a stable State like it is for people who would like that to be how these things work like sorry like oh Jesus Harvard's not gonna do it no right so if anybody's going to do that it's going to be some sort of new institution like it's going to be have to it's going to have to be somebody else anyway I don't even mean to actually reach a conclusion based on that it's just that you you can actually see this whole thing playing out um and I actually think the the kind of flow of events as people argue this stuff out it's it's these situations have unfolded often enough now where you can see the pattern and kind of predict where they go yeah and the um yeah it's really interesting I mean people like Michael schallenberger people like Thomas Soul um they're a number of people who've um you know uh shown that there's a certain set of policies that people the fox says or who uh promote that actually don't help the um the people that they're aiming to help um and they recommend alternative policies but those alternative policies um kind of break a fundamental assumption that uh you know all people are equal or or some fundamental assumption that people are uncomfortable with and so they would rather have they would rather keep the fundamental assumption that kind of they think respects people's dignity or something then then get maybe the outcomes that they want and it feels like that that fundamental assumption is so core to so many things um well this goes to in this ghost also you're yes I think sort of the same question earlier which is sometimes this oligarchic Elite seems to end up with these somewhat crazy ideas like like you will owe nothing and be happy or you will eat bugs yes right yes exactly you'll eat by because he will sleep in the Pod um well look so again what Brennan would say here what Brennan would say is very straightforward which is this oligarchic Elite has become a very disconnected class right so it's become a very disconnected disconnected set of people um it's a very small set of people um they're sort of a whole bunch of things so first of all they are actually often very high Merit they often actually are like quite smart um it's not that they're dumb um they have been educated at a relatively small number of Institutions generally you see a very high correlation to a certain small number of like ivy league universities and their International equivalents um they associate primarily with each other like part of what you get when you join the electrical lead is you get like a set of friends and your new set of friends are like much cooler than your old set of friends um and so they associate with each other um they kind of by definition don't invite people in who don't fit right and so if you show up and you're like wow I really like that type of Carlson character right isn't he great you know you don't get invited to Aspen next year right so they they kind of box out um you know this is even before they classify it all oppositional speeches hate speech and misinformation like even before that it was like look you're going to have a certain set of points of view here if you want to fit in like the social Dynamic it's a social Dynamic it's a social club like any Social Club people are expected to kind of all agree on things and to not not really argue about things and certainly not do anything that would offend or horrify anybody um and so it's like I don't know it's like the opposite it's like uh what's the joke it's a Marketplace of idea yeah [Laughter] real that happens right there's no truth seeking exercise it's like we're all going to basically agree on the same thing um and so and then they just they live in rarified air and then you you know a lot of them you know they're they're either rich or they have a lot of rich friends um and so you know they tend to live behind High walls you know they tend to be guarded by men with guns um you know they tend to not be subject to Violent Street crime um by the way you know another irony in Soul and others have pointed this uh the other irony is they actually follow very Bourgeois traditional life scripts on average like most you know the the most of them you know if they have kids it's generally they're you know if they have kids it's generally they're married they're you know they're raising their kids in in two parent households um you know they have very kind of stable family situations um and um you know they they prize education they teach their kids to work hard you know they they follow a very kind of traditional even aristocratic by the way mating like they have very strong opinions on who their kids should like marry and uh reproduce with um one of the you know enormous one of the reasons why there's so much focus on getting kids into these colleges is because that's the you know that's the marriage pool you know that's where the good people to marry are so there's like a there's like a uh you know a a reproductive kind of component to it um and so they live in this like rarefied you know it's like anything it's like the you know it's like the courtiers at Versailles or something like they they just they live in this rarefied world and so you know when something happens in the real world that is not as they predict it like they you know get television and skin of the game like they're not subject to the consequences so let's just take a hypothetical example um if they decide that the correct social policy to achieve true equality is to let all the criminals out of jail hypothetically um and the result is like a massive surge in Street crime that is victimizing like huge numbers of you know poor and disadvantaged people um they're completely insulated from that right they have no risks actually no I mean I'll I won't pick I want my names as tempting as it is but like I know people who are like you know big funders of all of the pro crime districts District Attorneys and they really believe that they're going to like heal the nation and Heal the World and Achieve racial Harmony if they let other criminals out of jail um and you know they are in my view responsible for like just this massive violent crime wave that's happening right now and they are then they literally have like SEAL Teams protecting them yeah right so there's no like you know crackhead homeless person who's gonna come get past your SEAL Team Six security guy right like you're you're out like you're out like you're ruling a society but with no accountability whatsoever um for uh you know for the results and so yeah so it's extremely easy in fact it would be shocking if people in the circumstance did not get like radically disengaged uh and disconnected from reality and again if you go back to your Machiavelli that's where it's like the oligarchy at some point at some point the people are just like you know what screw this screw these people you know um and they at some point they show up at pitchforks and just kind of take care of the problem yeah um to uh to finish the the analogy around or sort of the tension between nationalism and globalism you know in some in some ways this is supposed to be the era of the sovereign individual and yet it seems like as we see as this saw during covid um you know governments are adopting some of those technological advancements to um you know control its people in in tightening and you know increasingly tightening ways and it seems like this idea of global governance Global coordination to solve whether it's climate problems and nuclear proliferation or you know what's going to happen with AI God for you know um it feels like that's that's becoming more and more Vogue and yet you know for people who are as you are excited about trade excited about immigration excited about global coordination um how do you kind of like reconcile those tensions or say Hey you know stop here yeah so there's this idea that you've alluded to that's like very deeply seated and call it you know you could call it modern Global governance as they sometimes call it it's you know it's like if you go to the world economic Forum like they'll teach you this or if you um you know if you go to these you go to these parties although there's sort of this through line which basically says and it actually and it actually it in a lot of ways I mean some ways it's like tightly it's baked in a Judea Christianity generally but like Hegel was the philosopher who kind of um you know kind of fully articulated this some sort of modern philosophic terms and then his thinking was carried forward by markson and and others um and so the the sort of or or the intellectual origin of this kind of through line of thinking is is kind of it's sort of a Hegel in his successors um which basically is like look like the progress of human society is a progress and by the way this sounds great and there's certainly some truth to it the sort of flow of history is basically um confronting problems in solving problems um and so everything you know life used to be nasty British and short and everybody used to die of disease and everybody was hungry so everybody's slaves like all these problems problems and then basically what there's what they call the sort of historical process right and and the historical process plays out in the way the historical process plays out is what heck will call the dialectic and the dialectic basically is you know you've got basically one theory for how things should work boy they don't seem like they're working very well you've got another theory of things you should do about it you argue about that and then you come up you know sort of thesis antithesis and then you come up asynthesis and you kind of get to the answer right and then and then basically you play off that answer by the way if it works that's great if it doesn't work you repeat the process until you figure out the answer but at some point you figure out the answer right at some point the right set of smart people whether they're philosopher Kings or you know Democratic rulers or you know scientific experts right at some point they're going to run the experiments on how to optimize Society such that they will ultimately at some point figure out the right answers um now imagine that you ran that process for hundreds of years right and you ultimately figured out the right set of answers and maybe at one point you know you thought that that was you know stop stalinism maybe at one point you thought that whatever whatever but like you've arrived at point where like it's like okay you know this is the the end of History thing the fukuyama like liberal democracy like we figured it out we figured it out we've solved the answer is we have the Playbook we have it you know the the Davos version of this is whatever Global democracy thing that they have if you really have all the answers right then you have the ultimate moral imperative to impose those answers on the entire world because of course you do because you have all the answers right like you can solve all the problems right how if you had all the answers let's suppose you had all the answers not organized Society how could you not impose those answers on the entire world it's the only morally correct thing to do because if you don't do it all these poor people are going to be suffering and all these completely unnecessary ways and so therefore I have the answers therefore I must impose them um and so you know look and this this was everything I just this is the intellectual Foundation underneath communism like this was the story at the time uh this is the story behind the current Chinese form of Communism like this this is like a thing this is like this this idea has had a big impact on History um and the strong forms of it are not doing as well right now but the sort of the sort of softer form of it um uh you know it's less of a of a of a hammer and a little bit more of a I don't know velvet fist or something but um uh you know it this impulse is very strong and this is the impulse of you know all these this is the impulse of the oligarchic elite like we have the answers we have figured out the answers and by the way we just saw playing out in covet right the answers are like super obvious we're going to have lockdowns we're going to have this we're going to have that and like we are not open like we have already figured out there's no more reason to discuss this like we have the answers anybody opposing us is clearly opposing Us in bad faith because we are you know yeah you know this is the thing where these guys will get up there and they'll say things like you know to challenge me is to challenge challenge science right like I have the answers like stop bothering me and just do what I say right yeah and so anyway like this is a very deeply seated deeply rooted thing and these by the way these people like fully believe that they're doing the right thing like that in fact it's necessary to prosecute this kind of Campaign which is like they're completely convinced that they have that they have the answers and if they don't impose them they're they're they are actually they are actually committing a great moral crime by not imposing them oh anyway like this is very deeply rooted in in in in the system um and then yeah look people who oppose that right it's you know you you know what they're called right you know they're called nationalists right because they don't want the quote-unquote global governance that you know they're called you know fascists because they don't want you know right you know so you've got all the kind of the kind of dirty words um uh yurim has only uh uh wrote a book a couple years ago called The Virtue the virtues of nationalism which is a very kind of um uh you know kind of uh very provocative title in the in the current environment um and he was actually blocked from advertising the book on certain social media platforms because it sounded like it must be a fascist Manifesto um no he's Israeli um you know it's a bit much to kids with being a Nazi yeah um although people have um and so he makes this argument in the book that you that you'll enjoy um and it's the kind of argument that never really works but it is a fun argument to hear which is he's like actually This Global is sort of hegelian global governance World State kind of thing um is anti-diversity yeah um right right because he's like look the advantage of having many the way Sony puts it is the advantage of having many countries right is you have many different systems of organizing society and then you are actually able you know and you therefore have diversity of the forms of society and so therefore you can actually you can actually have real life experiments to play out as to which things are better which ones aren't if everything is just globalist and everything is just a single Global you know ultimately a single Global state which is like the hegelian and you know kind of marks the stream um you know you will eliminate all forms of of diversity of social organization and philosophic ideas right and and and so basically you you will not you will not achieve Utopia you will achieve dystopia right because you will no longer have a process of evolutionary involvement of uh of thinking and so he says in the book If you are pro diversity you should therefore be pro-nationalism you should be Pro the existence in many separate states of course this argument does not work at all right um which is you know just because the same people who want Universal World Government also say they want diversity it does not mean that they're going to buy his argument that you should therefore be nationalist argument that if you're pro-diversity you should have you know political diversity as well exactly yes that's the yes we we we yes we we could definitely not hate anybody from a different kind of ethnic background but we can definitely hate the people on the other side of the political aisle with the theory of a thousand signs and tell our kids that they are definitely not allowed to marry any of those people yeah because yeah that's because that that form of hate is is just fine now um yeah and so but but anyway I I go through all that because like that and to your question like that that is a massive like that is a massive you know kind of underlying question underneath a lot of this which is like do we want the entire world to run the same way um and if we really have all the answers yes we do um if we believe that it is actually impossible for anybody to have all the answers and that it actually is a very you know terrible assumption to ever believe that and that reality is actually like super messy um and you know the people actually deserve you know the freedom to you know not only try to figure out a better way to live but actually the freedom also to make mistakes right then you know then then this track that a lot of people are on is actually a very dystopian and you know kind of potentially you know leads to potentially hellish outcomes you know Thomas Soul if you were on this he would say yeah this is this was precisely the debate around communism you know nothing the the same debate exists today just under under uh under different names and people are basically making the same mistakes they were making then yeah um yeah anyway so you know what am I you know I don't know if like somewhere somewhere in the middle like yeah you know I'm sort of prime you know I'm a pride benefit you have a prime beneficiary of globalization you know you and I work in a field in which there's no question like our field is like practically enriched uh you know by the just enormous amounts of immigration that have happened in the US over the last 50 years we work with people who are you know I feel like I work with the United Nations every day like I work with people from all these different backgrounds um it's just absolutely spectacular I would not want to live in a system that would somehow decide that was a bad idea and send them all back to wherever that you know that would be horrible like that would be awful you know look at the same time do I think it's a good idea to have a single system of global governance where there's a set of experts that like determine everything and like everything is equal and everything is the same like no that sounds like hell yeah so what would if they're experts and fact checkers yes the missing lake is the fact Checkers because they can make sure the experts are on the straight narrow yeah exactly uh checks and balances um let's uh let's get into this this counter Elite we alluded it to it earlier that you know populism is a bit of a dead end we alluded to you know Peter teal in you know uh 2016 when you draws Trump was a bit of a pariah uh and and now he's uh you know there's been uh more of a movement around there's been more um diversity uh within Tech um and it seems like this this counter Elite is forming you know Elon obviously is potentially accelerating it massively um and that's on a macro level on the billionaire level but then also like on a micro level a lot of tech people are kind of politically homeless they don't want to be on on either side they don't want to be in the far left you know policies that sound good but don't work or dysfunction within organizations but they don't want to be on the far they don't watch Fox News they're you know they don't uh their pro-choice they so they don't want to be Republicans they don't want to be conservative uh they they want to be you know accentuous but that that won't hold for maybe reasons we've discussed so so you know on kind of that level but on the ability like what's play place out the counter Elite sort of new moral New Philosophy among among people who've been homeless politically yeah so let's I'm going to focus you know more on the structural kind of aspect to try to be a little bit less than the partisan side but on the structural side so that back to our our Burnham so um so what what Vernon was I I did the throwaway comment saying Papoose was a dead end and so it's it's worth for a moment kind of addressing why that's the case like even if you think the current Elite is terrible like let's even assume you're a full-on whatever you know let's assume you fully believe the current Elite is evil and they must be torn down and must be replaced by a true democracy like what Burnham would explain to you is like that's that's not actually possible and it's the it's the it's the it's the exact same point that we discussed earlier on managerialism um or or the the another version of it is what burning calls the iron law of oligarchy which which basically is in every human system no matter by the way this also was true in common it's true in the Soviet Union communism is true in China today under communism um uh every human system always there's always a minority of people ruling the majority of people um like that that's basically permanent like there's never actually democracy it's it's it's always basically some minority ruling some majority and you see this play out over thousands of years across many different kinds of societies and the reason for that is it's it's mechanical right it's just there's no the argument there's no bearing on how they rule it's just that they will there will be an elite that rules and it's a mechanical argument and it's because the elite is concentrated whereas the majority is dispersed right and so if you have a hundred people who are highly concentrated and are organized up against 10 000 people who are a rabble right and a mob um right and just are just like a populist that's just like out there doing their own thing every day and they're just not organized like the organized Elite is always going to end up in power over the the disorganized masses and this this just happens over and over and over again again the American system why do we not have a pure democracy we do not have a pure democracy because our founding fathers were well aware that I mean just imagine the horror show that would result if citizens got to vote on every individual issue as it came up which by the way that's what happens in California California is so screwed up now right we have direct democracy in California it's obvious to everybody it doesn't work of course we of course we will continue forever um but um but you know representative representative democracy is an expression of the fact that even in a system that was intended to be very egalitarian a very Democratic you're still going to have this organized Elite in the form of the literally Congress and the executive branch and the nine justices the Supreme Court who are fundamentally going to run the country on behalf of the people so anyway this is what's called the iron law of oligarchy there will always be a small number of people in charge of the large number of people that small number of people is referred to in this framework as the elite um though the oligarchic delete um and and you know and again we talked about it before like how do they rule they they rule by telling a story that legitimizes their rule that story is the story that story in our era is the story of egalitarianism they are not ruling for themselves they are ruling on behalf of the people um and you know and and you know they they tell that story they have policies that are intended to deliver on that maybe a little bit in some ways you know sometimes maybe not in other ways but like that's the story that they tell um and so and then as a consequence of that like they they are the Elite they set the narrative they they have the dominant part they have the sort of the the high the sort of moral High Ground in society um and then um they have and then they have these reinforcement mechanisms they have a you know the credentialing system and they have their recruitment system to bring in assimilate in the you know the new people and so forth and then they and then you know think about what else they have they they by the way they don't necessarily have all the money but they have the power um and then they have um they have the ability to perpetuate um and then they have um uh oh they have the sort of status High Ground so sort of status Prestige fashion like these are the fancy people like these are the people that when they do things and they say things like people care right um and so anyway if you read a Burnham what what he will tell you is basically like if the people were to actually rise up like suppose that people woke up one day and literally took pitchforks and you know and uh torches and went and stormed you know Davos and Aspen and killed the oligarchy Elite the result would be Anarchy they're like the result would be hell right it would just be a spiral into hell it would be you know you know like it'd be like Black Hawk Down territory of just like you know Madness and chaos and so like that that that's not a route so what what you need is you if you want to replace the elite that you have today what you need to do is you need to have a better Elite and there's the only one way out if you don't like the kernel look archic Elite um that doesn't result in just Mass def the only way out is a superior Elite so then that then your thought experiment territory which is okay what would be a superior Elite to the elite that we have today well a bunch of things so one is they would presumably have a set of ideas says that would be better ideas because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this um they would then need a story that is a superior story right so sometimes called a political myth right um which is they would need a moral claim right um that that was able to achieve buy-in right that was able to legitimate their rule um they would need um fashion status Prestige right they would they would they would need they would need legitimately to be able to project if you belong to our Elite you were a higher status higher Prestige person if you belong to that Elite right um and then and then they would and then they would need to build the kind of all these other things the perpetuation method the recruitment method fund you know they would need funding right they would need you know they would need they would need an education system like you know they would need and they would need media organs right they would need the ability to get their message out um you know for people who want to change the system like that that that is the way to do it no so the good news is like there's a road map like there's an answer to the question there's a way to do this it's been done before um and uh it could be done again um you know having said that like it's like the world's biggest challenge because like whatever you think of the kernel electric Elite like they are very powerful they are very charged they have many resources they are very cool people um and um they're not so easy to just simply replace um so yeah and you know to a smaller extent teal has done this with uh the teal Fellowship you know his higher status in in some circles or many circles than than you've been getting into Harvard or Stanford um so that's one example of an organ um if people are pursuing this in Earnest like on the on the ideas and and myth level um you know look let's brainstorm if you're open to it you know one track could be competence hey hey this you know as you saw during covet et cetera this past Elite has has been incompetent uh and putting intentions aside you know we're just a much more competent uh uh Elite uh you know we're we're gonna get rid of these or like we're gonna focus on unifying instead of dividing being this cultural but I'm just kind of riffing here but what ideas and myth do you think are potentially compelling that you know a counter Elite could could get behind could Advocate and and might resonate yeah so I think let's build one of those two to start with yeah so yeah one is just like yeah competence like you know look we like would you like your eight-year-old to be able to walk to school without getting like mugged or assaulted right you know like at some point there are some very basic like competence questions yeah you know how did you feel about being locked up for three years right and you got coveted anyway oh that's interesting right like right so yeah so like I think there's that and you know there's always this question of like you know when when do people finally get fed up I mean you know a a city level version of this was Prime in New York City in the 1970s and then you know they at some point they did elect an anti-crime mayor and then he at some point you know he did bring Crime down so like you know this this does play out at a micro level for sure um um and so you know maybe there's some larger version of it um no no again like you'd have to like a couple things on that like it'd have to be real right like because you know because if you were if you didn't deliver like you know people would get very upset the same thing would happen to you so uh you know it would have to be real um and then you'd have to be able to recruit right you know a chicken and egg problem you'd have to be able to recruit in the people who were actually capable of executing on it right before their in power uh right so so the key question you know the key question always is like the way to think about this is like suppose you have an existing corrupt Elite like let's suppose hypothetically you have an exist exist rotten in competent oligarchic Elite and you have a new Fresh competent fired up you know meritocratic Elite um and then put yourself in the shoes of like an aggressive ambitious young person right out of school who's like on the make and like wants to like optimize their position in society and wants life status and power and money right and it's saying so you you so you have to have a recruitment like your story has to be really good and you have to have like a critical mass the ability to recruit those people because otherwise the existing at least just going to get constantly reinforced by having you know new new people kind of take it over um and carry it forward so um yeah so so so so so that could be um uh that could be a really big one what was your second one oh um we're gonna focus on unifying people instead of unifying that's a good example okay so that's another thing yeah so you might yeah for example you might observe hypothetically that our current Elite seems to be doing an awful lot of demonization of the other side um you know interestingly the other side is you know basically it's you know arguably it's a sort of you know in our modern politics it's class and race demarcated right and so it's this you know there's nobody like it's really fun like our current oligarchical lead is like heavily dominated by like you know heavily dominated by white people um and uh you know there's nothing more than they hate that they hate than you know than poorer white people than them right um and so um you know yeah I mean they're they they sell you know that you you could argue they sell a story of division um and you know the deplorables right and and yeah you could you could have a you know you could you could have more of a sort of a Julius Caesar kind of thing where you'd say look like no I'm not gonna um I'm not gonna rule on behalf of 51 of the country versus 49 I'm going to rule up after the entire country right I'm gonna invite everybody in um you know and we're going gonna lift we're gonna lift we're gonna lift the whole thing now you know you are denying people the ability you know then to hate right which is a huge attraction of the current system right um and so you know you're taking a big motivator away you're replacing it with something that you know I think probably a lot of people would find more attractive yeah um yeah and then you know look you know you'd have to I think you know part of it would have to be look like you know these people have made you promises that they can't deliver it you know they've had time yeah I mean this is what you always kind of expect what happened in all these cities right which is it's like okay like if if if you know if if the single party governance of all these cities is going so well like why is the crime rate so so high like you know at some point it's like okay they're not delivering um yeah so you know there's that you you know look you'd have to challenge some sacred cows right you'd have to say look like you know maybe we should not you know maybe we should not be trying to do the level of social engineering that's happening right maybe it's a bad idea to have you know maybe it's a bad idea to have differential you know uh you know standards for different groups of people you know that you know what the Supreme Court's about to do in the Harvard case like you know maybe you'd have to revisit some of those things maybe people are ready for that maybe they're not yeah um yeah I mean look it's this is the this is like the big macro you know historically this is like the big you know this is like the biggest game of all it's like it's the creation of basically a new political story right um it's a you know it's the creation of a rationale to rule um you know that actually results in the support necessary to actually get the position where you actually are ruling yeah you know people have done it recently you've been tweeting out a series of white pills uh and uh there's you know reasons to be excited um and you know this is me projecting a little bit but it I feel like the last few years um for for you and others have been a bit more um you know pessimistic times um and um and so I'm curious for what's inspiring the recent optimism and uh wave pills and and maybe we can end with sort of the pessimistic case and the optimistic case you know some people have described the pessimistic case as like a very slow Decay you know 100 years brazilification I think some people call it and uh I'm curious for what what the what the optimistic case is I think the optimistic case I mean it's it's that kind of worded negatively but it's like one of my white pills is you know the current Elite is actually really bad it specifically being an elite yeah like who really like honestly like who who really wants to look up to some of the I mean maybe some of these people people look up to but like some of them it's just like a hard It's A Hard Sell like I mean God like it's difficult and by the way again this is not even a partisan I wouldn't say this is not even a person comment like you know you just look at a lot of the sort of national level people and it's just like oh like I'm supposed to get excited about that person that seems like a stretch um and then you know look the results are like not great like you know you you know you can like I said you know economic growth covers up a lot of a lot of a lot of sins you know the US economy you know generally works pretty well um but you know you get into situations like we've been in you know repeatedly for the last 20 years where you get in these weird you know foreign policy situations or these weird um you know economic sort of downturns you get these weird you know public health things or whatever and you're just like wow like these people really don't seem to I mean it's like policy I mean look covet policy right like it's like you know two weeks to crush the curve right okay two weeks to Across The Curve became two months became two years right and nobody at any point at least that I saw ever like articulated well wait a minute why did we ever think two weeks was ever gonna do anything did we know that two weeks was like did we did we do two weeks knowing it was gonna fail and it was gonna be two months so did like did you lie to us or were you incompetent right um and so just like every element of this I mean the mask the mask thing alone we could do like a whole podcast just on mass but the whole Mass thing alone it's like the exact same people who in February 2020 were saying there was no reason at all for any you know any normal civilian ever be wearing a mask you know who you know within two months had it be basically the new you know holy face you know covering for all right thinking people like and then they were on to like oh maybe we should all double mask and triple mask and then here we sit three years later and there are still you know schools that are forcing asking their kids like yeah it's like okay like whatever this is like whatever these people think they're doing like it's not and then everybody gets coveted anyway right so um like apparently like these people do not actually know what they're doing they're not actually good at good at their jobs um they're you know there seems to be zero accountability like they seem to never get fired right like whoever gets I you know it's like all these things like Afghanistan you know Afghanistan so we Afghanistan they say that we should forgive them uh yeah right like you know okay right because you know right it's like morale it's good intent right covers you know it sort of explains everything but like Afghanistan whoever got fired for Afghanistan right like 20 years of like Rule and Leadership right of the whole Afghanistan campaign and like you know we saw how it ended in the cut you know now we're countries back in you know it's like we were never there um and this massive exercise of thousands of Americans dead and like lots of other people dead and all this like chaos and blood and the whole thing and Stranded interpreters and like the whole thing and who you know who got fired like yeah you know so yeah so anyway so not to get specifically on these issues but um yeah so anyway like but this way like if they're going to be the elites they got to be good at being Elites like they gotta at least be good at being Elites right um and at some point it's like if they're not even good at that like what are they actually good at yeah um and so you know at some point like I said at some point I think people just kind of get fed up um and then look the internet you know every it's become very fashionable and of course nobody does this more than a current Elites but like it's very fashionable to dump on the internet for creating division into session and this and that this information and kind of on and on and on and the people who tell that story that most forcefully are our current Elites who just absolutely hate being challenged um and like you know look at the internet the internet is you know as you you well know like the internet is subject to the constant censorship censorship pressure at a level that would make Orwell blush um and notwithstanding that information is still more widely available today than it was before the internet like but by far right by far right and so you know even the same you know if the sensors have had a good you know eight years to do everything they can and you know information is still flowing it's not flowing as free as I would like it the flow but it's flowing a lot more free than it used to yeah um and so anyway yeah I it's yeah I don't want to yeah I ever want to get myself in a frame of mind that says the situation is hopeless and I think there's yeah there's at least cracks there's at least cracks in the system that are encouraging that dig to close maybe that way pill relates to your Tweet recently in terms of the theme of our era is uncast checks suddenly popping up absurd pretensions wistful fantasies and pretty ugly lies called by called by reality yeah it's like look if you're in power and you've got this story right and you can like sell these propositions and you can Implement these policies like at some point the results come in um and you know the longer conversation we can have about this another time but like you know they're I mean look just just since the 1960s and 1970s like there were a set of policies put in place in the 1960s 1970s that made very specific promises um and the results are in we're 50 years later and like not only did it not work they were you know catastrophic in many ways um and so like at some point the the the the the bill arrives um you know it does feel like an awful lot of you know bills are arriving a lot a lot of checks are a lot of people are trying to cash a lot of these checks they're not they're not I mean we could have a long conversation about education but I mean even even the entity you know even the even the Gates Foundation right did this big report so last year where they did they did a retrospective study of 40 Year 40 Years of uh philanthropic attempts to improve education in the US and the result of the report is nothing worked yeah right like 40 years of promises nothing worked um budget per you know per student budget of Education in the US K-12 or 3x so the last 40 years in real dollars results didn't budge right and so like the data's there like the data's in it doesn't work the people running the system are terrible um you know and for all the reasons that people already understand uh I mean it's become so obvious now right with you know some of the some of the people in charge of these systems um and so yeah I mean the bill comes due now people you know it's like anything people have to care about the results right they have to have to care about the results more than they care about they care about the story and it's always a question of like well they you know are people are it's always the thing are people more enamored by their belief in the story and in their sort of social affiliations based on the story than they are on the actual potential reality on the other end Yeah you mentioned Thomas solo I'll just recommend for anybody who hasn't read his books like you you want to definitely read like all of Thomas sewell's books does maybe more than anybody else in the last 50 years what he does is he tackles like all of these societal level questions you know directly um and then um and he does it for the position of kind of you know it's very high level of kind of moral Authority um but then he's uh he's one of the is a world-class Economist and so he actually goes at the data in addresses the data and he's just like okay this doesn't work this doesn't work this doesn't work this doesn't work and you come out the other end being like Oh my God we're ruled by people who have no idea what they're doing yeah um so it's a very I I find his books to be very inspiring other people yeah very very depressing let's wrap on that inspiring note the bills is coming due uh mark thank you so much for coming on the podcast good awesome Eric great to be with you secure frame is the leading all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance get stock to audit ready in weeks not months I believe in Secure frame so much that I invested in it and I recommend it to all my portfolio companies sign up for a free demo and mention Upstream during your demo to get 20 off your first year now more than ever startup Founders need a safe place to put their cash Mercury protects your money and also provides the streamlined user experience that great Founders expect do partner Banks and their sweep networks Mercury offers up to 5 million in FDIC insurance which is 20 times the per Bank limit they also make it easy to invest any cash above the FDIC insured amount in a money market fund a hundred thousand startups trust Mercury with their finances I've been a happy Mercury customer and have found their team incredibly helpful and responsive they even got an important wire out of purgatory on Christmas Eve after all your Christmas is my opportunity visit mercury.com to get started Mercury is a financial technology company not a bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC marketer hire is one of my favorite resources for startups looking to hire marketers with thousands of pre-vetted marketers across a dozen roles Market or hire matches you to your perfect marketer in 48 hours whether you need help with growth marketing SEO lifecycle content or any other aspect of your marketing strategy marketer hire has you covered so if you're a Founder looking for top-notch marketing talent to help grow your startup head over to marketerhire.com to find your perfect match sign up with roll code upstream and you'll get one thousand dollars credit on your first hire